![]() ![]() ![]() She discusses Eliza Doolittle, for example, as well as several early genre stories about mechanical women. But not just mechanical ones, or indeed magical ones from mythology. Inspired by the sight of a mannequin’s head in a basket of tat at a flea market, Wosk began researching female automatons, both historical and fictional. I nominated this for a BSFA Award in 2016 based on a read of the first few chapters… but I never got around to finishing the book off. Lavishly illustrated with film stills, artwork, and vintage advertisements, this book offers a fresh look at familiar myths about gender, technology, and artistic creation. 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.Īnything 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. ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. The fantasy of a male creator constructing his perfect woman dates back to the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Runner-up for the 2015 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize ![]()
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