Posthuman Women on Screen: A Cross-Cultural Study of Gendered AI, Emotional Labor, and the Posthuman Gaze in Global Cinema

This article presents a comparative case study of three contemporary AI-focused films: Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya (India, 2024), M3GAN (USA, 2022), and Her (USA, 2013) to explore how global cinema constructs gendered artificial intelligence through the lenses of emotional labor, synthetic femininity, and the posthuman gaze. Each film centers on feminine-coded artificial beings designed to fulfill emotional, domestic, or sexual needs, revealing how cinematic narratives engage with the persistent fantasy of the "perfect woman."The movie Her serves as a case study in disembodied posthuman intimacy, with Samantha’s emotional labor compensating for her lack of physical form. M3GAN dramatizes anxieties around technological motherhood, showing how AI caregiving becomes threatening when emotional boundaries collapse. In contrast, Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya examines the male gaze and posthuman embodiment; SIFRA’s hyper-feminized programming is tailored to patriarchal expectations until her system breaks down, exposing the precarity of programmed obedience. Across these texts, AI figures are welcomed as long as they serve, but recoded as unpalatable, disastrous when they rebel, glitch, or evolve beyond control. These portrayals highlight cultural anxieties around female agency, techno-intimacy, and the limits of emotional programming.Our analysis is anchored in the intersecting frameworks of gender theory, posthuman studies, and cinematic critique, drawing from Judith Butler’s gender performativity, Hochschild and Ahmed’s emotional labor, Laura Mulvey’s male gaze, and posthuman ethics by Braidotti and Hayles. Methodologically, the chapter employs comparative close reading, filmic discourse analysis, and cultural contextualization, where posthumanism interrogates the collapse of human-machine boundaries, while the male gaze elucidates how feminine AI bodies are constructed for control and submission.This study contributes to understanding how posthuman cinema critiques patriarchal emotional economies and reveals the fragility of techno-feminine ideals, illuminating the ethical dilemmas of loving machines designed to serve.Keywords: Posthuman Gaze, Feminine Performativity, Emotional Labour, Gendered AI, Comparative Global Cinema