Table of Contents

Introduction: All Too Dehumanized
1. Caring: Care Labor, Conversational Artificial Intelligence, and Disembodied Women
2. Thinking: Closed Worlds, Domestic Labor, and Situated Robotics
3. Feeling: Emotional Labor, Sociable Robots, and Shameless Androids
4. Dying: Drone Labor, War, and the Dehumanized
Epilogue. The Human: That Which We Have Yet to Know
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

About the Author

Jennifer Rhee is assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Reviews

"The Robotic Imaginary persuasively shows how contemporary depictions of robots and AI offer unique insight into both the governing conceptions of the human (of who does and doesn’t count as fully human) and the gendered and racialized ways in which we are currently imagining and constructing labor."—Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative"The Robotic Imaginary is a profound contribution to our comprehension of ‘the human,’ read through technocultures of artificial intelligence and robotics. Jennifer Rhee makes an incisive and compelling argument for the connections between histories of devalued labor and of the dehumanized Other, and the limits of identification and knowability as the basis for an ethics of caring, thinking, feeling, and dying."—Lucy Suchman, author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions