Dominant understandings of sex, gender and sexuality align with patriarchal ideology that maintai... more Dominant understandings of sex, gender and sexuality align with patriarchal ideology that maintains misogyny, sexism and male supremacy. A critical feature of the aforementioned gender paradigm is strict mutually exclusive binarism and essentialism. By taking a queer feminist perspective on gender (and the gender binary) and using posthuman new materialism (agential realism) as a theoretical framework this study engages with the constitution of myriad binaries, including the male/female, man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, sex/gender, human/nonhuman and mind/body binaries. Through a diffractive reading of feminist poststructuralist, new materialist, biological, ethnographical and queer theories of sexual difference, sex, gender and sexuality and the binary genderisation of anthropomorphised social technologies – including intelligent assistants and companion and humanoid robotics – the iterative constitution of sex, gender, sexuality, body and human is explored revealing various apparatuses that material-discursively (de)stabilise these binaries. Thinking of gender, the body and the human as dynamic contingent phenomena and taking a non-anthropocentric stance allows a reconsideration of both robotic and human embodiment. Paramount here is the dual possibilities of creating more of the same, reinscribing normative realities or leaving open the potential for the co- creation of dynamic futures.
Dominant understandings of sex, gender and sexuality align with patriarchal ideology that maintai... more Dominant understandings of sex, gender and sexuality align with patriarchal ideology that maintains misogyny, sexism and male supremacy. A critical feature of the aforementioned gender paradigm is strict mutually exclusive binarism and essentialism. By taking a queer feminist perspective on gender (and the gender binary) and using posthuman new materialism (agential realism) as a theoretical framework this study engages with the constitution of myriad binaries, including the male/female, man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, sex/gender, human/nonhuman and mind/body binaries. Through a diffractive reading of feminist poststructuralist, new materialist, biological, ethnographical and queer theories of sexual difference, sex, gender and sexuality and the binary genderisation of anthropomorphised social technologies – including intelligent assistants and companion and humanoid robotics – the iterative constitution of sex, gender, sexuality, body and human is explored revealing various apparatuses that material-discursively (de)stabilise these binaries. Thinking of gender, the body and the human as dynamic contingent phenomena and taking a non-anthropocentric stance allows a reconsideration of both robotic and human embodiment. Paramount here is the dual possibilities of creating more of the same, reinscribing normative realities or leaving open the potential for the co- creation of dynamic futures.
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Dissertations by Michelle Kock