Prof. Vivian Sobchack, University of California Los Angeles, School of Theater, Film and Television, USA

"Wind-Up Toys: Roboticizing Gender and Race in Cinema and the Toy Store" In both the cinema and the toy store, robots literally embody and reflect dominant (and patriarchal) culture's fantasies of technological mastery and intentional agency. Focusing on a selection of science fiction films and robotic toys, my presentation will explore the ideology of this "robotic imagination"--particularly as it has found its concrete and material embodiment in figures deemed to be "less human than human"--the animal, the child, the female, and the racialized Other. Vivian Sobchack is Associate Dean and Professor of Film and Television Studies at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Her work focuses on film theory and its intersections with philosophy, perceptual studies, and historiography. Her books include Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (Ungar, 1987), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, 1993), an edited anthology, The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event (Routledge, 1996), and a collection of her own essays, forthcoming from University of California Press, Carnal Thoughts: Bodies, Texts, Scenes and Screens.

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