"The Future of Intimacy and Sextech: Gendered Modalities of Posthuman Technologies in Sexual Commerce"

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This project seeks to explore how different manifestations of artificial female bodies serve to create emotionally intimate interactions with sex-tech, through an investigation of the unexplored nodes of knowledge where Lovotics, posthumanism, and feminist thinking meet. Simultaneously, this research will investigate why intimate relationships, or "bounded authenticity" (Bernstein, 2007) are sought via sex-tech and sex robots, and what happens when these relationships are transposed into this field of sex-tech. The prevalence of discussions regarding sex robots shows a growing anxiety around HRI (Scheutz & Arnold, 2016), while the emergent field of "Lovotics" seeks to interrogate the possibilities of romantic interaction between humans and robots (Levy, Cheok & Devlin, 2016). This field of study is growing both symbiotically and exponentially as the sex-tech industry explodes into a 30 billion-dollar market (Davis, 2018). The panoply of products that incorporate technological innovation into devices for sexual satisfaction, includes, inter alia, sex-robots, avatars, chatbots, AI sex toys, and teledildonics. These manifestations can be divided into two categories: those that seek to artificially replicate the human body, and those that do not. Feminist theory has long sought to interrogate the materiality of the body, revisiting its political significance in our posthuman world- the most iconic example being Donna Haraway's cyborg that strives to dissolve reductive taxonomies of identity (2010). However, Rosi Braidotti's critique of the neoliberal market's manipulation of the positive potential of the posthuman has shown Haraway's cyborg to have evolved into the contemporary gynoids we see today (2013). With gendered-female technological bodies permeating the field of sexual commerce, new feminist anxieties have arisen. In the field of sociology, Elizabeth Bernstein has noted a burgeoning trend in current sexual commerce, where consumers seek "bounded authenticity... the sale and purchase of authentic emotional and physical connection" (2007, p.192). Lovoticists are also keen to explore how intimacy can be experienced in HRI, with a great deal of focus centred on the variety of possibilities and potentialities inherent to this intimacy. For some roboticists, gendered anthropomorphism in this field has created the impetus for critical reflection on the artificial female body (Shaw-Garlock, 2014), to interrogate what technological bodies designed with the intention of emulating human ones represent. Whilst Lovotics fails to interrogate the symbolism and significance of the gendered body, it pays close attention to "intimacy between humans and robots" (Levy & Cheok, 2018). Lovoticists and sociologists share this interest in HRI, as academic sociological focus is keen to explore manifestations of intimacy in our socio-historical context and how it translates technologically (Jamieson, 2011). As the social-scape changes, questions have arisen regarding the way in which capitalist markets have led to the commercialisation of intimacy. Technology's influence on the commodification process raises key questions regarding which intimacies thrive in this market. How does this affect "gendered (self) representations and sexual subjectivities" and how are these intimacies manifested through different technological mediums? (Attwood et al., 2017, p. 249). To explore these focus points, the following research questions direct the investigation: What is the political significance of the artificial female body in the context of developments in sex-tech, and how does this relate to wider concerns within feminist theory and gender studies?Can we consider the artificial female body as a conduit for intimacy in the field of sex-tech, and explore this trend in relation to globalised sexual commerce? To what extent must Gender Studies incorporate a 'Revision of the Body' given posthuman developments in the Western social-sphere?