Notes to self: the visual culture of selﬁes in the age of social media
Derek Conrad Murray
∗
Department of History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
This paper explores the cultural fascination with social media forms of self-portraiture,
commonly known as “selﬁes,” with a speciﬁc interest in the self-imaging strategies
of young women in their teens and early 20s. Ubiquitous on social media sites
like Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, and Instagram, the selﬁe has become a powerful
means for self-expression, encouraging its makers to share the most intimate and
private moments of their lives – as well as engage in a form of creative self-fashioning.
Popularly regarded as a shallow expression of online narcissism, the selﬁe is
both adored and reviled; yet it ﬂourishes as one of the most effective outlets for
self-deﬁnition. Through a critical engagement with a history of feminist representational
politics, this paper explores the political urgency at the heart of the selﬁe
phenomenon, and contemplates whether the urge to compulsively self-image is
mere narcissism, or a politically oppositional and aesthetic form of resistance.
Keywords: feminist theory; selﬁe; photography; social media; visual culture;
Vivian Fu; Noorann Matties; Francesca Romeo
Introduction
In the past two years, the term “selﬁe” has become the focal of considerable debate. The
phenomenon of compulsive self-representation on social media sites has been written
about in major news outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times, among
many others (Carr 2015). However, most talk of selﬁes is focused (unfairly) on
young women, forming into a critique of their apparent narcissism as a kind of regressive
personality trait. The young women themselves often characterize the selﬁe (on
social media sites) as a radical act of political empowerment: as a means to resist the
male-dominated media culture’s obsession with and oppressive hold over their lives
and bodies.
This notion takes on great signiﬁcance in social media culture, when confronted
with the sheer volume of self-representations by women in their teens to mid-20s.
Viewed individually, they appear rather banal, commonplace, and benign. Taken en
masse, it feels like a revolutionary political movement – like a radical colonization
of the visual realm and an aggressive reclaiming of the female body. Even if there is
no overt political intent, they are indeed contending with the manner in which capitalism
is enacted upon their lives. That reading of the selﬁe revolution may seem more
than a bit charitable, because the gesture itself has been popularly characterized as
# 2015 Taylor & Francis
∗
Email: dcmurray@ucsc.edu
Consumption Markets & Culture, 2015
Vol. 18, No. 6, 490–516, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2015.1052967
something rather pitiful: as an expression of narcissism and self-loathing – or even as a
consequence of profound loneliness. It has no positive or redeeming connotations and
appears to personify all that is trivial about the human condition. As noted in a
New York Times article on 19 October 2013, writer Jenna Wortham attempted to
present a more generous viewpoint of selﬁe culture, situating it within the context of
social media and emergent Internet-based technologies:
But it’s far too simplistic to write off the selﬁe phenomenon. We are swiftly becoming
accustomed to – and perhaps even starting to prefer – online conversations and interactions
that revolve around images and photos. They are often more effective at conveying
a feeling or reaction than text. Plus, we’ve become more comfortable seeing our faces
on-screen, thanks to services like Snapchat, Skype, Google Hangout and FaceTime, and
the exhilarating feeling of connectedness that comes from even the briefest video conversation.
Receiving a photo of the face of the person you’re talking to brings back the human
element of the interaction, which is easily misplaced if the interaction is primarily textbased.
(Wortham 2013, 1)
This paper aims to give insight into a very contemporary discussion about the impact of
technology and social media as a means to disseminate and share images. The term
selﬁe, in its popular usage, is meant to delineate a very particular engagement with technologies
of image making – speciﬁcally, the spontaneous self-portrait, taken with a
range of consumer-based devices: smart phones, tablets, laptop computers, as well as
digital and ﬁlm cameras. In the digital era, personal cameras have become so ubiquitous,
that compulsive self-imaging is engendering a new consumer-based language
in the visual realm. In addition, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, and Tumblr enable the easy and spontaneous dissemination of images – a
phenomenon that has led to public debate about the potential corrosive effects of technology
on our individual and collective selves.
Often discussed as a negative consequence of capitalist consumer-based consumption,
the selﬁe appears to represent a critique of youth who have become subsumed
within a troubling consumerist ﬁxation with the superﬁciality of self-imaging and the
cult of personality. The consequences of this characterization are what concern me
most, speciﬁcally the gendered implications that link young women, self-obsession,
and what could be described as an insatiable consumerism – that according to Acocella
(2014), has “made Americans, especially women, dependent on commercial products,”
consumedby narcissism, and ultimately deprived of self-reliance. New York Times writer
David Carr (2015) echoes Acoella’s sentiment that selﬁes are the product of a
combustible mixture of media ﬁxation, capitalism, and narcissistic self-absorption. In
this investigation, my aim is to produce a productive counter-reading of the “selﬁe,”
one that advances the possibility that popular forms of female self-imaging may offer
the opportunity for political engagement, radical forms of community building – and
most importantly, a forum to produce counter-images that resist erasure and
misrepresentation.
The selﬁe and its discontents
Oxford English Dictionaries’ deﬁnition of selﬁe deﬁnes it as a photograph that one has
taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a
social media website. According to Oxford Dictionaries, the term is not a new one, and
is believed to have originated on an Australian online forum in 2002. Cultural
Consumption Markets & Culture 491
fascination with this phenomenon led Oxford Dictionaries to proclaim selﬁe their 2013
Word of the Year: a distinction that has inaugurated its introduction into the public consciousness.
The pseudo-controversy surrounding the imaging of US President Barack
Obama in the act of taking a selﬁe pic (along with British Prime Minister David
Cameron and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt) while at Nelson Mandela’s
memorial on 10 December 2013 speaks to the media-fueled characterization of the
gesture as a gratuitous and excessive expression of narcissism. The casual gesture
received widespread scrutiny; especially on social media, where the President’s behavior
was likened to that of a petulant, self-absorbed, and mannerless 14-year-old girl
(McCalmont 2013). Like one journalist, Christine Erickson proclaimed, “It looks
like Barack Obama has taken a few pointers from Sasha and Malia” (the US President’s
two teenaged daughters) (2013). Comments like this one were the general sentiment
expressed in the media in the wake of the Mandela event.
There has been a steady stream of female journalists and psychologist’s quick to
condemn the supposed navel gazing of overindulged teenage girls. According to psychologist
Jill Weber, the selﬁe is an expression of those with a poor self-outlook: “In
my experience, girls who repeatedly post selﬁes struggle with low self-esteem”
(Walker 2013). In a 19 November 2013 New Yorker article, journalist Sylvia Killingsworth
wrote:
selﬁes are everywhere these days. They feature prominently in Soﬁa Coppola’s The Bling
Ring (2013) as a cinematic trope – the main characters take dozens of pictures of themselves
partying at Hollywood clubs and wearing pilfered designer clothing and upload
them to Facebook. (2013)
Kate Losse makes similarly ridiculing assessments in a 5 June 2013 New Yorker piece,
stating that “Self-portraits shot with cell phones, or ‘selﬁes’ – cheap-looking, evoking
the MySpace era – became a sign of bad taste.” She goes on, “The subject of the
MySpace bathroom selﬁe – with its tableaux of bathroom counter, mirror, face, and
upper body – always looked alone. Selﬁes were for people without friends; the
savvy moved on to more advanced networks” (Losse 2013).
Most of the selﬁe-related articles posted in major news outlets focus on the personality
ﬂaws of the overindulged, namely, suburban teens and celebrities. It is a terminology
overﬂowing with judgment, sarcasm, and derision. However, one of the more
perplexing dimensions of the selﬁe craze is a contradiction between the cultural legitimation
of the term, and the complete and utter condemnation of the act itself. There
continues to be a concerted effort to ground the term selﬁe into the cultural consciousness:
there are now books on the subject, dedicated blogs, and a television sitcom – but
despite the media attention, the compulsion to take and share selﬁes continues to be the
butt of the joke (Figure 1).1
The legitimation of the term selﬁe is a type of ideological scapegoating that synthesizes
a range of fears about technology’s creeping infectiousness into a legible subjectivity:
a new Otherness designed to absorb our judgment and condemnation. Like the
demonized single parents of former UK Prime Minister John Major’s socially conservative
“Back to Basics” campaign, or the enduring social blame of parasitism placed on
single African-American welfare mothers in the USA – the young white female is the
perfect foil for a menu of cliche´d anxieties about technology’s uncanny ability to make
fools of us all. In Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (Tiqqun 2007)
by the French journal Tiqqun, the young girl is theorized as consumer society’s total
492 D.C. Murray
product and model citizen: she is the object and subject of late capitalism: she can only
seduce by consuming. Her body is a commodity.
On post-feminism and the selﬁe
For the purpose of this paper, I characterize this phenomenon in terms of post-feminism:
a controversial and polarizing terminology often used to delineate generational and political
shifts among feminists. Post-feminism began in the early 1980s, during the rise of
Third-Wave feminism. A contingent of leading feminists in academia began proclaiming
that feminism is dead; a move believed to assert the obsolescence of feminism in the
face of its radical revision. The basic idea behind the movement is that feminism had
achieved its goals. Third-Wave feminists had for some time, critiqued early expressions
of feminism for ignoring the plight of women of color, as well as women outside the
West. Since its early formulation, the term post-feminism has been used in a myriad
of ways. This paper appropriates the term in the service of understanding the representational
strategies of women in what could be characterized as the post-feminist moment
(post-Second and Third Wave).2
Nevertheless, my aim is not to assert that feminism is
dead, nor am I suggesting that gender inequality is a thing of the past. On the contrary, I
am interested in critically unpacking how young self-proclaimed feminists negotiate a
space for political action that breaks from Second- and Third-Wave Feminism – and
seeks to create a radical new aesthetics of the female body.
In their edited volume, entitled, Interrogating Post-feminism, scholars Yvonne
Tasker and Diane Negra claim that “post-feminism is deﬁned by class, age, and
racial exclusions; it is youth obsessed and white and middle class. Anchored in consumption
as a strategy and leisure as a site for the production of the self,” (2) postFigure
1. Noorann Matties, Self portrait crying during refeeding, 2014. # [Noorann Matties].
Reproduced by permission of artist.
Consumption Markets & Culture 493
feminism associates itself with pleasure and lifestyle and the notion that feminism has
accomplished its goals and is now a thing of the past. The authors are critical of postfeminist
consumer culture: which they characterize as a ﬁxation on an afﬂuent elite that
elevate consumption as a means to contend with the dissatisfactions of daily life.
However their real claim is that post-feminist culture works in part to incorporate,
assume or naturalize aspects of feminism – to commoditize it via the ﬁgure of
woman as empowered consumer (2). In the book’s introductory pages, the authors
make a clear distinction between feminist politics and post-feminist culture; a delineation
meant to interrogate the impulse to think that post-feminist media representation
somehow signals the widespread rejection of feminist oppositional politics on the
part of young, entitled women. Post-feminism does have politics deeply embedded
within it, but it takes a certain privilege as self-evident; a fact that is perceived as annihilating
of feminism.
In this regard, Tasker and Negra (2007) suggest that post-feminism is very similar to
other “posts,” particularly post-Civil Rights discourse in the USA. Both movements can
be deﬁned as having a moral ambiguity that is rooted in consumer culture, excess, and
commodity fetishism. There is no overt politics of the margins, no rhetoric of victimization.
Rather, there is an implicit understanding that the victories of Civil Rights and
the victories of the Feminist Movement have liberated their respective generations;
affording them the privilege to image themselves beyond trauma, while still understanding
and mobilizing the oppositional and radical force of self-representation. In
African-American discourse, the term post-black was used as a means to characterize
a generational shift in artistic production that rejected a politics of the past. Curator
Thelma Golden, who coined the term, described it in contradictory terms:
It [post-black] was a clarifying term that had ideological and chronological dimensions
and repercussions. It was characterized by artists who were adamant about not being
labeled as “black” artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested in redeﬁning
complex notions of blackness. (2001, 14)
For Golden, post-black is not a rejection of blackness, nor is it a post-racial stance (as it
is often mischaracterized),3
but rather a means to resist accepted notions of blackness
that are hetero-patriarchal at their core – and have relegated women and those who
are queerly identiﬁed to the margins of its political, cultural and representational
imperatives. Having been raised in a period of post-Civil Rights optimism, Golden
endeavors to create an expanded understanding of black identity that transcends the
limitations of past resistance movements:
As a child born in the mid-1960s, I imagine I hold a certain degree of nostalgia for the
passion and energy that created the nationalist/aesthetic dogma of the 1970s Black Arts
Movement [ . . . ] which allowed me to thrive in the words and actions of late 1980s multiculturalism.
(2001, 14)
I reference post-feminism because it is a conﬂicted terminology that, like post-blackness,
does not signify the end of feminism (or the notion that gender inequity is a
thing of the past), but rather is an effort to redeﬁne its parameters and step out
beyond the dogmas of the past (Bae 2011; Hall and Rodriguez 2003; Holmlund
2005). Emanating from the “seﬂie” movement is a feminism that is aggressively oppositional,
yet takes on different forms and has new agendas and commitments. In this
formulation, the feminism in post-feminism is not simply an umbrella term signifying
494 D.C. Murray
a history of political activism, but is actually a direct reference to a speciﬁc regime of
representation that privileged the experiences of certain women over others. If we think
about post-feminism as a theory of representation, it becomes possible to understand
how young women (particularly those of color) seek to redeﬁne the parameters of feminism
in a manner that grants them recognition. The idea that post-feminism is inherently
annihilating of feminism, or is a form of willful naivete´, is perhaps to
simplistic and dismissive of young women who are struggling for self-deﬁnition.
Indeed, post-feminism is a problematic term and one that has been mobilized in troubling
ways. However, my aim here is to think about it in relation to other posts that have
functioned as space-clearing gestures: as a means to make room for new identities, new
politics, and new forms of visual expressiveness.
Post-feminism and social media in the blogging era
Social media is now inundated with blogs by young women in their late teens to early
20s, who self-consciously and aggressively describe themselves as radical feminists,
while posting pictures of themselves in various states of dress or undress – or at
times completely nude, or engaged in sexual and/or pornographic activity.4
The production
of the self takes center stage, but also a contradictory mix of vulgarity and radicalism;
one where a young girl will post a sexually provocative self-portrait and then
deﬁantly follow-up with an impassioned written diatribe about rape and the abuses
of women. Often a pinup-style selﬁe will be followed by re-blogged images of
iconic women of the past. The selﬁes are fascinating because they are almost always
tinged with nostalgia for 1940s/1950s fashion aesthetics for women, mixed with the
Betty Page-style pin-up. Many of the women wear tattoos as an ironic contrast to the
hyper-feminine, sexual fantasy that deﬁnes the ideal woman of the 1940s–1950s.5
Constantly bombarded with objectifying and unattainable images of beauty in
popular media, young girls in the blogosphere respond by constructing an image of
themselves as a sexual fantasy, to be consumed online, and in the public domain.
But I argue this gesture is not meant as titillation for the male gaze, rather it is designed
to embrace femininity and sexuality; celebrate the history of women; reject unhealthy
beauty standards promoted by the media; and advance a body-positive attitude. This is
explored by Schuster (2013), who suggests that sexual activism is among the political
concerns of the socially engaged post-feminist blogger. The contradiction, of course, is
that the images they produce explore what Tasker and Negra characterize as formulaic
female sexualities, where these young women “enthusiastically perform patriarchal
stereotypes of sexual servility in the name of empowerment” (2007, 3).
Among the representational tropes of post-feminist oppositional politics is the
imaging of menstrual blood: a deﬁant gesture that is meant to be confrontational and
to elicit a condemning response in viewers. For many young female image-makers,
the perceived cultural revulsion for menstruation – and to a lesser degree, female
body hair – symbolizes the historical abuses of patriarchy and the oppressive social
control often exerted over female bodies. To image what for many may be perceived
as the intimacy of personal hygiene is an act of willful deﬁance and a means to
claim agency – despite the fact that one’s distaste for images of blood may arguably
stem from an array of other issues.
There are numerous female bloggers who have built considerable reputations
making snapshot-style photographs documenting their personal lives and intimate
relationships. Among the visual tropes popularized by these individuals are gritty
Consumption Markets & Culture 495
images of menstrual blood: self-portraits often presented in the context of sexual
encounter – or images of the artist’s contending with the banalities of feminine
hygiene products and the often-hidden routines of menstruation (e.g. Bobel and
Lorber 2010; Bystrom 2012; Cochrane 2009; Hecht 2012). Contemporary artist/
blogger Sandy Kim (Santolalla 2013; Zambelich 2012) is one exemplar, as is the controversial
young photographer Petra Collins, who generated debate for a t-shirt she
designed for the similarly controversial clothing company American Apparel
(McGuire 2013). Collins is known for her photographic work that regularly depicts
nude adolescent-looking girls in a sexually provocative manner. American Apparel,
the popular clothing outﬁtter, has been accused of creating sexualizing images of
youth that border on the pornographic, leading to public legal battles and charges of
sexual harassment (e.g. Bruni 2014; Daum 2007; Hiltzik 2014; Misener 2012;
Murray 2012; Sweney 2013; Tilda 2014). For American Apparel, Collins created a
t-shirt design consisting of a crudely rendered line drawing of a hand caressing the
lips of a woman’s splayed vagina (with ample pubic hair), while red blood ﬂows
from within it. Legs wide open; the image presents female genitalia and pubic hair
and what appears to be a masturbating and menstruating woman of indiscernible age.
The culture of selﬁes is intriguing when taken in mass, because the sheer number of
such images is staggering. On the social media sites Tumblr and Flickr alone, there are
innumerable blogs containing self-portraits by young women, usually standing alone,
frontally and facing a mirror, holding a camera at their midsection. The cameras range
from iPhones and small digital point and shoots, to ﬁlm and digital single-lens reﬂex
(SLR), to medium-format ﬁlm cameras. And the range of quality is broad from the pixilation
of cheap cameras, to the lushness of professional ﬁlm. What uniﬁes these images,
however, is a shared obsession with self-fashioning; an embraced narcissism that turns
navel gazing into high culture, and leisure-based consumption into a virtue. Fashion
plays an important role in selﬁe culture. Many of the personalized blogs feature
young women taking on various personas through alterations in dress, hair, and
makeup; sometimes in an effort to recreate iconic fashions of the past, or to mimic
looks that are ubiquitous in commercial beauty culture. The intentions of these young
women undoubtedly vary greatly, but as we will see as this article progresses, the aim
of some female bloggers is to achieve some sort of recognition, to make themselves
present in the world, and to create the kind of unique style and personhood that would
not be represented otherwise.
Criticisms of this phenomenon wrongly suggest that racial diversity is almost completely
absent in this world: characterizing it as a white and middle-class culture of personal
excess – where young women grapple with their privilege and kept status, by
considering their place in the world, and musing about the effects of patriarchy on
their lives. Their heroes range from artists Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and most
recently Laurel Nakadate, to the iconic self-portraits of Francesca Woodman; the late
photographer who committed suicide in 1981 at the age of 22. Goldin and
Woodman are probably the most inﬂuential visual references, and many photography-inclined
female bloggers attempt to recreate the aesthetic and melancholic selfobsessions
of their heroes. The striking prevalence of young female photographers
attempting to replicate the snapshot aesthetic of Goldin is staggering, as articulated
by photography curator Susie Bright:
One only has to teach a class of undergraduate photography students to realize [Goldin’s]
inﬂuence. Her ideas infuse all new work that deals with close family members, friends or
496 D.C. Murray
ideas of community. She gave legitimacy to an approach that has crudely been adopted
and understood as “snapshot style” or “diaristic.” I would go as far as to say her work
has come to represent an entire style. (quoted in O’Hagan 2014)
The blogging format allows not just for the display of personal images and “selﬁes,” but
also the re-blogging and sharing of erotica found on other blogs. This forms the core of
sites like Tumblr, which enable like-mined folks to ﬁnd each other and form communities:
intellectual, sexual, political, and otherwise. A component of a blogger’s ability
to self-construct is to take on the role of curator; the one who understands the zeitgeist
and can make sense of the media deluge. To do so is to be empowered and develop
loyal online cult following. In a recent article, journalist Greg Spielberg considers
the phenomenon of popular women’s blogs dedicated to showcasing sexual content:
Women aren’t just the dominant subject of the Internet, they’re increasingly the controllers.
Ladies make up more than half of the U.S. social media population: 58 percent of
Facebook, 64 percent of Twitter and 82 percent of Pinterest. They post, share and
comment more than men [ . . . ] The moral neutrality and the huge rise of women’s
voices means a more balanced, and much larger, erotic representation on the Web.
There’s no better example than on Tumblr, where women are showcasing their sexual
voice. (2013)
In her brilliant essay “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body,” Mulvey (2006) charts
the emergence of feminist aesthetics – and what she terms a new politics of the
body that arose in the 1970s. During this crucial period, women artists contributed to
widespread efforts dedicated to undoing the preponderance of gender inequity in the
USA. As Mulvey asserts, “artists were arguing for a politics of the margins” (2006,
285) and they utilized the female body in an activist mode in an effort to expose
how representation (and misrepresentation, for that matter) plays its part in the maintenance
of inequality. Cindy Sherman’s infamous self-portraits are widely understood
to have been instrumental to feminist efforts concerned with interrogating what Mulvey
calls “dominant meanings” (in images of women) that are ubiquitous in popular visual
culture. Sherman’s aesthetics recuperates a politics of the body (a political aesthetics)
that employs masquerade and mise-en-sce`ne to construct often-disturbing representations
of the feminine (Mulvey 2006, 285).
There is no doubting the importance of Sherman’s contribution to our understanding
of the ideological function of images. It would not be a stretch to suggest that the
artist wields the female body in a politically oppositional manner that has both inﬂuenced
and emboldened young women artists for over three decades. And Sherman is
not alone. There is a lengthy history of female self-representation: especially in photographic
history (Germaine Krull, Marianne Breslauer, Ilse Bing, Vivian Maier, and
Sally Mann are early examples). Artists Cindy Sherman, Adrian Piper, Lynda
Benglis, and Hannah Wilke (and most recently LaToya Ruby Frazier) have each
employed performative self-portraiture in an approach that essentially laid claim to
the kind of creative dominance and authority usually associated with male artists.
Nevertheless, the pioneering work of these individuals (with the exception of Cindy
Sherman) remains marginal in many respects and are all too often lumped into the
amorphous category of postmodern conceptualism – or dismissed as pretentiously
liberal and academically stilted musings on oppression.6
While feminist representational politics are as important today as they ever were,
there are visible changes in the aesthetic and conceptual strategies of artists working
Consumption Markets & Culture 497
in what is often termed the post-feminist moment. Whether intentional or not, the work of
many young female artists expresses an exhaustion around the rallying cry to continue
the charge against the objectiﬁcation of women in popular visual culture – and
wearied by an activist obsessionwith male desire and the scopophilic violenceof its gaze.
This shift is most present in the production of many young female photographers. In
their artwork, an interest in the fetishized female imago remains, but is subverted and
rendered less overtly politicized.7
I do not believe this change signals a rejection of feminism,
but perhaps a radical rethinking of its visual rhetorics. In many respects, their
images can be accessed without a prehistory of feminism and feminist aesthetics.
And for lack of a better term, this production could be labeled post-feminist art – as
problematic as that demarcation may prove to be. This article is therefore concerned
with the problem of “post” as it plays out within art discourse. There is a great skepticism
around the notion of post-feminism – and rightly so. However, within the realm of
African-American visual art, the concept of post-blackness is embraced, despite the
stubborn persistence of a few detractors. Post-Feminism and Post-Black in the visual
arts does not signal that we are in a post-Feminist or post-racial moment per se: that
the presence of gender inequity and racial intolerance are no longer with us. These
are widely held misperceptions subtending our understanding of their presence. As I
have mentioned previously, both signal a shifting aesthetics and a shifting usage of
black and female bodies as subjects of representation. The post-feminist label has
many deﬁnitions, uses, and applications and is symptomatic of warring agendas and
divergent notions around the efﬁcacy of feminism altogether.
There should indeed be concern with the deployment of the post-feminist label –
which is so often utilized to signal feminism’s obsolescence, or to depoliticize it
altogether. My central aim, however, is to examine what are problematically regarded
as the post-political conceptual and visual strategies of young female cultural producers
– without casting them as incommensurate with the aims of feminism. The
images in question are preoccupied with the female gaze – as ill deﬁned and
elusive that term has proven to be (e.g. Adamson, Chave and Covollino 2013;
Bowers 1990; D’Souza and McDonough 2008; Friedberg 1993). Ultimately, the
female gaze is a somewhat controversial notion because while its consideration is
potentially empowering, it also places the female image-maker in the position of
objectiﬁer. The feminist critique of images has always been preoccupied with locating
and deconstructing the gendered aspects of visual culture – particularly as it relates to
patriarchy, inequality, and female disempowerment. In many respects, the notion of
the male gaze has become somewhat cliche´ in academia – it is thrown around a
bit too casually (especially in art history and studio art programs). Part of the skepticism
around the female gaze emerges from the acknowledgement that women still
face such incredible amounts of inequality – that it remains the power dynamic
(socially/culturally) that truly deﬁnes the negative power of the gaze. However,
post-feminists might claim that it is a bit simplistic to suggest that if men hold the
power (politically, economically, institutionally) their gaze is inherently objectifying,
voyeuristic, and ideologically violent – and that women could therefore not occupy
such a power position. Such attitudes might very well constitute the disempowerment
of feminism or perhaps a negation of the ideological functions of representation as
they pertain to women’s struggle for equality.8
Nevertheless, my concern here is with the potential presence of a new set of visual
practices employed by a contingent of emerging artists. The post-feminist moniker, if
applied in our current cultural context, suggests a binary between what would be
498 D.C. Murray
construed as “progressive” versus “regressive” art practices (Jones 1993, 25). Falling
under the regressive would certainly be the continued preoccupation with masculinist
desires and phallocentrisms – contrasted against a progressive move toward an aesthetics
that naturalizes feminist agency and claims a certain privilege as a matter of
fact. In that regard, would the presence of a female gaze disrupt the traditional empowerment/disempowerment
binary (in terms of the interaction between the image-maker
and the subject)? Art theorist Amelia Jones is adamant that any universalist reading
of women’s art rely “on the maintenance of certain modernist and ultimately masculinist
models of artistic value” (25). While I certainly agree with Jones that critiques of
feminist art by mainstream (and largely white male) critics and scholars tend toward the
universalist, which is ultimately an undermining gesture – there is still a decisive shift
in the visual practices of women artists that foregrounds the female gaze. Whether or
not this shift can be decisively characterized as universal is yet to be determined, but
in my formulation, it does not inherently constitute an act of disempowerment.
Selﬁe or self-portrait?
While Tasker and Negra (2007) are quite harsh in their assessment ofpost-feminist media
culture, I ﬁnd something much more salient and meaningful: namely the rise of a newly
politicized and empowered female presence. Many young women in the blogosphere
self-consciously characterize themselves as “intersectional feminists”: as women concerned
with gender equality, but not at the expense of other oppressions – namely
racial, sexual, and class-based. The term selﬁe has complicated and reframed cultural
understandings of photographic self-representation in such a way that it perverts and stigmatizes
a gesture that is mobilized for a diversity of reasons.
There is perhaps a distinction to be made between the popular notion of the selﬁe:
the visual expression of vanity that is ubiquitous on social media sites like Facebook –
and the more artistically motivated photographic self-portrait. As a visual form they can
be totally indistinguishable, but the intentions that drive their production and social
function vary greatly. Photographer Francesca Romeo, an active blogger and self-portrait
taker, exhibits her work in galleries, yet she is also an avid user of social media –
speciﬁcally Tumblr and Instagram: both online forums where she can distribute an
array of images from spontaneously taken cell phone shots, to lushly composed photographs
taken with a medium-format ﬁlm camera. Born in 1976 in Fremont, California,
Romeo’s images are beautiful, if not brutally frank explorations of addiction, indulgence,
friendship, death, and the complexities of intimacy. Her photographic series
and accompanying documentary Mars (2000–2002), chronicled her time as a bartender
at the legendary Mars Bar, located in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The photographs
are black and white, and have a gritty, saturated tonality that gives them a harrowingly
timeless quality. Elegy, the artist’s follow-up series of color photographs,
picks up where Mars leaves off, and intimately follows the lives of close friends as
they struggle with everyday life. Her subjects, many of which are men, are clearly suffering
from some form of addiction – and the excesses of their daily routine, combined
with the extremity of bar life, is clearly visible in their expressions. Many of the bar’s
regulars have since succumbed to their addictions and Romeo captures the horrors of
these experiences with a heartbreaking clarity (Romeo 2009a, 2009b).
In certain instances, Mars is deceptively reminiscent of Nan Goldin’s famous series
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, though the young photographer’s work is less narratively
romantic and intentionally aesthetic. A more apt comparison might be Swedish
Consumption Markets & Culture 499
photographer Anders Petersen’s infamous series Cafe´ Lemintz. There is something unapologetically
authoritative, and disquietingly exploitive about Romeo’s suite of images.
Mars is often difﬁcult to process, because the photographs reveal a problematic set of
relations between image-maker and subject. Romeo is participant, enabler, and exploiter
simultaneously. She often speaks about the problematic nature of being an entitled
white female both engaging in and documenting the self-destructive activities of largely
disempowered individuals. Her ability to remove herself from those circumstances at
any given time – and fall back on a support system unavailable to her subjects –
creates a palpable source of tension that permeates the entire series. And that objectifying
distance is disturbingly contrasted with the extreme intimacy necessary to construct
such images.
If anything, issues of social class, and a certain sense of entitlement that I felt in commenting
upon my environment were at play in the mars bar work. Because I had the perspective
of the bartender, and dysfunction was the norm, I held this incredibly complex position of
being at once: enabler, critic, conﬁdant, friend, lover, voyeur and participant (as well as
deriving my income from all the people that I was documenting). I was also generally,
more educated than my subjects, which lends itself to further complications. I derived
my power from knowing that the people around me were disenfranchised, and that the
majority of them would not progress out of the bar and into productive lives (though I
don’t think I was entirely conscious of this at the time). And because I was trusted,
because I had built relationships with my customers prior to ﬁlming them, it was with relative
ease that I was able to make the work. Other ﬁlmmakers and photographers had tried
to do projects about the mars bar, but they never got very far because they didn’t understand
the incredibly volatile dynamics of the environment, so they would always end up
taking what amounted to “slumming it” type tourist snapshots. I actually knew the life
histories of most of my subjects. (from interview with Romeo 2010, 25 September 2013)
I mention Romeo’s more formal portraits, because it is within this work where a distinctly
female gaze is established: one where the artist forcefully constructs an alternative
way of looking that is unapologetically female. In other words, it aggressively
asserts a speciﬁcally female visual experience and aesthetic point of view. It is a
gesture that personiﬁes the political dimensions of selﬁe culture as a young woman’s
form of visual expressiveness. Romeo’s portraits of others reveal an intimacy and interiority
that she demands of her own self-representations, and therefore the selﬁe enables
for the most intimate dimensions of private life to be revealed and exposed. The forced
candor is where the exploited force of her photographic practice emanates from –
though it is also where her feminist agency is established as a form of resistance.
There are those who might suggest that, as a young woman in a male-dominated
society (and art world), the agency Romeo wields as an image-maker is ultimately
undermined – or less effective. That reading would be reductive, and surely, power
functions in more complex ways than that. It would be more accurate to suggest that
the agency she claims is aggressively feminist, while her gaze embodies the kind of
exploitive force most often associated with male photographers (Figure 2).
Perhaps more important is that Romeo’s photography envisions a space (and
working method) for women artists that is not concerned with talking back to men.
When looking carefully at the photography of Francesca Romeo, it is hard not to
think about Mulvey’s (2009) famous essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”
in which she explores the voyeuristic tendencies in mainstream Hollywood cinema.
Mulvey was rightly concerned with the manner in which women were portrayed (all
too often as hyper-sexualized fetish objects for male viewing pleasure; that women
500 D.C. Murray
functioned as the “image,” or the object of representation, that is subject to the nowmythical
male gaze). There is little argument there. But how do we begin to think
about the manner in which women see beyond the traditional power dynamic (active
male image-maker/passive female subject)? Is there any other way to think about
what and how women see that builds upon these dynamics? For example, it would
be hard to imagine a more uneven power relationship than that between Romeo and
her subjects in Mars. This is not to say that her work is intentionally exploitive or
demeaning of her subjects. But there is a sense of bravado – or a type of authorial
ease that permeates the work. There is nothing restrained or apologetic about her
gaze. The way Romeo sees has force and that quality deﬁnes both her photography
and ﬁlmmaking efforts. The issue of female agency in feminist representational strategies
has long been debated. As a result, an argument could be made that for many feminist
intellectuals; it is unsettling to think of a young entitled female fully embodying
the exploitive authorship traditionally associated with male artists (Jones 2002;
Leonard 2011). That notion is relatively new. In fact, these attitudes are similar to
Figure 2. Francesca Romeo, Ryan, 2009. # [Francesca Romeo]. Reproduced by permission of
artist.
Consumption Markets & Culture 501
the criticisms of exploitation directed toward Nan Goldin in the 1990s. Golden is often
credited (or perhaps blamed) with creating the heroin-chic aesthetic that emerged in
fashion circles in the 1990s (Garratt 2002).
This problematic is repeatedly evidenced in the conceptual strategies of female photography
students – where their work could be read as perhaps too concerned with critiquing
and subverting the male gaze – while failing to ponder the complex power
dynamics that impact their own acts of looking. Should they consider that there is
such a thing as empowered female looking? In that regard, Romeo’s production does
not need to claim, emulate, or appropriate the agency or brashness that is so synonymous
with male artists (particularly photographers) as a form of affectation. Her
work embodies this quality inherently. Both Mars and Elegy are disquieting precisely
because of the agency she wields over her subjects.
Her portraiture functions as a staging to explore the very nature of authorial power –
and often as a platform to reassert that authority over her male subjects. In so doing, she
harnesses the potency of photographic portraiture as a means to reclaim what was taken
or lost in past moments of intimacy. Considering Romeo’s conceptual approach in terms
of the power she wields over her sitters – can female photographers dominate their subjects
(particularly men) . . . can they exploit, sexualize, or simply objectify? If women
wield “the power of the look” then are they in turn non-exempt from the perils of
image making? Romeo speaks openly about intentionally embodying and wielding
the gaze of an imagined male viewer – or simply wrestling with her sexual past
through the camera:
The female gaze . . . I ﬁnd that when I shoot men that they look like children to me. They
become vulnerable in a way that is always unexpected, no matter how old they are. And
it’s such a strange experience for me, because almost all of the men I have photographed, I
have also had sex with at some point in my life. I only state that because oftentimes my
impulse to photograph these guys is born of some unvoiced desire on my part to revisit
something intimate, or create a context that might lend itself to eroticism, and that’s
what in fact happens when I am looking at them, is that my maternal impulse emerges,
and in some way, the act of photographing them becomes a way of taking care of them . . .
. . . The gaze that I use to look at myself, is almost always in reference to an imagined
male viewer and is constructed from years of feeling confused about my own supposed
femininity – both denying it and amplifying it, because that is what we are taught
implicitly as women – that somehow our sexuality should be wielded as a force in any
given situation to get what we want. And so much of my photography is rooted in a
history of responding to male artists with their brash, raw, irreverent and misogynist
impulses, and wanting to somehow emulate them and destroy them at the same time.
At the basis I think are common threads (at least I ﬁnd) of vulnerability, a desire to get
close, a need to rebel and a constant process of having to assert oneself in response to
male domination while concurrently wanting to feel “safe” in the presence of men.
(from interview with Romeo 2010, 25 September 2013)
The relation between image making and female self-empowerment is a dominant
feature of Romeo’s photographic practice and the self-portrait is always present.
Romeo’s intervention (which can be characterized as a type of feminist representational
politics) seeks to break from a ﬁxation with the male gaze; a gesture that she describes
as a means to claim agency, while still acknowledging the struggle against a patriarchal
logic.
Romeo, like many young female photographers of her generation, have been inﬂuenced
by Second-Wave Feminist critiques, most notably Laura Mulvey’s
502 D.C. Murray
aforementioned canonical writing on the male gaze and female representation in the
cinema. In it, Mulvey (2009) introduces the term “male gaze” and critically explores
how gendered power dynamics are evidenced, maintained and consumed in popular
cinematic representation. On her Tumblr blog Notes on the Divine, Notes on
Despair, the photographer posts a mix of portraits and self-portraits that are interspersed
with written diaristic entries that poetically recount the intricacies and banalities
of her life. Romeo’s “seﬂies” are more self-consciously aesthetic than what we might
associate with social media: they are beautifully lit, with warm and saturated tones, and
sculptural light. Combined with the diary entries, Romeo’s self-portraits bring a sense
of drama and melodramatic grandeur to the everydayness of life – which highlights the
self-aggrandizing and myth-making force of the Internet as a powerful means for selfdeﬁnition
and creative reinvention. However, the tension between the selﬁe and the
self-portrait converges in her image-making practice in interesting ways, because,
while feminist agency drives much of her work, the trivializing of the selﬁe tends to
reduce or diminish her more heady aesthetic aspirations. That said, Romeo has
always taken self-portraits, even though she rejects the term “selﬁe,” which for her
has negative and belittling connotations:
Selﬁes to me are something entirely different than self-portraiture, though technically they
are exactly the same. I was surprised when I ﬁrst heard the term, because it was voiced in a
comment under a picture I posted on instagram and phrased as an insult, “Ha, I never
thought you would be the kind of girl to take selﬁes.” Which struck me as odd and
made me feel embarrassed, and a part of me wanted to justify myself by claiming that
I was a photographer and have been taking self-portraits since I was 7 years old and
why couldn’t the person that left that comment just fuck off . . .
I think the big shift for me between my work as an artist and whatever I post on instagram
is that the art is considered, has depth, is contextualized by themes and metaphors that run
throughout a body of work, while the instagram stuff may look the same as my other work
because I have a certain style, or are attracted to certain ways of lighting an image, but that
the format doesn’t lend itself to profundity because my audience is preconceived before I
even make an image – so there is no spontaneity – it is merely an advertisement. (from
interview with Romeo, 25 September 2013)
Social media self-fashioning and the selﬁe as political activism
While Romeo makes a distinction between the selﬁe and the self-portrait (Figure 3),
Vivian Fu and Noorann Matties reject this difference and therefore their work tends
to blur the line between these designations. The enigmatic work of Taiwanese-American
photographer Vivian Fu has intrigued me for the past three years and has been
instrumental in my ever-evolving interest in Internet-based forms of self-portraiture.
Fu is part of an emergent generation of photographers that has developed almost exclusively
within social media circles. Fu is a master at self-promotion and is keenly aware
of the needs and interests of young women who spend considerable amounts of time
online. Blogging culture has become an extremely powerful force that has created
complex social networks and afﬁliations between individuals who, in most instances,
live great distances from each other. In fact, one of the most remarkable features of
blogging culture is the way that complete strangers – often separated by great geographic
distances – form communities and lasting bonds that inspire creative collabor-
ation.9
Fu has become known for her self-portrait work that focuses on her sexuality
and her relationship with her white boyfriend, who she met while attending art
Consumption Markets & Culture 503
school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Fu, like many of her fellow female
photographers, is obsessed with the work of Nan Goldin and seeks to create her own
facsimile of the elder artist’s saturated, gritty, realism and intimacy. Goldin’s snapshot,
heroin-chic style, has become the standard for lifestyle photography and hipster aesthetics
of the Internet generation. Fu’s photography bears a similarity to other young
female artists of her generation like Petra Collins and Sandy Kim, both of whom are
prote´ge´s of photographer Ryan McGinley (Freeman 2013). McGinley built his representation
as a chronicler of youth culture, with his grainy, saturated images of
young people who populated New York’s urban underworld. Blurring the lines
between documentary, ﬁne art, and fashion, McGinley perfected an aesthetic that
could be deﬁned as a type of subcultural chic, that has its roots in the photography
of Larry Clark, Goldin, and the late artist Dash Snow (a friend and collaborator of
McGinley).
Working in a similar mode to her forebears and contemporaries, Fu shoots exclusively
in ﬁlm, preferring the 35 mm point-and-shoot camera aesthetic. For more
formal and conceptual work, she uses a medium-format camera, however, like
Romeo, she is extremely active on the social networking sight Instagram, sharing
cell phone pics that document her life. It is her snapshot “selﬁe-style” self-portraits
that have garnered the most attention – speciﬁcally the images that explore the intimacies
of her romantic relationship. Fu is rather outspoken about the importance of the
“selﬁe-style” self-portrait as a radical form of self-deﬁnition: one that enables for the
undoing and interrogation of painful ethnic stereotypes:
I have always been aware of racialized stereotypes. Self-portraiture became a way for me
to own my identity as an Asian-American woman. I wasn’t really any of the
Figure 3. Francesca Romeo, Self portrait at the bar, in between coasts, 2013. # [Francesca
Romeo]. Reproduced by permission of artist.
504 D.C. Murray
representations of Asian women that were being shown to me, which were either highly
submissive and infantilized or very aggressive femme fatale types, and really, those ideas
of Asian women probably only really exist because they are archetypes made up by white
dudes. I wanted to show myself as an Asian woman the way that I was that differed
greatly from these pre-existing ideas about Asian women. I am also a sexual person
and self-portraiture and the documentation of my romantic relationships was also a
way to own my sexuality as MINE and not as a something that was to bring my
partner pleasure . . .
. . . I want to show my strength and vulnerability, I want to be deﬁant of the visual
imagery that I was presented with that sought to make me feel proud of my culture
from the perspective of white men, whose sole intentions were to objectify and sexualize
and eroticize me. I wanted to shake the ideas that were placed upon me and my body and
my identity because my parents came from the east and my eyes were slanted and my skin
is yellow that seemed to overshadow the person that I actually am. My photographs,
although quiet, are my rebellion. (From interview with photographer Vivian Fu on 28
September 2013)
Fu’s self-portrait work extends beyond selﬁes and snapshot-style images, into the
realm of constructed narrative in her ongoing series, Asian Girls. The series was
inspired by the artist’s discomfort around other Asian women, who she perceived as
a threat and intrusion when among her predominantly white friends. In an interview,
Fu stated that she was antagonistic and rejecting of her Chinese background in her
youth, which she believed stemmed from feelings of internalized racism:
I think that this was also sort of heightened by the fact that I had very few Asian friends
growing up, mostly because I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood, but also
because I carried (and probably still do carry) some level of internalized racism. I think I
viewed myself as “different” from the other Asian girls I knew because I at the time
viewed myself as more “westernized” and interested in “white people stuff,” which
was probably the product of some stupid juvenile rebellion against my parents which
translated stupidly into rebellion against the culture that my parents tried to impart onto
me. (From interview with photographer Vivian Fu on 28 September 2013)
In the Asian Girls series, Fu takes full-color photographic portraits of herself with
another Asian woman. Taken with the lushness of medium-format ﬁlm, the images are
subtly evocative of hidden tensions between people of color that are engendered by
societal racism. In each photo, Fu and her sitter gently touch each other: a gesture
that, in another context would seem benign, but here it represents a profound rejection
of the forces of intolerance that create lasting divisions and self-hatreds. In Me and Yui,
Castro, April 2014 (Figure 4), Fu and a friend sit closely together on a porch, each
gazing into the camera. The mise-en-scene is purposefully mundane, but the interaction
between the two youthful subjects conveys a tension that is palpable, but not overtly
articulated. It is a series about the subtleties and psychological complexities of intraethnic
conﬂict. There is something extraordinary about Fu’s contradictory engagement
with the gritty realism of Goldin, which she rearticulates as a young 20-something
Asian woman’s assimilationist narrative – and her more politically self-aware Asian
Girls series, that seems to interrogate her own racial longings. Even the aesthetic
greatly differs between the two bodies of work. The documentary-style images have
a DIY (do it yourself) feel about them that compliments what appears to be a selfconsciously
hipstery documentation of her descent into the reckless abandon of subcultural
whiteness. Grainy and often out-of-focus images of her heavily tattooed friends,
nude self-portraits, and heavily saturated shots of domestic intimacy populate her
Consumption Markets & Culture 505
blog and professional website. However, the Asian Girls series has the pristine aesthetic
of professional ﬁne art work: it is at once austere, intellectual, and serious in its
self-awareness.
Carefully composed and conceptualized, the Asian Girls series has none of the overt
sexuality that Fu plays with in her documentary-style work. She resists playing with
stereotypes of Asian women, imaging her herself and her sitters with a hint of
modesty and conservatism in dress. We see this in another image from the series entitled
Figure 4. Vivian Fu, Me and Yui, Castro, April 2014. # [Vivian Fu]. Reproduced by permission
of the artist.
506 D.C. Murray
Me and Wenxin, Mission, April 2014 (Figure 5), a beautiful photograph of Fu and friend
imagedfrontally and standingshoulder-to-shoulder. Framedhorizontally,the imagecaptures
its two subjects as they peer downward at the camera. The visual effect creates a
tone of deﬁance, willfulness, and strength, as the subjects’ gaze is directed seriously
and imposingly at the viewer. Based in San Francisco, Fu utilizes the city in every
shot, in this instance, a city block within the Mission neighborhood. In a sense, Fu and
her subject are engulfed by congested buildings and power lines, but they still manage
to convey a intensity that is imposing in its affective resonance. The contrast between
each series is exempliﬁed in a photograph entitled Bruise, Mission, July 2014
(Figure 6), a cropped image of the artist lying on her stomach and skirt hiked up just
enough to expose a large heart-shaped bruise. Her head fully cropped out of the
image, Fu’s portrait is a take on Nan Goldin’s similarly composed 1980 photograph
Heart-Shaped Bruise, NYC – though the younger artist’s reimagining is more selfconsciously
aesthetic and is reminiscent of the reclining nudes and Orientalist odalisques
immortalized in the history of modern Western painting. The red and blue stripes of her
blouse, bright purple skirt, and turquoise, black, and purple leopard-print panties have a
contrasting eloquence that appears more aware of its desire to ﬁnd beauty in banality –
yet, Fu is attempting to both construct and mythologize her physical attractiveness in
such a manner that deviates dramatically from the psychological harshness of
Goldin’s abjection.
Figure 5. Vivian Fu, Me and Wenxin, Mission, April 2014. # [Vivian Fu]. Reproduced by
permission of the artist.
Consumption Markets & Culture 507
While Fu’s photography is engaged in an overt politics of identity, this quality is
often subsumed within a type of hipness that dulls the sting of its more heady explorations
into the intricacies of race, gender and sexuality. A similar approach is at work in
the photography of Noorann Matties, an artist in her early 20s, who Fu met initially
online – eventually forming a friendship and aesthetic kinship.
Based in Baltimore, Maryland, Matties is a student at the prestigious Maryland
Institute College of Art and like Fu, her slightly older San Francisco-based colleague,
she shoots exclusively in 35 mm and medium-format ﬁlm. Also an active blogger, the
emergent photographer documents the goings-on of her daily life: relationships, health
issues, creative crises, fashion and popular culture obsessions, and her ever-increasing
engagement with body modiﬁcation. However, the politics in her representational
approach emanates most powerfully in her self-portrait work. Half Pakistani and half
white, Matties’s ethnically ambiguous subjectivity is always at the forefront of her
images. Like Fu, many of her photographs seem to represent an individual struggling
with both their privilege and their alterity, in social milieus that are predominantly
white. And similarly to her compatriot, her images feel almost like an assimilationist
ballad: tinged with desire and longing for acceptance and normativity – all while claiming
the ideologically assigned gravity of racial difference. Petit, strikingly thin and
heavily tattooed, Matties is a fascinating subject, whose brown skin and South Asian
features belie her suburban art school hipsterism – a quality she is certainly aware
of and fully maximizes.
What is perhaps most arresting about Matties’s work is the convergence of genderbased
and racial consciousness: a new representational politics that is speaking most
powerfully to the complex lives of young women of color, whose experiences have
never been acknowledged by either anti-racist movements in the USA, or by the
Figure 6. Vivian Fu, Bruise, Mission, July 2014. # [Vivian Fu]. Reproduced by permission of
the artist.
508 D.C. Murray
dictates of mainstream feminism. Despite her youth, Matties is extremely sophisticated
in her engagement with gender and race, and she is rather outspoken about the importance
of self-portraiture and selﬁes to her photographic practice:
I started imaging myself heavily when I was at a very solitary point in my life, there
simply was no one else around to photograph so I turned the lens on myself. The
reason, however, that I kept imaging myself was that I started to realize that I just
wasn’t seeing young brown women depicted the way I was photographing myself anywhere
else. I remember growing up seeing nothing but white women shown on TV
and online and in galleries and museums, it really messed with my sense of self and
my sense of self worth as a little brown girl. I want to contribute to the visibility of
brown women everywhere, and I want to do it in a way that is poignant and honest
about the struggles that I and many other young women face. I want to make honest
work and to be able to remember myself as I am, tears and zits and all. (From an interview
with Matties on 19 April 2014)
Matties’s unique brand of self-obsession breaks somewhat from Fu’s interest in
sexuality and racial stereotypes, and explores themes related to beauty routines, physical
modiﬁcation, and the physical and psychological toll caused by eating disorders. In
one of her more compelling black-and-white self-portraits entitled, Self Portrait as My
Stomach (2013) (Figure 7), Matties is imaged from the waist, so that her head and lower
half of her body is cropped out of the picture frame. The image is carefully composed to
only reveal the artist’s bare midriff and just a hint of her breasts that peak out from
beneath a white t-shirt, that is most likely being pulled upwards and held by her
mouth, or pinched between her chin and chest. Sitting purposefully at her lower
waist are the artist’s hands, as they clasp a black Olympus point-and-shoot camera.
The image has an awkward elegance to it: it is both beautiful and strained in its
Figure 7. Noorann Matties, Self portrait as my stomach, 2013. # [Noorann Matties]. Reproduced
by permission of artist.
Consumption Markets & Culture 509
compositional and physical dimensions, though it also conceals something that is allusive
and difﬁcult to pin down – a quality that rests somewhere between self-loathing
and self-adoration. It is a theme that is repeated in Matties’s photographic series
Rituals from 2014, a body of work that was featured in The Hufﬁngton Post in April
2014 (Parks 2014). Rituals is a series of snapshot portraits of young women, as they
apply makeup in front of mirrors (Figure 8). In the artist’s own words, the photographs
are meant to capture a very private and intimate moment:
Forced to examine ourselves in ways many normally avoid, Rituals as a project sought to
capture the moment in which we our lives become devoid of distraction and we become
intimately aware of ourselves. By photographing people’s personal beauty rituals I
attempted to capture this awareness, this intimacy that occurs only when one is forced
to examine their own body, the most basic thing that is theirs, and build upon it.
(Matties 2014)
What stands out about the series is the remarkable diversity of subjects in terms of
race and ethnicity. Rituals is deceptively banal in its capturing of something that is so
commonplace as to be entirely overlooked – but it also assigns value to the private lives
of young women, while still having criticality toward the often-unobtainable aesthetic
demands placed upon them. The range of physical and ethnic types speaks to the devaluing
of women who all-too-often fall outside of the normative beauty standards
Figure 8. Vivian Fu, Self portrait taking selﬁe, December 2014. # [Vivian Fu] Reproduced by
permission of artist.
510 D.C. Murray
promoted by Hollywood and the fashion industry. Although, I would argue that Matties
is ultimately more concerned with advancing a decidedly female gaze. Should we be
inclined to move beyond a judgmental reading of selﬁe culture, the female gaze
emerges as the primary visual operation at work: a claimed representational agency
that is as political as it is personal.
The uniqueness and speciﬁcity of Matties’ gaze is at the heart of her ever-growing
popularity. Her blog and photography website are dominated by selﬁes of various sorts,
in fact, on both sites, there are dedicated sections for self-portraits where these images
are accumulated. The types of selﬁes are incredibly diverse, from shots captured in
bathroom mirrors, to the artist carefully posed in pastoral scenes, to the cheap playfulness
of photo-booth portraits taken in shopping malls.
The photo-booth is becoming increasingly popular on the blogs of young women
and Matties is an active user of these now dated forms of public image making. The
photo-booth allows for the creation of multiple shots within a brief duration of time,
allowing for strips of photographs in grid-like formations. The effect recalls a Warholian-style
repetition whereby Matties presents herself as an icon of sorts. The very form
itself grants a certain quality of value, yet in her photo-booth portraits, she displays
various emotions that would normally be hidden. In one image, Matties is presented
in two strips of vertically oriented portraits that are side-by-side. In the ﬁrst headshot,
she looks rather blank and emotionless, but as the images progress downwards, she
begins to cry. Above the portraits are the words “I Love You.” In another, we see
Matties pinching the loose skin under her arm in one frame, in another is a cropped
shot of her midsection with shirt raised as she pinches the fat on her waist, and in a
third, she squeezes a patch of skin on her thigh. Each of her photo-booth portraits
focus on some aspect of her physical appearance: none are conventional or idealizing
and the cartoonish graphics above and below the images contain phrases like “Daddy’s
Little Girl” and “Fabulous Princess.” Unlike Fu’s overtly sexual self-portraits,
Matties’s selﬁes are incredibly melancholic in tone and focus more attention on
the physical and health-related struggles that young women face – in fact, she is
incredibly frank about her own struggles with Anorexia. As a visual diary, Matties’s
blog is a haven for young women ﬁghting similar battles, even while it simultaneously
functions as a fantasy space in which to be remade and ultimately desired and
worshiped.
Conclusion
The philosopher Slavoj Zˇizˇek once said that fantasy is not about an individual creating a
scenario in which they get everything they want. On the contrary, an individual’s
fantasy is about creating a scenario in which “he or she is desired by others” (Zˇizˇek
2012). When Zˇizˇek uttered these words, he was thinking critically about the relationship
between ideology and popular cinema – however, his rather playful explication
of fantasy continues to ﬁnd resonance when I consider the self-imaging strategies of
young women in the age of social media. The selﬁe is so often regarded as a form of
narcissism in the Freudian sense: a perversion whereby an individual “treats his own
body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is usually treated . . . he
strokes and fondles it till he obtains complete satisfaction” (Freud 1991, 3). In its
most pessimistic characterization, to take selﬁes is to stroke and fondle the self in a masturbatory
display of self-aggrandizement. Freud’s pathologizing of narcissism was concerned
with the relation between the ego and external objects – and we might surmise
Consumption Markets & Culture 511
that popular understandings of the selﬁe suggest a dysfunctional taking of oneself as a
sexual object as a means of achieving validation and pleasure. In “The Young-Girl as
Technique of the Self,” Tiqqun asks, “What is pleasure?” It is an important query when
considering the role of pleasure within the bizarre world of social media egoism – particularly
the largely female-driven landscape of “selﬁe-laden” blogging culture, where
the spectacle of female bodies is the dominant driving force. The visual power of online
self-portraiture is rooted in a type of pleasure that is voraciously claimed: an oppositional
desire and enjoyment in oneself as a response to a culture of devaluing and misrepresentation.
Tiqqun suggests that “[t]here is nothing in the Young-Girl’s life, even in
the deepest zones of her intimacy, that escapes alienated reﬂexivity, that escapes the
codiﬁcation and the gaze of the Spectacle . . . For the Young-Girl, what is most
secret is also most public” (2007, 48).
Vivian Fu’s photograph, Self Portrait Taking Selﬁe, perfectly embodies these
notions in its self-conscious and highly constructed engagement with the artist’s
own proliﬁc and sexualized practice as a selﬁe-taker. Fu is well attuned to the
public discourse on this mode of image making, stating: “To me this photograph is
about my self awareness in my self portraiture. This is about my performance of
imaging myself, but also about controlling even the image of myself imaging
myself” (interview with Fu, 14 February 14). Freud’s problematic formulation of narcissism
– the idea of taking oneself as a sexual object – is only useful in its most
cynical and judgmental dimensions – but it also allows just one entry point into the
contemporary phenomenon of Internet-based self-imaging. Fu’s intervention here is
more satirical and more meaningfully holistic in its critique of a society dominated
by an obsession with images. And it is important to remember that Self Portrait
Taking Selﬁe is not a selﬁe, but rather a constructed narrative photographic tableau,
that wields its self-conscious mise-en-scene in the service of making a meta-commentary
on what, for many, is actually a meaningful and thoughtfully realized gesture. The
image plays with the fraught matrix of seeing and being seen that the late writer Susan
Sontag wrote of in her inﬂuential book, On Photography (2001). The selﬁe does not
simply comment upon a narcissistic need to see oneself in an idealized state, rather
it makes one aware of the predatory nature of looking: the voyeurism in gazing at
others and the implied pleasure in knowing that one is being gazed upon. As Neil Evernden
recounts in his critical reassessment of On Photography, Sontag states the following:
“there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people
is to violate them . . . it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed”
(Everden 1985, 73). In this photo, Fu turns herself into an object to be viewed and
adored, while simultaneously engaging in the predatory act of voyeurism. Like
Zˇizˇek suggests in his thoughts on fantasy, Fu creates a scenario in which to be
desired; but most importantly, she creates a scenario in which she can begin to
desire herself.
In their notes to self, the young female photographers discussed in this essay,
claim a representational agency that transcends the gender-speciﬁc slights and
ideological trivializing of young women’s efforts to deﬁne themselves; to make
themselves visible, in a cultural climate that continues to negate, ridicule, malign,
and sexualize them. Maybe the selﬁe is an instinct of self-preservation: a survivorship
reﬂex – and perhaps it is in the young woman’s representational contending
with the most dehumanizing conditions of late capitalism, that they are able to envision
themselves anew and to transcend the depreciatory vision that is so often
imposed upon them.
512 D.C. Murray
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Jonathan Schroeder for his support of this research, as well as
Soraya Murray for her critical feedback. Finally, the author wishes to thank photographers
Vivian Fu, Noorann Matties, and Francesca Romeo, who generously and very candidly
shared their insights and artwork.
Disclosure statement
No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For popular culture references to the selﬁe phenomenon, see Kardashian (2015), Fallon
(2014), and “Selﬁe Blog,” (2015). The television show Selﬁe’s original run was scheduled
for September–December in 2014, but was canceled by ABC on 7 November 2014.
2. For a comprehensive and fascinating breakdown of post-feminism’s emergence in intellectual
culture, see Hall and Rodriguez (2003). The authors unpack the origins of the term postfeminism
as it was introduced and eventually debated within popular media circles of the
1908s. In their analysis of past debates, the authors identify four postfeminist claims:
support for the feminist movement has dramatically eroded; many women are becoming
increasingly anti-feminist; there is an increasing sentiment that the movement is irrelevant;
a new version of feminism has emerged that breaks from the past.
3. For critiques of post-blackness, see Baker and Simmons (2015), who argue that the term
“post-black” represents the post-racial aspirations of an entitled black elite. The popular
book Who’s Afraid of Post-blackness: What It Means to Be Black Now by Toure´ inspired
Baker’s collection of essays (Toure´ 2012). Toure´ argues that popular notions of blackness
are too rigidly deﬁned; creating a notion of racial authenticity that excludes and demeans
large segments of the African-American community. Despite Toure´ having never
claimed a post-racial stance, there is a growing discourse that characterizes his arguments
in such a manner.
4. Various scholars have studied the phenomenon of young women actively participating in
online social media culture in the twenty-ﬁrst century. One notable example is Schuster,
who in her study of young women’s online activism and feminist engagement in New
Zealand, argues that there is a generational divide that separates young women from
second- and third-wave feminism (Schuster 2013). She further suggests that the technological
divide between generations has the effect of concealing young women’s political participation
from older feminists who are disconnected from Internet culture. Blogging culture
and social media platforms like Facebook thus enable young women to connect despite signiﬁcant
geographic distances and demographic differences.
5. For an example of a popular blog on the social media platform Tumblr, see Margot Darling,
http://margotdarling.tumblr.com/. Having amassed a signiﬁcant following on social media,
Margot regularly posts selﬁes depicting herself nostalgically as a 1950s-era pinup. Heavily
adorned in theatrical makeup and costuming, she often poses in lingerie and other provocative
outﬁts – while also discussing fashion, grooming, makeup routines, sex, and the daily
banalities of her life.
6. For an in-depth critical unpacking of Cindy Sherman’s inﬂuence on younger generations of
female photographers, see Dalton (2000). Dalton explores the evolution of performative
self-portraiture as a conceptual gesture that many female photographers wield as a politically
urgent and oppositional manner.
7. In her exploration of late artist Hannah Wilke’s (who died in 1993) photographic work documenting
her battle with cancer, Amelia Jones locates a turn in performative self-portraiture
away from a male gaze-centric critical approach, towards a very personal investigation into
death and the complexities of identity (Jones 2002). For additional writing on feminist selfportrait
photography in the postmodern age, see Lowenberg (1999).
8. As evidenced in online journalism and blogging circles online, there is a growing sentiment
among young self-proclaimed feminists that the notion “male gaze” is outmoded and should
be abandoned. The argument is that women should resist an over-ﬁxation with the power
Consumption Markets & Culture 513
dynamics and gendered complexities of male viewing – in favor of a more assertive claiming
of female agency. See Liu (2014).
9. For a detailed investigation into feminist blogging and politically engaged social media
activity by young women in New Zealand, see Schuster (2013). She charts the growing
popularly of the Internet as a forum for feminist activity, although she suggests that a
divide is growing between elder (Second Wave) and younger (Third Wave) feminists,
due in large part by the latter’s embrace of technology. Schuster also explores the Internet
(and social media) as a means for young feminists to build online communities and to
develop a sense of belongingness.
References
Acocella, Joan. 2014. “Selﬁe: How Big a Problem Is Narcissism.” The New Yorker, May 12.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/selﬁe.
Adamson, Glenn, Anna C. Chave, and Robert Cozzolino, eds. 2013. The Female Gaze: Women
Artists Making Their World. Seattle: Marquand Books.
Bae, Michelle S. 2011. “Interrogating Girl Power: Girlhood, Popular Media, and Postfeminism.”
Visual Arts Research 37 (2): 28–40.
Baker, Huston A., and K. Merinda Simmons. 2015. The Trouble with Post-blackness.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Bobel, Chris, and Judith Lorber. 2010. New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of
Menstruation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Bowers, Susan R. 1990. “Medusa and the Female Gaze.” NWSA Journal 2 (2): 217–235.
Bruni, Frank. 2014. “A Grope and a Shrug: Dov Charney, American Apparel and Sexual
Harassment.” The New York Times, June 30. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/
opinion/frank-bruni-dov-charney-american-apparel-and-sexual-harassment.html.
Bystrom, Emma Arvida. 2012. “There Will Be Blood.” Vice, May 17. http://www.vice.com/
read/there-will-be-blood.
Carr, David. 2015. “Selﬁes on a Stick, and the Social-Content Challenge for the Media.”
New York Times, January 4. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/business/media/selﬁes-
on-a-stick-and-the-social-content-challenge-for-the-media.html?_r=0.
Cochrane, Kira. 2009. “It’s in the Blood.” The Guardian, October 1. http://www.theguardian.
com/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/02/menstruation-feminist-activists.
Criqui, Jean-Pierre, Re´gis Durand, and Laura Mulvey. 2006. “A Phantasmagoria of the Female
Body.” In Cindy Sherman, 284–303. Paris: Jeu de Paume.
Dalton, Jennifer. 2000. “LOOK AT ME: Self-portrait Photography after Cindy Sherman.” PAJ:
A Journal of Performance and Art 22 (3): 47–56.
Daum, Meghan. 2007. “American Apparel’s ick.” Los Angeles Times, August 25. http://www.
latimes.com/opinion/la-oe-daum25aug25-column.html.
D’Souza, Aruna, and Tom McDonough. 2008. The Invisible Flaˆneuse?: Gender, Public Space
and Visual Culture in Nineteenth Century Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Erickson, Christine. 2013. “Dear Obama: Funerals Are No Place for Selﬁes.” Mashable.com,
December 10. http://mashable.com/2013/12/10/obama-nelson-mandela-funeral-selﬁe/.
Evernden, Neil. 1985. “Seeing and Being Seen: A Response to Susan Sontag’s Essays on
Photography.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 68 (1): 72–87.
Fallon, Kevin. 2014. “‘Selﬁe’ Is Both a Brilliant and Terrible TV Show.” The Daily Beast,
September 30. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/30/selﬁe-is-both-a-brilliant-
and-terrible-tv-show.html.
Freeman, Nate. 2013. “Ryan McGinley, the Pied Piper of the Downtown Art World.” New York
Times, November 20. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/fashion/Ryan-McGinleys-
Apprentices-cool-kids-in-the-downtown-art-scene.html.
Freud, Sigmund. 1991. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” In Freud’s “On Narcissism: An
Introduction”, edited by Joseph Sandler, Ethel Spector Person, and Peter Fonagy, 3. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Friedberg, Anne. 1993. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Garratt, Sheryl. 2002. “The Dark Room.” The Guardian, January 6. http://www.theguardian.
com/theobserver/2002/jan/06/features.magazine27.
514 D.C. Murray
Golden, Thelma. 2001. “Post . . . ” In Freestyle, edited by Thelma Golden, 14–15. New York:
The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Hall, Elaine J., and Marnie Salupo Rodriguez. 2003. “The Myth of Postfeminism.” Gender and
Society 17 (6): 878–902.
Hecht, Morgan. 2012. “Sm{art}: 5 Menstrual Blood Artists/Projects Worth Seeing.” Bitch
Magazine, March 28. http://bitchmagazine.org/post/smart-menstrual-blood-art-feminism.
Hiltzik, Michael. 2014. “American Apparel Saga: Why Did It Take So Long to Sack Dov
Charney?” The Los Angeles Times, June 20. http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-ﬁ-
mh-dov-charney-20140620-column.html#page=1.
Holmlund, Chris. 2005. “Postfeminism from A to G.” Cinema Journal 44 (2): 116–121.
Jones, Amelia. 1993. “Postfeminism, Feminist Pleasures, and Embodied Theories of Art.” In
New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, edited by Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L.
Langer, and Arlene Raven, 16–41. New York: Icon Editions.
Jones, Amelia. 2002. “‘The Eternal Return’: Self-portrait Photography as a Technology of
Embodiment.” Signs 27 (4): 947–978.
Kardashian, Kim. 2015. Selﬁsh. New York: Rizzoli.
Killingsworth, Silvia. 2013. “And the Word of the Year Is . . . ” The New Yorker, November 19.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/11/selﬁe-word-of-the-year.html.
Leonard, Joanne. 2011. “Being in (Feminist) Pictures.” Feminist Review 99: 98–105.
Liu, Maria X. 2014. “Obstructing the Male Gaze in a Gaze-Dependent Culture.” Hufﬁngton
Post, December 16. http://www.hufﬁngtonpost.com/maria-x-liu/obstructing-the-male-
gaze_b_6322936.html.
Losse, Kate. 2013. “The Return of the Selﬁe.” The New Yorker, June 5. http://www.newyorker.
com/online/blogs/elements/2013/06/the-return-of-the-selﬁe.html.
Lowenberg, Ina. 1999. “Reﬂections on Self-portraiture in Photography.” Feminist Studies 25
(2): 398–408.
Matties, Noorann. 2014. “Rituals.” Inconnu Magazine, September 18. http://inconnumag.com/
rituals/.
McCalmont, Lucy. 2013. “President Obama Takes Selﬁe with World Leaders.” Politico.com,
December 10, 11:50 AM EST. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/nelson-mandela-
memorial-service-obama-photo-100948.html.
McGuire, Patrick. 2013. “Chatting with Petra Collins about Her Menstruating-Vagina
Shirt.” Vice, December 8. http://www.vice.com/read/chatting-with-petra-collins-about-her-
menstruating-vagina-shirt.
Misener, Jessica.2012. “American Apparel Ads ‘Sexualize’ ChildModels, Rules Britain’s ASA.”
Hufﬁngton Post, December 5. http://www.hufﬁngtonpost.com/2012/12/05/american-
apparel-sexy-ads-asa-child-models_n_2243360.html.
Mulvey, Laura. 2009. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other Pleasures,
14–30. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Murray, Rheana. 2012. “American Apparel Ad Banned in UK for Sexualizing ‘Model Who
Appeared to be a Child’.” The New York Daily News, December 14. http://www.
nydailynews.com/life-style/fashion/american-apparel-ad-banned-uk-article-1.1220428.
O’Hagan, Sean. 2014. “Nan Goldin: ‘I Wanted to Get High from a Really Early Age’.” The
Guardian, March 22. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/23/nan-goldin-
photographer-wanted-get-high-early-age.
Parks, Chanel. 2014. “‘Rituals’ Photo Series Deﬁnes the Intimacy of Beauty.” The Hufﬁngton
Post, April 16. http://www.hufﬁngtonpost.com/2014/04/16/noorann-matties-rituals-
photos_n_5159944.html.
Romeo, Francesca. 2009a. Elegy, 54 page catalog, edition of 50.
Romeo, Francesca. 2009b. Mars, 26 page catalog with documentary ﬁlm DVD, edition of 50.
Santolalla, Carlos. 2013. “Art Star Sandy Kim Is on the Rise.” Paper Magazine, October 16.
http://www.papermag.com/2013/10/photographer_sandy_kim.php.
Schuster, Julia. 2013. “Invisible Feminists? Social Media and Young Women’s Political
Participation.” Political Science 65 (1): 8–24.
“Selﬁe Blog.” 2015. http://theprettypeopleblog.tumblr.com/. Accessed February 14, 2015.
Sontag, Susan. [1977] 2001. On Photography. New York: Picador Press.
Spielberg, Greg T. 2013. “How Sex on Tumblr Will Change Media.” Nerve, June 14. http://
www.nerve.com/love-sex/how-sexy-tumblrs-will-seduce-journalism.
Consumption Markets & Culture 515
Sweney, Mark. 2013. “American Apparel Ads Banned for Using Overtly Sexual Images.” The
Guardian, April 10. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/10/american-apparel-ad-
banned.
Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra. 2007. Interrogating Post-feminism: Gender and the Politics
of Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Tilda, Emma. 2014. “American Apparel Ads Take Female Objectiﬁcation to New Heights (and
Skirt Lengths to an All-Time Low).” BUST, August 11. http://bust.com/american-apparel-
ads-take-female-objectiﬁcation-to-new-heights-and-skirt-lengths-to-an-all-time-low.html.
Tiqqun. 2007. Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. Translated by Ariana
Reines. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Toure´. 2012. Who’s Afraid of Post-blackness: What It Means to Be Black Now. New York: Atria
Books.
Walker, Melissa. 2013. “The Good, the Bad, and the Unexpected Consequences of Selﬁe
Obsession.” TeenVogue.com, August. http://www.teenvogue.com/advice/2013-08/selﬁe-
obsession.
Wortham, Jenna. 2013. “My Selﬁe, Myself.” The New York Times, October 19. http://www.
nytimes.com/2013/10/20/sunday-review/my-selﬁe-myself.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
Zambelich, Ariel. 2012. “Sandy Kim Puts Fresh Spin on Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Wired,
May 9. http://www.wired.com/2012/05/sandy-kim/.
Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. 2012. The Perverts Guide to Ideology. Directed by Sophie Fiennes. Narration
Slavoj Zˇizˇek. New York: Zeitgeist Films.
516 D.C. Murray