Affective labor and technologies of gender in Wei Yahua’s “Conjugal happiness in the arms of Morpheus”

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

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Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLove and Sex with Robots - 2nd International Conference, LSR 2016, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsKate Devlin, Adrian David Cheok, David Levy
Pages27-39
Number of pages13
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017
Event2nd International Conference on Love and Sex with Robots, LSR 2016 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: 19 Dec 201620 Dec 2016

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10237 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference2nd International Conference on Love and Sex with Robots, LSR 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period19/12/1620/12/16

Keywords

  • Affective labor
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Chinese science fiction
  • Gender theory and performance
  • Roboethics

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