The problem with fembots: inscribing pink collar labour onto non-human entities

Depictions of robots have long been intertwined with labour concerns. Whether embodying cultural anxieties over automation or acting as a metaphor for the working classes, the robot is often used as connective tissue between science fiction and social reality. But how does gendering the robot impact this relationship to labour? This paper examines the portrayal of female-coded robot (fembot) labour across three texts: Isaac Asimov’s ‘Feminine Intuition’ (1969), Chris Beckett’s The Holy Machine (2010), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). This paper considers fembot labour as a form of what Louise Kapp Howe refers to as ‘pink collar work’, that is: forms of labour which are culturally understood as women’s work due to a mixture of social, historical and economic factors. The texts analysed in this paper offer a selection of some of the gendered labour roles commonly assigned to fictional fembots: administrative work, sex work, and domestic/care work. This paper asks whether these three depictions of fembot labour effectively query the culturally contingent nature of pink collar work, or whether they serve to reinforce the gender essentialism that is often at the root of their portrayals.