“Body of My Own”: Disembodiment and the Digital Feminine in Mara Eagle’s Autoerotix
The digital feminine presence is the ideal interface for the unknown region between desire and fear. Housed in stoke-able fetish objects like iPhones, our in-phone secretaries like Siri mediate this unknown space, not just by sorting our emails and organizing our schedules but by performing affective labour we have come to associate with the feminine. In the digital realm, this work is disembodied. As Montreal artist Mara Eagle puts it, “because they do not speak through bodies, digital voices are never tongue tied, choked by breath – or by passion.” Eagle, a Concordia MFA student, explores the tension between the disembodied digital voice and female pleasure in Autoerotix, an 11-minute, five-channel “audio recital” of eight pop songs about female masturbation recorded between 1984 and 2015. Emerging out of her research on labour, mimicry and simulation, Eagle’s Autoerotix uses digital tools to disembody the concept of female pleasure.