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The “Good Female Spy”: Virtual Assistants, Domesticity, and White Femininity

Wed, September 4, 9:45 to 11:15am, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Five, Grand Ballroom D

Abstract

Gender and race have historically shaped the labor and status of intelligence gathering, often repurposing racialized gender scripts as affordances for building trust and intimacy with targets to gain privileged access to otherwise private spaces and information. Though the sexualized honey-trap is a well-known espionage strategy glamorized in popular culture, the narrative of “the good female spy” has historically been constructed through caregiving roles, and white femininity. This paper draws parallels between these gendered and racialized notions of intelligence gathering, and the positioning of virtual assistants (like Alexa and SIri) as domestic technologies that gather intelligence in the form of user data in the home. I critically analyze the marketing and advertising of Apple’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri as feminized domestic technologies, using critical gender and race frameworks. I explore the cultural and material affordances of these technologies, situating virtual assistant information gathering as activities that are circumscribed by state and corporate actors in ways that parallel previous forms of intelligence gathering. As in the historical shaping of the labor of intelligence gathering, ideologies about gender and race continue to shape these forms of “acceptable” information gathering by virtual assistants, smoothing consumer privacy concerns and creating new opportunities for extended surveillance of domestic and intimate spaces. Extending the good female spy narrative to virtual assistants provides further insights into the gendered and racialized infrastructures that undergird consumer surveillance activities in the home.

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