#GoodRead | Selfless Devotion
a scene from Ex Machina
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagined the possibility that gender might not cast a feminine or masculine shadow over a writer’s language. To forget one’s gender, in Woolf’s view, would be empowerment, dispensing with learned behavior to allow for new ways of seeing and new forms of consciousness. Though humanoid robots could be built with such androgynous minds, the robot women made by men aren’t. Bots like Sophia, and the Scarlett Johansson lookalike Mark 1 (named after its maker), do not have gender-neutral intelligence. They are not born with gender but built with it, an idea of femaleness forged within the male psyche — woman-shaped but not of the womb.