Machinic minds and posthuman bodies: the complexities of intimacy in three electronic works by Shelley Jackson

By Jill Walker Rettberg, 22 May, 2011
Publication Type
Language
Year
Pages
204-214
Journal volume and issue
63-2 (2010)
Record Status
Abstract (in English)

In her three electronic works, Shelley Jackson exacerbates the tension between self-writing and the diffraction of subjectivity, as she engages with a more explicit autobiographic form. Shifting from hyperfiction in Patchwork Girl (1995) to a fictionalized exercise in remembering through the scrutiny of her body parts in My Body & A Wunderkammer (1997), she eventually explores a pseudo-historiographic and documentary approach of the games she used to play with her sister in The Doll Games (2001), a work closer to an online family album of sorts. The present article purports to interrogate the preservation of the intimate in a context of public self-exposure through an archival electronic medium.