Women's Work: AI, Clones and Gendered Labour

This paper seeks to explore representations of gendered labour in sex work, service industries, organ donation and real-world AI assistants.

Reading several texts alongside real-world iterations of technologies being gendered according to their function, I make an interdisciplinary intervention in the conversations about technology and labour in the twenty-first century.  

I synthesise the findings of anthropologist Beth Singler and sociologist Gina Neff with a literary studies methodology to examine how the way we think and represent technological assistants in media such as novels, television, and film, influences and reflects our gendered assignations of roles.

Relevant texts include the films Bladerunner and Her, novels Cloud Atlas, The Wind-Up Girl and television shows such as Westworld and Black Mirror. Bringing these three disciplinary fields together to bear on the question of labour and gender in the 21st century allows for a comprehensive investigation of the intersecting influences that science and the humanities have on one another, and the possibilities for mutually beneficial development.