The Elizas: Assistive Automatons and Gendered Labour

Riffing off the title of Victor Malarek’s 2004 book The Natashas: Inside the Global Sex Trade, this paper takes a critical look at the history of automated female assistants, from Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza to her more contemporary variations, such as Siri and Alexa. It proceeds in four parts. In part I, I delineate the cultural-linguistic, corporeal, spatio-temporal and, more generally, organisational matrix these assistants create by comparing it to the 1960s place-based critique of domestic and professional (invariably assistive) female labour, usually seen as performing the hegemonic operation of normalising patriarchal power. In part II, I place the corporeal-cultural-professional matrix of cognitive and organisational assistance in dialogue with automated sex labour, performed by fully automated dolls, increasingly used in Germany and Japan.

Circumventing the obvious – as well as important although, in this debate, inessential question of ‘does automated sex labour liberate (actual) female sex workers or does it create an even more toxic model of acceptable social behaviour towards women?’ – I focus, in part III, on the repertoire of performative (vocal, gestural, and physical) actions such as gracious acceptance, blinking, nodding, ‘yes-ing’,’ wow-ing’, inflecting sentences in a particular way, teasing, nudging, etc. I further compare this automated behavioural and semantic repertoire to acknowledged forms of affective-digital domination (Massumi 2015; Parisi & Goodman 2011) in order to extract the temporal, reflex-based, Skinnerian mechanics of automated – and automatable – corporeal, physical, gestural and vocal schemes.

In part IV, I compare the standardisation of desire produced by the commodity, service, experience, and, most recently, information economy (Fisher 2017; Lushetich 2022) via fetishised objects, services, experiences, and informational strategies, to performativity (speech and gestural acts) and the current cognitive horizon of assistive automated labour, in order to theorise automaticity, seen both as (the dream of) ‘invariant repetition’ and (novel) self-production. I conclude with several possible scenarios of how the double meaning of ‘automation’ may shape the future horizon of gender-based labour.