Given the long and rich tradition of mapping books onto bodies and bodies onto books, we may suppose that if books were to undergo dramatic and profound changes in embodiment, the disturbances would shake up these metaphoric networks, resulting in new configurations.  As texts cease to take the material form of durable marks inscribed on paper and increasingly manifest themselves as electronic polarities, the bodies represented within (and without) electronic documents undergo correlated transformations in embodiment.  In these wide-ranging  changes, electronic literary texts have a special role to play, for they employ the resources of literary language to interrogate the plexed relation of body and text in digital media.  At the same time they also self-consciously interrogate their own status as flickering signifiers rather than durable marks. 

To explore how the connections between flesh and word are both troubled and reinscribed in New Media, I will explore Talan Memmottís Lexia to Perplexia and Deena Larsenís Disappearing Rain.   The two texts choose different points for their theoretical orientation, the origin and the interface.  It should come as no surprise that these points are the foci of theoretical interest, for both are highly charged in different ways.  The origin is charged because it offers the (imaginary) possibility of establishing a source for all that follows and hence a metaphysical grounding of ultimate significance.  The interface is similarly fraught because it marks the boundary between one regime and another, thus establishing the possibility of transformation and setting the parameters within which that transformation will unfold.  Beyond their theoretical importance, the origin and interface are productive topoi to explore together because they tend to work in opposite directions.  Whereas the point of the origin is to settle (or unsettle) a genealogy, the point of the interface is to mark the place where genealogy is disrupted and  replication of the same gives way to the innovation of difference.   In thinking about how traditional gender patterns are both replicated and reconfigured in electronic media,  the origin and interface serve as limit cases for stability and change, reinscription and innovation.

Lexia to Perplexia reveals the co-originary status of subjectivity and electronic technologies.  Instead of the technologies emerging in a history created and directed by human subjects, this work imagines digital technology as being there at the beginning, so that subjects and technologies produce each other simultaneously through  multiple (and specular) recursive loops.  Code erupts through the surface of the screenic text, infecting English with programming languages and resulting in a creole discourse that bespeaks an origin always already permeated by digital technologies.  In Disappearing Rain reinscribes English words into Kanji signs, thus creating a hybrid writing that visually conveys the differences and convergences between ancient traditions and contemporary electronic media.  At the center of this hypertext are women who care for others, a dynamic emphasizing the pleasures and dangers of letting go of a localized self and plunging into a fluid subjectivity no longer bounded by skin surfaces. 

Both works enact hybrid forms balancing ancient myths with contemporary narratives, foregrounding their dual functions of reinscribing the old while pointing toward the new.  As the bodies of these texts are transformed from durable marks to flickering signifiers, the human bodies within them continue to display the stigmata of gender even as they evolve toward hybrid forms that are never entirely readable within the coded surfaces of the textsí electronic bodies.