Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Critical Image)

Virtual Anxiety examines the fears and hopes surrounding imaging, information and reproductive technologies. It offers a gendered and contextualised reading which is critical of the trend towards technological determinism and the new biology of machines, and addresses the relationship between photography and the new imaging technologies in general. Concentrating on the contexts of medicine and law Virtual anxiety contains new research on body scanners and criminal identification technologies, as well as studies on the visible human project and the murder of James Bulger. The book also draws on the monster myths of Frankenstein and Dracula to expose and parody the masculine unconscious in contemporary reproductive and information technologies; science is arguably fathering itself, and the distinction between life and information has collapsed and created a new generation of undead.