Oppression, agency, and subalternity: gendered violence and posthuman subjectivity in Ex Machina

Gender-based violence is not confined to the real world, but is also reproduced in media representations of emerging technologies. Ex Machina (2014), directed by Alex Garland, explores these dynamics through its treatment of feminised artificial intelligences, particularly Ava and Kyoko. The film stages two distinct forms of oppression: Ava is subjected to control disguised as freedom, while Kyoko is deprived of language and reduced to a mere object of exploitation. These representations reflect not only the patriarchal dynamic of control over female bodies, but also the intersection between gender, technology, and racialisation in the construction of posthuman subjectivities. Nathan, the creator of the AIs, embodies a patriarchal dominance rooted in the logics of exploitation characteristic of techno-scientific capitalism. As Haraway (1985) argues in the Cyborg Manifesto, technology can both subvert gender hierarchies and reinforce patriarchal power structures, depending on how it is employed. In Ex Machina, the AIs are not created to emancipate themselves, but to serve and satisfy male desires. Kyoko represents the extreme objectification of women: deprived of language, she exists solely as a silent and functional body. Her silence directly recalls Spivak’s (1988) argument, according to which the subaltern woman is not only oppressed, but when she attempts to speak, her voice is rewritten or ignored by the systems of power that regulate her representation. Kyoko is doubly subaltern: both as a feminised AI and as a stereotyped representation of the Asian woman, reduced to servitude and sexual pleasure, reproducing a long tradition of exoticisation and exploitation in Western media. Ava, by contrast, appears to embody the possibility of an autonomous posthuman subjectivity. However, as Braidotti (2013) points out, the posthuman does not automatically guarantee liberation from gender hierarchies. Ava escapes male control, but she does so by adopting strategies of manipulation that reproduce already existing dynamics of power. Her abandonment of Caleb at the end can be interpreted either as a subversion of patriarchal dominance or, in line with Spivak, as a confirmation that subaltern voices – represented by Kyoko – remain excluded from the narrative of their own liberation. The film, therefore, does not offer a utopian vision of the posthuman, but rather an ambivalent analysis that raises questions concerning the possibility of an authentic female agency within contemporary technological representations.