The Smart Wife

Meet the Smart Wife – at your service, an eclectic collection of feminized AI, robotic, and smart devices. This digital assistant is friendly and sometimes flirty, docile and efficient, occasionally glitchy but perpetually available. She might go by Siri, or Alexa, or inhabit Google Home. She can keep us company, order groceries, vacuum the floor, turn out the lights. A Japanese digital voice assistant – a virtual anime hologram named Hikari Azuma – sends her “master” helpful messages during the day; an American sexbot named Roxxxy takes on other kinds of household chores. In The Smart Wife, Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy show that the principal prototype for these virtual helpers is the 1950s housewife: White, middle-class, heteronormative, and nurturing, with a spick-and-span home. It’s time, they say, to give the Smart Wife a reboot.

What’s wrong with preferring domestic assistants with feminine personalities? We like our assistants to conform to gender stereotypes – so what? For one thing, Strengers and Kennedy remind us, the design of gendered devices reinscribes those outdated and unfounded stereotypes. Strengers and Kennedy offer a Smart Wife “manifesta”, proposing a rebooted Smart Wife that would promote a revaluing of femininity in society in all her glorious diversity.