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Eating beside Ourselves examines eating as a site of transfer and transformation across bodies and selves. The contributors show that by turning organic substance into food, acts of eating create interconnected food webs organized by relative conditions of edibility through which eaters may in turn become eaten. In case studies ranging from nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial animal husbandry in the United States, biodynamic winemaking in Aotearoa New Zealand, and reindeer herding in Arctic Norway to the creation of taste sensation in pet food and the entanglement of sugar and diabetes in the Caribbean, the contributors explore how food and eating create thresholds for human and nonhuman relations. These thresholds mediate different conditions and states of being: between living and dying, between the edible and the inedible, and the relationship between living organisms and their surrounding environment. In this way, acts of eating and the process of metabolism partake in the making and unmaking of multispecies ontologies, taxonomies, and ecologies.

Contributors. Alex Blanchette, Deborah Heath, Hannah Landecker, Marianne Elisabeth Lien, Amy Moran-Thomas, Heather Paxson, Harris Solomon, Emily Yates-Doerr, Wim Van Daele

The love affair between humans and the machines that have made us faster and more powerful has expanded into cyberspace, where computer technology seems to offer both the promise of heightened erotic fulfillment and the threat of human obsolescence. In this pathfinding study, Claudia Springer explores the techno-erotic imagery in recent films, cyberpunk fiction, comic books, television, software, and writing on virtual reality and artificial intelligence to reveal how these futuristic images actually encode current debates concerning gender roles and sexuality.

Drawing on psychoanalytical and film theory, as well as the history of technology, Springer offers the first sustained analysis of eroticism and gender in such films as RoboCop, The Terminator, Eve of Destruction, and Lawnmower Man; cyberpunk books such as Neuromancer, Count Zero, Virtual Light, A Fire in the Sun, and Lady El; the comic books Cyberpunk and Interface, among others; and the television series Mann and Machine. Her analysis demonstrates that while new electronic technologies have inspired changes in some pop culture texts, others stubbornly recycle conventions from the past, refusing to come to terms with the new postmodern social order.

Written to be accessible and entertaining for students and general readers as well as scholars, Electronic Eros will be of interest to a wide interdisciplinary audience.