Introduction

Building on her impactful book, Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle explores the impact of the digital age on human interactions. Her writing illustrates, with various examples that technology's appeal rests on the promise that it will solve the problems and will help people lead a life that is "friction free". She questions psychoanalysts themselves who have given in to the use of disembodied technologies such as Skype. Rosemary Balsam focuses on modern gender fluidity and its relation to the psychic representation of individuals' bodies in the context of burgeoning technological expansion of possibility. She suggests that modern gender plurality is demanding a transformation of personal pronouns in the common language and this seems to signal a profound change in era. She carefully explores essential questions about the natal material body in the context of gender fluidity, transgender roles and enactments.