SCS6089 The Digital Self
Dr Ozge Ozduzen
Week 7: Digital gender identity:
reconstituting and challenging gender
roles through selfies
Lecture content: week 7
1. Gender, technology and media
2. Self-representation, selfies and digital selves
3. Selfies: stereotypes and stigmas
4. Selfies: empowerment?
1. Gender, technology and media
Technology and gender
Gender as a social structure, a means by which bodies are assigned a biological sex
category from which gender as inequality is built and reproduced.
Gender stereotypes = the social norms and social and psychological traits believed
to be more characteristic of one sex relative to the other
Are technologies (as knowledge and practices) inherently masculine? What sort of
assumptions about gender go into their design, production and use?
The male is treated as the norm and women (and queer communities) are
supposed to adopt masculine ways of relating to technology = in capitalist structure
of society, women (and queer communities) have been excluded (largely) from the
knowledge and practices which constitute technology.
Technologies are gendered – sign and source of women’s (and queer communities’)
oppression (Gill and Grint 1995).
Media and Gender: “women’s genres”
On the cultural hierarchy of taste, women’s genres and popular cultures - especially
soap operas - sit at ‘the absolute bottom’ (Harrington and Bielby 1995, 5).
Other feminised and therefore devalued genres include: reality television,
boybands, pop music, gossip magazines, romance novels, teen drama series, soap
operas
Cann (2015) calls this a devaluation of the feminine: media genres associated with
young femininities are devalued, trivialised, mocked, and referred to as ’guilty
pleasures’.
2. Self-representation, selfies and
digital selves
Self-representation
- Humans have always
represented themselves
through media
- “Today we post selfies to
Instagram or Snapchat and
write updates on Facebook or
Tumblr. With social media,
ordinary people share their
self-representations with a
larger audience than ever
before” (Rettberg 2018).
Self-representation
- Written: blogs, online forums,
status updates, captions, bios,
messages
- Quantified: representation
through numbers e.g. self
tracking, running apps, step
counters.
- Visual: vlogs, short videos
(TikTok), profile lay outs, selfies
(See Rettberg 2018).
History of self‐representation as
Self‐Portraiture
Rembrandt ‐1630 Warhol ‐1978
9
History of self‐representation as
Self‐Portraiture
Frida Kahlo – self portrait
Van Gogh - 1889 with bonito -1941
10
Going digital: first camera phone
J-SH04 - 2001 Camera phone is no different
from other portable image-
making devices to Kodak
Brownie cam photography,
1980s home videos or
miniature painted portraits
of the 19th century – in terms
of memory, communication
and self-expression (Lister,
2013, cited in Tiidenberg,
2018: 33).
11
What are selfies?
➢Photographic objects
➢Bane and boon of internet mediated visual practices
➢Part of participatory cultures of new media forms
➢Means for communicating and understanding ourselves
➢(Visual) self-representation objects
➢Expressive acts
➢Tools for visibility
➢Tools for performing particular versions of our selves
➢Digital networked objects - we share them on social media
➢Digital format: easily stored, altered & distributed online (Tiidenberg 2018, 6-7).
➢a genre of autobiography (Schleser 2014).
Why do we study selfies?
➢a cultural and economic practice
➢posts containing images generate more attention (e.g. likes
and comments) – attention economy (see week 11).
➢branding tool
➢a marketing technique
➢part of the ‘gig economy’
➢turn the image of the self into a commodity that is made
public and consumable by others (Iqani & Schroeder 2016, 411).
Why are selfies so popular amongst
users?
-(Fantasy of) Controlling your self‐representation
− self‐selecting from many possible images
− modifying/re‐touching/filtering selfie image
− more positive self‐representation & self‐esteem
Why are selfies so popular (more
widely)?
The global saturation of camera phones (more specifically smart phones)
The marketing and widespread adoption of the front-facing camera
The growing popularity of photo-sharing apps: Instagram, WeChat, Snapchat,
etc.
In 2014, people took approximately 93 million selfies per day on Android
models alone (Senft and Baym 2015)
3.
Selfies: stereotypes and stigmas
Critique of selfie culture
• ‘...selfie rules reflect the values &
expectations of the dominant social
group: that women should...display
their adherence to a specific form of
normative, passive femininity’ (Burns,
2015: 1728).
• How far do you agree/disagree with
Burns?
• “selfie represents a
formCritique
of digital of selfies:
labour
(see selfies
week and 9), ingigwhich
economy
users turn themselves
into objects
(commodities) in order
to claim themselves as
valuable in a cultural
system (capitalism)
that considers them
valuable only in certain
ways (as sexy bodies
etc.)” (Iqani & Schroeder, 2016: 411).
“...an out of control form of vanity & narcissism in a
society in which an unchecked capitalism promotes forms
of rampant self‐interests that both legitimize selfishness
and corrode individual and moral character” (Giroux
2015).
Critique of
the selfie Sacrifices privacy (normalizing surveillance &
over‐sharing)
culture
Creates insecurities about self‐image (?)
Selfie stereotypes
Discourses about the cultural meanings of selfies have tended to extremes (Senft
and Baym 2015, 1589).
- +
Vain Empowering
Attention-seeking ‘Self-love’
‘Likes’ Feminist
Fake (e.g., filters) Self-acceptance
Self-esteem issues (low/high) Control over representation
What do you think?
Contradictory: ‘I think I am judgmental of those who post lots of selfies on
social media but I have a selfie as my profile picture’ // ‘I think selfies can
be cringe, but I still take them’
Empowering: ‘Depending on the caption, sometimes I think selfies are
empowering and inspiring’
Embarrassing: ’I feel embarrassed to take a serious selfie’ // ‘selfies on your
own are vain but with other people they’re ok’
Representation: ‘Selfies are a way for you to control how you look in photos,
which I think is a good thing’
What do you think?
Metric-driven: ‘selfies are for social gratification = “likes”’
Self-acceptance: ‘As someone who has struggled with self-image, in the last
few years I have embraced the selfie. During my teen years there are no
photos [of me] so now I like the fact I post selfies as a form of self-
acceptance and memory’
Filtered: ‘it doesn’t bother me when other people do it unless it’s clearly
edited to make themselves look better’ // ‘I think selfies, especially girls’, are
not their real appearance. They use apps to male their appearance more
beautiful’
Context-dependent: ‘Generally taken when people look their best’
John Berger: ways of seeing
In the history of Western art, women in particular have had little control over how
they are represented
Berger argued that art is constructed for our gazes: ‘men act and women appear.
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger 1972, 47)
Women were often depicted looking at themselves in a mirror. This represented her
vanity and her recognition that she is an object of male desire
• Implicitly & explicitly gendered
– targeting young females
Critique of • Burns (2015) highlights problem of
the critique anti‐selfie discourses:
of selfies ☺ – Denigrates female selfie‐takers
–Maintains social control of
women’s behaviour and bodies
‘Once the selfie is established as connoting
narcissism and vanity, it perpetuates a vicious
circle in which women are vain because they take
selfies, and selfies connote vanity because
women take them’ (Burns 2015, 1720).
Selfies as “unimportant” and “dismissed”
Rettberg (2018) argues quantified forms of self representation are “less
ridiculed”
“Perhaps selfies are dismissed because they are often seen as ‘feminine’
(Burns, 2015), whereas quantified self is seen as masculine and therefore
more serious and worthy of attention”
“Quantitative self data may appear objective, but we know that people
negotiate with their data, retelling the stories of their days to make their
own experience match up with the data”
“Data is always something that needs to be interpreted. It is not an
objective window on truth”
“At a conference I once attended, an academic, having briefly
heard about my research topic, bemoaned, “Aren’t these just
young, rich women doing vain things online?” I share Banet
Weiser’s (1999) lament that scholars may “overlook” the
“complicated production and articulation” of some types of
research, such as when her work on beauty pageants was
diminutively classified by colleagues as mere “fun” (p. 4).
Banet-Weiser (1999, 4) cautions that these are “dangerous
dismissal[s], because [they] immediately and apparently
unselfconsciously defin[e] particular cultural sites as worthy of
intellectual attention and others . . . [as] junk
(Abidin, 2016).
4.
Selfies: Empowerment?
Laura Mulvey: the male gaze
In cinema, women are often depicted as the objects of male pleasure. The
male gaze is thus masculine and heteronormative
The gaze comes from three places: (1) behind the camera, (2) the
spectators, and (3) the characters within the film, who also gaze at her
This has historically left women with little control over their representation,
but maybe selfies are changing that, allowing women to self-represent
In response to populist discourses that dismiss selfies as a
narcissistic epidemic (Burns, 2015), the program adopted a tone that
celebrated the (technological) savvy of Influencers like @xiaxue.
Thus, within the sphere of Influencer commerce, the “assumed
association [of selfies] with feminine vanity and triviality” (Burns,
2015, p. 1718) does not devalue the practice of selfie-taking, unlike
the critiques of selfies and selfie-takers in the (selective) corpus of
memes (i.e., photographs, videos, cartoons) studied by Burns
(2015): Instead, these selfies are rewarded in a system that pegs a
price tag to the number of “likes” a selfie is able to garner, and in
this game, vanity selfies are unabashedly admired for their aesthetic
ideals and commercial value (Abidin, 2016).
De-Westernising approaches to selfies
Popular and academic interest in selfies tends to emphasise Western
countries and cultures, but this misses the other ways people might use
and understand technology
For example, in Brazilian favelas (urban slums), teens’ selfies are not ‘a
shallow way to show narcissism, fashion, and self-promotion and seek
attention’ (Nemer 2015, 1832). Rather, they use selfies to: exercise free
speech and talk about violence in their area, to self-document their lives,
improve their literacy skills, and to let their parents know they were safe.
Context is Key
‘What selfies mean depends
on the context surrounding
them’ (7)
Tiidenberg argues that it is not
true that all selfies are
‘narcissistic, inauthentic or low
quality photography’ but
neither is it true that all selfies
are ‘empowering’ (15).
Political Selfies: collective self-
representation or the personal is
political!
marginalized groups have turned
to selfies to raise awareness
about their rights and resistance.
40
• digital Identities are networked and social media
platforms alter what it means to be an individual
• visual self-representation existed in many forms
before selfies
• visual self-representation gains more importance
today? – visual turn
Summary • different functions, roles and place of selfies in
contemporary culture – e.g. individual, celebrity,
political selfies
• selfie culture – as part of a neo-liberal gig
economy and narcissistic culture? but its
denigration also very misogynistic and limited.
Next week: Intersectionality, dating apps and
social identities
Please do (at least) the two compulsory readings:
Noble, S. U. (2016). A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies.
The Scholar & Feminist Online, 13(3). Available at:
https://sfonline.barnard.edu/safiya-umoja-noble-afuture-for-intersectional-black-
feminist-technology-studies/
Zhou, Z. B. (2022). Compulsory interracial intimacy: Why does removing the
ethnicity filter on dating apps not benefit racial minorities?. Media, Culture &
Society, 44(5), 1034-1043.
Please also watch The Tinder Swindler (Felicity Morris, 2022).
