Queer Archives - ROBOPHILOSOPHY

An article titled “Queering Sex Robots Beyond Diversifying Design? Insights from Queer Lacanian Psychoanalysis and New Materialism” by Maaike van der Horst and Anna Puzio was published in the journal Philosophy & Technology in March 2026. Surprisingly, it does not reference several works that are highly relevant to the topic, including publications by Tanja Kubes and Oliver Bendel. As a result, some of the article’s claims to originality appear less convincing than they might otherwise have been. Following an exchange with one of the journal’s editors, Luciano Floridi, Oliver Bendel therefore submitted a commentary, which was published in Philosophy & Technology on June 10, 2026. From the abstract: “This commentary discusses Maaike van der Horst and Anna Puzio’s article ‘Queering Sex Robots Beyond Diversifying Design? Insights from Queer Lacanian Psychoanalysis and New Materialism’. While acknowledging the article’s valuable contribution, particularly its integration of Queer Lacanian Psychoanalysis and New Materialism, the commentary argues that its account of prior scholarship is incomplete. Several key themes and proposals presented as novel – including critiques of humanoid mimicry, new-materialist approaches to sexuality and technology, queer design concepts, relational ontology, and transformative sex robot forms – had already been developed in earlier work by Tanja Kubes and Oliver Bendel. The omission of these contributions affects assessments of originality, the reconstruction of the field’s intellectual development, and the allocation of scholarly credit. The commentary therefore calls for a more comprehensive scholarly genealogy of queer and new-materialist approaches to sex robots and argues that careful citation practices are essential to maintaining the integrity of academic discourse.” The article “Who Queered the Sex Robot? Notes on Attribution and Conceptual History” can be accessed at link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-026-01123-3 (Photo: Cybrothel).

A new article titled “Queering Sex Robots Beyond Diversifying Design? Insights from Queer Lacanian Psychoanalysis and New Materialism” (van der Horst & Puzio, 2026) has been published in Philosophy & Technology. The authors argue that queering sex robots should go beyond diversifying their physical design and instead involve a broader reconsideration of sexuality, identity, and human-technology relations. The paper starts from a critique widely discussed in the literature: current sex robot models largely reproduce heteronormative and stereotypical representations of femininity. Similar observations and related arguments can be found in earlier contributions in the volume “Maschinenliebe” (Bendel 2020). In that book, Tanja Kubes addresses the topic in her chapter “Queere Sexroboter”, while Oliver Bendel discusses transformations of gender and embodiment in “Trans-Formers”. Both contributions also refer to examples such as the Harmony robot from Realbotix/RealDollX. The main novelty of the new article lies in its theoretical framework, which combines Queer Lacanian psychoanalysis and New Materialism. Given the thematic overlap and the small number of publications on queer perspectives on sex robots, it is somewhat surprising that the earlier contributions in “Maschinenliebe” are not referenced. This book is predominantly written in German, but in times of large language models this should hardly pose a barrier. Moreover, the chapters by Kubes and Bendel have already been cited in several English-language academic publications (Photo: Cybrothel).