Asking more of Siri and Alexa: feminine persona in service of surveillance capitalism

This paper illuminates how gendered stereotypes can be leveraged to assuage anxieties surrounding artificially intelligent virtual assistants (AI VA). In particular, the analysis shows that these AI objects routinely traffic in normative gender roles of the feminine as caretaker, mother, and wife in order to obfuscate modes of surveillance, and mediate the relationship users and potential users have with late-capitalist market logics in the platform economy. Mobilizing essentialist feminine personas characterized in this paper as digital domesticity, artificially intelligent objects orient users to engage productively with surveillance capitalism as natural. To illustrate this relationship between femininity and surveillance, this paper focuses on two case studies of AI VA. The essay turns to Apple's Sid and Amazon's Alexa as emblematic of AI VA that perform a stereotypically feminine persona that invites users to participate in increasingly intimate forms of data exchange that in turn contribute to surveillance capitalism. The study of AI VA, like Sid and Alexa, demonstrates the significant rhetorical capacities of the feminine persona as they are applied to objects with weak (that is, limited) artificial intelligence.