Conferences

Keynotes

27th June 2016

Current Research in Speculative Fiction (2016) Liverpool University.

I was invited to give the keynote paper at the recent Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference at Liverpool University.  Her paper ‘She can’t love you, she’s just a machine’:  Metal-fevered boys and their passion for New Eves’ explored Alex Garland’s 2015 film, Ex Machina  and its relationship to the history of metal women (gynoids) in male-authored science fiction texts.  The paper ranged across such historical textual precedents  as Auguste Villiers de Isle Adam’s  Tomorrow’s Eve (1886), ‘The Benumbed Woman’ (1899),  Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Lester del Ray’s  ‘Helen O’Loy’ (1938) and  Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972). It speculated on whether the film offers new ways of reading the figure of the gynoid/posthuman AI  in terms of women’s agency or whether the film’s gesture towards women’s freedom via a narrative of revenge is an empty utopian trope.