陶晶瑩科幻小說《二十一》中的機器與性別

Gender and the Robot in Matilda Tao's Twenty-One

陶晶瑩書寫AI機器人介入家庭，想像「人倫與家庭關係的變異可能」，然而筆者要問的是：陶晶瑩描寫機器人成為家庭的一份子時，她對機器人是如何想像的？顯然的，機器人於小說中的再現形象，是先有男／女的性別，而人類根據機器人的性別與之互動。但為什麼機器人會被想像成具有性別？為何如此想像卻極為自然，毋須質疑？當性別理論已不斷指出人類的性別是社會的建構，為何科幻小說中對機器人的性別想像仍牢固於男性／女性的二元劃分？本文基於此提問，以性別理論探討《二十一》中的機器與性別。

Matilda Tao's novel, Twenty-One, presents a future scenario in which AI robots replace family members so that“it is possible to reimagine a radical change in family relationships.”However, there is a question we have to ask: when she depicts a robot as a family member, what is Tao's cultural imaginary about the man-made machine? Obviously, the robot in the novel is first represented as“gendered”(male/female), and therefore humans interact with the robot according to its gender. But why should robots be imagined as having genders? Why is it so natural to project our imaginary of gender onto robots? When feminism has consistently pointed out that human gender is a social construct, why is the gendered vision of robots in science fiction still firmly anchored in the male/female binarism? With these critical questions, this paper—based on Butler's theory—probes into the key issues about the robot and gender in Twenty-One.