ABSTRACT
Can robots have skin? To ask this question about skin in relation to robots is also to raise the issue of the human, or rather the human-ness of skin, and the nature of its touch. The apparent givenness of human nature and its materialisation in bodies have been topics of sustained feminist inquiry. More specifically, feminists, as well as other critical theorists, have stressed the importance of interrogating the human as that which grounds inequalities of gender, as well as race class, and sexuality in materialised form, that is, in the flesh (see Martin 1995; Butler 1993; Haraway 1991). Feminists working in science and technology studies in particular have also begun to ask whether the human continues to be as singularly powerful under contemporary conditions of techno-social change as it may once have been (Hayles 1996; Halberstam and Livingston 1995; Haraway 1991). Human nature as it is investigated, generated and lived, is said to be undergoing a transformation that explicitly breaches the human/non-human divide. The term ‘cyborg’, which refers to human-animal or human-machine hybrids, has come to displace ‘human’ as the sign of this transformation. To ask whether robots have skin, then, is to ask about ‘our’ post-human nature and its embodiment as it is being re-imagined in technoscientific domains.
