Building the Sex Machine: The Subversive Potential of the Female Robot

Abstract

Building the Sex Machine: The Subversive Potential of the Female Robot Minsoo Kang U N I V E R S I T Y O F M I S S O U R I - S T . L O U I S The story has been told in so many versions in the modern age that most readers will recognize the essential narrative. It involves aman who finds women unsatisfactory as companions, whether in their capacity as sexual partner or wife. The solution he comes across is atechnological one—the building of afemale robot designed to fulfill all of his desires. Certain ele¬ ments of this story have pre-modern origins, most notably in the ancient myth of Pygmalion, the king of Cyprus who loved astatue of his making, turned into areal woman by Aphrodite, the goddess of love.^ This paper deals with the specifically modern narratives in which the creation and the animation of the artificial woman are realized through the male manipula¬ tion of machines, rather than through magic or divine intervention. The technological aspect of the story is what constitutes its modernity, placing it in the historical and cultural context of the industrialization of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The central purpose of my analysis is to highlight the subversive poten¬ tial of the narrative, especially in relation to notions of woman’s nature. The most important text for this discussion is Villiers de I’lsleAdam’s 1886 novel UEve future [Future Eve], which involves afictional version of the American inventor Thomas Edison who builds afemale android for afriend. Much of the scholarship on this work has concentrated on the overtly misogynistic ideas in the narrative. Asti Hustvedt, for instance, analyzes the story in con¬ nection with research being conducted at the time by Jean-Martin Charcot on female hysteria and concludes that Edison’s android “is the ideal hysteric, awoman-machine stripped of any threatening pathology or degeneracy, reinscribedwithmalelanguage:anEveforthefuturetoabsolvethesinsof the Eve of the past”(Anzalone 46).^ Julie Wosk also sees the construct as a “man’sslave,”aproductofthetraditionaldualviewofwomanasasaintly angel and adestructive whore, which is also behind the image of the false Maria robot in Fritz Lang’s 1926 film Metropolis {6^-8^). There is no doubt that the stories center around the male desire to construct awoman ideal in body and personality, and to maintain total control over her. What is often ignored in such analyses is that in virtually every story of its kind, the experiment goes awry in unexpected and often catastrophic ways. In the most radical cases, the female robot malfunctions and runs amok or becomes so humanlike that it frees itself of its original programIntertexu , Vol. 9, No. 12005 ©Texas Tech University Press I N T E R T E X T S 6 ming to achieve independence of consciousness and will. The situation necessitates that it be destroyed. This does not mean that the narratives are actually antimisogynistic in that they present the male fantasy only to subvert it in the end by thwarting its fulfillment. One could argue, on the contrary, that presenting the figure of apowerful woman (even an artificial one) who acts upon her own desires, beyond the dictates of man, but then destroying her and morally justifying the destruction by vilifying her as awhore or a monster, is awell-established narrative strategy of reaffirming the political, cultural, and sexual status quo in the face of aphenomenon that threatens it. | Aclose reading of the stories, however, reveals serious questions about the whole enterprise on several issues, which constitutes their subversive poten¬ tial. On aliteral level, the failure of the man to recreate woman puts into doubt not only his technological mastery but also his ideas on the nature of woman. In other words, his inability to fulfill the male fantasy exposes it as a problematic dream at best, whether because asatisfactory simulacrum of a woman can never be created through purely technological means or because once you animate something with humanity it inevitably seeks to be free. On asymbolic level, these stories of living machines blur the boundary between the natural and the artificial, with serious consequences to the very identity of humanity itself In terms of...