Mechanical Maids: Digital Assistants, Domestic Spaces, and the Specter(s) of Black Women’s Labor

Owens, Golden M.

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-5khv-qg88

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Mechanical Maids: Digital Assistants, Domestic Spaces, and the Specter(s) of Black Women’s Labor

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This dissertation explores how dominant U.S. constructions of race, class, and gender are embedded into and inscribed onto artificially intelligent virtual assistants and the labors they perform. I examine virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana, interrogating their complex relationship to humanness, the tasks they are programmed to execute, and the ways they are designed to respond to and interact with users. I contend that these digital aides bear uncanny traces of the African American female slaves, servants, and houseworkers, who were once conscripted to perform the category of domestic labor that intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) now fulfill for those who use them. I employ the Antebellum-era stereotype of the Mammy, a figure who is arguably the blueprint for domestic service in the United States, as a case study, and assert that she—and a range of Black female laborers through her—subliminally haunts contemporary IVAs and the ‘smart’ devices they inhabit. Expanding on scholarship in Media Studies, African American Studies, Gender Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Sound Studies, I analyze popular representations of Black female house slaves and houseworkers, robotic and/or artificially intelligent servants/helpers, labor-saving products and devices, and contemporary IVAs in twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. films, television programs, radio shows, and print and TV advertisements. My dissertation ultimately mounts an examination of race, gender, technology, class, and American labor. Through the analysis of Black female laborers and contemporary IVAs, I provide a novel, racially and culturally specific reimagining of “universal” notions like comfort, ease, power, and control, and offer a nuanced sense of the historical meaning and impact of labor-saving devices.

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