AI In Heels: Exploring Gendered Representations In Gen-AI
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v39i1.158055Keywords:
AI, Artificial Intelligence, Interview, Gender, Performativity, Gendered TechnologiesAbstract
This paper examines how generative AI systems (re)produce and perform gender through language, tone, and affect. The paper utilizes a qualitative research design that adapts the interview method to AI as a nonhuman subject. In particular how AI-generated responses articulate “feminine” and “masculine” styles of communication rooted in culturally embedded norms rather than neutral reasoning. The findings show that AI does not simply describe gender - it does gender. Through its patterned use of relational language, emotional validation, or categorical reasoning, generative AI enacts a form of algorithmic performativity that mirrors and magnifies dominant gender scripts. To conceptualize this dynamic, the paper introduces the Citational Logic of Algorithmic Mimicry (CLAM). CLAM describes how AI models reiterate and reinforce historically situated discourses through statistical learning. It further highlights how cultural meaning circulates through data, and how AI participates in the ongoing performance of social hierarchies under the guise of neutrality. The article contributes to feminist technoscience and critical AI by shifting the focus from what AI knows, to how it enacts knowing. It treats AI as a performative, culturally situated practice that reshapes the politics of gender and knowledge in the digital age.
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