Subject objects
Zotero / D&S Group / Top-Level Items 2020-01-08
Type
Journal Article
Editor
Celia Roberts
Editor
Myra J. Hird
Author
Lucy Suchman
URL
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464700111404205
Volume
12
Issue
2
Pages
119-145
Publication
Feminist Theory
ISSN
1464-7001, 1741-2773
Date
08/2011
Journal Abbr
Feminist Theory
DOI
10.1177/1464700111404205
Accessed
2020-01-08 18:19:50
Library Catalog
DOI.org (Crossref)
Language
en
Abstract
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.