Digital Stimulation: The Promise and Problems of Sex and Intimacy Between Humans and Machines

Digital Stimulation explores the subject of intimacy, including romantic and sexual intimacy, between human and nonhuman entities, particularly technological entities. As relationships between humans and machines become increasingly prevalent, it is important to address the potential for such relationships to reflect, to reinforce, or to reinvent existing hierarchies. The distinction between man and machine, like the distinction between man and beast, between man and brute, between man and nature, between man and woman, and so on, is an expression of the anthropocentrism and androcentrism permeating western ideas of self and other.

Concerns about the representation (or misrepresentation) and treatment (or mistreatment) of machines are of consequence for other human and nonhuman others as well, and this book details many of the ways in which depictions of machines, especially robots, mirror ideas and attitudes about various human and nonhuman others. This book also addresses the ongoing development of machines designed explicitly for intimate engagement with humans, such as sex robots. As they become more and more lifelike, it becomes progressively

Mimi Marinucci is Professor of Philosophy and of Women and Gender Studies at Eastern Washington University. She is the author of Feminism is Queer: The Intimate Connection Between Queer and Feminist Theory (Zed, 2010), the editor of Jane Austen and Philosophy (2016) and the author of numerous articles and book chapters that address the intersecting issues of gender, philosophy, and popular culture.