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.