ABSTRACT
Having carried out a project on Mexican and Chicana writers’ online selves and intruded upon that curious public-private realm that constitutes social networking, I want to return to these spaces and reflect upon what it is to be online and where writers position themselves within these discursive spheres (Thornton n. pag.). I want to ask: What sort of self emerges from a medium that allows for multiple selves, all the while for an author there is a desire to create a voice, an identity, and a coherent professional self that the very form challenges? For the theorists Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin, their imagined typical remediated self “understands herself as a potentially rapid succession of points of view, as a series of immediate experiences derived from these points of view” (235-236). Interestingly, this individual is gendered and is highly self-reflective in her understanding of her positioning. This individual is an everywoman, figured as an ideal projection and, in their telling, her story is not complicated by class or location. Returning to the same writers I considered in my earlier article, in this chapter I want to reflect on these selves, where they should be positioned, and how the gendered self figures in this interplay between private and professional identities.
