Book ID: CBB418129968

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot (2020)

unapi

Yolande Strengers (Author)
Jenny Kennedy (Author)


MIT Press


Publication Date: 2020
Physical Details: 320
Language: English

Meet the Smart Wife—at your service, an eclectic collection of feminized AI, robotic, and smart devices. This digital assistant is friendly and sometimes flirty, docile and efficient, occasionally glitchy but perpetually available. She might go by Siri, or Alexa, or inhabit Google Home. She can keep us company, order groceries, vacuum the floor, turn out the lights. A Japanese digital voice assistant—a virtual anime hologram named Hikari Azuma—sends her “master” helpful messages during the day; an American sexbot named Roxxxy takes on other kinds of household chores. In The Smart Wife, Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy examine the emergence of digital devices that carry out “wifework”—domestic responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to (human) wives. They show that the principal prototype for these virtual helpers—designed in male-dominated industries—is the 1950s housewife: white, middle class, heteronormative, and nurturing, with a spick-and-span home. It's time, they say, to give the Smart Wife a reboot. What's wrong with preferring domestic assistants with feminine personalities? We like our assistants to conform to gender stereotypes—so what? For one thing, Strengers and Kennedy remind us, the design of gendered devices re-inscribes those outdated and unfounded stereotypes. Advanced technology is taking us backwards on gender equity. Strengers and Kennedy offer a Smart Wife “manifesta,” proposing a rebooted Smart Wife that would promote a revaluing of femininity in society in all her glorious diversity.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB418129968/

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Authors & Contributors
Wajcman, Judy
Martin Gibbs
Bo Ruberg
Lik Sam Chan
Ana Muñiz
Andrés Luque-Ayala
Concepts
Technology and gender
Digital technologies
Feminist analysis
Technology and society
Computers and computing
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
Places
United States
United Kingdom
France
Finland
Europe
China
Institutions
National Institute of Health (U.S.)
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