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This article responds to technofeminist calls to unpack the gendered politics of technologies and create critical crossover between their representation and design. I analyze feminized artificial intelligence (Siri, Alexa, Cortana) in light of two science-fiction narratives: Tomorrow’s Eve, a Victorian novel; and Her, a postmillennial film. Each story exemplifies a pivotal moment in media history: Eve the transition from symbolic to technical media; Her the transition from technical to computational media. Both stories depict a man falling in love with an artificially intelligent, feminized version of the communication media du jour. Whereas Eve and Her operate on our imaginary, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana are by our side every day, naturalizing contingent gender divisions. I address three questions: what is the cultural work accomplished by feminized AI? Which boundaries are coming down or built up? What gendered relations are (re)produced? Drawing on media archaeology, critical theory, gender studies, and media theory, this article argues the association of femininity with technology sustains differences across three dimensions: docile labour, replaceable embodiment, and artificial intelligence. This triadic framework weaves together analytic threads that often remain separate to develop a nuanced critique of femininity as a mode for domesticating new technology and technology as materializing gender relations. The discussion extends the framework to a more generalized analysis of AI as a problematic prescription for how we become machine-shaped. I advance an entangled reinterpretation of the Turing Test and suggest ethics, aesthetics, and performativity as key sites of intervention in rethinking AI design to include rather than exclude multiple forms of difference. The conclusion offers the framework as a novel heuristic for intersectional, nonreductive critiques of technology and difference.
Daniel M. Sutko (Thu,) studied this question.