Selfies, Image and the Re-making of the Body

Body & Society Article 1–26 Selfies, Image and the Re-making of the Body ª The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1357034X15592465 bod.sagepub.com Katrin Tiidenberg Tallinn University Edgar Gómez Cruz University of Leeds Abstract This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women’s experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical elaboration on what sexy selfies are and do by analysing interviews, selfies and blog content of nine women in the NSFW self-shooters community on tumblr. For our participants, self-shooting is an engaged, self-affirmative and awareness raising pursuit, where their body, through critically self-aware self-care, emerges as agentic, sexual and distinctly female. Thus, this is a reading of selfies as a practice of freedom. Keywords body, body-image, internet, nudity, photography, qualitative analysis, selfie Introduction Image-centred social media platforms like Instagram and tumblr, and apps such as Snapchat and WhatsApp, are growing in numbers of users and importance. On the social media behemoth Facebook, too, an increasing amount of communication happens through images. In this article we explore how taking and sharing selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr1 blogs make possible different experiences of Corresponding author: Katrin Tiidenberg. Email: katrin.tiidenberg@gmail.com Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 2 Body & Society their bodies for women. Selfie – a self-portrait made in a reflective object or from arm’s length – was selected as word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013, and news items about selfies are in the mainstream media daily. Posting or exchanging selfies is often dismissed as frivolous and self-absorbed, but the relationship between subjectivity, practice and social use of those images seems to be more complex than this dismissal allows. This article offers an empirical-data-led elaboration of some of these complexities. The growing scholarship on the topic suggests many readings for what selfies are and how they are used. Original research has been conducted to look at selfies as a way to harness fame (Marwick, 2015) and profit from it (Abidin, 2014); selfies and self-injury (Seko, 2013); on teenagers’ use of selfies (Dobson, 2014; Durrant et al., 2011); selfies and niqabs (Piela, 2013); selfies and sexuality (Tiidenberg, 2014; Gómez Cruz & Miguel, 2014); selfies and the changing concept of privacy (Lasén and Gómez-Cruz, 2009). Interpretations range from selfies being digital explorations of identity (Avgitidou, 2003) and self-revelation (Walker, 2005); therapeutic ways to transform individual experiences (Martin and Spence, 2003) or means of producing sociability and social hierarchies (Schwarz, 2010). Lee (2005) has argued that, for women specifically, selfies can offer a way to find control. Visual self-presentation online is seen by some as leading to increasing control, agency and power (Koskela, 2004; Walker, 2005); while other scholars (Hjorth, 2006; Lasén and Gómez-Cruz, 2009; Van House et al., 2005; Waskul and Martin, 2010) consider it power-ambiguous or even an oppressive reinforcement of consumerist, hetero- and body-normative discourses that create a commodified (Cox, 2007; Schwarz, 2010), even a ‘docile’ (Foucault, 1977) body. In this article too, we will question the hotly debated empowerment potential of selfies. We acknowledge that there is a certain sense of fatigue (Gavey, 2012) with the term, which stems from its depoliticization, cooption by advertising and by it having become a term in the conformist self-help discourse (Amy-Chinn, 2006; Barton, 2002; Douglas, 1994; Gill, 2008, 2009, 2012; Goldman, 1992; Lamb and Peterson, 2012; McRobbie, 2009; Peterson, 2010; Tolman, 2012). Some scholars even recommend we stop using the term (Bay-Cheng, 2012; Gavey, 2012; Gill, 2012; Senft, 2014), yet suitable alternatives have not been suggested and forgoing talking about issues of power, agency and self-efficacy would be disrespectful to Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 3 the experiences and the words of our participants. In this article, we are interpreting empowerment as personal sense of power and control, which carries potential for social impact through its influence on existing discourses and ways of looking. An elaboration of how we arrived at such a definition and how it is grounded in existing literature is offered further on. Images play an important role in how we experience being in the world and increasingly, due to the ubiquity of online interaction, how we ‘shape’ our world. The contemporary ‘visual economy that remains profoundly ageist, (dis)ablist and heteronormative’ (Gill, 2009: 139) leads people – particularly (young) women – to feel inadequate and dissatisfied with themselves (Lamb and Brown, 2006; McRobbie, 2009; Tolman, 2012). The sexualization (Gill, 2009; McNair, 1996, 2002; Paul, 2005), pornification (Gill, 2008, 2009; McNair, 2002; Paul, 2005) or raunchiness (Levy, 2005) of the visual culture has been extensively commented on. We, too, are looking at how bodies are experienced and performed within visual cultures, but our focus is on bodynormativity. Granted, bodies are entwined with sexuality, but we seek to interpret what body-selfies are and do in a space where ‘voyeurism and sexualized looking are permitted, indeed encouraged’ (McNair, 2002: ix), while, at the same time, women who are ‘unable to live up to increasingly narrow standards of female beauty and sex appeal’ (Gill, 2008: 44) are still accorded embodied subjecthood in the sense that they are seen and acknowledged as full members of the community.2 We set out to unravel the way practices of taking and sharing selfies engage with normative assumptions in the wider culture. This is important in order to understand how these practices make possible specific ways of looking and knowing. Along with interactions in the community they lead to women’s changing experiences of their bodies. To understand selfie taking and sharing theoretically, our article uses Coleman’s (2008) concept of ‘bodies as becoming’. While unlike Coleman’s, our work is epistemologically set in a social constructivist approach to bodies, gender and discourses, we find her work on becoming (2008, 2009) helpful for highlighting the relationality of selfies and women’s bodies. We explore women’s bodies in the context of their relationships with selfies, and the role images have in community norms. We critically analyse how and whether the relations between bodies and selfies produce practices that are experienced by our informants as increasing control and agency. Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 4 Body & Society Tumblr and Sexy Selfies NSFW blogs coexist with music, fashion, joke, kitten and many other typical blog types on tumblr. However, because of the lax policies about explicit content pre-Yahoo3 takeover, the NSFW blogs are quite abundant on tumblr. Ostensibly, these can be divided into two – the blogs that have original content and follow the logic of personal blogs, where authors post original writing and images (often sexy selfies), and the ones that have no original content, but rather curate a stream of third-party images without offering commentary on why. The bloggers included in our sample all have personal blogs that regularly post sexy selfies and tend to follow a set of common practices meant to protect their ‘plausible deniability’ (Tiidenberg, 2013). Real names are not used, identifying elements are blurred out, and images are usually headless or at least hide the face. Typically our participants found their way into tumblr via explicitly sexual images that linked back to tumblr, but were seen elsewhere on the internet. While it is not uncommon to see sexy selfies of celebrities or microcelebrities on (social) media now, tumblr was our participants’ first encounter with erotic or body-focused selfies, or at least with publishing them. In a similar way to female pop stars, many female self-shooters borrow (and emulate each other in that borrowing) from ‘codes of pornography in their self-presentation’ (Gill, 2008: 39). Women say they do not experience their choice to self-present in these raunchy ways as oppressive, but we acknowledge the fact that they do not have control over meanings ascribed to those actions by others (Donaghue et al., 2011; Gavey, 2012). Exploring this tension between wider cultural codes of feminine self-presentation and control is an important part of this article. Taking and sharing sexy selfies is a negotiated and complex activity that spotlights the tensions between the act of self-shooting, normative assumptions about gender and body-image and the ecology of the images themselves and elucidates issues of control, power and agency in the practices of looking and being seen. In the following we will ground our thinking in existing literature and highlight these tensions by unpacking whether and what in this process is experienced as empowering by these women. Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 5 Bodies , Selfies What do we mean, when we speak of bodies? We build on the premise that bodies are socially constructed (Featherstone et al., 1991; Shilling, 2003 [1993]) and invested with cultural meanings and values (Crisp, 2000: 48). Consumer culture makes all of us responsible for the surfaces of our body – failing to keep it fit, slim and young is a sign of a ‘flawed self’ (Featherstone, 2010: 195). This is particularly poignant with regard to women’s bodies – they are always seen as imperfect (Holland, 2004; Smith, 1988) and out of control (Gannon, 1999; Greer, 1999). This crossfire of competing discourses over-burdens (Shilling, 2003 [1993]) women’s bodies and coerces them to fit (Milkie, 2002) standards that equate ‘slenderness with beauty’ (Bordo, 2003 [1993]: 102). It has been argued that our bodies are abstracted and reconstituted through (bio)technological means in the 21st century, and this makes them more open to objectification and commodification (Cregan, 2006: 5). Bodies are porous and profoundly relational according to this approach. This recognition of relationality is hardly new – Turner (1996 [1984]) and Goffman (1959) addressed this in their seminal works, which conceptualized bodies as potentialities and something people do rather than something fixed. This focus on relationality and becoming lends itself particularly well to interpreting what goes on with women’s bodies as they undertake self-shooting and sharing selfies. Here we are inspired by Coleman’s (2008: 163) suggestion that bodies are ‘known, understood and experienced through images’. Her Deleuzean approach seems helpful to set the central questions of ‘the ways in which relations constitute bodies and images and the ways in which it is through relations that bodies and images become’ (Coleman, 2008: 168). This approach rejects the binary opposition of bodies and images as subjects and objects, which is particularly salient in the case of selfies, because the practice merges the subject and the object already on the material level. Although we are inspired by Coleman’s (2009) work in some of the ways she thinks about the relationship between images and bodies, we acknowledge that the constructivist approach used in this text differs from her overall perspective. In this article we see the practice of self-shooting as one way in which women can understand and experience their bodies. However, our work presupposes normative Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 6 Body & Society discourses in the western consumerist and visual tradition, which are reproduced (or rejected) by selfie practices, which then creates possibilities and limitations in how bodies can be experienced. We also find Coleman’s (2009) distinctions between different kinds of images (in particular mirror and photographic) useful in conceptualizing selfies. While for Coleman’s research participants photographs were ‘images of their bodies in the past’ (2009: 88) that actualized a spatial and temporal moment (2009: 92) of what their bodies ‘really’ looked like (2009: 89), they experienced mirror images as showing bodies as changing and changeable (2009: 93). Mirror images involve ‘the possibility of multiple presents’ (Coleman, 2009: 95) that ‘make possible the very knowledges and understandings of and ways of living a body in the present’ (2009: 98). Our findings extend her argument by showing that selfies can simultaneously do both. Possibilities of Empowerment? An important corpus of feminist work relies on early Foucault (1977) and the concept of power which disciplines bodies through normative and self-regulation (Bartky, 1990; Bordo, 2003 [1993]; Butler, 1990; Sawicki, 1991). This usually conceptualizes women’s experiences of their bodies in the context of surveillance. Power – both in the sense of self-efficacy and control (power to) as well as inner strength (power within) (Enns, 2004; Stavrositu and Sundar, 2012) lies at the core of the concept of empowerment, which has a rich and complicated debate in feminist, sociological, social work and many other fields (see Bay-Cheng, 2012; Cattaneo and Chapman, 2010; Gavey, 2012; Gill, 2008, 2012; Gutierrez, 1991; Lamb, 2009; Morell, 2003; Peterson and Lamb, 2012; Rappaport, 1987; Solomon, 1987; Sue and Sue, 2007). Personal empowerment is usually seen as consisting of intrapersonal, interactional and behavioural components (Cattaneo and Chapman, 2010; Zimmerman, 1995), motivated by goals that are related to power and which are simultaneously personally meaningful (Cattaneo and Chapman, 2010). It often relies on self-definition (Browne, 1998; Morell, 2003). Approaches that focus on the social impact of one’s personal sense of empowerment additionally focus on connectedness and the ability to effect change (Stavrositu and Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 7 Sundar, 2012). Senft (2014), in her attempt to define ‘full’ empowerment, sees it as the capacity to make meaningful choices, the capacity to act on those choices when interacting with others and the capacity to draw on resources that allow us to enforce those actions outwardly. The disagreement surrounding the empowerment concept stems precisely from the intersection of the personal and the social. As Lamb (2009: 301) puts it, ‘the question is whether feeling empowered and being empowered are the same thing and whether empowerment . . . should be connected to power and autonomy in other spheres’. Gavey (2012: 720) brings together many of the concerns of feminist authors reluctant to endorse using this term for ‘referring to the active and positive (in at least some ways) dimensions of girls’ [women’s] choices, actions, and experiences’. She pinpoints the dilemma of ‘articulations of empowerment as an individual state of being when it arises in relation to cultural norms and practices that have problematic implications for girls and women collectively’ (Gavey, 2012: 722). It is our position that participation in the NSFW self-shooters community does not merely claim individual empowerment at the cost of ignoring the broader conditions of gender order. Banks (2007) cautions sociologists to pay attention to whom the ‘society empowers to look and be looked at, and . . . how the act of looking produces knowledge that in turn constitutes society’. Images teach us how to see (Bordo, 2003 [1993]) and we can identify collective moral and aesthetic values in what is deemed photographable (Bourdieu, 1996; Van House et al., 2005). A multiplicity of alterations to one’s agency, power and political intent happen within the NSFW self-shooters community – women’s relationships to their own bodies change; but, additionally, both their own and their wider audiences’ ways of seeing and beliefs about what is photographable undergo a significant change. This includes many men, whose experiences do not fall within the scope of this article, but have been explored elsewhere (Tiidenberg, 2014). Granted, a community of self-shooters with their specific culture of looking and being looked at still exists in the ‘broader context that remains limiting’ (Gavey, 2012), but to dismiss the participants’ experiences as having only personal and no social impacts would ignore the empirical data and underestimate the relational context of the online community. Sharing, commenting, reblogging and actively participating in the Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 8 Body & Society community socially reinforces ways of looking and experiencing bodies in a new, body-positive, feminist and queer-friendly way. This, although having a strong personal element, also alters the ways of looking among more people than just the self-shooter. Nevertheless, while these women perceive selfie taking and sharing as an empowering practice, they do, paradoxically, lose control of the images that become part of that broader context mentioned by Gavey (2012). Their ways of incorporating these uncertainties into how they experience their bodies is touched upon later. Thus, in this article we rely on Foucault’s later understanding of power and technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988), where his attention shifted away from his earlier work on technologies of domination (Foucault, 1977) to a focus on the ‘games of truth in the relationship of self with self’ (Foucault, 1986: 11). Technologies of the self have been used to study embodiment and empowerment by Pringle (2005), Thorpe (2008), Markula (2004) and Markula and Pringle (2006). These authors see practices of freedom being manifested in the inherently political (because it implies caring for others) care of the self. In this context, freedom is a positive resistance where care for the self is what limits and controls power (Foucault, 1997). Rose, while agreeing with Foucault on the assumption that ‘freedom is not the negation of power but one of its vital elements’ (Rose, 1998: 98) complicates the notion of practices of freedom by questioning the amount of self-regulation involved (Rose, 1999: 61). According to him, we experience norms of autonomy as our personal desires, and this produces continuous self-scrutiny and dissatisfaction, which ties us to the project of our own identity. For him, freedom is ‘a mode of being in the world in which we would accord value to our lives to the extent that we are able to construe them as the expression of a personal autonomy’ (Rose, 1998: 193), which then becomes the measurement of what in ourselves and in others ‘does not accord with this dream or which fails by its principles’ (1998: 193). We agree with this on an abstract level, yet studying selfshooting we did not see it being used as a way to discriminate against others who do not choose to express themselves in such a way. We did see some tensions over normatively attractive bodies but, by and large, the community seems to follow the ethos of every body (including the normative ones) deserving of full subjecthood (Gill, 2008). Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 9 Markula (2004) and Lloyd (1996) rely on another core concept in Foucault’s theory of technologies of the self when addressing embodiment and practices of freedom. They utilize critical self-awareness as something that can lead to transgressive self-invention, which may have a public impact because it creates confusion about the existing discourses. This – self-awareness and self-care based; personal, yet socially impactful through its ability to influence the existing ways of looking – conceptualization of empowerment, is the one we are working with in this article. Method Our data came from nine female bloggers and self-shooters (aged 21–51, from USA, Australia, Canada) on tumblr.com. This is a part of a bigger project with NSFW bloggers for which 27 people were interviewed multiple times over the course of three years. The sampling criteria included authors of English-language NSFW blogs active for at least six months in September 2011, which updated regularly, posted diaristic reflections typical of personal blogs and, whose Ask boxes were activated. All are legal adults, who gave their informed consent to participate in the study. All of the images in this article are altered with an IOS app called toonPAINT to protect participants and are reproduced with permission. Snowballing (Creswell, 1998) was used: five bloggers whom one of the authors researcher, from ethnographic observation, knew to have a blog that met the criteria, were approached and asked for further contacts. This article is based on the analysis of interviews, out-takes from group interviews, field notes, images and blog content of nine female participants who regularly post and take selfies. Out of the nine participants one had a PhD, one a high school diploma and three people were working on their BA at the time of the first interview, but have by now earned it; the rest had university degrees. Seven are married (one got married after the initial interview in 2011), the rest are in relationships, some of the marriages are non-monogamous, and seven out of the nine participants self-identify as either kinky or bisexual or both. Data were analysed thematically, inspired by the logic of visual narrative analysis (Riessman, 2008) that combines the interpretation of images with the narrative analysis of the captions, comments, Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 10 Body & Society ethnographic field notes and interview excerpts. Interviews and field notes were coded using Nvivo, starting with open coding. Results and Discussion We want to open with how selfies and partaking in the community can make women feel powerful enough to welcome body experiences that counter the normative discourses. To do this, we need to briefly address the obvious tensions between the limiting and normative visual economy (Gill, 2008) that leads to women’s feelings of inadequacy and the body-positivity of the community under scrutiny. Informants unanimously reported a ‘body-positive’ (celebrative of diversity of different body types and low occurrence of bodycriticism) atmosphere within the self-shooters community. This co-occurs with a relatively high level of feminist and queer attitudes disseminated throughout blogs. The body-positive atmosphere comes about through the spiral of sharing and learning new ways of looking. It encourages people to put their body out there by soothing their pre-emptive worries about whether it is good enough to be publicly exhibited. Concurrently, it also positively reinforces the continuing uploading of images and that leads to more encouragement (see Cohen, 2005). More importantly, however, the bodypositive and pro-feminist culture of the community creates a new visual discourse. Jenna’s (20, USA) quote below, illustrates how finding beauty in the non-normative saturates the visual environment and affects one’s own aesthetic. It seems that the things you immerse yourself in become your own aesthetic, or your own, you start being drawn towards those images or looks . . . While this new visual discourse may be marginal in the context of the consumerist visual economy, it is, we argue, strong enough to somewhat confuse it (Lloyd, 1996; Markula, 2004). Posting selfies teaches the participants new ways of seeing (Bordo, 2003 [1993]), which in turn creates a productive context for more and more resistant (in terms of the normative ideals) selfies to be posted. This, in turn, opens up new possibilities for different power/vision regimes regarding women’s bodies, as critiqued by John Berger (1972). Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 11 Body Possibilities and Selfies We now want to spotlight how the active strategies of taking selfies and sharing selfies open up women’s potentialities of experiencing their bodies. To make these processes more visible, we are inspired by Coleman’s (2008, 2009) focus on the knowledge, understanding and experiences selfies as artifacts, self-shooting as the practice, and the normative contexts produce of bodies. First, we want to point out how the transformations are perceived and internalized through selfies. We notice that women experience corporeal and conceptual transformations – which are not mutually exclusive, but often merge – and selfies play a part in both. In some cases, like in the outtake from Katie’s (30, Canada) interview below, the impulse to take a selfie comes from a desire to document or internalize a corporeal transformation – an implicit sensation about one’s body and its tension with the wider cultural narrative of bodies in that particular corporeal state. Also worth noting is that I started my blog a few months after having my second son. I was frustrated with the way society strips pregnant/ nursing women of their sexuality and wanted a way to reconnect with my sexual self. It has been empowering, therapeutic, entertaining and a hell of a lot of fun. Taking and posting selfies can be interpreted as dually affecting Katie’s body. On the one hand it gets validated as sexual, an experience she feels society wants to keep her from. Through that she counter-positions herself to another widely shared discourse – namely that of self-sacrificing intensive-mothering, which displaces women as subjects and gives supremacy to foetuses and children (Wall, 2001). It is our reading here that taking and sharing selfies can help unfix (Coleman, 2009) Katie’s body from being experienced as ‘out of control’ (Holland, 2004) or ‘inferiorized’ (Bartky, 1990). Another example of the relationality of corporeal transitions and selfies is when selfies as images lead to both the realization and internalization of corporeal truths, and through that serve as a signpost and an inspiration for bodies physically transforming. In the following outtake Uma (51, USA) reflects on how a specific selfie (reproduced with permission in Figure 1) has created a specific kind of knowledge of her body and motivated her to do more physically to keep changing it. Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 12 Body & Society Figure 1. Uma’s backbend selfie. so . . . the other day I took a picture of me doing a back bend and . . . it was amazing to see the muscles. Today that was a big part of me going to the gym. I felt like I wanted to take that picture and tape it on my fridge and make THAT my motivation. Not somebody else’s body. MINE. (emphasis original) Here, we see the emphasis the woman places on the ownership of her body. Similarly to our interpretation of Katie’s statement, we suggest that it is a counter-narrative. By becoming able to see her own body as fit and attractive, and by using that as an inspiration, Uma rejects consumer-culture’s barrage of images of fitness and underwear models that women are expected to compare themselves to. Women with a difficult past or existing relations with their bodies and body-image (eating disorders, body-dysmorphism, stress from ageing) experiment with selfies and use them as knowledge devices which allow them to become something more than unfinished projects (Featherstone, 2010) that need to be coerced into frames where slender and young are the only way of being (Bordo, 2003 [1993]; Milkie, 2002). In the following out-take, Rachel (40, Australia) shares how, through self-shooting, her experience of her body changes: It surprised me how good I could look in a photograph . . . because from about 25 onward I hadn’t felt attractive on photos people had Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 13 taken of me. I’d just look at them and see a million chins or eyebags or bad teeth or fat arms or whatever, just stupid facial expressions. So on the webcam, with the ability to take my own picture and to pose myself, it made me see that I actually don’t look as bad as I think I do. That itself was really great. It is also significant to point out that instead of, for example, using photoediting tools to alter the selfie, Rachel prefers to arrange her body in front of the webcam as she experiments with what her body can become through self-shooting. Through this new knowledge and understanding, self-shooting actually transforms how the body is engaged with. Returning to the distinction between photographic and mirror images (Coleman, 2009: 91–9), we see that Rachel – by taking a selfie – captures her body in a way that allows her to have a specific understanding of how her body looks, that produces a body that looks good. Concurrently her ability to see herself changing and moving in the webcam’s screen, as well as the fact that she (like most self-shooters) takes many images in one ‘sitting’, makes selfies seem more accurate (in terms of representing what her body might look like or is capable of looking like) than photographic images taken by others. Posting these selfies, which garners comments, likes and interactions from the others, means she can use selfies to check on her body (Coleman, 2009: 97) and the posted selfie then can give reassurance (similarly to the mirror). Taking and sharing selfies thus make it possible for Rachel to experience her body both in terms of a moment in the past, a potentiality of a good-looking body and a way to reassure herself and know her body differently from how she has seen it on photos that others have taken of her and that she has hated. Selfies as Practices of Freedom It would be a simplification not to pay attention to the forms of ‘dependency and subjection toward the audience . . . the personal involvement with the practice, and . . . the requirements established by the commercial interests of the web owners’ (Lasén and GómezCruz, 2009: 211). The NSFW self-shooters community may have a different visual culture from the mainstream one, but for tumblr as a corporate entity, sexy selfies are very much a commodity on which it makes a profit, even when pretending they do not exist. To go further with our exploration of selfies and issues of control, power and Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 14 Body & Society agency, we need to now look at when and how selfie taking and sharing is experienced as a practice of potentially transgressive self-invention (Lloyd, 1996; Markula, 2004) and when it is not. According to Markula’s (2004) application of Foucault’s (1988) technologies of the self, practices of self-care only become practices of freedom when the person is critically self-aware. What about taking or sharing selfies is a self-care technology and can it be considered critically self-aware? This was one of the topics discussed in most depth in the interviews and something participants often commented on in their blogs without having been prompted by the researcher. Witness Georgina’s (41, USA) reasoning on why her experience has led her towards self-care and self-awareness. It’s for me. It’s not something I do just to put myself on display. I’m reintroducing myself to a piece of me that has been buried under 20 years of marriage, 4 children, and the mantles of ‘wife’, ‘mother’, ‘neighbor’, ‘coworker’, and every other role I fill in my daily life. For Foucault critique is the ‘art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility’ (1996: 386). By questioning what is inevitable about one’s self-identity and being-in-the-world, critical self-awareness leads to the possibility of transgression, results in self-invention and practices of freedom (Lloyd, 1996; Markula, 2004). In Georgina’s case, we see her questioning some of her social roles, and in this inquiry tracing her self back to a time when her body had not been yet claimed for motherhood and marriage. We also see her rattling the assumption that a mother’s or a wife’s body is by default docile and unsexy. Both the act of taking selfies, as well as the statement of sharing them, transforms the temporality of her body. Georgina experiences this as a sense of control over time and the way it affects bodies. This gives her a sense of power over her body as well and it confuses the wider visual discourse that does not usually deem 41-year-old mothers of four photographable. For Marilyn (24, USA), too, it is about a body that is in control, but she conceptualizes it in resistance to the consumerist visual economy (Figure 2). I have always stood by my tumblr in terms of my rationale . . . because I’m not getting paid for this, I’m not representing a company, I’m not wearing Calvin Klein underwear, I’m not in any way marketing this. I am . . . this is a self exploration, this is a finding of myself, Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 15 Figure 2. Marilyn’s selfie of her thighs, that she used to be embarrassed about. and I . . . feel . . . if I were ever to be . . . confronted with these images . . . my first thing would definitely be: ‘I don’t see what’s wrong with it because I was of age and I was exploring who I am as a person and I don’t see what the difference is between Megan Fox doing it for Armani and me doing it for myself.’ While we are mandated to look at naked bodies by our sexualized visual culture (Gill, 2008, 2009; Levy, 2005; McNair, 1996, 2002; Paul, 2005), this mandate only applies to easily commodifiable bodies that fit the narrow standards. Being nude in a (semi-)public way is not an allowed practice for everyone and especially not for people whose bodies transgress the consumer culture’s norms of appearances. Exposing one’s body with no goals of monetary gain could be interpreted as subversive in itself. Thus, sharing exposed amateur selfies of bodies of varying looks and for no monetary gain can be read as a transgressive practice on at least two levels. One is being nude in a non-commercial way, the other is showing bodies that may not tick all the boxes of visual economy defined appropriateness (youth, slenderness, etc.). It is, however, equally important to acknowledge that some interactions could be experienced by women as oppressing. This includes audiences making demands (for more images or specific images) or negative comments on appearances. These types of experiences Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 16 Body & Society speak of women not having control over meanings ascribed to their actions by others (Donaghue et al., 2011; Gavey, 2012), but were rare in our data and usually cross community lines (wider NSFW space versus the community of self-shooters). Usually, our participants who have found themselves in a judgmental interaction, note that their previous experience in the community has provided them with enough self-awareness to not be affected. The platform also allows for blocking or reporting of harassers, should not responding or making their interest or lack of interest clear not be enough to deal with the situation. Body-criticism is rare in the NSFW self-shooters community and the participants often feel in control enough to speak up for themselves or on behalf of their friends. Posting one’s body and ‘owning’ it is seen as a sign of courage and an achievement reached through the selfie practices. Sociotechnical Affordances of Bodies Becoming It would be short-sighted to ignore the role platform affordances and sociotechnical choices play in the way bodies are experienced through selfies. On tumblr, liking (leaving hearts), replying (leaving comments), sending Asks (notes that can be answered privately or publicly) and Fanmail (cannot be published) are all a part of the experience. The most significant affordance is the ‘reblog’ function, and it allows others to become part of the social construction of the meanings of the body-selfie. Self-shooters have a tendency to ‘speak in bodies’; images serve as ‘conversation pieces’ (Schwarz, 2010) especially since the emergence of cameraphones (Gómez Cruz & Meyer, 2012). Posting, submitting and reblogging body-selfies is often a way of saying ‘hello’, paying a compliment, flirting or wishing happy birthday. All self-shooters spoke of having been asked for images by special friends but also wider audiences long before they had started posting them. In terms of phototechnical choices, there are a couple of noteworthy strategies. One is the deliberate taking of low-quality pictures. For Anna (37, USA) it serves the function of reducing her perceived vulnerability to image reappropriation. I almost like taking mine with the shitty camera phone. I feel like it keeps them less popular, which is weird. You’re moving into a different zone of seriousness about selfies, when you use a real camera, like Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 17 there are degrees of commitment to shooting selfies, they are less permanent if of lower quality. Image quality has manifold effects on the relations of selfies and bodies. There are questions of one’s commitment to the practice (and concurrent self-identification as a nude self-shooter); longevity of the images (and concurrent safety and privacy issues, which has a strong gendered aspect; e.g. slut shaming); popularity of the images (also has an effect on safety), etc. This illustrates the tension between self-shooting as an agency-building practice on the one hand, and a way to make women feel vulnerable due to unwanted attention on the other. Our participants acknowledge this tension, but their accounts emphasize the self-efficacy and control they achieve through selfshooting and selfie-posting above the vulnerability. The Popularity Paradox Finally, we want to briefly touch on something we’ve come to call the ‘popularity paradox’ of body-selfies. There is a tension between not succumbing to the pressure of public demand and the need to stay relevant or be popular in order to be able to experience bodyblogging at its fullest. Clearly, the consumer society’s equation of the female form with bodyliness is replicated on tumblr. Self-shooters are aware of the fact that posting ‘boobs’ gains popularity. Selfdisclosure is also seen as something that increases the number of one’s followers. All the while, this awareness of what the audiences would appreciate is mediated by a need to feel in control of the selfcreated safe-space and post for one’s own benefit. Many of our participants, who had amassed many followers, mentioned missing the ‘simpler’ times when they had fewer and a better understanding of who they were. As Iris (39, USA) described it, the ‘inside out’ way of getting to know each other (naked body and intimate thoughts first and only then a chat and perhaps an image of the face or one’s real name) can create an assumed sense of intimacy. people think, men think, that there’s a certain level of intimacy with me, because they have seen my pictures and because they have read my posts, they think they know me in some way, so when we start talking outside tumblr, I think people sometimes try to move too fast or think that we’re really great friends . . . I don’t know how else to describe it beside that they get this false sense of intimacy . . . Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 18 Body & Society This is not to say that this community doesn’t yield significant human connections. In fact, one of our participants has by now married a person she met in the community and most say they have made great friends. It does showcase that, while having a larger following is good for one’s self-esteem and body-image, and it increases the sense of community and has many perks, there is also a discomfort in growing popularity. There seems to be a cut-off line – it is difficult to place, but it marks the number of followers that are conducive to bodies being experienced as positive and those that are conducive to anxious experiences of bodies. Learning about that line as well as reminding oneself, as Katie (30, Canada) does in the following quote, why she is posting in the first place, is a further exercise in critical self-awareness and agency. And I post things I want (like boys kissing and tales of relationship counselling) because I keep trying to use the blog for me rather than become a slave to it, you know? But the pressures still exist. I just consciously try to push back against them. All this points to certain ambiguity in terms of the relations of bodies and selfies. This ambiguity is, however, inherent in the experiences of being human in the late modern world, and as Thorpe (2008) puts it – we need to feel at ease with contradiction and embrace the hybridity of identities. Conclusions We propose that there are significant relations between selfies and bodies. For our participants, selfies shape the ways of knowing, understanding and experiencing their bodies. Taking and sharing selfies, combined, make possible to experience a body in ways that merge elements of both how we experience our bodies in photographs taken by others and how we observe our bodies in mirrors. This double axis helps with experiencing and internalizing both corporeal and conceptual transformations. It is our interpretation that, through self-shooting, bodies are experienced as something other than ‘out of control’ (Gannon, 1999; Greer, 1999; Holland, 2004) or ‘inferiorized’ (Bartky, 1990). Selfies can be celebrations of corporeal bodies or knowledge devices through which variations of corporeality are spotlighted, accepted, internalized. In some cases these Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 19 body-image relations are experienced as practices of freedom (Markula, 2004). Posting selfies teaches community members new ways of seeing (Bordo, 2003 [1993]), changes their views on what is appealing or photographable (Bourdieu, 1996), which in turn creates a productive context for more and more resistant (in terms of the normative ideals) selfies to be posted. This new, more body-positive visual discourse at least somewhat confuses the dominant normative visual discourses (Lloyd, 1996; Markula, 2004). In the context of these new ways of seeing, taking and sharing body-selfies – if critically self-aware and self-care led (Foucault, 1988; Markula, 2004; Pringle, 2005) – can be conducive to positive becomings of bodies. Nevertheless, women can sometimes feel ‘trapped’ in what we called ‘the popularity paradox’, meaning that instead of growing self-efficacy and agency through taking and sharing images, they feel pressure to deliver more and more selfies or have to perform in specific ways to meet their audience’s expectations. While it is important to acknowledge them, these examples were rather rare for our participants and more often their experiences referred to becoming of bodies, which can be read as positive because they are built on self-care. For our participants, then, despite the occasional negative experience with feeling objectified, self-shooting has been in no way a trivial, vain pursuit, but a self-therapeutic and awareness-raising practice. It has allowed for a new kind of body to emerge – a powerful, sexual, female body. While the rather narrow scope of this article limits its generalizability, we believe it to offer insight into how women use selfies as body techniques in the digitally saturated context, and how bodies’ relations with selfies have an impact on people’s life satisfaction. While participating in an NSFW online community is not for everyone, there’s a need to understand the role of vernacular images in subjectivity formation. Digital photography has become ubiquitous in western urban societies and we still have to understand the impact of these practices in everyday life. This text looks to be a contribution in that regard. Notes 1. A microblogging site launched in 2007 that hosted more than 200 million blogs in August 2014. This is a good platform for explorations of Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015 20 Body & Society bodylines as it hosts, among other kinds of blogs, those that post explicit content. 2. 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Edgar Gómez Cruz is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Communication Studies, University of Leeds. He holds a PhD in Knowledge and Information Society (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Open University of Catalonia). He has published widely on a number of topics relating to digital communications, particularly in the area of digital photography, computer-mediated communication and visual culture. His recent publications include the book (in Spanish) From Kodak Culture to Networked Image: An Ethnography of Digital Photography Practices. Current research investigates screen cultures and creative practices, which is funded through an RCUK digital economy grant. Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2015