Machine: Bodies, Genders, Technologies

Edited by M. Michaela Hampf and MaryAnn Snyder-Körber.

Women's work. Manning the machine. Bodies electric in an age of the mechanical. Such phrases highlight a crosshatched network of meaning-making in modernity. Technological developments in the concrete sense of devices and operations intersect with longer-standing conceptual architectures. This collection of ten essays explores key interstices of this evolving techno-cultural imaginary through interdisciplinary dialogue. Literary and historical perspectives within American Studies are brought into conversation with Film, Gender, Media, and Transnational Studies. Contributions consider politics of the body from radical self-fashioning to infections of the body politic, the interrelation of gender and technology from the factory floor to the film screen, and imaginations of the technological between the mechanic and the machinic from nineteenth-century electroshocks to millennial avant-gardes. Contents: MaryAnn Snyder-Körber: Apocalypse Not Quite Yet. Cyborg Variations, 1960-2000. - Jasper Verlinden: Transgender Bodies and Male Pregnancy. The Ethics of Radical Self-Refashioning. - Ruth Mayer/Brigitte Weingart: Discursive Contamination. Terrorism, the Body Politic, and the Virus as Trope. - Barbara Antoniazzi: »No Guidance in Regards to Herself«. Immigrants, Workers, and American Womanhood in the Progressive Era. - Heide Volkening: Working Girls. Economies of Love and Work. - Luis Longarela: Body/Screen. Male Spectatorship in Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr.". - Olaf Stieglitz: »Are We Not Men?« Sound, Gender, and a Cinema of Change, 1930-1933. - Norbert Finzsch: Henry Adams, Nikola Tesla, and the 'Body Electric'. Intersections Between Bodies and Electrical Machines. - Doro Wiese: Interventions and Inventions. "Dandy Dust" and the Emergence of the Body-Image. - M. Michaela Hampf/MaryAnn Snyder-Körber/Jasper Verlinden: Teaching Machines. Suggestions for Further Reading. 326 Seiten, gebunden (American Studies - A Monograph Series; Vol. 223/Universitätsverlag Winter 2012)