Labor, Desire, and the Femme Body in Catherine Chen’s Beautiful Machine Woman Language
AI, generally defined as technology able to complete functions once believed to require human skill, is a catch-all term for technology we once thought we could not hand over. The benchmark for what we imagine possible and impossible advances with each technological innovation, from the chess-playing computer to ChatGPT. But what happens when we assume a technological advance that does not exist? In a growing industry to meet consumer demands for more sophisticated content and quality moderation, ghost workers, globally subcontracted low-paid content moderators, and quality raters complete the frequently unrecognized work of offering feedback or key decisions that ensure user safety and maintain the intuitive magic of “smart” software and online algorithms. What does it mean to complete labor that consumers assume is part of the software they purchase?
Catherine Chen’s full-length debut, Beautiful Machine Woman Language, begins with a disclosure that the labor described within the text is their own: “[B]efore I recognized the rhythm of my worth in writing, I worked in data transcription and annotation.” In a collection that explores the illusion of the self-made machine and autonomous AI, Chen’s disclosure sets the parameters of how the reader might interact with the text. The ethics of this disclosure is innately in contrast to the conditions of Chen’s work transcribing data. Because the labor that Chen documents is their own, our recognition of their craft becomes part of their indictment against colonial value systems that emphasize efficiency through invisible labor, labor inseparable from the poet’s.
In constructing the fiction of the cyborg, a chimeric body that is both human and machine, Chen interrogates human elements disguised within our technology, the technician who must sift through data “full of gluttonous fuckery.” In the tradition of Franny Choi’s Soft Science and Donna J. Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Chen’s collection deconstructs the violent nature of this labor, of spending “eight hours a day listening to sexist, racist homophobic speech,” all speech that, directly or indirectly, targets someone like them (queer, femme, and non-white). The speaker’s invocation of the self both as the transcriptionist and the poet becomes an exploration of the lyric “I” and who gets to possess this brand of sentience. Who gets to name themselves?
The passive voice, in turn, reflects a question, a specter, and a measurement of imperialism:
Gardenias inhabit bodies. A body made. Do you accept this reality in your heart?
When the gardenia was named for the
white man from South Carolina who had imported them.
Any notion of native accents is colonial.
While “native accents” in this passage refers to the transcriptionist’s labeling of utterances, the terminology also interrogates questions of belonging. The gardenia, for example, is considered a staple of the American Southeast alongside azaleas, dogwood, and magnolias. And while varieties of azaleas, dogwood, and magnolias are native to the American Southeast, many that we see in gardens and landscapes are imported East Asian varieties. We see the cultivar, a kind of intellectual property, but not the body who imagined it. If “every technology reflects the desires of its creator,” Chen asks after the desires of the other hands at work, laborers obscured by syntax. When Chen introduces “A body made,” they have already pointed towards the invisible hands at work in the body—the gardenias planted (by whom?) and named (by whom?). The question, “Do you accept this reality in your heart?” becomes a new Turing test for me as the reader. Whose hands on the gardenia do I feel most—the unnamed cultivator or the white man who imported them?
When the speaker says:
I imagined a slogan, set ablaze in neon lights
{{
I
WANT
A
BODY
—
MADE
FROM
A
BODY
it’s unclear if they project their own desires or the desires surrounding them as they “lay in bed, soaking it up.” How receptive might one be to desire without an acknowledged corpus? Perhaps wanting defines the body. Throughout the collection’s seven sections, Chen amasses a body of sorts, each section gradually “lighting up” the diode lights at the bottom of each page which may indicate linear progression towards completion. When the reader reaches this “slogan,” six “●” of the eight “◌” indicators suggest a nearly complete entity. It’s very Frankenstein, especially because desire is conceptualized through electric currents, the neon bulb replacing the lightning bolt. Of course I mean the amalgam who, like the gardenia, in the popular imagination takes on the name of someone else. If, as Chen suggests, “[t]his self-stitching lineage is hybrid, a deed to the greedy & peevish children who maintain your burial grounds,” we can beautify our own hybridity. But will we recognize whom we exploit? Already, we’re discussing maintenance, the labor of children, and the ownership of that labor. Chen’s collection rejects the notion of the cyborg as a machine in human form and gives us the colonial reality of a person pushed towards amalgam. Hybridity is not a binary. Like Chen’s grayscale interior art, titled Spirit Article, form and shape emerge out of gradients of layered light.
When Chen presents the cyborg, she presents a femme body confronted with workplace dilemmas familiar to anyone read as feminine. When the speaker proposes, “How do you interview workers who must smile, especially when they don’t want to?” the question is reflexive. We, like the speaker, can be both the worker and the interviewer. Both Turing and the cyborg subject whose labor is informed by:
an emotional orientation that makes them well-suited for professions like managing
radical tarot card reading
psychiatry
swinger parties
press releases
floral arrangements
I’m excited by the generative nature of this list, tasks that predict and interpret, tasks that beg and desire—and still, these are tasks that no matter one’s skill, must be completed with a smile. To receive payment, one must suggest pleasure. They’re the tasks I’d most like to hand over to a machine but can’t.
The cyborg, like their cyborg voice, is a gendered receptacle for desire: “All depends on whether or not speech is directed or undirected at her, whether it is legibly heard.” I’m interested in Chen’s emphasis that hearing is the vessel, the homophonic description (her/heard) replicating the gendered naming scheme of male and female adaptors and other tools. In “Language Beta Test,” Chen rejects being “female,” receiving, being an adaptor. Their speaker declares explicit desires without the input of what they’ve heard:
I desire everything declared lost by the love theorists, the friendship philosophers, and the anarcho-syndical florists.
I desire understanding,
not recognizing the question I heard.
I desire sympathy,
not understanding the question I heard.
One might even say that the speaker’s desires are in opposition to external input. Their desire for understanding, for sympathy, is quantified by the absence of (“not recognizing,” “not understanding”) the questions they heard. What they desire is what is “declared lost” by a list of professions similar to those listed earlier as “well-suited” to the “emotional orientation” of the cyborg: the radical tarot card reader and the psychiatrist and the florist. Because the cyborg at times becomes a proxy for the speaker’s condition, one might assume their desires are the same, but “Language Beta Test” rejects the easy equivalency between who we are and who we are like. When Chen first introduces these professions in the “Cyborg Love Affair” section, they explain that “[i]ntimacy is an inconsistent logic. As if broken by the psychic’s prediction. I continue crying.” In a series of full stops, the lyric “I” separates from intimacy by comparative simile and by the sentences themselves. “[B]roken” by outside interference, Chen’s “inconsistent logic” suggests that intimacy is a personal act, a personal loss, which the speaker responds to as such (“I continue crying”). So when the speaker says, “I desire understanding,” “I desire sympathy,” I do not believe they ask this of someone else but of themselves. This too is reflexive.
The gendering of data processing, while embodied by the feminine voices of Siri and Alexa, isn’t a new invention by Amazon Echo or Silicon Valley. In creating the Dewey Decimal System (which still informs many information management systems currently), Melvil Dewey specifically preferred to train women in the science of information because he believed women less capable of interfering with the system he created. (It’s not surprising that Dewey, founder of the American Library Association, was also disavowed by it because of sexual harassment towards women, racism, and antisemitism.) And yet, the notion of a passive, feminine receptacle for our questions persists. When we talk about information and data, it’s easy to fall into language about purity and disaffection, and yet the act of managing data is inherently bodily—it strains the eyes, the hands. And there’s pleasure too: A senior librarian told me that her trick to understanding the collection was to touch every book in the reference section, to know by touch what information she might possess.
Throughout the collection, Chen juxtaposes the speaker’s undesirable humanity against the ultra-feminine. If femininity is the sound companies seek to mechanize, then Chen’s rebellion is through the image of femininity. The way “blushing,” an emotive urge, appears twice, is a trace of “residue” contained by the process note. Or, as the title “Status: SUCCESS ǀ SubStatus: Notes of a soft noose” suggests, a substatus outside of commissioned work that amends the title’s all caps “SUCCESS”:
like causes
helpless yet jubilant
pink dust offering
refrain of —. Roses
lie down
You flip the page
residue.
Because the process note isn’t about data, Chen may introduce the speaker’s self-awareness as our own existential quandary, directly addressing “You” flipping through the residue of organic life. We see floral patterns in the text, such as how “[p]roductivity by another name” evokes Juliet’s rose by any other name. Chen’s engagement with the audience frees the speaker from quantifying their own experience (“Listen: I won’t describe my feet. I won’t describe the space”). The text becomes a space of agency and command, the second person point of view integrating us within the composition. Because of the nature of labor within Chen’s collection, perhaps auditor is more appropriate than reader, not because we hear the collection, but because Chen’s repeated command to “listen” demands that we take on the labor the collection replicates. Like the speaker, we risk becoming the conduit for “a series of utterances.”
When “[o]ne’s work is judged by transcription accuracy and efficiency,” the process note lies beyond data, data being the predominant unit and driving force of contemporary (digital) labor. The process note becomes personhood disguised “[h]erein. This book —— at arm’s reach, a disclosure.” It becomes an expression of self-awareness that’s unconcerned with the auditor’s judgment (“Listen: or don’t.”). Like the disruptive AI of our childhood blockbusters, the speaker’s wellbeing is determined by their ability to control who has access to their interiority, memory and feeling being our most intimate data. Whoever we interpret to be within this femme body (the transcriptionist, the cyborg, the girl, or the memories of them) they’re not the executive nor the corporation. Through Beautiful Machine Woman Language, Chen explores the creative act as a vessel for desire and revolt and salt water. “The text is my tissue,” the speaker tells us—an intimate object, impossible to impose but one we choose to pick up.
Catherine Chen (@aluutte) is a multidisciplinary poet and performer. They have received fellowships from Theater Mitu, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Arts Center Residency 2021), Lambda Literary, Poets House, and Franconia Sculpture Park. Their poems appear in The Rumpus, Hyperallergic, Apogee, Nat. Brut, among others. Chen is the author of the chapbook Manifesto, or: Hysteria (Big Lucks, 2019). They live in Brooklyn.
Asa Drake (@asaldrake) is a Filipina American poet and author of the chapbook One Way to Listen (Gold Line Press, 2023). She has received fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Tin House, and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems have been published with The Slowdown Podcast, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, and The Georgia Review.