Technology Diary: Robots

Robots. Before they were even possible, the idea was always obsessed over. Dating back to the early mechanical robots of the renaissance and through the science fiction of the 1960s, and even to today, humans have been completely fascinated by the concept of a robot, so much so that entire mythologies have been created surrounding both the potential harms and triumphs they can create.

Now this is where gender comes in. Robots have an inherent paradox in their gender roles. Robots have no sex, have no biological source for an assigned gender, are made of steel, and do not have any societal standard to live up to, or gender roles to be taught. So based on this they should be completely genderless in their function or associations, but they aren’t.

Because robots are products of the human mind, the creator’s gender roles are thrust unto the machine. For example, men are gendered as dominant and/or destructive. Whether through the  fictionalization of Megatron or actual war machines, we have male robots. In the same vein, there are examples of gendered robots to women’s gender roles, like Rosie Jetson (a homemaker robot) of the Jetsons cartoon, or the Fembots (sexy robots that fire weapons out of their lingerie) in Austin Powers. The point is robots are often made to emulate human labor, in doing so we also often assign human gender’s that are associated with them.

This problematizes the symbol of the genderless cyborg that Harraway theorizes.

For reference, the following are pictures/gifs of the robots mentioned:

Megatron

Fembots

Rosie Jetson