Loveability: A Critical Theory for Understanding Love, Humanness, and Futurity in the Age of the Sex Robot

This thesis centres on the emotion of Love as a grand narrative into which experiences of affect are ordered. While many critical works have explored which beings are imagined to possess lives that matter to the project of coloniality, these writings have largely centred on rationality as the trait according to which the “color-line of the human” is drawn. However, non-living objects and living beings that are not humans also exist within this hierarchy. Furthermore, a growing body of scholarship demonstrates the importance of affective economies to the hierarchisation of beings and objects’ conjectured liveliness. This thesis delineates how a non-living object can be re-presented as having a life that matters to coloniality when it is positioned Loveable within the dominant ontology. It focuses on robotic objects made Loveable in a contemporary period of increasingly divorced beingness and objecthood. Three narratively-encoded vectors which dominantly direct affect into Love under coloniality are identified: Intelligibility, Recognisability, and Adaptability. The genealogical formations of these vectors are examined in reference to Loveable robots: the Tropic Gynoid, MIT’s Kismet, the humanoid of the uncanny valley, synthetically-modelled systems, and Bina48. The robots act as case studies into normative assumptions of how humanness, and indeed aliveness, should look and be performed to be positioned as Loveable within the dominant ontology. This study thus provides a critical framework for understanding the role of Love in attributing highly-valuated liveliness to non-living things within the project of coloniality.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Moran, Jenny

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Dillon, Sarah

• Affect
• Coloniality
• Gender
• Love
• Race
• Robot design
• STS

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/ba961ca1-2a85-49ea-942e-594e162b1389/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.106190

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/364597