Gendered Bodies and New Technologies: Rethinking Embodiment in a Cyber-era

In this era of ubiquitous information flow, heightened mobility and limitless consumer convenience, human interaction with new technologies has become increasingly seamless. In the process, the human body is effectively and steadily reduced to just another interface, or a “second life”, so to speak. What is easily forgotten during this translucent transaction is that being human also necessarily implies being embodied. In other words, to constitute a body in its non-negotiable physicality is still what it entails to be human (amongst other things). To live daily in and through the complicated and dynamic intersection between “mind” and “body”, psychology and physiology―also known as embodiment―is what makes us human.

Amanda du Preez is associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Pretoria where she teaches Art History and Visual Culture. She has obtained a DPhil in English from the University of South Africa on the topic of cyberfeminism and embodiment in 2003. She has co-edited South African Visual Culture (2005) and is the editor of Taking a Hard Look: Gender and Visual Culture (2009). She has served on several editorial and advisory boards and has published widely on topics mainly pertaining to gender, embodiment and the sublime.