SCIENCE sciencemag.org 4 SEPTEMBER 2020 • VOL 369 ISSUE 6508 1169PHOTO: TORU YAMANAKA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A
fter a long day at work, you arrive
home to find that your robot vacuum
has successfully cleaned your floors.
The slow cooker has sent you a text
to let you know that the pot roast is
ready. The thermostat senses your
movement and automatically adjusts to your
preferred temperature. “Alexa, turn on living
room lights,” you direct, as you settle
into your favorite chair to relax.
Today’s smart home still closely re-
sembles the fantasies of 1950s technofu-
turism, complete with retrograde gender
and (hetero)sexual politics. Whereas the
model of 1950s household economy fea-
tured a housewife as homemaker and
manager of the technologically enhanced
house, today’s smart home outsources
much of the domestic labor to a legion
of “smart wives.” These technologies in-
clude feminized robots, digital voice as-
sistants, virtual helpers, and other smart
devices that have been designed to take
over what Arlie Hochschild coined “the
second shift” of unpaid household labor.
In The Smart Wife, Yolande Strengers
and Jenny Kennedy explore the many
forms, representations, and roles played
by smart wife technologies, particularly
as they perform cleaning, caring, home-
making, companionship, and sexual
labor in the home. Strengers and Ken-
nedy use “wife” as both shorthand and a
metaphor for a specific form of gendered
labor within the heterosexual marriage
institution, a benefit historically af-
forded to men as a precondition for
pursuing economic opportunities and
leisure activities outside the home.
Employing a rich methodological toolkit
that includes interviews with technology de-
signers, industry insiders, and heterosexual
couples who use smart technologies, as well
as analyses of cultural representations of
smart wives and their associated advertise-TECHNOLOGYA pair of digital scholars confront the troubling implications
of feminized household management technologies
By Miriam E. SweeneyBOOKS et al.
The Stepford wife gets smart
ments, the authors contextualize the smart
wife as a “technofix” that seeks to address
changes that have occurred as women have
entered the paid labor force and gained
greater legal and social status outside of the
institution of marriage. Smart wives thus
provide a lens to explore “social and politi-
cal agendas about the role of women, wives,
and heteronormative relationships” in many
contemporary Western societies.Most of the book’s chapters are organized
around a different smart wife character that
provides entry into gendered functions and
social contexts. The Jetsons’ robot, Rosie,
for example, is the prototypical smart wife
performing housework and cleaning tasks,
whereas Amazon’s Alexa helps the authors
initiate a conversation about smart wives as
surveillance technologies, digital homemak-
ing, and “pleasance”—a “fundamental feelingthat is hard to define but that people desire to
experience,” according to the home automa-
tion company Lutron. The chapter about the
sexbot Harmony, meanwhile, provokes ques-
tions about intimacy, sex, and consent. Each
example is well chosen to facilitate insight-
ful discussion about the problematic gender
stereotypes and inequalities built into smart
wife technologies and to address the poten-
tial for harm, violence, and continued devalu-
ation of women and the feminized forms of
labor posed by such entities.
The authors acknowledge that their book
takes a perspective that prioritizes “the
gender politics of smart technology in
privileged Western homes,” identifying
their own positions as advantaged, het-
erosexual white women and recogniz-
ing their decision to “gloss over other
powerful narratives” that emphasize
race and class. Although I appreci-
ated the directness of this disclosure, it
nonetheless seemed like a missed op-
portunity to integrate the perspectives
and cultural histories of women of
color, poor white women, non-Western
women, and immigrant women, whose
domestic labor continues to enable
middle-class white women to partici-
pate in the paid labor force.
Similarly, integrating more perspec-
tives from LGBTQ people might have
helped to advance the authors’ stated
goals of queering smart wife technolo-
gies and developing smart wives that
promote gender equity and diversity.
The authors resist absolutes and
easy conclusions. They recommend a
“reboot” of smart wife technologies, for
example, while acknowledging that this
will require those of us who imagine,
design, build, and interact with smart
wives to challenge the norms and pre-
conceptions that form the basis of our
interactions with these devices. In a
provocative call to technology designers, they
urge us to engage with the complexities in-
herent in smart wife technologies, which they
believe represent a potential site of interven-
tion in the struggle for gender equity. jREFERENCES AND NOTES- A. R. Hochschild, A. Machung, The Second Shift
(Avon Books, 1990).
10.1126/science.abd2192Subtle design cues have led many to infer that the social robot
Pepper, who is technically “gender ambiguous,” is female.The reviewer is at the School of Library and Information
Studies, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA.
Email: [email protected]The Smart Wife: Why Siri,
Alexa, and Other
Smart Home Devices
Need a Feminist Reboot
Yolande Strengers and
Jenny Kennedy
MIT Press, 2020. 320 pp.Published by AAAS