The Subjectivity of Domestic Objects, or: Who Needs Women, Anyway?

• In Event: Domestic Technologies: Place, Person, Process – I

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence appears to be the next frontier for technoscience innovation. Particularly, this brand of innovation seems to be appearing more and more in the home. Embodied in different ways and typically gendered female, these manifestation of (primarily male) scientists and developers are built on many conceptual frameworks, including the (artificial) mind as reproduction of the brain/neurophysiological processes, code as reproduction of thought, home as site of labor, and women as sites of domestic pleasure and production. Building on the works of feminist philosophers of science Vandana Shiva and Luce Irigaray and feminist STS scholars Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Judy Wajcman, I seek to examine the ways in which domestic robot forms of artificial intelligence serve to further fragment the self from both her labor and her subjectivity, this time in the home rather than the lab or public sphere.

In this paper, I ask: how does the development of artificial intelligence in and for “domestic robots,” from Amazon Echo and Google Home to sex robots and exercise equipment, inform the way we conceptualize and engage with “intelligence,” labor, agency, and gender? How does embodiment configure this alignment of processes in ways which either reproduce or challenge gender norms of domestic practice? And how does the shifting gender performance of home labor towards more equitable division impact both the development of this technology and its use as regards conceptualizing the intersection of body and mind? Finally, how do these frames interact with the capitalist motivations for such sociotechnical developments?

Author

• Jamie Steele, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute