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

by Meenakshi Gigi Durham

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. 

164 pages, Hardcover

Published May 31, 2016

About the author

Meenakshi Gigi Durham, is the (joint) professor of gender, women’s and sexuality studies at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Meenakshi Gigi Durham's work centers on media and the politics of the body, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, race, and youth cultures. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies. She was named a CLAS Collegiate Scholar in 2012.

Her work has appeared in leading academic journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Theory, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and Women's Studies in Communication. She is the author of The Lolita Effect (Overlook, 2008) and the co-editor, with Douglas M. Kellner, of Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks (Blackwell, 2001, rev. 2006). Her work has earned her widespread public recognition, including media appearances on the BBC, Irish National Television, Iowa Public Radio, Illinois Public Radio, The Dr. Phil Show, and the documentary "Miss Representation," which was aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

She serves on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals, including Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of Communication. She also served on the advisory board for the Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents and the Media. Her essay, "Grieving," published in the Harvard Review in 2010, has been selected for inclusion in the 2011 Best American Essays anthology. She is the recipient of a Faculty Scholar Award from The University of Iowa. In 2013, she was awarded a faculty administrative fellowship in the UI's Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development. She was the 2014 recipient of the International Communication Association's Teresa Award, the Feminist Scholarship Division's highest award for achievement in research.

She teaches classes in gender and media, critical theories of the media, and magazine writing. Her professional journalism experience includes reporting, editing, and design for various newspapers and magazines including The Pensacola News-Journal, The Times of India, and Science Today. She coordinated a statewide public information campaign on family involvement in education for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. She served as publications editor for the University of Wisconsin System from 1992–94.

Before coming to Iowa in the Fall of 2000, she taught magazine journalism at the University of Texas at Austin for six years, where she was the recipient of an honorable mention for the campus-wide Gilbert Teaching Excellence Award in Women's and Gender Studies.

Reviews

[Biju P.R.]

I have extensively referred this book for my upcoming book tentatively titled on Selfie Sex: Politics of Sexuality in the Digital Age. A book on the interplay between technology and sex, it will tell you how sex embedded with technology itself is another form of technology. author quotes extensively of technological platforms such as social media, chat platforms and cell phone on which how sexual persuasions are being occurred in the new world of electronic republic. this book was useful for me as i was looking for book on the interplay between technology and sexuality in the Indian context. Certainly in the age of technology, in our every day realities, sex and how we enrage in this private act is going to be affected. This book is just a pointer.

[Mills College Library]

306.7 D9616 2016