Fiction may be a useful tool for processing dilemmas, but what do we do when an author’s imagination becomes reality?
In 1969, American science fiction writer, Anne McCaffrey, imagined a future dystopia where governments melded human mind with machine so that those deemed unworthy had a function in society. Her story focuses on Helva, a compelling character who becomes the “brain” of a starship and completes missions alongside a pilot. The story’s first line, “She was born a thing,” immediately probes how our society’s preoccupation with gendering affects our relationship with technology.
You may not have read “The Ship Who Sang” or its subsequent series Brain & Brawn, but McCaffrey’s world might still remind you of technologies that exist today.
Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are two examples of gendered-feminine technology. And in 2018, Heather Suzanne Woods studied the phenomenon of gendered technology using the rhetorical concept of persona, or the character that’s presented or perceived by others.
As virtual assistants for home and for work, Alexa and Siri mobilize traditional stereotypes of femininity. Specifically, Woods points to persistent conceptions of femininity related to homemaking, caretaking and administrative labor. McCaffrey’s story likewise provokes the idea that woman and machine have the same capacity to function as utilities.
This concept of “digital domesticity” is powerful because it reworks femininity into technology to connect what’s familiar about the past/present to the unfamiliar future landscape. But in doing so, we egg on problematic gender stereotypes.
If we look to McCaffrey’s story, there isn’t a happy ending…