The concept of the robot or humanoid machine has always been closely bound up with notions of sex, gender and reproduction. In Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., whose 1923 English production first introduced the term ‘robot’ to the English language, the humanoid machines are presented as a ‘sexless throng’ (Čapek 1961: 78). Outwardly gendered along binary lines in order to cater to consumer demand (for ‘female’ domestic servants, notably), they are nevertheless devoid of biological sex and lack sexual desire; indeed, their inability to procreate, to reproduce themselves, is what differentiates them from and makes them dependent on humans. Čapek’s play brings out a number of threats posed by this imagined technology: we see on stage the disastrous consequences that ensue when technology built to serve us escapes our control, when the apparently servile robots begin to think for themselves and overcome their human masters. And yet it is the robots’ disruption of categories of sex and gender that is most central to the play’s apocalyptic scenario, as the very existence of the ‘sexless throng’ mysteriously engenders an epidemic of infertility amongst humans, a phenomenon presented in the play as a kind of ‘punishment’ for humans’ hubristic meddling in nature (41).

Although R.U.R was not created under the aegis of any modernist movement or sensibility, I begin with it here principally because it raises a number of intersecting concerns that can be traced through a broader late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century technological imaginary. In its suggestion that the destructive power of machine technology (which finds its ultimate expression in the imagined figure of the robot) lies in its ability to destabilise or undo categories of sex and gender, Čapek’s play evokes the spectre of a ‘civilization without sexes’ – a notion which, as Mary Louise Roberts (1994: 4) has shown, haunted the French cultural imagination during the First World War and its aftermath. Fears about a degenerate technologised society, in which the status quo of sexual relations would be upended, may have been particularly prevalent in France in this period. This was due to a number of factors, including, first, a crisis of masculinity related to the technologies of war, which not only significantly dented the male population but subjected soldiers to psychological disorders disarmingly close in appearance to the ‘female’ disease of hysteria (Showalter 1987: 167–74).