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TECHNOSEX
Precarious Corporealities,
Mediated Sexualities, and the
Ethics of Embodied Technics
MEENAKSHI GIGI DURHAM
Technosex
 Meenakshi Gigi Durham

Technosex
Precarious Corporealities, Mediated Sexualities,
and the Ethics of Embodied Technics
Meenakshi Gigi Durham
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Iowa
Iowa, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-28141-4 ISBN 978-3-319-28142-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-28142-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016941492

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

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book was born, as many ideas are, at the University of
Iowa’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. The Obermann Center
is the kind of intellectual haven scholars dream about: it is a beautifully
appointed, secluded old house whose half-timbered walls, quaint office
spaces, irresistible library, and roaring hearth set the scene for deep reflec-
tion and creation. During a residency at the Obermann Center in 2009, I
found myself in conversation with the late chair of the University of Iowa
Department of Classics, Carin Green, who was intrigued by my scholar-
ship on the media, gender, and sexuality because of its resonances with the
Galatea myth. With her characteristic generosity, she invited me to sit in
on her undergraduate class discussion of Pygmalion and Galatea. I came
away provoked and inspired. I knew that somehow, Galatea was the key to
understanding more about our current media environment.
The idea captivated me, but it was years before I could develop my
fascination with Galatea into a research project. During that time, I spent
three semesters in residence at the Obermann Center, and I owe a tremen-
dous debt of gratitude to its dynamic director, Teresa Mangum, and to
the staff members who kept the coffee hot and the paperwork organized,
especially Neda Barrett, Erin Hackathorn, and Jennifer New. The stimu-
lating and congenial discussions and workshops at the Obermann Center
have fine-tuned my thinking in immeasurable ways. I will return as often
as I can.
My research leaves were a benediction of the Faculty Scholar Award I
received from the UI Office of the Provost, and I will be forever grate-
ful for that recognition of my work and the precious time afforded by it

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

for reading, thinking, and writing. Another pleasant and unexpected fillip
came in the form of the Collegiate Scholar Award from the UI College
of Liberal Arts and Sciences that provided me with crucial resources—
especially books—for this project. I am grateful for former Dean Linda
Maxson’s commitment to supporting women and feminist research in the
academy.
This book was also made possible by an Arts & Humanities Initiative
Grant from the UI Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic
Development. The AHI grant fueled the last, intense burst of writing
and editing the manuscript before I submitted it to the publisher. Many
thanks, especially, to Dan Reed and Ann Ricketts for their heartfelt sup-
port of the arts and humanities.
I would be remiss if I didn’t stop to pay tribute here to the University of
Iowa Libraries, an amazing resource we’re lucky to have. Not only could
I always find the materials I wanted, but I’ve never met more helpful,
knowledgeable, and enthusiastic librarians anywhere.
I owe a great deal to my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Felicity Plester,
whose enthusiasm for this project buoyed my confidence in its worth. And
this book would never have been published without her editorial assistant
Sophie Auld, who put up with my innumerable questions and answered
them with admirable calm and efficiency.
I cannot begin to name the colleagues whose friendship, loyalty, and
support have enriched my life. My wonderful colleagues in the UI School
of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Department of Gender,
Women’s, and Sexuality Studies have energized my work in countless
ways. The same goes for the people I’ve met through various academic
conferences and feminist organizations. Special thanks to Dafna Lemish:
a chance conversation with her at ICA was the genesis for Chap. 3 of this
book, on teens and sexting. I am indebted to her, as well as to Natalie
Foster of Routledge, for granting me permission to use portions of an
earlier version of this chapter that was published in The International
Handbook of Children, Adolescents, and Media (2013).
Carin Green’s influence on my research is unabated, though she is
gone. Her bright spirit and unfailing kindness are keenly missed by so
many. This campus can never be the same without her.
I’m glad the days spent glued to my computer were lightened and
brightened whenever I stopped to spend time with my wonderful daugh-
ters, Sonali and Maya. Their lively and perceptive observations of the
world—especially the media environment—have pushed me to think in
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

new ways about our engagements with communication technologies. In

that way, they carry on the spirit of my parents, VR and Jaya Venugopal,
and my brothers Buddy and Ravi Venugopal, who taught me to engage
the world critically and analytically as I mustered my arguments during
rip-roaring debates at the family dinner table and over coffee.
Finally, I must express my loving gratitude to my husband Frank, who
is my life partner and as well as my most trusted and cherished colleague.
We’ve been conversing about every subject under the sun, from aardvarks
to zygotes, for almost three decades now. This book could not have been
written without his unflagging support, interest, and love—and I cannot
express how much that means to me.
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction: Gender Trouble in Galatealand 1

2 Visible Technosexualities 25

3 Sexting It Up 41

4 What We Talk About When We Talk About Sex 61

5 Galvanizing the Frankenbabe: Sex-Media-Self 75

6 Technosex and the Politics of Location 97

7 Conclusions: Ethics for TechnoRebels—

The Power of Embodied Vulnerability 117

Bibliography 135

Index 155

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Gender Trouble in

Galatealand

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 Mirror1

The contemporary sexual landscape is haunted by the ghost of Galatea:

she peers at us from cybersex screens and cell-phone videos, from adver-
tisements 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 con-
sciousness 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.

1
Claribel Alegria, “Galatea Before the Mirror,” in Fugues, trans. D.J. Flakoll (in roman)
(Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1993), p. 85. Reprinted with permission.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

M.G. Durham, Technosex, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-28142-1_1
2 M.G. DURHAM

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 high-
est 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 corpo-
realities, 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 imagina-
tive 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

2
Ted Hughes, “Pygmalion,” in Tales from Ovid (London: Faber and Faber, 199),
pp. 144–150.
3
Mary Innes, “Pygmalion and Galatea,” in The Metamorphoses of Ovid (London: Penguin,
1955), p. 232.
 INTRODUCTION: GENDER TROUBLE IN GALATEALAND 3

corporealities in relation to a media-saturated and technologically acceler-

ated environment? How are new sexual subjectivities being constituted
through these embodied entanglements with media and related tech-
nologies? 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 further-
ing 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 recon-
figured 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 femi-
nist theory and ethics, media studies, critical race theory, psychology, and
social geography, among other epistemic frameworks; in tracing the evolu-
tion and expression of technosexualities in contemporary life, I posit an
understanding of how the power-inflected relationships between technol-
ogy, 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 corol-
lary 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 bed-
rock 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

4
Julia Cream, “Out of Place” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of
American Geographers, San Francisco, California, March–April 1994).
4 M.G. DURHAM

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 reci-
procity 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 inhabit-
ing a body,”6 my framework for corporeality considers the material out-
comes for the body of its particular engagements with the technologies of
representation.
I argue here that the fantastical seductions of technosex are teth-
ered 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 “info-
sphere” 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, tech-
nosex 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 dif-
ferences 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 for-
mulating “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
5
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), p. x.
6
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2014), p. 2.
7
Luciano Floridi, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality.
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 219. For Floridi, the infosphere “minimally …
 INTRODUCTION: GENDER TROUBLE IN GALATEALAND 5

solve the unprecedented challenges arising in the new environment.”8

In reinvigorating feminist concepts of embodied vulnerability and the pol-
itics 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; technolo-
gies also structure the geographical and cultural environment, positioning
people within it as part of an “informatics of domination,”11 delineat-
ing work places, social roles, migrations. Thus, technologies are ideologi-
cal, 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

denotes the whole informational environment constituted by all information entities, their
properties, interactions, processes, and mutual relations. It is an environment comparable to,
but different from, cyberspace, which is only one of its sub-regions, as it were, since the
infosphere also includes offline and analogue spaces of information. Maximally, infosphere is
a concept that can also be used as synonymous with reality” (p. 41). The inhabitants of the
infosphere are inforgs, beings that are “mutually connected and embedded in an informa-
tional environment (the infosphere), which we share with other informational agents, both
natural and artificial, that also process information logically and autonomously” (p. 94).
8
Ibid.
9
Floridi, p. 218.
10
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda
Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 191.
11
Haraway, ibid., p. 205.
12
Haraway, ibid.
6 M.G. DURHAM

through each other.”13 While a vast array of technologies, from the vibrator
to gender reassignment procedures, is engaged in the production of gen-
ders 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 augmen-
tation 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: technolo-
gies 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 techno-
logical 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, for body technologies and their utility, like all
technologies, change with the times. In other words, they are profoundly
engaged with human evolution. All technologies have the capacity to alter
our notions of time, space, perception, location, identity, mobility, power
and possibility; technologies of the body, by interacting with our very
flesh, our cytoplasm and corpuscles, our flesh and bones, make radical
interventions into our very reality, our sense of being in the world.
For all consciousness is necessarily incarnate, formed in and through
the body and via lived corporeal experience: identities are bound up in
corporeal events and performances. As Merleau-Ponty noted:

In so far as when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up

with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as
subjectivity is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence

13
Michael O’Rourke and Noreen Giffney, “Originary Somatechnicity,” in Somatechnics:
Queering the Technologisation of Bodies, eds. Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray (Farnham,
UK: Ashgate, 2012), p. xii.
14
Rosalind Williams, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change (Boston:
MIT Press, 2003), p. 116.
 INTRODUCTION: GENDER TROUBLE IN GALATEALAND 7

of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is
inseparable from the body and this world.15

Our physicality, our body images and schemas, our relationships with
our bodies, are all part of our sense of who we are, yet our bodies, too, are
shaped and reshaped by our environments and our engagements with the
cultures in which we live, by the discourses that ascribe social meanings to
our bodies through such descriptors as skin color, size, age, and sex, and
by our internalizations and enactments of these discourses. The philoso-
pher Elizabeth Grosz uses the metaphor of a Mobius strip to represent the
dynamic torque of the relationship between bodies and minds:

The Mobius strip has the advantage of showing the inflection of mind into
body and body into mind, the ways in which, through a kind of twisting
or inversion, one side becomes another. This model also provides a way
of problematizing and rethinking the relations between the inside and the
outside of the subject, its psychical interior and its corporeal exterior, by
showing not their fundamental identity or reducibility but the torsion of the
one into the other, the passage, vector, or uncontrollable drift of the inside
into the outside and the outside into the inside.16

The body/self is constituted in relation to cultural imaginaries—“those

ready-made symbols through which we make sense of social bodies and
which determine, in part, their value, their status, and what will be deemed
their appropriate treatment.”17 Global circuits of transnational media are
powerful agents of these cultural imaginaries, producing and distributing
millions of images every second, via satellite and wireless networks, high-
efficiency video coding, cable systems, fiber optics, cloud computing, and
other means; and sexuality is a vital part of this system. Increasingly, the
interactive and “DIY” features of digital technologies are being used to
represent and circulate sexual desires: teenagers engage in “sexting”; sex
tapes are uploaded to the Internet; people engage in chat that simulates
sex online; cyberporn is a multimillion-dollar industry; and sex trafficking

15
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York:
Routledge, 1962), p. 408.
16
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), p. xii.
17
Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (New York: Routledge,
1996), p. vii.
8 M.G. DURHAM

flows via transnational digital networks. Desire is channeled through

technology; images forge intimate bonds between partners, but they also
go viral, establishing sexual identities, reputations, and proclivities. Thus
cell phones, tablets, and other digital technologies can be understood
as “desiring-machines,”18 channeling flows of desire and corporeal signs
through their circuits to reinscribe sexual subject positions in line with
the larger logics of the day. As Karen Barad points out, “Existence is not
an individual affair … individuals emerge through and as part of their
entangled intra-relating.”19
Mark Hansen argues for a “deep correlation between embodiment and
virtuality,” pointing out that new media technologies, especially those
constituting a virtual reality, engage bodily sensations in ways that give rise
to ontological states. He notes that biological embodiment within cultural
experience is crucial to the development of “body schemas” (Merleau-
Ponty’s term) and subject positions.20
In this approach, he engages a philosophical tradition that not only
construes the body as socially and culturally structured, malleable, and
historicized, but recognizes subjectivity as constituted through the body.21
Subjectivity and corporeality are thus mutually implicated and generated
in relation to social formations. These poststructuralist concepts of corpo-
reality open up ways of considering the complex and dynamic operations
of power, embodiment, and sexualities in an era of transnational media.
Feminist science and technology studies, and the more recent discipline
of somatechnics, have explored technology’s constitutive role in gendered
power relations: as Judy Wacjman argues, understanding technology

18
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983).
19
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. ix.
20
Mark B.N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York: Routledge,
2006).
21
See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 1990); Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Toward a Materialist Theory
of Becoming (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter:
On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993); Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977); Michel
Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage); Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics, Subjectivity,
and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 223–252.
 INTRODUCTION: GENDER TROUBLE IN GALATEALAND 9

as a social apparatus, “a culture or ‘material-semiotic practice’ enables

us to understand how our relationship to technology is integral to the
constitution of subjectivity for both sexes.”22 Wacjman points out that
feminist perspectives recognize technology and society as involved in a
fluid relationship of “mutual shaping.” On her account, “gender relations
can be thought of as materialised in technology, and masculinity and femi-
ninity in turn acquire their meaning and character through their enrol-
ment and embeddedness in working machines.”23 Wajcman’s analysis is
rooted in a gender binarism, but drawing on the insights of somatechnics,
it is clear that a range of genders, sexualities, and categories of body/
identity are similarly mobilized.24
In the contemporary moment, the “working machines” we know best—
and use most—are the various media communication technologies that
permeate our environments. In every contemporary society, people inter-
act with the media. These interactions are, of course, shaped and compli-
cated by the locations in which they occur, impacted and configured by
histories, geographies, material circumstances, cultures, and other factors.
Fundamental to media theory is the recognition that all communication
media are both technological and cultural, and the very term “the media”
spans a vast range of forms and functions. Yet despite these specificities, as
Roger Silverstone reflects, it is possible to consider the media as a complex
system—“a space that is increasingly mutually referential and reinforcive,
and increasingly integrated into the fabric of everyday life. … The media
are becoming environmental.”25 More and more, the media constitute our
environments in ways that are taken for granted and imperceptible; from
electronic billboards to closed-circuit cameras to cellphones, media com-
prise elements of daily life. And as “electronic media increasingly saturate
our everyday spaces with images of other places and other (imagined or
real) orders of space, it is ever more difficult to tell a story of social space
without also telling a story of media, and vice versa.”26

22
Judy Wacjman, “Feminist Theories of Technology,” Cambridge Journal of Economics
34:1 (2010), 145.
23
Ibid., p. 149.
24
Sullivan, Nikki. “Transsomatechnics and the Matter of ‘Genital Modifications’,”
Australian Feminist Studies 24:60 (2009), 275–286.
25
Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: The Rise of the Mediapolis (New York:
Polity, 2010), p. 5.
26
Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy, “Orientations: Mapping Mediaspace,” in Mediaspace:
Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 1.
10 M.G. DURHAM

Our engagements with the media are perhaps the most veiled of our
relationships; we dismiss them as “guilty pleasures” or “distractions”; we
publicly deny that they have import or impact in our lives; we acknowl-
edge that others may be affected by the seductions of smartphones or
iPads, but we invariably see ourselves as active and decisive managers of our
media consumption; we balk at spending any time or serious thought on
our interactions with the media.
Yet we live in an era where media pervade our existences. This is most
true of Western societies, those of the global North, but it is increas-
ingly becoming typical of the global South/“third World.” As Hansen
has noted, “technology affects our experience first and foremost
through its infrastructural role … effectively, technologies structure
our lifeworlds.”27 If we acknowledge this, then we are faced with two
choices. We can accept and ignore the media and culture industries as
aspects of a taken-for-granted environment, or we can radically rethink
their function as cultural-historical structures that work, along with
such power formations as phallogocentrism and heteronormativity, as
defining symbolic institutions that make specific interventions into the
body-sex-gender-desire matrix, rearticulating these concepts in ways
that impinge upon our own imaginations of these key vectors of inti-
macy and identity.
No longer, then, do we premise our understanding of personhood or
subjectivity on a Cartesian dualism between mind and body, instead rec-
ognizing the fluid and continuous synergies that constitute the self as well
as the social. In fact, our embrace of body transformations appears to be
predicated on a rather sophisticated understanding that bodies are not
fixed, stable, or natural. But this recognition stands in an uneasy tension
with a concept of the self, which is a contradictory and paradoxical one
where the self is regarded as simultaneously split off from, and closely
aligned with, the body. People engaging in online sex seem to recog-
nize that a transformation into a virtual self is the conduit for physical
pleasure. “My life was so damn normal, straight, vanilla, with such high
integrity. Now I have a Dom. ‘Safe, Sane, Consensual.’ So, how does one
have a sexual D/s online relationship? You take it into your life. Dom/
me says ‘do’ and you do,” as one cybersex participant explained her life

27
Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 4.
 INTRODUCTION: GENDER TROUBLE IN GALATEALAND 11

on sadomasochistic interactive sex sites.28 The writer Cleo Odzer describes

the transformations at work in her active online sex life: “Posing as a man,
I had sex with a woman. Posing as a gay man, I had sex with a man. Posing
as a man, I had sex with a man who was posing as a woman … I had all
sorts of sex in every new way I could think of.”29 Odzer’s own embod-
ied desires were thus aligned with an imaginary and shifting selfhood.
Shannon McRae’s interpretation is:

When intense erotic union is accomplished in a kind of void, in which bod-

ies are simultaneously acutely imagined, vividly felt and utterly absent, the
resultant sense of seizure, of scattering, of self-loss can be experienced as a
violent mingling of pleasure and pain. The intensity of pleasure results from
the kind of sustained dislocation required when your body is entirely real
and entirely imagined at the same time.30

This juncture/disjuncture of self and body is also evident in the nar-

ratives of people who undergo actual physical transformations using bio-
medical technologies. “I’m happy about who I am—finally,” reported
Rachel Love-Fraser, after undergoing seven surgical procedures on the
FOX reality-TV makeover show The Swan.31 “It’s made such a difference
in the way I feel about myself,” enthused Marnie Rygiewicz, a contes-
tant on The Swan, after multiple surgeries depicted on the air.32 “I think
I’d have a more fulfilling life if I looked better,” mused schoolteacher
Maryellen Smyth at a casting call for the show.33 “I want to be somebody,”
explained Erica Moore, another plastic-surgery aspirant on the show.34

28
Jennifer P. Schneider, “A Qualitative Study of Cybersex Participants: Gender Differences,
Recovery Issues, and Implications for Therapists,” Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity 7:4
(2000), 263.
29
Cleo Odzer, Virtual Spaces: Sex and the Cyber Citizen (New York: Berkeley Books,
1997), p. 43.
30
Shannon McRae, “Coming Apart at the Seams: Sex, Text, and the Virtual Body,” in
Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, eds. Lynn Cherney and Elizabeth
Reba Weise (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1996), p. 261.
31
“The Face-Off,” People (May 17, 2004), pp. 122–123.
32
Ann Oldenburg, “Swan Ready for Its Close-Up,” USA Today (May 24, 2004), p. 5D.
33
Simon Houpt, “Amid the Wannabe Swans, Envy and Despair,” The Globe and Mail
(November 6, 2004), p. R1.
34
Alice Marwick, “There’s a Beautiful Girl Under All of This: Performing Hegemonic
Femininity in Reality Television,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27:3
(August 2010), 251–266.
12 M.G. DURHAM

For these women, the self is predicated on the body; self and body
are mutually dependent variables, and technological interventions into the
body can release “the real me” trapped inside the unwanted, unattractive
corporeal shell; an existential rift between the body and the self is healed,
and “the women come to understand their preoperative body as accidental
and their current, more ‘normative’ appearance as a more accurate indica-
tor of who they really are.”35 This version of the body as a representation
of the self is also present, in some transsexual narratives and among people
undergoing sex reassignment surgeries: in the past this has involved a feel-
ing of being trapped in the “wrong body” or being somehow out of align-
ment with one’s body36—“the mysterium tremendum of deep identity
hovers about a physical locus”37—but reconfigured transgender bodies,
as Sandy Stone has pointed out, have immeasurable progressive potential,
disrupting traditional gender binaries and inserting new narratives of the
body-subject, with radically different histories of coming into being, into
our social consciousness.
Yet the conventions of the contemporary “makeover” culture valorize
the notion that valid selfhood is attained through transformations: “make-
overs intervene with class, race, and gender-inflected ‘improvements’ that
gain legitimacy by speaking through the idiom of identity,”38 such that suc-
cessful selfhood is attained through the manipulation of the body toward
normative ideals. The makeover phenomenon tells a story “of coherent and
stable subject-positions, located in and expressed through the made-over
body. Before-bodies quite often lack valid me-ness and After-bodies mark
the zone of celebrated selfhood where subjects rejoice, ‘I’m me, now!’”39
The notion of a mismatch between body and subject suggests an
organic or intrinsic misalignment, yet any interrogation of such incon-
gruities points to culturally constructed logics as their source and site.
Without the imposition of a cultural logic of physical normalcy or even
perfection, there would be no sense of a slippage between self and body,
no need to take corrective action. As Judith Butler, following Foucault,

35
Deborah Gimlin, Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), p. 146.
36
Henry Rubin, Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment Among Transsexual Men
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003).
37
Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto,” Camera Obscura
29 (1992), 151–176.
38
Weber, Brenda R. Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2009), p. 5.
39
Weber, p. 7.
 INTRODUCTION: GENDER TROUBLE IN GALATEALAND 13

has emphasized, “bodies only appear, only endure, only live within the
productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schemas.”40

MEDIATING GALATEA
The allure of the Pygmalion myth lies in the fantasy that precedes the
advent of the real woman, and in the transformation that offers the seduc-
tive vision of a libidinal wish come true. The original Pygmalion dream is
that of a male artist, a visionary, who acquires the power to realize, indeed
to reify, his image of a perfect woman, the embodiment of an ideal sexual
partner. In the myth, Pygmalion “claims to have produced through art
a beauty superior to anything created by nature.”41 The image is purely
corporeal: he is a sculptor—a “plastic artist” as Bernard Baas puts it42—so
his creation is material, carved out of ivory, an inanimate body without a
spirit or soul, yet the latter are projected by the creator onto his creation;
the physical defines and determines the spiritual: “Yet he still dreamed of
a woman … The perfect body of a perfect woman—.”43
No longer working with ivory, modern-day Pygmalions apply their art-
istry and vision to create “perfect women” through a variety of sophis-
ticated technologies that are revolutionizing the sexual landscape. The
men’s soft-core porn magazine Playboy has featured computer-generated
images of women, taking representations of “perfect bodies” a step beyond
the routinely digitally manipulated images common to the contemporary
publishing world.44 Adult video games starring nubile computer-generated
women in sexual situations are produced mainly by male programmers and
artists for male audiences.45 An Italian entrepreneur named Franz Cerami

40
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge,
1993), p. xi.
41
Bernard Baas, “Pygmalion’s Gaze,” trans. Chris Semk, S: The Journal of the Jan van Eyck
Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 1 (2008), 5.
42
Ibid., p. 4.
43
Ted Hughes, ibid., p. 146.
44
“Playboy Goes Digital — With Its Models,” Associated Press, September 7, 2004,
accessed October 19, 2010 from http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/5933462
45
Jess Fox and Wai Yen Tang, “Sexism in Online Video Games: The Role of Conformity
to Masculine Norms and Social Dominance Orientation,” Computers in Human Behavior 33
(2014), 314–320; Robin Johnson, “The Digital Illusio: Gender, Work and Culture in Digital
Game Production” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2010); Mike Z. Yao, Chad Mahood,
and Daniel Linz, “Sexual Priming, Gender Stereotyping, and Likelihood to Sexually Harass:
Examining the Cognitive Effects of Playing a Sexually-Explicit Video Game,” Sex Roles
62: 1–2 (2010), 77–88.
14 M.G. DURHAM

hosts the Miss Digital World beauty pageant, where computer-generated

women compete for the title; the goal of the contest is to “create a con-
temporary ideal of beauty through virtual reality;” the contest has spun-off
a sexy swimsuit calendar similar to those featuring live women.46 Dr. Frank
Ryan was the Svengali-like plastic surgeon behind the transformation of
the aforementioned Heidi Montag, whose notorious surgical adaptations
have included several breast augmentations (that reportedly produced
DDD-cup and then G-cup sized breasts), more than one rhinoplasty, lipo-
suctions, otoplasty or ear pinning, and a variety of other cosmetic proce-
dures; she is said to have undergone as many as ten surgeries in a single
day.47 Following these operations, Montag posed for Playboy and starred
in a sex video that was widely circulated on the Internet.
Men, of course, are not always the actual instigators or masterminds
behind such body remodeling; as Sandra Lee Bartky reminds us, “the
technologies of femininity are taken up and practiced by women … [A]ll
women have internalized patriarchal standards of bodily acceptability.”48
The fact that these female sexual ideals are cyborg creations—a fusion of
technology and biology—“Frankenbabes” of a sort—is not a hindrance to
their appeal; in fact, the artifice at work seems to boost their desirability,
as they exemplify physical proportions and qualities that no “unedited”
human woman could approach. The resultant cyborg bodies are then cir-
culated via technologies of distribution that involve wireless, global cir-
cuits of transmission. Technology intersects with the desirable and desiring
body at multiple points. These processes are reflected in individual lives,
where people use digital imaging technologies to alter their own body
images and distribute them to friends via cell phones and the web.
Marcia Ochoa’s ethnographic studies in Venezuela reveal the parallel
self-modifications of transformistas (transgender women) and cisgender

46
Franz Cerami, “Miss Digital World,” last modified November 10, 2008, http://franzce-
rami.blogspot.com/2008/12/miss-digital-world.html
47
Jennifer Garcia, “Obsessed with Being Perfect,” People (January 25, 2010), pp. 80–88.
Liz Kelly, “The Scoop on Heidi Montag’s Plastic Surgery,” Celebritology/The Washington
Post, April 6, 2010, accessed October 19, 2010 from http://voices.washingtonpost.com/
celebritology/2010/04/the_scoop_on_heidi_montags_pla.html. “Heidi Montag’s 10
Plastic Surgery Procedures,” The Huffington Post, January 14, 2010, last modified March 18,
2010, accessed on October 19, 2010 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/14/
heidi-montags-10-plastic_n_423855.html
48
Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,”
in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, eds. Irene Diamond and Lee Quimby
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), pp. 71, 76.
 INTRODUCTION: GENDER TROUBLE IN GALATEALAND 15

beauty pageant contestants, noting the way that both modes of femininity
are achieved through similar practices of cosmetic surgery, body modifica-
tion, make-up, and performativity, and produced in citational relation to
the same mediated ideologies of feminine beauty. As she writes,

Transformistas, like other Venezuelan women, assemble their notions of

femininity from their bodies, their environments, the expectations placed
on them by their communities, their own ideas about the currency of spe-
cific forms of femininity, mass media, and the material forms of production
available for the project of accomplishing femininity.49

She situates her findings in the Venezuelan context, but the reach of
global media impacts and homogenizes ideals of femininity and sexuality
almost everywhere. Modifying and imaging one’s body is now unremark-
able; our understanding of our corporealities is firmly rooted in the notion
of bodies as “cultural plastic,” mutable and transmissible. But as Susan
Bordo has pointed out, there are hidden philosophical currents lurking
beneath the notions of liberty, renewal, and self-determination invoked
by this view. People are, indeed, increasingly free to physically or virtually
sculpt their own bodies to fit their ideals. Yet as Bordo argues, it is crucial
not to lose sight of “the normalizing power of cultural images, and the
continuing social realities of dominance and subordination” at work in
these physical transformations.50 She draws attention to the social direc-
tives that drive such transformations—directives that reinforce hierarchies
of race, ethnicity, class, and gender under an ingenuous postmodern rheto-
ric of diversity and empowerment; directives that are most often transmit-
ted via the mass media. The ideals are not only distributed via the media,
they are media fabrications, partially if not wholly constructed by digital
imaging and other technologies. For women, a mediated standard of the
culturally desirable body—inevitably thin, yet voluptuous; tending toward
the Aryan fantasy of the blue-eyed blonde—underpins and motivates the
creation of both virtual and flesh-and-blood female physiques. Power is
thus infused into our corporeal reshapings. Importantly, cisgender trans-
formations tend to reassert gendered power hierarchies, while transgender
transformations challenge and disrupt them. The technologies of physical

49
Marcia Ochoa, Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of
Femininity in Venezuela (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 4.
50
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), p. 275.
16 M.G. DURHAM

transformation intersect with the technologies of communication to forge

a complex rack-and-pinion system of body politics.

SUBJECTIVITY MATTERS: SIGNIFYING BODY-SUBJECTS

In the contemporary world, body schemas are made real, reified, through
visual representation in popular culture and the mass media; body ideals
are displayed, flaunted, promoted, and iconized via cinematic, televisual,
print, and online texts that not only reinscribe gender categories but forge
symbolic linkages between bodies, gender, and sexual identities through
a signifying economy of visual and verbal codes. “Get the sexiest body
ever!” command the cover lines of magazines; and “Hard abs, more sex,
hotter sex now!” even as they portray women bursting out of bustiers and
short shorts, or men with bulging biceps and rippling stomach muscles.
In the texts of popular media, gender categories are binary, and sexual-
ity is firmly intertwined with achieving specified physical ideals in each
category; these physical ideals have racialized as well as gendered com-
ponents. Media sign systems naturalize and normalize these regulatory
schemas, turning them into “common sense” while masking the ideologi-
cal imperatives at work in their design. These imperatives are reflected and
reinscribed in the images transmitted by individuals through social media
sites and phone networks.
It is perhaps because of the pervasiveness of such discourses that bodies
have become a primary locus of sexed/gendered transformations in the
new millennium. “Bodies,” writes Henry Rubin, “are a crucial element of
personal identity formation and perception. Bodies are far more important
to (gender) identity formation than are other factors, such as behaviors,
personal styles, and sexual preferences. … To get our heads around ‘the
body,’ we must come to terms with the experience that subjects have of
their bodies. Simply stated, subjectivity matters.”51 He notes that the sub-
jective experience of the body, in a given historical moment, “puts into
motion a dialectic of identity” that constitutes a sexed/gendered subject
position and can give rise to efforts to refashion the body.52 In his work
on transsexual identities, he notes that “body modification is a situated,
contextual project of authenticity based on the principles and demands of
recognition in modern society.”53

51
Rubin, ibid., p. 11.
52
Rubin, ibid., p. 12.
53
Rubin, ibid., p. 15.
 INTRODUCTION: GENDER TROUBLE IN GALATEALAND 17

Indeed, all body projects can be seen as a quest for authenticity and
social recognition in this sense. Carl Elliott interprets Americans’ feverish
use of “enhancement technologies,” from psychotropic drugs to breast
augmentations, as a quest for an authentic sense of self. “We need to
understand the complex relationship between self-fulfillment and authen-
ticity, and the paradoxical way in which a person can see an enhance-
ment technology as a way to achieve a more authentic self, even as the
technology dramatically alters his or her identity,” he writes, underscoring
the dialectical movement at work in these practices.54 The “all-consuming
project of the body,” echoes the historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg, is “cen-
tral to definitions of the self.”55 The sociologist Debra Gilman concurs:
“Body work is in fact work on the self. By engaging in body work, women
are able to negotiate normative identities by diminishing their personal
responsibility for a body that fails to meet cultural mandates.”56 Bodies,
then, are signifying systems; they are media of communication.
Gimlin correctly points out that cultural meanings “are embedded in
those institutions where culture and individual effort meet,” and, indeed,
references to the media—to cinema, photographs, videos, and so on—
permeate most studies of the body; yet media significations of the body
are rarely acknowledged as central to the self–body transaction in the con-
temporary media-saturated moment, and certainly the reciprocative trans-
lation of sexuality to the ever-more accessible virtual realms is still loosely
theorized. In fact, contemporary lives are continually engaged with the
media, in both public and private spaces; advertising, entertainment, news,
cell-phone interactions and social networking occupy significant portions
of everyday experience, and all of these contain frequent and insistent ref-
erences to the body; it would be ingenuous to discount our engagement
with the media from any understanding of the contemporaneous sexual
body-subject, yet the media’s role in the articulation of corporealities and
sexual identities remains largely unacknowledged and undertheorized.
The central question I will pose here, then, stems from this seemingly
willful elision: How can we understand our desiring corporealities in rela-
tion to a media-saturated environment?

54
Carl Elliott, Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York:
Random House, 2003), pp. xx–xxi.
55
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New
York: Vintage, 1997), pp. xvii, xxiv.
56
Debra L. Gimlin, Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), p. 6.
18 M.G. DURHAM

CORPOREAL VISIONS, SEXUAL MIRAGES

The media are dream machines, and their appeal is to our imaginations,
often to our visions of a future, perfect self within a fantasy of desire—
a “sexual mirage,” akin to the phantasmatic oasis that deranges desert
travelers. The mirage of sexuality, especially idealized female sexuality, is
a trope used to attract and arouse large media audiences. But like halluci-
nating desert wanderers, these audiences bring a variety of complex gazes
and wishes to their media practices. The work of the imagination in these
interactions is not to be taken lightly: Arjun Appadurai reminds us that
“the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form
of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and
a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally
defined fields of possibility.”57 Imaginations open up understandings and
ideas about the world and the self, stimulating new narratives and politics,
migrations and meldings, strategies and subversions. In provoking our
imaginations and inducing us to invest in the imagined worlds they con-
jure up, the media speak to our deepest longings and feelings of lack, con-
necting to our most intimate and closely held secrets and to the libidinal
currents that drive us.
In fact, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory offers us the crucial insight that
imagination inspires ego formation—the imagination of an ideal self is a
pivotal moment that Lacan dubbed the Imaginary, that revelatory moment
in which a baby recognizes its own reflection in a mirror and internalizes
a vision of an ideal, coherent self; the transcendent moment that fills the
Oedipal gap just before the sociolinguistic order imposes its regulatory
imperatives upon the subject.58 In Lacan’s invaluable contributions to
our understanding of ego formation and the self in society, imagination is
vital. The so-called “mirror stage” of Lacanian developmental psychology,
when the infant first relates to its reflected image as a projection of itself,
is a turning point in the evolution of the self. It is the crucial juncture
when “the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in
the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores

57
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 31.
58
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock,
1977), pp. 1–7.
 INTRODUCTION: GENDER TROUBLE IN GALATEALAND 19

to it, in the universal, its function as subject.”59 “The ego sees itself in
its relations with others,” as Elizabeth Grosz explains it. “Its fascination
with specular reflections will forever orient it in an imaginary direction.”60
From a Lacanian theoretical perspective, not only are sexuality and subjec-
tivity risky and unstable, but once the subject comes into being at the mir-
ror stage, it “is forever after haunted by images—ideal image, ego ideal,
self-image, copy, imago, double, alter ego.”61
The mirror image catalyzes a baby’s imagination, leading to visions of
the future self; and in an analogous move, the media offer images that
provoke similar visions, fictitious ideals of bodies and selves, fabricated
possibilities of impending fulfillment. Media messages offer “windows to
a future self” that “appear all the more attainable because they urge the
viewer to link the fantasy to … everyday life.”62 Media images ignite our
imaginations with pleasurable pictures of perfection that represent feasible
idealizations of our future selves. The enticements to seek these future
self-ideals are everywhere—on billboards and Jumbotron screens, airport
TVs and sports-arena signboards, shopping-mall window displays, and
mobile phone apps; they pervade our lives, brilliant, colorful, vibrant,
alluring, enlivening our landscapes, energizing our banal, anxious exis-
tences. Technologies catalyze our urge to harness these fantasies and turn
them into realities: we can use our handheld phones, webcams, digital
imaging apps, to create versions of ourselves that replicate these ideals;
we can download them, enlarge them, animate them; and in doing so, we
can engage in desiring acts and sexual adventures that involve only cyber
creations.
Media images, then, make up a kind of architecture of our lives, scenic
elements of our habitats, interlinked with the built environment as well
as with the everyday technologies that facilitate and mobilize our daily
routines. They are thus landscapes of a sort. The media have reconfig-
ured social space; media theorists recognize that media are components
of the physical environment as well as active shapers of our understand-
ings of space and time: “Mediaspace … at once defines the artefactual

59
Lacan, ibid., p. 2.
60
Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990),
p. 43.
61
Barbara Creed, “General Introduction,” The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader, eds. John
Caughie and Annette Kuhn (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 1.
62
Ellen McCracken, Decoding Women’s Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Ms (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 13.
Another random document with
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 ERICA pyramidalis.

CHARACTER SPECIFICUS.

Erica, antheris muticis, inclusis; floribus umbellatis, sub-quaternis; corolla

pyramidata, carnea, laciniis maximis, erectis; foliis sub-quaternis, linearibus,
pilosis, obtusis.

DESCRIPTIO.

Caulis fruticosus, ramosus, flexilis; ramuli frequentissimi, verticillati,

sub-quaterni, brevi, cernui.
Folia sub-quaterna, linearia, pilosa, tenuia, subtus sulcata; petiolis
brevissimis, adpressis.
Flores in apicibus ramulorum umbellati, sub-quaterni; pedunculi recti,
colorati, bracteis minutis, remotis.
Calyx. Perianthium tetraphyllum, foliolis, subulatis, adpressis.
Corolla campanulato-infundibuliformis, carnea; laciniis limbi acutis,
maximis, semiovatis, apicibus parum patulis.
Stamina. Filamenta octo capillaria. Antheræ muticæ, inclusæ.
Pistillum. Germen sub-globosum, apice octo-partitum, compressum.
Stylus filiformis, erectus, subexsertus. Stigma tetragonum.
Habitat ad Caput Bonæ Spei.
Floret a mensi Septembris, in Decembrem.

REFERENTIA.

1. Calyx, et Corolla.
2. Calyx, lente auctus.
3. Corolla.
4. Stamina a Pistillo diducta.
 5. Anthera una lente aucta.
6. Pistillum, lente auctum.

SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Heath, with beardless tips, within the blossom; flowers grow in umbels
mostly of four; blossom pyramid-shaped and flesh coloured, the segments
very large, and upright; leaves grow generally by fours, linear, hairy and
blunt ended.

DESCRIPTION.

Stem shrubby, branching and flexible; small branches are numerous,

grow in whorls, mostly by fours, short and hanging down.
Leaves grow most frequently by fours, are linear, hairy, thin and furrowed
beneath; foot-stalks very short and pressed to the stem.
Flowers grow at the ends of the small branches in bunches, generally of
four; the foot-stalks grow straight, are coloured, having the floral leaves at a
distance from the blossom.
Empalement. Cup four-leaved, leaflets awl-shaped, and pressed to the
blossom.
Blossom between bell and funnel-shaped, and flesh-coloured; the
segments of the border are pointed, very large, half egg-shaped, with the
ends a little spreading.
Chives. Eight hair-like threads. Tips beardless, and within the blossom.
Pointal. Seed-bud nearly globular, eight divisions at the top and
flattened. Shaft thread-shaped, upright and just without the blossom. Summit
four-cornered.
Native of the Cape of Good Hope.
Flowers from September, till December.

REFERENCE.
1. The Empalement, and Blossom.
2. The Empalement, magnified.
3. The Blossom.
4. The Chives detached from the Pointal.
5. A Tip, magnified.
6. The Pointal and Seed-bud, magnified.
 ERICA radiata.

CHARACTER SPECIFICUS.

Erica, antheris muticis, inclusis; stylo exserto; floribus horizontaliter-

verticillatis, terminalibus; corollis sub-cylindricis, pollicaribus, laciniis
revolutis; foliis quaternis, glabris, patentibus.

DESCRIPTIO.

Caulis fruticosus, erectus, sub-pedalis, ramosus; rami sub-simplices,

patento-erecti, glabri.
Folia quaterna, linearia, patentia, subtus sulcata, supra plana, glabra;
petiolis adpressis.
Flores in ramulorum apice verticillati, horizontaliter siti; pedunculi
foliorum longitudine, bracteis tribus, subulatis, instructi.
Calyx. Perianthium tetraphyllum, foliolis subulatis, adpressis.
Corolla subcylindrica, calyce triplo longior; oris laciniis revolutis.
Stamina. Filamenta octo capillaria. Antheræ muticæ, inclusæ.
Pistillum. Germen clavatum, sulcatum. Stylus filiformis, exfertus.
Stigma tetragonum.
Habitat ad Caput Bonæ Spei.
Floret a mensi Augusti, in Novembrem.

REFERENTIA.

1. Flos.
2. Calyx, lente auctus.
3. Stamina, et Pistillum.
4. Stylus, et Stigma, lente aucta.
 SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Heath, with beardless tips, within the blossom; shaft without; flowers
terminate the branches in horizontal whorls; blossoms nearly cylindrical, an
inch long, with the segments of the border rolled back; leaves grow by fours,
smooth and spreading.

DESCRIPTION.

Stem shrubby, upright, grows near a foot high, and branching; the
branches nearly simple, spreading upright and smooth.
Leaves grow by fours, linear, spreading, furrowed on the under part, flat
on the upper part and smooth; the foot-stalks pressed to the branches.
Flowers grow in whorls at the ends of the smaller branches, standing
horizontally; the foot-stalks the length of the leaves, having three awl-shaped
floral leaves.
Empalement. Cup four-leaved, the leaflets are awl-shaped, and pressed to
the blossom.
Blossom almost cylinder-shaped, thrice the length of the cup; the
segments of the mouth are rolled back.
Chives. Eight hair-like threads. Tips beardless, and within the blossom.
Pointal. Seed-bud club-shaped, and furrowed. Shaft thread-shaped and
without the blossom. Summit four-cornered.
Native of the Cape of Good Hope.
Flowers from August, till November.

REFERENCE.

1. The Flower.
2. The Empalement, magnified.
3. The Chives, and Pointal.
4. The Shaft and Summit, magnified.
 ERICA ramentacea.

CHARACTER SPECIFICUS.

Erica, antheris cristatis, inclusis; corollis globosis, umbellis confertis, rubro-

purpureis, pedunculis longissimis, coloratis; foliis quaternis.

DESCRIPTIO.

Caulis erectus, spithamæus, ramosissimus, rami et ramuli filiformes,

divaricato-patentes.
Folia quaterna, linearia, subtus sulcata, glabra, acuminata.
Flores plures, terminales, umbellati, conferti; pedunculi purpurei,
longissimi, capillares, bracteis tribus instructi.
Calyx. Perianthium tetraphyllum, foliolis subulatis, coloratis.
Corolla globosa, rubro-purpurea, ore contracto, laciniis minutis,
reflexis.
Stamina. Filamenta octo capillaria, receptaculo inserta; Antheris cristatis,
inclusis.
Pistillum. Germen globosum, sulcatum; Stylus filiformis sub-exsertus.
Stigma tetragonum, pubescens.
Habitat ad Caput Bonæ Spei.
Floret a mense Augusti in Decembrem.

REFERENTIA.

1. Calyx, et Corolla.
2. Calyx lente auctus.
3. Stamina, et Pistillum.
4. Stamina a Pistillo diducta, anthera una lente aucta.
5. Stylus, et Stigma, lente aucta.
 SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Heath, whose tips are crested, and within the blossoms, which are globe-
shaped, growing in close bunches, of a reddish-purple colour, having very
long foot-stalks coloured; the leaves grow by fours.

DESCRIPTION.

Stem upright, a span high, very much branched; the larger and smaller
branches are thread-shaped, and spread into various directions.
Leaves grow by fours, are linear, furrowed, underneath, smooth, and
pointed.
The Flowers are numerous, terminating the branches in close bunches;
the foot-stalks are purple, very long, hair-like, and have three floral leaves.
Empalement. Cup four-leaved, which are awl-shaped, and coloured.
Blossom globe-shaped, of a reddish purple, the mouth contracted, the
segments of which are very small, and bent back.
Chives. Eight hair-like threads fixed into the receptacle; the tips crested,
and within the blossom.
Pointal. Seed-vessel globe-shaped, and furrowed. Shaft thread-shaped,
just without the blossom. Summit four-cornered, and downy.
Native of the Cape of Good Hope.
Flowers from August till December.

REFERENCE.

1. The Empalement, and Blossom.

2. The Empalement magnified.
3. The Chives, and Pointal.
4. The Chives detached from the Pointal; one tip magnified.
5. The Shaft, and its Summit, magnified.
 ERICA retorta.

CHARACTER SPECIFICUS.

Erica, antheris muticis, inclusis; foliis quaternis, retortis, apice setaceis,

margine ciliatis; floribus umbellatis, viscosis, carneis, ampullaceis.

DESCRIPTIO.

Caulis fruticosus, pedalis, erectus, ramosus; rami flexuosi, filiformes.

Folia quaterna, retorta, seta terminali aristata, margine ciliata, glabra,
supra plana, subtus sulcata; petioli brevissimi, adpressi.
Flores plures, subterminales, sæpe quatuor, verticillati, viscosi;
pedunculi longi, bracteis tribus instructi.
Calyx. Perianthium tetraphyllum, foliolis aristatis, apice ciliatis,
subovatis, viscosis, adpressis.
Corolla, basi inflata, apice attenuata, ima parte carnea, summa saturate
purpurea, ore arctata, laciniis ovatis, reflexis.
Stamina. Filamenta octo capillaria, receptaculo inserta. Antheræ inclusæ,
villoso-muticæ.
Pistillum. Germen clavatum; stylus exsertus, purpureus; stigma
tetragonum.
Habitat ad Caput Bonæ Spei.
Floret a mense Julii, in Octobrem.

REFERENTIA.

1. Folium unum lente auctum.

2. Calyx, et Corolla.
3. Calyx, lente auctus.
4. Stamina, et Pistillum.
 5. Stamina a Pistillo diducta; anthera una lente aucta.
6. Stylus, et Stigma lente aucta.

SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Heath, with beardless tips, within the blossom; the leaves grow by fours, are
rolled back, having bristles at their points, and fringed at their edges; the
flowers grow in bunches, are clammy, flesh coloured, and flask-shaped.

DESCRIPTION.

Stem shrubby, grows about a foot high, and upright; the branches are
crooked, and thread-shaped.
The Leaves grow by fours, are rolled back, terminating with an awn-like
bristle, fringed at the edges, smooth, flat on the upper and furrowed on the
under part, having short foot-stalks pressed to the branches.
The Flowers are numerous, nearly terminal, mostly by fours, in whorls,
and clammy; the foot-stalks are long, having three floral leaves.
Empalement. Cup four-leaved, which are each terminated by a bristle, the
ends fringed, nearly oval, clammy, and pressed to the blossom.
The Blossom is swelled out at the base, and tapers to the point, the lower
part is of a flesh colour, the upper deep purple, straightened at the mouth,
whose segments are egg-shaped, and bent back.
Chives. Eight hair-like threads fixed into the receptacle. The tips are
within the blossom, beardless, and covered with hairs.
Pointal. Seed-vessel club-shaped; shaft without the blossom, and purple;
summit four-cornered.
Native of the Cape of Good Hope.
Flowers from July, till October.

REFERENCE.

1. One leaf magnified.

2. The Empalement, and Blossom.
3. The Empalement magnified.
4. The Chives and Pointal.
5. The Chives detached from the Pointal; one tip magnified.
6. The Shaft and its Summit magnified.
 ERICA Sebana aurantia.

CHARACTER SPECIFICUS.

Erica, antheris muticis, exsertis, longissimis; corolla clavata, incurvata,

aurantia; laciniis obtusis, incurvis; floribus ternis, terminalibus; calyx
duplex, imbricatus; foliis ternis, arcuatis, reflexis; rami toti tecti ramulis
brevissimis.

DESCRIPTIO.

Caulis robustus, erectus, pedalis; rami pauci, tecti ramulis confertis,

brevissimis.
Folia terna, linearia, arcuata, conferta, subtrigona, reflexa, apice acuta,
brevissime petiolata.
Flores terni in apice ramulorum dependenti; pedunculi brevissimi, nudi.
Calyx. Perianthium duplex, exterius triphyllum, foliolis, lato-ovatis,
membranaceis, adpressis, imbricatis; interius tetraphyllum, foliolis
majoribus.
Corolla clavata, incurvata, aurea, calyce duplo longior; laciniis limbi
obtusis, incurvis.
Stamina. Filamenta octo linearia, plana. Antheræ muticæ, exsertæ,
longissimæ, lineares, attenuata in filamenta.
Pistillum. Germen ovale, apice truncatum, sulcatum. Stylus filiformis,
staminibus paulo longior. Stigma obsolete tetragonum.
Habitat ad Caput Bonæ Spei.
Floret a mense Julii, in Novembrem.

REFERENTIA.

1. Calyx auctus.
 2. Flos.
3. Stamina, et Pistillum.
4. Stamina a Pistillo diducta.
5. Anthera una, lente aucta.
6. Stigma, auctum.
7. Germen, auctum.

SPECIFIC CHARACTER.

Heath, with beardless tips, without the blossom, and very long; blossom
club-shaped, turned inwards and orange coloured; segments blunt, turned
inwards; flowers grow by threes at the ends of the branches; cup double,
tiled; leaves grow by threes, are curved, and reflexed; the branches are quite
covered with little branches.

DESCRIPTION.

Stem sturdy, upright, grows a foot high; branches few, covered by little
branches which are crowded together.
Leaves grow by threes, linear, arched, crowded, nearly three-sided,
reflexed, sharp-pointed, very small foot-stalks.
Flowers grow by threes at the end of the small branches, hanging down;
very short, naked, foot-stalks.
Empalement. Cup double, the outer three-leaved, leaflets broad egg-
shaped and skinny, pressed to the stem, tiled; the inner four-leaved, with
larger leaflets.
Blossom club-shaped, turned inwards, orange colour, and twice the
length of the cup; the segments of the mouth blunt and turned inwards.
Chives. Eight linear, flat threads; tips beardless, without the blossom,
very long, linear, and tapered into the threads.
Pointal. Seed-bud oval, appearing cut off at the end and furrowed. Shaft
thread-shaped, a little longer than the chives. Summit slightly four-cornered.
Native of the Cape of Good Hope.