Bringing sexy back: Reclaiming the body aesthetic via self-shooting

Abstract

This paper is based on visual narrative analysis of cyber-ethnographic material from a 2.5 year fieldresearch with 'not safe for work ' [NSFW] bloggers and self-shooters on tumblr.com. I use Koskela's concept of 'empowering exhibitionism ', Waskul's 'erotic looking glass', and Foucault's 'technologies of the self' to analyze self-shooting (taking photos of one-self). Constricting societal norms of sexuality, body shape and body practices influence how my participants (N=20, 10 female, 9 male, 1 transgender, ages 21 -51, average age 34) live their embodied and sexual lives. Through self-shooting and by negotiating the community specific issues of control, power and the gaze, they are able to construct a new, empowered, embodied identity for themselves. I look at self-shooting and selfie-blogging as a practice of reclaiming control over one's embodied self AND over the body-aesthetic, thus appropriating what is and is not 'sexy'. The NSFW self-shooting community offers a safe space otherwise so hard to find within the body/sexuality-normative mainstream culture. This makes self-shooting a collective therapeutic activity. In their self-images participants construct themselves as 'beautiful', 'sexy', 'devious', 'more than just a mother and an employee' and as someone who 'likes their body instead of trying to not hate it'. The technologies of the self activated through diaristic blogging and selfie sharing, along with the empowerment from interactions with peers take bloggers on a path of sexual awakening and reintroduce them to their own bodies.

Show your best self(ie): An exploratory study on selfie-related motivations and behavior in emerging adulthood

“…For example, McLean et al (2015) demonstrated that adolescent girls who regularly share selfies on SNS also experienced more negative body affect (i.e., over-evaluation of shape and weight, body dissatisfaction) and increased levels of dietary restraint and internalization of the thin-ideal. In contrast, taking sexy selfies has been found to serve as a practice of accepting one's body that can increase life-satisfaction and contribute to positive body affect (Tiidenberg, 2014;Tiidenberg and Cruz, 2015). Future research designs should allow for further investigating these negative and positive associations in terms of causal relationships: It is important to consider whether body concerns arise as a consequence of engagement in selfie-behavior, or whether online self-presentation through selfies is used to regulate emotions and feelings about one's appearance and to boost one's selfesteem (cf.…”

The Dick Pic: Harassment, Curation, and Desire

“…As Katrin Tiidenberg (2014) points out in her research on NSFW self-shooting, the accepting sexual publics afforded by platforms such as Tumblr have remained separate from the shaming, negativity, and snarkiness that characterize much of social media exchange. On Tumblr, sexual selfshooting allowed rendering one's body an object of sexual desire independent of one's precise orientations (see Tiidenberg, 2016;Tiidenberg & Gómez Cruz, 2015).…”

Self-Representation in Social Media

“…Katrin Tiidenberg has analysed Tumblr communities that share erotic selfies (K. Tiidenberg and Gomez Cruz 2015;Katrin Tiidenberg 2014), while Crystal Abidin has written about the "subversive frivolity" of influencers' selfies (Abidin 2016).…”