Figures-in-the-making: Figurations of AI and gender in science, popular culture, and everyday life

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is often considered the science of making intelligent machines. Unavoidable are the ways in which gender informs and shapes what constitutes intelligence, yet rarely is gender explicitly addressed as a topic of research. At best, gender is reduced to an empirical question of counting gendered bodies. Indeed, by studies of gender, what many actually mean is a study of women—their presence or exclusion, their representation, or the ways in which their lives are affected by systems and technologies. Even in studies of AI that foreground feminist readings of science and technology, gender is a taken for granted relation —the stable backdrop against which AI is enacted rat..