ABSTRACT
My interest in this chapter is to bring into conversation three currently productive fields of inquiry-cuteness studies, cultural studies of technology, and scholarship on postfeminist sensibilities-over the figure of the female android, taking up the question of how machine cuteness connects to axes of gendered and racial inequalities peculiar to twenty-first-century postfeminisms. Important work on gender can now be found within the burgeoning field of cuteness studies, focusing, for example, on the “manic pixie dreamgirl” figure, the cute female star texts of Parker Posey or Zooey Deschanel, and cute masculinities in contemporary raunch cultures, gay aesthetics, and the military (as showcased in this book), to name only a few.1 Additionally, millennial culture’s fascination with robotics and AI has inspired an array of provocative studies across the rich intersection of science and technology studies with film and media studies, including recent books by Despina Kakoudaki and Jay Telotte, among others. Moreover, as Rosalind Gill maintains, today’s media culture creaks under the weight of recurring tropes of neoliberal femininity that comprise what she terms postfeminist sensibilities, including heavy emphasis on sexualization, individual - ism and choice, the entanglement of feminism and anti-feminism, and the shift from objectification to subjectification. These tropes arise frequently in the contemporary texts I analyze in this chapter, all of which depict what I am calling cute post-fembots.2 As new avatars of postfeminist subjectivity, female androids in popular culture today present a unique site of inquiry for scholars of cuteness: they frequently embody the postfeminist tendency to assert gender conservatism even in contexts of “progress” and futurity, particularly in terms of postfeminist dynamics of empowerment/disempowerment.
