Potency in All the Right Places: Viagra as a Technology of the Gendered Body LAURA MAMO AND JENNIFER FISHMAN Recent work from the humanities and social sciences has begun to explore the multiple interfaces between technologies and bodies, raising important questions regarding the ways in which bodies and current technological innovations, representations and biomedical practices are mutually constituted. These inter- faces have led to what many are calling the emergence of ‘techno-bodies’ (Balsamo, 1996), ‘hybrids’ (Latour, 1993), ‘plastic’ bodies (Bordo, 1993, 1997), ‘posthuman’ bodies (Halberstam and Livingston, 1995; Hayles, 1999), ‘cyborgs’ (Haraway, 1991) and even ‘monsters’ (Lykke and Braidotti, 1996). Central to these approaches is the idea that the human body, once thought to be organic and natural has been repositioned as a boundary figure neither wholly ‘organic/natural’ nor ‘technological and cultural’. Instead of pre-figuring culture, bodies are constituted within it. At work is the erasure of the nature/culture and body/machine dualisms by replacing a stable, fixed body with emergent, flexible and ‘volatile’ bodies (Grosz, 1994). Here, bodies are understood as changed by and also changing technological innovations, representations and medical prac- tices. Theoretical approaches addressing the body often obscure the social, cultural and socio-economic contexts within which the co-constitution of potentially transformative technologies and (material and discursive) bodies occur. It is our contention that reformulations of techno-bodies, understood as ‘health, enhanced . . . [and] more real than real’ (Balsamo, 1996: 5), occur within new cultures of biomedicalization which profoundly influence, and are influenced by, the emer- gent meanings of and inscriptions on the materiality of bodies. We use the term Body & Society © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 7(4): 13–35 [1357–034X (200112)7:4;13–35;017600] 02 Mamo (jr/d) 10/12/01 11:47 am Page 13