Bodies in E-Lit

Ensslin, A., Rice, C., Riley, S., Wilks, C., Perram, M., Fowlie, H., Munro L., & Bailey, K. A. (2021). Bodies in E-Lit. In Dene Grigar & O'Sullivan, J. (Eds.), Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Company. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501363474.ch-007

Introduction

In this chapter, we offer a survey of electronic literature (“e-literature” or “e-lit”) that deals with embodiment, corporeality, and body image in aesthetic and material ways. We begin with an examination of e-literature that foregrounds the post-human body as embedded in the cybernetic feedback loop in ways that debunk Cartesian dichotomies of mind/body and human/machine intelligence. We explore body-themed, feminist e-lit in theory and practice, arguing that female-coded bodies have been pitched against patriarchal neoliberalist appearance culture and positioned to challenge reader-players’ normalized expectations of bodily playability in digital media. In this context, we examine feminist encoded hypertextuality as perhaps the most canonical, poststructuralist approach to anti- phallocentric corporeality in e-lit. We consider works that subvert the “ergodic gaze” (Ensslin et al.) in multimodal ways, rupturing the scopophilic interface and allowing the voyeur to gaze via haptic intrusion. In concluding, we surface some of the ways that postdigital écriture feminine has sought to write new languages, spaces, and worlds for women-identified and gender nonconforming bodies. Expanding on the latter, we map out a new, applied e-lit project (“Writing New Bodies”) that adopts a reader-centric, feminist, participatory co-design process to allow young women-identified and gender nonconforming individuals to write new worlds of digital-born fiction in which they feel at home in their bodies.