This dissertation surveys effaced bodies and the complications and victories left in their wake. While the recent ‘material turn’ in media studies has produced valuable insight into the history of media artifacts and forms (as well as their contemporary progeny), the centrality of writing practices and inscription technologies in such scholarship has generated a rather ironic critical blind spot as regards the corresponding phenomenon of erasure. As inscription and erasure are co-constitutive forces that can only exist through ongoing encounters with one another, it is necessary—if we are to understand mechanical writing in all of its intricacy—to also keep in mind the parallel act of erasure and what has been lost or effaced as a result of the modern drive to write and record the world in so many ways. As such, this project considers three moments of erasure—or, scenes of deletion—between the periods of 1850 and 1950 in which the body serves as the site or object of effacement. In addition to carving out a secret route through which to explore the body’s intersection with media technology (and the increasing mutability that has befallen it as a result of this association), this project also throws light on practices and technologies of erasure that have, themselves, become subject to deletion from the evolving historical record. The first case study considers the neglected pre-history of Photoshop by elaborating the retouching practices that grew up alongside the camera during the nineteenth century. It argues that such practices worked to erect a visible difference between the portrait of the criminal and that of his genteel counterpart, thereby helping to secure the class privilege of the latter at a time when the ‘democratic’ representational style of the camera threatened to undo it. The second study explores the feminine