Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age / Edition 1

by Claudia Springer

Overview

The love affair between humans and the machines that have made us faster and more powerful has expanded into cyberspace, where computer technology seems to offer both the promise of heightened erotic fulfillment and the threat of human obsolescence. In this pathfinding study, Claudia Springer explores the techno-erotic imagery in recent films, cyberpunk fiction, comic books, television, software, and writing on virtual reality and artificial intelligence to reveal how these futuristic images actually encode current debates concerning gender roles and sexuality.

Drawing on psychoanalytical and film theory, as well as the history of technology, Springer offers the first sustained analysis of eroticism and gender in such films as RoboCop, The Terminator, Eve of Destruction, and Lawnmower Man; cyberpunk books such as Neuromancer, Count Zero, Virtual Light, A Fire in the Sun, and Lady El; the comic books Cyberpunk and Interface, among others; and the television series Mann and Machine. Her analysis demonstrates that while new electronic technologies have inspired changes in some pop culture texts, others stubbornly recycle conventions from the past, refusing to come to terms with the new postmodern social order.

Written to be accessible and entertaining for students and general readers as well as scholars, Electronic Eros will be of interest to a wide interdisciplinary audience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292776975
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	04/01/1996
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

Claudia Springer is an independent scholar living in Newton, Massachusetts. She was a professor in the English Department and Film Studies Program at Rhode Island College for many years.

What People are Saying About This

Mark Dery

Mark Dery

Springer plumbs the dark depths of the Strangelove affair between human and machine in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Electronic Eros is essential reading for cybercritics, technofeminists, and anyone thinking seriously about culture and technology as the millennium approaches.

Editorial Reviews

Social scientists choose sides, usually one emphasizing women's equality and the other emphasizing women's special needs, and trade views on procreation and female oppression, culture, welfare, Marxism and women's history, Foucault and sexuality, and Freud and repressed memory. Essays on Simone de Beauvoir's wartime writings and the male's search for a new identity remain unchallenged. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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