Technologies & Bodies: Humans performing with technologies and Artificial Intelligences performing Drag
This challenges the notion that we have to be embodied to be human, it gives a sense of what we would maybe be in the future as a people, a voice giving information, completely disembodied, all part of a cloud. Maybe it is the future of the pos-thuman? Some consider it as the last step. It could be seen as a performance moving trans-humanism too because making the human disembodied would be getting rid of its limits (sickness, old age) and making it connected to a cloud would mean that we would have access to all the knowledge that is stored in it, no need to memorize or to learn, only to think and to develop thought.She holds an electronic light in her mouth that flickers behind her teeth as she lip-synchs. When the strobe lighting intermittently stops, her light-engorged mouth becomes the only part of her body that is clearly visible, the rest of her flesh fading into relative obscurity. The staging effect of this light in the mouth amplifies the fact that the voice reverberating throughout the performance space does not emanate from within boychild’s body. She channels a disembodied voice, re-embodying it. In the breaks between song lyrics, this effect of channelling is added to performatively, as boychild’s mouth gapes open and she stares, transfixed.
Body is an important part of drag. Trying to visualize how drag would be without it through boychild's disembodied lypsinc performance is interesting. The fact that it is a gendered performance on top of an embodied one really serves post-humanism according to me because the notion of gender as embodied is very humanist and still true for a lot of people in nowadays society, people that relate gender to sex. This is post-humanism stance on how embodied genders can work :
This is a multiplicity that I would like to see in a disembodied human. I think that Artificial Intelligences challenge this notion of the human in a body, and try to put an intelligence similar to the human being's in a cloud that can be reached through our phones or our computers in the example of Siri. The only problem is that most of the time those Artificial Intelligences are gendered according to the gender binaries that erected hierarchies in our society and don't often try to make the disembodied mind gender fluid or gender neutral which can make us think that even if we're disembodied maybe gender will still be an important binary, and that it is something that can be unpacked also within embodied humans.Though she thinks of her gender as fluid, boychild considers her onstage persona to be female. This ambiguous layering of gender identifications serves to complicate readings of the ‘female’ body coded in her performances. boychild embodies trans in the sense that she gives concrete bodily form to the experience of being trans; her transness is part of her everyday life. Meanwhile she inhabits ‘femaleness’ (or at least, in naming herself female, it seems she intends to) in that her ‘femaleness’ is a persona that she assumes onstage [...] Rather than a character, boychild’s ‘female’ persona may well be another facet of herself, an amorphous aspect of her subjectivity that is not divorced from the ‘continually oscillating’
trans-identified remainder. These identifications are perhaps interwoven aspects of one and the same individual, the aforementioned ‘point[s] on the spectrum’ that never converge and never settle in one place.
As a French native speaker I understand how hard it is to make inanimate things not gendered, because we ascribe gender to everything, it is in our language. While I try to distance myself of that the most possible, I can see that even in a language that doesn't assign gender to objects we still have a strong tendency to assume the gender of some non-human others. Especially when we create this object and our goal is to make it the more human-like possible. Choosing to give it gender-based traits usually depending on it's role and place, is something that we see a lot in Artificial Intelligences and Robots. Indeed we usually create Robots and Artificial Intelligences in our image so we have a tendency to ascribe gender to them even if they are not.
Programmed to copy the human and to interact the AIs are in a way performing drag because they are trying to become the subject: "The truly functioning AI system, in other words, is always in drag. For what is the point of impersonating a per- son if one is not going to impersonate a gendered person?" (10-11). There performance resembles that of the objects performing Human Drag, but AIs go further being assigned or assigning themselves a gendered anthropomorphic voice is part of their performance: "Rather than hold artificial intelligence to the actual standards of person-hood as it is conceived and embodied in the humanist conception of the subject—to corporeality, to agency, to subjectivity, to gender—Turing’s innovation was to hold AI only to the performance of such personhood, on the theory that the performance of personhood is all that is ever really available to us anyway: we know others not through their being but through their enactment of being" (9-10). In this text Kornhaber elaborates an analysis of Her, in which the AI Samantha and Theodore, the human it works for, fall in love. However love is something mostly performed by Samantha and "her very attempt to approximate that same prescriptive heteronormativity. Inevitably, the posthuman reveals the queerness that always lies inside the normative: performing an ideal always serves to highlight the fragility of its foundations." (14) By copying a human heterosexual relationship in fact criticizes it because by performing what would be expected of her in human society if she was a woman shows how much the system's roots are fragile, making it an unwanted form of drag maybe because she really wanted to become human?
