University of Pittsburgh Associate Professor of Anthropology Gabriella Lukacs will give a lecture "Career Porn: Blogging and the Good Life" at Pitt on Friday, February 18. "The talk", says the university's Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies Program hosting the event, "is taken from Prof. Lukacs's book manuscript titled: 'Diva Entrepreneurs: Gender and Labor in the Digital Economy.'"
Lukacs expands on the topic, on her faculty homepage:
The manuscript I am presently working on explores new forms of Internet-based entrepreneurship that have evolved in the 1990s, a period in which the economic recession further narrowed young people’s opportunities for career-track employment while information technologies were expanding their opportunities for new forms of work. I examine new labor subjectivities such as the net idols who become famous by posting their photos and diaries on the web, cell phone novelists whose novels have recently come to dominate literary bestseller lists, and entrepreneurial homemakers who conjure wealth from day trading. These new labor subjectivities, I argue, bring into sharp focus significant changes in the meanings, forms, and conditions of work. Equally important, they highlight the emergence of a new form of rationality within which individuals accept and even celebrate the end of job security as a marker of a shift from the postwar order of “working to find pleasure” to the neoliberal imperative to “find pleasure in work.” This manuscript is provisionally titled Diva Entrepreneurs: Gender, Labor, and New Technologies in Contemporary Japan.The talk will be held in 401 Cathedral of Learning (map) from 4:00 pm, and is free and open to the public.
