{ "docId": "019dd923-5e88-73ef-bd59-dddef82be3b0", "docSlug": "b5722f8c12c21bf3", "documentTitle": "The importance of being human in a digital world", "authorId": "Deloitte", "authorName": "Cambridge University Press", "documentKindSlug": "consulting-deck", "documentKindLabel": "Consulting deck", "sourceTypeSlug": "strategy_consulting", "sourceTypeLabel": "Strategy consulting", "presentationDate": null, "orientation": "portrait", "aspectRatio": 0.667, "pageNumber": 119, "pageCount": 224, "prevPage": 118, "nextPage": 120, "slideType": "other", "function": "other", "density": "dense", "nDataPoints": 0, "notes": "This is a page from an academic publication, not a standard consulting deck slide.", "elementsJson": [ "paragraph" ], "metadataConfidence": 0.9, "imagePath": null, "slideHref": "/slides/019dd923-5e88-73ef-bd59-dddef82be3b0/119", "deckHref": "/decks/019dd923-5e88-73ef-bd59-dddef82be3b0", "deckJsonHref": "/decks/019dd923-5e88-73ef-bd59-dddef82be3b0.json", "deckAnchorHref": "/decks/019dd923-5e88-73ef-bd59-dddef82be3b0#slide-119", "components": [ { "bbox": null, "kind": "callout", "text": "Even if designers purport to create gender-neutral robots, the robots will inevitably be re-gendered by the people who use them because of the pervasiveness of sexist/stereotyped tropes of femininity and masculinity in society.", "attrs": null, "subkind": null, "toolName": "Visual emphasis", "toolSlug": "visual-emphasis", "confidence": null, "componentId": "019dd952-1044-75f9-bd05-0243186b3032", "frameworkName": null, "frameworkSlug": null }, { "bbox": { "h": 0.28, "w": 0.76, "x": 0.12, "y": 0.67 }, "kind": "paragraph", "text": "Considering these debates, is it possible to make gender-neutral robot designs? Even if designers purport to create gender-neutral robots, the robots will inevitably be re-gendered by the people who use them because of the pervasiveness of sexist/stereotyped tropes of femininity and masculinity in society. Re-gendering can occur, for instance, at the obvious level of languages such as romance languages that linguistically gender all things (e.g. from animate to inanimate, human to non-human) into either female or masculine nouns. Insofar as we conceive language as not merely an instrument or means of communication, but rather as constitutive of the very “reality” of which it speaks, we must contend with the gendering of even purportedly gender-neutral incarnations of robots. Moreover, in addition to language-related forms of gendering, it can also occur at the level of the activities performed by the service robots given that they can be culturally and discursively associated with female activities. In the case of caretaking functions that have historically been associated with female and poor labor, it would be unsurprising to see the replication of gendered stereotypes as applied to gender-neutral robots. As a result, any purported semiotic neutrality of robotic design is inevitably", "attrs": null, "subkind": "paragraph", "toolName": null, "toolSlug": null, "confidence": null, "componentId": "3fd34782-d452-4a91-9bbe-fff74f3712a4", "frameworkName": null, "frameworkSlug": null }, { "bbox": { "h": 0.15, "w": 0.76, "x": 0.12, "y": 0.09 }, "kind": "paragraph", "text": "Because the way “robot-makers gender their humanoids is a tangible manifestation of their tacit understanding of femininity in relation to masculinity, and vice versa” (Robertson 2010, 4), roboticists are entrenching their reified common-sense knowledge of gender and re-enact pre-existing sexist tropes and dominant stereotypes of gendered bodies without any critical engagement. Thus, despite the lack of physical genitalia, robots possess “cultural genitals” that invoke “gender, such as pink or grey lips” (Robertson 2010, 5).", "attrs": null, "subkind": "paragraph", "toolName": null, "toolSlug": null, "confidence": null, "componentId": "553336d2-2773-4aeb-82c7-14aeac49caab", "frameworkName": null, "frameworkSlug": null }, { "bbox": { "h": 0.18, "w": 0.76, "x": 0.12, "y": 0.24 }, "kind": "paragraph", "text": "This process of reification in the design of robots entrenches the mythological bubble of the “natural” in the context of sex/gender and male/female binaries that queer theorist Judith Butler bursts open very effectively by looking at the malleability of the body. The traditional feminist assumptions of gender as social and cultural and sex as biological and physical are recast by Butler, who contends that sex is culturally and discursively produced as pre-discursive. Sex is an illusion produced by gender rather than the stable bedrock of variable gender constructions.", "attrs": null, "subkind": "paragraph", "toolName": null, "toolSlug": null, "confidence": null, "componentId": "dc9349c5-b509-4604-900b-63a2177e2383", "frameworkName": null, "frameworkSlug": null }, { "bbox": { "h": 0.25, "w": 0.76, "x": 0.12, "y": 0.42 }, "kind": "paragraph", "text": "Butler develops a theory of performativity wherein gender is an act, and the doer is a performer expressed in, not sitting causally “behind,” the deed. Performance reverses the traditional relation of identity as preceding expression in favor of performance as producing identity (Butler 1990, 1993). Gender for Butler thus becomes all drag and the “natural” becomes performative rather than an expression of something “pre-social” and “real.” Gender performances are not an expression of an underlying true identity, but the effects of regulatory fictions where individual “choice” is mediated by relations and discourses of power. In this way, queer theory’s contingent and fluid pluralization of gendered and sexual human practices stands in stark contrast to the fixed conflation of bodies and genders of humanoid robots posed by Robertson.", "attrs": null, "subkind": "paragraph", "toolName": null, "toolSlug": null, "confidence": null, "componentId": "ec8c03d3-8502-4841-8be1-88d486d02dd8", "frameworkName": null, "frameworkSlug": null }, { "bbox": { "h": 0.04, "w": 0.76, "x": 0.12, "y": 0.96 }, "kind": "source-note", "text": "Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 98.118.43.248, on 02 Dec 2025 at 21:17:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/D8CC33CF026507F324AF00CEEC7C894C", "attrs": { "numbered": true }, "subkind": null, "toolName": null, "toolSlug": null, "confidence": null, "componentId": "4dc311fc-7505-4d11-926b-b6c9d05126d6", "frameworkName": null, "frameworkSlug": null }, { "bbox": { "h": 0.02, "w": 0.44, "x": 0.28, "y": 0.05 }, "kind": "title", "text": "Carebots: Gender, Empire, the Capacity to Dissent", "attrs": null, "subkind": "headline", "toolName": null, "toolSlug": null, "confidence": null, "componentId": "8eac5c95-d464-46d2-abd3-0224172cdc97", "frameworkName": null, "frameworkSlug": null } ], "metrics": [], "tools": [], "frameworks": [], "arcBeats": [], "loops": [], "imagePathAlt": null, "thumbSrc": null, "thumbSrcAlt": null, "locked": true }