The Internet, Gender and Identity: Proletarianization as Selective Essentialism

Abstract

Is it a manifestation of the state of things, when a married, middle aged white transnational male and father writes a chapter about gender and identity in an anthology about the Internet? I suspect so. The fields of gender and identity have been created, populated, colonized perhaps, and protected by all sorts of recently vivified “weirdoes” who we can celebrate. They and we are included in the life of society. The fringe is with us—the “majoritorians”—who populate the center of civilizations, who live in the suburbs, worry about our children and mortgages and find the new iterations of everyday identity almost incomprehensible. And yet that is where we are: fully embedded in a restructured social world that has cast off many of the historical constraints of otherness, even while it imposes new ones. We sit endlessly, incessantly watching, searching, typing and reading at a monitor screen. What kind of life is this? Cultural studies would argue that life should be involved in claiming a “social order of self-clarification, resulting in a heightened responsibility of fact and experience” (Peters 2006: 58). With this new sense of instrumentalism to offset the patchy performance of liberal democracy, the state of things requires that a white guy must try to meet the self-clarifying challenge.