Today I started off doing some research to add to a presentation that I'm putting together on the history of robots for the Young Roboteers club, as we have girls taking part I thought it would be cool to add some female robots to the examples for balance and to give the girls something to identify with. I have to say that I've come away scratching my head and asking questions of myself and the world in general.
I started out making a list of my favourite fictional robots, which are, in no particular order: - R2D2,
First lets define a robot... The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines a robot as "A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer." In robot technology the word robot is further enhanced by calling a robot designed to look and act like a human, especially one with a body having a flesh-like resemblance to be an android, but it turns out that is a male term which derives from the Greek root ἀνδρ- 'man' (male, as opposed to anthrop- = human being) and the suffix -oid 'having the form or likeness of'.
The OED defines an android as "a robot with a human appearance". The term android refers to robotic humanoids regardless of apparent gender, but the Greek prefix "andr-" refers to man in the masculine gendered sense, so because of the "andr-" prefix, many read Android to mean its a masculine robot that is being portrayed.
So if an android is masculine, it made me wonder what a feminine version is called, and until today I can hold my hand up and say I didn't know there was a female counterpart to an android, did you?
Well there is, and the term is gynoid first used in 1985 by the writer Gwyneth Jones in her novel 'Divine Endurance', the term is defined as "anything that resembles or pertains to the female human form", interestingly the OED has no definition for gynoid. In all honesty looking at the imagery that surrounds the gynoid its not a mantle that I'd want to own or be identified with, most female robots are heavily sexualised or depicted as slaves in one form or other.
There is another term that abounds when describing a female robot and that's a portmanteau of the words female and robot, I refer of course to the term Fembot ::cringe::, its crap but it sums things up and I'll use it to attach an identifier to the feminine robot. That delightful term fembot was first mentioned in 1976 in an episode of the television series 'The Bionic Woman' and was later used in the Austin Powers films, those films put the female robot movement back decades by depicting fembots as beautiful women dressed in sexually provocative outfits that fought with guns hidden in their breasts :o/ ::sigh::.
Analysing that fact switched the light of clarity on in my brain and showed me the reason why it was that only male robots featured in my favourites list, there are no cool female robots to identify with, oh there are female robots to identify with to be sure, but lets look at them more closely.
In Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, we have the Robot Maria aka False Maria, a robot built to resemble a good woman who lives in a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the industrialists. The most powerful industrialist Jon Fredersen, uses workers in underground machine halls that power his Tower of Babel the pinnacle of this modern, highly technological world.
Fredersen's son falls in love with the real Maria, a working class prophet who predicts the coming of a saviour who will work for a better world for everyone, his father sees her as a threat and orders that his head scientist capture her and turn her into a robot which is then used to deceive the workers, which in the end leads to catastrophe. The image of the False Maria is iconic, but when it boils down to it, she isn't a heroine, she is a robot that I certainly wouldn't chose to identify with, the same for most women I would assume?
Fembots were a part of science fiction before 1927, Hoffman wrote of Olympia (aka Olimpia) in his 1817 book 'The Sandman', and in 1886 the French writer Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam included the fembot character Hadaly in his book 'The Future Eve' - incidentally it was Villiers de l'Isle-Adam who first used the term android to describe robots in his book.
So far all our depictions show the fembot as an object of fantasy and desire, something that is either perfect or dangerous, so lets move on to 1975 and see if that notion has changed at all in that decade, and lets visit the town of Stepford. A town where the wives are disposed of and replaced with replica robots to give the men of the town complete control over their 'woman'... :o/ So no, apparently not!
The women are automated, plastic, and have no free will at all, again not something I want to identify with, they are docile, don't question anything and see their function to be nothing more than to be a thing to please a man. What the hell is going on, why aren't female robots being shown as being heroines, or doing something good in the world? It has to get better right? I'll continue the discussion in part 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment