Date Awarded
2021
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
American Studies
Advisor
Elizabeth Losh
Committee Member
Charles McGovern
Committee Member
Grey Gundaker
Committee Member
Jennifer Rhee
Abstract
“All the Work without the Workers: Robotic Labor in the American Imaginary” critically reexamines American labor history through the ideologies and mechanisms of deskilling and dehumanizing labor. Using a combination of literary and historical analysis to trace the historical relationship between mechanization and human labor in concert with questions of race, gender and design, this project uses the figure of the robot to think through how the post humanism of the past is both raced and gendered. I argue that despite our imagined pre-technological past, America has always been a cyborg nation. The technological and mechanical labor we have come to expect from our machines and robots has always been enacted onto the bodies of American laborers through how they have been trained and taught to work. Connecting different domains of labor within situations of biopolitical precarity, the dissertation utilizes three case studies of the enslaved worker, the migrant worker, the domestic worker to examine human-machine interaction, cooperation, and co-existence. Through these cases studies, this project examines how the processes of mechanization are superimposed onto laboring bodies while at the same time maintaining a continual denial of their mechanized bodies. By looking at who has been marginalized and their labor erased and eclipsed, this project emphasizes colonialism's continued influence to reframe and decentralize bodies of color and the racial and gendered violence done to them. The recognition of our robotic or cyborg self and all its hybridity dismantles the power structures that place the Western subject (and the human itself) at the ontological center of the ecosystem.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21220/dgrx-8v02
Rights
© The Author
Recommended Citation
Vo, Khanh Van Ngoc, "“All The Work, Without The Workers”: Robotic Labor In The American Imaginary" (2021). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. William & Mary. Paper 1638386878.
https://doi.org/10.21220/dgrx-8v02
