ABSTRACT
There are high expectations that, in the future, we will be able to design robots to interact with human beings as friends, soldiers, housekeepers, sex partners, and even babysitters. These ideas about future robots, their applications, and the ways in which they may come to entangle our social and subjective becoming may prove essential to potential future lifeforms. The expectations are saturated with gendered patterns interweaving the ideals about behavior, social relating, aesthetics, and movements to be built into androids and humanoids. This chapter looks into the claims about humanness and the negotiations of appropriate and desired gendered becoming, enacted by the attempted technological imitations of the human. While using avatars from video games, sex robot manufacturing, and a fictional love story as examples to help the reflections, still new questions arise. What becomes of taken for granted dichotomies such as those between real and virtual, matter and discourse, and between the imaginary and the real? If technological imitations of the organic human become our significant new Others, which gendered subjectivating effects may we envisage? Do technological imitations remain imitations, or are new forms of fellow beings and new forms of relational desires enacted? And where – in the spaces between the real and the imaginary – will power-regulating conditioning of gender encounter its subversive challenges?
