Rogers Brubaker

This project will analyze the remarkable career of the category “gender identity.” From its obscure mid-20th-century beginnings in the context of psychological assessments of intersex individuals, gender identity has become a fundamental “principle of vision and division of the world,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, written into laws, bureaucratic regulations, and court decisions, and embedded in organizational policies and routines. Widely understood as a basic component of selfhood, it has altered what Ian Hacking has called “the space of possibilities for personhood.” Today, of course, gender identity is being challenged on multiple fronts. But the challenges were slow to emerge. Why did the far-reaching institutionalization of gender identity, today the focus of such bitter controversy, meet with so little opposition and attract so little attention until a decade ago? What changed so abruptly thereafter, drawing gender identity into the vortex of culture war debates, but also prompting critical scrutiny from the liberal center? And how might one think and talk about gender identity in a way that might avoid some of the pitfalls and impasses of many current discussions? These are some of the questions Rogers Brubaker will address.

Rogers Brubaker’s  project will analyze the ways in which digital hyperconnectivity—a regime of communication in which everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time—paradoxically fosters both populism and its seeming antithesis, technocracy. Hyperconnectivity fosters populism in two main ways: as a technology and ideology of immediacy, which circumvents and undermines all kinds of institutional intermediation; and as a technology of the popular, which opens up new forms of popular participation, favors “low” rather than “high” styles of communication, and imposes an apparatus of continuous and granular quantification that enshrines popularity as the ultimate arbiter of value in the digital public sphere. Yet, the new modes of algorithmic governance enabled by hyperconnectivity are deeply technocratic. Brubakers working hypothesis is that digital hyperconnectivity—understood as the communications ecology within which all contemporary forms of politics and governance are embedded—contributes to a “technopopulist” fusion of populism and technocracy.