My Fair Ladies

[Dave Monroe]

My Fair Ladies
Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves
Julie Wosk (Author)
240 pages, 60 black and white and 12 color photographs

[...]

The fantasy of a male creator constructing his perfect woman dates
back to the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Yet as technology has
advanced over the past century, the figure of the lifelike manmade
woman has become nearly ubiquitous, popping up in everything from
Bride of Frankenstein to Weird Science to The Stepford Wives. Now
Julie Wosk takes us on a fascinating tour through this bevy of
artificial women, revealing the array of cultural fantasies and fears
they embody.

My Fair Ladies considers how female automatons have been represented
as objects of desire in fiction and how “living dolls” have been
manufactured as real-world fetish objects. But it also examines the
many works in which the “perfect” woman turns out to be artificial—a
robot or doll—and thus becomes a source of uncanny horror. Finally,
Wosk introduces us to a variety of female artists, writers, and
filmmakers—from Cindy Sherman to Shelley Jackson to Zoe Kazan—who have
cleverly crafted their own images of simulated women.

Anything but dry, My Fair Ladies draws upon Wosk’s own experiences as
a young female Playboy copywriter and as a child of the “feminine
mystique” era to show how images of the artificial woman have loomed
large over real women’s lives. Lavishly illustrated with film stills,
artwork, and vintage advertisements, this book offers a fresh look at
familiar myths about gender, technology, and artistic creation.

[...]

http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/My-Fair-Ladies,5458.aspx
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