Gender-coding controllable workers
Airus Media’s promotional video portrays a smiling white woman AVA saying, “I look pretty good, don’t I?” then later coyly claiming, “I am so versatile- I can be used for just about everything.” This video oozes with sexual innuendo, including the AVA winking and claiming that purchasers can “dress” the virtual assistant in any way that they like. The sexual undertones here aren’t accidental, indeed they are central to configuring the ideal worker whose labor and value as a worker is framed through racialized gender stereotyping and sexual objectification. Gendered identity markers such as submissiveness, controllability, and “complete customization” over the interface’s style and appearance are repeatedly advertised as desirable features for AVA. When applied specifically to the Latina AVA kiosks situated in borderlands regions, this fantasy recalls colonial formations of white, male sexual dominance over Mexican and indigenous bodies.
United States media, popular culture, and historical discourse have traditionally represented Latinas as exotic, hypersexual and over-reproductive. These stereotypes are rooted in the binary “virgin/whore” gender roles imposed by Spanish colonization on Mexican women.43 This binary can be seen in other related colonial constructions of sexuality and gender that positioned Latinas as either the over-sexualized “Malinche/traitor/whore,” or the Guadalupe/Virgin/submissive woman.44 These stereotypes functioned as modes of control over women, organizing Latina identity in ways that served patriarchs and colonizers, alike. These stereotypes persist in modern U.S. media representations of Latinas, whose bodies occupy the “center stage in the often vitriolic public debate over the causes and meanings of demographic change.” 45 The preoccupation with controlling Latinas’ bodies, sexuality, and reproduction operates as a form of biopolitics that are embedded in xenophobic immigration policy and the maintenance of a white-supremacist nation-state. Chávez observes that the U.S. societies’ discourse around Latinas’ bodies, as an axis of cultural fear around Latinx reproduction, have been ongoing for over forty years around the time Latinas began advocating for their labor rights through activism and union forming. The labor environment reflects the greater political struggles of the nation-state and ideologies about race, gender, sexuality are activated to frame both work and Latinas as workers.
The focus on having complete control over the Latina AVAs interface/body as a feature of the “ideal” information service worker is reminiscent of the maquiladora practices for monitoring real Latina’s bodies, appearance, and sexual activities. Young Latina workers were explicitly seen as desirable maquila employees because of their location within intersecting patriarchal and colonial cultural systems. Part of this desirability is linked to pernicious stereotypes that Latinas are innately suited for repetitive and tedious work, a narrative that pervades the history of women in computing and technology industries.46 This was true for women working in assembly lines along the U.S. / Mexico border who were described by plant managers as having “fine and delicate fingers” a justification for recruiting young women into repetitive and tedious technological work at the factory.47 Racist narratives work in tandem with gender stereotyping to cast women of color and indigenous women, particularly, as highly productive and easily controllable workers.48 Cowie cites a 1971 maquiladora guidebook that clearly states these values outright as a rubric for hiring practices aimed at recruiting young, Latina women:
women are more easily disciplined and directed, and can develop a spirit of loyalty towards their colleagues and the companies analogous to that which they show towards their families… [They] are susceptible to flattery and praise… they show respect and obedience to persons in authority, especially men. [Equally important, they] less demanding of convenience than their counterparts in the United States.49
The practice of maquilas holding annual beauty contests recalls another form of gendered social control.50 Peña’s interviews with women maquila workers reference these events, recalling similar themes of the links between sexual objectification and the construction of the idea worker:
But the whole thing about the pageants that troubles me the most is that the men, who usually do the judging, do think of us as bodies, sex objects. And the audience is awful, jeering and cheering like crazy. Even worse than all this is that the plant managers think they own the workers, our beauty is theirs for the claiming. They take credit and then expect you to be the ideal, pretty worker. But beauty is not much help back inside the factory, unless you are willing to accept the sexual advances to protect your own job security.51
Controllability, ownership, and entitlement to Latinas’ bodies is interwoven through the very nature of work in the maquilas. Other forms of gendered control documented in maquilas include compulsory birth control mandates, interviews about sexual history, and pregnancy tests for maquila workers.52 These programs all focus on Latinas’ bodies as sites of control, enforcing sexual agendas at the behest of the factory. Through these practices the “good worker” is defined as the “good Latina” who is attractive and submissive, and remains firmly embedded in the patriarchal relations that continue to shape the corporate environment.
Taken together, these practices communicate that Latina workers are valued for their sexual attractiveness and availability, insofar as they uphold the dominant gender power relations that shape factory/company structures. Compulsory fulfillment of gender expectations asserts itself as a main criteria for Latina information service work across information labor sectors, not just in the maquila setting.53 The design of the Latina AVA as an ideal worker draws on these histories through enacting coded gender and sexual cultural scripts of always smiling, passively waiting to be approached before “speaking to” customers, and remaining attractive and ready to serve. Airus Media’s advertising that emphasizes the complete control and customization a purchaser can have with these virtual employees reads as an updated version of the maquila hiring guidebook. The Latina AVA retains the gender and sexual scripts that are integral for framing her as an ideal worker, without the hassle of having to manage and control her actual body and reproduction in accordance with keeping her worker status active. In the modern U.S. context this has the additional benefit of tamping the white cultural fear of demographic changes associated with the stereotypes of hypersexuality and reproduction. As Villa-Nicholas and Sweeney previously noted about Emma, the Latina virtual assistant for USCIS, the design of the Latina virtual worker “renders the body passive enough to separate Latinas from the national stereotypes and productively engages the Latina body to perform another action,” in this case continued labor extraction.54
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Designing Virtual Assistants as Virtual Workers
- Latinas as labor problem and solution
- Gender-coding controllable workers
- Designing the ‘right kind’ of Latina
- Consumable Latinidad