Overview

"What distinguishes humanity from artificial beings? What do constructed creatures tell us about ourselves? From sex dolls to Siri, talking Barbies to the Bride of Frankenstein, Artificial Women explores the ways in which today's simulated females-both real and fictional-reflect and expose our own ideas about gender and female identity. Join Julie Wosk as she probes the realm of compliant sex workers, nurturing caretakers, genial servants, and rebellious creations in film, television, literature, art, photography, and current developments in robotics. These modern-day Galateas must embrace their own synthetic nature while also striving for authenticity and autonomy, all the while foregrounding gender stereotypes and changing perceptions of women and their roles. They embody the paradoxes and tensions that continue to arise in our increasingly simulated world, where the lines between the real and the virtual only continue to blur. As these ""artificial women"" become ever more lifelike, so too do the questions they raise become more provocative, and more illuminating of our own conceptions and conventions. Artificial Women pushes the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and culture studies to consider new digital technologies, artificial intelligences, and burgeoning simulations."

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9780253069252

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Reviews

"""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"

"""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 feminist 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"

Author Information

Julie Wosk is Professor Emerita of English, Art History, and Studio Art at the State University of New York Maritime College. Her research  centers on the social and cultural impact of technology. She is author of several books, including My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves; Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age; and Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century. She is also an artist and photographer.

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