Cyborg Eroticism as Feminist Speculative Fiction: All Is Full of Love (1999) in the Age of AI

While conversations about cyberlove and sex robots are often limited to human users and anthropocentric perspectives, Björk’s 1999 music video for All Is Full of Love presents a radical and resilient alternative that transcends human-centric narratives and challenges conventional ideas about embodiment, technology and love even today. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s (2003, 2006) concepts of the cyborg and the companion species, Jack Halberstam’s (2011, 2020) queer (posthuman) aesthetics, and Karen Barad’s (2003) agential realism, we argue that this work creates a space where queer feminist politics and feminine pleasure are deeply intertwined and expressed through its cyborg representations and redefinitions of eroticism. Through a combined videographic and sonic analysis we present that the work stages cyborg eroticism not as a simulation of human affect, but as an emergent phenomenon co-constituted within a technoscientific assemblage. The article concludes that All Is Full of Love functions as a powerful piece of feminist speculative fiction that de-centres the human and imagines eroticism as a practice of world-making, an assemblage of flesh, machine, sound and fluid. It also considers how this 1999 work continues to resonate two decades after its release, particularly in relation to AI companions, and evolving conceptions of love and companionship, thereby enriching our understanding of contemporary human-machine relationships.