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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.
Another random document with
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sequins. He found time while there for the preparation of translations
of the Rhetoric of Aristotle, and of a number of other Greek works.
Filelfo’s arrogance and bad temper, and his fondness for invective
and satire, soon brought him into trouble with the literary circle of
Florence, and finally with the Medici, and he was compelled to
withdraw to Siena, where he remained four years with a stipend of
350 florins. From there, after a brief visit to Bologna, he removed to
Milan, where his emoluments were much larger than any heretofore
received, and where, in the absence of any other scholars of equal
attainments or assumptions, he had the satisfaction of being the
accepted literary leader of the capital. In addition to his professional
salary, he received large sums and presents for addresses, orations,
and commemorative poems, which he was always ready to prepare.
Such a combination of rhetoric and literature was peculiarly
characteristic of the Italy of the time, and may be said to constitute a
distinct phase in the history of compensation for intellectual
productions. Filelfo published, in two ponderous volumes, his
Satires, Odes, and other fugitive pieces, under the title of Convivia
Mediolanensia.
Notwithstanding the considerable sums which Filelfo earned
through his lectures and through his various rhetorical productions,
he seems always to have been in need of money. His tastes were
expensive, while his three wives had borne him no less than twenty-
four children. In his later years he gained the reputation of being very
greedy of gold and of making impudent demands which bore very
much the character of blackmail. Gregorio Lollio, writing (in 1452) to
the Cardinal of Pavia, describes Filelfo in the following words: “He is
calumnious, envious, vain, and so greedy of gold that he metes out
praise or blame according to the gifts he gets, both despicable as
proceeding from a tainted source.”[419]
From Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, he received a liberal
stipend. Pope Nicholas V., after reading some of his Satires (which
Symonds characterises as “infamous”) presented him with 500
ducats. Travelling from Rome to Naples, Filelfo received more
presents from Alfonso, who dubbed him a knight. Continuing his
journey, he secured honours and rewards in Ferrara from Duke
Borso, in Mantua from Marchese Gonzaga, and in Rimini from
Gismondo Malatesta. After the death of Sforza, he accepted, in
1475, from Pope Sixtus IV., a professional Chair in Rome, with a
salary of 600 florins. He soon, however, quarrelled with the Pope,
and withdrew to Florence, where Lorenzo de’ Medici provided a post
for him as Professor of Greek Literature.
Filelfo died in Florence in his eighty-third year. He had probably
received larger emoluments for his work as an instructor, as a
rhetorician, and as a man of letters, than any man of his generation,
but he died without any means, and was buried by the charity of the
Florentines. His career, in its activities, vicissitudes, controversies,
successes, and bitternesses, was very typical of the lives of the
Italian scholars of the period.
At the time of Filelfo’s death, while in many other cities the
influence of the Renaissance was bringing together collections of
books and circles of scholars, and literary productiveness was
increasing throughout Italy, Florence still remained the capital of
learning and of refined culture. Lorenzo de’ Medici had, in 1469,
succeeded to Pietro, and of all the Medici it was Lorenzo whose
influence was the most important in furthering the intellectual and
artistic movements of the time. Symonds speaks of him as “a man of
marvellous variety and range of mental power, in whom ... the
versatility of the Renaissance found its fullest incarnation.”
Lorenzo attracted to his villa the greatest scholars and most
brilliant men of the time, a circle which included Poliziano, Landino,
Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Alberti, Pulci, and Michael Angelo. The
interests of this circle, as of all similar Italian circles of the time, were
largely absorbed in the philosophy and literature of Greece, and
special attention was devoted to the teachings of Plato. Plato’s
writings were translated into Latin by Ficino, and the translation was
printed in 1482, at the cost of Filippo Valvio. Ficino was too poor
himself to undertake the publication of his works, and this was the
case with not a few of the distinguished authors of the age. The
presentation of books to the public required at this time what might
be called the endowment of literature, an endowment which was
supplied by the liberality of wealthy patrons possessed of literary
appreciation or public-spirited ambition, or of both. As Symonds
expresses it, “Great literary undertakings involved in that century the
substantial assistance of wealthy men, whose liberality was
rewarded by a notice in the colophon or in the title-page.” The formal
dedication was an invention of a somewhat later date.
The Ficino edition of Plotinus, printed at the expense of Lorenzo
de’ Medici, and published a few weeks after his death, bears the
inscription, Magnifici sumptu Laurentii patriæ servatoris. The edition
of Homer of Lorenzo Alopa, issued in 1488, was printed at the
expense of either Bernardo Nerli or Giovanni Acciajuoli. These
examples of printed publications belong, however, to a later chapter.
Ficino followed up his translation of Plato’s work with a Life of Plato,
and an essay on the Platonic Doctrine of Immortality.
In 1484, appeared in the Florentine circle the beautiful and brilliant
Pico della Mirandola, a man who through his exceptional gifts, his
varied learning, and the charm of his personality, exercised a very
wide influence over his generation, and who may possibly be
accepted as at once the type and the flower of the Renaissance.
Pico studied at Bologna, and later at Paris. He printed, in 1489, in
defence of his philosophical theories, certain theses which were
condemned as heretical by Innocent VIII. In 1493, the ban of
heterodoxy was renewed by a brief of Alexander VI. Pico’s enquiring
mind and scholarly ardour covered a wide range of research,
including the philosophy of the Platonists, the mysteries of the
Cabbala, and the system and theories of Aquinas, Scotus, Albertus
Magnus, and Averrhoes, and he proposed to devote his learning and
his life to the task of reconciling classical traditions with the Christian
creeds. Didot quotes the following characteristic sentence from a
letter written by Pico, February 11, 1491, to Aldus Manutius:
“Philosophia veritatem quærit, theologia invenit, religio possidet.”
(Philosophy seeks truth, theology discovers it, religion possesses it.)
Pico died at the age of thirty-one, before the book had been
written in which he proposed to demonstrate these positions. He was
able, however, to render a great service to Italy and to Europe in
securing for his friend Aldus the aid required for the establishment of
the Aldine Press in Venice. The details of the relations of the two
men are given in the chapter on Aldus.
Other noteworthy members of the literary circle which surrounded
Lorenzo de’ Medici, were Christoforo Landino, Leo Battista Alberti,
and Angelo Poliziano. Landino edited Horace and Virgil and
translated Pliny’s Natural History, and in 1481 published an edition of
Dante, and Battista Alberti, (whose comedy of Philodoxius, which
passed for an antique, was published by the Aldi, in 1588, as the
work of Lepidus Comicus), wrote three treatises on painting, and
several volumes on architecture. Alberti was more distinguished as
an artist, architect, and musician, than as an author. It was
characteristic, however, of the men of this group to be universal in
their genius.
Symonds speaks of Poliziano as emphatically the representative
of the highest achievements of the age in scholarship, and as the
first Italian to combine perfect mastery over Latin and a correct
sense of Greek, with splendid genius for his native literature. His
published works included annotated editions of Ovid, Suetonius,
Statius, Pliny, and Quintilian, translations of Epictetus, Galen, and
Hippocrates, a series of Miscellanea, and most important of all, the
edition, printed from the famous Amalfi manuscript, of the Pandects
of Justinian.
Among the smaller cities in which the Humanistic movement
influenced literature and furthered the development of learning, may
be mentioned Carpi, afterwards the home of Musurus and Aldus;
Mirandola, the birthplace of the brilliant Pico; Pesaro, where
Alessandro and Constanzo Sforza brought together a library rivalling
that of the Medici; Rimini, where Sigismondo Malatesta gathered
about his fortress a circle of scholars; and Urbino, where the good
Duke Frederick brought together one of the finest collections of
manuscripts which Europe had known, a collection valued at over
30,000 ducats. Vespasiano, who served for some time as librarian,
says that for fourteen years the Duke kept from thirty to forty copyists
employed in transcribing Greek and Latin Manuscripts. The work of
these copyists went on for some years after the introduction of
printing into Italy, for Frederick, in common with not a few other of
the scholarly nobles who were collectors of manuscripts, distrusted
and looked down upon the new art, and had no interest in books
which were merely mechanical reproductions.
Vespasiano da Bisticci, whose aid Frederick had secured in the
preparation of his library, was noted as an author, as a scribe, and as
a bookseller. Symonds speaks of the “rare merit” of the biographical
work in Vespasiano’s Lives of Illustrious Men, the memoirs of which
Symonds utilised largely in the preparation of his Renaissance.
Vespasiano’s literary work must have been done “in the intervals of
business,” for his business undertakings were important. He was the
largest dealer in manuscripts of his time. His purchasing agents and
correspondents were armed with instructions to secure authenticated
codices wherever these were obtainable, and the monasteries not
only of Italy but of Switzerland, South Germany, Hungary,
Transylvania, and the East were carefully searched for possible
literary treasures. He employed a large force of skilled copyists in the
production of copies of famous works, which copies were distributed
through correspondents and customers in the different scholarly
centres of Europe. Possessing himself a wide and exact scholarship,
he gave his personal attention to the selection of his texts, the
training of his copyists and the supervision of their work, so that a
manuscript coming from Vespasiano carried with it the prestige of
accuracy and completeness.
Vespasiano’s scholarly knowledge and his special experience in
palæography were utilised by such clients as Nicholas V., Cosimo
de’ Medici, Frederick of Urbino, and other lovers of literature, in the
formation of and development of their libraries. Vespasiano united,
therefore, the functions of a scholarly editor and commentator, a
collector, a book-manufacturer, a publisher and a bookseller, a series
of responsibilities which called for a wide range of learning,
accomplishments, and executive ability. It is evident from his career
and from the testimony of his friends and clients (terms in this case
practically identical) that he was devoted to literature for its own
sake. He accepted the rewards secured by his skill and enterprise,
and promptly expended these in fresh efforts for the development
and extension of liberal scholarship. Vespasiano may be called the
last, as he was probably the greatest of the book-dealers of the
manuscript period. Born in 1421 and living until 1498, he witnessed
the introduction of printing into Italy, and may easily have had
opportunities of handling the earlier productions of the Venetian
printing-press. Vespasiano was a fitting successor of Atticus and a
worthy precursor of Aldus, whose work in the distribution of scholarly
literature was, in fact, a direct continuation of his own.
As before mentioned, the trade in the production of manuscript
copies went on for a number of years after the introduction of
printing. The noblemen and wealthy scholars who had inherited, or
who had themselves brought together, collections of famous works in
manuscript, were for some time, not unnaturally, unwilling to believe
that ordinary people could, by means of the new invention, with a
comparatively trifling expenditure secure perfect and beautiful copies
of the same works. Before the death of Vespasiano, in 1498,
however, the work of the printing-press had come to be understood
and cordially appreciated by book-buyers and students of all classes,
and the trade of the copyists and of the manuscript-dealers had,
excepting for newly discovered texts, practically come to an end. The
career of Vespasiano belongs strictly to the chapter on the
publishers of manuscripts, of whom he was the most important. The
man himself, however, through his character and services, belongs
essentially to the movement of the Renaissance, of which movement
he was at once a product and a leader.
During the reigns of Pope Innocent VIII., 1484-1492, and of
Alexander VI. (Borgia), 1492-1503, little or nothing was done in
Rome to further the development of literature. To the latter was in
fact due the initiating of the system of the subjection of the press to
ecclesiastical censorship, a system which for centuries to come was
to exercise the most baneful influence over literature and intellectual
activities and to interfere enormously with the establishment of any
assured foundation for property in literature. Some account of the
long contests carried on by the publishers of Venice against this
claim for ecclesiastical control of the productions of their presses, is
given in a later chapter.
 Venice stood almost alone among the cities of Italy in resisting the
censorship of the Church, and even in Venice, the Church in the end
succeeded in the more important of its contentions. In Spain, the
ecclesiastical control was hardly questioned. In France, it was, after
a century of contest, practically merged in the censorship exercised
by the Crown, a control which was in itself fully as much as the
publishing trade could bear and continue to exist. In Austria and
South Germany, after the crushing out of the various reformation
movements, the Church and State worked in practical accord in
keeping a close supervision of the printing-presses. In North
Germany, on the other hand, ecclesiastical censorship never
became important. The evils produced by it were, however, serious
and long enduring throughout a large portion of the territory of
Europe, and the papal Borgia, though by no means a considerable
personage, is responsible for bringing into existence an evil which
assumed enormous proportions in the intellectual history of Europe.
Towards the close of the fifteenth century begins in Italy the age of
academies, associations of scholars and littérateurs for the furthering
of scholarly pursuits and of literary undertakings. One of the earlier
of these Academies was instituted in Rome, in 1468, by Julius
Pomponius Lætus (a pupil of Valla), for the special purpose of
promoting the study of Latin literature and Latin antiquities.
Comedies of Plautus and of other Latin dramatists were revived, and
the attempt was made to make Latin, at least for the scholarly circle,
again a living language. The Academy was suspected by Pope Paul
II. to have some political purpose, and it was for a time suppressed,
but resumed its activities some years later under the papacy of
Alexander VI.
The Academy of Naples was instituted in 1470, under the
leadership of Beccadelli and Juvianus Pontanus, and with a
membership comprising a number of the brilliant scholars whom
Alphonso the Magnanimous had attracted to his Court. This society
also devoted itself particularly to the revival of an interest in Latin
literature, and not a few of the members became better known under
the Latinised names there adopted by them than by their Italian
cognomens. Pomponius had written little and hoped to be
remembered through his pupils. Pontanus on the other hand, wrote
on many subjects, using for the purpose Latin, of which he was a
master. Symonds says that he chiefly deserves to be remembered
for his ethical treatises, but he seems himself to have attached
special importance to his amatory elegiacs and to a series of
astronomical hexameters entitled Urania.
In Florence, the Platonic Academy continued to flourish under the
auspices of the Rucellai family. It was suppressed in 1522, at the
time of the conspiracy against Giulio de’ Medici, but again revived in
1540. In 1572, was organised in Florence the famous academy
called Della Crusca, which secured for itself a European reputation.
In Bologna, in 1504, the society of the Viridario was instituted, with
the purpose of studying printed texts and of furthering the art of
printing. Bologna had a considerable number of other literary
societies, for the study of jurisprudence, chivalry, and other subjects.
Throughout Italy at this period academies multiplied, but the greater
number exercised no continued influence.
It is probable, however, that they all proved of service in preparing
the way for the printed literature which the Italian presses were, after
1490, beginning to distribute, and that in widening the range of
popular interest in scholarship and in books generally, they did not a
little to render possible the work of Aldus and other early Italian
publishers. The academy founded by Aldus in Venice, for the
prosecution of Greek studies, will be referred to in the chapter on
Aldus.
“The fifteenth century rediscovered antiquity; the sixteenth was
absorbed in slowly deciphering it. In the fifteenth century ‘educated
Europe’ is but a synonym for Italy. What literature there was north of
the Alps was in great part derived from, or was largely dependent
upon, the Italian movement. The fact that the movement originated in
the Latin peninsula, was decisive of the character of the first age of
classical learning (1400-1550). It was a revival of Latin as opposed
to Greek literature. It is now well understood that the fall of
Constantinople, though an influential incident of the movement,
ranks for little among the causes of the Renaissance. What was
revived in Italy in the fifteenth century was the interest of the Schools
of the early Empire—of the second and third century.... But in one
decisive feature, the literary sentiment of the fifteenth century was a
reproduction of that of the Empire. It was rhetorical, not scientific.
Latin literature as a whole is rhetorical.... The divorce of the literature
of knowledge and the literature of form which characterised the
epoch of decay under the early empire, characterised equally the
epoch of revival in the Italy of the Popes.... The knowledge and
wisdom buried in the Greek writers presented a striking contrast to
the barren sophistic which formed the curriculum of the Latin
schools. It became the task of the scholars of the second period of
the classical revival to disinter this knowledge.... Philology had
meant composition and verbal emendation; it now meant the
apprehension of the ideas and usages of the ancient world. Scholars
had exerted themselves to write, they now bent all their effort to
know.... There came now into existence what has ever since been
known as ‘learning,’ in the special sense of the term. The first period
of humanism in which the words of the ancient authors had been
studied, was thus the preparatory school for the humanism of the
second period, in which the matter was the object of attention.
As Italy had been the home of classical taste in the first period,
France became the home of classical learning in the second. Single
names can be mentioned, such as Victorius or Sigonius in Italy,
Mursius or Vulcanius in the Low Countries, who were distinguished
representatives of ‘learning,’ but in Bulæus, Turnebus, Lambrinus,
Scaliger, Casaubon, and Saumaise, France produced a constellation
of humanists whose fame justly eclipsed that of all their
contemporaries.
If we ask why Italy did not continue to be the centre of the
humanist movement, which she had so brilliantly inaugurated, the
answer is that the intelligence was crushed by the reviviscence of
ecclesiastical ideas. Learning is the result of research, and research
must be free and cannot coexist with the claim of the Catholic clergy
to be superior to enquiry. The French school, it will be observed, is
wholly in fact or in intention Protestant. As soon as it was decided
(as it was before 1600) that France was to be a Catholic country, and
the University of Paris a Catholic university, learning was
extinguished in France. France saw without regret and without
repentance the expatriation of her unrivalled scholars. With Scaliger
and Saumaise, the seat of learning was transferred from France to
Holland. The third period of classical learning thus coincides with the
Dutch school. From 1593, the date of Scaliger’s removal to Leyden,
the supremacy in the republic of learning was possessed by the
Dutch. In the course of the eighteenth century, the Dutch school was
gradually supplanted by the North German, which from that time
forward has taken, and still possesses, the lead in philological
science.”[420]
 CHAPTER II.
THE INVENTION OF PRINTING AND THE WORK OF THE
FIRST PRINTERS OF HOLLAND AND GERMANY.
1440-1528.
“
FOUR men, Gutenberg, Columbus, Luther, and Copernicus,
stand at the dividing line of the Middle Ages, and serve as boundary
stones marking the entrance of mankind into a higher and finer
epoch of its development.”[421]
It would be difficult to say which one of the four has made the
largest contribution to this development or has done the most to lift
up the spirit of mankind and to open for men the doors to the new
realms that were in readiness. The Genoese seaman and discoverer
opens new realms to our knowledge and imagination, leads Europe
from the narrow restrictions of the Middle Ages out into the vast
space of Western oceans, and in adding to the material realms
controlled by civilisation, widens still more largely the range of its
thought and fancy. The Reformer of Wittenberg, in breaking the
bonds which had chained the spirits of his fellow-men and in
securing for them again their rights as individual Christians,
conquers for them a spiritual realm and brings them into renewed
relations with their Creator. The great astronomer shatters, through
his discoveries, the fixed and petty conceptions of the universe
which had ruled the minds of mankind, and in bringing to them fresh
light on the nature and extent of created things, widens at the same
time their whole understanding of themselves and of duty. The
citizen of Mayence may claim to have unchained intelligence and
given to it wings. He utilised lead no longer as a death-bringing ball,
but in the form of life-quickening letters which were to bring before
thousands of minds the teachings of the world’s thinkers. Each one
of the four had his part in bringing to the world light, knowledge, and
development.
At the time when the art of printing finally took shape in the mind of
Gutenberg, the direction of literary and intellectual interests of
Germany rested, as we have seen, largely with Italy. The fact,
however, that the new art had its birthplace, not in Florence, which
was at that time the centre of the literary activities of Europe, but in
Mayence, heretofore a town which had hardly been connected at all
with literature, and the further fact that the printing-presses were
carrying on their work in Germany for nearly fifteen years before two
printers, themselves Germans, set up the first press in Italy,
exercised, of necessity, an important influence in inciting literary
activities throughout Germany and in the relations borne by
Germany to the scholarship of the world.
The details of the life and early work of Gutenberg are at best but
fragmentary, and have been a subject of much discussion. It is not
necessary, for the purpose of this treatise, to give detailed
consideration to the long series of controversies as to the respective
claims of Gutenberg of Mayence, of Koster of Haarlem, or of other
competitors, as to the measure of credit to be assigned to each in
the original discovery or of the practical development of the the
printing-press. It seems in any case evident that whatever minds
elsewhere were at that time puzzling over the same problem, it was
the good fortune of Gutenberg to make the first practical application
of the printing-press to the production of impressions from movable
type, while it was certainly from Mayence that the art spread
throughout the cities, first of Germany, and later of Italy and France.
It is to be borne in mind (and I speak here for the non-technical
reader) that, as indicated in the above reference, the distinction and
important part of the invention of Gutenberg was, not the production
of a press for the multiplication of impressions, but the use of
movable type and the preparation of the form from which the
impressions were struck off. The art of printing from blocks, since
classified as xylographic printing, had been practised in certain
quarters of Europe for fifty years or more before the time of
Gutenberg, and if Europe had had communication with China,
xylography might have been introduced four or five centuries earlier.
With the block-books, the essential thing was the illustrations, and
what text or letterpress accompanied these was usually limited to a
few explanatory or descriptive words engraved on the block, above,
beneath or around the picture. Occasionally, however, as in the Ars
Moriendi, there were entire pages of text engraved, like the designs,
on the solid block. The earlier engraving was done on hard wood,
but, later, copper was also employed. It is probable that the block-
books originated in the Netherlands, and it is certain that in such
towns as Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, the art was developed
more rapidly than elsewhere, so that during the first half of the
fifteenth century, the production of wood engravings and of books
made up of engravings (printed only on one side, and accompanied
by a few words of text), began to form an important article of trade.
The subjects of these designs were for the most part Biblical, or at
least religious. One of the earlier of the block-book publications and
probably the most characteristic specimen of the class, is the volume
known as the Biblia Pauperum. This was a close imitation of a
manuscript book that had for five or six centuries been popular as a
work of religious instruction. It had been composed about 850, by S.
Ausgarius, a monk of Corbie, who afterwards became Bishop of
Hamburg. The scriptorium established by him at Corbie was said to
have been the means of preserving from destruction a number of
classics, including the Annals of Tacitus.[422] The use, five centuries
later, as one of the first productions of the printing-press, of the
monk’s own composition, may be considered as a fitting
acknowledgement of the service thus rendered by him to the world’s
literature. Examples of manuscript copies of the Biblia Pauperum are
in existence in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, in Munich, in the
British Museum, and elsewhere, and there is no difficulty in
comparing these with the printed copies produced in the
Netherlands, which are also represented in these collections.
It is probable that Laurence Koster of Haarlem, whose name is,
later, associated with printing from movable type, was himself an
engraver of block-books. Humphreys is, in fact, inclined to believe
that the first block-book edition of the Biblia Pauperum was actually
Koster’s work, basing this opinion on the similarity of the
compositions and of their arrangement to those of the Speculum
Humanæ Salvationis, which was the first work printed from movable
type, and the production of which is now generally credited to
Koster.[423] The Biblia Pauperum was printed from blocks in
Germany as late as 1475, but before that date an edition had been
printed from movable type by Pfister in Bamberg.
As has been pointed out by many of the writers on the subject, the
so-called invention of printing was not so much the result of an
individual inspiration, as the almost inevitable consequence of a long
series of experiments and of partial processes which had been
conducted in various places where the community was interesting
itself in the multiplication of literature.
If, as is probably the case, the first book printed from movable type
is to be credited to Koster, it remains none the less the case that
Gutenberg’s process must have been worked out for itself, and that
the German possessed, what the Hollander appears to have lacked,
not merely the persistence and the practical understanding required
to produce a single book, but the power to overcome obstacles and
to instruct others, and was thus able to establish the new art on a
lasting foundation.
The claims of the Hollanders under which Koster is to be regarded
as the first printer, or at least (bearing in mind the Chinese
precedents in the tenth century) the first European printer, from
movable type, claims which Humphreys accepts as well founded, are
in substance as follows: Laurence Koster was born, somewhere in
Holland, about 1370, and died in Haarlem about 1440. He is
believed to have made his first experiments with movable wooden
types about 1426, and to have worked with metal types about ten
years later. The principal of the earlier authorities concerning
Koster’s career is a certain Hadrian Junius, who completed, in 1569,
a history of Holland, which was published in 1588. He speaks of
Koster as being a man of an honourable family, in which the office of
Sacristan (custos, Coster or Koster) was hereditary, and he
describes in detail the development of the invention of type, from the
cutting of pieces of beech-bark into the form of letters, to the final
production of the metal fonts. Junius goes on to relate the method
under which Koster’s first book (from type), Speculum Humanæ
Salvationis, was printed, in 1430. This book, the origin of which is not
known, had for many years been popular among the Benedictines,
and few of their monasteries were without a copy. As a result of this
popularity, many examples of the manuscript copies have been
preserved, some of which are in the Arundel collection in the British
Museum. Zani says that the Speculum was compiled for the
assistance of poor preachers, and in support of this view he quotes
certain lines, which may serve also as an example of Latinity and of
the general style:

Predictum prohemium hujus libri de contentis compilavi

Et propter pauperes predicatores hoc opponere curavi.[424]

Koster appears to have produced, about 1428, an edition of a portion

of the Speculum in which the entire pages (presenting on the upper
half two designs, and on the lower two columns of text) are printed
from solid wooden blocks. Humphreys gives examples of these
pages. The cutting of the text, all the letters of which had, of course,
to be cut in reverse, is a wonderful piece of work. About 1430, was
completed the first issue printed from movable types. The
arrangement of the pages is the same, the upper half is occupied
with two designs (printed in brown ink, from wooden blocks), and the
lower half is given to the text, printed in black ink, from the metal
type. The first typographic edition contains a number of xylographic
pages. In the type-pages, the block-illustration was printed first, and
the sheet was then imposed again for the printing of the text. Both
the designs and the text were modelled to follow very closely the
character of the manuscripts of the period. The volume is
undoubtedly the earliest European example of printing from type,
and the evidence that it was the work of Koster, and that it was
produced not later than 1430, or about twenty years earlier than the
Bible of Gutenberg, is, I understand, now accepted by the best
authorities as practically conclusive. Three editions of the book were
printed by Koster before his death in 1440, the third being printed in
Dutch (instead of Latin), and being entirely typographic. This is the
edition seen and described (128 years later) by Junius. After
specifying the method employed by Koster (according to his own
views concerning movable type), Junius goes on to say, “It was by
this method that he produced impressions of engraved plates, to
which he added ‘separate’ letters. I have seen a book of this kind,
the first rude effort of his invention, printed by him on one side only;
this book was entitled the Mirror of Our Salvation.” While this
evidence of Junius comes first into record one hundred and twenty-
eight years after the time assigned to the printing of Koster’s first
book, it is the conclusion of Humphreys, Blades, and other historians
that, in consideration of the circumstances under which Junius wrote,
and the nature of the information which was evidently at that time
available for him, his testimony may safely be accepted as
conclusive. Junius goes on to say that Koster, having perfected his
system, and finding a rapidly increasing demand for his printed
books, was unable to manage the work with the aid of the members
of his own family. He took foreign workmen into his employ, which
eventually led to the abstraction of his secret and caused the credit
of his invention to be given to others.[425] Junius gives further details
concerning the channels through which he secured the record of the
work of Koster. He refers to a certain Nicholas Galius who had been
his first preceptor, and who remembered having heard the facts
connected with Koster’s discovery from a certain Cornelius when the
latter was over eighty years of age. Cornelius testified that he had
himself been a binder in the establishment of Koster, and the Dutch
historian, Meerman, has discovered in the records of the church of
Haarlem a memorandum dated 1474, which is evidence that there
was at that date a binder in the town called Cornelius.[426]
In claiming for Holland the prestige of inventing the several
distinctive processes connected with the printing of books,
Humphreys sums up as follows: It is beyond dispute that the Dutch
were the first to produce block-books, and thus were virtually the first
printers of books. It is also a matter of record that it was the printers
of Holland who first devised the art of stereotyping, a process which
was applied by John Miller of Amsterdam towards the close of the
seventeenth century. There is, therefore, apart from the details
above specified and from the evidence of tradition, a strong natural
presumption in favour of the development in Holland of the
intervening step of substituting movable types for carved pages of
letters. Humphreys points out that there are other references to the
production in the Netherlands of books from movable metal types,
before the date at which Gutenberg’s first volume was completed in
Mayence. In a record of accounts of Jean Robert, Abbé of Cambrai,
the manuscript of which has been preserved in the archives of the
city of Lille, appears the entry: “Item, for a printed (getté en molle)
Doctrinal that I sent for to Bruges by Macquart, who is a writer at
Valenciennes, in the month of January, 1445, for Jacquet, twenty
sous, Tournois. Little Alexander had one the same, that the church
paid for.” It is stated later in the record that one of these books
proved to be so “full of faults” that it had to be replaced by a written
copy.[427] The purport of the term getté en molle (which might
possibly have been written jetté or guetté) was first elucidated by M.
Besuard, who pointed out that it evidently stood for “cast in a mould,”
the reference being to the metallic types, which were so cast. In the
letters of naturalisation accorded, in 1474, to the first printers with
movable types established in Paris, the term used is escritoire en
molle, or writing by means of moulds or moulded letters. Humphreys
is inclined to give credit to the theory, which is presented by many of
the advocates of Koster, that the first suggestion of the new art was
brought to Gutenberg in Strasburg by a workman who had been
employed by Koster in Haarlem, but he admits that this theory is
supported by practically nothing that can be called evidence, and
depends for its authority simply upon the sequence of events, and
upon the surmises and probabilities suggested by Junius. It remains
the case that after the death of Koster, which occurred either in 1440
or in 1439, the production of books from type came to an end in
Holland, and that for instruction in the new art Europe was indebted
not to Haarlem but to Mayence. We may accept as conclusive the
evidence which gives to Koster the credit of producing the first book
printed (outside of China) from movable type, without lessening the
value of the service rendered by Gutenberg. The shores of our
Western Continent were undoubtedly visited by Eric and his
Northmen, but it was Columbus who gave to Europe the New World.
The production of printed books, which changed the whole
condition of literary production and of literary ownership, is to be
traced directly to the operations of Gutenberg and Fust. Kapp
mentions that if it were not for the records of certain court processes
of Strasburg and of Mayence, we should have hardly any trustworthy
references whatsoever to the work or the relations of Gutenberg
prior to 1450.
By means of these court records, however, it has proved possible
to secure some data concerning various undertakings in which
Gutenberg was engaged before he devoted himself to his printing-
office. He belonged to a noble family of Mayence, the family name of
which was originally Gensfleisch, a name Latinised by some writers
of the time as Ansicarus. For more than a century, the Gensfleische
stood at the head of the nobility of the city in the long series of
contests carried on with the guilds and citizens.
Until the sacking of the city, after the outbreak of October, 1462,
Mayence was the most important of the free cities and of the
commercial centres of the middle Rhine district, and was an
important competitor for the general trade of central Europe with
Strasburg on the upper river and with Cologne in the region below.
The citizens felt themselves strong enough, with the beginning of the
fifteenth century, to make a sturdy fight against the old-time control
claimed by the nobility, and as early as 1420, they had overcome the
patricians in a contest which turned upon the reception of the newly
chosen Elector, Conrad III. As one result of this struggle, a number
of the Gensfleische found themselves among the exiles.
Gutenberg’s father, whose name was Frilo, had held the office of
Tax Receiver or General Accountant in the city, and was among
those who were banished in 1420. Gutenberg himself was born
either in 1397 or 1398. He appears to have passed a portion of his
youth at the little village of Eltville, and from there went to Strasburg.
In the year 1433, an entry in the tax record of Mayence speaks of
Henne Gensfleisch, called Gutenberg, who was an uncle of the
printer. About the year 1440, Gutenberg was engaged in Strasburg
in the manufacture of looking-glasses, and is already referred to as a
man of scientific attainments and learned in inventions.
One of the court records above referred to gives the details of a
suit brought by the brothers Dritzehn against Gutenberg, in
connection with this first manufacturing business. Another Dritzehn,
a brother or a cousin of the above, had as early as 1437 applied to
Gutenberg to be instructed (in consideration of the payment of an
honorarium) in a “certain art” (in etlicher kunst). Shortly thereafter
Gutenberg entered into an arrangement with a certain Hans Riffe of
Lichtenau, and instructed him in the trade of manufacturing mirrors,
Riffe making an investment in the business and sharing the profits.
Dritzehn made in all, three contracts with Gutenberg; under the
first, he was instructed in the art of stone-polishing, and took some
interest in this branch of Gutenberg’s business; under the second, he
interested himself in the manufacturing of mirrors; while the third
contract refers to certain arts and undertakings (kunste und afentur)
in which Dritzehn also received instruction, and to the carrying on of
which he also contributed an investment.
It is the opinion of some of the students on the subject that the
researches of Gutenberg, which resulted in 1450 in the production of
a working printing-press, had begun at least ten years back, and
that, in connection with these researches, he had been obliged to
borrow money or to accept investments from Dritzehn and from other
associates. The vague terms used in referring to the undertakings
which were associated with or which followed the mirror
manufacturing business (“a certain art”) indicate that these
associates had been cautioned to give no information as to the
precise nature of the work in which Gutenberg was experimenting.
Humphreys is of opinion that the term “manufacture of looking-
glasses” was used partly as a blind and partly as a joke, and that
Gutenberg was actually engaged in the production (with the aid of
one of Koster’s assistants) of copies of the Speculum (Mirror).
Against this view is the fact that Gutenberg did not print the
Speculum at all. If Gutenberg were already working over the printing-
press invention at the time of his association with Dritzehn and with