ABSTRACT
Almost 40 years ago, Susan Sontag (1977: 4) observed that photos have a powerful social role in fixing the people depicted in them to particular ‘truths’. By appearing as ‘miniatures of reality’, photos can obscure the social and cultural processes by which that meaning is attributed. The result is that the dominant interpretation of the image is frequently misunderstood as a fact captured by the image. As such, photos can act as particularly dense loci of power relations since they appear to offer prima faci confirmation of hegemonic norms and values, while in fact it is precisely those norms and values that shape how images are constructed, framed, circulated, displayed and understood. Once an image of a person is inserted into this circular relation, they can be reduced to ‘objects that can be symbolically possessed’ (Sontag, 1977: 14) and the target of ‘deduction, speculation and fantasy’ (p. 23). The power of the image is particularly apparent in the age of social
media, when social and intimate life is pervaded by the convergence of camera and internet technologies on smartphones, tablets and computers. Self-produced photos and video now emanate at a rapid pace from the sites of everyday life and in this process they condense and transmit the complex of relations and norms that shape not only the manufacture of the image but how it is circulated and received. On social media, these
self-produced photos and videos intersect with a highly visual culture that endorses revealing forms of self-representation. This was examined in the last chapter, where the pursuit of online ‘rankings’ can involve the incorporation of the body and its products into images and video designed to shock and fascinate. These practices of self-exploitation can come full circle and ultimately breach normative expectations about ‘authenticity’ in social life, potentially triggering abuse and harassment. This chapter suggests that the collision between social media visibility
and social norms is particularly acute for girls and women. It begins by questioning the degree of scrutiny that attends girls and women’s online practices and, in particular, the shaming of girls and women who are accused of ‘doing it for attention’; that is, deploying their bodies in the production of social media content. This is contrasted with the absence of moral categories and judgements for male social media users who expose their bodies for admiration and comparison with others. Images of male bodies circulate on social media without arousing the controversy that attends female images, to the point where boys and men can use their bodies to produce and distribute deliberately crude and offensive images with few negative consequences. The chapter goes on to examine how this gendered asymmetry impacts on the exchange of intimate images within heterosexual relations. It shows how the production and exchange of ‘nudes’ or eroticised images is often characterised by a lack of reciprocity and mutual desire, and occurs with an online visual economy in which ‘nudes’ of girls and women are conflated with pornography. The chapter suggests that widespread and normalised differentials in gendered power blur the boundaries between the consensual and coerced exchange of intimate images, providing the ‘cultural scaffolding’ (Gavey, 2005) for online abuse.
