Technosex

Precarious Corporealities, Mediated Sexualities, and the Ethics of Embodied Technics

Meenakshi Gigi Durham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319281421
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Meenakshi Gigi Durham outlines and advances a progressive feminist framework for digital ethics in the technosexual landscape, exploring the complex and evolving interrelationships between sex and tech.

Today we live in a "sexscape, " a globalized assemblage of media, transnational capital, sexual practices, and identities. Sexuality suffuses the contemporary media-saturated environment; we engage with sex via cellphone apps and airport TVs, billboards and Jumbotron screens. Our techniques of sexual representation and body transformation — from sexting to plastic surgeries — occur in relation to our deep and complex engagements with mediated images of desire. These technosexual interactions hold the promise of sexual liberation and boldly imaginative pleasures. But in the machinic suturing of technologies with bodies, the politics of race, class, gender, and nation continue to matter. Paying acute attention to media's relationship to the politics of location, social hierarchies, and regulatory schemas, the author mounts a lucid and passionate argument for an ethics of technosex invested in the analysis of power.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Meenakshi Gigi DurhamTechnosex10.1007/978-3-319-28142-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Gender Trouble in Galatealand

Meenakshi Gigi Durham¹

(1)

School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA

End Abstract

my perfection isn’t mine

you invented it

I am only the mirror

in which you preen yourself

and for that very reason

I despise you.

—Claribel Alegria, Galatea Before the Mirror ¹

The contemporary sexual landscape is haunted by the ghost of Galatea: she peers at us from cybersex screens and cell-phone videos, from advertisements for Botox^® and breast implants; from the dazzling smiles of drag-pageant contestants and from the vacant eyes of Heidi Montag, the starlet notorious for her multiple plastic surgeries. Her presence among us is insistent, intangible, hypogean. She has, of course, galvanized the Western imagination since the poet Ovid first wrote her into our consciousness more than two millennia ago, but her significance in modern life has intensified in the twenty-first-century media environment: she is our sexual touchstone, her saga the story of our lives as embodied beings in a hyperreal media-saturated universe.

In Greek mythology, Galatea was the beautiful sculpture fashioned from ivory by Pygmalion, a Cypriot youth who fell in love with his own sexual fantasy; “so he had made a woman/Lovelier than any living woman … Woven from the fabric of his dream …” as the poet Ted Hughes puts it in one of many translations of this myth.² In the story, Pygmalion becomes besotted with the statue he has created; he kisses and caresses it, brings it gifts and jewelry, talks to it, sleeps with it. Her cold, lifeless form cannot return his embraces, yet to Pygmalion, Galatea is superior to every living woman: she exemplifies perfection, as he crafted her to meet his highest ideals of physical beauty. He prays to Venus to bring him a woman who resembles this icon, and Venus goes one better: she turns his beloved statue—his “ivory obsession”—to life. “She seemed warm: he laid his lips on hers again, and touched her breast with his hands—at his touch the ivory lost its hardness, and grew soft … The lover stood, amazed, afraid of being mistaken, his joy tempered by doubt, and again and again stroked the object of his prayers. It was indeed a human body!”³ Pygmalion is deliriously happy at being able to consummate his love for the consort of his ultimate dreams.

Galatea was, in fact, a “translated woman”—translated from Pygmalion’s imagination to real life, transmitted through his art and prayer from fantasy to reality, transformed from lifelessness to lust. Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses engages the notion of transforming bodies and selves, a phantasmatic poetical conceit that acquires trenchant meaning in the contemporary era—an era of digital images and mediated sexualities.

This is a moment of intersection, where body technologies and media technologies are converging in the metamorphosis of the body. As corporealities, media, and machines become increasingly engaged and enmeshed in mutually constitutive relationships, concepts of gender and sexuality are constantly recalibrated. The boundaries and borders of bodies, sexes, genders, and desires are blurring and shifting, mobilized by the imaginative possibilities unleashed by new media cultures and technologies. These shifts, into practices of “technosex,” give rise to the many compelling questions at the heart of this project: How can we understand our sexual corporealities in relation to a media-saturated and technologically accelerated environment? How are new sexual subjectivities being constituted through these embodied entanglements with media and related technologies? How do these technological and cultural changes impact our understandings of sexual development? A pressing and related question would be: What is the role of corporeal and media technologies in furthering the logics of “post-feminism” and “post-racism,” the ludic elision of gendered and racial oppressions in the twenty-first century? And finally, the culmination of these questions is: What is the impact of these reconfigured identities and subjectivities on the material interpersonal realities of society? That is how do these new subject positions interact with, or act on, notions of sex and desire, gender and power, emancipation and oppression, violence and risk?

Thus, underlying these questions are profound ethical issues that I explore and address in this book.

The questions I’ve posed above—which can only begin to get at the complexities of technosex as practice, process, and place/lifeworld—connect with fields of knowledge that illuminate various facets of my investigation and that also intersect in interesting and provocative ways. My approach to confronting these questions draw on insights from feminist theory and ethics, media studies, critical race theory, psychology, and social geography, among other epistemic frameworks; in tracing the evolution and expression of technosexualities in contemporary life, I posit an understanding of how the power-inflected relationships between technology, corporeality, and geopolitics lead to new ethical insights and practices.

The term “corporeality,” central to my analysis, is not a simple synonym for the materiality of the body. Rather, corporeality is a conceptual corollary to the complex experience of “embodiment”—both terms engaging the body’s enmeshments with, and constitution by, its sociocultural and historical contexts. As Julia Cream has noted,

We should not be accepting our body as given, as natural, as pre-discursive, or prior to culture. The body is not a foundation. It is not a biological bedrock upon which we can construct theories of gender, sexuality, race and disability. The body is not a beginning. It is not a starting point.⁴

Indeed, bodies are neither starting points nor endpoints. Rather, they are constituted through their dynamic relationships with the discourses and vectors of identity and social location. They are always in a state of flux, their meaning and impact a function of complex interactions of materiality and discourse. As the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explains, “It is not simply that the body is represented in a variety of ways according to historical, social, and cultural exigencies while it remains basically the same; these factors actively produce the body as a body of a determinate type.”⁵ Corporeality, as I use the concept in this book, speaks to the reciprocity of the body and its cultural context, where the body is a site of practice—an interface between representation and materiality. Grounded in phenomenology, with “its emphasis on the lived experience of inhabiting a body,”⁶ my framework for corporeality considers the material outcomes for the body of its particular engagements with the technologies of representation.

I argue here that the fantastical seductions of technosex are tethered to the materiality of social relations—to the intensifying inequities of gender, class, race, and region—via recursive and iterative dynamics. Understanding the workings of technosex in the contemporary “infosphere” brings us to a reckoning with embodiment as it is entwined with axes of power. In some ways, technosex offers thrilling possibilities for resisting repressive sexual norms, for eluding the regulatory moralities that have worked to marginalize and stigmatize sexual difference. Thus, technosex can be rebellious, pioneering, nonconformist; but it is important to remember that any conduit of power has the potential for violence, dysfunction, and social harm. Thinking about technosex pushes us toward a digital sexual ethics that acknowledges the historicized tensions and differences of the politics of location, recognizing them to be as vital and relevant to the infosphere as they were to the conditions that preceded and formed it. The philosopher Luciano Floridi notes the urgency of formulating “an ethical framework that can treat the infosphere as a new environment worthy of the moral attention and care of the human inforgs inhabiting it.”⁷ Such an ethical framework, he writes, “must address and solve the unprecedented challenges arising in the new environment.”⁸ In reinvigorating feminist concepts of embodied vulnerability and the politics of location, I develop such an ethics in this book. My starting point is Floridi’s reminder that the contemporary environment is one where we acknowledge “the virtual as partly real and the real as partly virtual.”⁹

Sexing the Cyborg

In fact, more than two decades ago, the feminist biologist Donna Haraway recognized that “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”¹⁰ Perhaps before anyone else, she perceived the increased blurring of boundaries between bodies and technologies, the enmeshment of human identities with the machineries of our time, the circuitry of power and capital that locates bodies—particularly women’s bodies—in social spaces. For Haraway, the boundaries between bodies and technologies are permeable; technologies also structure the geographical and cultural environment, positioning people within it as part of an “informatics of domination,”¹¹ delineating work places, social roles, migrations. Thus, technologies are ideological, she asserted: “technologies and scientific discourses … should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings.”¹²

Technologies imbricate our lifeworlds; they are signifiers in virtually every realm of human existence, and they are central to the formation of gender and sexuality in contemporary society. Recent scholarship in the emerging field of somatechnics calls attention to the fact that “the body and technology are … always already mutually interdependent, woven through each other.”¹³ While a vast array of technologies, from the vibrator to gender reassignment procedures, is engaged in the production of genders and sexualities, many are strategically deployed to enforce dominant meanings about gender and sexuality, while others have the potential to disrupt them. Media technologies tend to delineate ideal bodies for each socially defined gender category and regulate, as well as capitalize on, the practices for achieving them. Certain somatechnologies—breast augmentation or rhinoplasty, for example—are pointedly designed to help human bodies mimic technologically generated media ideals. Yet the easy move toward a technologically determined body would be simplistic: technologies don’t spontaneously self-generate; they are developed and created by human inventiveness. As the historian Rosalind Williams points out, “technological determinism is a non-issue, because there are no technological forces separate from social ones … The real question to ask, then, is not “Is technological determinism true?” but “What are the historical forces shaping the construction of the technological world?”’¹⁴

Technologies of the body operate within dynamic matrices of culture, temporality, politics and economics; they can be seen as a consequence of the ethos of an era as well as a factor in shaping it, and they must be understood as historicized, f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Gender Trouble in Galatealand
• 2. Visible Technosexualities
• 3. Sexting It Up
• 4. What We Talk About When We Talk About Sex
• 5. Galvanizing the Frankenbabe: Sex-Media-Self
• 6. Technosex and the Politics of Location
• 7. Conclusions: Ethics for TechnoRebels—The Power of Embodied Vulnerability
• Backmatter