New materialism and gender - (re) configuring human and robotic embodiment

Abstract

Dominant understandings of sex, gender and sexuality align with patriarchal ideology that maintains misogyny, sexism and male supremacy. A critical feature of the aforementioned gender paradigm is strict mutually exclusive binarism and essentialism. By taking a queer feminist perspective on gender (and the gender binary) and using posthuman new materialism (agential realism) as a theoretical framework this study engages with the constitution of myriad binaries, including the male/female, man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, sex/gender, human/nonhuman and mind/body binaries. Through a diffractive reading of feminist poststructuralist, new materialist, biological, ethnographical and queer theories of sexual difference, sex, gender and sexuality and the binary genderisation of anthropomorphised social technologies – including intelligent assistants and companion and humanoid robotics – the iterative constitution of sex, gender, sexuality, body and human is explored revealing various apparatuses that material-discursively (de)stabilise these binaries. Thinking of gender, the body and the human as dynamic contingent phenomena and taking a non-anthropocentric stance allows a reconsideration of both robotic and human embodiment. Paramount here is the dual possibilities of creating more of the same, reinscribing normative realities or leaving open the potential for the co- creation of dynamic futures.