Selfies, Image and the Re-making of the Body

Abstract

This article explores the relationality between women's bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women's experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical elaboration on what sexy selfies are and do by analysing interviews, selfies and blog content of nine women in the NSFW self-shooters community on tumblr. For our participants, self-shooting is an engaged, self-affirmative and awareness raising pursuit, where their body, through critically self-aware self-care, emerges as agentic, sexual and distinctly female. Thus, this is a reading of selfies as a practice of freedom.

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).…”

Showing/Sharing: Analysing Visual Communication from a Praxeological Perspective

“…Both pictures convey layers of meaning that can be elaborated and further framed in visual or textual communication. Moreover, both pictures are selfies, a genre that is intrinsically linked to sharing and visibility politics of social media (Tiidenberg & Gómez-Cruz, 2015). While Anna and Flora are at very different stages in their lives, they both show and share their portraits and thereby themselves in the networked environments where they put them up for discussion.…”

Selfies beyond self-representation: the (theoretical) f(r)ictions of a practice

“…Drawing also on a long history of feminist STS studies, 45 we argue that image-creation (along with distribution and its use in social media), does not only represent bodies, it also generates them. 46 In order to understand our approach, it is necessary to discuss the concept of performance that underpins claims that selfies are self-representations and that have traditionally been understood following the work of Erving Goffman. While we have limited scope to discuss this at length here, and indeed other authors have reflected on his conceptualisation of performance to think about digital photography, 47 and self-representation, 48 a brief overview is necessary.…”