“For centuries, Asian women have been associated with service and what Bow calls “affective labor”: caring for other peoples’ emotion-based needs. According to Bow, Asian-featured fembots are just the newest twist in the longstanding cultural “fetishization and overt sexualization of Asian women.” Our own Professor Leslie Bow examines the implications of high-tech robots embodying female Asian features.
Read the full article “Artificial intelligence. Real stereotypes.”
Leslie Bow is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Mark and Elisabeth Eccles Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. She is the author of the award-winning, ‘Partly Colored’: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York University Press, 2010); Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton University Press, 2001); editor of the four-volume, Asian American Feminisms (Routledge, 2012) and a reissue of Fiona Cheong’s novel, The Scent of the Gods (Illinois University Press, 2010). Leslie is a contributor to Progressive magazine and the Progressive Media Project through which her op-ed columns appear in newspapers across the United States. She is currently working on a book that explores race and pleasure in the public sphere, focusing on fantasy and visual culture.