TY - GEN
T1 - Affective labor and technologies of gender in Wei Yahua’s “Conjugal happiness in the arms of Morpheus”
AU - Conn, Virginia L.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Robotics explores the boundary between the human body and its objective use value, recasting the fields of of gender and affect as commodities— a question that takes on specific cultural values in post-Mao China. This privileging of technology and its engagement with gendered labor are examined in Wei Yahua’s short story, “Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus,” which uses the feminine performativity of a robot wife to engage with the intertwined role of affective labor and the legal status of objects. Such a performance decenters the human subject while simultaneously subjugating the laboring technological materials, such that Lili—the robot wife in question—is only capable of acquiring legal subjecthood through her appeal to a law that binds human actors. The historical context in which this story was written is as important an artifact as the language it uses and the subject matter it treats, raising the specter of a possible ethics of consciousness unconnected to humanistic social mores at a time when technology was being touted as the way towards a collective future emancipated from labor as a whole. In 1980s China, labor and technology were both equally privileged as sites of socialist revolution, with a restructuring of the imaginaries of both free and controlled labor. By raising the question of differential relationships in a supposedly egalitarian society through characters that explore their various relationships to artificial life, “Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus” offers a critical look into what kinds of labor (and laboring bodies) are replaceable and which are privileged—and, in doing so, directly critiques the legal framework regarding women in the country, as well as how a subject is defined in the first place.
AB - Robotics explores the boundary between the human body and its objective use value, recasting the fields of of gender and affect as commodities— a question that takes on specific cultural values in post-Mao China. This privileging of technology and its engagement with gendered labor are examined in Wei Yahua’s short story, “Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus,” which uses the feminine performativity of a robot wife to engage with the intertwined role of affective labor and the legal status of objects. Such a performance decenters the human subject while simultaneously subjugating the laboring technological materials, such that Lili—the robot wife in question—is only capable of acquiring legal subjecthood through her appeal to a law that binds human actors. The historical context in which this story was written is as important an artifact as the language it uses and the subject matter it treats, raising the specter of a possible ethics of consciousness unconnected to humanistic social mores at a time when technology was being touted as the way towards a collective future emancipated from labor as a whole. In 1980s China, labor and technology were both equally privileged as sites of socialist revolution, with a restructuring of the imaginaries of both free and controlled labor. By raising the question of differential relationships in a supposedly egalitarian society through characters that explore their various relationships to artificial life, “Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus” offers a critical look into what kinds of labor (and laboring bodies) are replaceable and which are privileged—and, in doing so, directly critiques the legal framework regarding women in the country, as well as how a subject is defined in the first place.
KW - Affective labor
KW - Artificial intelligence
KW - Chinese science fiction
KW - Gender theory and performance
KW - Roboethics
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-57738-8_3
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-57738-8_3
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85018662602
SN - 9783319577371
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 27
EP - 39
BT - Love and Sex with Robots - 2nd International Conference, LSR 2016, Revised Selected Papers
A2 - Devlin, Kate
A2 - Cheok, Adrian David
A2 - Levy, David
T2 - 2nd International Conference on Love and Sex with Robots, LSR 2016
Y2 - 19 December 2016 through 20 December 2016
ER -