MACMILLAN Technosex: Precarious Corporealities, Mediated Sexualities, and the Ethics of Embodied Technics

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.  About the Author Meenakshi Gigi Durham is Professor and Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa. Her research on media, gender, and sexualities has appeared in leading academic journals. She is the author of  The Lolita Effect and the co-editor of  Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works. In 2014, she received the International Communication Association’s Teresa Award for feminist scholarship.