Artificial Women Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females

"Julie Wosk . . . opens our eyes to the multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings of such recent cultural creations as sex dolls, robotic caregivers, fictional female aliens, disembodied women's voices, and imaginary automated mothers. A tour de force!"-Ruth Schwartz Cowan, author of More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave
"Artificial Women offers a timely, insightful exploration of how facsimiles of women-in the form of sex dolls, caregiving robots, virtual voices, and more-have been constructed through both real-life technologies and the technological imagination of film, fiction, and art. The book brings a valuable perspective to the topic by highlighting tensions between the cultural expectation that female-coded creations will be obedient and the stories in which these robots and dolls resist control or assert their own autonomy."-Bo Ruberg, author of Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies
"Wosk's book . . . offers a new route into considering how we construct gender identity culturally, by exploring how we manufacture gender identity in very literal ways. . . . One of the most powerful features of [this] book is that it situates our current AI moment in relation to the long history of the manufactured woman, as both a problem and an actual product."-Marion Thain, Los Angeles Review of Books
"The breadth of Wosk's research is continually staggering in its ability to make connections across so many varied time periods, national contexts, formats, and fields, including gender studies, science and technology studies, visual studies, literary studies, and more."-Nicola McCafferty - Northwestern University, H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences