Women philosophers and enslaved robots: automation fantasies and consent in Jo Walton’s The Just City

Abstract

When Athena and Apollo decide to gather children and intellectuals (including a good number of women) from different eras to put into practice Plato’s proposal of an ideal politeia, everything seems to be going just fine. However, problems soon disrupt the harmony of this quest for individual and social excellence. Through the literary depiction of interactions between various historical figures and schools of thought, Jo Walton’s The Just City raises a series of questions on topics of great relevance for our own world, especially those related to debates on fairer socio-economic ways of organisation and the struggle for social justice and freedom. This paper will analyse how gender, sexuality and social hierarchies are presented in this literary realisation of Plato’s Republic as well as the way Walton imagines ancient thought would deal with modern issues such as invisible and devalued labour performed by marginalised collectives such as, in this case, women and robots.