Who Queered the Sex Robot? Notes on Attribution and Conceptual History: Commentary on “Queering Sex Robots Beyond Diversifying Design? Insights from Queer Lacanian Psychoanalysis and New Materialism” by Maaike van der Horst and Anna Puzio Philosophy & Technology (March 2026)

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.