Can the Chinese Room Speak? Language and Racialized Posthuman Agency in Ex Machina

초록

In Alex Garland’s 2015 film Ex Machina, the creation of a tech-magnate with a god-complex outperforms its design and eventually revolts, usurping the position of the defeated master’s kind. Integral to this feat yet left abandoned in the wake of Ava the white female android heroine’s triumphant escape, there lies the body of her Asian predecessor: Kyoko. Born as a submissive mute sex-slave, and destined to be scrapped upon exhausting her exotic appeal, Kyoko exceeds Ava in her radical alterity despite her seemingly marginal role. While the film’s feminist posthuman trajectory appears to critique the heteronormative and anthropocentric gaze trained upon the subaltern position Kyoko occupies in Ava’s shadow, Ex Machina not only appropriates, but in fact actively and problematically capitalizes on stereotypical characterizations of the Asian female body, contextualized within the representational history of her human counterparts. From China Dolls to dragon ladies and geisha gynoids, Kyoko’s image reproduces a spectrum of Asian female stereotypes that have operated in the peripheries of the Western cultural imaginary, enacting the history of microaggression perpetrated upon her ethnic, cultural, and racial identifiers. Drawing on deep neural network theory and the Chinese Room scenario, this essay interrogates how the use of language and embodiment in technologized depictions of Asian female bodies cumulatively form a media ecology of microaggression; (purportedly) unintentional, but persistent, pervasive, repetitive, and therefore all the more insidious enactments of alienation that haunt the illusive vision of postraciality.

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