Performing Gendered Work Biographies

Abstract

Individualisation as an ability to craft one’s own life path should have been nowhere more explicit than in the way ICT workers narrated their biographies in this study. In current academic and popular discussions it is often emphasised that individuals are now in the driving seat in terms of shaping their own biographies. Through self-improvement, adaptability and becoming an entrepreneur of the self, people’s lives are said to be becoming increasingly organised on the basis of market values (Beck, 2000b; Pongratz and Voß, 2003; Sennett, 1998). This entrepreneurial self has been heralded as the new model for the neoliberal subject (Lemke et al., 2000). Although some claim that traditional markers of life courses such as gender, class and race are less important in the constitution of neoliberal subjects, gender continues to structure life courses (McDowell, 1997; 2002; Skeggs, 1997; Walkerdine et al., 2001; Wetterer, 2003). One way of studying how gender influences the life course is to explore how gender matters in people’s lives over time. Dausien (1998) theorised this by describing how individual enactments of gender ‘add up’ over the life course to form gendered biographies. However, the gender dimension of neoliberal subject constitution processes in relation to biography can also be conceptualised in another way.