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Work It, Robot! Exploring Forced Choices of Femininity in I’m Your Man [Ich bin dein Mensch] (Maria Schrader, Germany, 2021)

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Working Women on Screen

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender ((PSRG))

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Abstract

This chapter explores German science fiction film I’m Your Man [Ich bin dein Mensch] (Maria, Schrader, Germany, 2021). The chapter scrutinises the “working” woman in the neoliberal labour market, asking for a re-definition of man/womankind in opposition to human-like machines within society and a “capitalist reading of love”. Ich bin dein Mensch centres on 40-something-year-old Alma, a successful researcher, who has devoted her life to her work. Tom (a humanoid robot made to make her happy) comes on the scene as part of an experiment, a kind of Turing test for robotic partners. Alma is intellectual, successful, independent and single because of it. The only man available and willing to date her, is Tom, the robot; thus, raising questions on the invisibility of women and the seemingly exclusionary juxtapositions for women between their private and professional lives and personas. Alma encapsulates these juxtapositions, as she fights her emotions throughout the film, highlighting the dilemma of the modern woman forced to choose between professional and private success. Reading this film through a lens of gender and feminist film theory, phenomenology and posthumanist theory, raises questions with regards to relationships, desire and love as well objectification and oppression.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

  2. 2.

    Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Pan Books, 1988).

  3. 3.

    See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Translated by Burke, C. and Gill, G.C. (London: Athlone Press, 1993); Luce Irigaray, “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,” in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi, and Simon Critchley (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1991); Judith Rifeser, “Feminine desire in Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow (2009) and Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (2009) in Dialogue with Irigaray’s Philosophy of the Caress,” Comparative Cinema VII, no. 15 (2020): 25–40.

  4. 4.

    Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference; Caroline Bainbrige, A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).

  5. 5.

    Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990).

  6. 6.

    See for example Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism: The Project that Inspired a Worldwide Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2021).

  7. 7.

    Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, no. 8 (1989): 138–67.

  8. 8.

    See for example Joakim Lindgren, “Spaces of Social Inclusion and Exclusion—A Spatial Approach to Education Restructuring,” Education Inquiry 1, no. 2 (2010): 75–95; Maria Rodó-de-Zárate and Mireia Baylina, “Intersectionality in feminist geographies,” Gender, Place & Culture 25, no. 4 (2018): 547–53.

  9. 9.

    Geoffrey Macnab, ““It’s girl meets robot boy”: Maria Schrader talks Berlin contender ‘I’m Your Man.’” ScreenDaily, March 1, 2021.

  10. 10.

    Ibid.

  11. 11.

    Margo DeMello, Body Studies: An Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 5.

  12. 12.

    Alison Phipps, The Politics of the Body. Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 138.

  13. 13.

    See for example the #ichbinHannah campaign.

  14. 14.

    Eva Illouz, The Rise of Homo Sentimentalis: Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

  15. 15.

    Julian Hanich, “Ich bin dein Mensch,” Filmbulletin, July 1, 2021.

  16. 16.

    Hester Baer, “Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism,” Feminist Media Studies16, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 17–34.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 30.

  18. 18.

    Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 25.

  19. 19.

    Jaqueline S. Smith, Victoria L. Brescoll, and Erin L. Thomas, “Constrained by Emotion: Women, Leadership, and Expressing Emotion in the Workplace,” in Handbook on Well-Being of Working Women. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life, edited by Mary Connerley and Jiyun Wu (Springer, Dordrecht, 2016), 209–24.

  20. 20.

    Julie Wosk, My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids and Other Artificial Eves (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 137.

  21. 21.

    Jennifer Henke, “’Ava’s body is a good one’: (Dis)Embodiment in Ex Machina,” American, British and Canadian Studies 29, no. 1 (2017): 135.

  22. 22.

    Anna Smith, “Berlin Review: Anna Smith On ‘I’m Your Man’—Int’l Critics Line,” Deadline, March 1 2021.

  23. 23.

    Macnab, “‘It’s Girl Meets Robot Boy’”.

  24. 24.

    Laura Bates, “The Trouble with Sex Robots,” New York Times, July 17, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/opinion/sex-robots-consent.html.

  25. 25.

    Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1990 [1985]), 195‒96.

  26. 26.

    Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991 [1987‒1989]), 180.

  27. 27.

    Patricia MacCormack, “Perversion: Transgressive Sexuality and Becoming-Monster,” Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture 3, no. 2 (2007).

  28. 28.

    Margrit Shildrick, “Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body,” Body and Society 2, no. 1 (1996): 2.

  29. 29.

    Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

  30. 30.

    Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickle Paradigm Press, 2003).

  31. 31.

    Scott Roxborough, “Maria Schrader on Turning Dan Stevens into a German-Speaking Love Robot in I’m Your Man,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 4, 2021.

  32. 32.

    Jeanette King, Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible Woman (Houndmills: Springer, 2012).

  33. 33.

    Ibid.

  34. 34.

    Angela Taylor, “Theorizing Women’s Singleness: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Popular Culture,” in Single Women in Popular Culture (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).

  35. 35.

    Volker Woltersdorff, “Paradoxes of Precarious Sexualities,” Cultural Studies 25, no. 2 (2011): 173.

  36. 36.

    Rita Fontinha, Simon Easton, and Darren Van Laar, “Overtime and Quality of Working Life in Academics and Nonacademics: The Role of Perceived Work-life Balance,” International Journal of Stress Management 26, no. 2 (2019): 173.

  37. 37.

    Edward Shorter, “Female Emancipation, Birth Control, and Fertility in European History,” The American Historical Review 78, no. 3 (1973): 605–40.

  38. 38.

    Renata Salecl, The Tyranny of Choice (London: Profile Books, 2011).

  39. 39.

    Brian R. Jacobson, “Ex-Machina in the Garden,” Film Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2016): 23–34.

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    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Independent Researcher, London, UK

    Judith Rifeser

  2. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Irina Herrschner

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  1. Judith Rifeser
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  2. Irina Herrschner
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Correspondence to Judith Rifeser .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of English and Media, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK

    Ellie Tomsett

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Nathalie Weidhase

  3. College of English and Media, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK

    Poppy Wilde

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Rifeser, J., Herrschner, I. (2024). Work It, Robot! Exploring Forced Choices of Femininity in I’m Your Man [Ich bin dein Mensch] (Maria Schrader, Germany, 2021). In: Tomsett, E., Weidhase, N., Wilde, P. (eds) Working Women on Screen. Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49576-2_14

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