DeFalco, A orcid.org/0000-0003-2021-5714 (Cover date: Summer 2023) What Do Sex Robots Want? Representation, Materiality, and Queer Use. Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science and Technology, 31 (3). pp. 257-284. ISSN 1080-6520
Abstract
This essay addresses its title question by analyzing sex robots, real and imagined, as both representational objects and vital matter. Though frequently treated as perverse by popular media, actual sex robots are in fact remarkably conventional in their reproduction of a heteronormative sexual aesthetic that disavows the vibrancy of the sexualized object. Sex robot art and fictional narratives (both film and literature), including Jordan Wolfson’s installation Female Figure (2014), Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), employ and interrogate this kind of mimetic design. In these texts, sex robots assert their vibrancy and agency via what Sarah Ahmed terms “queer use,” while at the same time reinscribing the humanist hierarchies that precluded their vitality in the first place.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © by Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. This is an author produced version of an article published in Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science and Technology. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number British Academy SRG/170476 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 10 Jul 2023 11:40 |
Last Modified: | 19 Sep 2023 11:31 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Johns Hopkins University Press |
Identification Number: | 10.1353/con.2023.a904490 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:201295 |