Processing (Post)humanism, Mediating Desire: Technology in the Works of Three Border Playwrights

Abstract

New electronic technology, such as personal video cameras, videotape players, and the internet, has increasingly sparked interest from Northern Mexican border authors across genres. In Juan Ríos’s Generación Atari , Francisco J. López´s Cibernauta: cómo vivir atrapado en la red , and Bárbara Colio’s Teoría y práctica de la muerte de una cucaracha (sin dolor) and La habitación , technological innovations play a key role in the development of the central emotional conflicts. The four dramatic works relate new technology to an increased social openness regarding more diverse expressions of sexuality, yet they also portray existing hierarchies, fraught relationships, and tragic events that signal the limits and interruptions involved in the technological mediation of desire. Rather than any wholesale condemnation or celebration of technology, these works pose human-machine relations as an open question to be shared with and pondered by the audience.