Feminist investigations into caring technologies emphasise the tension between their reproduction of care’s assumed femininity and their ability to destabilise gendered markers and systems. However, the existing literature ignores the historical racialisation of care and its perpetuation in the form of the posthuman caring object. This article examines how racialised relations of power shape the posthumanisation of care in three science-fiction works, Channel 4’s television show Humans, Alex Riviera’s film Sleep Dealer and Spike Jonze’s film Her. While Her’s disembodied operating (...) systems are premised upon an implicit whiteness, posthuman caring objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer take a racialised, embodied form. Drawing upon the work of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, this article examines how the racialised objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer are constituted as both labourers and commodities, purchased for the purpose of facilitating white reproductivity. Nonetheless, this article also documents how these caring technologies complicate key binaries such as subject/object, human/machine and productive/reproductive labour. In doing so, they disrupt the whiteness of the social reproduction paradigm. The article concludes by calling for greater feminist engagement with the racialisation of care labour in human and posthuman forms, in order to challenge white, heterosexual models of reproductivity based upon the exploitation of racialised labour. (shrink)

Insects and ‘the swarm’ as metaphors and objects of research have inspired works in the genres of science fiction and horror; social and political theorists; and the development of war-fighting technologies such as ‘drone swarms’, which function as robot/insect hybrids. Contemporary developments suggest that the future of warfare will not be ‘robots’ as technological, individualised substitutions for idealised warfighters, but warfighters understood as swarms: insect metaphors for non-centrally organised problem-solvers that will become technologies of racialisation. As such, contemporary feminist analysis (...) requires an analysis of the politics of life and death in the insect and the swarm, which, following Braidotti, cannot be assumed to be a mere metaphor or representation of political life, but an animating materialist logic. The swarm is not only a metaphor but also a central mode of biopolitical and necropolitical war, with the ‘terrorist’ enemy represented as swarmlike as well. In analysing the relations of assemblage and antagonism in the war ontologies of the drone swarm, I seek inspiration from what Hayles describes as a double vision that ‘looks simultaneously at the power of simulation and at the materialities that produce it’. I discuss various representations and manifestations of swarms and insect life in science/speculative fiction, from various presentations of the ‘Borg’ in Star Trek, Alien and The Fly to more positive representations of the ‘becoming-insect’ as possible feminist Utopia in Gilman's Herland and Tiptree's Houston, Houston, Do You Read?. Posthuman warfare also contains the possibilities of both appropriating and rewriting antagonisms of masculine and feminine in the embodiment of the subject of war in the swarm. This piece seeks to analyse new ways of feminist theorising of the relations of power and violence in the embodiment of war as the swarm. (shrink)

The imaginative context in which artificial intelligence is embedded remains a crucial touchstone from which to understand and critique both the histories and prospective futures of an AI-driven world. A recent article from Cave and Dihal sets out a narrative schema of four hopes and four corresponding fears associated with intelligent machines and AI. This article seeks to respond to the work of Cave and Dihal by presenting a gendered reading of this schema of hopes and fears. I offer a (...) brief genealogy of narratives which feature female automata, before turning to examine how gendered technology today—particularly AI assistants like Siri and Alexa—reproduces the historical narratives associated with intelligent machines in new ways. Through a gendered reading of the hopes and fears associated with AI, two key responses arise. First, that the affective reactions to intelligent machines cannot be readily separated where such machines are gendered female. And second, that the gendering of AI technologies today can be understood as an attempt to reconcile the opposing hopes and fears AI produces, and that this reconciliation is based on the association of such technologies with traditional notions of femininity. Critically, a gendered reading enables us to problematize the narratives associated with AI and expose the power asymmetries that lie within, and the technologies which arise out of, such narratives. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present some of the findings (which were reported on more extensively in earlier work) regarding the visibility of gender issues in the literature on selected information and communication technologies (ICTs) with a view to make predictions about potential ethical issues that the application of these ICTs may bring about in the future. On the basis of the analysis of around 100 published sources, which dealt with various aspects of selected ICTs, conclusions have been (...) drawn regarding gender issues and concerns that the applications of these ICTs may cause. The authors' analysis is theoretically informed by critical discourse analysis (CDA) which assumes that texts, both written and spoken, as well as other forms of symbolic representations, are indicative of social practices. Of particular methodological relevance was the survey of methods of text and discourse analysis presented in Titscher et al and especially the application of keyword search as a way to measure the prominence of each investigated method. This approach to literature surveying proved very useful in selecting analytic material: only those published sources on the selected four ICTs have been included in the survey, for which the analysis of keywords, abstracts and indexes of terms indicated authors' interest in gender issues. Findings - First, ICTs such as affective computing, ambient intelligence, and artificial intelligence, have been found to have the potential of positively affecting gender power relations and thus positively affecting gender balance in the areas of labour market related to ICT across EU countries and worldwide. Second, more research on the relationship between gender and ICT design, application and representation is needed, so as to enhance a better understanding of ethical issues resulting from unequal participation of women and men in all aspects of ICT production and implementation, which in itself is an ethical dilemma with which both the ICT business and legislators have to grapple. The paper offers insight into the relationship between the level of attention devoted to particular ICTs by ICT researchers, as evidenced in the reviewed literature, and the likelihood of the application of a particular ICT in the future, which is looked at and assessed from a gender perspective. (shrink)