Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Foreword
- List of Contributors
- Introduction and Overview
- Ms.Calculating the Apocalypse
- The Apocalyptic, Gender and American Christian Fundamentalism
- Who's Afraid of Virginia Dare? Confronting Anti-abortion Terrorism after 9/11
- Apocalyptus Interruptus: Christian Fundamentalists, Sodomy, and The End
- The Joy of (Apocalyptic) Sex
- ‘The Second Descent of the Spirit of Life from God’: The Assumption of Jemima Wilkinson
- Making Space, Taking Space: The Dynamics of 1980s Peace Activist Women's Efforts to Reclaim and Transform the Public Arena
- ‘Before, the Cup Was Filling Up. Now It Is Flowing Over’: The Eschatology of Fluids
- Visions of Mary, Wounds of Christ: Women Stigmatics in the Apocalyptic Piety of Recent Marian Apparitions
- Rhetoric of the Rejected Body at ‘Heaven's Gate’
- Eccentric Citizens: Subjectivity and Citizenship in the Technomillennium
- Index
Eccentric Citizens: Subjectivity and Citizenship in the Technomillennium
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Foreword
- List of Contributors
- Introduction and Overview
- Ms.Calculating the Apocalypse
- The Apocalyptic, Gender and American Christian Fundamentalism
- Who's Afraid of Virginia Dare? Confronting Anti-abortion Terrorism after 9/11
- Apocalyptus Interruptus: Christian Fundamentalists, Sodomy, and The End
- The Joy of (Apocalyptic) Sex
- ‘The Second Descent of the Spirit of Life from God’: The Assumption of Jemima Wilkinson
- Making Space, Taking Space: The Dynamics of 1980s Peace Activist Women's Efforts to Reclaim and Transform the Public Arena
- ‘Before, the Cup Was Filling Up. Now It Is Flowing Over’: The Eschatology of Fluids
- Visions of Mary, Wounds of Christ: Women Stigmatics in the Apocalyptic Piety of Recent Marian Apparitions
- Rhetoric of the Rejected Body at ‘Heaven's Gate’
- Eccentric Citizens: Subjectivity and Citizenship in the Technomillennium
- Index
Summary
What kinds of subjectivity—that is, subjugation to forces of power—derive from technologically networked societies in a globally interconnected economy? And what range of freedom or agency is possible under these circumstances? Although these crucial questions of the day can be posed in direct enough terms, answers to them have been complex, conflicting, and at times perhaps incomprehensible. Many of them ignore the apocalyptic element so often incorporated in the way forces of technology and globalization are perceived. Ranging from Samuel Huntington's alarmist ‘clash of civilization’ thesis to President Bush's pounding insistence that the United States should lead the fight against the ‘axis of evil’, when the forces of technology and globalization are cast into the mold of apocalyptic drama, they generate man-made danger.
In this essay, I offer a theorization that illuminates these fraught issues of subjectivity and agency in our time and also accentuates the danger of existing apocalyptic belief systems in this regard. I propose a typology of three key forms of subjectivity in the present day: atavists, avatars, and netizens. In the discussion that follows, I outline several leading studies on these issues, in part because my typology is indebted to them but also because I believe my approach better enables criticism of the patriarchal, apocalyptic and/or millennial forces that shape and regulate many features of today's everyday life, especially those involving gender and sexuality.
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- Information
- Gender and Apocalyptic Desire , pp. 165 - 179Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2006