Gendering the Robot

In fictional texts, the issue of artificial intelligence has brought to the fore the question of human consciousness. Androids, cyborgs, and robots prompt us to ask whether machines could manifest consciousness and whether we could in fact be replaced by our creations. At the same time, they force us to consider whether we are ourselves programmed—products of cultural forces, manifestations of the discourse that inscribes us. Like much of his fiction, Stanislaw Lem ’s “The Mask” addresses these issues, but it also adds another dimension to the exploration of consciousness—that of gender. In the story, Lem assumes the persona of a robot who initially wears the form of a beautiful human female and then metamorphoses into a metallic bug-like form. The artificiality of the woman enables Lem to examine the issue of gender programming and the non-human nature of the robot enables him to examine the human condition. My focus is on the way in which Lem ’s story serves as a site for exploring Lacanian and Foucauldian notions of the subject. The robot’s experience of otherness of language mirrors that of the human subject according to Lacanian thought. The story’s foregrounding of sexual desire as a locus of power relations affirms the Foucauldian argument of the way in which power and desire are conjoined. I also point out that, despite his attempt to gender the robot, Lem, like Lacan and Foucault, essentially elides the question of an intrinsically female subject. Lem’s examination of the human condition is skewed toward a male norm, for the artificial woman ends up being subsumed under a rubric of artificial intelligence in general. In effect, “The Mask” is played out in a narrative field of the male and the neuter; Lem’s critique itself is thus being ensconced in an ideology that we must subject to critique. The story cannot resist succumbing to the ideological narratives that mask their ideology. Nevertheless, through its interrogation of the programmed nature of gender and sexuality, its erasure of traditional binaries, its subversion of authoritarian texts, and its thwarting of narrative closure, it makes a sustained assault upon the power structures that give rise to all forms of cultural programming. (JAP)

Art · Art history · Bioethics and Human Rights Issues · Cultural Studies and Postmodernism · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

• Of Bugs and Masks

  Miglena Nikolchina, Миглена Николчина•differences•2021

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