If I was back in Gender Studies doing film theory this would've been a neat book to study. Ultimately the book was an interesting exploration of psychoanalytic feminist theory to Star Trek and more. When I tried to explain the underlying logic of arguments like "the Enterprise is a passive female womb" to anyone who hadn't studied psych or gender studies, I was met with blank stares. I had a really hard time finding anyone with enough of a grounding in feminist psychoanalysis (or even straight-up Freudian psychoanalysis) to talk about this book with, even after reaching out on my social networks. This book was relatively accessible compared to the materials I read in my undergrad, but not relative to non-fiction books in general. It seems to be enough for psychoanalytic theorists that an on-screen representation aligns with something Freud once said, and if you do a survey of average people and they don't concur, it must be because they aren't schooled in the workings of the subconscious. Nor does it provide the supporting evidence that I would need to believe things like the contention that Picard's holodeck fantasy character Dixon Hill's nickname "Dix" is a hidden way of overcompensating for the threat to his masculinity posed by Lwaxana Troi. I'm fairly familiar with psychoanalytic feminist theory from my Gender Studies undergrad but I wasn't the biggest fan and in my opinion this book doesn't totally succeed in breaking free of the the theory's pitfalls of gender and cultural essentialism, though there are attempts. I accepted a pitch to review this book based on the copy on the back of the book, which praises the book as both "elegant" and "highly accessible" and promises an exploration of "contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment." But I didn't get far into the book before I realized that the ad copy made a significant omission in failing to mention the analysis is almost entirely based on psychoanalytic feminist theory. I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. It makes important contributions to conversations around the gender gap and the increasing acceptance of transgender people. Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions surrounding media, technology, and gender. Faber ends her account in the present, with incisive looks at the film Her and Siri herself. She then moves on to an intrepid decade-by-decade investigation of computer voices, tracing the evolution from the masculine voices of the ’70s and ’80s to the feminine ones of the ’90s and ’00s. Faber begins by considering talking spaceships like those in Star Trek, the film Dark Star, and the TV series Quark, revealing the ideologies that underlie space-age progress. Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment. Why is Star Trek ’s computer coded as female, while HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey is heard as male? By examining how gender is built into these devices, author Liz W. A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talkĪlthough computer-based personal assistants like Siri are increasingly ubiquitous, few users stop to ask what it means that some assistants are gendered female, others male.
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