ABSTRACT
The contemporary self-produced idol represents himself or herself through the idiom of celebrity, via their engagement with selfie culture. This chapter begins the work of exploring the argument that selfie culture may be understood as an innovation in the modelling and performance of competitive self-advancement and social aspiration in a supposedly post-class society. The selfie and the career selfie, the private self and the public self, would somehow be one and the same. The merging of both would arguably represent a further evolution of the neoliberal subject whose success or failure in the world can only be explained in terms of individual performance across the public–private divide. The hallmarks of social class are wiped away by selfies which display the nicely attired, smiling, aspirational neoliberal subject. But, as cultural historians have long argued, that which has been established as socially marginal often becomes symbolically central.
