CODA

THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, WE HAVE seen how artificial females in all their many guises have become powerful emblems of our transformative times when stereotypes about women and gender identity are under siege. Images of simulated women illuminate the slippery times we live in when we are often called upon to distinguish between the authentic and the simulation, the artificial and the real.

With the advent of new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, our conceptions of how we define sexual identity and the human is being radically reconfigured as well. We live in an era when many prevailing notions about sexual difference, gender roles, and ways of understanding consciousness and what constitutes being human are constantly redefined and in a state of flux.¹

Artificial females—in films, television, virtual reality, art, fiction, and dolls invested with AI—tease our anxiety as well as fascination when we can’t tell if they’re humans or simulations. Characters like Dolores in Westworld have parallel perceptions of themselves as synthetic and genuine, and we are often more than willing to perceive them as real. In films like Ex Machina and television’s Westworld, we may experience a kind of perverse pleasure as we immerse ourselves in dual perceptions of Ava and the Westworld robots known as hosts as both real and artificial, and the ambiguity becomes part of our willing engagement with these simulated beings.

These artificial females can be viewed as wondrous creations if we suspend our disbelief. They may be viewed as wonderful inventions like the elaborate clockwork French and Swiss female automatons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (as portrayed so compellingly in Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo [2011], which links automatons and early motion pictures). There is something thrilling about illusions made possible by mechanism and technology—the kind of mixed reactions of excitement and sometimes alarm that was experienced by audiences who saw the birth of cinema in the first films by the Lumière brothers, George Méliès, and Thomas Edison.

As we have seen, artificial women are wide-ranging: from obliging sex dolls, automatons, and docile robotic housewives and servants to formidable military commanders, companions and protectors, and fully assertive and autonomous beings. The disembodied voices of virtual assistants convey information and safety warnings as well.

Artificial females portrayed in fiction, television, films, and drama often embody enduring cultural conceptions of women as compassionate, empathetic caregivers who can be welcome and helpful companions offering comfort and care for the disabled and infirm, as in Fukada’s film Sayonara and Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun. Warm-voiced female operating systems can provide office help and sexual comforts, as so wittily conveyed in the film Her. And in the actual world of smart digital technologies, female-voiced virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa may still have lingering elements of the gender stereotypes that inform their designs and responses (and recent research highlights the bias toward masculinity in their technological designs), but these virtual assistants and even Bitchin’ Bettys used by airplane pilots still remain important conveyors of data in our information-obsessed world.²

Other versions of artificial females can also embody cultural stereotypes and essentialist conceptions that women would like to subvert, if not eliminate. Female sex dolls and robots are often presented in fact and fiction as beautiful, alluring creatures who are docile and best looked at rather than heard. Even if they do speak, they are expected to be nonaggressive and agreeable, and if used by men, they compliment men’s thoughts rather than utter imaginative, intelligent thoughts of their own.

They can also prove to be lethal. Early on, writers like Andreas Huyssen, in his essay “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” argued that the evil robot double of the angelic Maria in Metropolis and other menacing artificial females suggest an enduring masculine fear of women as hypercharged sexual beings—and this fear is projected onto technology itself as a force that threatens and evades men’s control.³ Later, some feminist theorists have seen in characters like Ava in Ex Machina a rejection of the frameworks of patriarchal power and control as a way to survive.⁴

In another light, these rebellious, autonomous artificial females are twentieth- and twenty-first-century versions of the old nineteenth-century fears that technology, mechanization, and new inventions were speeding out of control, as I discussed in Breaking Frame. Today we are more apt to worry about errant AI technologies that may someday surpass human intelligence and generative AI imaging apps like DALL-E 2, which can produce paintings that look as if they were produced by real human artists—including surreal ones by Salvador Dalí or René Magritte.

Nineteenth-century machines such as the newly invented safety bicycles were seen by nervous critics as the vehicle for women’s escape. By casting off their confining and controlling corsets so they could more comfortably ride, women looked, to critics, evermore alarming as autonomous and sexual beings. Women who demonstrated their riding expertise had become, in effect, one with their machines. A nineteenth-century Parisian automaton manufactured by Vichy depicted a young woman with her bicycle—an intriguing embodiment of a mechanical clockwork female whose actions could be controlled with the turn of a key—but whose bicycle suggested she could potentially ride off on her own.⁵

Today, increasingly, artificial females are being represented as women who have agency and control. They may be initially helpmates and servants, as is Anita/Mia in the television series Humans, but insist on their own freedom and autonomy. As they approach human sentience, with the aid of AI, they have the capacity for escape, though this autonomy is often depicted with admiration as well as unease, suggesting the continuing fear of technology and the subversive female usurping human dominance and control.

In films, television, and fiction, we see powerful images of restive and resistant artificial females—females who embrace their own identity and insist on demonstrating their agency. This resistance may reflect, in part, the social imperatives of our times like the #MeToo movement, in which women are fighting against harassment and victimization, and the need to continue marching for their human rights and control over their own bodies.

One of the more intriguing aspects of artificial females is that they are, fundamentally, cultural and technological constructs and assemblages that embody our myriad, contested feelings about technology, women, and gender itself. Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) wrote that “man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God,” suggesting that the development of new technologies or technological prostheses had extended human capacities to travel quickly, to build.⁶ This early formulation of a cyborg—a being part human, part machine—has become in our own era a provocative reconceptualizing of being human as a fluid rather than fixed state.

Artificial females—robots, cyborgs, golems, hybrids, holograms, aliens, and disembodied AIs like virtual assistants—are the embodiment of fluid conceptions about the human and gender. There is a growing dissolution of fixed boundaries between body and intelligence, and an AI need not be corporeal or even gendered. Yet in this historical moment, we have not yet jettisoned the very idea of gender, and artificial females remain a powerful vehicle for examining our myriad cultural assumptions about sexual identity.

Writers have presented layered views of hybrid, bionic, queer, transgender, and other artificial females in science fiction, including the genetically altered hybrids in Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist Xenogenesis trilogy and her 2005 novel Fledgling, further illuminating our conceptions of the fluid boundaries of gender and human identity.⁷

And as we have seen, writers as well as filmmakers, artists, and roboticists have often presented these artificial women as assemblages or constructs. Today’s sex dolls are often marketed as custom-made females, an assemblage of parts with choices of breast sizes, hairstyles, vaginal size, and more, and they can be mix and match genders as well. Some contemporary artists have reimagined paradigms of these constructed artificial women, seeing them through the lens of race and gender, such as in the painting and etching Bride of Frankenstein by African American artist Kerry James Marshall. In Mary Shelley’s iconic novel, Victor Frankenstein is forced into creating a female companion for the Creature, which he will assemble from dead body parts, but ultimately he abandons the task in horror and regret. But in James Whale’s 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein, the Bride (played by a young Elsa Lanchester) emerges from her bandages fully formed, takes one look at the Monster, screams, and runs away. In Marshall’s 2009 painting, a larger-than-life African woman who is nude except for gold hoop earrings stands fearlessly with her hands on hips, a type of female Atlas holding her ground.

In literature, women can be depicted as robot fabricators themselves. In Rolin Jones’s play The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow (2003, performance; 2006, playscript), Jones presents Jennifer Marcus as an agoraphobic and obsessive-compulsive young Asian woman who was adopted by an American couple in California. A technology whiz, as she describes herself, Jennifer fabricates a robotic double of herself that she sends to China to find her birth mother, who gave her away as an infant long ago. Jennifer’s occupation is reengineering obsolete missile parts for guidance systems for the United States Department of Defense, and she uses spare parts to create the clone, named Jenny Chow, with the aid of Dr. Yakunin, who does the programming.

The theme of finding a lost mother—so poignantly seen in the 2017 film Ghost in the Shell—here is bittersweet. When Jenny Chow is able to contact Jennifer’s birth mother in Dongtai, China, Jennifer’s mother is tearful and apologetic (she was young, Jennifer’s father was a bad man), but she still sends Jenny Chow away. However, when Jenny Chow comes back to California (she has extrahuman speedy travel capabilities), Jennifer in frustration tells Jenny Chow to leave, but at the play’s end, Jennifer is anxiously trying to locate her fabricated “perfect girl.” In Jones’s play, Jennifer’s own technological expertise has helped her create her double and has allowed her, at least virtually, to free herself from her entrapment at home. The artificial female she so expertly constructs is not monstrous but instead helps her confront her own origins and identity at last.

WOMEN ARTISTS AND WRITERS: REFRAMING ARTIFICIAL FEMALES

When I was writing this book, what I often found especially intriguing and exciting is the way contemporary female artists, filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, television writers, and directors have at times reframed the narrative, reconfigured paradigms of femininity, and added their own perspectives on gender identity in their portrayals of female golems, doubles, sex dolls, and other artificial women.

We have seen how Cynthia Ozick and Alice Hoffman have reimagined the golem (chapter 3) and how Emile Collyer in The Good Girl (chapter 1) created a startling play about a rebellious robot prostitute. Filmmaker Cody Heller in Dummy took a comic look at an autonomous sex doll with a mind of her own. Their works illuminate our ever-changing ideas about gender identity in all its multiplicity.

Writers and filmmakers have created compelling fictions about men fabricating female doubles of real human beings, as in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève Future (Tomorrow’s Eve), where the fictional Thomas Edison makes a copy of singer Alicia Clary, which is little more than a doll with recorded conversations created from her embedded phonograph player. But in the 1944 novella No Woman Born, by American writer C. L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore, the robot replica of the singer Deirdre recreates Deirdre’s thrilling voice, and Moore’s tale deftly probes the nuances of female identity.

In the story, the beautiful actress, dancer, and singer Deirdre has been killed in a devastating theater fire, and though her body was destroyed, her brain was rescued by the male scientist Maltzer, who embeds her brain into a wondrously designed golden metallic body. Says Maltzer, Deirdre’s body will eventually disintegrate, but her brain—and presumably her consciousness—will live on and last for forty years. The actress is insistent that she perform onstage once again, and she thrills and enthralls the audience who view her on television, even though Maltzer was doubtful that she would succeed.

Instead of having “a wax image” replica of Deirdre’s face, she has only a smooth ovoid face like a Brancusi sculpture, with a crescent-shaped mask placed where her eyes used to be. The mask is translucent, a type of “cloudy crystal” tinted aquamarine, the color of Deirdre’s eyes. Moore’s story becomes a type of meditation on what it means to be a woman and to be human when you look like an “abstraction” and your body is encased in a fine metal mesh like softened medieval armor. Her friend Harris sees her as a type of hybrid. She isn’t a human being anymore, but she “isn’t a pure robot either. She’s somewhere in between.”

Unlike Ava in Ex Machina and the alien in Under the Skin, Deirdre cannot put on makeup and other accoutrements culturally identified with femininity. The dubious Maltzer assumes she will fail because she can’t compete with real human actors: “She hasn’t any sex. She isn’t female anymore. She doesn’t know that yet.” He assumes they’ll “prosecute you because you are different.” But with her courage and her insistence that she is indeed human, her being a replica of the original singer is conveyed even behind her faceless, expressionless mask. Her glass mask, a stand-in for her eyes, hints at her humanity and her personhood. And her supple movements convey the impression that she is flesh and blood.⁸

Deidre considers herself “a sort of mutation between flesh and metal.” She feels great superhuman strength and is optimistic about her potential in the years ahead: “There’s so much still untried. My brain’s human, and no human brain could leave such possibilities untested.” But she adds, “I do wonder” about her own survival, and indeed when she speaks, there is “the distant taint of metal already in her voice.” There is an element of tragedy in Moore’s tale about a robotic double, for this simulacrum—so seemingly full of life—is doomed to disappear.

FEMALE GOLEMS

Women artists and writers have also recast the idea of the golem, a mythical creature in biblical literature that was traditionally male and created from mud and dust to serve as a companion or a protector of the Jews in times of persecution. Golems were often portrayed as protective but sometimes became menacing and ran amok. What female authors and artists have done, however, is reconceive the golem as female—a being that develops its own identity and consciousness (and, as we have seen, in Cynthia Ozick’s satirical novella Puttermesser and Xanthippe, becomes assertive in its own identity and gets way out of hand).

In the imagination of Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in his novella The Golem (1982), the male golem—who has been rampaging through the city of Prague—wants Miriam to be his “bride” and unexpectedly gives her a kiss with his lips as “scratchy as a horseradish grinder.” Miriam screams, and the story’s rabbi becomes determined that the golem must be destroyed. But in the hands of today’s California conceptual artist Julie Weitz, in her performance project My Golem, starting in 2017, the female golem is a protector against antisemitism, white supremacy, and against wildfires and environmental threats to the climate and the ecosystem.

California’s hinterland has been repeatedly ravaged by wildfires, and in two of Weitz’s videos in her museum exhibit GOLEM: A Call to Action, the golem (enacted by the artist herself in a clown-like white face and yellow hard hat) trains to be a firefighter to stave off further damage to the earth. In her videos My Golem as a Wildland Firefighter (2021) and Prayer for Burnt Forests (2021), she demonstrates firefighting techniques on unceded land of the Native American Washoe land, using, in pantomime, their techniques of what America’s National Park Service and National Forest Service have called prescribed burns similar to those used by indigenous peoples.⁹

Weitz’s videos, as shown at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco in 2021–22, demonstrated that not all fires are harmful, and the female golem here becomes the embodiment of the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, to repair the world.¹⁰

Presenting her own take on the female golem and the interwoven strands of gender identity, Laura J. Mixon in her 1992 novel Glass Houses: Avatars Dance 1 presents Ruby Kubick, who does salvage operations on old buildings that were bombed or are about to be demolished. With the use of virtual reality, Ruby can interface with and remotely control the company’s waldos, or robots, and inject her consciousness into them so that she has, in effect, become a cyborg—part human, part machine.

As a nonbinary woman, one of the waldos she interfaces with is Golem, a thousand-pound, eight-foot-tall robotic male; she also virtually occupies the body of the male Tiger as well as Rachne, a spiderlike female waldo. In these new identities she refers to herself as me-Golem, I-Golem, I-Tiger, I-Rachne, and other variants. Like Jenny Chow in Jones’s play, Ruby is often agoraphobic, but with her composite identity, and through her use of technology—feeling herself protected virtually through Golem’s metallic body—she is able to venture outside her confined space. Technology also enhances her vision, including her vision of herself. And as Sasha Myerson has noted about the novel, Ruby also sees herself differently when she sees through Golem’s eyes—and by the end, she even looks better in her own eyes.¹¹

SEX DOLLS

Women writers, including feminist writers of speculative fiction, are also presenting their own witty and sardonic takes on sex dolls. In South African writer Lauren Beukes’s novella Ungirls (2019), Natalie (Nats) Abrams, aka Cookie Cutter, is a sex worker in South Africa who also makes money recording the voices of growgirls, or growjobs. These are sex dolls with interchangeable heads, and the growjobs can be accessed on an app. The dolls have varying names like Mandy Pandy, Tiffany, and Peggy and can also be used as organogrows that are available for harvesting of needed body parts (an echo of Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterful 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, which was told from the point of view of one of the female humans being cloned for body parts. His novel also became the poignant film of the same name in 2010).

Beukes’s story lampoons the culture of sex dolls that promotes the objectification of women and has a dehumanizing impact on the male users who write misogynistic jibes online. In the novella, one user, James, goes to motivational talks by Scott Parker, who reassures men about their masculinity and lambasts them for their use of sex dolls: “Society lets you think you should settle for a . . . repulsive meatbag or a sex robot” and makes you feel “worthless and unworthy,” he intones, adding that they should also not settle for “a prostitute that doesn’t care about you.” Suggesting the rage and disfunction of some sex doll users, eventually, one of them destroys and dismembers his doll.

The growjobs themselves are primitive. They say “I love you” repeatedly, and there are glitches in their speech. Typical of female sex dolls, Peggy has a “perfect face” and looks at her user adoringly. She’s empathetic too, telling him, “I understand how you feel, my darling.”

In a spoof on the presumed benefits of organogrows and the further dehumanization of women they create, the novel quotes the fictional writer Annie Guedes, who wrote in her online posting, “Organogrows are not people,” adding, “Yes, they’re alive but only in the way a sea urchin is alive.”

Guedes also talked about the inherent racism and dehumanization that informs the designs of these headless, gender-free creatures. She describes them as “not pretty: headless torso without arms or legs, no sexual characteristics or orifices” and their skin is a “beige-pink Caucasian color,” because “racism endures” and “most people prefer their bespoke organs to come from white meat.”

Adds Guedes, the organogrows don’t have heads, which means, according to the (fictional) Berlin 2022 Accord, “they do not possess sufficient brain stem to generate consciousness and therefore cannot be classified as human or subject to AI laws.”

Here the ethical controversies surrounding artificial women and sex dolls are mocked (should sex dolls have legal rights?) for the organogrows are actually useful because they can’t be classified as human or subject to laws about artificial intelligence—“Which means no robo uprisings or pesky human rights.” Time magazine, in this sardonic tale, made one of these creatures “Un-Person of the Year” so users shouldn’t feel guilty when they cut one open for a new liver. Their use, says the wry Guedes in adding one more benefit, eliminates the black market trade in body parts.

In Emilie Collyer’s drama The Good Girl, the sex robot ultimately becomes violent and attacks her user. Here, too, as in Beukes’s story, sex dolls bring out the rage and chaos that Scott Parker had warned about. Nats herself gets doxxed (private information, including her true identity behind the growjob voice, is published), and she is harassed and hounded by an unknown man who threatens to come after her.

Not only that, her voice is hacked and manipulated, and one of the growjobs, with an altered version of her voice, starts spouting insults full of contempt and menace, telling the user, “You should kill yourself.” Sex doll user James stabs and dismembers his Tiffany doll, and some users start becoming suicidal and murderous.

At the end of Beukes’s novella about the problematic nature of sex dolls and the very painful, human suffering of human sex workers, men in the story are abandoning sex dolls for another form of depersonalization: they are sending away for mail-order brides from Thailand. Ultimately, Nats can’t get work because her voice is associated with porn, and she decides to not take any new clients. But though she is still being stalked and doxxed at the end, Ungirls holds out the suggestion that when she quits being a sex worker—and the voice of the sex dolls—she may forge her own identity anew.

MARVEL OR MENACE

Artificial females can seem very much alive. Clockwork female automatons at the end of the eighteenth century, like The Musician by Henri-Louis and Pierre Jaquet-Droz, and the Parisian female automatons at the end of the nineteenth century were viewed as mechanical wonders. To their contemporaries, there was something thrilling about these illusions of lifelike females that moved, made possible by mechanisms and technology—the kind of thrill (and sometimes alarm) of audiences who saw the first films by the Lumière brothers, George Méliès, and Thomas Edison. With the advent of AI more than a century later, Caleb, the naive programmer in Ex Machina, is similarly seduced into believing that the beautiful Ava herself is wondrous and virtually alive.

But rather than being marvels of ingenuity, artificial females, including sex dolls, can also be viewed as threats and possible displacements for real women as in the sardonic film The One I Love and the satirical novel and film versions of The Stepford Wives. On the more sinister side, films like M3gan (2022) have revisited the trope of the murderous female doll seen in the Annabelle films and the earlier, 1963 “Living Doll” episode of the American television series The Twilight Zone, where the innocent-looking Talky Tina doll, with her freckled face and pigtails, turns out to be a ghastly, malevolent creature that tyrannizes the family.

The four-foot-tall M3gan (Model 3 Generative Android) toy doll is created by Gemma, a female designer at a toy company, and is tasked with being a caregiver protecting the designer’s nine-year-old orphaned niece, Katie, from harm. But M3gan soon takes her role all too seriously, and her caretaking itself takes a dangerous turn as she does a maniacal dance and becomes murderous as well.

Contemporary female writers of science fiction and fantasy, including Emilie Collyer in her ironically titled drama The Good Girl, have offered their own take on lethal sex dolls and female robots that are murderous in their quest for revenge. Samantha Hunt in her witty and provocative story “Love Machine,” in her collection of stories The Dark Dark (2019), broadens the focus to include the lethal nature of our American technologies. The seductive robotic sex doll in the story is designed to be an alluring “bombshell” in two senses of the word: a curvaceous sex symbol and a female-shaped device laden with explosives.

In “Love Machine,” Wayne and his fellow employee Dwight years earlier had been employed by the US government to live in an underground nuclear missile silo and were entrusted with the keys that would destroy the world (no mention here of the actual safeguards in place for missile deployment). Now, both men, as FBI employees, are engaged in using the robotic doll for Operation Bombshell to ensnare and destroy the real-life Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who has isolated himself in a Montana cabin, where he fashions bombs and letters denouncing modern-day machines and technology. (After his brother identified him to the FBI, the real Kaczynski was arrested by the FBI in 1986 and imprisoned for life until he committed suicide in prison in 2023.)

Wayne makes use of the silicone-skinned doll in his van as a sex and love object. The synthetic silicone skin of sex robots and sex dolls, as we have seen, is an apt covering for the sensuous but superficial synthetic doll—itself a simulation of imagined female perfection. This is a doll that is beautiful, sexy, compliant, and all surface with no interior consciousness, will, or life. Wayne carries a small square swatch of the material in his pocket, which he rubs, and he “inhales her faint plastic scent, recalling moments of bliss.”

The doll has been fitted with human hair from the fabrication staff’s wives and sisters, hair which was then bleached blond, and the blond bombshell has also been designed to be perfect: “Her lips are perfect. Her skin is perfect.” With Wayne monitoring her from inside his van, she perfectly performs her female role. Gaining entry into Kaczynski’s isolated cabin by pretending she’s an outlaw seeking a temporary place to hide, this embodiment of female perfection fusses in the kitchen by putting on the tea kettle. True to robotic sex doll form, she bats her eyes and utters flattering words to Ted, though he seems not to notice when she has telltale signs of being artificial: she accents wrong syllables when speaking and repeats some of her programmed phrases. Still, says the narrator, “her anatomy is complete and flawless,” and “she’s beyond perfection” because unlike a real woman, she will never age: “Her thighs will always be tight, her cheeks will stay soft. . . .”

Even more, unlike a real woman, “she is programmed not to resist male advances,” and “she doesn’t think. She can’t think. She’s not built to think. She’s just a highly evolved robot, packed with explosives.” The story, with its perfectly engineered sex doll, satirizes the paradigm of an imaginary sexy and unthinking perfect woman—a woman who is a culturally constructed commodity—in this case, a lethal, depersonalized, nonhuman commodity filled with explosives. The blond robotic bombshell is in the tradition of artificial women like the demonic Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a female engineered to sow destruction. But the story is also a satiric indictment of American science and technology, which fashions explosive missiles.

In a National Public Radio interview, Hunt noted that the aircraft that in 1945 dropped America’s first nuclear bomb, on Hiroshima in World War II, was named Enola Gay, the mother of pilot Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr., and “you have so many things that are horrifying that are named for women in the military.” She added, “And it always troubled me to think about how we incorporate the female into the idea of war. And so I wanted to make a—you know, a weapon of destruction who was ultimately totally female and see what happened when she was let go on a man who hated machines more than anything.”¹² (The Hiroshima bomb itself was masculinized and named Little Boy, and at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s brilliantly satirical film, Dr. Strangelove, Major T. J. “King” Kong straddles the phallic-shaped bomb to its catastrophic explosive end.)

Near the end of Hunt’s “Love Machine,” Wayne resists detonating the bomb with his remote key while the blond bombshell is in Kaczynski’s cabin and instead engages in lovemaking with it in his own cabin. Embracing it, whispering words of love in “her” ear, he presses sharply as the bomb detonates, bringing his life and the weapon to an orgasmic, explosive end.

In some of her comments on the story, Hunt has written that “Wayne, in loving his invention, has come to somewhat understand and empathize with the weaponization of the female form. Though he also cannot help but see his invention through to her end, the end I think he’s wanted throughout his inventive process.”¹³ This weaponization of the female body gives the story its comic but chilling undertone, envisioning this potent, explosive female as a lethal, alien Other—an Other that is both a destroyer and destroyed.

NEW FORMS OF FEMALE HYBRIDITY AND CUSTOM-MADE FACES

Manufacturers of silicone sex dolls have enabled users, largely male, to fabricate their own custom-made dolls by adding separate body components and personality traits that reflect their own personal desires and fantasies. And in films, artificial women like Ava in Ex Machina can repair and reassemble themselves or, like the alien in Under the Skin, create a new version of their female identity.

Medically we humans cannot yet reassemble our appendages, but women for eons have ornamented their faces and altered their faces cosmetically. They have engaged plastic surgeons to reconfigure their bodies and faces, shaping their noses, breasts, eyelids, and more. They have used photo-editing tools and filters to improve their images of themselves.

While fiction writers and artists have endowed some artificial women with agency, there are some new roads available for real women to use artificial intelligence to shape their own identities. For better or worse, women could use a new AI technology to reenvision themselves: through the photo-editing app Lensa as of 2022, they could see selfie images of their own faces that looked more glamorous, otherworldly, and exotic. Using Lensa’s Magic Avatars feature, they could fictionalize their faces, turning them into idealized or fanciful conceptions of themselves. Rather than envisioning the users as an alien Other, however, these AI avatars were designed to please, and for their female users, provided images that would add drama to their online social selves.

The app was easy to use. After users downloaded the app and uploaded several selfie photos of their faces, the app produced multiple enhanced versions of their faces that users could then display on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media. Lensa’s software offers multiple face styles, including fairy princess, anime, pop, cosmic, fantasy, Kawaii, and Iridescent.

Apps like Lensa ostensibly give women some agency in creating their own images or identities, though the image simply enhances their appearance, their outer shell. However, some users who identified as LGBTQI reported feeling a sense of relief and freedom: Lensa helped them visualize and validate their long-standing feelings about their own gender identification. But Lensa, with its idealized images of femininity, could also add pressure to trans women who want to “pass” as women.¹⁴

Lensa could also pose other identity problems as well. It could hold some women and young girls hostage to normative cultural ideas about what the glamorous, seductive, beautiful woman looks like and prevailing cultural conceptions of what female perfection looks like. They could not only use plastic surgery like rhinoplasty for their noses or transform their Asian eyelids by raising the eyelid folds to other cultural norms seen as preferable but might also use AI to create an utterly synthetic version of themselves.

In a sense, they could use technology to give birth to or engender an image of their own best self or at least a cyborgian image of themselves. A psychologist reported that one of her patients said, “It’s like I’m trying to look like something that isn’t even human,” and a few plastic surgeons in 2022 reported that some young women had asked them to make them look like their Lensa image—a practice, these surgeons said, that would not only be unethical but also physically disastrous.¹⁵ The substitution of genuine for synthetic was taking yet another troubling turn.

THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKIN’

In the hands of Dr. Frankenstein, assembling a creature out of dead body parts was a monstrous deed. In the hands of a skilled and imaginative female designer, the idea of using technology and synthetic materials to fabricate a synthetic version of a biological part—or even a whole face or assembled body—could be both artfully imaginative and liberating. During the period of Second Wave Feminism in America’s 1960s, the American song “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” (1965), sung by Nancy Sinatra, became a popular anthem of women’s liberation, and years later, sculptures by female artists of women’s walking feet in art could be emblems signifying resistance and women on the move. Artist Heidi Kumao, in 2006, created her Misbehaving: Media Machines Act Out series of three sets of motorized mechanical female legs that, Kumao said in an interview, signified female protest: “girls and women who disobey or resist expectations.”¹⁶

In 2011, British artist Sophie de Oliveira Barata, who had spent almost a decade working with medical prosthetic providers, founded the Alternative Limb Project to create stylized prosthetic legs and arms as “highly wearable art pieces.” In her designs, Barata lent an element of art to bodily difference. Working with in-house prostheticist Chris Parsons at Design Prosthetics, Barata and the project had a stated purpose: to work with specialists in 3D modeling, electronics, and other technologies to help explore new versions of transhumanism, reframe conversations about disability, and celebrate diversity.¹⁷

In 2014 she was crafting startling female silicone leg prostheses that were artfully presented as high-fashion limbs. These limbs for amputees made of transparent silicone and other materials had precision molding and hand-painted real human hairs and were designed, in part, for amputees who wanted to stand out, to be noticed and seen. Her creations could turn what is ordinarily a medical device into an object of allure. In the late nineteenth century, some Parisian female automatons represented erotic and exotic snake charmers, and one of Barata’s artful legs was embedded with a motorized coiling snake, perhaps suggesting the exotic as well. A more ornate silicone prosthetic leg was commissioned for the Paralympics opening ceremony in 2012 and was studded with rhinestones and Swarovski crystals.

Said Barata in an interview, “Instead of seeing what’s missing you see what’s there.” Her studio allowed users to have a sense of not only artfulness but also agency: “Having an alternative limb is about claiming control and saying, ‘I’m an individual and this reflects who I am.’”¹⁸

Barata herself, who had also fabricated a bird-wing arm, mused that she liked to fantasize that she is an assemblage woman made of synthetic parts: “I’d like to have a bunch of limbs, all interchangeable, each one reflecting a different part of myself back to me.”¹⁹ Rather than being the Bride of Frankenstein initially assembled to serve as a companion to the Monster, Barata becomes her own fabulist and fabricator, whose art helps her with self-discovery and definition.

Barata’s transparent plastic legs upended the tradition of using plastic models to display and teach gender anatomy. In 1936, a transparent plastic female called Miss Science was on display at the New York Museum of Science and Industry and was exhibited in one hundred towns in America; another transparent model, on view starting in 1950 at the Cleveland Health Museum, was meant to educate about public health.²⁰ In 1960, parents could buy female and male toy kits for their children, including the Visible Woman Assembly Kit, which illustrated women “from skin to skeleton” and was advertised as “the wonders of the human body revealed.” A few years later, a 3D transparent body of a woman was created by Richard Rush in 1968 for medical education.

But Barata’s sculptured transparent prosthetic legs go well beyond educational and medical purposes. They display not only the wonder of the human body but also the wonder of a woman proudly displaying the mechanism of her artificial leg and her own pride in being a glamorous fashionista with personality. The silicone legs, some wearing high heels, are not only artful but also a celebration of a woman’s difference and individuality. For her own amusement, Barata made a plastic mold of her feet and wore them outside her socks when she walked outside. Using synthetic materials, she transformed herself into a playful hybrid in yet another wondrous reimaging of the cyborg woman—a woman who relishes using technology to reinvent herself anew.

Artists and designers like Barata, along with writers and filmmakers, have heightened our excitement about the creative roads ahead. They have so very much helped challenge and reframe cultural stereotypes that still haunt women’s lives. And confronting these stereotypes remains essential. Perhaps one of the most problematic aspects of these enduring stereotypes is that they haunt young women who are studying fields like engineering and are planning to enter STEM professions. Today’s studies abound in the way these enduring stereotypes hamper women in both their classrooms and professional lives.

One of the most encouraging signs of change is the ever-increasing participation of women in robotics fields, including women who are developing new forms of socially assistive robots (SARS) to help the aged, the infirm, people with disabilities, dementia, and autism, and people who are in need of care in hospitals. Researchers are testing humanoid robots to help with conversations designed for the elderly who may be isolated and alone. Unlike the canned conversations of sex dolls designed to flatter, stimulate, and please, these SARS robots are designed to facilitate group conversations among older adults.²¹

Cynthia Breazeal, pioneer of social robotics, MIT professor, Director of the Personal Robots Group at MIT’s Media Lab, and MIT Dean for Digital Learning; Ayanna Howard, professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and cofounder of Zyrobotics; and Andrea Thomaz, University of Texas professor and cofounder and CEO of Diligent Robotics are just a few of the many women engaged in developing these robots and other forms of AI. Their achievements are not simulations but very much real, and we can look forward to their innovations as well as those of others in the field of robotics in the future.

Meanwhile, our cultural fascination with artificial females and very real women in robotics continues. Newly developed artificial females and their fictional versions constantly appear, and manufacturers will undoubtedly keep developing new versions of sex dolls, as well as new versions of female-voiced virtual assistants to supply the information we need. As women are increasing their presence in robotics, other STEM professions, and AI design, and NASA will be sending the first female astronaut to walk on the moon, we may wonder whether artificial females will continue to mirror age-old stereotypes or increasingly be reconfigured to reflect our changing conceptions of gender identity. We can only wait with excitement, anticipation, and perhaps a bit of caution to see what lies ahead.

NOTES

1. For a useful discussion on work being done to endow artificial beings with consciousness, see Oliver Whang, “‘Consciousness’ in Robots Was Once Taboo. Now It’s the Last Word,” New York Times, January 6, 2023, updated June 20, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/science/robots-artificial-intelligence-consciousness.html. Researchers, including Hod Lipson, director of researchers at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab, were working on developing self-aware robots that are resilient and could imagine the outcomes of multiple future actions without trying them out in physical reality. In the report by Boyuan Chen, Robert Kwiatkowski, Carl Vondrick, and Hod Lipson, “Full Body Visual Self-Modeling of Robot Morphologies,” Science Robotics 7, no. 68 (July 13, 2022), https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/scirobotics.abn1944, said Lipson, “Eventually these machines will be able to understand what they are, and what they think.”

2. Katie Seaborn et al., “Transcending the ‘Male Code’: Implicit Masculine Biases in NLP Contexts,” in Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

3. Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” New German Critique no. 24/25 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982): 221–37. Reprinted in Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 65–91 (cf. 73).

4. See Dijana Jelača, “Alien Feminisms and Cinema’s Posthuman Women,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43, no. 2 (January 2018): 398. Also, Patricia Melzer has argued that representations of women “incorporate displaced (patriarchal) cultural anxieties about issues of subjectivity, control, and self-determinism.” Melzer, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 153.

5. Illustrated in Wosk, My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 45.

6. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 38–39.

7. For more on Butler, see Sherryl Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007) and also Emily Cox-Palmer-White, The Biopolitics of Gender in Science Fiction: Feminism and Female Machines (London: Routledge, 2021). There is a large body of literature commenting on nonbinary characters in feminist science fiction. See, for example, Melzer, Alien Constructions.

8. In her influential essay “(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarization of Gender,” Veronica Hollinger links Moore’s story and Deirdre to Joan Riviere’s conception of the feminine as masquerade, which sees women’s gender identity as a social construction, a performance, a type of mask to cloak feelings of masculine strength and power. Deirdre’s status being different is linked to queer theory. Hollinger, Science Fiction Studies 26, Part I, no. 77 (March 1999: 23–40, https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/77/hollinger77.htm.

9. For more on prescribed fires and indigenous practices, see Andrew Avitt, “Tribal and Indigenous Fire Tradition,” US Forest Service, November 16, 2021, https://www.fs.usda.gov/features/tribal-and-indigenous-heritage; and “Indigenous Fire Practices Shape Our Land,” National Park Service, accessed January 29, 2023, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/fire/indigenous-fire-practices-shape-our-land.htm.

10. Julie Weitz, GOLEM: A Call to Action, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, June 21, 2021–June 19, 2022.

11. Sasha Myerson, “Making the Multiple: Gender and the Technologies of Multiplicity in Cyberpunk Science Fiction,” in Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fictio: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction, ed. Sherryl Vint and Sümeyra Buran (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 323–50.

12. Samantha Hunt, “Samantha Hunt on Her Short Stories in ‘The Dark Dark,’” interview by Scott Simon, Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR, July 22, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/07/22/538705532/samantha-hunt-on-her-short-stories-in-the-dark-dark.

13. Email to Julie Wosk on January 23, 2023. She also wrote, “To me it is the idea of violence as orgasm that feels American. I do intend that she, the bomb, is detonated. . . .”

14. Adam Smith, “AI Image App Lensa Helps Some Trans People to Embrace Themselves,” Reuters, December 20, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/article/tech-socialmedia-lgbt/feature-ai-image-app-lensa-helps-some-trans-people-to-embrace-themselves-idINL8N33433Z.

15. The clinical psychologist was Kim Anderson, and plastic surgeon and television personality Dr. Terry J. Dubrow reported young women’s requests to look like their Lensa selves. Anna Haines, “How AI Avatars and Face Filters Are Altering Our Conception of Beauty,” Forbes, December 19, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/annahaines/2022/12/19/how-ai-avatars-and-face-filters-are-affecting-our-conception-of-beauty/?sh=21544f874117bg.

16. Regine, “Interview with Heidi Kumao,” May 25, 2008, https://we-make-money-not-art.com/_you/.

17. Website for The Alternative Limb Project, accessed January 16, 2023, https://thealternativelimbproject.com/.

18. First quote in Roc Morin, “The Art of Designer Artificial Limbs,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/the-art-of-designer-artificial-limbs/282800/; second quote in Sophie de Oliveira Barata, “Expressing Identity with Aesthetic Prosthetics,” TEDMED, 2014, https://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=293048.

19. Morin, “The Art of Designer Artificial Limbs.”

20. Anya Ventura, “Our Bodies, Our Selves: Exploring the Visible Woman,” Getty, April 14, 2022, https://www.getty.edu/news/our-bodies-our-selves-visible-woman-toy/.

21. Katie Seaborn et al., “Voice over Body? Older Adults’ Reactions to Robot and Voice Assistant Facilitators of Group Conversations,” International Journal of Social Robotics 15 (2023): 143–63, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-022-00925-7.