Critical
Responses | Informative
Summaries | Works Cited
Postmodern Identities
Identity is introduced as a central theme as part of the Introduction's
overview of the articles: for instance, Hawisher and Selfe note the
“importance of Norwegian cultural identities” in Holmevik’s and Haynes
chapter (12). Because online literacy practices are seen as transgressive
and hybrid literacy practices that “express the value of difference,” these
literacy practices “cling to historical, cultural, and racial diversity
[. . . that enable . . .] groups and individuals [to] constitute
their own multiple identities” (15). This connection between online
literacy practices and online identities in the Introduction is implicitly
explored through the following chapters. Hawisher and Selfe’s "Conclusion"
expands their definitions of these postmodern, online identities by seeing
them as hybrid, cyborg, and transgressive identities.
Hawisher and Selfe's discussion of hybrid, cyborg, and transgressive
identities relies on Manuel Castells, Donna Haraway, and Gail Hawisher’s
prior research for a theoretical bases. Castells describes identities
in a networked society as existing both “within, and in resistance to”
those networks (279); such “blurred identities” (279) are “based on shared
language, shared history, shared culture, or shared political interest”
(280), instead of being based on modernist constructions of identity, like
ethnicity, class, gender, or nationality. As such, these identities
are transgressive of presumed boundaries within traditional perceptions
of a culture. Haraway’s refutation of traditional gender roles and
gendered identities develops into a definition of “cyborgian identity”
which “invents new politicized subjects capable of acting productively
and boldly in a changing world that continues to be shaped and mediated
by technology” (280). These cyborg selves would also “cut across
national and geopolitical borders” and would “grapple at all levels with
what it means to be embodied beings in an information-rich technological
world” (280). These concepts of the transgressive and cyborgian identities
suggest that online identities are hybrids of them and that online identities
cross national, ethnic, and gendered boundaries to combine and recombine
as diverse selves.
This exploration of identity as hybrid, as cyborg, and as transgressive
is appealing – such explanations reject the construction of a unified “self”
that can be part and parcel with westernized ideas of the “True” that idolize
the unified, the eternal, and the transcendent. But for all
the discussion of these identities, I find myself wondering how they are
experienced as a person exists on and in the Web. How would I recognize
these identities in the moments of my existence? I would have
found it useful if the Conclusion included a much fuller explanation of
these postmodern identities as lived experiences so that I could more fully
understand the connections between Web literacy practices and the theoretical
discussions of the hybrid, cyborg and transgressive identities. I
recognize that my desire for a somewhat unifying, and specific, description
of these fluid, postmodern identities defeats some of the point.
This very slipperiness infuses postmodern identities and is a necessary
element of such identities. Nevertheless, Hawisher and Selfe have
derived these particular postmodern identities – the cyborg, the hybrid,
the transgressive – from the chapters, but they do not claim that these
identities are described in detail in any one of the chapters, leaving
me wanting a fully developed example in their Conclusion.