This paper examines how mainstream Western screen science fiction from the 2010s uses Asian-coded female artificial bodies to imagine AI and cyborg futures. Through comparative textual and visual analysis of Major in Ghost in the Shell (2017), Kyoko in Ex Machina (2014), and Mia in Humans (2015-2018), it asks how racialised and gendered bodies are made to signify technological progress, labour, and personhood. Existing scholarship on cyborg feminism and techno-Orientalism shows that human-machine figures can disrupt binaries while also reproducing racial and gendered hierarchies. Building on this work, the paper argues that these characters are figures of conditional futurity: they are granted signs of consciousness, resistance, and agency, but their agency remains attached to service, sexualisation, weaponisation, whitewashing, or sacrifice. Major’s recovery of Japanese identity is mediated through a white star body; Kyoko’s rebellion enables Ava’s escape while her own body is destroyed and repurposed; Mia’s political agency culminates in martyrdom rather than leadership. These narratives therefore do not simply exclude Asian-coded women from technological futures. More ambivalently, they make them essential to those futures while restricting their capacity to inherit them. The paper contributes to media, film, and STS debates by showing how AI imaginaries distribute humanity unevenly, allowing some artificial subjects to become future-bearing while others remain the labouring or disposable infrastructure of futurity.

Authors:
Stella Liu, University College London, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Stella Xingchen Liu is currently a PhD applicant and an independent STS researcher, works on human-robot interaction, digital sociology, and media/cultural analysis; her current project examines Asian-coded female cyborgs in screen science fiction.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stellaxl/

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