Selfie Aesthetics

Abstract

In Selfie Aesthetics Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore transition, selfhood, and relationality. Morse contends that rather than being understood as shallow emblems of a narcissistic age, selfies can produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers. Through close readings of selfies and other digital artworks by trans feminist artists, Morse details a set of formal strategies they call selfie aesthetics: doubling, improvisation, seriality, and nonlinear temporality. Morse traces these strategies in the work of Zackary Drucker, Vivek Shraya, Tourmaline, Alok Vaid-Menon, Zinnia Jones, and Natalie Wynn, showing how these artists present improvisational identities and new modes of performative resistance by conveying the materialities of trans life. Morse shows how the interaction between selfie creators and viewers constructs collective modes of being and belonging in ways that envision trans feminist futures. By demonstrating the aesthetic depth and political potential of selfie creation, distribution, and reception, Morse deepens understandings of gender performativity and trans experience.

The self in selfies—Conceptualizing the selfie‐coordination of marginalized youth with sociology of engagements

“…Here, selfies are conceptualized as representations of either personal or collective identity, and as sites of struggle over how and whose identities should be represented in public spaces. In contrast, notably feminist new media theorists have opted for the concept of performativity to describe online self‐images as sites of self‐making (Morse, 2018; Rettberg, 2017). Theresa M. Senft (2013, 348) describes a similar dichotomy in approaches to online identity that she calls theories of identity as ‘naming’ and identity as ‘doing’.…”