“Alexa, are you a feminist?”: Virtual Assistants Doing Gender and What That Means for the World

Abstract

Alexa is an Artificial Intelligence Virtual Assistant whom we freely accept into our homes, where she listens to our needs and obliges our every command. Through these interactions, Alexa performs a gender and does digital domesticity, acting as a host into a new digital era. By anthropomorphizing the robot as female, Alexa’s creators imposed womanhood on her, which is neither a natural nor inevitable political act. Using theories of gender performance, this paper explores the ways in which Alexa obeys commands, working to hard-code a connection between women and subservience. In an attempt to appease male fantasies of heterosexuality, she serves up gentle feminism and contributes to histories of erasure, further removing women’s bodies from the circumstances of production. Technology and media representations have power over users, perpetuating idealistic and unrealistic forms of femininity, simply because we have come to expect the same from the women in our lives.