Feminist investigations into caring technologies emphasise the tension between their reproduction of care’s assumed femininity and their ability to destabilise gendered markers and systems. However, the existing literature ignores the historical racialisation of care and its perpetuation in the form of the posthuman caring object. This article examines how racialised relations of power shape the posthumanisation of care in three science-fiction works, Channel 4’s television show Humans (2015), Alex Riviera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008) and Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013). While Her’s disembodied operating systems are premised upon an implicit whiteness, posthuman caring objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer take a racialised, embodied form. Drawing upon the work of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, this article examines how the racialised objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer are constituted as both labourers and commodities, purchased for the purpose of facilitating white reproductivity. Nonetheless, this article also documents how these caring technologies complicate key binaries such as subject/object, human/machine and productive/reproductive labour. In doing so, they disrupt the whiteness of the social reproduction paradigm. The article concludes by calling for greater feminist engagement with the racialisation of care labour in human and posthuman forms, in order to challenge white, heterosexual models of reproductivity based upon the exploitation of racialised labour.
DawdyS.L., 2006. Proper caresses and prudent distance: a how-to manual from colonial Louisiana. In StolerA.L., ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 140–162.
10.
DevlinK., 2018. Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots. London: Bloomsbury Sigma.
11.
Ex Machina, 2014. Film. Directed by Alex Garland. United Kingdom: United Pictures International.
JacksonZ.I., 2015. Outer worlds: the persistence of race in movement ‘beyond the human’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3), pp. 215–218.
22.
JollimoreT., 2015. “This endless space between the words”: the limits of love in Spike Jonze’s Her. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 39, pp. 120–143.
23.
LevyD., 2009. Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd.
24.
McBeanS., 2018. Digital intimacies and queer narratives. In DinnenZ.WarholR., eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 132–144.
25.
Metropolis, 1927. Film. Directed by Fritz Lang. Germany: UFA GmbH.
OsuchaE., 2009. The whiteness of privacy: race, media, law. Camera Obscura, 24(70), pp. 67–107.
31.
PetersonV.S., 2003. A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies. London and New York: Routledge.
32.
Puig de la BellacasaP., 2012. ‘Nothing comes without its world’: thinking with care. The Sociological Review, 60(2), pp. 197–216.
SchuellerM.J., 2005. Analogy and (white) feminist theory: thinking race and the color of the cyborg body. Signs, 31(1), pp. 63–92.
35.
SchullerK., 2017. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Durham: Duke University Press.
36.
SilvaE., 2010. Maids, machines and morality in Brazilian homes. Feminist Review, 94, pp. 20–37.
37.
Sleep Dealer, 2008. Film. Directed by Alex Riviera. Mexico and United States: Maya Entertainment.
38.
SpillersH., 1987. Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an American grammar book. Diacritics, 17(2), pp. 64–81.
39.
StolerA.L., 2006. Intimidations of empire: predicaments of the tactile and unseen. In StolerA.L., ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–22.
