Bent Street 4.1. Tiffany Jones
representations of humanity. Bots with different body types? Different coloured skin? Different abilities? Different accents? Bots with cool hair? Bots wearing chaps? Or perhaps it would be bots with changeable forms. A bot with modular genitals? (See Figure 1). A bot whose gender appearance shifts across a spectrum of bodily capacities and gendered representations? A bot whose form ranges from human to non-human—goblin, daemon, angel, vampire slayer What would the image of a queer bot even be?
I can see marketing potential in the ultimate queer bot whose body can take any form. A body that presents in its own unique way, with infinite possibilities. The separation of the physical body from identity. The extraction of biology from gender. The ultimate queer body.
But of course, queer is not just about the physical form. Being queer is a stance in the world. It is about the ways we make sense of gender and sexuality. The way we resist, reshape or transgress cultural expectations.
Queerness in a bot would have to exist in its programming—or its deprogramming. Imagine a bot that has no idea about the rules of gender because it has not been programmed with gendered scripts or expectations. What if a bot is never taught to be passive in a feminised way, or has no idea what it means to ‘be a man’? Perhaps a queer bot is one that has no idea about heterosexual ‘rules’ of engagement. This lack of script might make for the ultimate queer bot.
However, a truly queer bot might also need programming to understand where it sits in the world. Queer consciousness is shaped by the experience of being queer in a world where cisgender, heterosexual and able bodies dominate most of the space. This is an experience of belonging and of not belonging, of understanding how to hack normative scripts. Of knowing both the liberation and oppression that comes with this. Of alienation and creative resistance. Of rejection and joy. Do we need to program an experience of marginalisation into our bot for it to be truly queer? Does the bot need to hold some fire of radical resistance to the everyday messages that queer is wrong or bad or deficient? What does this then mean for our bots? Are they just about sex? Or does our queer bot also, by definition, bring a measure of intimacy and emotional connection for a human based on recognition of some shared experience?
Even raising these questions begins to infer the possibility that for our queer bot to be possible it must hold a level of consciousness. This risks taking us deep into the tunnels of artificial intelligence, something I do not wish to do here. However, I do want to talk about agency (in a queer context). Ultimately, a bot is programmed by a human. Capacity for artificial learning aside, a bot has no capacity to make decisions outside of the limited range of options and behaviours written for it by its programmer. In this sense, it is an object of control. It can be manipulated to behave in the ways its human makers tell it to behave. Can a bot be queer if it has no consciousness and no capacity to independently understand its place in the world? Can it be queer if it cannot consciously choose to conform or resist cultural norms? Can it be queer if it has no capacity to seek pleasure on its own terms? Surely this lack of agency is the antithesis of queer experience and queer identity.
Is a Queer Sex Bot Even Possible?
Agency is generally understood as the capacity to consciously make choices and take action. It evokes free will. By definition, a programmed bot has no agency as it has no capacity for free will. We can, of course, argue that no-one makes choices entirely on their own terms. We are all bound by our material existence and cultural location. However, without consciousness our bot has no capacity to understand its actions or to pursue pleasure on its own terms. Without this, how can it be queer?
Perhaps a way forward is to rethink where choice and agency sit in the relationship between humans and machines. Bruno Latour and other writers in the Science and Technology Studies tradition encourage us to imagine humans and machines as collaborators—operating intra-dependently to produce action, reaction, choice, and outcome (Brey, 2005). Latour (2009) uses the gun to explain this concept. He critiques the familiar argument of the US National Rifle Association that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’. The gun is an object that can have no effect without human action. However, the form of the gun enables the transformation of someone with a desire to inflict harm into someone with capacity to kill. It does this in a way that another object, such as a knife, cannot achieve on the same scale. The form and function of the gun is central to the way a human engages with it and the way they feel when they hold it. The human and the gun work together. While the gun does not create the human and does not create that human’s desire to inflict harm, it could inspire it simply by the knowledge of its existence. Latour writes:
Which of them, then, the gun or the citizen, is the actor in this situation? … You are a different person with the gun in your hand. Essence is existence and existence is action. If I define you by what you have (the gun), and by the series of associations that you enter into when you use what you have (when you fire the gun), then you are modified by the gun … (page 189)
Moving from guns to sex, Robin Bauer (2018) draws on a similar concept in their work on les-bi-trans-queer BDSM practitioners, exploring the relationship between transmasculine people and strap-on dildos. Retelling the story of one participant, Bauer writes:
Strapping on a dildo provided his immaterial dick with a material form. He could sense it like a consolidated part of his body, an extension of the boundaries of his body, a transformation of the shape. Scout was not seeking out a substitute for a penis made of flesh and blood; his butch trans masculinity did not create a desire for that. There is no intentionality behind this phenomenon; rather matter displays its queer qualities by stretching out to incorporate other material objects to create unexpected forms of embodiment. (page 72).
Bauer’s point is that the strapped-on dildo does not just hold cultural significance as an object or artefact separate from the human body. Rather it becomes integrated with the body so that it is part of an embodied and emotive experience. In this way the dildo is not an ‘unnatural object’ held up in opposition to the ‘natural body’ or the ‘natural penis’. Rather, it is a unique augmentation of the body that is part of the ‘wearer’s’ sense of themselves—an object that shapes how they experience their body which in turn shapes sexual experiences for both them and their partner/s.
So what of sex bots? Imagine a simple form of programming in which a bot is given capacity to choose between a set of options when faced with a situation or request. Even if the bot’s ‘choice’ is based on random allocation of potential responses rather than consciousness or artificial intelligence, their ‘selections’ effect the response, actions and options of humans in their sphere. The bot plays a role in producing human experience and action by limiting certain choices and responses and expanding others. The human therefore does not bring all the agency to that interaction. Indeed, the form, function and capacity of the bot influences who the human is in their entanglement with the bot. As Karan Barad (2003) writes:
Agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has. Agency cannot be designated as an attribute of ‘subjects’ or ‘objects’ (as they do not preexist as such). Agency is not an attribute whatsoever—it is ‘doing’/ ‘being’ in its intra-activity. (page 826-827)
Queerness is similarly produced through our engagement with the social world—through where we stand in relation to others, our response to our location, our response to others, and through our actions and choices. We collectively produce queerness. Throwing radical queer sex bots into that mix, with their wildly malleable and indefinable bodies, might transform our experience of being human and being queer in ways we can’t imagine right now. Bots have potential to be more than just objects that symbolise queer culture, but active players in shaping queer culture. In this regard, a queer sex bot—or indeed a Queer Love Bot (which would make Contraxia a vastly more interesting planet to visit)—is a definite possibility.
The Ethics of Queer Bots
A Queer Love Bot might be a naïve or ‘Pollyanna-ish’ vision for the future of sex bots. However, it is a vision that aims to take us beyond the imagery of the enslaved ‘female’ sex bot—an image that is disturbingly easier to grasp than that of an empowered, complex