Intimate Machines: Women, Desire, and the Infrastructures of AI Companionship In the Global South

AI companions, romantic chatbots, and generative intimacy applications have rapidly become significant sites of emotional, romantic, and sexual life — yet debates remain dominated by Euro-American users, anxieties, and design imaginaries. This Open Session shifts the analytic centre to the Global South, where women engage AI intimacy under conditions of infrastructural unevenness, data extraction, linguistic marginalisation, and the outsourced labour that sustains synthetic companionship. Speaking on technology and artificial intelligence and feminisms producing and challenging knowledge, this session asks how desire, care, and attachment are reconfigured across the South's diverse platforms, languages, and cultural worlds.

We welcome empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions addressing questions such as: How do women in the Global South cultivate intimacy with AI systems, and what forms of agency, pleasure, and refusal emerge? How do design, data, and training corpora encode racialised and gendered assumptions while marginalising non-Western languages and intimacies? Who performs the invisible affective and data labour — content moderation, annotation, companionship — that sustains intimate machines, and under what conditions? How do AI companions intersect with loneliness, social reproduction, migration, and surveillance? How might feminist, decolonial, and more-than-human perspectives reframe global debates?

We particularly encourage work foregrounding East, Southeast, South Asian, African, Latin American, and diasporic contexts.