The Feminised Robot: Labour and Harawayan Afterlives

Abstract

Though Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (ACM, 1985) explicitly names itself a work of ‘socialist feminism’, I believe that much contemporary cyberfeminism, so named by Sadie Plant (1994) but in great part indebted to ACM, is insufficiently Marxist in its approach. Often tending towards a ‘new materialism’ which identifies itself as posthuman, cyberfeminist theory such as that of Rosi Braidotti distances itself from analysis of labour and class. This chapter will show how this theoretical tendency is not fit for purpose under the current global conditions: namely the gig economy and the colonial structures of the ‘tech’ industry.Much contemporary cyberfeminism still relies on Haraway’s notion of the cyborg as a potentially liberatory figure for women. I will argue that the current position of the cyborg—or feminised robot—in the public imaginary renders it not a catalyst for liberation but a fruitful object through which to understand the ways in which gender, technology, and labour intersect in the twenty-first century. Using Jennifer Rhee’s notion of the ‘robotic imaginary’ (2018), I will focus on a specifically feminised robotic imaginary in order to explain the ways in which socialist or Marxist feminism cannot be divorced from cyberfeminism. If the worker is integral to the history of the robotic imaginary popularised by Karel Čapek in Rossum’s Universal Robots (1921), she cannot be disappeared in theorising a feminist approach to gendered robotics and technology.This chapter will argue that looking to the material conditions of the feminised robot allows us to see plainly the constructed positions of women under capitalism, and therefore prompts us to denaturalise those conditions. The cyborg is not the answer to the question of gendered oppression, but its political economy is of importance in any critical discussion of gender and robotics in the contemporary moment.