Made to Fall in Love: Humanity, Gender, and Desire in the Representations of 'Harmony' the Sex Robot

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest not only within the scientific community towards the emergence of more personal relationships between humans and robots, but also within the constantly expanding industry of sex tech – estimated to be already worth of $30bn. That is to say, recent years have witnessed both an increasing interest by theory and popular culture towards the intimate relationships between humans and automata, but also the arrival and launch of humanoid robots offering sex. Although the development and manufacturing of companion robots emulating human features along with dispensing sex and companionship is rather recent, the narratives of human-like machines and other man-made partners – frequently in the form of women – are not. Consequently, this paper explores the cultural meanings of sex robots by examining how the robots of today are marketed and proclaimed to the potential users by the manufacturers. The focus of the work is outlined in the study of the case of “Harmony” that is one of the most well-known sex robots of the current sex tech market. Harmony is a sex robot manufactured by two Californian-based companies, Abyss Creations and Realbotix, and merchandised at the official websites of the companies as the “perfect companion”. This work thus examines how Harmony is represented at the official websites, and how the representations construct the notion of Harmony as the perfect companion. The study is conducted with qualitative methods and with the concept of representation as the theoretical frame of the analysis. The main task of the work is thus in the study of symbolic performances, that is, texts and images that depict Harmony the sex robot at the websites of the manufacturers. Consequently, the concept of representation is utilized in order to examine the cultural meanings of Harmony as well as the possible implications of the representations of Harmony within the broader cultural and social contexts. That is to say, the analysis conducted in the thesis focuses on examining how the images of Harmony are constructed, and how they work in relation with the broader contexts of science fiction, the development of social companion robots, and the representations of hard-core pornography. The overall aim of the approach taken in this work is to interpret what kind of notions and ideals of gender, sexuality, and companionship the representations of Harmony convey. On the whole, the main objective of the work is to increase the comprehension of a still marginal phenomenon which yet receives a fair amount of attention and investment by the media as well as the various fields of research, technology, and engineering. On the grounds of the analysis conducted in the work, the representations of Harmony can be divided at least into two broad themes. First of them proposes that the marketing perceives and constructs Harmony as a human-like companion, and the second as a gendered object of desire. That is to say, based on the approach taken in this work, the representations of Harmony are interpreted as imaginations of ideal companionship, and more accurately, an ideal companion in the female form. Accordingly, the study of the case of Harmony indicates that the ways in which Harmony is represented circulates and asserts the narratives of sexualized, fetishized, and subjugated machine women. In other words, the representations of Harmony reinforce the conventionally gendered conceptions of the machines embodied as women