Fluid Orlando: Beyond Binary
Lonely Orlando ...
A headless creature,
Of fluid gender,
With dreadful looks,
Will people ever talk to it ?
Most of the current literature is about how gendering robots influence human-robot interaction but few studies cover the gender of the robots themselves.
Hence there arise the questions: Do robots have genders? Do they even need genders? If they do, what genders should they have, male and female? Pondering these questions, we decided to have gender as our creatureness and then we realized, without the confinement of biological sex, artificial creatures are perfect to imply the idea of gender fluidity.
Previous gender studies have pointed out that in human society, gender is not something one is, it is something one does, an act, or more precisely, a sequence of acts, a verb rather than a noun, a “doing” rather than a “being” (Butler, 1990). And voice, clothing, and task play important roles in identifying gender (Dennler et al., 2021). So we chose to focus on the voice and clothing.’
The face is usually one of the most telling parts of gender. That’s why we chose to have our creature beheaded. Without genitalia, it’s hard to decide the gender of “it” just by appearance. For voice, we let it switch from male, to female, to gender-neutral voice every one minute, implying the fluidity of gender. Also, the LEDs are intended to change its colors to reflect the gender status of the voice.
With all this, we decide to call our creature Orlando, the protagonist of Virginia Wolf’s novel Orlando, whose gender literally fluids as time changes.
Reference:
Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203824979
Dennler, N. S., Kian, M., Nikolaidis, S., & Matarić, M. (2024). Designing Robot Identity: The Role of Voice, Clothing, and Task on Robot Gender Perception. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.00494.