Science, technology and globalization have not only re-mapped the spaces into which the bodies are contained, represented and read but have also re-configured the body itself and its boundaries. From Haraway’s cyborgs to Hayles’ posthuman narratives of life cycles, we are acknowledging how electronic culture is changing our whole perception of/within the body and how the notion of the body’s borders has become a shifting and mutable one through the processes engendered by a "prosthetic culture" and by "plugging" into the machine.

Hayles’ distinctions between primatology and the post-human condition/print and electronic culture, focuse on the aspects of old and new, static and dynamic. Nevertheless, the prominence of visuality in the Victorian age, especially in the Literary Annuals, also invokes post-modern notions of hybrid bodies, in that the merging of the human with technology is present at different levels. The Annuals display a collection of portraits/pictures alongside framing/framed writings in prose or poetry, thus drawing attention to the technology producing the visual work –be it an engraving or the written word- and to the artistry of the whole album. As a "body" of work containing representations of human bodies, handled and manipulated by/for human bodies, the question of the intersection and blending of body and technology into a hybrid and genderless form necessarily arises.

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