Artificial Women
Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females

Julie Wosk (Author)

9780253069252

Paperback / softback, published 2 April 2024

220 pages, 47 b&w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.331 kg

"Julie Wosk . . . opens our eyes to the multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings of such recent cultural creations as sex dolls, robotic caregivers, fictional female aliens, disembodied women's voices, and imaginary automated mothers. A tour de force!"—Ruth Schwartz Cowan, author of More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave
"Artificial Women offers a timely, insightful exploration of how facsimiles of women—in the form of sex dolls, caregiving robots, virtual voices, and more—have been constructed through both real-life technologies and the technological imagination of film, fiction, and art. The book brings a valuable perspective to the topic by highlighting tensions between the cultural expectation that female-coded creations will be obedient and the stories in which these robots and dolls resist control or assert their own autonomy."—Bo Ruberg, author of Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies
"Wosk's book . . . offers a new route into considering how we construct gender identity culturally, by exploring how we manufacture gender identity in very literal ways. . . . One of the most powerful features of [this] book is that it situates our current AI moment in relation to the long history of the manufactured woman, as both a problem and an actual product."—Marion Thain, Los Angeles Review of Books
"The breadth of Wosk's research is continually staggering in its ability to make connections across so many varied time periods, national contexts, formats, and fields, including gender studies, science and technology studies, visual studies, literary studies, and more."—Nicola McCafferty - Northwestern University, H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences

Enhanced by artificial intelligence, today's simulated females are becoming ever more lifelike as the virtual vies with the real. They have already had a dramatic impact on personal relationships, on our views of women, and our ideas about what it means to be human.
From sex dolls to Siri, talking Barbies to robotic mothers, Artificial Women explores the ways in which today's simulated females, both real and fictional, reflect and expose our own ideas about sexuality, gender, and the impact of simulations on social relationships. Join Julie Wosk as she probes the realm of compliant robot sex workers, nurturing genial caregivers and companions, virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, and rebellious creations in film, television, literature, art, photography, and current developments in robotics. These simulated women often reflect old stereotypes, but also highlight a new breed of female robots, cyborgs, and dolls that possess agency, self-awareness, and autonomy.
Artificial Women pushes the boundaries of culture studies to consider how new digital technologies, artificial intelligences, and burgeoning simulations affect our own understandings of ourselves.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A New Breed of Sex Robots and Sex Dolls
2. Under the Skin: The Fabricated Femme Fatale
3. Female Robot Caretakers, Doubles, and Companions
4. Paradoxes of Perfection: A Servant No More
5. Virtual Voices: Talking Barbie Dolls, Alexa, Bitchin' Betty, and More
Coda
Bibliography
Index