Engenderneered Robots Concentration on the relationship between machines and gender serves a specific purpose. When the body is technologized, many discordant components of gender become highlighted. The human-like machine, occupying an unstable position somewhere between nature and artifice, brings to the fore how women have been placed in similar states of tension. Engenderneering acquires special significance in the context of engineering machinery that performs tasks that humans could discharge. Popular concepts of robotics personify robots, and this personification implicates gender.
Gendered robots have very deep roots in popular culture.
In the Jetsons comic utopia, the mechanical maid not surprisingly was a female, Rose. This female came complete with gender-marked accessories such as an apron, a useless accouterment for stainless steel. The feminine occupies a dual position both as radical Other and as the manifestation of gender expectations that have not launched far past their patriarchal bases. This strange irony, in this case initially most notable through gender-marked clothing, occurs in the human encounter with Robby the Robot. The first robotic movie star in his own right, Robby the Robot offers an instructive case study in engenderneering.