ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives and Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman to locate a particular cultural and historical moment: the cybernetic seventies, when cybernetics transitions from a scientific discourse and closed community to a cultural sensibility. With its emphasis on autonomy, cybernetics became, in the 1970s, a discourse of automata, of independent computers, and of spontaneous and continuous human-computer interface. Artists begin experimenting with computer enhancements, and popular culture witnessed the appearance of a new linguistic register around computational reproduction. Monson-Rosen shows how the cybernetic application of the “self” to computers systematically erased the labor of women in the production and reproduction of computers, computer programs, and organisms. This erasure is evident, and significant, in representations of the computing labor force, which shifted from decidedly female and invisible to decidedly male and visible. This chapter critiques the liberatory rhetoric of desire that eroticized the cybernetic interface in a language of bodily fluids and flows, obscuring how reproduction, whether of programs or humans, requires the investment of significant labor that is usually feminine—and therefore erased. This project narrates that erasure, but it also highlights resistance to it to make its recovery possible.
