Caring Robots: Automata, Service Work, and Gender in the Premodern Mediterranean

Lamia Balafrej
Art History
UC Los Angeles

My project examines the feminine-gendering of automated vessels, clocks, and other technical devices from a transhistorical perspective. If the feminized robot—how the mechanization of service work has usually been rendered as an anthropomorphic, female-gendered machine, from Hephaestus’s golden maids to Apple’s Siri—is well-known for the ancient and modern periods, little research has been done on the medieval and Islamic worlds. I carry out archival research in museums and libraries around the Mediterranean to explore in particular the circulation of the feminized robot in the premodern Islamic realm. The general goal is to develop a framework for understanding the Mediterranean reception of the feminized robot, not simply as the repetition of the same trope but as an act of rewriting, illuminating this technological motif as a palimpsest, made of multiple, heterogeneous layers.

Image credit: Folio from al-Jazari’s Compendium of the Mechanical Arts, 1315.