Research

The Computer's Voice: From Star Trek to Siri

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Considering Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, and more, this book explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment. Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions surrounding media, technology, and gender.

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Recipient of the 2022 Popular Culture Association Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies

Special Issue of Popular Culture Studies Journal on Robots & Labor

Guest Editor

[A]s the essays in this special issue demonstrate, fictional robots are often not just robots; rather, they are also metaphorical portraits of humans, representative of the ways we build systems of oppression and dehumanization. The essays presented here offer a broad array of pop culture research on robots and labor, including analyses of literature, film, television, video games, advertising, music, and fan culture. Using a range of methods and theoretical frameworks, the contributors stretch the definition of labor to include not just the literal workforce but also emotional labor, semantic labor, and the labor of birth. Throughout, they uncover new ideas about humanity’s fraught relationships with technology as well as humanity itself. I have organized these fifteen essays around broad categorizations of analysis: we begin with a theory-driven reflection on robots and labor, followed by six different cultural histories, five in-depth case studies, and finally two essays on artificial intelligence as both production and producer.