Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Subject Objects
AU - Suchman, Lucy
PY - 2011/8
Y1 - 2011/8
N2 - The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design of the humanoid robot. The humanoid or anthropomorphic robot is a model (in)organism, engineered in the roboticist’s laboratory in ways that both align with and diverge from the model organisms of biology. Like other model organisms, the laboratory robot’s life is inextricably infused with its inherited materialities and with the ongoing – or truncated – labours of its affiliated humans. But while animal models are rendered progressively more standardised and replicable as tools for the biological sciences, the humanoid robot is individuated and naturalised. Three stagings of human–robot encounters (with the robots Mertz, Kismet and Robota respectively) demonstrate different possibilities for conceptualising these subject objects, for the claims about humanness that they corporealise, and for the kinds of witnessing that they presuppose.
AB - The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design of the humanoid robot. The humanoid or anthropomorphic robot is a model (in)organism, engineered in the roboticist’s laboratory in ways that both align with and diverge from the model organisms of biology. Like other model organisms, the laboratory robot’s life is inextricably infused with its inherited materialities and with the ongoing – or truncated – labours of its affiliated humans. But while animal models are rendered progressively more standardised and replicable as tools for the biological sciences, the humanoid robot is individuated and naturalised. Three stagings of human–robot encounters (with the robots Mertz, Kismet and Robota respectively) demonstrate different possibilities for conceptualising these subject objects, for the claims about humanness that they corporealise, and for the kinds of witnessing that they presuppose.
KW - feminist technoscience
KW - human—machine relations
KW - nonhuman subjects
KW - robot
U2 - 10.1177/1464700111404205
DO - 10.1177/1464700111404205
M3 - Journal article
VL - 12
SP - 119
EP - 145
JO - Feminist Theory
JF - Feminist Theory
SN - 1741-2773
IS - 2
ER -