3.0

Average Course Rating

This course explores the interactions between sex, gender, and cyber-technologies, old and new. How do the internet, smart devices, robots and generative AI shape sex and gender? In turn, how do discourses of sex and gender shape technologies? This seminar will help students answer these questions by introducing them to debates within feminist theory, the historical development of gendered and sexed technologies, the embedding of these technologies in our everyday life and the aesthetics and ethics of such technologies as seen in film and media. We will explore how AI, algorithms, and machines raise complex questions around the ethics, politics, and epistemologies of sex and gender. Through readings of key academic texts, films, and ethnographies, we will try to gain a full picture, through discussion, of what a gendered cyberscape looks like and how it might come to look otherwise. By understanding such technologies as instruments of power, we will analyze how this power is applied differentially across different marginalized groups and in different regional contexts. Further, we will consider how technologies enter our intimate spaces and reshape our desires and pleasures.