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One of HBO’s television series Sex in the City’s major attractions is its obvert defence of women’s independence in a context in which thirtysomething single white (or otherwise) females are regarded as a social anomaly and are still judged and, above all, valued according to their capacity to find a partner and become wives and mothers. Like other examples of post-feminist or chick-lit fiction, however, Sex and the City’s defence of female independence stops short of fully embracing spinsterhood has a fulfilling option for women. This paper focuses on the limitations of postfeminist fiction to escape the patriarchal conventions that still regulate social interaction in both the public and the private spheres.

This paper discusses Le Guin's classic novel as an example of the creative use of popular fiction codes and motifs to deal with gender issues. The use of androginy in the text is read as a thematization of the bisexualist bias in dealing with gendered bodies in our culture.Through the experiences of the main character, the novel reworks the classic science-fiction motif of the "alien encounter" in order to tackle the importance of otherness in the cultural understanding of gender. Far from offering an escapist utopia of unified androginy, the text sets free the multiplicity of identity options that exist behind the naturalized bisexual model.

This paper examines body-building as a result of the corporal technologies of early XXI th century, and also as a popular practice that erases social borders between the walls of the gym. My purpose is to interrogate the bodybuilding magazines, and particularly, the publicity dedicated to products for instructors, in order to investigate the bond between body and popular culture in a post-Hiroshima and post-clonation World.

The article discusses the figure of the British scientist Robert Boyle as the construction of the modern image of scientific authority and objectivity through social and literary technologies that systematically exclude nonhegemonic groups (women, colored people). The paper argues that the figure of the self-invisible modest witness in technoscientific discourse should be queered in order to enable a more corporeal and situated form of knowledge.

The appearence and popularization of the Internet has created new forms of writing, that compel us to think anew about identity and subjectivity. Webjournals or blogs are specially interesting because they are a massive phenomenon that uses autobiographical writing in a peculiar way. These forms of writing stress a traditional paradox of the genre: the coexistence between a purpose of private, confessional and spontaneous writing and a public image, carefully built, as a result of its writing. The technology is new, but, in fact, the paradox is old. This paper tries to explore this old paradox, our eternal condition of cyborgs, our use of technologies in order to construct a public, unique and recognizable identity. In order to do so, I will try to show the virtual condition of any written individual "this issue has already been dealt with by autobiographical studies", focusing on blogs, and especially on concrete example (Lord Whimsy's Journal). I will pay attention to gender as a technology that constructs identity and, at the same time, is deconstructed by the autobiographical narratives analyzed. In short, I attempt to show that virtual and autobiographical discourse do not bring forth a new kind of subject but the permanence of an old phenomenon "clearly developed by dandyism, for instance": the use of technologies to re-invent, re-formulate and re-construct us as multiple, hybrid and mixed subjects.

The text reviews different approaches to the analysis of the discursive construction of the body by power practices. From the late Michel Foucault‚s "technologies of the self" to Judith Butler's performativity, the paper describes the dynamic relationship between the hegemonic and subversive discourses that act upon the body, both as object of regulation and as subject of resistance. The ideological implications of technological practices such as plastic surgery are discussed in the context of inter-sex identities and the medical responses to "sexual dimorfism".

Cyberfeminism has provided us with a new point of view about technology and new political images related to it. These images work as "foundational myths" for all the people engaged in cyberfeminism. This paper, depicting the "grounding of foundational myths" as something crucial, describes a few female characters performing in different contemporary new media projects and embeds them in their theoretical and literary contexts. The focus lies on the content and meaning of the figurations rather than on technological and medial aspects of the art work. Given the fact that the term cyberfeminism is a highly speculative and mythic term with a vague and blurry meaning and an infectious circulation, the examination of aspects of pleasure of the cyborg is conducted within contexts which are not always directly acknowledged by the various protagonists (authors, theorists, artists, programmers, netizens) as strictly cyberfeminist.

Given as a conference paper, this article deals with time, with the passage of time, aspect which punctuates, accurates and times the whole of Yourcenar's production. It appears in many titles of her books, she talks about it in many novels and prose writings of hers, and it is one of the fundamental settings she chooses for her work. She mentions her own years and days, her own vital time, to set books and obsessions, immaturities and fulfillments, she makes it move forward and backwards in the notes and warnings which are always included in her literature. She explains the relativeness, as well as the different tones and textures which past, present and future can adopt.

This text focuses on the issue of human mutation within the frame of contemporary feminist aesthetics through the analysis of Cindy Sherman‚s photographic series Disastres (1986-1989) and Sex Pictures (1992). This work denounces harshly the gradual de-humanization of industrial society and questions obsolete socially established identity patterns. The theoretical discussion of Sherman‚s pieces is based on Judith Butler‚s concept of "perfomativity" and Donna Haraway's idea of the cyborg. The paper seeks a reformulation, within the context of the new technological media used in contemporary artistic practices, of the waning borders between real and virtual bodies of women and men, gays and lesbians, transvestites and transexuals. In other words, the text seeks to explain the deep transformation that affects the very concept of human.

This article works as a riddle, offering several interpretations not only about what the Graal is, but also to whom it serves. Some specialists on Arthurian matters describe the image of a woman touching the Graal. Could it be that the Graal was a originally pre-christian object? Why is it that this symbolic image of masculine theological, sexual, military and political discourse is guarded by women? To answer these questions, the paper discusses Celtic narratives to explain the extermination of Catarism and Occitan culture (where women had a defining role), touching on the Mediterrarean and Indo-iranian origins of the myth. The riddle can only be solved weaving the above mentioned concepts with the symbolic and archetypal dimension of human existence. The narrative shows the thorough task of the Roman Creed to exclude systematically any traces of the feminine in the configuration of explicative models about the spiritual, emotional and social aspects of the individual.

The authors reflect on the equation formulated in Maria-Antònia Oiver's work Tallats de lluna between AIDS and male character+illness, stigmatising it morally with an association to "desviation". The paper discusses several excerpts from the novel to show how its positioning towards AIDS and the implicit aspects of guilt include the historical construct of "corrupt and guilty desviation" that has been the brandmark of Western sexual identity.

This text examines the character of the cat-woman in Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and Paul Schrader's remake of the same title (1981), within the frame of the contemporary evolution of the sinister and its body representations, like David Cronenberg's "New Flesh". The paper analyses both the difference between both versions of the film as well as the ideological implication of its plot and characters, arguing that Schrader's version is actually more conservative in its gender representations than the 1942 movie.