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NINSO, The Northumbria Internet & Society RIG

Dr Rachel Adams on interpellating digital subject/objects of desire in the gendering of artificially intelligent virtual personal assistant

Northumbria University

<p>This seminar will explore how the particular gendering of artificially intelligence virtual personal assistants as female through their names, characterisations and marketing, meets with an imperative grammar with which users are to engage with them, most notably with the call “Hey Siri!” or “Hey Alexa!” Drawing on Louis Althusser and Judith Butler’s accounts of interpellation, I discuss how the gendering of these devices coupled with the new techno-crafted grammar given to engage with them, plays into a broader history of female automata produced as both subjects to and objects of a male desire to (literally) constitute, control and command the female. Thus, expanding on the current account of female gendered virtual personal assistants as a strategy for softening the transition from a traditional past to a disruptive digital future, I argue that, more critically, this gendering re-inscribes and legitimises a historically embedded male desire which works, primarily, to ensure the female is always in a subject to/object of relationship to their male “user”/maker, without agency to attain her own status as subject.</p>

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