Gender and identity in the postmodern, posthuman, and postdigital era

This chapter looks at the relationship between gender and identity, examining the opportunities and constraints for gender performance and representation afforded by digital media. It provides a history of theoretical perspectives on identity that have influenced Cultural Studies before presenting contemporary case studies which apply these theories to gender performance on social media. It then turns to critiques of the idea of discrete individualism suggested by the term identity, examining feminist posthuman and postdigital perspectives which eschew the concept of identity altogether, in favour of the idea of embodied, affective subjectivity. What are the advantages of seeing ourselves as acting in networks or assemblages of human and non-human actors, embedded, embodied subjectivities in constant intra-action with the world around us, and how might this perspective inform our thinking about gender? At the end of this chapter, Tanya Geggie uses posthuman feminist frameworks to explore female subjectivity and kinship in her own family.