Robots, Gender, and the Limits of Posthumanism in Twentieth-Century Science Fiction

Abstract

This dissertation examines early twentieth-century science fiction narratives about robots, cyborgs, and artificial life to interrogate the extent to which these narratives express early articulations of posthumanism. Using Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism, and Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism as a theoretical framework, I also explore how gender informs contemporary anxieties about technoscientific innovation. I argue that early robot narratives such as Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and robot stories in American pulps consistently express anxieties about the ontological boundaries of the human in the technoscientific age through conflicts of gender, including threats to heteronormative domesticity and muscular masculinity. Early female-authored robot narratives likewise critique masculine anxieties of both technology and women; Thea von Harbou’s novelization of Metropolis and C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” critique patriarchal and intellectual masculine dominance over women’s bodies by proposing and valorizing new, erotic intimacies with technology. I then expand my analysis to texts throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. Pointing to in Eando Binder’s Adam Link stories and Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man,” I define and examine the bildungsrobot, a narrative in which a robot/android protagonist strives to acquire rights and humanity through the conferral of citizenship. The bildungsrobot perpetuates a staunchly liberal humanist politics through the robot’s emulation of idealized masculinity. Finally, I analyze Amy Thomson’s Virtual Girl and the HBO television series Westworld to consider the features of a distinctly female approach to the bildungsrobot; I argue that these texts offer a more posthumanist approach to robot development through autopoiesis and communities of solidarity.