The Erotics of the Technological Body

Since the beginning of the industrial age, representations of technology have always been associated with eroticism and gender roles. Industrial machinery, as well as cars, have been framed as objects of sexual desire and invested of techno-erotic impulses. Engines and machines have been described through sexual metaphors and have been made an object of cult by artistic movements such as Italian Futurism. The passage from the industrial to the digital age has modified our relationship to technology and the awareness of our body through the use of technological objects –yet techno-eroticism still remains a central drive.

Why is technology a source of erotic thrill? A central motivation is the relationship with power. Technology provides control over power, and, by extension, power over the "Other". After the beginning of the nineteenth century, machines came to be perceived as threatening and uncontrollable entities, and thus made the object of displacement and projection of patriarchal fears towards female sexuality. The physical manifestations of industrial machines, such as size, shape and motions (thrust/pause/press), provided straightforward metaphors for human sexual responses, and the increasingly widespread use of cars made it possible to the large mass of consumers to experience the extension and transformation of the human body through exhilarating blasts of speed and power. The drastic changes in technology have brought a new kind of awareness. As an object of erotic attraction, electronic technology is of a different order from the industrial one exemplified by the car. The masculine power of size and motion has been replaced by the feminized and miniaturized intricacy of electronic circuitry. Re-production has supplanted production and space has become an abstract entity hidden behind the opaque screen of computers and electronic equipments. The more overt sexual connotations of power and strength of industrial machinery has given way to an ambiguous relationship with gender roles and sexual identity. Small size, fluid and quiet functioning computers, which provide the practical possibility to assume on-line personae, invert or blend gender roles. The erotic and exciting feeling experienced with electronic circuitry transgresses the notion of solely body control, in that cybernetics enables control over the information and, for those who own the technology, control over the consumer classes. Donna Haraway's call for a feminist embrace of technology is grounded on the recognition that the technological evocation of feminine metaphors in terms of appearance and functioning does not acknowledge the dangers hidden behind the process of miniaturization: "small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous as in cruise missiles" (153).