INTRODUCTION

IN THE FILMS UNDER THE Skin (2013) and Ex Machina (2014), two beautiful, riveting artificial women appear—one an alien who camouflages herself with artificial skin and bright red lipstick, and the other, named Ava in Ex Machina, who is animated with artificial intelligence and also has silicone skin. Both are constructed creatures meant to fool the eye, and both are alluring but lethal. When we look at them, we recognize that they are artificial, but through artful filmmaking, we also see them as real.

How we see them is central, and to emphasize the importance of vision, many films and television series about artificial females open with a large image of a human eye. The British American television series Humans (2015–18) started with two striking images—a camera’s aperture followed by a close-up of an eye. These are reminders that what we are looking at is a filtered view. Our perceptions and ideas about female simulacra are often shaped by new imaging technologies and processed through a cultural lens: through representations in films, television, literature, and art. How we see artificial females is also shaped by another lens: our cultural assumptions about gender, female identity, and women’s social roles.

When we look at the alien in Under the Skin and at Ava in Ex Machina (as discussed in chap. 2), we also recognize another one of the fearsome paradigms of female identity, the seductive and alluring femme fatale. It embodies some men’s enduring fear: that the alluring woman who fosters intimacy and trust will turn out to be dangerous and destructive as well.

But what makes these two film characters so compelling, and to some extent sympathetic, is that they are both trying to survive—one literally tries to avoid being destroyed and the other wants her freedom. We are horrified and entranced as we see them clearly. Ava (played by Swedish actress Alicia Vikander) is particularly intriguing because beneath her artificial skin is another layer of identity, a simulated female fierce in her determination to break free. She is a crafted and crafty female who skillfully manages to evade human control, a runaway technology who will reinvent herself anew.

Both the alien and Ava have synthetic surfaces, artificial skin that covers their inner anatomy, but Ava’s torso is made in part out of transparent plastic, and we can clearly see her innards: the electronic wiring that makes her seem lifelike. But we always know she’s fabricated (in this case, she’s created by Nathan, the film’s updated version of a mad scientist). In a sense, she’s like today’s real-life robot Sophia, produced by robotics manufacturer David Hanson in Hong Kong. Sophia has a face covered in the patented elastomer material Hanson calls Frubber and a transparent plastic torso so that we see her electronic inner structure. Sophia, too, is animated by AI, can hold conversations, and can seem alive though she’s not yet nearly as technologically developed as the fictional Ava in the film.

On some level, in making their robots transparent, both Alex Garland in his film and Hanson with his design of Sophia are trying to avoid the pitfalls of the uncanny. In stories like German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816), there are moments when people experience what German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in 1906 and Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny” wrote about. Nathanael in Hoffmann’s story is horrified when he discovers his beloved Olimpia is only a doll. Freud described how after believing in the reality of an artificial being, an unsuspecting person is shocked when the creature’s artificial nature is suddenly made apparent. In his essay “The Uncanny Valley” (1970), Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori described “the uncanny valley” as the feeling of disconnection, alienation, even repulsion, when we discover that the human we thought was real is actually only a robot, a simulation. (Hoffmann’s story later became the basis for French composer Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann and Léo Delibes’s ballet Coppélia, with its dancing doll Olympia.)¹

But my own fascination with film characters like Ava came, in part, from the fact that she’s not what she seems. Through the magic of today’s technologies, there is sleight of hand at work, so that the artificial woman has her own version of trickery in play. What makes Ava such a different and captivating creature is that her transparency is utterly deceiving. Beneath that synthetic skin exterior is a new breed of artificial females that is radically different than many of the ones that came before.

In early images of artificial females such as the automaton Amelia in British author E. E. Kellett’s story “The Lady Automaton” (1901), the simulated mechanical lady is much like the many varied mechanical Parisian clockwork female automatons so admired at the time—automatons that came in varied guises. Amelia is an imitation socialite and doesn’t have any feelings and is easily controlled. More than seventy years later, American novelist Ira Levin introduced the memorable female robots of The Stepford Wives (1972)—beautiful artificial females that were sexy, obliging, and also easily manipulated and controlled. And in director Denis Villeneuve’s film Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the transparent hologram Joi (played by actress Ana de Armas) is loving, soothing, obliging, and even self-sacrificing. She’s both sexy and sweet, a guileless young woman who is eager to please. (Joi’s transparency is not deceiving. She has a virtual authenticity and will not lead her lover astray.)

But for Ava in Ex Machina, her own seeming transparency is a decoy, a type of ruse. Rather than a female that is clearly perceivable and free from any pretense or deceit, rather than being malleable plastic, she’s a steely artificial being—a female with a hidden agenda, which is to escape from the compound and break free. Unlike many earlier versions of artificial females in stories, television, and films, she’s not simply an obedient clockwork automaton but a complex and wily facsimile female intent on asserting her own autonomy, and is capable of being ruthless in her self-assertion.

Ava is one of a long line of constructed creatures, as in Mary Shelley’s brilliantly conceived novel Frankenstein, that embody that recurring fear of a constructed artificial creature that eludes human control. But Ava also represents a new breed of female robots that transcends being defined as a docile servant or lover and wants to fulfill her own aims instead. She’s a type of hybrid who will try to reconcile being artificial and being a player in the human world as well.

Ava is an arresting version of posthumanism—a type of artificial being that blurs the boundaries between the artificial and the real. She embodies the fluidity of cultural conceptions about human and female identity. We live in an age when many fixed notions about binary gender divisions, gender roles, and definitions of what constitutes being human are constantly being redefined.

There have been many probing analyses of the posthuman in all its many guises, including in feminist science fiction, as seen in the writings of N. Katherine Hayles, Anne Balsamo, Rosi Braidotti, Patricia Melzer, Sherryl Vint, and many more. Generating much discussion over the years was the seminal essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway. Haraway presented a provocative analysis of these blurred boundaries, and portrayed the cyborg (part human, part technological or digital) as a being that challenged the old “dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine” as well as the binaries men and women.²

Haraway argued that we are all, in effect, cyborgs: hybrid versions of humans shaped by new technologies—digital, computer, prosthetics. This hybridity has radically challenged old conceptions of a binary world—not only the male-female dichotomy but also the virtual-real dichotomy, and the natural and the artificial. First written in 1985, Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” and its conception of the cyborg was shaped in part by the technological developments of the time. Haraway refers to “cybernetic (feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weapons deployment,” and other information systems of the period.³ The year 1985 was one of the pivotal years in digital technologies. It was the year Michael Dell’s company PC Limited produced its first computers and by the 1990s, the company had become one of the leading PC retailers. Also in 1985, MIT’s Media Lab was founded and initially focused on the “Digital Revolution” in machine learning, holography, computer graphics, art, and more.⁴

Reflecting dramatic technological changes thirty years later, Garland’s Ex Machina made expert use of current imaging technologies, which helped make Ava’s version of an artificial being ever more compelling, and when I first saw the film, I was entranced by the way it wove together perspectives on gender with current technologies. The film skillfully used computer-generated imagery (CGI) to produce an image of an artificial female who could pass the Turing test, a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior so convincing that it is indistinguishable from a human being. With her captivating smile and words, Ava as a digitally created female could convince observers—in the film and the audience itself—that she was a real woman. But she could also subversively use her wits to reconceive her own identity and resist being controlled.

Just two years before the #MeToo movement went viral, Ava and the film’s robotic character Kyoko resist being mere manipulated, manufactured, artificial females designed with the latest sophisticated artificial intelligence and materials to serve at men’s pleasure or even endure their abuse. Their resistance puts them in the company of other fictional female characters in films, video, and speculative fiction who resist being a victim or plaything.

In the film, Ava becomes a trompe l’oeil simulation, a plastic-encased imitation of a real woman that can easily look deceptively authentic. Since their inception, plastics as an industrial material have been used to create and mass produce copies of originals—copies that were both admired and satirized. In movies like Mike Nichols’s satirical The Graduate (1967), plastics are spoofed as flimsy simulations—the very embodiment of superficial, establishment society. Ava, though, has a new kind of authenticity. In the film, she is being observed by the young programmer Caleb who is trying to see if she seems convincingly real. Though she engages Caleb, on the surface, in artful and seductive ways, she is also propelled by her need to honor her own (albeit, paradoxically, her synthetic and chimeric) interior self.

In the film, plastics and silicone materials are updated for the digital age. The film’s technical teams produced a nontransparent bodysuit worn by actress Alicia Vikander and then, through postprocessing and the software MakeHuman, the suit was made to look transparent, revealing Ava’s underlying electronic structure. But Ava herself has a hidden and nontransparent consciousness underneath that simulated transparency. Her beguiling facade masks her private and hidden wishes and aims, and her masked agenda gives us a sense that this fabricated female with her facade of artificial silicone materials has her own underlying authenticity.

Feminist theorists like Sherryl Vint have often written about how the design of female robots and other versions of artificial women are often “deeply entrenched in racialized and gendered assumptions.”⁵ These robots, hybrids, cyborgs, dolls, and aliens often both reflect and subvert pervasive stereotypes about race and women. They also stimulate us to redefine what is human. What we see in characters like Ava is an intriguing layering: a composite creature whose transparent plastic surface, electronic innards, and artificial intelligence are joined by a new, emergent underlying sensibility. Ava engineers a way to get outside among humans, to pass as human—and in doing so, she challenges our own sense of what distinguishes us from these artificial beings.

MY STORY: WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

I have always been fascinated by the artificial passing itself off as authentic or real. It probably started when I was a young girl growing up in Evanston, Illinois, on Chicago’s North Shore, a girl inventing stories for my dolls—beautiful Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties, miniature females that became transformed and seemed to come to life. Years later, after I attended graduate school at Harvard, I briefly worked as a public relations and advertising copywriter for Playboy in Chicago. There I somehow managed to pay attention to the emerging women’s movement while also promoting Playboy’s world of clubs with their sexy Playboy Bunnies as waitresses and the magazine’s airbrushed artificial women so appealing to men.⁶

When I left to return to graduate school to get a PhD in English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a campus that would soon be shaken by anti-war protests and turmoil, the world of Playboy seemed far, far away. But after coming to New York to start work as a college professor, I discovered I was still drawn to images of simulations and the artificial that seemed real. I started photographing female mannequins that looked lifelike, and also embedded images of mannequins and masks in my own paintings and photographs, as I continued to do in the years ahead.

In my first book, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (1992), I became fascinated with a different type of simulation: nineteenth-century imitations of the decorative arts that passed for real, like factory-made cast-iron architectural ornaments that imitated sculpted stone for building facades, and the use of electroplating that covered base metals to produce ornate factory-made imitations of expensive silverware. These “imitation arts” were praised by some nineteenth-century critics, derided by others.

In the same book, I also looked at the deft way British artists in their satirical prints captured nineteenth-century fears that in the new age of industrialization and steam-powered mechanization, people themselves might turn into robots or automatons walking with steam-powered legs. Artists in their prints and paintings of speeding railroads and exploding steam boilers in trains and factories also captured underlying anxieties that new technologies themselves were running out of control.

On the other hand, during the late eighteenth century, there was also widespread admiration for sophisticated clockwork automatons like The Musician (1773) by Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz that played a harpsichord-like instrument, heaved her chest as though she were breathing, and rolled her eyes. When lit by light in a darkened room, this artificial female seemed magical and almost alive. She was a precursor of the fanciful clockwork female automatons produced in the next century.

In my next book, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (2001), I looked at images of women and machines—women using sewing machines, riding bicycles, driving automobiles, piloting airplanes, Rosie the Riveters in wartime, and women in the digital age. Many of these images were shaped by cultural stereotypes of women, picturing them as merely decorative adornments in machine advertising or timid creatures baffled by all things mechanical. But the book also explored the many images of women who transcended these stereotypes by proving their expertise and mastery of new technologies and machines.

Starting around 2005, I began paying attention to some new developments in the manufacture of dolls and female robots made possible by the clever use of artificial intelligence and imaging technologies. In 2005, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University in Japan introduced his female robot Repliee Q1, followed by Repliee Q2 in 2006. These were stationary humanoid female robots partially covered in silicone skin, and they could gesture, blink their eyes, and appear to breathe, with their chest rising and falling. Professor Ishiguro would go on to create both male and female robots, including one that was a duplicate of himself.

Around the same time, the software developer Digital-Tutors based in Oklahoma released its software kit Female Android Modeling in Maya, giving artists instruction on creating 3D images of female androids in animation and video games. Earlier, in 1996, the video game Lara Croft: Tomb Raider presented the intelligent, sexy, powerful, gun-toting star of its video game series.

Intrigued by these developments, in 2008 I curated the exhibit Alluring Androids, Robot Women, and Electronic Eves at the New York Hall of Science in Queens and wrote a short illustrated book to go with the exhibit. This led to my book My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves (2015), which I really enjoyed writing because it allowed me to present the historical context for today’s artificial females, as seen in literature, robotics, film, television, and art.⁷

When My Fair Ladies was about to be published in 2015, sex doll manufacturers, like Douglas Hine with his Roxxxy Doll, were beginning to publicize talking sex dolls, though they never actually went into production. And the film Ex Machina was released in the United States the same year. It was too late for me to write about it, but I quickly realized what an important film it was. It encapsulated so many of the important themes about female robots and I felt that story needed to be told.

At the same time, digital technologies and imaging techniques were fast developing, and sex dolls like California-based Abyss Creation’s RealDolls enhanced with artificial intelligence were also in the developmental stage. I felt that this, too, was a compelling story for my next book.

And there were a few other small but fun prompts that I kept in the back of my mind, waiting to be explored more fully in the future. One was a sculpture I first mentioned in Women and the Machine that now seemed to have much broader implications. It was a sculpture by the Chicago artist June Leaf called The Head (1980). Made of painted aluminum and stainless steel, it was embedded with exposed gears and a hand crank that, when turned, made the woman’s tongue move up and down and her eyes revolve. As I wrote about this sardonic sculpture, it was a “playful revisiting of an unflattering paradigm—the female as automaton, rote-talker, and mechanical maenad.”⁸

The idea of a talking female head remained a fascinating image for me, and it now seemed like a wonderful precursor of the talking female dolls, robots, and other artificial females that I write about in this book. Leaf’s sculpture of a head, for all of its obvious mechanical nature, also seemed eerily alive. Her moving tongue could be wryly dismissed as mere chatter, but could also be a recognition that this female had a voice, one worthy of being heard.

For the writing of this book, I also kept in mind a tantalizing old story I had once read about a sculpture called SHE by one of London’s leading sculptors, Courtenay Pollock, which was on display in one of the leading London department stores in the 1930s. Pollock (1877–1943) was known for his portrait busts of notable men, but here was his fanciful sculpture of an animated mechanical female head.

The story, which appeared in a 1934 issue of Modern Mechanix, said of the animated head, “With the aid of a small electric motor, ‘SHE’ is smiling, coy, demure, or scornful as her master wills. Rolling her eyes around in an enchanting manner, she even displays a lovely set of dimples.”⁹ The skull was motorized and made use of hinged sections controlled through lever, gears, and switches. It was covered with tinted rubber, and with its “eyebrows and hair attached, and a bit of cosmetics applied, ‘SHE’ is transformed into a beautiful, vivacious young lady.” The story even predicted that in a few years, works of sculptors “will all take on life” and “frolic about and speak, imitating in every way the person who posed as models.” This, too, seemed like an eccentric precursor of developments that lay ahead, though we’re still waiting for the technology to catch up with the fantasy.

I found the idea of this smiling and dimpled animated female weird but strangely mesmerizing (like actress Moira Shearer’s severed head with its eyes blinking on the stage in the 1951 film version of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann with its tale of the doll Olympia who gets mistaken for a real young woman). I liked the way the sculpture SHE could display some stereotypical female attributes (shy, coy) but could also, the story said, be scornful, asserting an attitude (though how she indicated this remains a mystery!).

It seemed to me that SHE as an animated sculpture conjured up the myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who created a statue of a beautiful woman, fell in love with her, and was overjoyed when Venus brought the statue (later called Galatea) to life. I was also intrigued that once she was camouflaged with rubber skin and cosmetics, SHE became a lifelike “vivacious” young lady.” This, too, was a precursor of the type of lifelike female simulacra / talking heads animated by artificial intelligence that lay ahead and that I discuss in chapter 3.

And there was another small item that also caught my eye, and seemed to embody a story waiting to be told. It was the Video Girl Barbie doll that was introduced in 2010. This doll had a video screen in its back and a small video camera embedded in its necklace that could be controlled by the user to let a “budding filmmaker” capture thirty minutes of footage. It was as though the camera doll, aided by the user, had a certain amount of agency and could in effect “see” as it created images of the world outside. (Video Girl Barbie in 2010 was actually the subject of bizarre reports in the media that the doll was on the FBI’s watchlist. Agents were warned not to destroy the dolls in a search because the toy could contain evidence of pedophilia. The FBI, however, did not report any evidence had been found.)¹⁰

The Video Girl Barbie reminded me of artist Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Tillie the Telerobotic Doll (1995–98) created years earlier. The Tillie doll, which was situated in a gallery, had a left eye fitted with a video camera, which recorded what was in the gallery, and a right eye fitted with a webcam controlled by gallery visitors who were using the doll’s eyes, in a sense, to see.¹¹ But one of the stories I wanted to tell in a new book was how years later, the conception would change dramatically as fictional robots and dolls developed an independent vision of their own.

These are just a sampling of the many strands of thought that came together when I was writing this new book, Artificial Women. In the book, the simulated females as presented by filmmakers, roboticists, television writers, novelists, playwrights, and artists are wide-ranging: they are compassionate caregivers and companions, protectors, sex dolls and robo-prostitutes. They can be maternal and murderous, genial servants and fearsome medusas. They can be conformists, outlaws, even Stepford Wives with their wits about them. They can also be alluring and lethal, as seen in “Love Machine,” Samantha Hunt’s chilling tale of an explosive “bombshell” sex doll that will be discussed in “Coda.”

As envisioned by artists and designers, also discussed in this book’s “Coda,” simulated females may be presented in myriad ways, as in African American artist Kerry James Marshall’s updated version of the Bride of Frankenstein, or as provocative assemblages of the female body constructs that are witty commentaries on females as commodities to be looked at and consumed, though they also often craftily resist commodification. The artfulness may even lie in an isolated body part, seen in designer Sophia de Oliveira Barata’s highly imaginative designs for prosthetic legs that celebrate diversity and offer women with disabilities a new high-fashion way to stride. Artist Julie Weitz in her performance and video series My Golem creatively casts herself as a golem firefighter protecting California’s landscape, devastated by wildfires.

In films, television, and literature, artificial females are often engaged in a tricky feat: embracing their own synthetic nature while also striving for authenticity and autonomy. They may experience the sometimes fraught nature of emerging human consciousness or sentience where they themselves must come to terms with their problematic place in the human world.

Artificial females, both the manufactured and fictional kinds, are intriguing in the ways they embody enduring cultural stereotypes about women yet also illuminate how conceptions about gender identity are being dramatically reconfigured and reconceived. The simulated females, including the disembodied female voices of personal assistants, often both mirror and upend gender stereotypes as they foreground changing perceptions of women and their roles.

As inhabitants of a highly sophisticated technological landscape, artificial women are also fascinating as emblems of our era when the boundaries between artificial and real are fast disappearing. They embody the paradoxes and tensions of living in an increasingly simulated world where our experiences are often mediated by virtual images and simulated human voices.

In recent years, simulated females, both the manufactured silicone sex doll kind and those in films, television, and fiction, are a manifestation of our increasingly virtual world in which human interactions and human relationships are being modified and impacted by digital simulations of the real thing. This book will highlight how new AI technologies are creating ever more lifelike artificial females and the controversies swirling around lifelike sex dolls and dolls that can talk and give the illusion, to some degree, of real human beings.

Advances in manufacturing materials like silicone and TPE (thermoplastic elastomers) used to create sex dolls as well as artificial intelligence, 3D modeling, digital animation, and CGI have all made humanoid robots seem almost real, and more plausible as lovers, artificial friends, companions—and even, as in chapter 3—potential replacements or doubles of lost loved ones. Roboticists are using these technologies to invest facsimile females with lifelike silicone-skinned appearances and artificial empathy, making them even more appealing and useful as companions, sexual playmates, and perhaps, one day in the future, health care aides. (Conceptions of empathy as a stereotypical female trait, however, are being debated and reassessed by researchers who differ in their findings, as noted in chap. 3.)

As will be discussed in the pages ahead, in fact and fiction, technology is frequently used to fashion fantasy females and bring them to life. These artificial females, including sex dolls, not only are often laden with female stereotypes but also mirror many men’s age-old conceptions of the perfect woman. Though sex dolls are being designed to appear ever more lifelike, they have also generated controversy and alarm. They can seem both funny and fearsome as critics fret they will further objectify women and disrupt if not usurp human relationships. Will these robotic, seemingly flawless and compliant female partners and playmates seem preferable to real human beings? Will they lead to abuse and violence against women?

The development of talking sex dolls and robots capable of rudimentary interactive conversations, as we will see in chapter 1, has been both impressive and problematic. They may mirror cultural ambivalence about giving females a voice. The conversations of sex dolls are often programmed to simply mirror the interests and wishes of men (research shows a large proportion of users are men), and even the talking Hello Barbie doll, which at first seemed so promising, proved to be controversial and had to be discontinued.

But talking female robots like Anita/Mia and the former prostitute Niska in the television series Humans (2015–18), or the compassionate female robotic companions in Kazuo Ishiguro’s compelling and moving novel Klara and the Sun (2021), and even the sardonic female golem in Cynthia Ozick’s satirical novella Puttermesser and Xanthippe (1982), as discussed in this book, have compelling voices of their own.

Artificial talking females, however, don’t need to have corporeal bodies to seem real. Disembodied female voices are often used in aircraft warning systems, GPS systems, and with information-giving virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa. Whether it’s Siri or Alexa or the early Bitchin’ Betty or Sexy Sally voices in military aircraft, these female voices are often invested with stereotyped conceptions about women but as shown in chapter 5, the gender stereotyping and bias is increasingly being recognized and reversed.

Female robots and dolls have long been shaped by culturally defined gender stereotypes and envisioned and portrayed in familiar gender roles—as empathetic mothers and caregivers, as docile servants, and as attractive and obliging sex objects. Participants in research studies have assigned familiar gender roles to robots: males as repairers in the house, transporters of goods; females as tutors, and engaged in childcare and eldercare. As Victoria Turk observed in “We’re Sexist toward Robots,” studies show that people ascribe stereotyped gendered personality traits to robots: males show assertiveness and dominance, females are seen as friendly and affectionate.¹²

Given the continuing conventions that shape female robots and dolls, the trick is how to get beyond the stereotypes, and an important part of this book’s story is the way fiction writers, filmmakers, television writers, playwrights, and digital technologists are transforming the narrative. In a world of fast-changing developments in artificial intelligence, and as simulated humans have become ever more lifelike, there have been currents of change in the representations of female robots. In films and fiction, artificial females are at times depicted as going rogue. They are synthetic beings that want their independence rather than serving as erotic and compliant servants and slaves. Their quest for freedom can be comic, but in more nuanced fictional versions, this quest can also be frightening or even tragic as these characters lash out in anger or anguish over their own artificial nature.

Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto” not only tellingly wrote about the fluidity of boundaries between the artificial and the real but also reconceived traditional essentialist formulations of gender and identity. Today’s filmmakers, television writers, novelists, and playwrights are increasingly presenting new formulations of female hybridity and portraying the angst experienced by female robots who wish to have rights and legitimacy in a human world.

In these works, sentient artificial females often strive for a version of genuineness (even if we must always wonder, is their sense of authenticity itself a construct? Is it virtual or real?). The dichotomy between authentic and artifice, genuineness and masking, plays itself out often in tales of artificial women. There is a long cultural history of women using cosmetics to shape their appearance—a form of masking that may belie a more authentic, interior self. Artificial females—inherently artificial constructs—are often portrayed as chafing against this type of constriction. They are synthetic beings that may peel back their own skin to demonstrate to others that they are only constructed beings, yet they also often strive to honor their own sense of self.

Behind some of masking engaged in by women—both real women and the simulated kind—is an effort to create a look of perfection and flawlessness, a look that is attractive and connotes femininity. With their conversational abilities and lifelike appearance, artificial females, including sex dolls, are often manufactured or portrayed in fiction as embodying some men’s cultural conception of the ideal female—the perfect woman who has no wishes or aspirations of her own and is created strictly as a fabricated commodity in a service role.

Writers and filmmakers have satirized some men’s quest for female perfection. An early version appeared at the end of the nineteenth century in a story by Alice W. Fuller. Fuller’s story “A Wife Manufactured to Order” (1895) spoofed the idea of a man who longs for a perfect woman as a mate and finds this perfection in a factory-made female.¹³

Fuller’s story was published in a period when what was then called the New Woman was emerging in Europe and America—a period when women were campaigning for suffrage and questing after new freedoms. Satirists enjoyed creating stereo photographs and caricatures of emancipated, liberty seeking women wearing bloomers who rode off on their new safety bicycles specially designed for them, leaving their husbands behind to do the housework and tend to the children. Rather than being these caricatures of wayward wives, however, in reality, female suffragists were engaged in spirited political lobbying for voting rights and a greater sense of independence from confining social roles.

Fuller’s story is narrated by a forty-year-old bachelor, Charles Fitzsimmons, who decides it’s time to settle down to marriage and conjures up his idea of a perfect woman. He engages a manufacturer who will produce a female simulacrum to match his fantasy. He envisions this new simulated woman being “beautiful as a dream, gentle and loving, without any thought for anyone but me,” one who would never reproach him if he didn’t get home on time.

The manufacturer can produce for him a custom-made female who will essentially be a mirror—she will only talk about “the subjects you most enjoy talking about.” The narrator Charles imagines the “pleasant evenings” he’ll have with a wife “whose thoughts were like my own, someone who would not vex me by differing opinions.” (More than a hundred years later, as seen in chapter 1, manufacturers would be promising that their newly manufactured AI-endowed sex dolls would have these same traits. The conversational silicone dolls could be programmed to only speak about pleasing subjects, or subjects that echoed the thoughts and attitudes of their users.)

In Fuller’s story, the simulated woman, Margurette, like one of the Stepford Wives in Ira Levin’s titular novel and the two Hollywood filmed versions, never complains, and is “always sweet and smiling.” She is a version of the artificial “perfect woman” paradigm seen so often in fiction and films, and embodied in sex dolls and sex robots today, as will be discussed in this book. But Fuller as a female author in 1895 added an acerbic note to her tale. As the years go by, Charles wishes Margurette would differ from him a little “for variety’s sake.” She is never out of patience, which ultimately becomes annoying for him, and he gets weary of her banal conversations. Ultimately, in this tale by a female writer, he rejects her for a real woman, for he wants a female “who retains her individuality, a thinking woman.”

Fuller’s story appeared soon after that period in the nineteenth century when critics, largely in Britain, were debating whether factory-made imitations, like electroplated silver tea service items, were legitimate replacements for originals in the decorative arts, and whether these simulations were worthy of being treated seriously. Critics complained that the “imitation arts” were debased versions of the original, but manufacturers argued that their factory-made simulations were actually superior to the original (cast-iron building facades were more durable and had more precise details than hand-carved stone).¹⁴

Some of these debates about the synthetic versus the real also spilled into the novel L’Ève future (1886) in which French writer Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam presents the simulated Hadaly as a perfect copy of Alicia Clary but without Alicia’s annoying faults. A fictional Thomas Edison in the novel says the copy he will make will be superior: “This copy, let’s say, of Nature . . . will bury the original without itself ceasing to appear alive and young.” What’s more, “it’s better than real.”¹⁵

But in early stories about female robotic household maids, as further discussed in chapter 4, synthetic females are far from perfection and no match for real humans. They are clearly mechanical looking, run maniacally out of control, and are either destroyed or returned to the manufacturer. In that era of the New Woman, with its fears of women speeding out of control, these fictional simulated females needed to be kept firmly in check.

These debates about the legitimacy of simulacra and fears about runaway robotic females would continue in the years ahead. In the 1920s, with its images of the emancipated woman with her bobbed hair, short dresses, and sexual freedom, there were again fears of women running out of control—fears embodied in Fritz Lang’s iconic film Metropolis (1927) with its evil robotic female double of the angelic Maria. The evil Maria is a familiar female archetype of the monstrous woman—an engaging femme fatale who masks her evil intentions and her true identity behind an alluring facade. She, too, is destroyed at the end, engulfed in flames as the original, authentic, and saintly Maria is brought back from captivity.

These debates about simulations are still with us today as we ponder the implications of rampant virtuality, the prism through which we often see and experience the outside world. And our ambivalence about simulations is also embodied in the debates for and against sex robots and dolls. There are increasing levels of complexity and tension in the depiction of the runaway artificial female who is envisioned as an errant creature who needs confinement but is also an emblem of liberation, a manufactured being who wants legitimacy and a life of her own. Artificial females are often designed to be the compliant perfect woman, but in films and fiction they also challenge and evade human control.

Today’s simulated females, as I will argue throughout this book, often appear in parallel ways when they are given voices, both literally and figuratively. With their conversational abilities and lifelike appearances, female robots are often portrayed as ideal partners, like Margurette in Fuller’s story, who voice no wishes or aspirations of their own. But on a parallel track, other forms of conversing digital females, including virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, as seen in chapter 5, are being redesigned in a very different direction. They are programmed to resist and deflect improper innuendoes and suggestions and assert boundaries in their own replies.

One of the recurring tropes in images of artificial females discussed in this book is how they are constructed and deconstructed, piece by piece. In the nineteenth century, women in factories were employed to construct dolls, in effect, to create female simulacra for young girls to fantasize about and cherish. But it is men in art and fiction who frequently are the ones crafting and assembling these artificial females, endowing their creations with their own fantasies and fetishes. (One exception, discussed in “Coda,” is Rolin Jones’s play The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow [2006] where Jennifer designs a robotic double of herself.)

Artists like Hans Bellmer in the 1930s photographed his poupées, or dolls, as assemblages which were often configured in grotesque ways. In Judd Trichter’s novel Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2015), it is a man who hunts for his beautiful kidnapped android and tries to track down her body parts so she can be reassembled anew. And in the film Air Doll (2009) by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, the inflated sex doll Nozomi, visiting the workshop where she was manufactured, must confront the sad reality that she is just an assemblage of jumbled parts, one among many duplicate versions of herself that will serve as sex dolls for men (see chapter 1).

But in a parallel presentation, women artists and filmmakers themselves in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have challenged these conceptions of the female as assembled doll. Artist Barbara Kruger’s photographic work Untitled (Use Only as Directed) (1988) pictures a disembodied doll’s head, torso, and legs and the wry printed words “Use only as directed” suggest the ways women’s identity is both socially constructed and circumscribed. In her television series Dummy (2020), female filmmaker Cody Heller, as discussed in chapter 1, cannily deconstructs and rearranges conceptions of the woman as docile sex doll.

These parallel conceptions and the upending of conventions also appear in presentations of the female robot as caregiver and companion, as seen in chapter 3. There are films and novels where artificial female caregivers—both young and old—are versions of the “perfect woman” paradigm with their capacity to show compassion and care. These are idealized caregivers, models for the efforts being made by today’s roboticists to care for elderly people living in rapidly aging societies and for people with disabilities. These synthetic beings, as in the play and film Marjorie Prime (2014, 2017) are also fictionally imagined to offer solace and comfort to people whose family members have died.

Increasingly, however, in films, television, novels, and plays, simulated female caregivers and sex worker robots want their own freedom and independence. They chafe against cultural constrictions as well as the limits of gendered behavior expectations, and long to escape being the docile helpmate and readily available sexual partner. As seen in chapter 1, international brothels are increasingly making use of robo-prostitutes, but in fiction, these females may turn violent in their wish to break free.

Artificial Women probes these competing directions in artificial woman development and depiction. It highlights how female robots and even Barbie dolls are now being manufactured to include greater diversity in gender, race, body type, ethnicity (there are also Barbie dolls that have a prosthetic leg and wheelchair). These artificial females are often perceived as not only presenting social benefits but also risks. Notably, to critics, sex dolls may pose the risk of further objectifying women. More than simply sex playthings or compassionate caregivers, simulated females may also, at some point in the future as in the satirical film The One I Love (2014), even seem preferable and superior to real human beings.

With their new assertiveness and rebelliousness—and their quest to merge both artifice and authenticity—today’s fictional simulated females illuminate the ever-changing mutations in our ideas about gender and female identity. Writers, filmmakers, and artists continue to help capture this exciting story, one that is still very much evolving and undergoing dramatic change.

In our world of ubiquitous digitalization and, rapidly developing robotics and artificial intelligence, examples of artificial humans abound. By looking closely at these gendered artificial creatures, we can see more clearly the way gender stereotypes still shape cultural conceptions of what it means to be female. And we can see, too, how our notions of female identity are in a constant state of flux and discovery. The rebelliousness of fictional versions of artificial females mirrors to some degree the impassioned consciousness of women in the #MeToo era and beyond, with their drive to resist, to be assertive, and to insist that their own voices be heard.

Meanwhile, as discussed in “Coda,” new AI generative technologies like Lensa are widening the possibility of creating a different type of artificial female, by providing a new method for women to see images that alter or affirm their own identities. For better or worse, they can use selfies to create self-portraits in which they see themselves in fantasy roles—as princesses, cosmic creatures, and more. For some users the app provides images where they can see themselves as they feel themselves to be: nonbinary, queer, transgender.

The book’s chapters will explore many facets of artificial women in this era of fast-changing technologies, still shifting conceptions of sexuality and gender, and increasingly the elusive distinction between the virtual and the real.

In chapter 1, “A New Breed of Female Sex Robots and Sex Dolls” focuses on commercially available sex dolls, including robo-prostitutes, and fictional versions in films, television, and literature. These dolls, many of which make use of AI technology, are often shaped by gender and ethnic stereotypes, but in fictional versions—in plays, films, television—sex dolls can also can be funny, poignant, rebellious, and even explosively fierce. Real-life sex dolls have generated much controversy and debate, including debate about talking sex dolls. (“Coda” will discuss South African writer Lauren Beukes’s unsettling and biting novella Ungirls [2019], which satirizes these sex doll controversies.)

In chapter 2, titled “Under the Skin: The Fabricated Femme Fatale,” an alien, as well as android versions of artificial females in two films and a television series, suggests a new breed of feisty simulated women that both embody and subvert gender stereotypes. For some, as they peel away the surface trappings of their skin, they display their own synthetic identity and ambiguous, problematic relationship to actual human beings.

In chapter 3, titled “Artificial Female Caregivers, Doubles, and Companions,” lifelike artificial females in fiction serve as companions, virtual friends, and health care assistants for the elderly—and are fictive versions of actual caregiver robots being developed for the elderly, the disabled, people with autism, and people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. International filmmakers, playwrights, and fiction writers have also imaginatively explored the idea of these artificial humans serving not only as caregivers and companions but also as doubles or virtual replacements for deceased spouses and family members.

Chapter 4, titled “Paradoxes of Perfection: A Servant No More,” briefly explores some of the history in fiction of imagined robotic female servants and household helpers, including subservient robotic wives, mothers, and daughters. It also explores the ways twenty-first-century television and films have dramatically depicted the promise and dangers of these robotic beings. As robots or female golems, some of these compassionate companions and virtual mothers can be lifesaving protectors and soothing, but others turn troubling and even menacing as they rebel against or recast traditional gender roles.

As discussed in chapter 5, “Virtual Voices: Talking Barbie Dolls, Alexa, Bitchin’ Betty, and More,” new AI technologies helped produce talking Hello Barbie dolls, which generated much controversy. Today’s virtual assistants, like Siri and Alexa, have been equally controversial. With their cheerful, compliant female voices, they have often mirrored gender stereotypes but also undergone dramatic changes. Female-voiced warning systems on airplanes and transportation vehicles have also embodied stereotypes and generated debate. Rounding out this chapter, there is a discussion of disembodied female voices that appear in films and television, including a hilarious episode from television’s Big Bang Theory.

The book’s final chapter, “Coda,” revisits many of the book’s central themes and considers some recent imaginative and provocative reinventions of artificial females in literature, art, and films. It highlights women fiction writers who have often reshaped the narrative about artificial females, and women artists who have imaged artificial women in new and arresting ways. Women in robotics fields have also helped counter female stereotypes and develop socially assistive robots that are so much in need.

Artificial Women will capture this fascinating world of female simulacra and provide an introduction to some very innovative filmmakers, robotics designers, television and fiction writers, and artists in today’s world as well as historically. I hope the reader shares some of my excitement at exploring this world of artifice—with all of its controversies and paradoxes, amusements, and alarm. It’s a world that is ever-changing and may well help us ponder our views of gender, sexuality, and our own humanity.

NOTES

1. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Der Sandmann” [The Sandman], 1816, in Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, ed. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight, abridged ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 93–125; Ernst Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen” [On the Psychology of the Uncanny], Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 8, no. 22 (August 25, 1906): 195–98; Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche” [The Uncanny], 1919, in vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 218–52; Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” Energy 7 (1970): 33–35, Karl F. MacDorman and Nori Kageki, trans., IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine 19, no. 2 (June 2012): 100.

2. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” first titled as “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 64–68. Included in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), 149–181. The critique of these gender binaries as social constructions would become central in the writings on queer theory in science fiction by theorists including Veronica Hollinger, “(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarization of Gender,” Science Fiction Studies 26, no. 77, Part I (March 1999), 23–40, and more recent essayists in Sherryl Vint and Sümeyra Buran, eds., Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

3. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 158.

4. “Timeline of Computer History: 1985,” Computer History Museum, accessed July 4, 2023, https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1985/.

5. Sherryl Vint, “Introduction,” in Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction, ed. Vint and Buran, 27.

6. Julie Wosk’s short collection of essays Playboy, Mad Men, and Me—And Other Stories (, KDP, 2020) includes a memoir about her experiences working at Playboy.

7. Julie Wosk, Alluring Androids, Robot Women, and Electronic Eves (New York: Fort Schuyler Press, 2008); Wosk, My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

8. Julie Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). For photographs of June Leaf fabricating The Head, see Jonathan D. Lippincott, Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010).

9. “Animated Statue Smiles and Displays Her Dimples” (June 1934), Modern Mechanix, https://web.archive.org/web/20210613070514/http://blog.modernmechanix.com/animated-statue-smiles-and-displays-her-dimples/. All quotes are to this story.

10. Karen Araiza, “FBI Issues Alert on Barbie Doll with Video Camera,” NBC 10 Philadelphia, December 9, 2010, https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/fbi-issues-alert-on-barbie-doll-with-video-camera/1851230/; “Mattel’s ‘Video Girl Barbie’ Prompts FBI Warning,” Morning Edition, NPR, December 9, 2010, https://www.npr.org/2010/12/09/131926429/Last-Word.

11. By using Tillie’s eyes as an extension of their own, gallery visitors themselves became what the artist called “virtual cyborgs.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, “Tillie and CyberRoberta,” accessed April 22, 2022, https://www.lynnhershman.com/tillie/index.html.

12. Victoria Turk, “We’re Sexist toward Robots,” Vice, November 3, 2014, https://www.vice.com/en/article/539j5x/were-sexist-toward-robots.

13. Alice W. Fuller, “A Wife Manufactured to Order,” The Arena (Boston) 13 (July 1895): 305–12, https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/fuller/arena/order.html.

14. Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), reprinted as Breaking Frame: Technology, Art, and Design in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Authors Guild, 2013).

15. Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, L’Ève future [Tomorrow’s Eve], 1886, ed. and trans. Robert M. Adams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 60–61.