Work It, Robot! Exploring Forced Choices of Femininity in I’m Your Man [Ich bin dein Mensch] (Maria Schrader, Germany, 2021)

This chapter explores German science fiction film I’m Your Man [Ich bin dein Mensch] (Maria, Schrader, Germany, 2021). The chapter scrutinises the “working” woman in the neoliberal labour market, asking for a re-definition of man/womankind in opposition to human-like machines within society and a “capitalist reading of love”. Ich bin dein Mensch centres on 40-something-year-old Alma, a successful researcher, who has devoted her life to her work. Tom (a humanoid robot made to make her happy) comes on the scene as part of an experiment, a kind of Turing test for robotic partners. Alma is intellectual, successful, independent and single because of it. The only man available and willing to date her, is Tom, the robot; thus, raising questions on the invisibility of women and the seemingly exclusionary juxtapositions for women between their private and professional lives and personas. Alma encapsulates these juxtapositions, as she fights her emotions throughout the film, highlighting the dilemma of the modern woman forced to choose between professional and private success. Reading this film through a lens of gender and feminist film theory, phenomenology and posthumanist theory, raises questions with regards to relationships, desire and love as well objectification and oppression.