No longer the iconic American? The changing cultural and economic value of white masculinity in the global economy

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which the economic and cultural value of white masculinity has changed over the last twenty-five years as a result of new technologies of work, globalization, and the transition to a postindustrial information economy. It examines the social, economic, and cultural contexts for the emergence of a new form of citizenship characterized by a splintering of previously unified dimensions of citizenship. This analysis is based on the close study of popular, expert, and policy discourses on automation, outsourcing, and economic productivity in order to map out the shifts in the discursive terrain that have allowed for the displacement of the white male worker from the center of American national identity. By bringing out the connections between the changing meanings of citizenship within the United States and the changing place of the United States in the global economy, this dissertation emphasizes the ways in which globalization has refigured the distribution of power and privilege in a way that affects even hegemonic subject positions.; I argue that hierarchies of race and gender, among others, were naturalized by their articulation to a seemingly-egalitarian ideal of productive work that contributed to the well-being of the nation-state. The ideal of productive work was redefined in the 1980s by the increasing use of technology and a technological mindset that re-located productivity in machines, capital, procedures and processes. This led to the construction of laboring humans as a bundle of interchangeable and replaceable human-machine skills, that is as cyborgs. The citizen in contemporary discourse in the United States is one such cyborg subject---hence the idea of a cyborg citizen. These changes meant that the citizen qua (raced, gendered) national subject was much more easily separable from the citizen qua worker, prompting---as seen in nationalist calls for saving "our" jobs from foreign workers---anxieties about the meaning and value of citizenship in this country. It is in this context that I have argued in this dissertation that in a capitalist democracy the cyborg is particularly well-suited to describe the worker-citizen that is the ideal subject of such a system.