In this article I unpack the labour of “networking” to understand the changes in sociality and worker identity that have occurred in the Australian professional managerial class workforce under post‐Fordism. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at the interface of the pubic service and private consultancy firms in Canberra, I break from dominant readings of intimacy in post‐Fordism which preference either a downwards imposition of “ways of being” from capital to worker, or a reactive self‐regulation in line with objective external structures. Networking, I argue, is as much about being recognised as patron as it is about any tangible economic benefits. The intimate relations and self‐fashioning of networking constitute attempts to embody particular classed, sexualised, gendered fantasies of the figure of “the networker” in post‐Fordist Australian business culture. This interpretation does not necessitate overlooking the tangible results of networking, and I discuss too, how masculine fantasy structures the topography of workplaces.
In this article I discuss an Argentine workfare program as an entry point to challenge dominant understandings of the relationship between masculinity and the nation‐state. By examining this program as it is enacted in Huerta Maipú, a community farm in the outskirts of Córdoba, Argentina, I explore how materializing nationally appropriate masculinity can impede the realization of the substantive benefits associated with national inclusion. Drawing upon Lauren Berlant's (2011) Cruel Optimism, I develop the concept of Pyrrhic Nationals to describe this dynamic. My argument builds upon a subordinated approach to understanding masculinity which I put into conversation with anthropological analyses of the role of civil society in neoliberal regimes. Even though Huerta Maipú was explicitly constructed as an anti‐market, anti‐capitalist and anti‐patriarchal site, materializing masculinities through social and community activism entailed becoming the exact subjects required by neoliberal projects.
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