Gendering the Robot: Stanislaw Lem's "The Mask"

Parker, Jo Alyson. "Gendering the Robot: Stanislaw Lem's 'The Mask.'" SFS #57, 19.2 (July 1992): 178-91.

Mostly on "a robot who in the first half of the story ["Mask"] wears the form of a beautiful human female and in the second metamorphoses into its essential metallic form—significantly, a form that resembles a praying mantis . . ." (179). Even though he attempts "to gender the robot, Lem, like [J.] Lacan and [M.] Foucault, essentially elides the question of an intrinsically female subject," but still presents a politically useful story (Abstract 191).

RDE, Title, 11Aug19