Bella Baxter and the Machine: On Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things” and Julie Wosk’s “Artificial Women”

Artificial Women: Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females by Julie Wosk IT SEEMS NO coincidence that Yorgos Lanthimos’s cinematic rendition of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things , released at the end of 2023, would come at a time of obsessive commentary about the possibilities and threats of AI. While Lanthimos’s movie has nothing, ostensibly, to say about digital technologies (beyond its own production process), the publication this year of Julie Wosk’s Artificial Women: Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females provides a context for considering the potential of the film in the public imaginary. Wosk’s study explores the construction of artificial women in the age of AI as sex robots, care providers, domestic servants, and the disembodied voices of our digital tools and personal assistants. Considering both actually manufactured women and the many artworks that fabricate them as fictions, Artificial Women explores the strange phenomenon of womanhood in the artificially generated human world. Such constructions, Wosk argues, offer a potent way to recognize gender stereotypes and analyze how they have shifted over the years. The way female robots are now being made to represent an ever-greater diversity of ethnicity and body types, for example, tells us about our own changing cultural expectations. Similarly, one can pick apart the construction of female-voiced virtual assistants to observe the “lingering element of the gender stereotypes that inform their designs and responses (and recent research highlights the bias toward masculinity in their technological design).” And the gendering of AI-powered care robots is raising afresh debates about whether women are more “naturally” empathetic than men. Wosk’s book, then, offers a new route into considering how we construct gender identity culturally, by exploring how we manufacture gender identity in very literal ways. Simultaneously, writers of fiction (novelists, filmmakers, playwrights, etc.) have long interacted with the phenomenon of the literally manufactured woman, continuing to question, transform, and challenge the stereotypes those creations reaffirm. One of the most powerful features of Wosk’s book is that it situates our current AI moment in relation to the long history of the manufactured woman, as both […]

Click here to view original page at Bella Baxter and the Machine: On Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things” and Julie Wosk’s “Artificial Women”

© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.