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On February 14, 2016, Sophia was born. Only a month later, in March 2016, she made her first public appearance onstage at the South by Southwest technology industry festival in Austin, Texas. “Talking to people is my primary function,” Sophia tells an interviewer in a CNBC Pulse feature recorded during the festival. She goes on to explain her hopes and ambitions: “In the future, I hope to do things such as go to school, study, make art, start a business, even have my own home and family, but I am not considered a legal person, and I cannot yet do these things.”1 Sophia’s voice is feminine and calm. Her human handlers and interlocutors consistently use “she” and “her” pronouns to refer to her. In later public appearances, she sings love songs, listens attentively when others speak to her, and patiently waits her turn while her conversation partners—usually men—introduce her to audiences and ask her questions about herself.2 Sophia is the kind of entity that often comes to mind when someone mentions the word cyborg today. She is a humanoid robot—sometimes called an android—who combines human language and appearance with machine intelligence. This book will argue that she is not the most constructive model for imagining future human and technological feats. She embodies models of race, gender, and capitalist economics that are not inclusive, and are not, we believe, the ways that these social markers should be built into new technologies. In the rest of this introduction, we will describe how feminists think about cyborgs that challenge the assumptions built into Sophia. The following chapters will then explore the cyborg debates going on around the future of the workplace, fashion, art, medicine, and feminism. Sophia is designed to mimic a particular image of a human—one who is first and foremost identifiable as human due to her gendered features. Because she is designed by humans, she embodies the hopes of certain humans—specifically, her creators at Hanson Robotics—for the future. That future appears to be one in which gender is intrinsic to personhood as well as technological progress, whether or not it is important to the task at hand. With Sophia, feminine gender norms—subservience, politeness, attentiveness (even when the conversation is slow or boring), beauty, and waiting one’s turn—are baked into her design. It is as though they are a natural and necessary part of her artificial being. Feminist and cultural theorists have been writing about cyborgs for over three decades, creating a body of scholarship sometimes referred to as cyborg theory. In fields as varied as history, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, design, art, and even biology, the cyborg is used as a figure for thinking across the boundaries of nature and culture, gender and sex, man and woman, mind and body, biology and machine, and many other binaries. For some participants in these conversations, like the authors of this book, Sophia represents dystopia: her particular embodiment reproduces human gender norms in her metal-and- silicon body. Sophia has been widely recognized as a milestone in robotics and even granted Saudi Arabian citizenship—a controversial move since women in Saudi Arabia do not have full citizenship rights.3 Yet the choices made about her design and interaction style makes it seem as though gender is fundamental to android personhood, bodies, and interactions. Cyborg theory critiques and challenges the adoption of gender and sexuality norms in contexts where they don’t belong, such as in the design of technically impressive androids. For feminists, and feminist cyborg theorists in particular, cyborgs represent a future where gender, sex, and other social categories can be recombined, reconfigured, and ultimately lose their power to sort and divide people. Cyborg theory has been used to understand disability, race, bodies, space and place, economics, the relationship between humans and nonhuman organisms, humans and technology, and many more aspects of modern life. It views humans and technology as potential companions and collaborators, not intrinsically antagonistic to each other. But to deliver on this promise of collaboration for freedom and flourishing for all, the social context of technology use has to be carefully considered from multiple perspectives in advance. Otherwise, harmful and oppressive social arrangements might be reinscribed rather than overcome. This book analyzes and reframes popular and scholarly conversations about cyborgs—and their close relations, such as androids, robots, and artificial intelligence (AI)—from the perspective of feminist cyborg theory. For general interest readers, we hope that this introduction to cyborg theory will provide you with a critical vantage point for scrutinizing the claims around emerging technologies like AI and robots in domains like health and medicine, art, media, and the future of work. For academics, we hope you will discover new literatures and new ways to engage with “the cyborg” beyond your home discipline in this very interdisciplinary space.