ABSTRACT
This chapter, based on research conducted with Indian girls in the age group of 13–19, looks at how girls attempt to stake claims to online spaces by sharing their selfies. In most narratives around the dangers of selfies, there has been a jarring exclusion of the voices and perspectives of the young women who are the central subject of discussion, leading to an erasure of the complexity of their negotiations with processes of self-representation and of the social relations of power in which girls from different sections of Indian society are situated. This chapter undoes this erasure of girls’ voices by exploring how girls participate in the act of taking and sharing selfies, negotiating with discourses of honour and respectability that attempt to discipline their sexualities. The chapter argues that in making the selfie a site of expression of their sexual subjectivities, girls foreground the need for pleasure rather than protection in both online and offline spaces.
