ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the repercussions of giving “intelligent personal assistants” (IPAs) women’s names and other feminized attributes—thus gendering the machine. Technologies like “Alexa” and “Siri” transform an intimate marker of personhood, a first name, into both a joke and command, with consequences for both women and machines. Drawing on the linguistic theory of “animacy hierarchy” and the authors’ personal experiences of having their names appropriated for machines, the chapter demonstrates how the design of IPAs fuses gendered stereotypes about women with metaphors of gendered and lively machines. Though women named Siri and Alexa may feel the effects first, and most acutely, the experience of being retroactively animated as machines—or deanimated as women—is not exceptional nor specific to IPAs. The gendering of machines has insidious and far-reaching effects, penetrating the contours of what it means to be gendered female in a patriarchal society.
