In August 2025, the New York Post published an article titled “‘Pregnancy robots’ could give birth to human children in revolutionary breakthrough”. Many other international publications followed their enthusiastic lead proclaiming a new era of birthing. What appears to be a post-human science fiction scenario – and robot-birthing proved to be nothing but fiction – is in fact only the newest manifestation of a longstanding tradition of fantasizing about humanoid robots or cyborgs.

Looking at the literary roots of artificial humans, one finds a wide range of examples beginning with the myth of Talos, continuing with tales inspired by Jaquet-Droz’ mechanical dolls of the 18th century, up till science fiction narratives starring humanoids from Rick Deckard in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) to 3CPO in Star Wars (1977–present). The desire to own custom made, docile, mechanical people and their bodies appears to be almost human in itself. This phenomenon highlights the obvious link between robotics in science fiction and the discourse on slavery.

Iconic texts like E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816), Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (1880), Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972) or more recent novels like Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), to only name a few, are especially interested in female subservience. The ideal ‘partners’ are silent puppets designed to do men’s bidding and to appear pretty. Many robotic companions are given a distinctly female form to serve not only in a domestic capacity but in a sexual role as well. This practice oscillates between mere aesthetic decisions, fetishizing the female body through (sexual) objectification and the exploitation of as female perceived beings, as well as the overcoming of such attributions through various forms of resistance. Narratives of resistance can be found in texts concerning the emancipation of enslaved people as well as in texts about androids seeking freedom. In both cases, those owned protest and rebel against their owners in a multitude of ways that bear a striking resemblance to each other.

We seek conceptual, theoretical, and interdisciplinary approaches that explore the connection between slavery, fetishization, and robotics from a comparative perspective. The seminar is intended to encourage proposals that address, for example, the following topics:

• The connection between science fiction novels and the discourse on slavery (e.g. in the context of Afrofuturism).
• The connection between creating and owning artificial life.
• Representations of power structures, mechanisms of oppression and opposition.
• Narratives of enslavement and fetishization of the female body.