The clockwork woman

[gryphonsegg]

Hey, if anybody is still keeping up with this journal, what are your thoughts on gendering robot/AI characters? The practice of assigning social genders to characters who don't have sexes in the biological sense has been on my mind lately. Among other things, I'm trying to sort out how the category of "robots that humans prefer to think of as girls" fits alongside the category of "female characters." I find that I tend to like "girl robot" characters in media intended for younger audiences but usually find their portrayal in media intended for adults extremely unsettling and discouraging because works written for mature audiences so often use the "robot that looks like a woman=sexbot" trope. Also, children's stories seem to be more likely to have a "girl robot" interacting with other robots or a varied mix of creatures, whereas stories for older audiences are more likely to make her half of a dyad with a human man, which brings in some weird politics. I'm flipping through the card catalog of my memory, looking for girl robots that were a) created by women for b) an adult audience, and all the examples I can come up with were blatantly created to critique or express frustration with RL exploitation and/or the popularity of the concept of the robotic woman as sexual and domestic servant.

Comments

[tigerlily]

I don't recall many female robots in the stories running across my mind just now. Would the Portal game's Glados be an example of one who isn't either kind of servant? I've never played the game. The only other ones I remember are Jenny from the cartoon My Life as a Teenage Robot (I think that was the name), the one from The Jetsons who is a domestic servant, and the Stepford Wives who are sexual servants if I remember right.. The first two are from children's cartoons. Jenny was a robot but acted like a normal girl and went to school with human teenagers, and she was also a superhero. I loved that show.

Oh, the Green Lantern show on Cartoon Network, which I've only watched two episodes of, does have a robot named Aya. She's kind of a spaceship something. Venturing into anime, Melfina from Outlaw Star was also a ship something, and I'm sure you know about Rei from Evangelion (if she was a robot, now I'm not sure).

[gryphonsegg]

Glados is in a gray area because, while she appears in-game as a robot with a feminine-sounding voice, her backstory is that she was originally a human girl whose personality was uploaded to a computer. I'm thinking about made-from-scratch robots and how those characters are portrayed differently and should perhaps be analyzed differently than characters who were born rather than made, which is why I didn't bring up Major Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell and other cyborgs. Glados is right on the line between robot and cyborg, which makes her an interesting individual case. Rei from Evangelion was a clone and something of a cyborg, not a robot. I'd never heard of My Life as a Teenage Robot before. What was it like?

[tigerlily]

Ah, I only knew about those two from osmosis, except for the final episodes of Evangelion.

Jenny saved the world but went to high school and had the typical sitcom high school situations. Her mother was her creator, and she had a human boy friend who I think had an unrequited crush on her. She had an enemy in The Hive, bee-themed villains with a female leader. The wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Life_as_a_Teenage_Robot It says the episodes are still airing on Nicktoons, which I don't have. Apparently the creator worked on the new My Little Pony and is now producing for Gravity Falls. And he developed this idea from his original of a human girl with a robot boyfriend.

[gryphonsegg]

Interesting! I've never seen the "human-looking robot tries to understand humans and live a normal human" theme done with girl robot as the focal character. I have seen it done with boy robots as main characters and with a girl robot as a plot device for the development of male human character who acts as her teacher/guide, but not with the girl as the star of the story.

[surrealistdreamer]

Oh! I used to watch this show when it was first airing. The episode I remember liking the most was the one where her "mother" (the woman who created her) revealed that she'd created nine prototypes to Jenny. They all spent the day hanging out because Jenny thought of them as her sisters. It was cute.

[gryphonsegg]

Hey there! Remember how Yahoo wasn't letting you email me? Well, now Hotmail won't let me email you. So . . . just to let you know that I got your message, and I sympathize. *sends sympathy at you* Also, that episode does sound really cute.