Designed to be held: gynoid bodies, storage politics, and the gendered aesthetics of containment
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the gendered politics of storage in digital games through the figure of the gynoid—female-coded robots and androids whose designs conspicuously lack the capacity to carry, retain, or accumulate. Inventory systems are a central site of this refusal, but storage politics also unfold through aesthetic minimalism, narrative erasures such as memory wipes, and the scripting of emotional labour. Drawing on feminist posthuman theory, feminist technology studies, and affect theory, the article argues that overlapping forms of storage denial function as infrastructural disempowerment and ideological containment. Through analysis of Signalis, NieR: Automata, Cyberpunk 2077, and Technobabylon, the article maps how aesthetic minimalism, interface design, and constrained utility intra-act to frame the gynoid as a vessel: emotionally burdened yet materially empty. The denial of inventory (no pockets, no bags, no gear) is shown not as a neutral omission but as a gendered design strategy that reinscribes femininity as ornamental, passive, and consumable and reveals how digital bodies are shaped by techno-cultural logics that condition labour, emotion, and worth in the material world. The article proposes the “anti-inventory gynoid” as a critical figure for examining the entangled politics of design, gender, and posthuman embodiment in game infrastructures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it