ABSTRACT
This chapter explores objectification as a central, oxygenating force within selfie practices. Drawing on Beauvoir’s feminist existential phenomenology, which explores how Western women experience themselves and “lives her body as seen by another, by an anonymous patriarchal Other,” we think through the new forms of gendered objectification at play within selfie practices. Beauvoir’s writes the defining feature of the lived experience of women is the experience of herself as aesthetic object, a form of “doubling.” Digital selfie practices, as we will illustrate, deepens this splitting so that it is closer to a relentless fracturing. Selfie practices involve a multiplication of selves produced by the camera, serially enacted through online “versions” of the self in singularities and ephemera of lighting, angles, poses, as well as shifting technological affordances (editing, platforms, etc.) and trends (filters). The seriality of selfie practices, enabled by digital technology and expected by algorithmic sociality, further fragments the doubled self into a series of infinite and refracting digital she-objects. We explore how the participants negotiate these practices and the critique the selfie truism of “visibility” qua “empowerment.”
