Eros, women and technology

Eros, Women, and Technology seeks to address the potential of a vibrant position for the body and a vital role for women in technoculture. The important job of imagining and re-imagining the potential of technologies to bring benefits, costs, and concomitant effects requires a plurality of approaches. Using a highly interdisciplinary methodology, I focus on an original project of research-creation undertaken between 1998 and 2011, featuring video interviews with thirteen contemporary artists and designers. Participants' personal stories were gathered using my radical method of nude narrative enquiry, and analysed using affinity mapping to identify important questions regarding erotic experience, expression and imagination, body image, pregnancy and mothering, and relationships between mothers and daughters. Themes of the erotic body and technology in education, family life, creative practices, and intellectual and professional pursuits, uncover a range of technological contents and discontents.

Through an examination of the history of women's education, a positive chronology of their historical achievements is reported. Theoretical grounding is established through the Chora as conceptual locus for the female body in creative and technological practices. Related thinking of second- and third-wave feminists Balsamo, Battersby, Braidotti, Butler, Grosz, Irigaray, and Young addresses issues of female bodies, maternity, relationships, and the place of women in technoculture. The role of the camera as a favoured technological tool is examined through the work of photographic pioneers Julia Margaret Cameron, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, and Francesca Woodman, and parallels are drawn through my videographic artworks. Arendt, Blixen, Cavarero, and Kristeva provide theoretical framing for narrative in contemporary art and design projects using mobile technologies to locate and disseminate compelling personal and community stories. Insights are offered into the lives of creative women research participants who reinvigorate ways of thinking, making, and Being in technoculture. Concluding concepts, ideas, recommendations, and strategies are offered to inspire wider consideration. Original research expands from the narratives and professional practices of intellectuals, artists, and designers to build a better understanding of women's individual efforts, and collective work, on the frontlines of eroticism, creative making, and technological change.