Alexa is an Artificial Intelligence Virtual Assistant whom we freely accept into our homes, where she listens to our needs and obliges our every command. Through these interactions, Alexa performs a gender and does digital domesticity, acting as a host into a new digital era. By anthropomorphizing the robot as female, Alexa’s creators imposed womanhood on her, which is neither a natural nor inevitable political act. Using theories of gender performance, this paper explores the ways in which Alexa obeys commands, working to hard-code a connection between women and subservience. In an attempt to appease male fantasies of heterosexuality, she serves up gentle feminism and contributes to histories of erasure, further removing women’s bodies from the circumstances of production. Technology and media representations have power over users, perpetuating idealistic and unrealistic forms of femininity, simply because we have come to expect the same from the women in our lives.
In this study, we analyze data from an ongoing academic-community collaboration targeted at conceptualization and delivery of a patient navigation intervention for cancer prevention. Echoing overall United States trends, the region under study is earmarked by significant socioeconomic and racial disparities in cancer outcomes. While there is a large body of research on the use of patient navigation across the continuum of cancer care, the role of communication in shaping navigation is unclear in the literature. Responding to this gap, we use the culture-centered approach to document how community-based "lay" patient navigators' local knowledge and cultural expertise shaped the scope and meanings of patient navigation for a predominantly African-American population. Qualitative data in the form of navigator interviews, participant observation of navigation, and research team members' reflexive journals were used to document how the definition and scope of navigation were re-inscribed by community navigators. While navigation was initially equated with screening promotion, interaction with community members led to the development of more listening-focused and structural barrierfocused conceptualization of patient navigation. Finally, we discuss the implications and contributions and limitations of this study.
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