ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, selfies have become central to the practices and politics of visual self-representation inherent in citizen media. Selfies invariably hinge on the ‘self’ inscribed in the concept, but still raise questions concerning the relationship between individual and collective identities, subjective stories and shared concerns. This entry first presents empirical examples from citizen witnessing and civic protest movements of how individuals in contentious social and political situations use selfies to track, perform, and write their own instant history. To provide a historical framework for understanding current selfie practices, the entry next revisits scholarship on how the photographic portrait has been tied to regimes of visibility, to disciplining of the body, and to negotiations between empowerment and disempowerment. Third, the entry discusses two scholarly approaches to selfies of relevance to citizen media. The first centers on the image itself and the performances of self-enacted). The second examines the political, social, and cultural contexts of selfie practices in relation to, for example, participatory journalism, military culture, post feminism), queer storytelling as well as to issues of race and gender. Even if the two approaches have been presented as incompatible), they are both vital to understanding selfies within a citizen media framework. Taken together, they enable analysis of how the self is visually performed and situated in diverse contexts and power relations.
