| Summary/Abstract |
This essay offers a reading of advertisements of wearable technologies, or prostheses, designed to enhance sexual pleasure and physical health in Tibbi Dunya Lahore, an Urdu-language medical periodical. It contrasts the conception of the body implicit in these advertisements with that of earlier medieval and early modern discourses on sex. This juxtaposition of historically disparate discourses renders visible the colonial transformations of sexual subjectivity that Urdu print advertising presents. By juxtaposing these medical advertisements with earlier medico-moral discourses, one can see a shift away from technologies of the self, directed at managing the interiority of desire, towards the consumption of ‘small technologies’ that exteriorise pleasure. This material suggests not only the mutual implication of ars erotica and scientia sexualis, but also the subversion of both by the commodification of pleasure.
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