Kubes, Tanja | Germany

Kubes, Tanja | Germany

Dr. Tanja Kubes is a post-doc researcher in the department of Feminst STS/Gender in STEM and Planning at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. She graduated in anthropology, sociology, and psychology at LMU Munich and received a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Vechta, Germany, for a study on car show hostesses (Fieldwork on High Heels, Bielefeld: Transcript 2018). Since 2013, she is lecturer for anthropology, sociology, and gender studies at the LMU Munich, University of Vechta, and TU Munich, pursuing an interdisciplinary teaching agenda with gender studies as a common denominator. From 2013 to 2016, she held a scholarship for Young Researchers in Gender in Lower Saxony. From 2016 to 2019, she worked as a research fellow at the Technical University of Munich in Gender Studies in Science and Engineering, where she was conducting several studies with a focus on STEM Gender Studies. Currently, she is doing a post doc research on “Living and Loving with Robots: Neo Materialist Perspectives on Sex Robots” at the Technical University of Berlin in the field of Feminist STS /Gender and STEM in Planning (funded by DiGiTal). Her research interests include feminist STS, new materialism, anthropology beyond the human, autoethnography, and gender studies.

 

Project at IAS-STS: Sexual Relationships between Humans and Matter in the Digital Age: Thinking about a sex-positive Future beyond Dichotomies

In a not too distant future, human-robot-relationships are very likely to have similar emotional significance for us as relationships between humans. Already today, many of us work with robots, some of us live with them, and it is rather a question of when, not if, people will start to develop genuine romantic feelings towards them. Already at this point in history, passionate relationships between humans and robots are anything but unimaginable, and recent progress in the field of sex robotics has made them only more probable. This development radically challenges traditional views about man’s (and woman’s) place in the world.

My research combines approaches from science and technology studies with debates on critical posthumanism and findings from queer and gender studies, multispecies anthropology and anthropology beyond the human, in order to explore the idea that human robot interaction does in fact pave the way for hitherto unimagined (and unimaginable) forms of interconnectedness between nature and techno-species as autonomous actors and thus can significantly contribute to the deconstruction of sexual binaries and heteronormative normalizations.

Contact: tanja [punkt] kubes at posteo [punkt] de

 

Selected Publications

Kubes, Tanja. 2020. Queere Sexroboter - Eine neue Form des Begehrens? In: Bendel, Oliver (Hrsg.). Maschinenliebe: Liebespuppen und Sexroboter aus technischer, psychologischer und philosophischer Sicht. Springer Gabler, Wiesbaden.

Kubes, Tanja. 2019. New Materialist Perspectives on Sex Robots. A Feminist Dystopia/Utopia? Social Sciences, 8. 224. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/8/224

Kubes, Tanja. 2019. Bypassing the Uncanny Valley: Postgender Sex Robots and Robot Sex beyond Mimicry. In: Techno:Phil - Aktuelle Herausforderungen der Technikphilosophie. Loh, Janina; Coecklebergh, Marc (Hrsg.). J.B. Metzler Verlag. S.59-73. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04967-4_4  

Kubes, Tanja. 2019. Sexroboter - Queeres Potential oder materialisierte Objektifizierung? In: Cyborgs revisited: Zur Verbindung von Geschlecht, Mensch und Maschinen. Feministische Studien Heft 2/2019. S. 351-362. https://doi.org/10.1515/fs-2019-0033  

Kubes, Tanja. 2018. Fieldwork on High Heels – Eine ethnographische Studie über Hostessen auf Automobilmessen. Bielefeld: Transcript. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4349-7/fieldwork-on-high-heels/