9 September at 11 am
WELCOME!
We kindly invite you to a lecture by Dr. Carlotta Rigotti entitled »The regulation of sex robots: Gender and sexuality in the era of artificial intelligence«, which will be held as part of the Tuesday Meetings on Tuesday, 9 September 2025, at 11 a.m., in the library of the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana.
The topic of the Tuesday Meeting is based on her recently published book, which explores the legitimate regulation of human-like machines designed for emotional and sexual interaction, commonly referred to as sex robots. While these technologies remain at the margins of the adult entertainment and robotics industries, they raise profound and controversial questions about the social construction of gender and sexuality, questions that existing legal and policy frameworks have yet to meaningfully address.
Rather than reproducing dominant binaries that portray sex robots either as tools of sexual empowerment or as instruments of personal degradation and gender inequality, Carlotta plans to critically unpack the polarized feminist and legal debates that have shaped this discourse. Her approach challenges these reductive narratives by foregrounding the lived realities of users and affected communities, attending to the intersectional power dynamics embedded in the design, use, and governance of these machines, and drawing lessons from the regulation of sex work and pornography across Europe.
The talk will also interrogate prevailing regulatory responses, particularly in the domains of criminal law and AI governance, which tend to evaluate emerging forms of technology-mediated sex through abstract, risk-oriented frameworks that overlook relational, social, and contextual dimensions.
Carlotta will warmly invite the audience to take part in an open discussion, encouraging critical reflection and collaborative thinking on how legal frameworks are – or are not – evolving to address, on the one hand, questions of gender and sexuality, and on the other, the growing complexities of human–machine interaction in this area.
Carlotta Rigotti is a post-doctoral researcher at eLaw – Centre for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University. Her work explores the intersections of law, gender, and technology, with a particular focus on image-based sexual abuse and diversity bias in AI systems. This research line began with her PhD on the regulation of sex robots at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Carlotta engages in several international collaborations, including with the Council of Europe and the International Labour Organisation. She is also actively involved in research initiatives such as the Horizon Europe BIAS project, which currently occupies much of her time. Her aim is to bridge legal scholarship and practice, grounding her research in real-world challenges and approaching them through an intersectional lens. To this end, she seeks to remain closely connected to civil society organizations and feminist collectives.
At Leiden University, she teaches courses on Law, Gender and Technology and Law, Technology and Society, and regularly gives guest lectures on her areas of expertise both within and beyond the university. Outside academia, Carlotta enjoys cooking, watching films that don’t scare her, and reading novels—ideally during her daily commute or by the sea.
