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What distinguishes humanity from artificial beings? What do constructed creatures tell us about ourselves?
From sex dolls to Siri, talking Barbies to the Bride of Frankenstein, Artificial Women explores the ways in which today's simulated females-both real and fictional-reflect and expose our own ideas about gender and female identity. Join Julie Wosk as she probes the realm of compliant sex workers, nurturing caretakers, genial servants, and rebellious creations in film, television, literature, art, photography, and current developments in robotics. These modern-day Galateas must embrace their own synthetic nature while also striving for authenticity and autonomy, all the while foregrounding gender stereotypes and changing perceptions of women and their roles. They embody the paradoxes and tensions that continue to arise in our increasingly simulated world, where the lines between the real and the virtual only continue to blur. As these "artificial women" become ever more lifelike, so too do the questions they raise become more provocative, and more illuminating of our own conceptions and conventions.
Artificial Women pushes the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and culture studies to consider new digital technologies, artificial intelligences, and burgeoning simulations.
From sex dolls to Siri, talking Barbies to the Bride of Frankenstein, Artificial Women explores the ways in which today's simulated females-both real and fictional-reflect and expose our own ideas about gender and female identity. Join Julie Wosk as she probes the realm of compliant sex workers, nurturing caretakers, genial servants, and rebellious creations in film, television, literature, art, photography, and current developments in robotics. These modern-day Galateas must embrace their own synthetic nature while also striving for authenticity and autonomy, all the while foregrounding gender stereotypes and changing perceptions of women and their roles. They embody the paradoxes and tensions that continue to arise in our increasingly simulated world, where the lines between the real and the virtual only continue to blur. As these "artificial women" become ever more lifelike, so too do the questions they raise become more provocative, and more illuminating of our own conceptions and conventions.
Artificial Women pushes the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and culture studies to consider new digital technologies, artificial intelligences, and burgeoning simulations.
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Reviews
"Wosk's book . . . offers a new route into considering how we construct gender identity culturally, by exploring how we manufacture gender identity in very literal ways. . . . One of the most powerful features of [this] book is that it situates our current AI moment in relation to the long history of the manufactured woman, as both a problem and an actual product."
Marion Thain
"The breadth of Wosk's research is continually staggering in its ability to make connections across so many varied time periods, national contexts, formats, and fields, including gender studies, science and technology studies, visual studies, literary studies, and more."
Nicola McCafferty - Northwestern University
"Wosk uses art as a vehicle to elucidate the ambivalent dynamics of artificial women. Through this expositional work, her fascination with illusion, intoxication, and modernity becomes clear and contagious."
Michelle Charette