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Love From The Machine: Technosexualities And The Desire For Machinic Bodies, Ann-Renee Clark

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dimensions and practices of "technosexualities" - human desires for machinic bodies. For the purposes of this project, technosexualities are defined as sexual and/or other intimate desires for technologically enhanced or constructed humanoid bodies ("machinic bodies") or the desire to be such a machinic body. A machinic body may be mechanical (robotic) and/or digital, techno-biological (as per biological computing and/or a laboratory-“grown” or built body), or “cyborg” (cybernetic organism, a partially technologically-modified, partially biological body.) Rather than interpreting technosexuals as troubled or disturbed “fetishists” who are attracted to the unnatural, or imposing suppositions of feelings of impotence …