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Selfies, Image and the Re-making of the Body

Article  in  Body & Society · July 2015

DOI: 10.1177/1357034X15592465

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the Re-making of DOI: 10.1177/1357034X15592465
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the Body

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

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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 con-
ducted 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 pri-
vacy (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 individ-
ual 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 con-
trol. 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 consumer-
ist, 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 empower-
ment 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; Bar-
ton, 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 suit-
able alternatives have not been suggested and forgoing talking about
issues of power, agency and self-efficacy would be disrespectful to

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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 con-
trol, 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 lit-
erature 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 dis-
satisfied 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 exten-
sively commented on. We, too, are looking at how bodies are experi-
enced and performed within visual cultures, but our focus is on body-
normativity. 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 bod-
ies. 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 con-
structivist approach to bodies, gender and discourses, we find her
work on becoming (2008, 2009) helpful for highlighting the relation-
ality 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.

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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 con-
tent, but rather curate a stream of third-party images without offer-
ing commentary on why. The bloggers included in our sample all
have personal blogs that regularly post sexy selfies and tend to fol-
low a set of common practices meant to protect their ‘plausible
deniability’ (Tiidenberg, 2013). Real names are not used, identify-
ing elements are blurred out, and images are usually headless or at
least hide the face.
Typically our participants found their way into tumblr via expli-
citly sexual images that linked back to tumblr, but were seen else-
where 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 expe-
rience their choice to self-present in these raunchy ways as oppres-
sive, 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.

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Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 5

Bodies , Selfies
What do we mean, when we speak of bodies? We build on the pre-
mise 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 respon-
sible 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 compet-
ing discourses over-burdens (Shilling, 2003 [1993]) women’s bod-
ies 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 rela-
tionality 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 prac-
tice 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 dif-
fers from her overall perspective. In this article we see the practice of
self-shooting as one way in which women can understand and expe-
rience their bodies. However, our work presupposes normative

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6 Body & Society

discourses in the western consumerist and visual tradition, which are

reproduced (or rejected) by selfie practices, which then creates pos-
sibilities 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 con-
ceptualizing 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 intra-
personal, interactional and behavioural components (Cattaneo and
Chapman, 2010; Zimmerman, 1995), motivated by goals that are
related to power and which are simultaneously personally meaning-
ful (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

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Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 7

Sundar, 2012). Senft (2014), in her attempt to define ‘full’ empow-

erment, 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 empower-
ment 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 fem-
inist 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 empower-
ment 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 photograph-
able (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. Shar-
ing, commenting, reblogging and actively participating in the

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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. Neverthe-
less, 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 atten-
tion shifted away from his earlier work on technologies of domina-
tion (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 mani-
fested 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 ques-
tioning 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 dissatisfac-
tion, which ties us to the project of our own identity. For him, free-
dom 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 self-
shooting 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).

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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 embodi-
ment 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 dis-
courses. 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 sam-
pling criteria included authors of English-language NSFW blogs
active for at least six months in September 2011, which updated reg-
ularly, 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. Snowbal-
ling (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 con-
tacts. 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,

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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 experi-
ences that counter the normative discourses. To do this, we need to
briefly address the obvious tensions between the limiting and norma-
tive 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 body-
criticism) 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 sooth-
ing 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 encourage-
ment (see Cohen, 2005). More importantly, however, the body-
positive 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 some-
what 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 regard-
ing women’s bodies, as critiqued by John Berger (1972).

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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 trans-
formation – 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 experi-
ence 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 inter-
nalization of corporeal truths, and through that serve as a signpost
and an inspiration for bodies physically transforming. In the follow-
ing outtake Uma (51, USA) reflects on how a specific selfie (repro-
duced 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.

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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 mod-
els 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

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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 photo-
editing 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-shoot-
ers) 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 pos-
sible 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 Gómez-
Cruz, 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 fur-
ther with our exploration of selfies and issues of control, power and

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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 prac-
tices 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 dis-
cussed 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 tempor-
ality 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 market-
ing this. I am . . . this is a self exploration, this is a finding of myself,

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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. Expos-
ing 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 inter-
actions 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

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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 mak-
ing their interest or lack of interest clear not be enough to deal with
the situation. Body-criticism is rare in the NSFW self-shooters com-
munity 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 tak-
ing 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 differ-
ent zone of seriousness about selfies, when you use a real camera, like

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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 self-
shooting 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 body-
blogging 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. Self-
disclosure 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 self-
created safe-space and post for one’s own benefit. Many of our par-
ticipants, 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 . . .

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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 grow-
ing 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 bod-
ies being experienced as positive and those that are conducive to anx-
ious 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 con-
sciously 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 photo-
graphs taken by others and how we observe our bodies in mirrors.
This double axis helps with experiencing and internalizing both cor-
poreal 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 cor-
poreal bodies or knowledge devices through which variations of cor-
poreality are spotlighted, accepted, internalized. In some cases these

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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 cre-
ates 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 criti-
cally 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 spe-
cific ways to meet their audience’s expectations. While it is impor-
tant 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 power-
ful, sexual, female body.
While the rather narrow scope of this article limits its generaliz-
ability, 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 every-
one, 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 mil-
lion blogs in August 2014. This is a good platform for explorations of

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20 Body & Society

bodylines as it hosts, among other kinds of blogs, those that post explicit
content.
2. We are aware of the conceptual baggage that comes with the term, but
we are using it in this article as this is the term the participants mostly
use when referring to their shared space and practices as NSFW self-
shooters on tumblr.
3. Yahoo bought tumblr in 2013 for $1.1 bn. While outside the scope of
this article, it is important to note that they promised not to go after
explicit content in public addresses, but some changes in how adminis-
trators tag content and blogs for visibility and searchability have become
evident to users.

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Katrin Tiidenberg is a PhD candidate and a lecturer at the Institute of

International and Social Studies, Tallinn University. Her PhD project
focuses on identity and the online experience as constructed photographic
practices in adult blogs on tumblr and pregnant women’s accounts on Insta-
gram. She has published on narrative identity in blogs, self-identity and
embodied-identity work in images and boundaries and taboos in the online
community.
Edgar Gómez Cruz is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Communica-
tion Studies, University of Leeds. He holds a PhD in Knowledge and Infor-
mation 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 publica-
tions 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.

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