Uploaded photo on Facebook via Instagram. Tagline reads “i am writing a paper on selfies because i’m a boss and this is the shit i in university. it’s such a joke. writing about porn and selfies forevaaa. i had to commemorate this occasion. #selfies #nofilter #queer”
*This piece is inspired and dedicated to clementine morrigan, Amy Saunders and Skrally Wolf. These individuals regularly take selfies challenging standards of beauty, gender and sexuality.
The world is flooded with digital images. Popular Western culture is obsessed with beauty that is youthful. The “selfie” is a relatively new phenomenon that has gained popularity through social media technologies like Myspace, Facebook and Instagram. The selfie is a personally produced self-portrait done with a cell phone, digital or web camera. Selfies are acts of resistance that disrupt normalized beauty, gendered and sexualized representations in mass media. They empower individuals to be active agents in defining their own beauty, gender and sexuality. Selfies provide visibility to non-normative bodies underrepresented and misrepresented in the media.
Although the selfie has recently gained popularity, there are people that dislike it as well. People that regularly take selfies are sometimes pathologized as being addicted and obsessive with their personal image. Local Toronto artist and writer, Clementine Morrigan, blogged about her experiences with selfies explaining that “one of my best friends says he just won’t do it. all the pictures you see of him online were taken by someone else. my other best friend is the queen of selfies…for me, i love taking selfies but it kind of feels like a guilty pleasure. i have read and heard statements that taking selfies makes a person come off as vain, self-centered, narcissistic” (1). This mentality is furthered when people make generalized comments that individuals of the Myspace and Facebook generation are narcissistic. The shaming of personal bodily expressions is not new. Slut-shaming is done to make individuals, more often women, feel guilty for the way they express sexual desire and agency over their body. Shaming is sometimes done to individuals that take selfies for expressing body pride and claiming a space of beauty. This negative response to selfies reinforces internalized shame for individuals challenging normative beauty standards and expressing bodily agency.
Normative gendered and sexualized beauty standards are largely influenced by advertising and mass media. Advertisements have become a repetitive and pervasive display of unsolicited images. Continuously seeing advertisements turn viewers of media into passive spectators. Morrigan describes the Westernized desired female body “as white, as young, as a very small range of sizes and shapes, as cis, as able-bodied, as marked by class privilege, as smoothly shaven and so on” (3). Further, thinness is preferred over larger and fatter bodies. These standards are rigid and limiting. These selective characteristics have become fixed standards. The hyper focus on beauty ideals disciplines and regulates non-conforming bodies. This focus coerces individuals to participate in the pursuit of attaining the idealized body. If an individual does not participate in the game, their body is shamed being marked as lacking and inadequate. These standards are not reflective of the dynamic and multiplistic characteristics of human beings. The human body varies across the world and continuously changes as it matures. No one stays young forever.
This normalized beauty standard is maintained through its repetitive visibility is mass digital media. More often, representations in media are of the young, tall, thin, able-bodied white woman instead of bodies that are older, fatter, disabled with brown or black skin tones. Individuals with bodies that are more closely aligned to the preferred beauty standards are awarded with their image reflected back through the increased visibility in media. Bodies that do not fit are restricted in their visibility in media. When non-conforming bodies are visible in media, they are either tokenized or misrepresented. Non-conforming bodies are devalued in order to preserve the status quo. The desired body is allowed to be sexy and beautiful. Selfies interrupt this monotony of homogenous images offering alternative representations of beauty.
In addition to standards of beauty represented in mass digital media are the normative representations of LGBTQ-ness. In her study exploring how media technologies mediate queer sexualities in rural areas, Mary Gray makes a distinction between the “fictional” and “real” queer representations. She relates the fictional queer representation as the LGBTQ narrative depicted in movies and television (1163). In comparison, she describes queer realness as the authentic and personal stories shared by individuals about coming out as queer (1163). She further explains LGBTQ visibility in media:
Films, television characters, press accounts of social movements, AIDS reporting, plays, books, and the Internet are where most stories of queer desire transpire…As such, media are the primary site of production for social knowledge of LGBTQ identities. It is where most people, including those who will come to identify as LGBTQ, first see or get to know LGBTQ people. In other words, media circulate the social grammar, appearance, and sites of LGBTQ-ness (1165).
Society needs to understand sexuality. The default sexuality is understood as heterosexuality. Viewing repetitive representations of LGBTQ people in media makes sexuality intelligible. Coming out is understood as part of the process of exploring queerness; if you are queer, you have to come out. Heterosexist and cissexist culture coerces queer questioning individuals to follow the narrative of coming out. Heteronormative and homonormative representations limit the queer imagination. Unlike repetitive and fixed representations of LGBTQ-ness in media, queerness is not defined. Queerness as a sexuality and gender expression uproots the intelligibility of sexuality made possible by heterosexist, homonormative and cissexist culture.
Selfies taken by LGBTQ people creates queer realness. The Tumblr blog titled SEXY-POSI PUNKS is a collection of personal submissions of selfies for people that want to claim a space of sexiness and do not adhere to the rigid standards of beauty. SEXY-POSI PUNKS is a space where individuals can represent themselves through selfies that challenge beauty, gendered and sexualized norms. When individuals submit a selfie to SEXY-POSI PUNKS they have the option to include a message or tagline to accompany the image. For example, a submission displays an image of a white person standing, wearing underwear with an erected penis sticking out. The tagline reads “these are my first ‘girl’ undies and I like myself in them :)”. This image shows a person that has a penis wearing “‘girl’ undies”. Cissexist culture would argue that a “girl” has a vulva not a penis. The individual clearly takes pride in the way that they look in their underwear. The person does not declare themselves as a man, a woman, both or neither. This demonstrates how a person can be gender non-conforming and still take pride in their body. Similarly to the coming out stories that spark queer realness, this selfie brings authenticity of the possibility of gender non-conformity.
Selfies blend the boundaries between the on and offline world. Technology has increased the accessibility to the Internet making it readily available through smartphones. Additionally, people use popular social media technologies like Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr are used to document their day-to-day lives. Arguably, Facebook profiles are a digital extension of individuals’ identities. In his article exploring virtual intimacies involving love, addiction and identity, Shaka McGlotten claims that he “discovered that there were no clear lines between virtual and real life. Virtual and real life bleed into one another, as do public, private and intimate lives” (130). Selfies make the private and personal public. Often, selfies are taken in the bathroom in front of the mirror or in the bedroom in front of a webcam. Through the use of Facebook profiles, online dating profiles and blogging websites, individual users are active instead of passive agents in mediating their identity. This is necessary for claiming agency over one’s body. Selfies act as a disruption to the limited representations of beauty, sexiness and LGBTQ-ness to digital mass media and multimedia advertisements. The individual taking the selfie plays an active role in deciding their own preferences and standards for beauty. They decide if they want to look like a man or a woman, neither or both. They construct their own image and represent themselves.
The use of selfies allows individuals to exercise bodily autonomy and create visibility for those rendered invisible or misrepresented in mass media. Morrigan suggests that the selfie “breaks down the subject/object split. the person who creates the selfie is both the person being photographed and the person doing the photographing. this gives the creator of the selfie the agency to decide how they want their image to appear” (3). In this way, the photographer photographing themselves can decide to delete or post the image online. They can do a personal photo-shoot and select the image they like best. With camera apps for smartphones like Instragram, individuals can choose to add varying camera filters for effects, add hashtags, write comments attached to the image and synchronize with additional social media outlets to post the photo. The individual is the photographed, photographer and producer of their own work.
The selfie can rework and redefine personalized preferences for beauty and sexiness. If individuals are underrepresented and misrepresented in mass media, this would suggest that these bodies are undesirable. When the image of bodies represented in media is reflected back, the gaze of desirability is on those defined as beautiful. Those unwillingly declared as undesirable may wish to be desired. In this way, selfies can be used to affirm personal ideas of beauty, sexiness and desirability. Additionally, the Internet trend “selfies for self-care” involves individuals taking a selfie when they are feeling down in order to boost their self-esteem. This act self-authorizes a personal positive affirmation. This is a resistance to beauty standards that shame, exclude and make non-conforming bodies feel inadequate.
The selfie is an act of resistance for individuals not represented and misrepresented in media. This act is a reclamation and redefinition of beauty, desirability and sexiness. Feminist writer for the website Hyperallergic, Alicia Eler suggests that “The selfie is an aesthetic with radical potential for bringing visibility to people and bodies that are othered” (1). The “othered” body is supposed to remain invisible from the public focus. Beauty, gendered and sexualized norms are maintained through repetitious visibility in mass media. This privilege allows a limited amount of the population that reflects these standards to feel beautiful and sexy without feeling inadequate or shamed. For non-conforming bodies, becoming visible and maintaining visibility is a strong statement. Declaring beauty and sexiness as different from the status quo is an act of resistance. Selfies encourage individuals to re-imagine standards of beauty. Fatness can be beautiful, disability can be sexy and people of colour do not have to be eroticized. Scars do not have to be hidden and stretch marks can be sexy. A boy can love a boy while still being attracted to women. Not all men have to have flat chests and not all women have to have vulvas. These descriptions of beauty, sexiness, gender and sexuality are rarely represented in mass media. When marginalized bodies take selfies, it is an active engagement of creating visibility through self-representation. This is an act resisting the fallacy of the normative body.
Beauty, gendered and sexualized norms are re-imagined through the visibility of selfies. Selfies are a tool for self-representation that challenges the limited definitions of beauty, sexiness, gender and sexuality. Taking selfies is an art but you do not have to be an artist to take selfies. Selfies involve risks. Define your own beauty and take sexy back. Fuck the haters.
Submission to SEXY-POSI PUNKS HERE. Tagline reads “i like hardcore tank tops and no bottoms. life$tylez ov da mixed race anarchist qpoc <3″
Work Cited
- Eler, Alicia. “The Feminist Politics of #Selfies.” Hyperallergic RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Nov. 2013. <http://hyperallergic.com/95150/the-radical-politics-of-selfies/>.
- Gray, Mary L.. “Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online And The Remediation Of The Coming-Out Story.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14.4 (2009): 1162-1189. Print.
- McGlotten, Shaka. “Virtual Intimacies: Love, Addiction and Identity @ The Matrix.” Queer online: media technology & sexuality. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 123-137. Print.
- morrigan, clementine. “in defense of selfies.” clementinemorrigancom. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Nov. 2013. <http://clementinemorrigan.com/2013/09/05/in-defense-of-selfies/>.
- “SEXY-POSI PUNKS (these are my first “girl” undies and I like myself…).” SEXY-POSI PUNKS. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Nov. 2013. <http://sexyposipunks.tumblr.com/post/66946719704>
