Constructing a New Femininity

Abstract

This project applies critical media and gender theories to the relatively unexplored social space where technology and subjectivity meet. Taking popular film as a form of public pedagogy, the project implicates unquestioned structures of patriarchal control in shaping the development and depiction of robotic bodies. The project was spurred from a decline in critical discourse surrounding technology’s potential to upset binaried gender constructions, and the increasingly simplified depictions of female-shaped robots (gynoids) as proxies for actual women. By critically engaging assumptions of gender when applied to technology, the project recontextualizes fundamental theories in contemporary popular film.