What Makes the Woman a Woman: Artificial Intelligences, Androids and the Construction of Femininity (and Feminine Bodies) in Science Fiction.

Within the majority of feminist history, feminist theory has been centralized around the subject of feminine bodies. What the feminine body is capable of (such as reproduction and sexuality), what abuses are possible against feminine bodies and more particularly, what makes feminine bodies unique.

However, a criticism to such theories is the idea that the identity of womanhood is restricted to the body, which leaves feminists in the paradox of wanting women to be associated away from the body but having their bodies define womanhood. Which is what makes the representation of femininity in science-fiction texts such as Her (2013) and Person of Interest (2011–2016) so interesting; because of the fact that they are feminine characters presented without a corporeal body. The two characters — Samantha from Her (2013) and the Machine from Person of Interest (2011–2016)– are framework-based artificial intelligences that lack the physical presence of bodies to interact with the physical world, unlike androids such as Joi from Bladerunner 2045 (2017) or Ava from Ex-Machina (2015). The characters of Samantha and the Machine present an interesting interpretation of femininity: femininity that exists outside and independent of physical bodies. Interpretations of femininity. Interpretations of femininity, which the essay focuses on, that creates three issues of gender that the essay plans on addressing: how femininity is linked to humanity/subjectivity, how femininity is constructed through the interconnected dynamics of socialization and performativity and how femininity can exist without a body to be subjected on.

To understand how femininity and feminine bodies are constructed (and in return, deconstructed) in science fiction, we need to understand the context of the two texts Her (2013)and Person of Interest (2012–2017).In the filmHer, the character of Samantha is a talking operating system which the main character Theodore downloads — something created to explicitly interact and assist Theodore with everyday life (like a secretary). With Theodore choosing for her to talk in a feminine voice and addressing her with feminine pronouns, the film depicts Theodore and Samantha falling into a romantic relationship (which involves a sexual surrogate to act as Samantha’s physical stand-in) while Samantha’s programming evolves to gain independence from Theodore and eventually leave him. Meanwhile,Person of Interest has the character of the Machine; a heuristic computer system designed by Harold Finch, a brilliant hacker and software engineer, to help the U.S government predict federal crimes before they happen. While Theodore from Her (2013)places femininity onto Samantha, validates her femininity and enters a romantic/sexual relationship with her, the opposite dynamic happens. The Machine does not go by a feminine name and mostly interacts with the physical world through voiceless texts and Morse code (only choosing a feminine voice to commemorate a lost friend) and the relationship between the Machine and her creator resembles more a daughter/father relationship with Harold distressed by the Machine’s revelation of gender (which correlates to the Machine’s growing sense of humanity, as it goes away from the purpose that Harold Finch designed her for). Both the Machine and Samantha relate to femininity as a form of humanity — even if they lack physical existence.

For the characters, the Machine and Samantha’s feminization is presented as a form of consciousness that relates them closer to humanity than to machines. This situation, where their revelations of gender relates to the revelation of their humanity, relates back an argument that Nick Mansfield made about how we consider gendering as a way of recognizing ones humanity and consciousness, how ‘there is a horror at the use of the word ‘it’ as a general term for human beings, rather than the more conventional ‘he’ or ‘she’: it seems that the failure to ascribe gender in the usual way is interpreted as a denial of your very humanity.’ (Mansfield, 2000, pp. 74). Mansfield’s argument is especially relevant to the Machine’s growing consciousness, where Harold Finch (her creator) refuses to address the Machine with female pronouns (referring to the Machine as ‘it’), and by extension, refuses to address the Machine as an intelligent and sentient subject. An act that is framed by the text as needlessly cruel and unfair, causing Harold to rethink his ideas about the Machine and soon address her with female pronouns by the end of the TV series.

This rejection of gender — and by extension, rejection of the individual’s subjectivity about their sense of consciousness and about the sense of their body — could potentially be linked to a transgender narrative, of the parent (Harold, the creator of the A.I) rejecting a child who has recently came out as transgender (the A.I). Stryker in particular notes how science fiction narratives often act as an analogue for narratives that question the nature of gender, commenting upon Donna Haraway’s texts about cyborgs and how they create ruptures in boundaries once held solid: ‘The cyborg, in Haraway’s usage, is a way to grapple with what it means to be a conscious, embodied, subject in an environment structured by techno-scientific practices that challenge basic and widely shared notions of what it means to be human’ (Stryker and Whittle, 2006, pp. 103). In the same way that cyborgs are liminal beings, Stryker continues on, caught between human and non-human and whose bodies act as the site of politics concerning physicality and immateriality, so too are the bodies of intersex and transgender individuals that become sites over the struggle of what it means to be a human being — to be a gendered subject — in the 21st century (Styker and Whittle, 2006, pp. 103). This struggle — what it means to be a woman — could very well be applied to Samantha and the Machine. Which leads to the next question to be answered — how do they become women?

The second issue linked back to how gender is connected to subjectivity and consciousness, there comes the question of how gender is first created — especially how the feminization of artificial intelligences acts as an analogue to the feminization of human beings. In traditional science fiction texts, artificial intelligences that are coded female are usually coded through the construction of the bodies who the artificial intelligences occupy. More particularly, as some feminist theorists have noted, the bodies of female-coded A.I’s are created for the sexual and aesthetic pleasure of the (human) men who interact with them. This is prominent in many science fiction texts; texts such as Ex-Machina (2015), where the android Ava is literally designed based to appear desirable and potentially seduce the human subject in a Turing test; where iconic figure of Robot-Maria in Metropolis (1927),who is designed in the very image of the creator’s lost beloved and whose unnaturalness (coded also as sexuality) is a contrast to Maria’s naturalness and purity (i.e. her humanity) and the one, through her sexuality and beauty, leads Metropolis into chaos. Androids designed for men, designed in men’s ideas of the perfect (and sexual) woman, embrace an idea of women being created to act in relation to men which Simone de Beauvoir discussed in the trademark book of The Second Sex(De Beauvoir, 2011, pp. 5–6). An idea that is supported in a Guardian article, where it’s being dissected that the gendering of voice-based artificial intelligences, such as Alexa or Siri, are a bigger part of the cultural bias that women act as helpers or assistants (Hempel, 2015).

With no body to focus on, to sexualize or violate or confine to, one can make the argument that the feminization of the Machine and Samantha occurs in relation towards the human men they interact with, Samantha with her human lover Theodore and the Machine with her creator/father Harold Finch. This comes back to Simone de Beauvoir’s idea of women acting in relation to men, with women as incidental and men as whole (Simone de Beauvoir, 2011, pp. 5–6) while also giving to the main principal that once ‘subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the “I” neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves’ (Butler, 2011, pp. 11). This principle of machines being subjected to a gendered society goes in different directions for the two texts, where the Machine and Samantha feminine in different ways. Theodore subjects Samantha to perform femininity; choosing for Samantha to speak in a feminine voice, to be addressed with feminine pronouns and choosing a female surrogate to act as Samantha’s physical stand-in when Samantha and Theodore decide to have a physical relationship. Meanwhile, the Machine has a more progressive arc where despite being created and interacted with as a genderless subject, the Machine actively chooses gender and does not have femininity hosted onto her.

However, it must not be mistaken that the Machine’s pathway of feminization is better than Samantha’s; it must not be mistaken that one can simply choose to be a woman. Rather, Mansfield argues that gender is merely a system of performances that are highly regulated, that ‘gender performance is not just a question of dressing or behaving in a way acceptable to a peer group; nor is it a simple matter of not standing out in the crowd; we are imprisoned within endlessly repeated and endlessly reinforced messages from the media, schools, families, doctors and friends about the correct way to represent our gender.’ (Mansfield, 2000, pp. 77). If anything, the fact that the Machine can’t adequately perform femininity — the fact that the Machine is absent in bodily and vocal form, where Samantha can gain a degree of corporality and physicality through the physical surrogate — is why Harold Finch turns against her. If anything, the Machine actively going against the system of performances that Harold Finch expects of her — to exist outside of gender — is a reinforcement of Mansfield’s idea of how individuals who do not perform gender to society’s standards — particular if women don’t perform femininity for men — about subjects to violence and discrimination and Othering. All that the artificial intelligences in the texts do is reinforce an important aspect to science fiction in how it illuminates an aspect of humanity, in depicting the very nature of nonhuman characters undergoing the process of discovering and performing gender identity without the pressure of sex and gender, Person of InterestandHerdepict one argument that Judith Butler made: ‘Hence, the strange, the incoherent, that which falls “outside,” gives us a way of understanding the taken-for granted world of sexual categorization as a constructed one, indeed, as one that might well be constructed differently’ (Butler, 2002, pp. 176).

In the conclusion, Person of Interestand Her (2013) are not the only stories that actively question the nature of femininity through analogues of cyborgs and androids and artificial intelligences — creatures literally constructed to fulfil one’s ideas of a woman. But Person of Interestand Her (2013) are revolutionary in dissecting how femininity can act independent of the body, and through that independence, end up questioning how we — the humans — occupy our bodies and occupy the ideals of womanhood that our society upholds. As Butler has famous noted, we are the ones who assign meaning — assigning femininity and masculinity — to our bodies, from there creating sex that acts as the foundation (or divergence) of gender and from there, limiting ourselves to the confines of our sexes and genders (Butler, 2011). By the mere act of existing without a body, and therefore without a predetermined sex and gender, the Machine and Samantha provide an interesting interpterion of the constructionism and socialization of the female role in society. Of what it means to become a woman, what it means to perform and to choose and to live as a woman in the 21st century, where just like cyborgs, these stories recognize the liminality that is gender.