Leslie Bow clicks through movie and television clips on her computer: scenes from recent sci-fi thrillers, including Cloud Atlas, Ex Machina, Battlestar Galactica and the hit British miniseries Humans. Each features a synthetic human — benevolent or sinister, depending on the plotline — designed to look like a young, attractive Asian woman. Then Bow, a professor of English and Asian American studies, opens a video.

Filmed at a Toronto tech expo, it shows a sweet-faced robot with distinctly Asian features named Aiko. As a group of rapt pre-teen boys circles the eerily lifelike female replica, dressed in a dark wig and prim pink blouse, they can’t resist pinching and poking her arms and face. Each jab prompts a plaintive reply from Aiko, triggered by the cutting-edge artificial-intelligence technology beneath her silicone skin: “Stop it.” “Ouch.” “Please do not touch my head,” “It hurts.”

Welcome to the “uncanny valley.” That’s what tech theorists call the point at which we human beings — normally charmed by creatures who look a bit like us (think of all those adorable anthropomorphized animals we love to watch conversing in cartoons) — begin to experience mixed, uneasy or antagonistic feelings toward robots and other human knockoffs that have gotten too realistic for our comfort.

This ambiguous terrain fascinates Bow, who explores how attitudes toward Asians are expressed in popular culture and how we humans relate, for better or worse, to nonhuman beings. Literature and semiotics scholars have long tracked how people from Japan, China and other Asian nations (typically ones at the forefront of technological innovation) are depicted in literature, film and other media. “Techno-orientalism” is their term for the tendency to use stereotyped Asian characters to reflect fears and fantasies about a future ruled by enhanced beings and fiendishly smart machines — Dr. Fu Manchu, the evil mastermind scientist featured in 20th-century movies and T.V. shows, is a vintage example of techno-orientalist caricature. However, surveying the current media landscape, and noticing “the sheer ubiquity” of artificial intelligence technology being “embodied by young, nubile Asian female facsimiles,” convinced Bow that this particular techno-orientalist trend deserves special scrutiny.

For centuries, Asian women have been associated with service and what Bow calls “affective labor”: caring for other peoples’ emotion-based needs. According to Bow, Asian-featured fembots are just the newest twist in the longstanding cultural “fetishization and overt sexualization of Asian women.”