Artificial Women: Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females

“Julie Wosk . . . opens our eyes to the multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings of such recent cultural creations as sex dolls, robotic caregivers, fictional female aliens, disembodied women’s voices, and imaginary automated mothers. A tour de force!”―Ruth Schwartz Cowan, author of More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave

“Artificial Women offers a timely, insightful exploration of how facsimiles of women―in the form of sex dolls, caregiving robots, virtual voices, and more―have been constructed through both real-life technologies and the technological imagination of film, fiction, and art. The book brings a valuable perspective to the topic by highlighting tensions between the cultural expectation that female-coded creations will be obedient and the stories in which these robots and dolls resist control or assert their own autonomy.”―Bo Ruberg, author of Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies

“Wosk’s book . . . offers a new route into considering how we construct gender identity culturally, by exploring how we manufacture gender identity in very literal ways. . . . One of the most powerful features of [this] book is that it situates our current AI moment in relation to the long history of the manufactured woman, as both a problem and an actual product.”―Marion Thain, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The breadth of Wosk’s research is continually staggering in its ability to make connections across so many varied time periods, national contexts, formats, and fields, including gender studies, science and technology studies, visual studies, literary studies, and more.”―Nicola McCafferty – Northwestern University, H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences

“Wosk uses art as a vehicle to elucidate the ambivalent dynamics of artificial women. Through this expositional work, her fascination with illusion, intoxication, and modernity becomes clear and contagious.”―Michelle Charette, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

“Wosk navigates the affects of anxiety and allure that cluster around artificial women, handling debates about inventions like RealDolls, the talking 2015 Hello Barbie toy, and robots designed to care for the elderly and the effects of their simulated empathy on their human counterparts’ ability to interact with others. Wosk treads these and other contested grounds related to the place of artificial women in an anthropocentric world carefully, teasing out the ambivalences at the heart of these creatures that promise new kinds of love, desire, and connection while threatening the centrality of biological humanity to these experiences.”―Nicola McCafferty – Northwestern University, H-Sci-Med Tech

“In this book, Wosk brings together the scientific, technological, and social aspects of artificial women, while exploring future prospects, through an examination of artificial femail representations using cultural, literary, and historical lenses.”―Ika Aprianti Usman, Gender and Development

“In the wake of her earlier book My Fair Ladies (Rutgers UP, 2015), Wosk’s Artificial Women (Indiana UP, 2024) tracks subtle, ongoing configurations in cultural representations of women and as technology.”―Gabriela Méndez Cota, Women: A Cultural Review

“Overall, however, this is a strong book that thoroughly examinesartificiality, gendered portrayal and perception, and agency in images of artificial women. It gives a detailed overview of the current state of artificial women in real life and in various media and highlights several key examples in great depth. The ideal audience for this text would be any scholar or reader looking to deeply understand the imageryof female robots and the influence of gendered cultural perspectiveson technological creation.Because of this,Artificial Womenis a text that will continue to be relevant in the study of artificial women, as narratives exploring their humanity continue to be written even today.”―Miranda Miller, Fafnir –Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research

Julie Wosk is Professor Emerita of English, Art History, and Studio Art at the State University of New York Maritime College. Her research  centers on the social and cultural impact of technology. She is author of several books, including My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves; Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age; and Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century. She is also an artist and photographer.