Alexa, Alert Me When the Revolution Comes: Gender, Affect, and Labor in the Age of Home-Based Artificial Intelligence
Open accessAbstract
The fantasy of automation is one of liberation from alienating tasks. Today, domestic artificial intelligence (Al) enacts this dream of frictionlessly offloading monotony. This article deploys theories of Marxist feminism, affective labor to interrogate domestic Al’s unprecedented promise of absorbing forms of labor we hardly acknowledged that we did. While these devices make the reproductive labor of the household legible as labor, we interrogate their quasi-emancipatory promise. We argue that devices such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home elide and reproduce the gendered and racialized dimensions of domestic labor, streamline this labor for capture by capital, and heighten the very affective dynamics they promise to ameliorate. Only critical political theories of work can illuminate the unfulfilled transformations and ongoing dominations of gender, race, and affect that saturate labor with domestic Al – expressed, we contend, by re-articulating the framework of the “social factory” to that of the “social server.”
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Historically, subordinate roles have been occupied by women of color, treated as physical absorbers of physical and affective dirt of a home.
“They argue that historically, these roles have been occu-pied by women of color (treated as “physical absorbers” of “physical and affective dirt of a home” [68]).”
From Examining Humanness as a Metaphor to Design Voice User Interfaces (2024) · cites this paper as [68]
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Cites
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling.
Brown, J. V., & Hochschild, A. (1985) · Social Forces · doi:10.2307/2578990 · Cited by 10,863 · see citing works
More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave.
Davies, A. C., & Cowan, R. S. (1986) · The Economic History Review · doi:10.2307/2596180 · Cited by 69 · see citing works
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Research works printed but not linked: 3
- Encarnacion Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect: A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labor (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010).
- Silvia Federici, "Feminism and the Politics of the Common in an Era of Primitive Accumulation," in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), pp. 145-46;
- Silvia Federici, "On Elder Care Work and the Limits of Marxism," in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), pp. 115-25.
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Browsing with Alexa: interrogating the impact of voice assistants as web interfaces
Natale, S., & Cooke, H. (2021) · Media, Culture & Society · doi:10.1177/0163443720983295 · Cited by 76 · see citing works
Examining Humanness as a Metaphor to Design Voice User Interfaces
Desai, S., Dubiel, M., & Leiva, L. A. (2024) · ACM Conversational User Interfaces 2024 · doi:10.1145/3640794.3665535 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
Leaving the Butler Behind: The Future of Role Reproduction in CUI
McMillan, D., & Jaber, R. (2021) · CUI 2021 - 3rd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces · doi:10.1145/3469595.3469606 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
- Authors
- Schiller, A., & McMahon, J.
- Affiliations
- The Graduate Center, CUNY (US)
- SUNY Plattsburgh (US)
- Corresponding author
- McMahon, John
- ORCID
- McMahon, John
- Venue
- New Political Science
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Published
- 2019-06-01
- Volume
- 41
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 173-191
- ISSN
- 0739-3148 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-9931
- OpenAlex
- W2940058453
- Cited by
- 59
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 3
- FWCI
- 12.08
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Locations
- New Political Science (publishedVersion)
- SUNY Digital Repository Support (State University of New York System) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Economy and Work Transformation
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Economy and Marxism
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Feminism, Gender, and Intersectionality
- Keywords
- affective labor, reproductive labor, gender division of labor, racialization of labor, Marxist feminism, social factory, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, domestic work, labor theory of value
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