Affective Labor and Technologies of Gender in Wei Yahua’s “Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus”

Abstract

Robotics explores the boundary between the human body and its objective use value, recasting the fields of of gender and affect as commodities—a question that takes on specific cultural values in post-Mao China. This privileging of technology and its engagement with gendered labor are examined in Wei Yahua’s short story, “Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus,” which uses the feminine performativity of a robot wife to engage with the intertwined role of affective labor and the legal status of objects. Such a performance decenters the human subject while simultaneously subjugating the laboring technological materials, such that Lili—the robot wife in question—is only capable of acquiring legal subjecthood through her appeal to a law that binds human actors.

The historical context in which this story was written is as important an artifact as the language it uses and the subject matter it treats, raising the specter of a possible ethics of consciousness unconnected to humanistic social mores at a time when technology was being touted as the way towards a collective future emancipated from labor as a whole. In 1980s China, labor and technology were both equally privileged as sites of socialist revolution, with a restructuring of the imaginaries of both free and controlled labor. By raising the question of differential relationships in a supposedly egalitarian society through characters that explore their various relationships to artificial life, “Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus” offers a critical look into what kinds of labor (and laboring bodies) are replaceable and which are privileged—and, in doing so, directly critiques the legal framework regarding women in the country, as well as how a subject is defined in the first place.