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Full-Text Articles in Film and Media Studies
Technofetishism And The Uncanny Desires Of Asfr (Alt. Sex. Fetish. Robots), Allison De Fren
Technofetishism And The Uncanny Desires Of Asfr (Alt. Sex. Fetish. Robots), Allison De Fren
Allison De Fren
This essay interrogates the visual landscape of technofetishism, particularly in relation to the machine woman, using as a springboard a little-known internet community of technosexuals who collectively refer to their fetish for artificial bodies as A.S.F.R. (alt.sex.fetish.robots). Although A.S.F.R. was made possible by the advent of virtual communities, its fetishistic interests have historical antecedents that were documented in the early literature of sexology. Against their classifications of similar fetishistic practices as variations of necrophilia, as well as subsequent Freudian interpretations of fetishism as grounded in castration anxiety, this essay argues that A.S.F.R. is less about technology in general, or the …
The Anatomical Gaze In Tomorrow's Eve, Allison De Fren
The Anatomical Gaze In Tomorrow's Eve, Allison De Fren
Allison De Fren
In the sf novel "L'Eve future" [Tomorrow's Eve, 1886] by Philippe Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the female body is dissected repeatedly: a female android is technologically disassembled, a living woman is poetically blazoned, and a dead woman is cinematically deconstructed. This article explores the novel's central thematic of dissection, tracing its rhetorical and visual coding to the anatomy theater of the Renaissance, and in particular to the work of Andreas Vesalius, to whom the scientist-anatomist Thomas Edison (a character in the novel) is explicitly compared. Within the anatomy theater, the medical investigation of the body was conducted within a highly …