(Adi Kuntsman (Eds.) ) Selfie Citizenship

Selfie Citizenship
Adi Kuntsman
Editor
Selfie Citizenship
Editor
Adi Kuntsman
Manchester Metropolitan University
Manchester, United Kingdom
ISBN 978-3-319-45269-2 ISBN 978-3-319-45270-8 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The discussion about selfie citizenship began at the Selfie Citizenship

conference, held at Digital Innovation (http://diginnmmu.com/) at
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, in April 2015. I am grateful
to my co-organisers, Simon Faulkner and Farida Vis, from the Visual
Social Media Lab (https://twitter.com/VisSocMedLab), who made the
event possible and stimulated the ongoing debate on the subject, on the
day and beyond. A special thanks goes to Jim Henderson for his assistance
with indexing; to Esperanza Miyake and Ruth Preser for their insightful
comments on earlier drafts of this introduction; and to N.C. for the many
inspiring conversations on the politics and ethics of the digital, and on the
responsibilities of writing about it, as an observer, a participant and a critic.
But most of all, I am indebted to all the contributors, whose ideas, hard
work and poignant writing and art made this book possible.
v
CONTENTS
Prologue
1 Inject/ed: Self(ie) Determination 3

Raju Rage
2 Introduction: Whose Selfie Citizenship? 13

Adi Kuntsman
Conversation I Acts of Selfie Citizenship
3 Performing Citizenship: Freedom March Selfies by

Pakistani Instagrammers 21
Fatima Aziz
4 V-Day Selfies in Beijing: Media Events and User Practices

as Micro-Acts of Citizenship 29
Gabriele de Seta and Michelle Proksell
5 Selfies for/of Nepal: Acts of Global Citizenship and

Bearing Witness 39
Catherine Hartung
vii
viii CONTENTS
6 Youth’s Civic Awareness Through Selfies: Fun

Performances in the Logic of ‘Connective Actions’ 49
Catherine Bouko
7 The People: The #Selfie’s Urform 59

Negar Mottahedeh
Conversation II The Selfie Genre and Its New Adaptations
8 Performative Intimacies and Political Celebritisation 65

Mattias Ekman and Andreas Widholm
9 Vote for My Selfie: Politician Selfies as Charismatic

Engagement 75
Crystal Abidin
10 Biometric Citizens: Adapting Our Selfies to Machine Vision 89

Jill Walker Rettberg
11 Dronie Citizenship? 97
Maximilian Jablonowski
Conversation III Selfies and the Politics of In/visibility
12 Selfies, Self-Witnessing and the ‘Out-of-Place’ Digital

Citizen 109
Mark Nunes
13 Visual Afterlife: Posthumous Camera Phone Practices 119

Larissa Hjorth and Jung Moon
14 Like a Stone in Your Stomach: Articulating the

Unspeakable in Rape Victim-Survivors’ Activist Selfies 127
Debra Ferreday
CONTENTS ix
15 Selfless Selfie Citizenship: Chupacabras Selfie Project 137

Silvia Rodriguez Vega
16 ‘My Face Is Not for Public Consumption’: Selfies,

Surveillance and the Politics of Being Unseen 149
Sanaz Raji
Epilogue
17 On the Ethics of Looking 161

JB Brager
Index 165
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1.1 (a–f) ‘Inject/ed: self(ie) determination’, selected images/

selfies from performance by Raju Rage, assisted by Rena Onat 5
Fig. 3.1 ‘The moment when I first saw Imran Khan’ – ‘street view’
selfie in Islamabad with Imran Khan in the background.
Initially published on Instagram, this photograph was
deleted and republished by the user on Facebook as his
profile picture updated on 20 October 2014. Photo by
Instagram user <mj_Hassan> 25
Fig. 3.2 ‘ . . . wish I could take a selfie for real’ – ‘indoors’ selfie
Photo by Instagram user <tufmanbakali> 26
Fig. 9.1 ‘#runwithBYK’ – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram 79
Fig. 9.2 ‘Waiting’ – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram 80
Fig. 9.3 Make-up tutorial selfie – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram 82
Fig. 9.4 Outfit of the day selfie – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram 83
Fig. 15.1 ‘#NotYourChupacabras’ 139
xi
Prologue
CHAPTER 1
Inject/ed: Self(ie) Determination
Raju Rage
Abstract This set of selfies is staged and taken by the transgender queer of
colour artist, Raju Rage, at a German exhibition that documents the
history of ‘homosexual men and women’ in the country. The artist’s
selfies, in(ter)jected into whiteness and homonormativity of the gallery,
neither claim simplistic visibility nor aim to achieve a celebratory inclusion.
Rather, they instil a haunting presence that simultaneously undoes racist
and transphobic erasure and offers a form of presence for queerness of
colour that is not about being displayed and objectified.
Keywords Transgender Queer of colour Haunting Whiteness

Homonormativity Exclusion
In response to ‘The Homosexualität_en’ exhibition at Schwules museum,

Berlin 2015, that ‘documents 150 years of the history, politics and culture
of homosexual women and men in Germany’ (from the pamphlet to the
exhibition), I decided to spontaneously inject myself into the exhibition
and art works by using selfies as a transgender queer of colour interruption
and intervention.
R. Rage (*)
Independent Visual Artist, London and Berlin
e-mail: info@rajurage.com
© The Author(s) 2017 3

A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_1
4 R. RAGE
As I walked through the guided tour of the art exhibition at the

Schwules museum, it became apparent that most of the bodies being
presented were white bodies or white passing bodies (since one cannot
know for certain). The absence of black bodies and those of colour were
also present and visible in not being there. Transbodies were also absent
although I’m not sure if I wanted them to be visible either. What does it
mean for transbodies to always be visible? Although it was clear that they
were consciously absent as a silent T (with no reasons given). I read the
pamphlet which stated ‘the exhibition shows how same sex sexuality and
non-conformist gender identities have been criminalised through legisla-
tion, pathologised in medicine and excluded from society’. Nowhere did it
mention the parallels of black bodies and bodies of colour who are/were
also exposed to this same treatment, if not more, many in intersectional
criminalisation, pathologisation and exclusion. For example, brown queer
Muslim’s* (in Berlin context) deemed homophobic and thus their queer
identity erased outright and the constant policing of black, usually
migrant, people which also impacts black transmasculine folks. I recalled
the last 10 years of visiting Berlin and witnessing this constant criminalisa-
tion, pathologisation and exclusion from the streets, the gay bars, queer
clubs and elsewhere.
Those stories told to me continuously by Cutiebpocs (queer and trans*
black people and people of colour in Berlin). Where were these bodies and
narratives in this exhibition? Were they not considered German enough to
be included? Where they not Homo enough?
I decided to in(ter)ject myself into the art works, to interact with them.
I wanted to present a dark ghostly shadowy presence in direct contrast to
the whiteness, the white-washedness being conveyed. A redirection of the
whiteness of the briefs underwear that matches the white glow of the face
of the model on the exhibition cover image (the model being Cassil’s, a
trans Canadian visual artist, who later also took issue with the whiteness
depicted and exclusion inherent in this exhibition). I wanted to interrupt
and create an intervention into this whiteness, which felt persecuted, and
explore what impact my brown often persecuted gender non-conforming
hairy body had in blurring this work, as a shadowy figure, obscuring,
invisible yet visible and yet devoid of objectification (which happens a lot
in Germany and elsewhere) (Figure 1.1a–f).
The process in itself was interesting as an experience. I was surrounded
mostly by a white audience looking at the artworks, who totally ignored
my taking selfies with the work. The staff also did not notice or ask me to
1 INJECT/ED: SELF(IE) DETERMINATION 5
Fig. 1.1 (a–f) ‘Inject/ed: self(ie) determination’, selected images/selfies from

performance by Raju Rage, assisted by Rena Onat.
http://www.rajurage.com/2015/08/visual-activisms-residency-berlin-11-17th-july-2015/
6 R. RAGE
Fig. 1.1 (continued)


8 R. RAGE


10 R. RAGE

stop, but maybe that would’ve been different if I had walked into the
gallery off the street and not been part of an expected guided tour.
Part of me wondered if taking selfies has become such a non-threatening
(yet annoying) part of everyday life that is better ignored than challenged.
To be honest I was expecting to be told off by an older German citizen who
would tell me where I was out of place in my behaviour and conduct, which
is what usually happens as I try to navigate everyday life in Berlin on public
transport, crossing the road or at public toilets (that I am usually using
incorrectly?!) to affirm that I clearly do not belong. But maybe this gallery
was full of more ‘clued up’ arty and activist types who smile and stare
instead? Who include you whilst oppressing you at the same time! Maybe
I should have got selfies with them as well! These selfie interventions are
testiment to the belonging/not belonging that queer and trans people of
colour are constantly faced with. We are either missing or taking up too
much space. What does it mean to take up space whhilst we are missing?
Raju Rage is an interdisciplinary artist who is proactive about carving space and
using art and activism to forge creative survival. They are focused on knowledge
and creative production both inside and, mostly, outside of academia and institu-
tions, within pro/active creative and activist communities. Raju Rage’s work
interrogates the ways in which history and memory, in/visibility and the affect of
politics, space, symbolism, stereotypes, ethnic codes, ideology and gazes impact
the body, with a focus on race, class and gender. http://www.rajurage.com/
CHAPTER 2
Introduction: Whose Selfie Citizenship?
Adi Kuntsman
Abstract In the introductory chapter, Adi Kuntsman presents the con-

cept of ‘selfie citizenship’: claims made by ordinary citizens via their
networked self-portraits, created, distributed and consumed at the times
of algorithmic visibility, large-scale dataisation, globalised participatory
politics and biometric governance. Kuntsman argues that both ‘selfie’
and ‘citizenship’ need to be understood not as a given but as a field of
potential violence and contestation. Approaching selfie citizenship as a
visual, networked and social phenomenon, the introduction asks: What are
the conditions in which a selfie can do political work? Who are the selfies
made for? By whom? How are they consumed? Who, when and how has
the ability – and the safety – to star in a selfie, and when is such ability
impossible?
Keywords Visibility Intimate citizenship Dataisation Biometric

governance Selfie politics
The book opens with a set of selfies, staged and taken by the transgender
queer of colour artist, Raju Rage, at a German exhibition that documents
A. Kuntsman (*)
Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom
e-mail: a.kuntsman@mmu.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_2
14 A. KUNTSMAN
the history of ‘homosexual men and women’1 (the wording of the exhibi-
tion, Schwules museum) in the country. The selfies were part of Raju’s
performative intervention into the whitewashed space of the exhibition
where black, brown and transgender bodies were entirely absent. And as
the artist notes in their commentary, such selfie ‘in(ter)jection’ (Rage, this
volume) into whiteness and homonormativity neither claims simplistic
visibility nor aims to achieve a celebratory inclusion; rather, it instils a
haunting presence that simultaneously undoes racist and transphobic
erasure and offers a form of presence for queerness of colour that is not
about being displayed and objectified. Raju’s account of their experience
during the intervention ends with a question as to why their process of
taking selfies caused no objections from the almost exclusively white
audience in the gallery – and in fact, was largely ignored, at a striking
difference to the artist’s experience of navigating urban spaces, public
transport or toilets, in Germany and elsewhere. Was that something to
do with space of the gallery, the particular crowd that attended or the act
of selfie-taking itself?
Raju’s in(ter)jection and reflection foreground and inspire some of the
key questions raised in this book. What are the conditions in which a selfie
can do political work? What are the regimes of in/visibility in which such
work operates? Who are the selfies made for? By whom? How are they
consumed? Who has the ability – and the safety – to star in a selfie, how
and in what context, and when is such ability impossible?
***
In the recent years, we have become accustomed to politicised use of
selfies: photographs of individuals with handwritten notes or banners,
various selfie memes and hashtag actions, spread on social media as actions
of protest and various social statements. Such mobilisation of the selfie
genre – understood broadly as self-portraits in viral digital circulation –
challenges the prevalent popular view of selfies as narcissistic, inherently
apolitical and even antisocial. Instead, it invites us to think about what I
propose to call ‘selfie citizenship’: claims made by ordinary citizens via the
use of their own networked self-portraits. Such claims, as the contributors
to this book demonstrate, often merge the individual and the collective,
the deliberate and the spontaneous, the marketised and the grass roots.
In that respect, citizenship itself is taken on here not as a given condition
but as an entity in the making, whether we think of ‘affective citizenship’
(Fortier 2010) – a sense of citizen collectivity constituted through the
2 INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SELFIE CITIZENSHIP? 15
governance of intimacies and performed feelings, or ‘acts of citizenship’

(Isin 2009), where citizenship is made, enacted, within and across geo-
graphical borders, cultural scripts and communication genres.
Selfie citizenship, as visual scholars would remind us, needs to be
analysed as a phenomenon of depicting and seeing (What kind of icono-
graphies does selfie citizenship mobilise? What does a citizen selfie show?
How is it seen?). Furthermore, as Farida Vis (2015) and Jill Walker
Rettberg (2014) have recently argued, the visuality and visibility of selfies
is a networked phenomenon, mediated by algorithms and computer
visions (How and where are acts of selfie citizenship circulated? How
and when they can become visible, and to whom? Who are their human
and non-human audiences?). But perhaps most importantly, selfie citizen-
ship is also a social phenomenon, and understanding it requires a focus on
power, context, actions, effects and consequences. For despite citizen
selfies’ global spread, and somewhat standardised iconography – person
+ face + sign – their causes and claims vary significantly. Some stand
against police brutality or military occupation, while others promote
corporate or governmental causes, or incite hatred and war; some act as
witnesses against regimes of silence and erasure, while others capitalise on
being bystanders to sensational tragedies; some claim humanity, rights and
political selfhood – theirs or those they stand in solidarity with – while
others proudly show off their own violent deeds as a means of viral self-
promotion. And while in many such selfie actions ordinary citizens put
their faces into digital circulation freely and willingly, the phenomenon of
selfie citizenship cannot be separated from the rise of biometric govern-
ance, and in particular the use of facial recognition in surveillance and
policing of individuals and communities, in border control or military
operations.
This book therefore proposes that the mobilisation of selfies by citizens
should be understood as a new techno-social practice that is embedded
not only in new forms of agency, but also in new forms of governance and
violence. Selfie citizenship, in other words, is about particular forms of
spectatorial intimacies and performative effects that can create or disrupt
the sense of citizen collectivity through illusory proximity, and capitalise
on individual visibility, at the time when citizenship itself is increasingly
governed through biometric recognition and large-scale dataisation
(Blas 2013).
Reading selfie citizenship this way requires a new set of critical ques-
tions, beyond and away from the argument about selfies as either a futile
16 A. KUNTSMAN
gesture or a vital format of citizen political mobilisation. Contributors in

this collection ask, instead: Can we/should we tie today’s increasingly
digital practices of citizenship – from consumerism to voting to social
protect locally and globally – to the ‘self’, the face and to various forms
and regimes of visibility? Or should we, instead, take apart both the
currency of the selfie as a globalised networked practice and the notion
of citizenship itself?
Asking these questions means that we approach citizenship neither as a
positive value nor as a given condition. Instead, the contributors meditate on
citizenship, and in particular, selfie-based citizenship actions, as contested,
and contextual, practices and processes. These can include media events that
tie the political to the familial, the patriotic to the everyday, the grandiose to
the quotidian, as Fatima Aziz, Gabriele de Seta, Michelle Proksell and Negar
Mottahedeh demonstrate in their discussion of collective citizen marches,
captured in selfies and shared on various social networks. They can offer
possibilities for global solidarity and witnessing, as Catherine Hartung sug-
gests. And they can include ways of selfie-based gamified entertainment that
seem to shape – or sometimes even replace – other forms of civic engage-
ment, as Catherine Bouko shows in her discussion of millennia selfies.
Indeed, current debates around selfie citizenship are increasingly linked
to forms of entertainment and celebritisation that both reshape the face
(pun intended) of politics and obscure its power. Politicians’ selfies, for
example, is a phenomenon that no longer surprises us. As Crystal Abidin,
Mattias Ekman and Andreas Widholm demonstrate, the intimate genre of
the selfie is adapted by political leaders who take selfies routinely, purpose-
fully and skilfully as part of their election campaigning and self-branding.
But behind the move to popularise a politician’s persona by using the
latest media trend – the selfie and its trafficking in the banal and
the everyday – is a broader shift towards the playful myopia that is at the
heart of today’s adaptation of ruthless digital technologies into the patina
of everyday life. Such is the case of ‘biometric citizenship’, discussed by Jill
Walker Rettberg who shows how we complacently adapt to machine
visions of ourselves (and of our selfies); and that of Maximilian
Jablonowski’s notion of ‘dronie citizenship’, where a drone – perhaps the
sign of our technomilitarist times – is excitedly welcomed into casual self-
photoshoots.
A light-hearted and eager engagement with such technologies, which is
at the centre of the digital industry and its accompanying consumer
culture, allows and encourages to continuously disregard both these
2 INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SELFIE CITIZENSHIP? 17
technologies’ violent origins and their current and future dangerous

applications. But disregarding the violence of the digital, and embracing
instead its promises and pleasures, is also a privilege and a capital – a
socially constructed form of entitlement that is highly contested and
policed, and unequally distributed while masquerading as universal. This
is an entitlement that can be conditionally offered, or violently withdrawn,
just as citizenship itself.
Understanding the digital – and in this particular case, the use of selfies
shared on social media– as a form of social capital invites us to rewire the
often assumed connections between visibility, face/body and politics.
Being able to be visible through a selfie can undoubtedly be a way of
locating oneself in time and space, or a form of powerful witnessing that
counters death, erasure and forgetting, as Mark Nunes, Larissa Hjorth and
Jung Moon argue in their analyses of selfie witnessing. Becoming present
through a selfie-based action, as Debra Ferreday claims, can also be a
means of claiming speakability, agency and survivorhood in the face of
violent silencing and stigmatisation. But selfie visibility can also be a form
of privilege, frequently mobilised and capitalised on, yet rarely questioned.
As Raju Rage’s powerful in(ter)jection reminds us, and as and Silvia
Rodriguez Vega and Sanaz Raji poignantly demonstrate in their discus-
sions of selfie activism without a face, for many the visibility ingrained in
the genre of the selfie is neither always available nor desirable, and claim-
ing it can have dire consequences. The refusal to show one’s face or to
participate in social media photo-sharing entirely, or the alternatives
deployed by some activists – wearing a mask (Vega), or refocusing the
photo on the message instead of the face (Raji) – offers a powerful critique
of the currency of visibility in today’s digital politics (and beyond). It also
reminds us that acts of selfie citizenship are never solely about those
starring in selfies, but always also about those looking at them. As JB Brager
poignantly notes in the epilogue, looking at the selfie ‘one is forced to ask
where we are looking from, as well as who we are looking at, within political
frameworks of visibility, hyper-visibility, erasure and misrepresentation’
(Brager, this volume: 152).
When both selfies and citizenship are understood as a privilege rather
than a given, as a capital that can be gained, lost, appropriated or with-
drawn, or as a right that needs to be fought for, our concerns about selfie
citizenship begin to shift. Rather than claiming what selfie citizenship is, or
should be, this volume hopes to offer an opening to a much needed
conversation on selfies, citizenship and politics, as a field of potential violence
18 A. KUNTSMAN
and contestation rather than that of playful celebration. By examining the

contexts and conditions in which selfies do – or fail to do – political work,
and by attending to metaphorical, visual and physical erasures within selfie
citizenship, the book is an invitation to reflect on the possible meanings and
costs of ‘selfie’ and ‘citizenship’ as they intersect today.
NOTE
1. Schwules Museum, Berlin http://www.schwulesmuseum.de/en/exhibi
tions/archives/2015/view/homosexuality-ies/.
REFERENCES
Blas, Z. (2013). Escaping the face: Biometric facial recognition and the facial
weaponization suite. Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus. Retrieved
from http://median.newmediacaucus.org/caa-conference-edition-2013/
escaping-the-face-biometric-facial-recognition-and-the-facial-weaponization-
suite/.
Fortier, A.-M. (2010). Proximity by design? Affective citizenship and the manage-
ment of unease. Citizenship Studies, 14(1): 17–30.
Isin, E. (2009). Citizenship in flux: The figure of the activist citizen. Subjectivity,
29, 367–388.
Rettberg, J. W. (2014). Seeing ourselves through technology: How we use selfies, blogs
and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vis, F. (2015, April 16). Algorithmic visibility: Edgerank, selfies and the net-
worked photograph. Paper Presented at the Selfie Citizenship Conference,
Manchester.
Adi Kuntsman is Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK,

the author of Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (with
Rebecca L. Stein), and the co-editor of Queer Necropolitics (with Jin Haritaworn
and Silvia Posocco) and Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion: Feelings,
Affect and Technologica Change (with Athina Karatzogianni).
CONVERSATION I
Acts of Selfie Citizenship

CHAPTER 3
Performing Citizenship: Freedom March

Selfies by Pakistani Instagrammers
Fatima Aziz
Abstract Drawing on a close reading of ‘Freedom March’ selfies, published

by Pakistani instagrammers in August–December 2014 under #azadimarch,
Aziz discusses the relationship between selfies and civic participation offline
and online. She offers a qualitative analysis of a shift in selfie practices from
documenting media coverage to participation and citizenship performance
by Pakistanis in a national freedom march organised in 2014. Focusing on
photographs of participants published on Instagram, the chapter draws
attention to selfie as a dialogical gesture and polemical representation of
political identity performed on social media.
Keywords Selfie Citizenship Performance Instagram #azadimarch
FREEDOM MARCH
In protest to systematic rigging of Pakistani election results in 2013,
Imran Khan, leader of centrist, opposition party, Pakistan Movement for
Justice (PTI), called for a nationwide march on the country’s indepen-
dence day, 14 August 2014 (Dunya News 2015). Initially launched as
‘tsunami’ movement to signify a wave of political change, the march was
F. Aziz (*)
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
e-mail: fma2001@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_3
22 F. AZIZ
organised as final action following a series of smaller rallies. It was subse-

quently renamed ‘revolution’ and ‘azadi’ (‘freedom’) march. Beginning in
Lahore, demonstrators joined en route and arrived in the country’s capital
city, Islamabad, on 15 August to participate in a short peaceful sit-in,
which lasted for a hundred days in front of the Parliament House.
Fearing media censorship by the incumbent government, PTI launched
a bilingual website, AZADI MARCH (http://azadimarch.insaf.pk) for
party supporters to share rally activities online. On social media, PTI
encouraged protestors to share photos and videos under #azadimarch
hashtag.1 On Instagram 9,777 posts are accessible under this hashtag
and most of the visuals still accessible showcase a variety of photographic
and video selfies. Mainstream media ignored PTI’s social media campaign,
and most of the visual content shared on their site was accessible only to
Internet users.
This chapter is based on empirical research of 200 selfies published on
Instagram from 14 August to 17 December 2014 by Pakistani citizens
under #azadimarch. Even though some photographs might have been
deleted since initial publication,2 the following qualitative analysis demon-
strates a shift in selfie usage from documenting media coverage of the
march to participation and citizenship performance both offline and online
which lasted for over a period of 5 months.
SELFIES: A CITIZEN RIGHT AND A DIALOGICAL GESTURE

Internet access and its unfiltered use are not democratic rights of Pakistani
citizens. Foreign social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube are
regularly monitored and censored for content deemed ‘anti-islamic’ by
government authorities (OpenNet Initiative 2012). For a population of
193.2 million, only 20.1 million have Internet access, while active mobile
subscriptions amount to 134.8 million (We Are Social 2014). Mobile tech-
nology and Internet access are increasing (Pew Research Center 2015). In
Asia, Pakistan provides the fifth largest mobile phone market (We Are Social
2013). Smartphone sales are increasing as these are relatively cheaper than
computers and digital cameras and can provide individual Internet access
with average recording and viewing quality for domestic use.
Under repressive technocultural affordances, only a relatively small part
of the population, 16.2 million users, are connected to social media. In the
absence of statistical evidence on Instagram use in Pakistan, based on
observation it can be hypothesised that Instagram use is limited to sharing
3 PERFORMING CITIZENSHIP: FREEDOM MARCH SELFIES . . . 23
fashion and touristic content. Therefore, selfies published under #azadi-

march on individual Instagram accounts of rally participants can be con-
sidered as outstanding acts, a creative break from a quotidian use (Farnell
2000). The prolonged publication duration of freedom march content on
Instagram constitutes another important aspect of this dispersed online
movement. Protestors from different cities regularly published and docu-
mented their participation during various rallies. The variety of visual
content helps track its development from the time protesters started taking
and posting selfies to subsequent changes in the visual content and its
reception online.
Selfies published by protestors provide an alternative source of informa-
tion to mainstream media coverage, which contrary to demonstrators’
testimonials reported aggressive and violent crowd behaviour. Mediation
via a street view of blockades and other impediments preventing rally
participants from reaching Islamabad, the rally’s end point, illustrates the
enactment of protestors as peaceful claimants visually voicing their
demands for fair elections. In this regard, freedom march selfies can be
viewed in relation to Engin Isin’s notion of citizenship. According to Isin,
acts of citizenship are claims for rights intended to elicit recognition and
redistribution by others, actions that constitute the ‘performative force’ of
citizenship performance (Isin 2008).
Moreover, selfies as photographic activity produce what Paul Frosh calls
the ‘gestural image’, defining its intention as not only ‘see this, here, now’
but also ‘see me showing you me’ (Frosh 2015). André Gunthert, photo-
graphy historian, also argues for selfies to be considered as a different type
of self-portraiture, one that establishes a twofold role of the photographer,
both as subject and operator of the image (Gunthert 2015).
Performance of citizenship through selfies then becomes a dialogical
gesture, transforming rally participants/photographers into claimants
addressing their appeal to other protestors as well as government officials
and foreign media. This transformation occurs first by using Instagram as a
public broadcasting platform. Secondly, as a citizen, partaking in a collec-
tive political effort and conversation with other protestors. In political
contexts, selfies may also act as visual signatures and when shared online
‘en masse can challenge power’ (Mottahedeh 2015).
Publishing selfies under #azadimarch indicates an intention of political
self-identification, a concept Senft has termed as ‘networked reflective
solidarity’, linking people who share similar political sentiments and invit-
ing response from fellow supporters who might mimic and/or redistribute
24 F. AZIZ
the content (Senft 2008). These self-portraits are not showcasing social
identity, but are about a polemical identification (Mirzoeff 2011) seeking
social validation.
#AZADIMARCH: FRIENDS, WOMEN AND FAMILY

An analysis of recurring visual content in #azadimarch selfie dataset allows
for its thematic organisation. During the analysis I identified four types of
selfies: ‘on the move’, ‘indoors’, ‘street view’ and ‘family’. Selfies pub-
lished earlier in the protest document various preparatory aspects and
activities carried out with friends. Shot in cars or on motorbikes, ‘on the
move’ selfies show mostly male protestors in groups3 or with friends
posing in streets.4
Selfies shot indoors at restaurants or at home5 document indirect
support and acknowledgement of the rally’s importance. Individuals
unable to participate in situ displayed their support through t-shirts
printed with slogans, PTI party colours (red and green) and badges of
Imran Khan’s portrait. It must be noted that ‘indoor’ selfies are uploaded
by privileged teens and mostly girls, a social category whose movement in
public space is controlled by parents.
Photographing and sharing different phases of the rally, completing a
milestone with a group of friends or arriving at a key location and doc-
umenting these activities through ‘street view’ selfies also informed family
members of protestors’ safety. Most ‘on the move’ and ‘street view’ selfies
are shot and uploaded via male Instagram accounts, indicating a gender
imbalance when it comes to physically participating in public political
demonstrations. Although women actively participated in the freedom
march, female presence is not as visible on Instagram as those of male
protestors.6 While for some protestors selfies were a visual proof of their
struggle in overcoming massive containers blocking the Parliament
House, for those who successfully reached the rally destination, selfies
were shot to include Imran Khan’s speech podium serving as visual
rewards (Fig. 3.1).7 Many ‘indoor’ selfies also show photographers with
Imran Khan’s image broadcasted on live television (Fig. 3.2).
During the hundred days protest, selfie production and publication on
Instagram increased considerably. In successive selfies shot at various rallies
held across different cities in Pakistan, a shift can be observed in the visual
content of ‘on the street’ selfies taken with friends which are replaced by
selfies shot with political celebrities and family members. This change
Fig. 3.1 ‘The moment when I first saw Imran Khan’ – ‘street view’ selfie in
Islamabad with Imran Khan in the background. Initially published on Instagram,
this photograph was deleted and republished by the user on Facebook as his profile
picture updated on 20 October 2014. Photo by Instagram user <mj_Hassan>.
Source: Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=
898416496850338&set=a.179429482082380.41143.100000459899270
&type=3&theater
26 F. AZIZ
Fig. 3.2 ‘ . . . wish I could take a selfie for real’ – ‘indoors’ selfie. Photo by Instagram
user <tufmanbakali>. Source: https://instagram.com/p/r2JPNEtBIY/?tagged=
azadimarch
documents a significant shift in attitude of Pakistani citizens towards demo-

cratic participation, selfies and photography. Family participation in freedom
march also ensured an active representation and performance of women and
girls as individual claimants.8
Although photographed by male family members, ‘family’ selfies indicate
social acceptance of selfies as citizen journalism on a small scale. Inclusion of
parents can reduce narcissistic rhetoric against selfies propagated by Pakistani
press. Moreover, encouraging comments written online in response to these
selfies on Instagram translate into a positive interpretation of these citizen
acts. A crucial aspect of Isin’s concept of citizenship performance is the
‘performative force’ of an act, which is not limited to the moment of its
performance, but includes its subsequent interpretation and description (Isin
2012). Social media affordances encourage performative force of citizenship
acts to be developed in different ways. In this case, freedom march selfies

helped Pakistani citizens to perform their civic identity individually, as well as
collectively on Instagram, which was used as a site by new social actors, who
represented themselves as claimants.
In conclusion, freedom march selfies provide interesting examples of
how selfie photographic practices, when aligned with political motivation,
transforms banal activity into a citizen act, an active performance of political
identity. In Pakistan, female participation in public demonstrations is lim-
ited to professionals such as lawyers and politicians. The visual shift observed
in this case reflects an awakening of political awareness and responsibility in
young women and families who live in a struggling democracy and male-
dominated culture. Selfie as a photographic practice gives visibility to pre-
viously invisible female citizens and reifies their claims to civic identity.
NOTES
1. Other hashtags include #azadimarchpti (3,760 posts); azadimarch14
(8 posts).
2. Indicating what Senft and Baym (2015) note in the case of selfies the
‘politics of their assemblage (by human and nonhuman agents) is a constant
reminder that once anything enters digital space, it instantly becomes part of
the infrastructure of the digital superpublic, outliving the time and place in
which it was originally produced, viewed or circulated’. However, in this
case, in spite of Internet filtering, the #azadimarch visual content and selfies
continue to be accessible online, most probably also because of their low-
interest value to print and broadcast media.
3. ‘On the move’ – selfie with friends on motorbikes. Photo by Instagram user
<jawad__ahmed>. Source: https://instagram.com/p/rzq21uBK5h/.
4. ‘Street view’ – masked selfie with a friend, capturing the blockade in the
background. Photo by Instagram user <wahab_ali72>. Source: https://
instagram.com/p/r5PGwDySMg/?tagged=azadimarch.
5. Composite of ‘indoor’ mirror selfie with media footage. Photo by Instagram
user <ahmad.arif.31>. Source: https://instagram.com/p/rmoMLijuRd/?
tagged=azadimarch.
6. Pakistani female social media accounts are mostly private, a strategy to avoid
policing of their activities by family members.
7. ‘Street view’ Epic Selfie at the march, 15 August 2014. Photo by Instagram
user <faizan.h.malik>. Source: https://instagram.com/p/r5JL1hK1pF/?
tagged=azadimarch.
8. Family selfie. Photo by Instagram user <farrukhlak>. Source: https://insta
gram.com/p/t2fm15N2_1/?taken-by=farrukhlak.
28 F. AZIZ
REFERENCES
Dunya News. (2015). Imran Khan accuses ECP of rigging general election.
http://dunyanews.tv/en/Pakistan/284091-Imran-Khan-accuses-ECP-of-rig
ging-general-election. Accessed 14 September 2015.
Farnell, B. (2000). Getting out of the habitus: An alternative model of dynamically
embodied social action. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(3),
397–418.
Frosh, P. (2015). The gestural image: The selfie, photography theory, and kines-
thetic sociability. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1607–1628.
Gunthert, A. (2015). La consécration du selfie. Une histoire culturelle. Etudes
Photographiques, 32. http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3495.
Isin, E. F. (2008). Theorizing acts of citizenship. In E. F. Isin & G. M. Nielsen
(Eds.). Acts of citizenship. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Isin, E. F. (2012). Citizens without frontiers. New York and London: Bloomsbury.
Mirzoeff, N. (2011). Occupy theory, For the Right to Look. http://nicholasmir
zoeff.com/RTL/?p=314. Accessed 17 May 2016.
Mottahedeh, N. (2015). #iranelection: Hashtag solidarity and the transformation
of online life. California: Stanford University Press.
OpenNet Initiative. (2012). Pakistan. https://opennet.net/research/profiles/
pakistan Accessed 10 August 2015.
Pew Research Center. (2015). Communications technology in emerging and devel-
oping nations. http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/03/19/1-communications-
technology-in-emerging-and-developing-nations/. Accessed: 10 August 2015
Senft, T. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity and community in the age of social networks.
New York: Peter Lang.
Senft, T., & Baym, N. (2015). What does the selfie say? Investigating a global
phenomenon. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1588–1606.
We Are Social. (2013). Social, digital and mobile in Pakistan. http://wearesocial.
net/blog/2013/01/social-digital-mobile-pakistan/. Accessed 10 August 2015
We Are Social. (2014). Social, digital & mobile in 2014. http://wearesocial.sg/
blog/2014/08/social-digital-mobile-august-2014/. Accessed 10 August 2015.
Fatima Aziz is a PhD candidate at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales, Paris. Her PhD project focuses on identity and sociality as co-constructed
visual practices on social network sites. She has published on hook-up practices of
French youth on Facebook and networked sociality and solidarity through image
sharing in online communities.
CHAPTER 4
V-Day Selfies in Beijing: Media Events

and User Practices as Micro-Acts
of Citizenship
Gabriele de Seta and Michelle Proksell
Abstract Zipai, or ‘taking a picture of oneself’, is an extremely popular

practice across an increasingly digitally mediated China. The principal plat-
forms through which Chinese digital media users share their zipai are mobile
micro-messaging and social contact apps such as WeChat. This chapter follows
a highly visible media event – the 2015 V-Day military parade in Beijing – and
its representation across micro-media practices of spectatorship to rethink the
role of zipai in the construction of contemporary forms of Chinese citizenship.
Keywords China Media events Media practices Micro-media

Military parade Zipai WeChat
FROM SQUARE TO SCREEN

I used to have a photograph of myself when I was fifteen, standing in the
middle of Tiananmen Square with Mao’s huge portrait visible in the back-
ground. It was taken not in Beijing but in the photography studio of our town
G. de Seta (*)
Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
e-mail: notsaved@live.com
M. Proksell
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht,
The Netherlands

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_4
30 G. DE SETA AND M. PROKSELL
a thousand miles away. The room in which I was standing cannot have been
more than twenty feet wide, and the square was just a theatrical backdrop
painted on the wall. When you looked at the photo, you might almost have
believed I was really standing in Tiananmen Square – except for the complete
absence of people in the acres of space behind me. (Yu 2012: 31)
– ‘Did you watch the Beijing V-Day parade on TV?’

– ‘No, I didn’t watch it at all. I never follow any of those zhongda shijian
[major events] happening in China.’
– ‘But did you follow what was going on through other media?’
– ‘I stopped watching television when I was in middle school. So I don’t
get any news from the TV. But because this was a zhongda shijian, it’s
inevitable, I’ve seen a lot of short clips of the military parade reposted
by people in my WeChat pengyouquan [friend circle].’ (The authors in
conversation with Yi, a 32-year-old freelance writer)
On 3 September 2015, as it became immediately evident from the sudden

thematic change in the zipai (selfies, literally ‘self-shot’) we were collect-
ing on local social media platforms, Beijing’s Tiananmen Square was the
ground of a historic event. Six years after the last grand military parade
organised in the Chinese capital, thousands of troops and hundreds of
military vehicles marched on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of
Japan’s 1945 surrender. Commonly referred to as ‘China’s V-Day’, the
‘Commemoration of 70th anniversary of Victory of Chinese People’s
Resistance against Japanese aggression and World Anti-Fascist War’
(Xinhuanet 2015) was declared to be a public holiday by Chinese autho-
rities four months in advance (Tang and Zhao 2015) and has been
described as an occasion for China to flex its muscles in international
relations (Page and Wong 2015) while reasserting its model of peaceful
rise (Phillips 2015). The military parade, happening under the blue skies
of Beijing – cleared of smog through weeks of reduced industrial produc-
tion and tightly regulated street traffic (Lu and Chan 2015) – was evi-
dently planned as a ‘media event’ in the sense described by Dayan and
Katz (1992): the cheering on-site audience was mostly composed of
veterans and Party members, while the national public was included in
the celebration through televised broadcasts and allowed, if not encour-
aged, to document and share the spectacle through mobile phones and
social media.
As Pan Zhongdang argues, this sort of media events, from Hong
Kong’s handover in 1997 to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the military
4 V-DAY SELFIES IN BEIJING: MEDIA EVENTS AND USER PRACTICES . . . 31
review on National Day 2009, have been consistently engineered to sup-

port the ‘construction of collective memories’ and heighten ‘national
identity and pride’ (2010: 521) among Chinese citizens. Yet in this case,
even before the actual event and its broadcasting, the establishment of a
new national holiday gave rise to extensive discussions across local social
media platforms, many of which, as Wertime (2015) reports, were focused
on the practical details of the upcoming vacation: how many days would
people get off work, where could they go for a short trip and how the
parade machinery would impact their mobility and activities in the capital.
Moreover, besides discussions about the parade and its reverberations
across national and international media, the recent popularisation of
mobile devices and social contact apps in the country contributed to the
emergence of a parallel experience of the national celebration, a form of
participatory spectatorship shared through zipai, short video clips and
comments across personal messaging, group chats and user profiles.
The aim of this chapter is to rethink the role of these media practices in
the construction of contemporary Chinese citizenship. By presenting an
ethnographic snapshot of user activity on a mobile social media platform
in the time around the 2015 V-Day parade in Beijing, we seek to highlight
how media events are experienced and chronicled in extremely different
ways by their target audiences: as inevitable, intrusive and somewhat
disruptive ‘major events’, as occasions for patriotic pride to be displayed
across friend circles or as positive moments in which national celebration
intertwines with intimate self-reflections on citizenship. As blogger Li
Yinuo summarises in a WeChat post widely shared around the days of
the parade:
I also found something profound in the 3 generations of my own family:

from my grandparents, who lived through war and poverty [ . . . ] through
my parents, who lived through the famine in the 60s and the dark ‘cultural
revolution’ of the 70s, to me, sitting here now, with the best technology at
my fingertips, writing a note like this to you all. (Li 2015)
MAJOR EVENTS, MICRO-MEDIA

This intervention is based on the findings of a larger research project that
the authors have been working on since 2014, an interdisciplinary
inquiry focused on the production and circulation of zipai on the
messaging app WeChat (in Chinese, Weixin, literally ‘micro-letter’). Our

research methods consist of long-term, active participation in the plat-
form, the use of WeChat’s locational search function to collect visual
media from public user profiles, and the triangulation of insights regard-
ing trends or phenomena through interviews or focus group discussions
with app users (de Seta and Proksell 2015). While our research project
has been broadly concerned with the production and circulation of visual
media in Chinese everyday life, the materials presented in this chapter
were collected in Beijing over the course of just 1 month – from
23 August to 23 September 2015 – and illustrate how a zhongda shijian,
the ‘major event’ of the V-Day parade, was spectated, interpreted and
remediated locally through user practices already established on the
popular mobile messaging platform.
Nationalism has been a missing element in our long-term visual ethno-
graphy of WeChat. After collecting zipai at first, and then more broadly
different kinds of vernacular visual media from the platform (status update
photos, short video clips, animated GIFs, personalised stickers), we rea-
lised that although widely documented in academic literature (Chan 2006;
Leibold 2010; Liu 2012; Qiu 2006), visual expressions of everyday patri-
otism and banal nationalism (Billig 1995) were largely absent from our
archives. This changed drastically during the two weeks leading to the
parade, when the public profiles of military personnel started appearing
with increasing frequency among the nearby app users, along with a
wealth of photos of Chinese flags being installed along Beijing’s hutong
neighbourhoods, tank convoys being transported across the city and air-
crafts rehearsing parade formations in the skies above. The V-Day parade
had entered the everyday life of people in Beijing, and was being mediated,
through the affordances of mobile devices and digital media platforms, by
residents, visitors and even army members travelling to Beijing from
different parts of China for the occasion. Nationalist and patriotic expres-
sions of citizenship suddenly flooded the local visual landscape of WeChat,
conjoining the exceptionality of the new holiday with the spatial reconfi-
guration brought by the much-touted media event.
These few examples of personal mediation of a zhongda shijian already
evidence the importance of individual articulations of citizenship.
According to Peter Dahlgren, understanding contemporary articulations
of citizenship and media requires a ‘cultural turn’ helping us to see citizen-
ship ‘not just in formal terms but also in regard to meaning, practices,
communication and identities’ (2006: 267). Dahlgren’s proposal for a
cultural turn is admittedly a reaction to essentialist and a priori notions of

citizenship in liberal democracies (pp. 268–269), but it is equally valid
when discussing Asian countries, often subjected to similarly essentialist
and orientalist assumptions regarding civic participation (Isin 2002).
A constructivist perspective on citizenship formation becomes necessary,
especially in times when media play such a central role in the articulation of
national imaginations and personal interpretations. According to
Dahlgren, the focus of citizenship studies should shift towards ‘all kinds
of horizontal “mini” media’ (Dahlgren 2006: 275) and beyond the public
sphere towards ‘the terrain of the private’ (p. 276). Similar arguments,
albeit more critical regarding the idea of cultural citizenship, are echoed by
Nick Couldry, who suggests rather to study ‘studying the experiential
dimensions of citizenship, studying what it actually feels like to be a
citizen’ (2006: 323) by inquiring into how these dimensions intersect
with media use ‘by listening closely to individuals’ reflexive accounts of
their own practice’ (p. 328) without neglecting feelings of withdrawal,
disinterest or indifference (p. 333).
We collected evidence that people around us in Beijing were consistently
aware of the parade, and involved in its unfolding with different degrees
of interest, excitement, indifference or commitment. Whereas PRC flags
captioned ‘Long live the motherland!’ and zipai of users among the crowds
around Tiananmen Square or in front of passing military vehicles abounded
in publicly shared WeChat posts, people we asked about the parade were
largely disaffected and cynical about it. ‘The event has no meaning to me’,
declares Yuanyuan, a 26-year-old local resident, then continuing to explain:
‘as a Beijinger I find it very annoying that many streets and transportations
had to be closed in advance, it reminds me of the time before the 2008
Olympics . . . gigs and exhibitions were cancelled, and so on’. Zhen, another
young Beijing resident, expresses similar feelings of inconvenience and
recalls how the parade occupied very little space in discussions with her
own friends: ‘We talked about it briefly. We were not very concerned with
it’. The predominance of disaffected or cynical descriptions of the V-Day
parade among the Beijing residents we talked to, in stark contrast to the
generally positive and celebratory zipai participation observed on public
WeChat profiles, might be explained by the limited demographics of our
interviewees, mostly university-educated urban youth, generally more alie-
nated from the patriotic sentiments shared by the previous generation,
suspicious of active participation in media events, and distrustful of the state’s
efforts of national representation (Wu 2012: 2223).
MEDIA PRACTICES AS MICRO-ACTS OF CITIZENSHIP

Nationalist imagery, expressions of patriotic pride and on-site chronicling
of one’s own presence as audience of the parade were just one variety of
the content we collected on WeChat during the month of research. In
contrast to these ‘orderly’ mediations of on-site experience that con-
formed to the celebratory tone set by official media, other user practices
resulted in the production and circulation of more ‘disorderly’ (Latham
2007: 295) self-representations. Some examples are group zipai taken in
front of television screens by friends watching the parade together, digi-
tally mediated drinking games based on the appearance of certain political
leaders on screen or the humorous discussion of specific moments of the
celebrations captured as photos or short video clips and shared in status
updates and group chats. Here the interplay between the parade taking
place on Tiananmen Square, its live broadcasting as a media event on
national television and the possibilities of refracting it through individual
acts of selective and participatory remediation evidence how the multi-
plication of media practices requires a more nuanced vocabulary to
describe the articulation of citizenship in contemporary China. Sharing
clips of remixed videos and taking close-up photos of political leaders with
funny expressions to discuss them in a group chat with friends watching
the parade in scattered places across the city (or the country) cannot
neither be reduced, as Kevin Latham warns, to a simple act of resistance
against state propaganda (2007: 296), nor to a Bordieusian habitus of
acting out ‘already written scripts’ (Isin 2008: 38).
The distinction that Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen propose between
practices of citizenship and acts of citizenship, the former being ‘institu-
tionally accumulated processes’ and the latter being the disruptive and
confrontational ‘actual moments that shift established practices, status and
order’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008: 10), has been widely adopted in recent
discussions of the experience of citizenship – even with reference to the
specific case of China (Hsu 2008) – but fails to encompass exceptional and
ephemeral bouts of social media activity such as the sociable spectatorship
of the V-Day parade described in this chapter. If, as Isin argues, a new
vocabulary of citizenship is needed to describe ‘the emergence of new
“sites”, “scales”’, and “acts” through which “actors” claim to transform
themselves (and others) from subjects into citizens as claimants of rights’
(2009: 368), then user practices of self-representation through disorderly
micro-media during major events should be recognised as valuable cases in
which citizenship is articulated and rearticulated (Pan 2010) without

necessarily falling on either end of the spectrum between habitus and act.
After all, as Yu Haiqing reminds us, ‘Chinese audiences have always
been active decoders of official messages’ (2006: 305), and as many of the
WeChat status updates and publicly shared images we collected, digital
media users are also very well-versed producers of personal interpretations
of these messages, eager to include themselves and their own sociable
spectating practices in the picture. Ultimately, from the Tiananmen
Square backdrops in the photographic studio of Yu Hua’s town to the
effervescent pengyouquan (friend circles) of Beijing residents during the
2015 V-Day parade, it is still the case that ‘the portrait must be authenti-
cated by the public, for the elementary reason that otherwise it will not
work’ (Dayan and Katz 1992: ix). What remains to be seen is what these
portraits, augmented and reconfigured by micro-acts of citizenship, actu-
ally work for.
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Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage.
Chan, B. (2006). Virtual communities and Chinese national identity. Journal of
Chinese Overseas, 2(1), 1–32.
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of Cultural Studies, 9(3), 321–339.
Dahlgren, P. (2006). Doing citizenship: The cultural origins of civic agency in the
public sphere. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 9(3), 267–286.
Dayan, D., & Katz, E. (1992). Media events: The live broadcasting of history.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
de Seta, G., & Proksell, M. (2015). The aesthetics of zipai: From WeChat selfies to
self-representation in contemporary Chinese art and photography. Networking
Knowledge, 8(6), 1–17.
Hsu, Y. (2008). Acts of Chinese citizenship: The Tank Man and democracy-to-come.
In E. F. Isin & G. M. Nielsen (Eds.), Acts of citizenship. London: Zed Books.
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Isin, E. F. (2009). Citizenship in flux: The figure of the activist citizen.
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internet. The China Quarterly, 203, 539–559.
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Gabriele de Seta is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute

of Ethnology in Taipei, Taiwan, and a media anthropologist studying digital
folklore and media practices of vernacular creativity in contemporary China. He
collects, curates and narrates the genres of user-generated content, local humour
and platform-specific aesthetics circulating across Chinese post-digital media ecol-
ogies. His research work is chronicled on his website http://paranom.asia
Michelle Proksell born in Saudi Arabia to expat American parents, is an

independent researcher, curator and writer currently based in Beijing, China.
Her work focuses on the emergence of digital, new media and Internet art in
China. Information about her archival and curatorial work is available on her
online gallery: http://netize.net.
CHAPTER 5
Selfies for/of Nepal: Acts of Global

Citizenship and Bearing Witness
Catherine Hartung
Abstract This chapter examines two very different ways that selfies were
used to bear witness to the earthquake that devastated Nepal in 2015:
selfies taken by locals ‘on the ground’ and selfies taken by those overseas
wanting to show solidarity with the Nepalese. The chapter argues that
these selfies and their differing public receptions function as acts of citizen-
ship, highlighting the underlying discourses of nationalism and global
citizenship that dictate what is deemed a morally appropriate response to
such devastation. Ultimately, the chapter contends that the selfies that are
intended to promote global solidarity and connectedness may inadver-
tently reinforce nationalistic borders and inequalities, while the globally
controversial selfies taken by locals to bear witness to the devastation
challenge what is institutionally recognised as ‘legitimate’ journalism.
Keywords Global citizenship Selfies Bearing witness Acts of citizen-

ship Citizen journalism
C. Hartung (*)
University of Otago College of Education, Dunedin, New Zealand
e-mail: catherine.hartung@otago.ac.nz

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_5
40 C. HARTUNG
INTRODUCTION
On 25 April 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake brought mass devasta-
tion to Nepal, killing 9,000 people, injuring 23,000 and leaving hun-
dreds of thousands more without homes. The United Nations estimated
that a total of 8 million people were affected by the disaster, including
1.7 million children living in some of the worst-hit and most isolated
areas in Nepal. The earthquake was the country’s worst natural disaster
since the Nepal-Bihar earthquake in 1932. The earthquake, and subse-
quent aftershocks, also caused immeasurable and irreparable damage to
the environment and infrastructure, flattening whole villages and many
UNESCO World Heritage sites. One such site was the nine-storey
Dharahara Tower, built in 1832, which killed an estimated 180 people
when it collapsed. The international response to the earthquake was
widespread among governments, NGOs, news media and members of
the public. Digital technology and social media played a significant role
in mobilising these efforts and allowed a global audience to bear witness
to the devastation, though not all use of social media during the after-
math of the earthquake was well received.
This chapter juxtaposes two responses to the earthquake that
involved selfies as a way of bearing witness to consider how selfies
and their public reception can function as acts of citizenship. An ‘act
of citizenship’, according to Isin and Nielsen (2008), is an event
through which subjects are constituted as citizens. In this sense, citi-
zenship is not restricted to rights and responsibilities but is a form of
subjectivity that is performed. The first selfie ‘act’ under examination
here involved online campaigns asking people to send a selfie holding a
sign to show love for and solidarity with the people of Nepal. The
second selfie act involved tourists in Nepal who took photos of them-
selves standing next to the collapsed Dharahara Tower and the subse-
quent media backlash. In examining these two very different acts of
selfie citizenship, their global reception and effects, the chapter high-
lights the complex interplay between conceptions of the self(ie) and the
‘other’ and the underlying discourses of nationalism and global citizen-
ship that shape what is considered an appropriate response to devasta-
tion of such magnitude. Ultimately, the chapter argues that selfies that
are intended to promote global solidarity and connectedness may inad-
vertently work to reinforce rather than overcome nationalistic borders
and related inequalities.
5 SELFIES FOR/OF NEPAL: ACTS OF GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP . . . 41
REPOSITIONING THE SELFIE AS A POLITICAL ACT

The rise of the selfie in recent times, primarily attributed to mobile phone
technology and the inclusion of a front camera on many smartphones
(Mirzoeff 2015), has been popularly understood as an indulgent yet
ultimately apolitical form of digitally enhanced narcissism. Rarely a week
goes by without a media article declaring the disintegration of society due
to an individual’s or group’s rampant interest in taking selfies. However,
recent scholarship has challenged this moral panic, repositioning the selfie
as a political and relational act that is constitutive of citizenship in new
times. A special issue of the International Journal of Communication
explores the selfie as a global phenomenon, an exploration that the editors,
Senft and Baym (2015: 1601), describe as ‘a set of first steps toward
building the deep, interdisciplinary, international, multilayered under-
standings of selfies and all that the discourses that surround them repre-
sent.’ In her contribution to this special issue, Jenna Brager (2015)
explores the political potentials, limits and dangers of the selfie in the
Western consumption of viral tragedy. Brager argues that
Once the selfie is taken and goes viral, spectators must ask what to do with
this Other self we face. This is increasingly urgent in a landscape in which
social media is ascribed the power to topple governments, killing is increas-
ingly remote, and a sense of shared humanity – the ability to grieve for a
dead teenager, whether killed by a Hezbollah car bomb or a U.S. drone
attack – seems increasingly distant as well. (2015: 1669)
This chapter extends upon this recent selfie scholarship through a close
examination of selfies used in the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake to
examine how selfies enable, challenge or extend Western notions of global
citizenship. Global citizenship is a highly complex notion encompassing a
range of dimensions from the political, moral and economic, to the social,
critical, affective and spiritual. In the twenty-first century, the dominant
view of global citizenship positions it as the ‘great white hope’ of interna-
tional relations and a counterbalance to political and economic threats
(Brysk 2002: 243). The ‘white’ in the quote is no accident – indeed, this
view while seemingly universal is primarily driven by the political and
economic interests of the global north that encourages people to see
themselves as democratic members of a global community. This view of
global citizenship emphasises individual responsibility to solve global
42 C. HARTUNG
problems, whereby a privileged person can overcome distant inequalities

simply by being the change they wish to see in the world (Hartung 2016).
Popular understandings of global citizenship are simultaneously rein-
forced, extended and challenged by advancements in the digital world
where people are inventing and sharing with others around the globe
‘different forms of co-laboring, co-thinking, co-mapping’ (Azoulay 2014:
56). Such digitised encounters present a range of ethical and political con-
cerns when it comes to witnessing tragedy such as the Nepal earthquake. As
Steel states, ‘one of the most potent promises of social media is that it can
extend the eye of publics around the world, allowing us to bear witness to
events as they occur’ (2015: 1270).
BEARING WITNESS TO CATASTROPHE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

‘What happens to my citizenship in the encounter with this look? What
happens to it in this encounter with their catastrophe, knowing that they
are more vulnerable than I to catastrophe?’ asks Ariela Azoulay in her
book, The Civil Contract of Photography (2012: 18). It is well established
that bearing witness to catastrophe and representing the suffering of
others is ethically and politically fraught, especially in a digital age that
enables often immediate and extensive coverage of tragedy on a global
scale. For some, digital witnessing democratises Western journalism and
humanises tragedy, yet for others it dehumanises and depoliticises
(Chouliaraki 2015). Here it is useful to acknowledge a growing field of
research focused on photojournalism whereby traditional binaries between
professional and amateur/citizen journalism are being destabilised (e.g.
see Allan 2013, 2014; Allan and Peters 2015). This type of citizen journal-
ism, involving images captured on smartphones and disseminated online,
contrasts with a ‘conventional ethics of showing’ because it ‘invites unruly,
disruptive ways of seeing, its impulsive materiality threatening to disobey
tacit, codified rules of inclusion and exclusion consistent with mainstream
journalism’s preferred framings’ (Allan and Peters 2015: 1357).
Fundamental to these debates is our understanding of photography and
the possibilities and limits of visual representation. Sloshower (2013: 11),
following from Sontag (1977) and Didi-Huberman (2008), argues that
photography can act as a phenomenological approach to bearing witness
that ‘produces dynamic images, which although incomplete and imperfect,
can represent ideas, themes, concepts and truths about the human condi-
tion’. Indeed, Azoulay (2014) argues that photography is inseparable from
such catastrophe; part of what she calls the ‘civil contract of photography’
whereby a visual space for citizen engagement with the political is made
possible. Similarly, in her exploration of war and the lives that are ‘grieva-
ble’, Butler (2009: 29) argues that the materiality of death and conflict
cannot be divorced from ‘those representational regimes through which it
operates and which rationalize its own operation’.
In light of the political and ethical complexities surrounding citizen-
ship, selfies and bearing witness in the digital age, this chapter will now
turn to an examination of two recent selfie-related responses to the Nepal
earthquakes, their public reception and what this suggests about the
possibilities and limitations of global citizenship.
SELFIES FOR NEPAL: ACTS OF THE ‘GOOD’ GLOBAL CITIZEN

In the aftermath of the earthquake, a number of small online campaigns
emerged that encouraged the production and dissemination of selfies to
demonstrate solidarity with the people of Nepal. For example, the Selfie
for Nepal campaign by the non-government organisation, MySmallHelp,
attempted to use the selfie to demonstrate compassion for the Nepalese,
while also encouraging participants to donate money alongside their selfie.
We started this campaign to unite and to bring peace and courage to all
Nepalese. We are sad for our brothers and sisters who lost their lives during
recent earthquake in Nepal, who are hurting and them who mourn. Selfie
for Nepal encourages participants to take a selfie to show support Nepal with
#selfiefornepal. (MySmallHelp 2015: n.p.)
Similarly, an organisation called Creatives Without Borders ran a special

project called ‘Projections from the World to Nepal’, asking people to
send through selfies with signs of support and love. The selfies were then
screened at an outdoor event at Naya Bazar in Kathmandu with the
intention of lifting the morale of locals and aid-workers.
Although small in scale and impact compared with many recent global
selfie and hashtag-led campaigns (e.g. #blacklivesmatter, #bringbackour-
girls, #wearethe99%), these well-meaning responses were not negatively
received by the public. These campaigns did, however, draw on and
reinforce a ‘white-saviour’ view of global citizenship that rests on the
assumption that the Nepalese will gain courage and reassurance simply
by virtue of seeing the faces of well-intentioned people from around the
44 C. HARTUNG
world. This reinforces, rather than challenges, a popular view of the good
global citizen who recognises and responds to injustice and tragedy
around the world, with minimal critical thought and effort.
The use of selfies allows individuals far removed from the earthquake to
virtually and collectively acknowledge the earthquake. However, these
images are selective and, unlike the news reports, pictures of the affected
people and buildings are replaced with a sanitised view of the event,
screens filled with positive messages and hopeful faces, reinforcing the
self and other as distinct in accordance with national borders, further
delineating between observer and observed. This is suggestive of Said’s
(1978) classic analysis of Orientalism that reinforces a binary between the
‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’, whereby the former is positioned as unable to
represent itself.
SELFIES OF NEPAL: ACTS OF THE ‘BAD’ GLOBAL CITIZEN

In contrast to the selfie-led campaigns intended to show solidarity with the
people of Nepal, there emerged another selfie response to the earthquake
that arguably demonstrated much greater impact, albeit for all the ‘wrong
reasons’. Shortly after the quake, major news outlets from around the
world, from The Huffington Post to The Indian Times to The Independent
in the UK, began circulating four photographs of people taking selfies in
front of the collapsed Dharahara Tower. The most circulated photograph
shows a man in a white tee and a casual jacket holding a classic selfie
stance; arm outstretched and smartphone in hand. Behind the man are the
remains of the Dharahara Tower and many solemn faces of others walking
about the site. All four of the photographs can be traced back to the
Associated Press (AP). The AP is an American corporation that is strongly
involved in the production of news and images as a salable commodity and
is often the sole source representing stories that go on to reach audiences
around the world (Brager 2015).
What is deceptive about the public outcry regarding these selfie-takers
is that the commentary seems to indicate that there were many selfies
being taken near the collapsed landmark by hoards of ‘disaster tourists’
(Allan and Peters 2015). For example, in a piece for news.com.au, journal-
ist Rowena Ryan writes
It is the worst earthquake to hit Nepal in 80 years. As the death toll passes 4000
you would think selfies would be far from people’s minds. But people are
flocking to the devastated scenes in the country’s capital, Kathmandu, posing

and smiling for photographs in front of wreckage and rubble. (2015: n.p.)
The implication here is that flocks of people were taking selfies at the site.
Yet, the limited photographic evidence suggests that it was more likely
only a handful of people taking photos of themselves at the site and
that they were predominantly locals rather than tourists. Further, this
outcry, in its preoccupation with intent, is underpinned by a moral
double-standard between the professional reporter-to-camera and the
local citizen, whereby only the former is granted authority to bear witness
in a way that still inserts the ‘self’ within the representation. It is only in the
case of the latter, however, that including the self in bearing witness is
considered insensitive and callous.
Of course, this is not the first time a selfie bearing witness to tragedy has
caused moral outcry. In mid-2014, a photograph of a teenage girl taking a
smiling selfie at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp was widely circulated
online and made international news for her insensitivity and poor taste
(Koziol 2014). Similarly, selfies taken near the Lindt Store involved in the
Sydney Siege that year were also criticised by the public and media. It is
easy to see how these reports constitute a citizen that fits the template of a
‘disaster tourist’. Yet to conclude an analysis there is problematic, espe-
cially in light of other selfie acts that do not receive such bad press but also
present ethical limitations. A more nuanced understanding of how we
come to make meaning of selfies can be achieved by going beyond
perceived or actual intentions of the selfie-taker and positing selfies as
potential acts of citizenship, made possible through the complex context
in which they are taken and received.
CONCLUSION: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE SELFIE

To be a ‘good’ citizen while bearing witness to tragedy is an increasingly
complex task in today’s interconnected world. As Jean-François Lyotard
(1997: 245) notes, ‘[T]here is no poetics for regulating the manner of
bearing witness, nor an aesthetics to tell how it should be received’.
Although 20 years old, Lyotard’s words capture some of the difficulty,
and perhaps even the impossibility, of bearing witness to the suffering of
others in an ethically agreeable manner. This is no more evident than in
recent examples of bearing witness that utilise social media and selfies to
connect to others.
46 C. HARTUNG
Far from frivolous and apolitical, the selfies for and of Nepal, and their
reception, demonstrate significant political power. While the response to
such selfies is often focused on the perceived intentions of the photogra-
pher, this chapter has shifted the focus away from a normative framework
to consider the discourses that underpin these acts. This shift in focus is
not intended to excuse or celebrate offensive or insensitive behaviour, nor
is it an attempt to moralise and shame those who take selfies in their
response to tragic events. Rather, it calls for a more nuanced understand-
ing of the different and often hidden ways in which selfies enact forms of
global citizenship that have the potential to challenge or reinforce natio-
nalistic borders and existing power structures. From this perspective, the
purportedly ‘good’ selfies, those well-meaning images taken by non-
Nepalese wanting to raise awareness, empower and show solidarity with
the people of Nepal, might be seen as acts of ‘saviour citizenship’ remi-
niscent of the white saviour complex that underpins dominant and corpo-
rate understandings of global citizenship. Conversely, the purportedly
‘bad’ selfies, those ‘insensitive’ images taken by Nepalese locals at the
remains of the Dharahara Tower and consequently circulated via outraged
news outlets thanks to one of America’s largest news corporations, might
be positioned as a kind of ‘citizen journalism’ that subverts and engages on
a global scale. It is easy, and common, to dismiss the selfie as an example of
self-involved citizens who are intent on trivialising tragedy. This chapter
has sought to challenge this knee-jerk reaction, highlighting how selfies, as
a relational practice, carry strong political resonance with intended and
unintended effects. It is crucial that we continue to revise and challenge
how we recognise and foster acts of global citizenship in an increasingly
complex and interconnected world.
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Herald, 22 July. http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/smil
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March 2016.
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Catherine Hartung is a lecturer at the University of Otago College of Education.

Her work draws on feminist poststructural theory to explore notions of participa-
tion, citizenship and diversity, particularly as used to understand and govern young
people.
CHAPTER 6
Youth’s Civic Awareness Through Selfies:

Fun Performances in the Logic
of ‘Connective Actions’
Catherine Bouko
Abstract Can we raise the youth’s civic awareness via selfies? This
is the bet that several non-profit organisations aiming at raising the
youth’s civic awareness have made. In injecting a fun dimension to
civic mobilisation, campaigns via selfies place the young participants’
performance as a constitutive element of their civic action. This chapter
analyses six youth campaigns based on selfies (#DiversifyMyEmoji,
#SuperStressFace, #UpdateYour Status, #WeAreAble, #MakeItHappy,
#ShowYourSelfie) and shows that they privilege awareness techniques
that fall under the ‘actualizing citizenship paradigm’ (Bennett et al.
Journal of Communication 6:835–856, 2011), in which self-expression
and ‘connective action’ (Bennett and Segerberg, Information,
Communication & Society, 15(5):739–768, 2012) are favoured,
instead of more traditional collective actions.
Keywords Youth Civic awareness Fun Performance Actualising

citizenship Connective action
C. Bouko (*)
Free University of Brussels, Brussels, Belgium
e-mail: cbouko@ulb.ac.be

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_6
50 C. BOUKO
‘The Me me me generation’: this is the title of the now famous cover of

the 20 May 2013 issue of Time Magazine, illustrated by a teenager taking
a selfie. In the accompanying article, Joël Stein immediately shows his col-
ours: ‘I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call
those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow’ (Stein 2013: 28).
The practice of taking selfies might particularly strengthen this propensity
to narcissism disengaged from the world. Against this tide, can we raise the
youth’s civic awareness via selfies? This is the bet that several non-profit
organisations aiming at raising the youth’s civic awareness have made. The
American association Dosomething.org particularly exploits the selfie as a
mode of action. Its slogan ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’ demonstrates this
tendency to transform civic awareness into a performative act which gains
value through its visibility on social media.
The hypothesis that I wish to explore in this chapter is the following:
in injecting a fun dimension to civic mobilisation, campaigns via selfies
place the young participants’ performance as a constitutive element of
their civic action. Thus, like voices before them, self-mediation through
selfies becomes ‘a characteristic property of the performative view of
publicness, in the sense that, unlike mainstream views of citizenship as
ends-oriented political activism, it thematises the importance of simply
“speaking out” ‘in the knowledge that you will have the ear of the
community’ (Stevenson 2007: 256) as a ‘sovereign act of citizenship’
(Chouliaraki 2010: 228). If this focus on performance can also concern
adults’ actions, it is particularly stimulated in youth campaigns, which,
we will see, privilege awareness techniques that fall under the ‘actualising
citizenship paradigm’ (Bennett et al. 2011), in which self-expression and
‘connective action’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2012) are favoured, instead
of more traditional collective actions.
I have chosen to examine this hypothesis in relation to a corpus of six
youth campaigns based on selfies. Five of them were created on
Dosomething.org (www.dosomething.org). This association is exclusively
intended for young people aged between 13 and 25 years old.
• #DiversifyMyEmoji (summer 2014) is a campaign for which the

Dosomething members were asked to transform themselves into
emojis by using the ‘no-good gesture’ in order to call for more
ethnic diversity among Apple’s emojis.
• As stress and anxiety are directly linked with young people’s suicide,
#SuperStressFace, still ongoing in April 2016 with no specific end
6 YOUTH’S CIVIC AWARENESS THROUGH SELFIES: FUN PERFORMANCES . . . 51
date, proposes to share a selfie with one’s worst face when stressed on
Instagram, accompanied with tips proven to help de-stress.
• The members who participate in the #UpdateYourStatus campaign
(still ongoing in April 2016 without a specific end date) get HIV
tested and Instagram a picture of their hand with the word ‘tested’
written on it.
• #WeAreAble, still ongoing in April 2016 without a specific end date,
aims to help stop violence and abuse against disabled children by
reducing the stigma around disability. The selfie is a template in
which the participant has written his/her own ability (such as ‘My
best ability is storytelling’) published on Instagram. Three friends are
challenged to do the same.
• #MakeItHappy was organised in February 2015 in collaboration
with the Coca-Cola Company to battle harassment on the Internet
by sending compliments to friends via social media.
#ShowYourSelfie (December 2014–September 2015) is the sixth campaign

of my corpus. It was laid on by the non-profit organisation The Global
Poverty Project. It was also reserved for young people, although without any
age precision. The aim was to gather the largest possible amount of selfies
from young people, accompanied by a short text explaining why they
thought it crucial to invest in youth, and to send them to the world leaders’
meeting for the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015.
These six campaigns can be categorised according to their mode of action:
1. Protest ‘petitions’ in which selfies replace names and ask a designated

interlocutor for change: UN world leaders for #ShowYourSelfie and
Apple CEO Tim Cook for #DiversifyMyEmoji.
2. Preventative action to make my friends’ and my own health better
with #UpdateYourStatus.
3. Chains to raise awareness in order to improve my online environ-
ment for #MakeItHappy; members of my community who suffer
from disabilities for #WeAreAble.
In the first part of this chapter, I examine how these campaigns intensify
the ‘logic of connective action’ (Bennet and Segerberg 2012). In the
second part, I analyse how these non-profit organisations concretise the
connective logic in strategies that fall under the ‘actualising citizenship
paradigm’ (Bennett et al. 2011).
52 C. BOUKO
‘CONNECTIVE ACTIONS’ IN FAVOUR

OF ‘SOCIAL AND MEDIA’ CITIZENSHIP
Bennett and Segerberg remind us how structural fragmentation (decreas-

ing membership of ideological groups and increasingly (online) weak ties,
notably) leads to the construction of identity and citizenship from a more
personal angle: ‘People may still join actions in large numbers, but the
identity reference is more derived through inclusive and diverse large-scale
personal expression rather than through common group or ideological
identification’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2012: 744). In this context, the
connective logic does not strive towards the construction of a ‘united we’
(748) but instead creates a temporary aggregation of individualities around
easily personalised ideas or large-scale personal concerns rather than
around established ideologies. #ShowYourSelfie exemplifies such a choice
for a general topic that needs little to convince, as vague action frames can
encompass the different personal reasons for which the young Web surfers
want to protest or fight. The Global Poverty Project presents the cause in
the following way: ‘NOW is the time to invest in youth’. Such a rallying
slogan can easily gather the multiple and varied visions of the reasons to
invest in youth, while the Global Poverty Project works on youth in
developing countries. On its side, Dosomething favours large-scale personal
concerns, which are part of the young people’s communities’ daily life.
In our fragmented social context, where the distinctions between pri-
vate and public as well as between entertainment and power are breaking
apart, citizenship can materialise in a tendency to ‘citizenship as consump-
tion’ (Hartley 2010: 238): especially thanks to the visibility and sharing
possibilities of social media, one can express one’s opinion as a citizen, take
part in a civic action or in collective decisions through global (media)
consumer culture. While Hartley illustrates such young people’s citizen-
ship as consumption with the very process of consumption and amateur
production of commercial pop culture, in which fun is a central element, it
seems it can also be applied to the selfie campaigns. More precisely, such
campaigns seem to lie at the crossroads between Marshall’s social citizen-
ship (1963), linked to citizens’ rights (in education, employment, etc.),
and media citizenship (Hartley 2010: 242), based on consumer produc-
tivity and loose choice-based temporary affiliations. Indeed, these selfie
campaigns articulate awareness and (sometimes) protest for a better social
life with funny performance acts shared on social networks, which them-
selves are private companies whose products we consume every day.
Besides, Dosomething, like other associations like Taking It Global, sends a

weekly campaign digest to its members, who are invited to browse and
consume actions like they would do for articles gathered in other typical
newsletters.
#MakeItHappy, for example, shows clearly the blurring between the
public and the private, and citizenship as the consumption it can involve.
With The Coca Cola Company as a partner, #MakeItHappy is also a truly
corporate marketing campaign. These selfies perfectly illustrate the phi-
losophical shift in marketing management identified by Kotler and Lee,
‘from building brands through advertising to building brands through
performance and integrated communications’ (Kotler and Lee 2008: 33).
#MakeItHappy evokes brand feelings – a corporate societal marketing
strategy – more than it defends any citizen cause. For Hoeffler et al.,
evoking brand feelings notably allows for the generation of self-respect:
‘Self-respect occurs when the brand makes consumers feel better about
themselves, for example, when consumers feel a sense of pride, accom-
plishment, or fulfilment’ (Hoeffler et al. 2002: 81). #MakeItHappy
creates a certain illusion of empowerment through citizen actions with a
rather limited potential for reflection and agency. Moreover, as the parti-
cipation in #MakeItHappy gives the chance to win a $10,000 scholarship,
the difference between civic awareness and a brand contest is evaporating
even more.
This social and media citizenship among young people is not mere
coincidence. For Hartley, this combination is even constitutive of teens’
identity:
The ‘tipping point’ between [ . . . ] ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ citizenship, where

‘social’ rights connected with family security and education transmogrify
into ‘cultural’ rights connected with identity and participation in socially-
networked meaning-formation – this tipping point is also the transition-
phase between childhood and adulthood. In short, it is the place of the
teenager. (Hartley 2010: 242)
By uniting a social cause which enables easy rallying and a mode of action
specific to new media, these selfie campaigns highlight a double approach
to citizenship, both social and media, which suits the connective logic
of action.
In the next part, I will examine how this connective logic concretises in
awareness strategies that fall under the actualising citizenship paradigm.
54 C. BOUKO
WHEN SOCIAL AND MEDIA CITIZENSHIP BECOMES ‘ACTUALISED’

BY NON-PROFIT ORGANISATIONS
Bennett et al. (2011) show how the growing importance of participatory
media has particularly favoured the emergence of a new paradigm of
education to citizenship: for decades, the dutiful citizenship paradigm
was the norm. Based on the citizen’s sense of duty regarding the govern-
ment’s and public institutions’ modes of work, the dutiful citizenship
paradigm primarily consists of one-way consumption of civic informa-
tion. Here, civic action is managed by the institutions, which leave little
room for personal initiative.
Conversely, the actualising citizenship paradigm blurs the lines
between production and consumption of information. The citizens’
autonomy and creativity is favoured, notably in sharing over peer net-
works. Activism is rooted in self-expression that connects engagement
with personal identity, which is facilitated by the fact that most causes are
based on lifestyle concerns.
Firstly, let us look at the distinction between information provided one-
way by the association and opportunities for peer knowledge sharing,
respectively in connection with the dutiful and actualising citizenship
paradigms (Bennett et al. 2011: 846). The information provided for
#ShowYourSelfie mainly consists of the following rallying sentence ‘1.8
billion people, or 1 in 4 worldwide, are between 15 and 25. That’s too
many to ignore’ and six key statistics about youth’s situation worldwide.
#ShowYourSelfie does not offer the possibility for sharing information.
Dosomething’s campaigns do not offer interfaces to share knowledge
either, except personal tips against stress in #SuperStressFace. In all of
their campaigns, the information provided is limited to one or two general
sentences. Helped by the fact that these causes are connected to the young
people’s familiar environment, Dosomething does not aim to inform its
members beyond basic facts but aims to put them directly in action. These
campaigns are all based on awareness through friends: via the created
chains and the proposed challenges, the young citizens are invited to
convince their friends in a ludic way, and by doing so become the ambas-
sadors of the defended cause. The aim of such campaigns is to move away
from hierarchical persuasion, from adults to young people, and to stimu-
late horizontal persuasion thanks to a snowball effect. To reach it,
Dosomething utilises familiar, striking and enthusiastic language to moti-
vate its members to join, such as for #SuperStressFace: ‘Got a face? Got a
phone? Great! You’re good to go. Here’s everything else you’ll need to
post your #SuperStressFace’.
#ShowYourSelfie goes even further. Just as in famous military recruit-
ment drives, it uses imperatives to encourage action: ‘In order to show the
need to uphold young people’s rights and needs, we need YOU to inspire
your friends to take action’. #ShowYourSelfie insists on the importance of
the challenge to be undertaken:
We’re showing world leaders the faces of the millions who support the
6 measures we’re fighting for. The pure volume of images we deliver will
make the statement. When faced with the true number of young people in
the world – and the millions speaking out for their rights with a simple
photo – they won’t be able to ignore us any more. (showyourselfie.org)
Secondly, let us examine how the young citizens are invited to express
themselves via their selfies. The communication skills are divided into
traditional communication forms (letters, petitions, etc.) relating to the
dutiful citizenship paradigm and self-produced and shared-on-media
forms (blogs, videos, etc.), typical of the actualising citizenship paradigm
(Bennett et al. 2011: 386). As practices anchored in social media, selfies
fall under the second category. However, they show a specific tension
between autonomy and formatting. Indeed, the meme implied by the
selfie leaves less room for personal creativity than other campaigns where
artistic talents are exploited. However, as they can be defined as ‘pieces of
cultural information that pass along from person to person but gradually
scale into a shared social phenomenon’ (Shifman 2013: 18), the memes
are used as an effective tool to create a feeling of belonging to a virtual
community and the impression of taking part in a phenomenon that
goes beyond their sphere. In order to enhance the fun element of taking
a selfie, the campaigns suggest a specific pose, which acts as a rallying sign
of recognition.
Each campaign shows a gallery of selfies which strengthens the impres-
sion of belonging to a virtual community. In a mix between autonomy and
guidance, each campaign provides practical tips to prepare the selfie
(needed material, suggested time and place). #ShowYourSelfie went pretty
far with this guidance, as it provided a three-page user’s manual to make
and share it, with suggested messaging for Facebook and Twitter.
Moreover, beyond this selfie, this campaign tried to encourage a second,
more substantial, level of engagement, which resulted in the organisation
56 C. BOUKO
of local micro-campaigns by the young citizens themselves, for which

The Global Project provides a plentiful package of communication material
(user’s manuals, posters, badges, etc.). In the latter case, the authoritative
figure ruled much of the action, which then fell under the dutiful citizen-
ship paradigm.
Personal autonomy and spontaneity typical of selfies are exploited from
the angle of the funny dimension the participant gives to his/her selfie: an
upside-down selfie for #ShowYourSelfie, a funny, stressed face for
#SuperStressFace and an emoji for #DiversifyMyEmoji. The three other
selfies from my corpus exploit the funny character of taking a selfie as such,
without adding extra funny features; they simply enable to embody a civic
message through a photograph rather than via an impersonal text or
signature. #UpdateYourStatus exploits the indexical function of the selfie
(as a trace of an event) in order to use it as a proof for the HIV test which is
aimed to convince one’s friends to get tested as well.
Between altruism and narcissism, we see how these campaigns exploit
the selfie to bring the cause back to the young citizen’s personal life. This
is even more obvious in #MakeItHappy and #WeAreAble. In both cases,
the defended cause concerns the Other: the Other to whom one writes
compliments, as well as the Other who suffers from bullying. In
#MakeItHappy, while the compliment turns the spotlight on the compli-
mented person, the selfie enables some visibility to be given to the one
who writes the kind message. In a similar way, #WeAreAble wants to draw
attention towards disabled children but focuses on the participants’ abil-
ities via selfies in which they carry a template mentioning their own ability.
In these campaigns, the awareness of the Other’s situation paradoxically
concretises in self-centred spotlight.
CONCLUSION
Bennett et al. (2011: 844) underline the existence of a continuum
between the dutiful and actualising citizenship paradigms; civic campaigns
for youth rarely fall under one exclusively. The six campaigns of my corpus
also show a continuum between the two, tipping the scales in favour of the
actualising paradigm.
In the tension between autonomy and institutionalised formatting, the
selfie as a tool for civic awareness exploits its performative assets thanks to
humour and/or self-centred emphasis. This way, altruism and narcissism
are never far from each other. Intended to be shared on social media, these
selfies perfectly exemplify both social and media citizenship, at the heart of
young people’s cultural consumption, to the extent that the missions of
non-profit organisations and private companies (like Coca Cola) some-
times tend to blur.
Given the limited engagement and information they imply in favour of
fun performances, do such campaigns simply reinforce youth’s supposed
laziness, selfishness and shallowness, so often criticised, as mentioned in
the introduction of this chapter?
For some like Hartley, fun and citizenship are not incompatible. On the
contrary, he observes that media citizenship is becoming ‘sillier’, but ‘silly
citizenship’ must be considered as a constitutive element of young peo-
ple’s ways of engaging in the world:
Still more weirdly for social theory, [ . . . ] the stage for citizenship is [ . . . ] as
much dramatic and performative as it is deliberative. The play’s the thing.
[ . . . ] For too long, educated taste has refused to admit that the civic and the
silly are in intimate physical contact. [ . . . ] Here is a new model of citizen-
ship based on self-representation of, by and for ‘ordinary’ people, using
‘new’ media to produce discursive associative relations, superseding the
modernist ‘man with a gun’. (Hartley 2010: 241–245)
These selfie campaigns truly exemplify it.
REFERENCES
Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action. Digital
media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information,
Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–768.
Bennett, W. L., Wells, C., & Freelon, D. (2011). Communicating civic engage-
ment: Contrasting models of citizenship in the youth web sphere. Journal of
Communication, 6, 835–856.
Chouliaraki, L. (2010). Self-mediation: New media and citizenship. Critical
Discourse Studies, 7(4), 227–232.
Hartley, J. (2010). Silly citizenship. Critical Discourse Studies 7(4), 233–248.
Hoeffler, S., & Lane Keller, K. (2002). Building brand equity through corporate
societal marketing. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 21(1), 78–89.
Kotler, P., & Lee, N. (2008). Social marketing: Influencing behaviours for good.
3rd ed. London: Sage.
Marshall, T. H. (1963). Sociology at the crossroads and other essays. London:
Heinemann.
58 C. BOUKO
Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Stein, J. (2013). The Me me me generation. Time Magazine, 20 May.
Stevenson, N. (2007). Cultural citizenship. In T. Edwards (Ed.), Cultural theory.
Classical and contemporary positions (pp. 254–270). London: Sage.
Catherine Bouko is an adjunct professor and full-time postdoctoral researcher in

the Department of Information and Communication Sciences at the Free
University of Brussels (Université libre de Bruxelles). She mainly studies social
media from a semiotic and discourse analysis perspective.
CHAPTER 7
The People: The #Selfie’s Urform
Negar Mottahedeh
Abstract The chapter considers the ways in which the selfie is connected,
in its quotidianness, to private life. In its daily co-articulation and its
challenge to objects invested with power, it upends contemporary notions
of the state, of government, of capital, of art and urban design, of copy-
right and of privacy. As such, the selfie aligns with the quotidian body of
the collective, indeed, ‘the people’ comprised of both flesh and data – an
amorphous sensing body, articulated with and networked to others across
national boundaries at a distance away.
Keywords Networked contagion Quotidianness ‘The people’ Iran

Revolution
the people [pee-puh l] verb, noun: networked contagion. related forms: #selfie
Associated with the ephemeral, the trivial, the routine, the everyday, the
unconscious, the unremarkable, as the exact antithesis of what has routi-
nely been called ‘history’, the selfie is connected, in its quotidianness, to
private life. In its daily co-articulation with objects invested with power, it
N. Mottahedeh (*)
Duke University, Durham, USA
e-mail: negar@duke.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_7
60 N. MOTTAHEDEH
stands to challenge all contemporary notions of the state, of government,

of capital, of art and urban design, of copyright and of privacy. In this, it
confronts ideas of the beautiful and the presentable as well. It is in this sense
that the selfie aligns with the quotidian body of the collective, as opposed
to, say, the body of the monarch (a double body which, as Foucault
significantly points out, is the traditional subject of historical chronicles),
and indeed with the emergence on the global stage of ‘the people’ as the
selfie’s urform.
In #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online
Life (Mottahedeh 2015), I discuss how ‘the people’ occupied the streets
and boulevards of the city to reclaim their votes after a fraudulent pre-
sidential election in 2009. In these city streets, ‘the people’ attempted to
distinguish themselves from the ‘riff raff’, the ‘soccer fans’, the ‘thugs’ and
‘the hooligans’. These were the designators of the state’s rhetoric about
them. Instead, ‘the people’ spoke of themselves as ‘Iranians’, ‘workers’,
‘students’. They were brothers, and sisters. Together they were unafraid.
They were ‘the people’.
‘The relevance of the people has endured for thirty years’, writes Sertag
Manoukian, since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. ‘[Y]ears of
disciplinary exercise, the war against Iraq, and an intensive project of
technological and infrastructural development continuously turned the
crowds of the revolution into the people of the Islamic Republic’.
Yet, and this is crucial:
During the presidential campaign of 2009, all candidates claimed to be the

true representatives of the people. In televised debates, [the sitting President]
Ahmadinejad argued that he always acted ‘in service to the people,’ while his
opponent Mir-Hossein Mousavi argued that Ahmadinejad’s cabinet was a
‘shame for the people.’ In the aftermath of the fraudulent election, political
figures and religious ones too, made reference to the people and claimed
allegiance to them, while condemning their enemies, despite different iden-
tifications of what ‘the people’ were. Ahmadinejad defined crowds as either
‘foreign agents’ or ‘rabble,’ praising security forces for reestablishing order
for the people. (Manoukian 2010: 243–245)
The opposition defended ‘the people’ on the streets; ‘the people’, its colour
(an iridescent green, the colour of the familial line of the Prophet
Mohammad), its voice (Neda – the name of the first female martyr of the
uprising). It did so in the slogans that rang loudly on every square: ‘Rang-e
7 THE PEOPLE: THE #SELFIE’S URFORM 61
ma, rang-e Ma! Neda-ye Ziba-ye ma’ (Our colour, our colour! Our beautiful
voice/Neda). The people worked diligently to identify the police, the secur-
ity forces, the ‘paid agents’, the basij or militia (often referring to them as the
‘plainclothes’). They identified them in texts, videos and images, which were
uploaded to blogs and circulated in tweets. They – the plainclothes – were the
enemy of the people who were occupying the boulevards, the streets and the
squares of the Revolution.
As the first social revolt to be catapulted onto the global stage by social
media, the Iranian election crisis of 2009 came to define ‘the people’ less by a
particular socio-economic or ideological category, and more by the mimetic
gestures and viral composition of which it was constituted. For the first time,
during the course of the crisis, ‘the people’ appeared as a collective, com-
prised of both flesh and data, an amorphous sensing body, articulated with
and networked to others who were at a distance elsewhere.
It was in this context too that the term ‘the people’ could be thought
anew: as a kind of contagion that survived online as well as offline; a
contagion that perpetuated itself through mimetic practices that com-
bined the corporeal sensing body with the materiality of the digital
body. Through acts of listening and recording, seeing and screen grab-
bing, tweeting and retweeting, posting and reposting, of content creation
and repurposing, ‘the people’ became something akin to a collective
digital flesh, a shared sensorium that saw and heard the world together
and at the same time. In this way, the term ‘the people’ emerged for the
first time during the crisis as a networked term. Its slogan, a hashtag; the
hashtag #iranelection.
The selfie is closely associated with this networked term. It is an image
captured of some part of a person’s body (not just the face). That body
also touches the technology that captures it and posts it as a selfie along
with a hashtag on a social platform. Here, the function of the hashtag is to
connect the selfie to other selfies, as well as other textual and visual content
on social platforms. The selfie thus simultaneously points to an embodied
form (the actual body that touches the technology that captures it) and to
a collective life online that spreads it and that also pulses through its
networked appearance as viral content. The actual physical body in time
and space, the digital body on a social platform and the collective body
that spreads the selfie online, all these are indexed by the networked object
of the selfie simultaneously.
Little wonder then that political figures co-opt the selfie when they
attempt to align their voices with the collective and everyday voice of the
62 N. MOTTAHEDEH
people. As part flesh and part data, the selfie embodies this virality of the
people’s networked presence both online and offline.
REFERENCES
Manoukian, S. (2010). Where is this place? Crowds, audio-vision, and poetry in
postelection Iran. Public Culture, 22(2), 237–263.
Mottahedeh, N. (2015). #iranelection: Hashtag solidarity and the transformation
of online life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Negar Mottahedeh is a professor of film and media studies in the Program in

Literature at Duke University, USA. She’s the author of #iranelection: Hashtag
Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life (Stanford University Press,
2015).
CONVERSATION II
The Selfie Genre

and Its New Adaptations
CHAPTER 8
Performative Intimacies and Political

Celebritisation
Mattias Ekman and Andreas Widholm
Abstract Mattias Ekman and Andreas Widholm provide fresh insights

into an ongoing performative turn in political communication, arguing
that the incorporation of selfies into the daily communication strategies of
individual politicians entails a popularisation and celebration of political
discourse. Against the background of Swedish politicians’ self-imagery on
Instagram, they show that ‘performed connectivity’ has become increas-
ingly central for political identity making online, paralleling the celebrity
management of actors in the global entertainment industry. This devel-
opment is problematised in terms of three performative styles that disclose
strategic choices in which politicians act and interact across the increas-
ingly blurring boundaries of the professional and the private and where
symbolic connections between politicians and citizens are staged through
new mediatised performances.
Keywords Celebrity politics Political communication Performativity

Instagram Selfies
M. Ekman (*)
Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden
e-mail: Mattias.Ekman@oru.se
A. Widholm
Södertörn University, Södertörn, Sweden
e-mail: andreas.widholm@sh.se

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_8
66 M. EKMAN AND A. WIDHOLM
In the new and increasingly fragmented media landscape, Facebook,

Twitter and Instagram have become influential platforms for political
communication (Ekman and Widholm 2015). As online spaces enable
new forms of social interaction between politicians and citizens, they
have also become increasingly central for political performativity and
identity making, paralleling the ‘celebrity management’ that characterises
the communicative strategies of large actors in the global entertainment
industry (Marwick and boyd 2011). In this chapter, we analyse what we
define as a digital performative turn in online political communication. We
argue that politicians’ use of selfies is part of a broader process of political
celebritisation where performed connectivity plays a substantial role
(Ekman and Widholm 2014). The analysis draws on a strategic selection
of selfies derived from the Instagram accounts of six well-known Swedish
politicians.1 Thereby it sets the focus on politicians’ everyday visual com-
munication rather than organised and centralised election campaigns.
Politicians’ use of selfies merges the personal and the professional realm
of politicians’ lives, articulating different modes of audience address
(Van Zoonen et al. 2010). In what follows, we trace these communicative
practices to new forms of celebrity formations which, we argue, are
emanating from broader societal changes related to the current era of
mass-self communication (Castells 2013).
CELEBRITY POLITICS ON INSTAGRAM

Instagram is one of the world’s largest social networks specifically devoted
to visual imagery. The platform, which has over 300 million users, leans on
a mobile-specific logic, meaning that the images that are published there
reflect a central change in the way people communicate with their family,
friends, colleagues and broader social networks. The popularity of
Instagram emanates from everyday social needs of sharing experiences
and ideas of who we are in a visual form and in real time. The massive
flow of images published on Instagram also enables people coming closer
to those they know and admire as well as those they dislike or even abhor.
It has, to put it differently, become a significant resource for the produc-
tion and cultivation of identity and fandom in the digital era.
At the centre of social media such as Instagram is the constant circula-
tion of mediated images of the self. The ‘selfie’, a form of self-portrait
which occurred in tandem with the technological advancement of mobile
phone cameras, is an expression of the growing performative individualism
8 PERFORMATIVE INTIMACIES AND POLITICAL CELEBRITISATION 67
that characterises much of the communication that takes place in digital

social networks. Performativity is an inherent feature of the selfie since it
can be seen as a reflexive behaviour, where individuals publically stage
their own identities in relation to surrounding symbols, codes and broader
social structures (cf. Turner 1986). The Instagram selfie is both a photo-
graphic ‘gesture’ (cf. Becker 2015), for example, the act of holding and
looking into a high-held camera, and a subject position (look at me and
the situation I am in!). However, as a cultural practice, the selfie cannot be
seen as a universal signifier. On the contrary, its meaning differs greatly
depending on the social and cultural status of the actual actor behind the
selfie. Celebrities, as opposed to ‘common people’, are attractive objects in
themselves. The celebrity selfie can therefore move across various social
settings and still provide a strong symbolic value among social media
consumers.
Celebrity is here understood as an ‘ever-changing performative prac-
tice’ (Marwick and boyd 2011), meaning that it is a discursive category
rather than any fixed characteristics of a person. Thus, celebrity is con-
tinuously shaped by practices and rituals within contemporary culture in
general, and within the mass media, in particular. Furthermore, this
implies that performing celebrity is contingent with the development of
a variety of representational media techniques. Prior to the rise of Internet
and digital social media, the production of stardom was almost solely
located in the entertainment industry and the mass media. For politicians,
it meant that in order to appear outside the field of politics, staged
performances – especially on television – established politicians as ‘per-
son[s] of qualities within the public space of demonstrable representative-
ness’ (Street 2010: 256).
Within contemporary media culture, the tangible presence of poli-
ticians in the visual culture of celebrity is facilitated by the rise of social
media. It opens up for new ways in which politicians can be observed
and consumed by others – but also commented, circulated and reme-
diated in other public (mediated) settings. No longer depended on the
traditional process of photo opportunities, politician’s use of online
selfies evades the traditional communication channels (such as news
media) to citizens. However, the popularisation of online selfies is not
foremost about a self-managed photo opportunity – our argument is
that politicians’ selfies is about performing a (ostensive) connectedness
with the (imaginary) citizen. The selfie ‘is linked to phatic commu-
nion . . . whose primary purpose is the production, expression, and
maintenance of sociability’ (Frosh 2015: 1623). The production and

maintenance of sociability is fundamental to celebrity culture.
Sociability is organised around the very notion of the spectator’s ability
to identify with the celebrity, yet at the same time recognising the
extraordinariness, that is, the ‘specific’ qualities that characterise celeb-
rities. The capability to, simultaneously appear as ‘one of us’ and as
‘special’ (Van Zoonen 2005: 82) is enabled by the premeditated
managing of selfies on social media platforms. Platforms such as
Instagram and Twitter facilitate a (superficial) connectedness between
the politician and the citizen observer, in which the performed inti-
macy, authenticity and access (Marwick and boyd 2011) of politicians
are strategically organised. In that way, the selfie often involves a form
of ‘backstage’ access to the personal everyday lives of celebrities, while
it also can provide insights into the professional life.
In the following section, we assess selfies of six Swedish politicians,
analysing how celebrity is performed through political communication on
Instagram. The six politicians included in the analysis are all high profile
and represent five different political parties in the Swedish parliament;
two of them are ministers of the current government. The politicians
were chosen on the basis of party affiliation, gender and social media
prominence (e.g. they use Instagram on a daily basis, their account is
open and public, and they have relatively a large amount of followers).
The selected politicians are Gustav Fridolin, minister of education and a
member of the Green Party; Alice Bah Kuhnke, minister of culture and a
member of the Green Party; Rosanna Dinamarca, MP and a member of
the Left Party; Fredrick Federley, MP and a member of the Center Party;
Veronica Palm, MP and a member of the Social Democratic Party; and
Linus Bylund, MP and a member of the Sweden Democrats (a nationalist
right-wing party).
THREE STYLES OF CELEBRITY PERFORMANCES

We have identified three frequent performative styles, demonstrated in
the selfies of the five Swedish politicians: the politician as a celebrity,
inter-celebrity connectivity and the everyday life selfie. These styles
encompass a sociotechnical practice of political performance, that is,
they disclose strategic choices in which the politician acts and interacts
within the increasingly blurring boundaries of the professional and
the private. The infrastructure of Instagram also implies that the
production and public distribution of selfies create an incessant visual

narrative of politician’s day-to-day practices.
The politician as celebrity includes selfies of the politicians together with
ordinary citizens. These (group) selfies exhibit the politician in various socio-
geographical locations, such as schools, workplaces and public spaces. The
politician often appears in a casual, in the moment manner accentuating a
sense of immediacy in the publication process. At the same time, these selfies
showcase the palpable presence of celebrity, which is demonstrated by the
regularly enchanted subjects. Swedish minister of education, Gustav
Fridolin, often publishes selfies portraying himself together with school-
children where he appears as a laidback and easy-to-like politician far from
a formal and arid political representative.
Bah Kuhnke publishes more expressive images of this type. Here, celeb-
rity is accentuated partly through connections with the public and partly by
constructing a self-image that is reminiscent of a classical pop star. An
interesting example was published in July 2015 during Sweden’s biggest
annual event for political debate, the Almedalen week. During this week,
the political elite, the news media industry and thousands of lobbyists come
together for a festival style gathering. In a collage selfie constituted by two
images, Bah Kuhnke is seen dancing on a stage located in front of a big
crowd and she is waving what appears to be a blouse in the air. In the
second image, she looks straight into the camera in a more traditional selfie,
puckering her lips in a pose together with two party colleagues. The images
are accompanied with the following status: ‘Gosh! We represented the
government and “DJ battled” the opposition. They offered beautiful
resistance BUT – we came, we saw, we CONQUERED! In a couple of
hours, Thursday’s first meeting . . . #dancedancedance #djbattle’ (English
translation by the authors).2 By combining the visual features of pop
culture and conventional social media aesthetics (‘duck face’), the selfie
discloses celebrity performance outside the traditional field of politics.
Performing celebrity is about staging public interaction in which the
politician can be observed, admired and celebrated.
Performing inter-celebrity connectivity includes selfies of politicians
with other prominent figures in society such as sports celebrities, famous
people from the entertainment industry as well as other prominent
politicians. This style typically deploys the composition of a group selfie–
or more often, a friend selfie – in which the politician pairs up with the
(other) celebrity. Sometimes inter-celebrity connectivity also includes
images of political rituals such as handshaking and mingling with
prominent political leaders or other ‘distinguished’ members of society.

Through performing significant interactions with other celebrities, the
selfies become evidence of ‘celebrity moments’ and they establish sym-
bolic value, in which the politician portrays himself/herself as an impor-
tant and connected actor. Let us take a look at one illustrating example of
this category. On 25 September 2015, Veronica Palm visited the
Gothenburg book and library fair, an annual event organised by the
publishing industry that gathers the Swedish cultural elite, hundreds of
journalists and a long row of politicians. The Swedish parliament had a
stand there, from which Palm published a selfie of herself together with
Sofia Arkelsten, also an MP and member of the conservative moderate
party. The two politicians, who belong to two completely different sides
of the political spectrum, smile directly into the camera accompanied
with the following status: ‘The two happy, beautiful and competent
politicians that now is in charge of the parliament’s stand. #bookfair’
(English translation by the authors).3
Palm’s selfie is interesting in the sense that it reflects how ‘serious’
political events are de-politicised when reduced to moments of immediate
visual consumption. Palm does not mention Arkelsten by name, but her
‘knownness’ (e.g. her beauty and competence) clearly operates as a dis-
cursive substitute. As noted earlier, celebrity politics, in general, and the
inter-celebrity selfie, in particular, are often connected to distinguished
events. Less common is the communication of political ideals and values as
the focus seems to be on the branding of personal rather than political
identities. This is also evident in Bah Kunkhe’s Instagram account where
she explicitly writes in the bio that ‘Questions and requests are not
answered here’4 and refers instead to the official web page of the cultural
ministry. Few of the politicians studied here actively interact with their
‘audiences’ and comments are mostly restricted to a handful example.
More broadly, the inter-celerity selfie can therefore be seen as intimately
connected to broader processes of individualisation, while also ignoring
one of the key features of mass-self communication, namely interactivity
with others (Castells 2013).
Portraying yourself in everyday situations is one of the most common
visual practice on Instagram, and it is also relatively common in the poli-
ticians’ Instagram profiles. The everyday selfie deviates from the styles of
politician as a celebrity and inter-celebrity connectivity since it is foremost
about staging ordinariness rather than extraordinariness. However, the
everyday selfie also becomes a way of expressing personal and ethical
responsibility both within and outside professional life. It can therefore be

seen as a key performance in which personal values and attributes are
expressed in the context of lifestyle politics (Bennett 2004). Everyday
selfies from the professional realm of politicians’ life include imagery of
traditional work practices in parliament or in the office – but often within
the context of contributing with something extraordinary in a legislative
procedure or proposing a policy change, attending important meetings,
etc. These selfies are about performing respectability in relation the public –
showing that you are executing the duties which the citizens elected you
for. In that way, they become visual evidence of reliability and a profes-
sional working capacity. This is also by far the most common selfie in all the
Instagram profiles.
The everyday selfies from the private life are more diverse and they are
strategically managed to fit the particular image of the politician and his/
her party profile. There are a variety of selfies depicting politicians in festive
situations, sometimes in private settings. Bylund, for example, published
several selfies in which he is drinking alcohol (suitable to a right-wing
populist image), and there are selfies from traditional Swedish crayfish
parties (Palm), family barbecues (Fridolin) and gatherings at various din-
ing establishments, etc. Everyday selfies also include imagery from out-
door activities such as mushroom picking in the forest (Bylund), boat
riding in the archipelago (Palm), beach-hanging (Dinamarca and
Federley) and farm life (Federley). Basically, these types of images establish
the politician in the context of familiarity, outside his/her professional
political role. Thus, the everyday selfie in private settings is first and fore-
most about performing ordinariness. There are plenty of selfies including
the politicians cuddling with their toddlers or doing meaningful things
with their older children. Depicting parenthood is frequent in several of
the profiles regardless of political affiliation and the gender of the politi-
cian. The performance of family respectability (look at me, I’m both
hardworking and a good parent!) needs to be addressed in relation to
the specific societal context. Gender equality as well as spending much
time with your family are cherished values in the Swedish society.
Portraying yourself as an active and caring parent therefore becomes an
important element in the image making of a contemporary modern poli-
tician. In some respects, the parent-child selfie mirrors the classical (and
infamous) politician-kissing-a-baby-in-the-crowd image. The vast differ-
ence is of course the embedded legitimacy of the selfie; it is portraying
‘authentic family love’.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
This chapter has argued that the incorporation of selfies into the daily
communication strategies of politicians, in Sweden, is strongly related to
an ongoing popularisation of political discourse where symbolic connec-
tions between politicians and citizens are staged through new mediatised
political rituals. The selfie opens up new avenues for promoting the
personal/private sphere of a politician, and as our analysis suggests,
this often involves performances that are strongly related to the way
public personas appear as celebrities. Politicians’ selfies signify various
ideas of a successful life and key to these performances is also the con-
struction of what we might call ‘networked ties’ between politicians,
followers and other prominent social media actors who actively redis-
tribute images to a wider audience. This redistribution operates across
old and new media, and selfie images are constantly appearing in the
news flows of large newspapers in Sweden, offline and online (Ekman
and Widholm 2014, 2015).
Politicians’ selfies produce an illusion of intimacy – when politicians’
professional and private life is visually performed on social media plat-
forms (cf. Holmes and Redmond 2006). These performances mirror
politicians’ paradoxical ability to simultaneously appear as ordinary and
extraordinary (Van Zoonen 2005) which also adheres to celebrity dis-
course in general. Since lifestyle choices and values are becoming increas-
ingly important in establishing the politician as a trustworthy person,
managing the life outside the professional realm is imperative on plat-
forms such as Instagram. For the lifestyle politician, there is a necessity to
appear trustworthy, both as an elected professional and as a private
person. In contrast to celebrities in the entertainment industry, the
politicians need to produce ordinariness in numerous ways. Rather than
showcasing a glamorous private life, the more common everyday selfie is
about constructing down-to-earth moments, in which the politician
establishes connectivity based on mutual life experiences with the spec-
tator citizen. If entertainment celebrities often produce a distant admira-
tion of a lavish lifestyle, the politicians produce identification based on
resemblances in the life of the regular viewer – the politician needs to
appear as a ‘regular’ citizen, with family duties and other types of private
engagements. However, the selfies become part of a strategic manage-
ment in which a successful private life is established alongside the profes-
sional life as an elected politician.
NOTES
1. The accounts are Gustav Fridolin: https://www.instagram.com/gustav_frido
lin/Alice Bah Kuhnke: https://www.instagram.com/alicebahkuhnke/
Rosanna Dinamarca: https://www.instagram.com/rossanadinamarca/
Fredrick Federley: https://www.instagram.com/federley/Veronica Palm:
https://www.instagram.com/palmveronica/Linus Bylund: https://www.
instagram.com/linusbylunds/
2. Posted on 2 July 2015 by Alice Bah Kuhnke https://www.instagram.com/
p/4nJO1TJOE3/?taken-by=alicebahkuhnke Original text: Åh jisses! Vi
representerade regeringen och ‘DJ battlade’ mot alliansen. Dom bjöd på
vackert motstånd MEN - vi kom, vi såg, vi SEGRADE! Om några timmar
torsdagens första möte . . . #dansadansadansa #djbattle.
3. Posted on 25 September 2015 by Veronica Palm https://www.instagram.
com/p/8DcWr2jQrw/?taken-by=palmveronica&hl=sv Original text: De två
glada, snygga och kompetenta politiker som just nu bemannar riksdagens
monter. #bokmässan
4. Posted on the account homepage by Alice Bah Kuhnke https://www.insta
gram.com/alicebahkuhnke/ Original text: Frågor besvaras via regeringen.se.
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Mattias Ekman is a senior lecturer of Media and Communication Studies at

Örebro University, Sweden. His current research focuses on online political com-
munication and political mobilisation in social media.
Andreas Widholm is associate professor of journalism at Södertörn University,

Sweden. His research addresses the relationship between media, politics and
culture with a particular focus on the role of new media technologies.
CHAPTER 9
Vote for My Selfie: Politician Selfies

as Charismatic Engagement
Crystal Abidin
Abstract Taking Singaporean Member of Parliament (MP) Baey Yam

Keng as a case study, this chapter analyses how charismatic engagement
can be mediated through social media and selfie tropes. In the wake of
online campaigns since the General Elections 2011, and with the ruling
party garnering its lowest share of electoral votes since state independence,
MP Baey, aged 47, has emerged as a press-branded ‘selfie king’, ‘social
media celebrity’ and ‘Twitter influencer’ for engaging with the online
citizenry since publishing his first selfie in March 2013. Drawing on his
Instagram and Twitter feed and selfie-related engagements up till 2015,
this chapter demonstrates how politician selfies can be exercised to solicit
affect and mobilise public sentiment among voters.
Keywords Selfies Politician Charisma Singapore Twitter Instagram
C. Abidin (*)
National University of Singapore, Queenstown, Singapore
Media Management and Transformation Center, Jönköping University,
Jönköping, Sweden
e-mail: crystalabidin@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_9
76 C. ABIDIN
Politicians taking selfies have received their fair share of praise for con-
necting with voters during campaign trails and flak for inappropriate dis-
plays à la the widely publicised Cameron-Thorning-Obama selfie at
Nelson Mandela’s funeral in December 2013. But what happens when
politicians take to regularly publishing self-curated selfie streams on their
personal social media accounts? When selfies are the new political photo
op, the everyday and mundane can become a spectacle and a site for
naturalised vernacular campaigning.
This chapter looks at Singaporean Member of Parliament (MP) Baey
Yam Keng as a case study in investigating how charismatic engagement
can be mediated through the repertoire of social media and popular selfie
tropes. In the wake of voting campaigns taking to online ground in the
most recent General Elections 2011, and with the ruling party having
garnered its lowest share of electoral votes since state independence, MP
Baey, who despite being 47 years old at the time of writing, has emerged
as a press-branded ‘selfie king’, ‘social media celebrity’ and ‘Twitter influ-
encer’ for engaging with the online citizenry since publishing his first selfie
in March 2013, with a fan base to boot. Drawing on his Instagram and
Twitter feed and selfie-related engagements up till 2015, this chapter
demonstrates how politician selfies can be exercised to solicit affect and
mobilise public sentiment among voters.
MEDIA CLIMATE IN SINGAPORE

Singapore has unswervingly been operated as a ‘soft authoritarian’
(Nasir and Turner 2011) or ‘semi-authoritarian’ regime (Wang and Tan
2012) with a partly free media (Freedom House 2010) due to the ruling
partyʼs draconian action against political opposition (Salimat 2013) and tight
rein over the media (George 2007; Rodan 2003; Sussman 2012). Freedom
House (2010) lists Singaporeʼs ‘Freedom Rating’ as 4.5 (with the score of 1
being the best and 7 being the worst) while Reporters Without Borders
(2013) ranks Singaporeʼs ‘Press Freedom Index’ 149 out of 179 countries.
In the 2011 General Elections (GE2011), the incumbent party, the
People’s Action Party (PAP), received its lowest vote share since Singapore
gained independence from the British in 1965. Surveying 2,000
Singaporeans including 447 youth between the ages of 21 and 34 through
national telephone interviews conducted in May 2011, Lin and Hong
(2013) report that youth voters’ perceived credibility of media outlets in
Singapore greatly affected political consciousness. New media had ‘more
9 VOTE FOR MY SELFIE: POLITICIAN SELFIES AS CHARISMATIC ENGAGEMENT 77
pull factors to engage young citizens’ (2013: 5), with 28.2 % of youth
posting about GE2011 on blogs, Facebook and Twitter compared to just
9.3 % in the whole sample, and 20.2 % of youth forwarding GE2011
content via email, Facebook or Twitter compared to just 9.9 % in the
whole sample (2013: 5). While youth ‘still trusted mass media and used
them more’ during the campaigning period, their ‘impact on voting are
decreasing’ (2013: 13). New media was breaking new ground for alter-
native and contentious journalism: of the youth who perceived ‘new media
as important’, 54.8 % expressed that they would vote for the opposition
while only 39.8 % indicated they would vote for the PAP; of the youth
who perceived ‘new media as trustworthy’, 52.5 % expressed that they
would vote for the opposition while only 38.6 % indicated they would vote
for the PAP (2013: 9). The authors concluded that ‘new media will
become even more vital for political parties’ campaigning in future’
(2013: 13)
Simultaneously, under the government’s long-term initiatives to shape
Singapore into an ‘Intelligent Island’ (Cordeiro and Al-Hawamdeh
2001), users in Singapore report an 87 % smartphone penetration rate
(Media Research Asia 2013) and 123 % mobile Internet penetration rate
(Singh 2014). Social media use and selfie-taking is proliferating, led by
Influencers who are micro-celebrities (Senft 2008) on the Internet, and
who accumulate and monetise their relatively large followings on plat-
forms such as Instagram (Abidin 2014). Since he debut his Instagram
account in December 2012, Singaporean MP Baey Yam Keng appears to
be borrowing from the vernacular of Influencers to engage with voters on
digital media.
DIGITAL PRESENCE
As an MP, Baey Yam Keng’s official digital presence is foremost his profile
on the Parliament of Singapore website (Parliament of Singapore 2015).
However, Google autocomplete prompts for ‘Baey Yam Keng’ reveal
popular searches to include the MP’s ‘wife’, ‘Instagram’, ‘profile’ and
‘selfie’. A Google image search for ‘Baey Yam Keng Instagram’ brings
up primarily selfies. In early 2015, Baey posted a screenshot on Instagram
announcing that his Twitter account had been ‘verified’ to assure voters
that his digital platforms were genuine. This was also an important signal
that he was personally managing his social media instead of using
ghostwriters.
78 C. ABIDIN
All screenshots in this paper were taken on 1 April 2015, when the MP
boasted over 8,000 followers on his Instagram account, @baeyyamkeng,
and over 14,000 followers on his Twitter account, @YamKeng. As of April
2016, these figures have risen to over 14,000 and 28,000 respectively.
STRATEGIC SELFIES
On Twitter, Baey curates several hashtags in which he uses selfies to engage
with voters across platforms. ‘#FBchatwithBYK’ advertises his ‘monthly
chat’ with voters on Facebook, while ‘#BYKcolumn’ promotes his news-
paper columns in mainstream press. On a lighter note and in expression of
his grasp of Internet vernacular – specifically, the ‘look alike’ meme – Baey
uses ‘#BYKlookalike’ on Instagram to collate voter-submitted images of
men who bear an uncanny resemblance to him.
Perhaps the initiative that has received the most engaging response from
voters is ‘#runwithBYK’ on Twitter. On this channel, Baey announces the
date, time and venue of his next run, inviting voters to join him (Fig. 9.1).
He makes the effort to rotate locations around Singapore and usually posts
brief profiles of the voters who come down, usually comprising men in their
early 1920s to late 1940s. Some are even regular running companions. On
days when no one shows up for #runwithBYK, Baey appropriates the
moment to display his social media savvy. Mimicking the pose of the Sir
Stanford Raffles statue in the background (Fig. 9.2), Baey captions his
photograph – albeit not a selfie – in the style of hashtags as a paralanguage
for linguistic humour and metacommentary. Shifting away from plainly
hashtagging his Tweets with ‘#runwithBYK’ as a form of ‘searchable talk’
(Zappavigna 2012: 1), he uses five hashtags to construct a narrative. While
his first two hashtags ‘#keepingfit #ownresponsibility’ may come across as
didactic especially when read in the vein of the PAP’s paternalism, his
subsequent hashtags ‘#noone #runwithBYK #runbymyself’ reveal a playful
self-satire on his failed efforts.
CHARISMATIC ENGAGEMENT
In his study of forms of legitimate rule, Sociologist Max Weber (1962)
describes charismatic authority as situated in a leader’s right to lead out of
followers’ personal devotion to unique qualities or exemplary behaviour.
This is unlike legal authority in which leadership is enshrined through a
system of rules applied administratively and judicially, nor traditional
Fig. 9.1 ‘#runwithBYK’ – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram. Source: twitter.com/

YamKeng
80 C. ABIDIN
Fig. 9.2 ‘Waiting’ – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram. Source: twitter.com/

YamKeng
authority in which leadership is inherited. Baey takes on charismatic leader-

ship, conveyed through a personal branding strategy that relies on selfies to
give the impression of accessibility and relatability, premised on how he
visibilises the backstage (Goffman 1956) of his daily work to voters.
Selfies featuring Baey in the office, at home preparing for a work day,
with voters during ministerial sessions, with other politicians during state
visits, at press interviews and with mainstream media celebrities at func-
tions where he is an official guest have a levelling effect as Baey appears to
forgo the privacy and distance usually adopted by politicians for a ‘per-
ceived interconnectedness’ (Abidin 2015) – an aesthetic he adopts from
Influencers who continuously stream their personal lives in a bid for
followers to feel emotionally connected to them.
So central are selfies to Baey’s personal branding as a politician – the
highest circulating English newspaper The Straits Times (2014)
described the MP as being ‘known for his frequent selfies and strong
presence on social media’ – that he was invited to star as ‘a romantic
blogger’ in a Mandarin play ‘centred around society’s obsession with
social media’ in December 2014 (Robert 2015). Unfortunately, on the
Monday before opening night, Baey announced on Facebook that he
was hospitalised for dengue fever, but eventually ‘mustered the
strength to return to the stage just in time for the show’ (Ng 2014).
However, unlike the widely publicised Cameron-Thorning-Obama
selfie faux pas at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in December 2013, Baey
instead chose to announce his situation via a Facebook text post and a
photo of his intravenous drip in hospital.
REACTIONS
Based on comments on Baey’s Instagram, voter reactions to his strategic
selfies have largely been positive, with many users complimenting his
looks, thanking him for his work and expressing their support during the
election campaigning period. An anonymous Tumblr, http://baeyyam
kengselfies.tumblr.com/, reposting Baey’s selfies also circulated on social
media. Most notably, user-generated content viral sites such as mustshar
enews.com began curating Baey’s ‘best of’ selfies (Ang 2015). Several of
such listicles highlight Baey’s confident perception of Influencer selfie
tropes and youth voters’ selfie vernacular, including humorous selfies,
make-up tutorial selfies (Fig. 9.3), #OOTD or Outfit Of The Day selfies
(Fig. 9.4) and ‘Hot Dog Legs’ meme selfies.
82 C. ABIDIN
Fig. 9.3 Make-up tutorial selfie – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram. Source:
Instagram.com/baeyyamkeng
Fig. 9.4 Outfit of the day selfie – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram. Source:
Instagram.com/baeyyamkeng
84 C. ABIDIN
Perhaps in anticipation of the potential backlash from older voters

who may not understand youth digital vernaculars, the PAP reposted
an op-ed from The New Paper titled ‘Who are you calling narcissistic’
(Ong, S. M. 2013), in which a reporter muses about Baey’s selfies and
added a caption to assure voters that Baey was ‘on the job’: ‘So what do
you think of MP Baey Yam Keng’s series of selfies? P.S. You should check
out his facebook page to see his other posts. He doesn’t just do selfies all
day long!’
VOTE FOR MY SELFIE

In interviews to the press, Baey reveals that he posts selfies about three
times a week but is aware that not everyone takes to them: ‘When I first
took a selfie, I was quite cautious and not sure about how the public would
react’ (Ong, Y. 2013). However, he sees the value of selfies in relating to
his voters: ‘I hear it is popular now. It could be useful as a channel of
engagement with the public’ (Ong, Y. 2013).
In the wake of Singapore’s soft authoritarianism to weed out the
opposition (Nasir and Turner 2011) and new media’s usurp of traditional
media’s credibility and influence (Lin and Hong 2013), Baey’s strategic
use of selfies to manage his personal brand as a politician speaks to
Postman’s (1984: 4) notion that ‘cosmetics has replaced ideology as the
field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control’.
Where President Richard Nixon and Senator Edward Kennedy depended
on ‘the cosmetician’s art’ to ‘significantly enhance[e]’ (1984: 4) their
appearances, Baey conscientiously self-presents through relatable selfie
tropes and digital media vernacular.
In response, voters interviewed also expressed that the ‘human touch’
is ‘refreshing’ when ‘an MP uses social media like any other normal
person would’ (Ong, Y. 2013). Baey also admitted that while some
voters have threatened to unfollow him because of his selfies, others
have jumped to his defence: ‘I was very heartened when another netizen
say: “It’s his own Instagram account. Of course if you don’t like it, you
don’t follow. I mean, no one is forcing you to follow Baey Yam Keng”’
(RazorTV 2013).
Baey intentionally uses selfies to manage his personal brand as a politi-
cian: ‘I think these are aspects of our personal life that members of the
public are quite keen. Sometimes they have this perception that politicians
are not real people. They don’t have a life or they’re all very stuffy, you
know, very serious’ (RazorTV 2013). It is precisely this relatability that

constitutes Baey’s charisma (Weber 1962), in contrast to other incumbent
MPs who have yet to shed their image of authoritarianism, paternalism,
hierarchy and distance. Additionally, through his hyper-visibilising of the
‘backstage’ (Goffman 1956) in his daily work, Baey constructs an auto-
biography and narrative through which he is able to invite voters to
identify and connect with him (Lilleker 2014: 130) through parasocial
relations (Horton & Wohl 1956) as a political figure, personal brand, but
above all, an ordinary person.
REFERENCES
Abidin, C. (2014). #In$tagLam: Instagram as a repository of taste, a brimming
marketplace, a war of eyeballs. In M. Berry & M. Schleser (Eds.), Mobile media
making in the age of smartphones. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Abidin, C. (2015). Communicative intimacies: Influencers and perceived inter-
connectedness. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology, 8.
http://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/.
Ang, C. (2015, February 2) The best of Baey Yam Keng’s Instagram. mustshar
enews.com. http://mustsharenews.com/best-of-baey-yam-keng-ig/. Accessed
1 April 2015.
Cordeiro, C. M., & Al-Hawamdeh, S. (2001). National information infrastructure
and the realization of Singapore IT2000 initiative. Information Research, 6(2),
1–25.
Freedom House. (2010) Singapore. Freedom house. http://www.freedom
house.org/report/freedom-world/2010/singapore#.Uwy4avSSxi4. Accessed
20 December 2013.
George, C. (2007). Consolidating authoritarian rule: Calibrated coercion in
Singapore. The Pacific Review, 20(2), 127–145.
Goffman, E. (1956). The presentation of self in everyday life. London: Penguin Books.
Horton, D., & Richard, W. R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social inter-
action. Psychiatry, 19(3), 215–229. Republished in Particip@tions 3(1). http://
www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/TF33120/horton_and_wohl_1956.html.
Lilleker, D. G. (2014). Autobiography and political marketing: Narrative and the
Obama Brand. In T. Bronwen & J. Roundeds (Eds.), Real lives, celebrity stories:
Narratives of ordinary and extraordinary people across media. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing.
Lin, T. T. C., & Hong, A. Y.-H. (2013). Youth, new media and political partici-
pation in the election. Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. http://lkyspp.
nus.edu.sg/ips/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/06/S4_1_Trisha-Lin_
0410.pdf. Accessed 1 April 2015.
86 C. ABIDIN
Media Research Asia (2013). 87% Smartphone penetration in Hong Kong,

Singapore. Media Research Asia. http://www.mediaresearchasia.com/view.
php?type=press&id=3184. Accessed 5 January 2014.
Nasir, K. M., & Turner, B. T. (2011). Governing as gardening: Reflections on soft
authoritarianism in Singapore. Citizenship Studies, 17(3–4), 339–352.
Ng, Y.-S. (2014, December 6). Theatre review: An anticlimatic drama starring
MP Baey Yam Keng,’ Straits Times. http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/
entertainment/theatre-review-an-anticlimactic-drama-starring-mp-baey-yam-
keng. Accessed 1 April 2015.
Ong, S. M. (2013). Who are you calling narcissistic? The New Paper, 13 August.
http://news.asiaone.com/news/singapore/who-are-you-calling-narcissistic.
Accessed: 1 April 2015.
Ong, Y. (2013, August 14). MP Baey Yam Keng: I am surprised and flattered by
the interest in my ‘selfies’. Straits Times. http://www.straitstimes.com/singa
pore/mp-baey-yam-keng-i-am-surprised-and-flattered-by-the-interest-in-my-
selfies. Accessed 1 April 2015.
Parliament of Singapore (2015). Member’s Profile: Mr Baey Yam Keng. http://
www.parliament.gov.sg/mp/baey-yam-keng. Accessed 1 April 2015.
Postman, N. (1984). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show
business. London: Heinemann.
RazorTV. (2013, August 15). Baey Yam Keng’s Many Selfies. RazorTV. http://
www.razor.tv/video/463216/baey-yam-kengs-many-selfies. Accessed 1 January
2015.
Reporters Without Borders. (2013). 2013 World press freedom index: Dashed
hopes after spring. Reporters Without Borders. http://en.rsf.org/press-free
dom-index-2013,1054.html. Accessed 25 February 2014.
Robert, C. (2015, September 30). MP Baey Yam Keng set to take stage in social
media play. The New Paper. http://www.tnp.sg/entertainment/mp-baey-
yam-keng-set-take-stage-social-media-play. Accessed 1 January 2015.
Rodan, G. (2003). Embracing electronic media but suppressing civil society:
Authoritarian consolidation in Singapore. The Pacific Review, 16(4), 503–524.
Salimat, S. (2013) Singapore falls to record-low place in press freedom ranking.
Yahoo News. http://sg.news.yahoo.com/singapore-falls-to-record-low-place-
in-press-freedom-ranking-035131531.html. Accessed 20 December 2013.
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remain. The Times of India. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/article
show/28703982.cms Accessed 5 January 2014.
Sussman, G. (2012). The Tao of Singaporeʼs Internet politics. Journal of
International Communication, 9(1), 35–51.
Times, S. (2014, September 30). MP Baey Yam Keng to star in play about social
media obsession. Straits Times. http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/thea
tre-dance/story/mp-baey-yam-keng-star-play-about-social-media-obsession-
20140930. Accessed 1 April 2015.
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Hybrid regimes and non-democratic regimes in East Asia. ABS Working
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Weber, M. (1962). Basic concepts in sociology. New York: Philosophical Library.
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Continuum.
Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist who researches Internet culture, including

people’s relationships with social media, technology and devices. Her current
projects focus on self-branding, vernacular Internet cultures and social media
commerce. Crystal has a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology, and
Communication and Media Studies from the University of Western Australia.
She is a postdoctoral fellow in Sociology at the National University of Singapore
and an affiliated researcher with the Media Management and Transformation
Center at Jönköping University. Reach her at https://wishcrys.com/.
CHAPTER 10
Biometric Citizens: Adapting Our Selfies

to Machine Vision
Jill Walker Rettberg
Abstract Machines are an important audience for any selfie today. This
chapter discusses how our selfies are treated as data rather than as human
communication. Rettberg looks at how facial recognition algorithms analyse
our selfies for surveillance, authentication of identity and better-customised
commercial services, and relates this to understandings of machine vision as
post-optical and non-representational. Through examples ranging from
Erica Scourti’s video art to Snapchat’s selfie lenses, the chapter explores
how our expectation of machine vision affects the selfies we take, and how
it may be locking down our identity as biometric citizens.
Keywords Biometric citizenship Machine vision Time-lapse selfies

Snapchat
Machines don’t see as humans do. Machines convert that which humans
can see into data that can be analysed by algorithms. Light, dark and
contrast are analysed and computed. Eyes, nose and mouth are identified,
converted and stored. The curves and features of a face are condensed into
J.W. Rettberg (*)

University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
e-mail: Jill.Walker.Rettberg@uib.no

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_10
90 J.W. RETTBERG
3D grids, allowing the machine to recognise another picture of that same

face even if it is tilted to the side or shown from another angle.
Machines are good at this kind of vision. iPhoto uses facial recognition
to sort our personal photos so we can easily find all our photos of each of
our friends. Facebook’s DeepFace algorithm can recognise individual faces
in a crowd almost as well as a human can (Taigman et al. 2014). But the
way in which the machine identifies that face has little to do with our
human way of recognising a familiar face.
Machine vision is about data, not about the visual or optical. Carolyn
L. Kane sees this as such a fundamental aspect of today’s society that she,
building upon Kittler (2009), calls our time post-optical, arguing that we
no longer use colour or sight itself as an end in itself but as a means to
another end (Kane 2014). The military paints pixelated patterns on the
tops of drones, not because humans will see the patterns but to fool the
machines watching from satellites above us. Makeup like CV Dazzle is
specifically designed not to make humans appear more beautiful to each
other but to fool surveillance cameras trying to identify human faces in a
crowd. With chromakey video, producers use a coloured background to
let a machine know to replace that colour with something else. ‘Colour is
not exclusively about vision’, Kane writes. ‘Rather, it is a system of control
used to manage and discipline perception and thus reality’ (Kane 2014:
211). We could say much the same thing of selfies.
Much has been written about the ways in which selfies can be seen
as a form of discipline, where we learn to shape ourselves in ways
permitted by our visual culture (Burns 2015; Rettberg 2014; Senft
and Baym 2015). But we can also see selfies as post-optical, post-visual
and post-human. When we post selfies online, our audience will not
only be other humans. Our audience is also, and perhaps primarily,
machines.
In an excellent article discussing selfies in the context of photography,
Paul Frosch argues that it is the non-representational aspects that are new
in selfies: the ‘distinctiveness from older forms of self-depiction seems to
derive from nonrepresentational changes: innovations in distribution, sto-
rage, and metadata that are not directly concerned with the production or
aesthetic design of images’ (Frosh 2015: 1607). This is true as far as it
goes, but it neglects the ways in which machines analyse our selfies. In this
chapter, my aim is to show you how the machines that will read our selfies
actually affect and control the way that we create them. Machine vision is
changing the way we see ourselves.
10 BIOMETRIC CITIZENS: ADAPTING OUR SELFIES TO MACHINE VISION 91
The development of photography as a technology was in many ways

decided by our society’s desire to control citizens by identifying them.
Photographs in identification documents and police mugshots are among
the earliest uses of photographic portraits. Today it is impossible or at least
extremely difficult to cross a border, buy alcohol, vote or, in some cases,
pick up medication or a parcel addressed to you without being able to
prove your identity with a driver’s licence, passport or other photographic
identification. For many decades, these photographs were intended to
identify us to other human beings, but now they are designed to be
machine readable. In many countries, we can no longer smile for a pass-
port photograph because the smile makes it harder for a machine to match
the image to a fixed identity. This changes the way we think about faces.
Paul Frosh argues that the selfie’s indexicality is more deixic, pointing
towards the social gesture of communication, and in fact, machines can
also read this social quality of the selfie by counting people who like or
comment on each other’s selfies. Yet it is the fixing of the face to a unique
body that is the main goal of facial recognition, whether it is used by the
government to control the movements and actions of citizens or by
Facebook to provide relevant content to users and relevant users to
advertisers.
New security systems are skipping the intermediary of the ID card and
are instead running facial recognition directly on the image of our face.
Refugees in Jordan are given cash assistance from the UN which they
withdraw from an ATM without a bankcard or a PIN: instead, the ATM
scans their iris to identify them (Dunmore 2015). Soon MasterCard
customers will be able to prove their identity when making purchases
online by blinking at the camera in their smartphones. In reading press
reports of MasterCard’s payment-by-selfie system, it is interesting to note
the emphasis on the face’s conversion to data:
The facial recognition scan will map out your face, convert it to 1s and 0s
and transmit that over the Internet to MasterCard. Bhalla [the spokesperson
for MasterCard] promised that MasterCard won’t be able to reconstruct
your face – and that the information would transmit securely and remain safe
on the company’s computer servers. (Pagliery 2015: n.p.)
There is an underlying assumption here that the customer would not want
her selfie to be uploaded to MasterCard. This discomfort points to the
difference between seeing a selfie as an end in itself and as a means to an
92 J.W. RETTBERG
end. Technically, looking at a camera that records an image of my face is

the same as taking a selfie, but it is not a selfie that is intended to be
published or to be seen by any other human, or even by myself. This is a
selfie that is being used as something else.
Kelly Gates writes that facial recognition technology ‘treats the face as
an index of identity, disregarding its expressive capacity and communica-
tive role in social interaction’ (Gates 2011: 251). There are other modes of
machine vision that can interpret selfies more broadly though, such as
emotion analysis software.
Companies offer systems with names like Emotient, Real Eyes and
Affectiva where the webcam on a test subject’s computer captures video
of their face as they watch an advertisement or other material on their
computer. Their face is instantly analysed for emotions and the marketer
or content creator who is paying for the service receives a report pinpoint-
ing the exact moments of their video that elicit joy, tears, boredom or
frustration. Expression analysis is used in other situations, too. The mar-
keting video for Affectiva shows a young boy using expression analysis
with his Google glasses to interpret his older sister’s responses to what he
is saying (Affectiva 2014). A video made for Emotient shows a smart car
with a camera trained on the driver’s face. When she frowns, the screen on
the dashboard is shown to read ‘Driver frustrated. Suggest alternate route’
(Voltage Advertising + Design for Emotient 2014).
Some of the early versions of expression analysis software were designed
to help people with autism to understand emotions, but current marketing
assumes that all humans would find this useful, especially if they are trying
to sell something. Machines constantly watching us and our homes are
also posited as helpful in the marketing of home surveillance and commu-
nication devices like the Withings Home, a camera that alerts absent
parents when a person comes near the device. In the marketing video, a
child arrives home after school, and the mother, who is at work, receives a
message on her phone and is able to start a video conversation with her
son (Withings 2014).
Most consumer-oriented machine vision systems, such as Facebook’s
facial recognition algorithms, Affectiva’s emotion-sensing car and the
Withings Home, are intended to feel helpful and to improve our lives.
However, they are not neutral. In her study of users’ experiences with
heart rate variability monitors, Minna Ruckenstein (2014) found that
users told the story of their day differently before and after seeing the
data from the heart rate variability monitor, which indicates stress levels.
The users negotiated with the data, adjusting their lived experience to
match the story the data was telling. The more we outsource our emotions
and social communication to machines, the less likely we are to trust
ourselves.
Most machine vision strategies rely on the assumption that selfies can
be broken down into individual parts. Faces become 3D grids, emotions
are reduced to certain muscular movements and a child arriving home is
simply motion in a quiet living room. These machine vision techniques are
also easily used by humans, especially when we try to use machines to
understand more about a phenomenon such as selfies. Elizabeth Losh
discusses the ways in which Lev Manovich’s Selfiecity projects ‘depicts
human individuals as discrete elemental particles’:
Yet applying an atomistic social physics to selfie culture perpetuates the

stereotype of the independent and autonomous self as isolated media creator
and media subject in the cultural imaginary of personal consumer electronics
and ignores how people are embedded in complex rhetorical situations.
(Losh 2015: 1649)
For digital machines to ‘see’ selfies, this atomism is necessary. Digital

algorithms rely on 0s and 1s. But what does this do to the ways we see
ourselves? How does machine vision influence human vision?
One genre of selfies that illustrates such influence is the ‘time-lapse
selfie’ (Rettberg 2014: 36–40), where people take a photo of themselves
every day and generate a time-lapse video showing their face changing day
by day and year by year. The app Everyday automates this process in a way
that makes the algorithm very visible. When you take a photo, you are
asked to align your face on the screen with the selfie you took the day
before. By aligning your eyes and mouth to the grid the app provides, you
ensure that the video produced will be as smooth as possible.
Snapchat’s popular selfie lenses similarly mark our faces as machine-
readable. To activate the lenses, you use the front-facing camera so you see
your own face and then touch the image of your face on the screen until a
biometric grid pops up on your face. You can now swipe between different
lenses that apply various special effects to your face, mapping them to the
grid so that the effects follow the movements of your face. Some distort
your face, removing your nose or twisting your chin, while others add
makeup and accessories or make rainbows gush out of your mouth. Like
funhouse mirrors that show us distorted versions of ourselves, Snapchat’s
94 J.W. RETTBERG
lenses allow us to play with our visual identity, and of course to send silly
selfies to our friends. They also normalise biometrics and automated image
manipulation. They make us more used to having our faces read by
machines (Rettberg 2016).
Artists have of course experimented with the many ways in which we
use machines to see ourselves and our surroundings. CamFind is an app
that will search the Internet to find images the user captures with the
phone’s camera. The app is aimed at shoppers, so, for instance, if you point
the camera at a crayon, the app will identify the object as a crayon and
point the user to a range of websites where they can purchase crayons.
CamFind can identify a surprisingly broad range of objects, including parts
of the human body. Artist Erica Scourti has made use of this feature to
create Bodyscan, a short video composed of images she has taken of her
body using CamFind and the results it finds in response to her images. I
saw the full video at the Transmediale exhibition in Berlin in January
2015, and an excerpt is also available online (Scourti 2015). The video is
in portrait layout, like the screen of an iPhone, and is an edited recording
of a session using the CamFind app, where Scourti reads the descriptions
of items identified by the app as a voiceover. Sometimes she also narrates
beyond the terms provided by the app, blending her human voice with the
words of the machine. The video moves faster than the app, cutting away
all the lag and cutting between search results at a frenetic pace while
reading aloud the identification text the app produces.
A photo of breasts fills the mobile phone-shaped screen for a moment,
quickly followed by CamFind’s result: ‘woman breast’, then quickly mov-
ing on to the search results: breast enlargement, fast enlargement. A quick
montage of various male and female body parts follows. ‘Identifying
human, human armpit, human feet’. The merging of the personal, the
human and the consumerist machine algorithm in CamFind is skilfully
mocked. A picture of a foot returns the search result ‘Baby’ and the
voiceover reads ‘Baby, I can’t wait forever 21’, shifting from the human
emotion of ‘I can’t wait forever’ to shopping as ‘forever’ is coupled to ‘21’,
thus becoming the women’s clothing store chain Forever 21.
Selfies are of course not wholly defined by the machines that read them.
There is resistance against the machines, for instance, in nude or sexually
provocative selfies that are deliberately taken in ways that make any kind
of automated facial recognition or other identity-fixing strategies difficult
or impossible (Van Der Nagel 2013). I remain optimistic and believe
selfies serve an important communicative purpose for humans. But it is
important to also be aware of the ways in which our machines are steering
and controlling the ways in which we can see ourselves. In many ways, we
are becoming biometric citizens, identified and shaped by the digital
images of our faces.
REFERENCES
Affectiva. (2014). Affectiva overview. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=mFrSFMnskI4&feature=youtu.be. Accessed 30 March 2016.
Burns, A. (2015). Self(ie)-discipline: Social regulation as enacted through the
discussion of photographic practice. International Journal of Communication,
9, 1716–1733.
Dunmore, C. (2015). Iris scan system provides cash lifeline to Syrian refugees in
Jordan. http://www.unhcr.org/550fe6ab9.html. Accessed 7 October 2015.
Frosh, P. (2015). The gestural image: The selfie, photography theory, and kines-
thetic sociability. International Journal of Communication, 9(22), 1607–1628.
Gates, K. (2011). Our biometric future: Facial recognition technology and our
culture of surveillance. New York: New York University Press.
Kane, C. L. (2014). Chromatic algorithms: Synthetic color, computer art, and
aesthetics after code. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kittler, F. (2009). Optical media. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity.
Losh, E. (2015). Feminism reads big data: ‘Social Physics,’ atomism, and selfiecity.
International Journal of Communication, 9, 1647–1659.
Pagliery, J. (2015). MasterCard will approve purchases by scanning your face.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/01/technology/mastercard-facial-scan/
index.html. Accessed 7 October 2015.
Rettberg, J. W. (2014). Seeing ourselves through technology: How we use selfies, blogs
and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rettberg, J. W. (2016). How Snapchat uses your face (A Snapchat research story).
YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XOd-rc7r98&list=
PL46Xs2itPIMlDBL0tPfg-2WzXwZrnTePh&index=1. Accessed 19 May 2016.
Ruckenstein, M. 2014. Visualized and interacted life: Personal analytics and
engagements with data doubles. Societies, 4(1), 68–84.
Scourti, E. (2015) Body scan (excerpt). https://vimeo.com/111503640
Senft, T. M., & Baym, N. K. (2015). Introduction: What does the selfie say?
Investigating a global phenomenon. International Journal of Communication,
9, 1588–1606.
Taigman, Y., Yang, M., Ranzato, M., & Wolf, L. (2014). DeepFace: Closing the gap
to human-level performance in face verification. In Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 1701–1708.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2680208.
96 J.W. RETTBERG
Van Der Nagel, E. (2013). Faceless bodies: Negotiating technological and cultural
codes on Reddit Gonewild. Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, 10(2).
http://scan.net.au/scn/journal/vol10number2/Emily-van-der-Nagel.html.
Voltage Advertising + Design for Emotient. (2014) Emotient - Emotional awareness
for devices. https://vimeo.com/70048902
Withings. (2014) Meet Withings Home. Connect. Sense protect. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=qUydD9ycSWQ. Accessed 1 March 2016.
Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in

Norway. Her research is on how storytelling and self-representation evolve in
online environments, and she has published on hypertext fiction, digital art, social
media, games and selfies. Rettberg is also the author of Blogging (Polity Press
2014) and Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, and Blogs and
Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (Palgrave 2014). She discusses her
research on Twitter and Snapchat as jilltxt. More details on her work can be found
at http://jilltxt.net/.
CHAPTER 11
Dronie Citizenship?
Maximilian Jablonowski
Abstract The chapter draws attention to a new digital media practice: the
dronie. This recently coined term designates short videos people take of
themselves with the help of consumer drones in order to share them via
social media platforms such as Vimeo, Twitter or Instagram. Jablonowski
departs from the dronie’s aesthetic genealogies, the selfie and aerial video-
graphy, and describes the dronie’s distinct aesthetics of verticality. He
discusses how these are related to the epistemological and political dis-
positifs of the aerial view and the vertical politics of drone warfare and
aerial surveillance. The chapter concludes with a case for ‘dronie citizen-
ship’ that does not fear drones, but explores their ambiguous powers and
pleasures.
Keywords Drones Unmanned aerial vehicles Surveillance Creativity

Verticality Aerial view
In a 2011 blog post, Zygmunt Bauman observed an unexpected liaison,

which in his eyes augurs ‘the end of invisibility and autonomy, the two
defining attributes of privacy’ (Bauman 2011: n.p.). By comparing two
M. Jablonowski (*)
Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich,
Zurich, Switzerland
e-mail: jablonowski@isek.uzh.ch

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_11
98 M. JABLONOWSKI
pieces of news published on the same date – one on the increasing

miniaturisation of drones, another on the carefree compliance of social
media users in giving away their private data to companies – Bauman
makes out an uncanny ‘meeting between the drone operators and the
Facebook account operators’. According to Bauman, they meet in a gen-
eral orientation towards ‘social sorting’ – the gathering of personal data in
order to predict people’s behaviour via algorithms for commercial or
security purposes (Bauman and Lyon 2013: 23).
This secret meeting might have begot an illegitimate but popular child:
the dronie – a word composite of drone and selfie. These are videos people
take of themselves with the help of consumer drones. Since the beginning
of 2014, they have been numerously published on video-sharing plat-
forms. The gadget-affine blogosphere, but also some traditional feuille-
tons celebrated the dronie as the ‘new evolutionary step of the selfie’ (Zeit
Online 2014; translation mine).
But which political implications does this ‘evolution’ from the selfie to
the dronie entail in the context of military and intelligence drone uses for
surveillance purposes? Do they share in, as Bauman suggests, the practice
of social sorting and the consequential demise of personal privacy and
autonomy? Or, to the contrary, could the dronie engender representations
and practices of citizenship and political or counter-surveillance
engagement?
To explore these questions, I start with a short discussion of the
dronies’ aesthetic genealogies; these are the selfie and aerial videography.
Secondly, I briefly outline how the view from above is related to episte-
mological and political dispositifs. Consequently, I discuss the ambiguous
involvement of the dronie in these practices. I conclude with a proposal of
what dronie citizenship might be and why we might need it. My arguments
draw on the concept of ethnography of media-worlds (Holfelder and
Ritter 2013), which analyses the image aesthetics of media artefacts in
their complex interrelations with the users’ particular media practices,
their contexts of use in everyday lifeworlds and the material affordances
and constraints of media technologies.
GENEALOGIES
Drones are not only devices for remote-controlled or autonomous flying;
they also are synesthetic media technologies. Filming and remote sensing
are essential parts of almost all drone applications. Taking dronies is just
11 DRONIE CITIZENSHIP? 99
one of many realisations of drones’ media technological potential. Its

popularity has been enabled by the increasing availability of relatively
low-cost, easy-to-handle and ready-to-buy consumer drones with video
cameras.
As a media practice, dronies combine aesthetic characteristics of the
selfie and of aerial videography. Since aesthetics always reflect modes of
(self-)representation, they are inherently political. Tracking the aesthetic
genealogies of the dronie thus might be insightful for exploring its poli-
tical dimension. Similar to the selfie, dronies are representations of a self
with the purpose of sharing it with others via social media platforms as
Vimeo or instant messengers as Twitter.1 They can be characterised as an
‘ego-technical device’ (Sloterdijk 2011) in the sense that they actively
constitute a self in a distinct social, technological and media setting.
But dronies, as a German news show has pointedly put it, rather focus on
‘panoramas than noses’ (Tagesschau 2015; my own translation). Despite
its relatively recent appearance, a common aesthetics of dronies has already
been established. Usually the drone is ascending away from the depicted
person(s), creating an effect of zooming out. In many videos, especially in
‘group dronies’, the depicted persons are waving at the drone before it
soars up. In a notably smaller number of dronies, the drone descends
towards the persons. This effect of zooming in is almost exclusively used
in so-called ‘space selfies’,2 where a Google Earth sequence is montaged
before a dronie shot in order to create the impression that the drone
nosedives from space. The videos seldom are longer than 30 seconds and
sometimes contain slow-motion or other post-production effects.
These formal aspects have the result that the actual depiction of the
person(s) usually lasts just a few seconds and is not detailed enough to
really recognise their facial expressions. The focus is on landscape, not on
persons. This also seems to influence the attitude of reception since
dronies with spectacular landscape shots generally get the best ratings.
Of course, the aesthetic qualities of the location are also of importance in
the reception of other types of images, such as selfie shots or vacation
snaps. But other than these, the image aesthetics of the dronie – as
opposed to that of a selfie – seems to have no interest at all in the gestures,
facial expressions and appearance of the depicted person(s). It reverses the
relationship between person and landscape.
By introducing an aspect of verticality to the image aesthetics of the
selfie, the dronie abstracts from the individual. Its aesthetics purposefully
foregrounds this verticality and orients towards aerial videography and
100 M. JABLONOWSKI
cinematic landscape takes. The dronie explicitly wants its image practices
be judged in an aesthetic register. Thus, taking dronies is primarily per-
ceived as an ‘aesthetic practice’, which means it wants to be ‘an end in
itself, self-referential, and oriented to its own realisation at this particular
moment in time’ (Reckwitz 2014: 27).
THE CITIZEN UNDER THE DRONE

The aesthetic qualities of the view from above are undeniable. But it is
important to note that ‘for all its spectacle and beauty, we must be careful
not to celebrate it. . . . The aerial view has been complicit with militarism,
security and geopolitical pursuit’ (Adey et al. 2013: 2–3). Throughout its
history, the view from above has simultaneously been interpreted in
aesthetic, epistemological and political registers, constantly oscillating
between oversight and surveillance, between knowledge and reconnais-
sance. Both science and the military rely on a ‘god’s eye view’; this is a
disembodied, detached view from an imaginary nowhere. The view from
above ‘has traditionally been associated with the empowerment of the
elevated viewer’ (Adey et al. 2013: 8).
These ‘vertical visualities’ (Weizman 2002) have been and still are a
powerful device for the modern state’s scrutinising and policing dispositifs,
projecting its force on the people below and thereby shaping their spaces
and practices of everyday life. The privileged aerial perspective also affects
the way the people below are represented since ‘the view from above is
connected to enhanced forms of legibility, in and through which nature,
peoples and settlements can be dislocated from their everyday complexities
and seen (and governed) in the abstract’ (Adey et al. 2013: 8). Andreas
Hackl (2014) named this practice, in contrast to the selfie, an ‘otherie’
because it prohibits every mode of autonomous self-representation. In this
sense, the view from above could be called a xeno-technical device as
opposed to Sloterdijk’s notion of ego-technical devices; it does not estab-
lish a particular self through media technologies, but destabilises its indi-
viduality and particularity.
In the last years, drones have become the next big thing for the state’s
‘politics of verticality’ (Weizman 2002). Long-endurance military drones
can loiter in the air for up to 24 hours or even more, persistently keeping
their cameras and other sensor arrays directed at the people on the ground.
Thereby it does not surveil single individuals, but dissolves them in
abstract ‘patterns of life’, which are the new ‘epistemic bases of armed
surveillance’ (Chamayou 2015: 42). In this ‘analysis of behaviour patterns

rather than the recognition of nominal identities’ (Chamayou 2015: 42),
the epistemic and the policing powers of the aerial view concur, trying to
predict ‘suspicious subjects’ based on their ‘deviant’ behaviour patterns.
Thus Chamayou considers military drones as a means of a pre-emptive
‘social defence’ (Chamayou 2015: 35), a notion closely linked to
Bauman’s above-mentioned idea of ‘social sorting’.
These aerial methods of tracking and locating are not just an epistemo-
logical issue; it has become a matter of life and death. In the ‘cynegetic war’
(Chamayou 2011: 2) with its invasive practices of targeted killings, the
enemy is no longer an equal adversary with guaranteed rights. S/he is rather
turned into prey, which is stripped down to its bare life and thereby made, as
Giorgio Agamben has it, incapable of any political or legal articulation. At
this extreme point of explication of the drone war’s rationale, the ‘citizen
under the drone’ ceases to be a citizen at all. The constant stare from above
dissolves him into a readable and governable ‘pattern of life’, which is
deprived of its basic civil rights and can be hunted down at any time.
These practices inevitably address questions to the dronie, despite its
explicitly playful and aesthetic purpose. Even though ‘not every drone
carries a missile . . . all drones carry the burden that comes with being an
instrument of tremendous power’ (McNeil and Burrington 2014: 57).
Since its not only ‘the Hellfire missile that makes the drones so powerful
[but] the vantage point they offer’ (McNeil and Burrington 2014: 59),
the dronie’s aesthetics of vertically are both symbolically and materially
involved with the military’s politics of verticality and the ambivalent powers
of the aerial gaze. What does this involvement mean with regard to the
dronie’s ego-technical function?
THE CITIZEN WITH THE DRONE

‘The view from above has always been dialectically entwined with the
struggle to be concealed from below’ (Adey et al. 2013: 7). The strategies
to evade the aerial view have generally been linked to practices of camou-
flage and making oneself invisible (Robinson 2013). Dronies seem to
perform the very antithesis: they embrace the state of being seen from
above.
The people taking dronies could be seen as not only being complicit in
their aerial surveillance, but even perceiving it as pleasurable. As with other
digital images shared via social media, dronies rely on voluntarily giving
102 M. JABLONOWSKI
away personal data. The happily surveilled self is turning the ‘condition of
being watched and seen . . . from a menace into a temptation’ (Bauman
and Lyon 2013: 23). But do they really give in to the constant stare from
above and the deprivation of privacy and invisibility?
In my research on the uses of dronies, I could not find explicitly
political uses. Taking dronies was primarily understood as an aesthetic
practice with an attitude that can be pointedly described as le drone pour
le drone. It is the alleged coolness and innovativeness of the artefact that
makes the practice pleasurable. The journalist Sam Mutter criticises this
‘recurrent portrayal of drones as playthings’ and argues that this view of
‘gadgetry is one of the most insidious forms of normalisation’ infecting the
drone ‘with the cancer of apolitical indifference’ (Mutter 2015: n.p.).
Conversely (and not surprisingly), the drone-minded DIY maker cul-
ture from which most of the dronies originate tends to see in this gadgetry
a move to ‘demilitarise and democratise [drones] so they can find their full
potential’ (Anderson 2012: n.p.). Making out a sense of empowerment in
the popular appropriation of new and powerful technologies is a wide-
spread argument not only among the members of the DIY community but
also in parts of the cultural studies. Yet, all too often this rather indulges in
wishful thinking than empirical reality (Löfgren 2000).
Just as the proliferation of blogs and consumer media technology did
not automatically challenge the hegemonic position of media corporations
(Buckingham 2009), the technology and skills which enable the media
practice of dronies will not necessarily contest the state’s vertical politics of
surveillance. The creative appropriation of a new technology ‘from below’
(in the case of drones, this is to be taken quite literally) is ambiguous and
remains embedded in dominant power relations. Nonetheless, it is all too
simplistic to discard the idea of empowerment through appropriation
completely.
Whether military or civilian, drones certainly are devices deeply
entangled in the epistemic and violent powers of vertical visibility. But
their power does not only stem from their threatening, but also from their
playful and pleasurable characteristics. This tension is deeply rooted in the
decentred and contradicting meanings and practices of drones, being both
a feared and desired object (Jablonowski 2015). In this sense, dronies are a
practice of ‘hijacking surveillance’ where people use ‘surveillance equip-
ment for producing visual material for their own purposes’. Even though
this ‘does not necessarily form any critical or other statements’, the dro-
nie’s vertical aesthetics are simultaneously reinforcing and problematising
the drone’s aerial gaze by implicitly unfolding its contradictory relations to

aesthetics and politics (Koskela 2009: 162–163).
By participating in the tempting pleasures and powers of the view from
above, dronies facilitate the ‘ability of those below to think and see like
those above’ (Adey et al. 2013: 11). Thereby, they retain a certain agency
in the face of the aerial gaze. Even though the people taking dronies do
not yet explicate this agency for actively contesting the ‘politics of verti-
cality’, they appropriate the drone’s view from above for their own ego-
technical purposes, constituting themselves as selves involved in the
ambiguous powers of this media technology. Unlike the numerous ‘pat-
terns of life’ populating the drone state’s video feeds, they at least maintain
some sort of ego-technical sovereignty.
However, the question remains whether dronie citizenship could be a
universal position or whether it is confined to a privileged social group.
Even a superficial look makes obvious that dronies show a highly gendered
stratification of users; these are predominantly young or middle-aged
males. The drone-minded maker culture where dronies and other recrea-
tional drone uses are foremost employed could indeed serve as a particu-
larly striking example of Löfgren’s observation that creative cultures often
represent themselves in ‘military (and masculine) metaphors’ (2000: 159).
At the same time it should not be forgotten that the drone community is
not homogeneous. There are other, yet marginal ways to use and repre-
sent drones that go beyond their ‘boys with toys’ image and thus are
potential challenges to the gendered and militarised representations that
come along with Technoscience’s objects and signifying practices
(Jablonowski 2015).
A CASE FOR DRONIE CITIZENSHIP

Peter Adey et al. highlight an often-neglected fact, namely that ‘to look up
at the sky today will probably involve staring – unknowingly – in the
direction of numerous aerial vehicles and satellites whose eyes and sensors
are pointed right back at us’ (2013: 15). Certainly it would be overly
farfetched to understand dronies as a subversive ‘look back’ of the sur-
veilled. Its practices are not part of the ‘process whereby “ordinary”
citizen-publics expose the visual vulnerabilities of those above to surveil-
lance from below’ (Adey et al. 2013: 12), thereby reclaiming their author-
ity over the aerial view on themselves.
104 M. JABLONOWSKI
The dronie’s politics are more clandestine and in need of a closer look.
They evoke an understanding that drones are not one-dimensional. Also
they show that there is no technological solution to the challenges society
is facing with the drone. Appropriation of technology ‘from below’ alone
is not enough, it needs deliberate aesthetic, epistemological and political
strategies to counter contemporary politics of verticality and surveillance
practices. The dronie hints at both the technological potential and the
need for a critical practice to use this potential in other ways.
Drones are often attributed with an époche-making potential. If the
widely prophesied ‘Drone Age’ (Anderson 2012) is really about to come,
it might be necessary for us to become dronie citizens that not only fear
drones, but explore their pleasures and powers.
Acknowledgements I thank Julia Fleischhack, Adi Kuntsman, Christian Ritter

and Christian Schönholz for their many helpful comments and annotations on this
chapter.
NOTES
1. Both Vimeo and Twitter have channels designated to dronies. The term
dronie has been coined in a Vimeo comments section, https://vimeo.com/
91898486 (accessed 24 September 2015).
2. These ‘space selfies’ originally were a publicity stunt for the Cannes Lions
International Festival of Creativity, https://twitter.com/dronie?lang=de
(accessed 24 September 2015).
REFERENCES
Adey, P., Whitehead, M., Alison, J., & Williams, A. J. (2013). Introduction: Visual
culture and verticality. In P. Adey, M. Whitehead, J. Alison, & A. J. Williams
(Eds.), From above. War, violence, and verticality. Hurst: London.
Anderson, C. (2012, 22 June). How I accidentally kickstarted the domestic drone
boom. Wired Magazine. http://www.wired.com/2012/06/ff_drones/all/.
Accessed 10 May 2014.
Bauman, Z. (2011, 28 June). On never being alone again. Social Europe. http://
www.socialeurope.eu/2011/06/on-never-being-alone-again/. Accessed 11
August 2015.
Bauman, Z., & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid surveillance: A conversation. Cambridge
and Malden: Polity Press.
Buckingham, D. (2009). Speaking back? In search of the citizen journalist. In

D. Buckingham & R. Willett (Eds.), Video cultures: Media technology and
everyday creativity. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chamayou, G. (2011). The Manhunt doctrine. Radical Philosophy, 169, 2–6
Chamayou, G. (2015). Drone theory. London: Penguin Books.
Hackl, A. (2014, 30 June). Who cares about selfies? It’s the #otherie, stupid!.
Transformation-blog.com. http://transformations-blog.com/who-cares-
about-selfies-its-the-otherie-stupid/. Accessed 24 September 2015.
Holfelder, U., & Ritter, C. (2013). Filmen im Alltag: Handyfilme in der Perspektive
einer medienweltlichen Ethnografie. kommunikation@gesellschaft, 14. http://
nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-361878. Accessed 12 September 2014.
Jablonowski, M. (2015). Drone it yourself: On the decentring of “Drone Stories”.
Culture Machine, 16. http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/arti
cle/view/589/594. Accessed 27 September 2015.
Koskela, H. (2009). Hijacking surveillance: The new moral landscape of Amateur
photography. In K. F. Aas, H. O. Gundhus, & H. M. Lomell (Eds.),
Technologies of InSecurity. Milton Part: Routledge.
Löfgren, O. (2000). The cult of creativity. In Institute of European ethnology at
the University of Vienna (Ed.), Volkskultur und Moderne: Europäische
Ethnologie zur Jahrtausendwende. Vienna: Institute of European Ethnology.
McNeil, J., & Burrington, I. (2014). Droneism. Dissent, 61, 57–60
Mutter, S. (2015, 17 March). The doublespeak of drones. Opendemocracy.
net. https://www.opendemocracy.net/sam-mutter/doublespeak-of-
drones. Accessed 27 September 2015.
Online, Z. (2014, 18 June.). Dronies sind die neuen Selfies. Die Zeit. http://
www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2014-06/dronies-die-neuen-selfies. Accessed
13 August 2015.
Reckwitz, A. (2014). Creativity as dispositif. In H. Knoblauch, M. Jacobs, & R. Tuma
(Eds.), Culture, communication, and creativity: Reframing the relations of media,
knowledge and innovation in society. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Robinson, J. (2013). Concealing the crude: Airmindedness and the Camouflaging
of Britain’s oil installations, 1936-9. In P. Adey, M. Whitehead, J. Alison, &
A. J. Williams (Eds.), From above. War, violence, and verticality. Hurst:
London.
Sloterdijk, P. (2011). Bubbles: Spheres Volume. I: Microspherology. Cambridge MA:
MIT Press.
Tagesschau (2015, 20 April). Nach dem Selfie kommt das Dronie.
Tagesschau.de. https://www.tagesschau.de/schlusslicht/dronies-101.
html. Accessed 21 September 2015.
Weizman, E. (2002, 24 April). The politics of verticality. Opendemocracy.net.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_801.
jsp. Accessed 21 September 2015.
106 M. JABLONOWSKI
Maximilian Jablonowski is a teaching assistant and PhD student in the

Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of
Zurich, Switzerland. He is currently conducting ethnographic research for his
PhD project Drone Stories: Meanings and Practices of Civil Drone Uses. His fields
of research are Anthropology of Technology/Science & Technology Studies and
Visual Anthropology.
CONVERSATION III
Selfies and the Politics

of In/visibility
CHAPTER 12
Selfies, Self-Witnessing
and the ‘Out-of-Place’ Digital Citizen
Mark Nunes
Abstract The placemaking selfie documents a complex relationship between

embodied social context and networked social media presence. The complex-
ity of these placemaking selfies is particularly apparent in the ‘out-of-place’
selfie, taken at a location considered too austere for what is often cast as a
frivolous act. Rather than moving to quickly condemn these out-of-place
selfies, this chapter explores how we might read such gestures as attempts to
negotiate two overlapping frames – one embodied and physically situated,
and the other circulating within an affective imagined community. This act of
‘self-witnessing’ serves as a form of parasocial civic engagement that attempts
to communicate one’s own place within interpenetrating social spaces, no
matter how gawking or disengaged they may appear at first analysis.
Keywords Placemaking Self-witnessing Platform vernacular Affective

networks Parasocial civic engagement
To start with the obvious: every selfie must take place somewhere. While
the lens may focus on the face, quite often selfies will, in effect, foreground
M. Nunes (*)
Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies,
Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA
e-mail: nunesm@appstate.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_12
110 M. NUNES
the background, performing what Losh (2014) has called a placemaking

function that locates its subject within a specific physical and social context.
This placemaking function plays well with the affordances of the always-
present, always-networked mobile device, offering a set of everyday
photographic practices enacted at the intersection of embodied presence in
physical space and digital identity in circulation (Gibbs et al. 2015: 258). By
placing oneself within this recording of place, the selfie also documents its
own documentary moment, situating its subject in two simultaneous con-
texts – as an embodied presence, posed before the lens, and as a digital
image, distributed across social networks. As a result, the placemaking selfie
does more than broadcast (or narrowcast) one’s location to the world;
rather, it asserts an identity that borrows from the social and cultural
encoding of a place as part of an evolving performance of a networked
‘spatial self’, while simultaneously foregrounding one’s own understanding
of that space through the documentary act of framing oneself within that
particular location (Schwartz and Halegoua 2014: 1647–1649). The place-
making selfie responds to the ‘power of place’ (Hayden 1997); in doing so,
it both performs and documents the subject’s affective experience of place.
It should be no surprise, then, when we encounter critiques of selfies
taken in contexts where that power of place is most austere, and in
seeming contradiction to the mainstream encoding of selfies as a light-
hearted affair. But as Deblinger notes, while mass media and social media
commenters alike are quick to condemn selfies at Holocaust sites, for
example, as ‘frivolous and self-indulgent’ acts, such attempts to document
one’s presence at a memorial site, while seemingly out of place, might also
suggest an attempt to ‘wrestle with this history while we continue to live
our lives’ (2014: n.p.). So when we encounter San Antonio Spurs player
Danny Green’s selfie at the Memorial of the Murdered Jews of Europe,
accompanied by commentary that many found patently offensive (‘You
know I had to do it one time lol #Holocaust’), the question we might ask
is: What was the imperative of place to which Green had to respond, and
why respond through a selfie (Deblinger 2014; Moses 2014)?
As Mullins (2014) notes, selfies at Auschwitz are in many ways no
different from other versions of tourist photography at Holocaust land-
marks. What perhaps makes these selfies worthy of commentary beyond a
quick condemnation is not that they duplicate the tourist’s attempt to
capture the horrors of the Holocaust through iconic images of the camp,
but rather that they attempt to articulate in photographic form one’s own
embodied experience of the power of place (Mullins 2014). The challenge,
12 SELFIES, SELF-WITNESSING AND THE ‘OUT-OF-PLACE’ DIGITAL CITIZEN 111
then, is to think through these documentary acts of emplacement, even if

they express themselves through apparently out-of-place smiles, poses and
hashtagged comments. By documenting its own documentary moment,
the selfie forces us to confront, comment on and critique the recorded
disjunction between the power of place and the subject’s attempts at
emplacement. But as Brook (2009) notes in his comments on Roger
Cremers’s photographs of tourists taking photographs at Auschwitz,
these images of the seemingly out-of-place tourist offer something more
than a cynical commentary on the banality of the photographic impulse;
rather, these images capture individuals absorbed in ‘creating their own
visual memories of the site’ in an attempt to document their own affective
experience of place (Brook 2009: n.p.).
The mass media critique of the out-of-place selfie presents a version of
that older tension in documentary photography between ‘aestheticised’
and ‘authentic’ images of suffering, struggle and social conflict. But as
Strauss (2003: 108) notes, ‘aestheticisation is one of the ways that disparate
peoples recognise themselves in one another. . . . What [photographs] do
most persistently is to register the relation of photographer to subject – the
distance from one to the other – and this undertaking is a profoundly
important political process.’ The selfie marks a distance between its subject
and the place at hand, but also between the subject’s own experience of
place and – to borrow from Anderson (1991) – an imagined community of
social media onlookers receiving this image. Thus one finds critiques
against selfies on pilgrimage to Mecca that focus not on a lack of connec-
tion to place, but rather an over-proximity to the power of place (Blumberg
2014; Quraishi 2014). As Rutledge (2014) suggests, placemaking selfies
provide a form of parasocial interaction, creating an image that signals both
the power of place and the desire to share that experience of place with
others. The placemaking selfie, then, serves as a double-register, docu-
menting both the distance between subject and place, as well as the
distance between emplaced subject and a networked community.
Or to consider another example: while mass media and social media
critiques point to #funeral selfies as a failure to show emotional depth,
we might likewise see in these acts a kind of negotiation of distance
between everyday practices of mediated social engagement and embo-
died experience – an attempt to perform a parasocial act within a wider
affective network (Meese et al. 2015). The #funeral selfie, then, would
serve to document an affective experience of place not for oneself, but
for an imagined networked community – and would do so within the
112 M. NUNES
multivalent registers that support and sustain circulation within these social
networks. Gibbs et al. (2015: 257), for example, take up the #funeral
hashtag on Instagram through the lens of what they term the ‘platform
vernacular’ of the photo-sharing app – the ‘unique combination of styles,
grammars, and logics. . . . which emerge from the ongoing interactions
between platforms and users’ (see also: Meese et al. 2015). They note
that the mobility assumed by the material practices accompanying social
media applications such as Instagram – in other words, that photos are
uploaded through mobile devices, coupled with the multiple registers of
hashtagging – creates ‘performative assemblages’ that are simultaneously
embodied and mediated experiences (Gibbs et al. 2015: 258). In the
context of #funeral selfies, then, one might ask, as Gibbs et al. (2015:
261) do, not how such ‘out-of-place’ pictures could circulate, but rather
how is it that the ‘formal, sacred, and institutionalised rituals commingle
with the individualised profane, subjective, and sometimes improvised
events in the platform vernacular’ for the digital citizen.
What we see at work in the placemaking selfie is an orientation towards
both embodied experience within a place-specific event and a mediated
experience of networked co-presence. The selfie, so easily critiqued as a
sign of self-absorbed disengagement, may well serve, in multiple registers,
as an engaged articulation of one’s place within an increasingly complex
networked social space. In documenting its own documentary moment,
the placemaking selfie can also function as a form of ‘mobile witnes-
sing . . . journalism with a POV combining self-presentation and the pre-
sentation of visual proof of a witnessed event’ (Koliska and Roberts 2015:
1675). Drawing upon Goffman (1959), Koliska and Roberts (2015:
1676) suggest that selfies ‘create context-bound identities that simulta-
neously visually verify the existence of this presented identity in relation to
a specific time and space’. This ‘sign of proof’ inscribes both event and self
in a relationship that is simultaneously highly personal, yet at the same
time meant for circulation (Koliska and Roberts 2015: 1676). What’s
more, the ‘tension between the “event” that is witnessed and the “self”
that is represented’ in all its contradictory encodings need not undermine
the selfie’s role as journalistic witnessing and may, in fact, help constitute
journalistic point of view (Koliska and Roberts 2015: 1677). For example,
Koliska and Roberts analyse an image that we might well categorise as an
‘out-of-place’ selfie: that of a smiling woman in sunglasses, posing for a
selfie in front of a soldier and jeep in the midst of the 2014 Thai military
takeover. While mass media and social media alike have used this and
similar images from the Thai military takeover as examples of misplaced

selfies, from their analysis, this image is both an ‘act of witnessing’ and a
‘public performance indicating point of view’ that operates on multiple
registers to emplace the subject on the scene and at the same time circulate
that documented moment to a wider, imagined community (Koliska and
Roberts 2015: 1678).
Given this double-register, we might think of this act of ‘witnessing’ as
performed simultaneously for oneself as well as others – in other words, an
act of ‘self-witnessing’ that blurs the line between the banal act of tourist
photography and civic or social action. While less clearly the sort of ‘rights
claim’ that Isin and Ruppert (2015) associate with witnessing, these ambigu-
ously coded documentary acts serve as a form of parasocial civic engagement
that attempts to communicate one’s own place within interpenetrating social
spaces. Isin and Ruppert (2015: 131) discuss ‘openings’ as ‘moments and
spaces when and where thinking, speaking, and acting differently become
possible by resisting and resignifying conventions’. They discuss social media
‘witnessing’ as both submissive and subversive acts – submissive to the extent
that they enact existing codes or conventions, but subversive as well to the
extent that the subject has the capacity to judge how these conventions are
deployed (Isin and Ruppert 2015: 133–139). Given the performative
aspects of these ‘digital acts’, we might then want to examine the apparently
out-of-place selfie in a different light, and with an eye toward ‘the felicity or
infelicity of such acts, whether speaking subjects have understood adequately
the appropriateness of the situation in which they have spoken, and whether
there were misfires’ (Isin and Ruppert 2015: 65).
The conflict in registers is less apparent when the felicity conditions of the
selfie-as-self-witness are met – for example, in another image analysed by
Koliska and Roberts (2015): slain journalist Molhem Barakat, reflected in a
mirror, with the wreckage of a bombed-out Syrian street in the background.
Koliska and Roberts (2015: 1680) argue that Barakat’s selfie announces that
‘he is not simply witnessing the events transparently, acting as a lens for the
viewer to see the war, but rather staking a claim to his own importance and
presence there as the witness’. And is it not the legible seriousness of the
image that allows this message to communicate so clearly? It becomes less
clear, it would seem, the extent to which someone is ‘staking a claim’ when
place marks a scene of social and political upheaval, but the smiling selfie
would seem to indicate disengagement or a failure to read the performative
situation in which this photographer chooses to engage in this digital act.
The selfie-as-self-witness becomes a complicated matter to the extent that
114 M. NUNES
the platform vernacular blurs the line between parasocial interaction and
the conventions of reportage. While the photograph might always mark the
distance between photographer and subject, as Strauss (2003) notes, the
selfie documents that distance in a profoundly foregrounded manner, mark-
ing the individual as both photographer and subject, and marking one’s
relationship to the location and events captured as both recorder of events
and subject within the event. That marking of distance, perhaps more than
anything else, is apparent in both the ‘authentic’ witnessing of the Barakat
selfie and the ‘disengaged’ tourist selfie posed before a military vehicle.
In the context of citizenry, however, we might pause to acknowledge
that in both instances we see a register at work in which an individual is,
through this moment of encoding of self within a social and political
context, likewise encoding an engagement with these events. And of
course let us remember that the selfie does not ‘intrude’ on these social
spaces, but is rather very much caught up in the same practices that make
possible the ‘networks of outrage and hope’ that mark political action in
an age of social media (Castells 2012). If we understand social space,
following Lefebvre (1991), as a product of material, conceptual and
experiential forces, and if we are to maintain that multiple, interpenetrat-
ing social spaces are possible, then we must acknowledge in the placemak-
ing selfie a set of new media practices that run a full spectrum of what it
means to place oneself within the scene of digital citizenship. Tourist selfies
at OccupyHK, then, are by no means ‘out of place’, no matter how
gawking or disengaged they may appear at first analysis (Hong 2014;
Wei 2015). They are likewise positioning themselves within this scene,
mediating a sense of what it means to be a part of this moment in history, if
not an active participant in the protest itself. One gains a kind of political
agency not by making an overt rights claim, then, but by situating oneself,
in a highly personal way – situating one’s selfie – as a node of circulation
within a movement that expresses itself equally through actions and
imagery.
Part of the hesitation to think through these acts as articulations of
digital citizenship comes from our hesitancy to think ‘citizen’ in that
broader context. As Couldry et al. (2014: 616) note, extending
Dahlgren’s (2009) concept of ‘civic culture’, digital citizenship may
map itself through practices that are fundamentally about a ‘circuit’ for
‘enabling and deepening mutual recognition’. While critiques of ‘out-of-
place’ selfies are common, consider the circuit opened by – and the
positive media response to – the 2014 Turkish protest selfies, in which
it is precisely the discontinuity of context that marks a moment of

political and civic engagement. With the military present in the back-
ground, it is the riot shields and body armour that seem ‘out of place’,
not the jovial, highly recognisable coding of the selfie pose. And let us
remember that it is precisely this disjunction of contexts that marks a
moment of civic conflict – that military force and tourists occupy the
same, interpenetrating social spaces, and that in many ways marking
these spaces in conflict is very much an act of digital citizenship. As one
commentator noted in the English-language Turkish newspaper Today’s
Zaman (2014):
The message of today’s selfies is multifaceted. In one sense: Protesters are

ordinary people, just like you and me, facing extraordinary action by the
police. In another: Protesters are determined to maintain their spirit and
goodwill in the face of violent police action. In yet another: While police are
old-school agents of the repressive state, protesters are young, hip and
interconnected to viral cultural phenomena. (‘Selfie’ spoof points mocking
lens at Turkish police 2014)
In this light, then, the emplacement denoted by these self-witnessing

selfies produces a social space that is both located in a specific, experienced
moment, but at the same time networks this moment within a larger
context of circulating images. For the tourist visiting OccupyHK, this
moment is something more than a snapshot at a landmark; rather, it
documents the subject’s own place within a particular historical moment,
and the subject’s own attempt to perform a parasocial relation between a
site of social conflict and a wider social network. In a similar fashion, the
disjunction of images in the Turkish protest meme suggests a complex
relation to social space, one that does not reduce merely to an earnest
staging of ‘outrage and hope’, but is likewise expressed in a language
entirely native to the discursive framework of the selfie and its platform
vernacular.
In each instance, the selfie marks a moment of complex negotiation,
even in its most banal form. In part, what we witness in the selfie, and
the critique of its ‘out-of-place’ nature, is an apparent conflict between the
platform vernacular of networked photo sharing and the inscribed set of
social behaviours deemed appropriate for a particular context. But we can
at the same time read these approximations at emplacement as attempts to
create a proximal relationship between the network and the embodied
116 M. NUNES
context of the photographic subject. To take the tourist shot in the midst
of political upheaval is not to degrade or debase the struggle and rights
claims of activists, but rather to acknowledge the interpenetrating spaces
that operate as a context for citizenship in the digital age.
REFERENCES
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities. New York: Verso.
Blumberg, A. (2014, 1 October). Infamous Hajj selfie is one more thing
transforming Mecca, and not everyone is happy about it. Huffington Post.
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Castells, M. (2012). Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the internet
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Dickens, L. (2014). Digital citizenship? Narrative exchange and the changing
terms of civic culture. Citizenship Studies, 18(6–7), 615–629.
Dahlgren, P. (2009). Media and political engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Deblinger, R. (2014, 9 October). Selfies, memory sites, & ‘appropriate’ forms of
commemoration. MemoriesMotifs. http://memoriesmotifs.tumblr.com/post/
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MA: MIT Press.
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tourists-are-taking-hong-kong-protest-selfies.html. Accessed 1 January 2016.
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MA: Blackwell.
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Mark Nunes is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair for the

Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies at Appalachian State
University in Boone, North Carolina. He is author of Cyberspaces of Everyday Life
(Minnesota UP, 2006) and editor of Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media
Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2010).
CHAPTER 13
Visual Afterlife: Posthumous Camera

Phone Practices
Larissa Hjorth and Jung Moon
Abstract At the crossroads between the aesthetic and the social, camera
phone practices can provide insight into contemporary digital media. This
phenomenon is magnified in the context of selfies as a barometer for
changing relationships between media, memory and death. This relation-
ship between emotion, grief and affect is most apparent in the South
Korean MV Sewol boat disaster on 16 April 2014 (known as ‘Sewol
disaster’) whereby selfies operated as self-designated eulogies for the 246
high-school children who were tragically killed. Through this tragic dis-
aster, this chapter recalibrates the role of selfies as lenses into understand-
ing affect as a texture with both deep emotional and political rhythms.
Keywords Camera phone Disaster Grief Memorialisation

Posthumous practices South Korea
L. Hjorth (*)
School of Media & Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: larissa.hjorth@rmit.edu.au
J. Moon
Centre for Ideas, Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne,
Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: happymissmoon@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_13
120 L. HJORTH AND J. MOON
PICTURE THIS: THE EFFECT OF CAMERA PHONE AGENCY

Camera phone practices are entangled within the rhythms of everyday life in a
variety of ways. They entangle play, work, politics and affect. Magnifying the
intimate nature of mobile media, camera phone practices also play a key role
in changing the way memory and image is experienced and shared. While
camera phone images are shaped by the affordance of mobile technologies,
they also play into broader photographic tropes and genres (Palmer 2012;
Zylinska 2015; Frohlich et al. 2002; Kindberg et al. 2005; Whittaker et al.
2010; Van Dijck 2007). At the crossroads between the aesthetic and the
social, camera phone practices can provide insight into contemporary digital
media. This phenomenon is magnified in the context of selfies as a barometer
for changing relationships between media, memory and death (Senft and
Baym 2015; Rettberg 2014).
As Graham et al. argue, new media are affording emergent modes for life to
be ‘extended, prolonged, and ultimately transformed through the new circu-
lations, repetitions, and recontextualisations on the Internet and other plat-
forms’ (2013: 133). Digital data allow new ways in which to construct one’s
life, death and afterlife (Stanyek and Piekut 2010; De Vries and Rutherford
2004; Veale 2003; Bollmer 2013; Bennett and Bennett 2000; Jones 2004).
This is especially the case with mobile media as a witness, repository, dissemi-
nator and magnifier of events. Within this process, new types of genres such as
‘selfies at funeral’ signal emergent relations between intimacy, mobile media,
etiquette and affect (Meese et al. 2015; Gibbs et al. 2015a, 2015b).
This relationship between emotion, grief and affect is most apparent in the
South Korean MV Sewol boat disaster on 16 April 2014 (known as ‘Sewol
disaster’) whereby selfies operated as self-designated eulogies for the 246
high-school children who were tragically killed (Lim 2014). These selfies
illustrated a new type of what Roland Barthes would call punctum (1981) –
that is, the emotional affect of these images on spectators. Here we witness a
‘mobile punctum’, whereby immediacy, ubiquity and intimacy are entangled
within the ‘sticky’ aesthetics and texture (Ahmed 2005) of the affect.
MEMORIALISED, INTIMATE PUBLICS: A CASE STUDY OF CAMERA

PHONES DURING A DISASTER
As soon as the ferry capsized on 16 April 2014, hundreds of mobile
phones were on hand capturing the sheer terror of the events unfolding.
After the ship sunk – killing over 300 passengers (246 school children) by
13 VISUAL AFTERLIFE: POSTHUMOUS CAMERA PHONE PRACTICES 121
either drowning or hyperthermia – it was the mobile media footage that

friends and family cradled in their disbelief as the traumatic reality
unfolded. YouTube began to fill with hundreds of user-created content
videos, consolidating public grief, anger and outcry. Most traumatic were
the mobile media fragments of children leaving messages to their parents
declaring their love in the face of death.
Through these highly distressing IM and video messages, a process of
shock, trauma, memorialisation and grief had begun. In many cases, the now
deceased used camera phone images do not only expose the chaos of the
situation but do also provide a co-presence and continuing bond between
themselves and their loved ones. Many used their mobile phones to film a
tribute to their loved ones, while others filmed the disaster in a narrative that
suggested they would survive. While a few of these stories were documented
and disseminated in global press by being translated from Hangul into
English, dozens of stories of mobile media memorialisation processes
remained untranslated and were shared just across vernacular, Korean sites.
While much of the literature around bereavement and online memorials
focuses upon the loss and experiences of the mourner, the Sewol disaster
provided some examples of the role of mobile media – and especially
camera phones – in memorialisation by the soon to be deceased. The
quotidian and intimate dimension of mobile media undoubtedly impacted
processes of grief differently than other media. In the Sewol disaster, many
families were receiving messages and videos from their children unaware
that these fragments would be the last moments captured of their chil-
dren’s lives. Here the role of co-presence in mobile media’s ability to
traverse the mortal and immortal took new dimensions. The story of
tragedy and procedures gone wrong documented by mobile media
afforded others to redeploy the material to serve not only as a memorial
but also a way in which to learn from the tragedy. The affordances of
mobile media both extended older rituals around grieving as an ongoing
process (Rosenblatt 1995, 1996, 2000).
This phenomenon is highlighted in the YouTube ‘What happened
inside . . . ’ example whereby mobile media from the deceased is used not
only to continue bonds with them but to also serve justice in the wake of
their deaths. The replaying and editing of the mobile footage served to
further formalise and legitimate the collective role of grief and the need to
acknowledge its unending nature. In the re-editing of the mobile footage,
spectres were allowed to live on and memorialisation was allowed to
cohabitate various online and offline spaces.
While the remixing of the mobile footage of the deceased afforded

different ways in which people could participate in the memorialisation
process globally, it also signified a particular type of relational bond
specific to Korean culture. Here the concept of Jeong is significant as one
of the most ‘endearing and evocative’ words of which there is no English
equivalent (Kim 1996). This is not to essentialise experience but rather to
understand the specific cultural milieu from which the grief was formed.
Jeong, like the notion of han (or haan, a complex feeling that is related to
the history of oppression by Japanese and American forces), are often
defined as quintessential to the Korean psyche. As Luke Kim notes,
‘Jeong encompasses the meaning of a wide range of English terms: feeling,
empathy, affection, closeness, tenderness, pathos, compassion, sentiment,
trust, bonding and love . . . Koreans considers jeong an essential element in
human life, promoting the depth and richness of personal relations’
(1996: 14).
While a similar notion of jeong can be found in Chinese and Japanese
culture (i.e. jyo), it has a far less significant and poignant meaning (Kim
1996). The feeling of jeong is palpable in and through the tragic events
and memorialisation of the disaster. Jeong binds the various camera phone
memorialisation with the loved ones left behind. The mobile footage
taken during the disaster still leaves a raw effect in that it captures the
pain, confusion and terror of the victims as they face their death. The role
of mobile media to capture this liminal stage is a testament to its intimate
and ubiquitous role and unquestionably this area of mobile media mem-
orialisation before death will continue to grow and become a key area for
analysis in the future. Given the newness of this phenomenon, in this
section we will detail some of the events and mobile media fragments
captured from the disaster to consider the changing role of mobile media
in and through moments of life, death and afterlife.
One of the most tragic videos is from the high-school girl Park Ye-seul
who filmed the disaster at 9.40 a.m. (the disaster was first reported at 8.40
a.m.). Ye-seul and her friends documented the disaster as it happened
through selfie videos. In the videos, we see typical selfie performativity (i.e.
peace symbol with fingers by smiling girls) juxtaposed with other passen-
gers crying with terror. Her father recovered the camera phone footage
after her death. The video conversation, which can be found on YouTube,
consists of a conversation between Ye-seul and her fellow passengers as
well as her co-present parents. She talks of how scared she and other
passengers are while begging, ‘Please rescue us’. They talk about the
increasing tilt of the boat. Then there is an official announcement, ‘Please

double check your life jacket whether it was tighten well or not. Please
check and tighten it again.’ Ye-seul says to her videoing phone (as if her
parents are inside it), ‘Oh we’re going to diving into the water’, followed
by ‘Mum, I am so sorry. Sorry Dad! It’s bullshit!! We will be okay! See you
alive’.
In the YouTube video, we also see that Ye-seul’s selfies are far from a
vehicle for narcissism. They are about a numbness and misrecognition of
the event (Wendt 2014). They become part of the process of memorialisa-
tion for her family and friends, spectres of jeong and han, while the
deceased was still alive. Here we see the power of the mobile phone as
one of the most intimate devices to capture the fleeting moments of the
deceased before they pass away. For loved ones, mobile media becomes a
crucial embodied part of that passage from life to death and afterlife. The
role of the mobile phone as continuing bonds between the living and the
dead was evidenced in one scenario between a deceased son and his father
on Kakao IM. Here the mobile phone became like a portal between earth
and heaven. It is not uncommon for mourning relatives and friends to
send messages to the deceased in order to continue the bonds as an
integral part of the han and jeong processes.
CONCLUSION: LOCALISING SELFIE AGENCY

More than one year after the Sewol disaster, one can feel the haunting of a
country still in mourning for all those young, unlived lives (Mullen 2014;
Choi 2014; Kim and Jeon 2014). The mobile media spectres haunt with
residual punctum as grief goes through a variety of shades, textures and depths
(Segerstad et al. 2014; Amore and Scarciotta 2011). While photography has
always had a complicated relationship with power, representation and death
(Barthes 1981; Sontag 1977; Deger 2008), the social life of the mobile media
is changing the relationship between the memory, image ownership and
dissemination. And so what happens to Barthes’s notion of punctum –
originally used to discuss analogue photography – in the context of digital
and mobile photography? Mobile media photography provides a vehicle for
continuing these activities while at the same time it uniquely allows for these
activities to extend across temporal and spatial boundaries (Brubaker et al.
2013). Far from narcissist vehicles, selfies are not only used to connect in
moments of trauma and grief but also play a key role in mobilising the Korean
population into a collective action against, firstly, the boat company and,
secondly, the government. As these Sewol selfies demonstrate, mobile punc-

tum is local as it is palpable in its affective and mobilising power.
Acknowledgements This chapter is part of a broader study with Katie Cumiskey

exploring the role of mobile media in processes of loss.
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Larissa Hjorth is an artist and digital ethnographer who studies the sociocultural
dimensions of mobile media and play cultures in the Asia-Pacific. She is a Professor
in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University. Her books include
Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific; Games & Gaming; Online@AsiaPacific (with
Arnold); Understanding Social Media (with Hinton); Gaming in Social, Locative
and Mobile Media (with Richardson); Digital Ethnography (with Pink, Horst,
Postill, Lewis and Tacchi) and Screen Ecologies (with Pink, Sharp and Williams).
Jung Moon is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of
the Arts, the University of Melbourne. Her work looks at Korean women called
ajammas and their media practice from a feminist perspective.
CHAPTER 14
Like a Stone in Your Stomach:

Articulating the Unspeakable in Rape
Victim-Survivors’ Activist Selfies
Debra Ferreday
Abstract This chapter examines Project Unbreakable, a photographic

project which posts selfies made by survivors of rape and sexual abuse,
to demonstrate how selfie culture operates as a space of embodied
resistance. Following Senft and Baym’s view of selfies as relational and
constitute practices that involve the mobilisation of affect as a basis of
politically engaged community building, it examines the ways in which
selfies disrupt dominant narratives of survival as ‘speaking out’, a dis-
course which privileges some survivors’ experiences as more worthy than
others. Selfies, I argue, are moving in that they literally move, circulating
virally in a culture that produces victim-survivor experience as both
‘unspeakable’ and ‘spoken for’: this chapter pays attention to the ways
in which they both move and mobilise us.
Keywords Rape Survival Activism Twitter Trauma Recovery

narratives
Project Unbreakable (http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/) is a

photography project that uses the visual imagery of the selfie to make
visible survivors’ experiences of rape and sexual abuse. The project uses
D. Ferreday (*)
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
e-mail: d.ferreday@lancaster.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_14
128 D. FERREDAY
Tumblr to publish survivor selfies: in its 6 years of operation, there have

been thousands, submitted by people of all genders. Its stated aim is ‘to
give a voice to survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child
abuse’. Each submission follows a variation on a by now familiar format
associated with selfie activism1: a single, unnamed individual, holding up a
placard with handwritten words. The words may be those of the survivor
him- or herself, but are more usually quotes, words spoken by the rapist
during the assault experienced by the author/subject or by others, includ-
ing family, friends, teachers and law enforcement, who denied or deni-
grated the survivor’s account of their experience. The project was founded
in 2009 by Grace Brown (who recently stepped down), then a photo-
graphy student who was deeply moved when a friend confided in her
about her own experience of abuse: as Brown describes it, this experience,
which led her to meditate on the many, many survivors whose stories
would ordinarily remain untold and would instead linger ‘like a stone in
your stomach’, was ‘the last straw’2 leading to the project’s inception.
I want to think about this image of living with a stone in the stomach as a
way of thinking through what it means to inhabit traumatised subjectivity
in everyday life, what forms of knowledge might be entailed in stone-
carrying and how a recognition of such knowledge might be mobilised to
transformative effect. A stone is a burden if carried, but also a potential
tool and a powerful, shattering weapon.
ON THE AFFECTIVE POLITICS OF BEING MOVED

To look at Project Unbreakable is to encounter an emotionally devastating
archive of feeling: it is staggering how many carry such a stone. Even in a
mediated society steeped in violent imagery, the affective power of such a
medium is considerable. To look at Project Unbreakable is emotionally
overwhelming, occasioning rage, despair and sadness. Often – always –
these images are harrowing. To read the words of rapists alongside the
faces of their victims is confronting, even engulfing.3 In fact so great is the
project’s concern about the potentially triggering effect of viewing so many
visually immediate accounts of sexual assault that updates are posted infre-
quently, resisting the fast-moving temporality more usually associated with
social media: as the site’s FAQ page has it, ‘this project is a sensitive topic,
and we don’t want to overwhelm anyone with what is being posted. It’s
more important to make sure that everyone following the blog also takes
time for themselves’. Sharing practices on the site are shaped by the need for
14 LIKE A STONE IN YOUR STOMACH: ARTICULATING THE UNSPEAKABLE . . . 129
sensitivity, for caring forms of communality; comments on individual entries

are not allowed: trigger warnings are ubiquitous.4 The aim in keeping
examples temporally separate, then, is not simply to reproduce the sensatio-
nalistic and individualistic narrative of the heroic survivor associated with
mainstream media representations of survivor testimony, but to attempt to
balance the need to bear witness to the scale of rape and sexual violence – to
reconstitute the atomised and fragmented hidden community of the walking
wounded into a collective – with the equally pressing need for each indivi-
dual to be named, seen and heard in the clamour of a media society that
continually silences and erases the experience of those whose trauma
excludes them from neo-liberal framings of citizenship.
The timing of these posts, then, represents a performance of the need
to walk the fine line between galvanising resistance and re-victimising
readers by overwhelming them: between productive, empathic rage and
disempowering despair. But the survivor selfies are not simply representa-
tions of violence: as Senft and Baym remind us, selfies are relational and
constitute practices: they initiate ‘the transmission of human feeling in the
form of a relationship (between photographer and photographed,
between image and filtering software, between viewer and viewed,
between individuals circulating images, between users and social software
architectures, etc)’. Hence, selfies ‘send . . . different messages to different
individuals, communities, and audiences’ (Senft and Baym 2015: 1589).
It is this sharing of messages, this transmission of affect, I argue, that
allows Project Unbreakable to function as a site of resistance. Selfies are
moving in that they literally move, circulating virally in a culture that
produces victim-survivor experience as both ‘unspeakable’ and ‘spoken
for’: and they both move and mobilise us.
ACTS OF CITIZENSHIP
As Engin Isin has argued, recent times have seen the emergence of new
ways of claiming citizenship, with new media and social networking con-
stituting important sites of struggle and enabling new acts of citizenship
(Isin 2009). Central to the activist potential of victim-survivor selfies is
this facilitation of action, in a context that positions sexual violence as
unspeakable: activist selfies allow for speaking out, but on one’s own
terms. This is important because, as Tanya Horeck argues, the figure of
the ‘rape victim’ is at once invisible and hyper-visible: rape is imagined as
the most private and intimate of crimes, yet media and popular culture are
130 D. FERREDAY
saturated with images of sexual violence ranging from the eroticised and
sensational to ‘issue-based’ representations including soap storylines, mid-
dlebrow mainstream cinema and the proliferation of popular survivor
narratives in publishing and TV (Horeck 2004). In this context, selfie
activism constitutes a way of articulating victim-survivor citizenship that
resists the overwhelming cultural imperatives that construct this term as a
binary (you are either a victim or a survivor) or as a narrative of linear
progress through ‘recovery’ (you start out as a victim, but through perso-
nal effort, become a survivor). In this sense, victim-survivor selfies speak to
Adi Kuntsman’s reminder that selfie activisms work by mobilising the
intimate and personal to political effect (Kuntsman 2015): in capturing
the rage, sadness and trauma that may surface in a single moment, they are
acts of citizenship in that they refuse the need to become citizen through
survivorhood and instead draw attention to the actual experience of the
vast body of citizens who are also already victim-survivors.
It is the visual nature of selfies, their apparent capturing of a fleeting (if still
composed) moment, that potentially opens up a space for resisting dominant
narratives of victimhood and survivorhood. Such narratives circulate in
culture to overwhelming effect: having been raped, we are told, there is
work to be done to ensure that appropriate survivorhood which restores one
to – albeit limited – citizenship (the focus, as always, is very much on the
person who has been raped rather than on the rapist). To be a victim is to
be non-productive according to the values of neo-liberal capitalism, except,
we are told, when survivor narratives can themselves be made productive
through commodification, for example, in the form of the popular ‘misery
memoir’, a form which demands a very particular and proscribed mode of
storytelling. To ‘be a victim’ is widely imagined as the ultimate failure of neo-
liberal subjectivity, articulated through narratives that frame continued suf-
fering as pathological attachment to one’s own trauma, a failure to move on.
Survivors are exhorted to move up, move on, attain closure in a linear
narrative of courageous self-making that entails ‘rising above’ the intolerable
and unspeakable status of victim. In a context where forms of trauma
expressed as mental illness are already subject to disenfranchisement, then,
the consequence of trauma is to be doubly denied citizenship.
While the notion of citizenship invokes ideals of equality, the question
of who is defined as a citizen is in practice deeply gendered, raced and
classed. The question of who has access to justice, and on what terms, is
entangled with the question of citizenship: for example, the legal scholar
Joanne Belknap identifies a structuring binary through which the legal
system separates offenders and victims into those who are marginal or
deviant, and others conversely who embody a ‘citizen lifestyle’, living
within mainstream society and conforming to social norms of heterosexual
propriety, and hence have access to justice (Belknap 2014: 140). Yet this
positioning of some subjects as citizens, she cautions, is complex, occur-
ring as it does in a context where even privileged women are continually
excluded from full citizenship (545). In cases of gender-based violence,
the ability to maintain a citizen lifestyle defines the possibility of literal
survival: ‘financial security, self-esteem, citizenship, social support . . . and
other official support limit survivors’ capacity to . . . survive’ (Belknap
2014: 419). The experience of sexual violence is deeply entangled with
questions of social exclusion, inequality and citizenship: but also, to speak
out about sexual violence is to lose citizenship, to become a non-subject
whose testimony is regarded as inherently suspect. Rape and abuse are
unspeakable, firstly in that the marginal and disenfranchised are dispro-
portionately unable to speak out in the first place: and secondly in that
when their stories are told, their status as testimony is immediately called
into question.
This is not to say that the very notion of ‘speaking out’ is not implicated in
relations of inequality. As Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray have argued, the
dominant strategy employed by survivors’ movements has been to encou-
rage ‘breaking the silence’ in both public and private contexts. This project is
almost universally articulated in terms of speech: as they note, ‘survivor
demonstrations are referred to as “Speak Outs,” the name of the largest
national network of survivors of childhood sexual abuse is VOICES, and the
metaphor figures prominently in book titles’ (Alcoff and Gray 1993). This
notion of ‘speaking out’ has gained traction, they note, in the mainstream
media, with figures such as Oprah Winfrey featuring survivors discussing
their experience with psychiatric ‘experts’. This speech can result in genu-
inely transgressive moments of solidarity that effect social change: but it is
also always subject to a framing that produces a hierarchy between survivor
and expert, with testimony always subject to potential recuperation as sensa-
tionalised media commodity. These representations as rape, they argue,
involve a particular performance of emotion in which the survivor must
appear upset, but not too upset, and especially not too angry (Alcoff and
Gray 1993: 284). Further, the framing of rape through mediated forms of
speech, like the helplines that have become a regular feature of rape storylines
in soap opera and TV drama (‘if you have been affected by the issues in this
programme, please call . . . ’), produces it as a rare ‘issue’ that affects a small
132 D. FERREDAY
number of individual subjects such that the real scale of rape as a social
phenomenon – indeed as one of the defining social phenomena of hetero-
patriarchal capitalist societies – is obscured. Paradoxically, we are told that
the survivor must affirm her status as not-victim through privileged speech to
a trained expert, even as the sheer prevalence of rape together with the
ongoing erosion of mental health services through neo-liberal forms of
governance makes this impossible. This reproduces the status of rape, and
the rape victim, as absent referent in public discourse: s/he is, as Horeck
describes, everywhere and nowhere (Horeck 2004).
At the same time, questions of citizenship work to determine whose
trauma can be recognised as such. As Jin Haritaworn points out, women of
colour are discursively regarded as ‘non-rapeable’ (Haritaworn 2013: 70),
and the same is true in various contexts of queer, trans and disabled people,
people with mental illnesses, and sex workers as well as those simply
regarded as engaging in ‘deviant’ behaviour, a fluid category that encom-
passes everything from non-monogamy to being drunk. Poverty is central in
determining who is most likely to experience sexual violence: this is starkly
demonstrated by the ‘£100 test’ cited by Walby and Allen, in which the
ability to find this sum of money at short notice was found to map onto
levels of risk, for both men and women. ‘Among women’, they state, ‘rates
of sexual assault were twice as high among those who would find it impos-
sible to find £100 compared with those for whom it was no problem’
(Walby and Allen 2004: 77). In the UK alone, we are currently seeing
wave after wave of testimony from survivors of childhood sexual abuse
whose attackers escaped detection for many years through their member-
ship of business, media and government elites, and whose own status as
queer, poor or disabled children often led to their testimonies being ignored
or disbelieved.
CONCLUSION: VICTIM-SURVIVOR SELFIES

AND NETWORKED REFLECTIVE SOLIDARITY
In the face of such overwhelmingly shaming and silencing public discourse
around sexual violence, what spaces of resistance might be found?
Following Senft I would suggest that selfie practices constitute precisely
such a space (Senft 2008). The practices through which victim-survivor
selfies are shared, consumed and circulated, I would argue, a potential
articulation of ‘networked reflective solidarity’: making connections
between those whose shared experience of trauma is privatised, individua-

lised and made unspeakable. To have a ‘stone in one’s stomach’, to inhabit
traumatised subjectivity in daily life is, here, transformed into the basis of
collective action and mutual support. This is not to claim some utopian
power for selfie activism: although it has formed an important element in a
global move towards consciousness raising, it is yet to be seen what, if any,
material social change will result: and, as Baym and Senft have suggested,
‘every campaign for solidarity, from the most urgent to the most banal,
contains explicit and implicit claims regarding whose suffering and hero-
ism matters, and whose does not’ (Baym and Senft 2015). Feminist
scholarship has long shown that those who do have access to public
platforms, especially those identifying as feminist, are subject to rape
threats and other forms of hate speech aimed at policing and limiting
our participation in public debate (Jane 2014a, 2014b). The digital, while
it constitutes a potentially powerful space of organisation, testimony and
support, has engendered new platforms for re-victimisation and silencing
(Alfcoff 2015). Nevertheless, these acts of sharing operate to create spaces
of support on the terms of survivors themselves. The proliferation of victim-
survivor selfies works together to insist on the way in which trauma is
experienced as intimate and personal, as something that one carries around,
but also to the collective and communal possibilities afforded by activism.
They constitute both a way of speaking back to the multiple denials of
citizenship through which rape culture is both reproduced and continually
made invisible, and a graphic performance of the impossibility of speech.
Functioning both as speech and not-speech, the selfie operates on multiple
levels to articulate what is both literally and figuratively unspeakable in
culture. As Alcoff and Gray conclude:
Women’s righteous anger on our own behalf is a success won through

political and theoretical struggle. The difficulty we are made to have in
experiencing anger on our own behalf is indicative of the threat it poses
for patriarchal society. In what ways can we express this anger and unleash its
disruptive potential while minimising the adverse effect on our safety and
wellbeing? (Alcoff and Gray 1993: 286)
The survivor selfies of Project Unbreakable represent precisely such an

unleashing of the disruptive potential of survivors’ rage. As recent demon-
strations against capitalism have powerfully demonstrated, a stone repre-
sents a powerfully disruptive weapon: but to throw stones is to risk
134 D. FERREDAY
immediate and disproportionate punishment by the ideological and

repressive apparatuses of the state. It is dangerous to throw one’s stone:
even to display it as an object that might be thrown. The viral and
proliferating nature of selfie culture potentially creates, then, a sense of
community, of safety in numbers, which makes it possible for survivors to
waive the anonymity (and hence the isolation) that is the sole protection
afforded them by the neo-liberal state. Through speaking out the stone is
potentially no longer carried heavily in the stomach but is hurled, shatter-
ing the silence that surrounds what is imagined as the most private and
shameful of crimes. As is a political gesture, survivor selfies insist on
placing accountability back where it belongs: not simply with the rapist
as toxic individual, but with a wider rape culture. After all, the inescapable
conclusion to be drawn from these images is that the numbers of stone-
carriers are not confined to a small group of unfortunates, but are limitless,
stretching back into a long history of undocumented suffering.
And yet we can think of stones as more than a weapon. En masse, stones
can be used to build, they can form a cairn to guide the lost: piled on a
grave, they are a sign of grief, of mourning. And then there is the form of
the selfies themselves: in these images as in all selfies, the face is a marker of
presence, but the written sign is held at a distance from the face, perform-
ing a literal distance between the person and the experience: it is thus a
refusal to be defined by the experience of violation, even as it insists on the
realness of that experience. The survivor’s face is displayed alongside their
written words, positioning them as a subject located in language, as one
who writes and through writing takes back their own experience. What is
more, by reproducing the words of rapists, they make visible that sexual
violence is itself inextricably entangled with normative social discourses
around violence, gender and sexuality: we start to see patterns, scripts
emerging (e.g. in which male victims are told to be ‘good little girls’) that
shatter the illusion of sexual violence as somehow separate from the
normal, the natural and the everyday.
Finally though, although the words it bears are shocking and violent,
the sheet of paper itself suggests hope: in the child’s game of rock paper
scissors, paper beats rock, not through superior strength or violence,
but through the protective and caring gesture of wrapping. The stone of
trauma might be thrown, but is never quite thrown away: and yet to
belong to a community of stone-bearers might feel qualitatively different
than the miserable experience of carrying this burden alone. Above all
it involves a refusal of shame.
In rearticulating the figure of the victim-survivor as activist citizen – by

confronting our culture with what it has done, and continues to do,
through its yoking together of sex and violence, and especially by refusing
its limited and atomising modes of reparation for harm done – selfie
activism provides a potential space to refuse dominant ideals of ‘speaking
out’, and to mobilise what have been framed as troublesome, pathological
forms of emotional experience to politically disruptive effect.
NOTES
1. Its model of selfie activism has been widely adapted by other survivor
projects, and more widely as a mode of ‘hashtag activism’ on platforms
including Twitter and Tumblr to speak about experiences of racism, homo-
phobia and transphobia.
2. http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/meet-grace-brown-unbreak
able-photograph.
3. Although the content of specific articles will be explored in a future article,
I have made a deliberate decision, here, not to cite specific images or texts:
since the focus of the project is on the face of the survivor, it feels politically
urgent and necessary to foreground survivor experience. This is not, how-
ever, to deny the importance of accountability in holding rapists, and rape
culture more generally, responsible for the acts of violence the selfies recall.
4. The use of trigger warnings has been controversial in recent feminist theory:
nevertheless, I would argue that the trigger warning as genre should be
understood as a practice for thinking through forms of practical caring, not
primarily or only as a technology of constraint (Ferreday, forthcoming).
REFERENCES
Alcoff, L. (2015, 17 September). Rape and the question of experience. Public
Lecture Given at Australian Catholic University.
Alcoff, L., & Gray, L. (1993). Survivor discourse: transgression or recuperation?.
Signs, 18 (2), 260–290.
Belknap, J. (2014). The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice. Belmont,
Canada: Wadsworth Publishing Co.
Ferreday, D. (forthcoming). Becoming unbreakable: The affective politics of
digital anti-rape activism as a space of radical hope. In R. Andreassen,
H. Harrison, M. N. Petersen, & T. Raun (Eds.), New media – New intimacies:
Connectivities, relationalities, proximities. London: Routledge.
Haritaworn, J. (2013). Beyond ‘Hate’: Queer metonymies of crime, pathology
and anti/violence. Jindal Global Law Review, 4(2), 44–78.
136 D. FERREDAY
Horeck, T. (2004). Public rape. London and New York: Routledge.

Isin, E. (2009). Citizenship in Flux: The figure of the activist citizen. Subjectivity,
29, 367–388.
Jane, E. (2014a). ‘Your A ugly, whorish slut’: Understanding e-bile. Feminist
Media Studies, 14(4), 531–546.
Jane, E. (2014b). ‘Back to the Kitchen, Cunt!’ Speaking the unspeakable
about online misogyny. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies,
28(4), 558–570.
Kuntsman, A. (2015). Acts of selfie citizenship. Paper given at Selfie Citizenship:
The Political Uses of Personal Social Media Photography, Manchester
Metropolitan University, 16 April.
Senft, T. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity & community in the age of social networks.
Senft, T., & Baym, N. (2015). What does the selfie Say? Investigating a global
Walby, S., & Allen, J. (2004). Domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking:
Findings from the British Crime Survey. London: Home Office Research,
Development and Statistics Directorate.
Debra Ferreday is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. Her

research centres on the affective cultural politics of digital and screen media, with a
particular interest in questions of gender, sexuality and embodiment. Her current
project, ‘Screening Rape’, explores the complex relationship between media,
mediation and sexual violence across a diverse range of platforms including film,
television, Internet and social media.
CHAPTER 15
Selfless Selfie Citizenship: Chupacabras

Selfie Project
Silvia Rodriguez Vega
As undocumented immigrants, we have been portrayed as monsters

sucking the blood out of American society. To them, we are not humans,
we are the Chupacabras.
– Chupacabras: The Myth of the Bad Immigrant, film by author
Abstract This chapter sheds light on the experiences of immigrants crim-

inalised by the immigration system in the USA. As the media perpetuates a
discourse of immigrants as dangerous and threatening to a sanitised
American way of life, the aim of this chapter is to focus on the often
forgotten stories of people left out of the immigrant right’s agenda and
often the main targets of punitive legal measures. At the centre of the
chapter is ARTivism – activism through art. Inspired by the author’s film,
Chupacabras: The Myth of The Bad Immigrant, undocumented immi-
grants in California were encouraged to take selfies with a chupacabras
mask and stand up to dehumanisation and criminalisation of immigrants,
by taking ‘selfless selfies’ and using the hashtags #NotYourChupacabras
and #YourChupacabras.
S. Rodriguez Vega (*)

César E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies, University of California,
Los Angeles, CA, USA
e-mail: silvia.rodriguez.vega@ucla.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_15
138 S. RODRIGUEZ VEGA
Keywords Undocumented immigrants Selfless selfie citizenship

Digital ARTivism Respectability politics #NotYourChupacabras
#YourChupacabras
INTRODUCTION
We generally think of selfies as narcissistic and apolitical photographs that
individuals post for ‘likes’ to their social media accounts, but in Los Angeles,
CA, undocumented immigrants are reappropriating the selfie genre as a form
of civic engagement. ‘The Chupacabras Selfie Project’, discussed in this
chapter, is about selfies without the self. Inspired by the Zapatistas, this
‘artivist’ project – a form of activism through art – reappropriates both a
violent symbol and a self-centred genre that is part of the social media gestalt
for collective representation and voice through the self-less selfies. On the
6th of June 2015, following a screening of my short film Chupacabras:
The Myth of The Bad Immigrant,1 attendees had the opportunity to don
an animal mask – the chupacabra – as a political statement. The film was
about the lives of five undocumented immigrants in the USA and their
perceptions of who is a ‘bad’ immigrant, as seen through the metaphor of
the mythical chupacabras – the dangerous mythical reptile-like creature
known to prey on livestock and people around the US-Mexico borderlands
during the 1990s. When juxtaposed to media narratives on immigration, the
similarities are uncanny. Narratives, which include quiet neighbourhoods,
where unknown and dangerous creatures are lurking. This rhetoric perpe-
tuates the fears of dangerous creatures coming from south of the border to
cause harm. By taking selfies in connection with the film, attendees were
asserting their humanity. Our message is simple: #NotYourChupacabras, or
to satirise xenophobia, #YourChupacabras (Fig. 15.1).
This chapter highlights how in the spirit of Zapatismo and Guerrilla Girls
undocumented immigrants in the USA are challenging dehumanisation.
The chupacabras mask offers a unique way to protect the identity of a
population that is constantly under the watchful eye of the law. The mask
enables undocumented immigrants to claim their right to participate in the
discourse that shapes the laws that threaten their livelihood. This civic form
of anonymous participation creates a safe community where the identities of
vulnerable individuals are transformed into power. The idea of the selfie
project came during one of the shoots where the camera captures an
interviewee taking selfies while wearing the mask.
15 SELFLESS SELFIE CITIZENSHIP: CHUPACABRAS SELFIE PROJECT 139
Fig. 15.1 ‘#NotYourChupacabras’

Source: Instagram (with permission from account holder)
These selfies specifically express disapproval of President Obama for

breaking his promise to legalise the status of the 12 million undocumented
people in the USA. Instead, the administration deported 2 million people in
the course of five years (2008–2014) – more than any other administration
in history (Nava 2014). Two-thirds of the people deported had only minor
infractions and no criminal record (Thompson and Cohen 2014).
Misdemeanours render undocumented residents ineligible for executive
orders like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred
Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA).
Outside punishment for minor infractions further stigmatises millions of
other immigrants as they enter the criminal justice system, thus deteriorating
their quality of life vis-à-vis possible deportation.
These recent changes in immigration law have perpetuated a divide
between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ immigrant. Although some studies have
explained the creation of the ‘bad’ immigrant (Ngai 2014) and examined
the effect of respectability politics2 (Higginbotham 1993) in the African-
American community, few have highlighted the voices of criminalised immi-
grants impacted by an enforcement-focused immigration system (Pallares
2014). The film sheds light on the experiences of undocumented immi-
grants in the USA through digital artivism. Artivism is defined as ‘work
created by individuals who see an organic relationship between art and
activism’ (Sandoval and Latorre 2008). It is importation to call attention to

the metaphor of the ‘chupacabras’ as a threatening and dangerous depiction
of undocumented immigrants coming into the USA endangering the ‘safe
and sanitised’ American way of life (Chavez 2013, Santa Ana 2012). This
chapter highlights the fight that undocumented and criminalised commu-
nities in the USA face against silencing, dehumanisation and punitive legal
measures through selfless selfies. The following section will demonstrate the
creation of the ‘bad’ immigrant.
CONSTRUCTING THE ‘BAD’ IMMIGRANT

Using the chupacabra mask, selfless selfies – selfies without the ‘self’– aim
to destroy the good versus bad binary that justifies legal violence in anti-
immigrant policies (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). Words such as ‘illegal’,
‘illegal immigration’ and ‘illegal alien’ work to create a framework where
undocumented migrants are characterised as criminals (Perez-Huber
2009). The migrants produced by such discourse are dangerous and
threatening to the ‘American way of life’ (Chavez 2013, Santa Ana
2012). Recent changes in immigration law perpetuate the divide between
the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ immigrant. When the president announced the
first and second executive orders (DACA/DAPA), thousands of ‘good’
students and parents would gain a two-year work permit while those who
do not qualify were considered ‘bad’ immigrants. Consequently, immi-
grants would be polarised between those deemed exemplary and undesir-
able. This polarisation promotes respectability politics through the
punishment of ‘bad’ immigrants and the rewarding of ‘good’ immigrants.
These divisions perpetuate old beliefs of meritocracy, the American
Dream, and American exceptionalism (Gustafson 2005). Yet, millions
remain forgotten in the margins of the immigration debate and vulnerable
to policies that criminalise the poor (Union 2000). The film that inspired
these selfies, Chupacabras: The Myth of The Bad Immigrant, questions the
immigrant binary and ideas on the impossible subject (Ngai 2014). Many
of the films created by/with undocumented people justify the ‘illegality’
of their existence within the USA or Europe, thus perpetuating the model
minority myth. The chupacabras, rather, express solidarity with the ‘bad’
immigrant as a way to expose practices of domination endemic to institu-
tions in the USA. The use of selfies and social media are forms of partici-
patory citizenship the chupacabra mask elicits.
SELF-LESS SELFIES
‘But first, let me take a #selfie’ is the most important line of the song ‘#Selfie’
popularised by the DJ duo, The Chainsmokers. In the song, the main
character is a young girl at the club criticising other people and their outfits.
As she prepares to go after the guy she likes, she makes the infamous
statement, ‘but first, let me take a selfie’. Telling of our time, this song
perfectly captures what selfies have come to exemplify in popular culture –
vanity and self-indulgence. It is against this backdrop that immigrant artivists
aim to make their voices heard. Artivists can utilise various art forms to create
cultural impact outside of the art world by shedding light on important issues
facing their community (Asante 2008). Digital artivism (Sandoval and
Latorre 2008) draws on multimedia technologies to critically engage in
social justice. It is through digital artivism that multidimensional meanings
create the foundation of the Chupacabra Selfies Project.
Reflecting on the notions immigrants as other than human and the perpe-
tuating stereotypes of criminals and terrorists, I decided to propose the
chupacabras as an idea for a film in my class, Diasporic Nonfiction: Media
Engagements with Memory and Displacement. Two undergraduate students
helped me film, interview and edit what would become Chupacabras: The
Myth of The Bad Immigrant. Through interviewing various people deemed by
society as ‘bad’ immigrants, we wanted to understand: How do undocumen-
ted immigrants experience dehumanisation in society through the media, law,
public opinion or other means? What messages do undocumented crimina-
lised immigrants have for policymakers? The film took news clippings about
the chupacabras from the 1990s and juxtaposed them with current news
stories about undocumented immigration, the similarities were uncanny.
A challenge during the chupacabras project was how to use the mask to
express subject identities of undocumented people, without further dehuma-
nising them. I looked at how masks were used to create solidarity in margin-
alised communities. One example of this is the use of the ski masks that the
Zapatistas wear in southern Mexico. The mask announces an ‘insistent,
collective politicised presence, and at the same time they make visible the
neglected anonymity of indigenous people in Chiapas’ (Lane 2003: 136).
While the black ski mask creates a transformed, protected and unified iden-
tity, Zapatistas are not hiding behind a mask, rather one hides by taking the
mask off (Kowal 2002). Likewise, founded in New York during the 1980s,
Guerrilla Girl – an anonymous collective of women artists – is an example of
how using a mask can create solidarity and at the same time call attention to
systematic forms of oppression. Using a gorilla mask, guerrilla girls protest

the limited and sexualised inclusion of women in the arts. Through their witty
art, they challenged racial exclusivity of museums, funding and exhibitions
(Demo 2008). Both Zapatistas and Guerrilla Girls offer a creative and unique
way to challenge exclusivity and disenfranchisement. However, as the follow-
ing section demonstrates, that it is important to know who are the people
behind the mask.
CHUPACABRAS MASK
The film highlights five undocumented individuals: Miguel, Yessica,
Marcela, Bamby and Jonathan. Miguel is a college student who is ineligi-
ble for DACA due to a robbery he committed at the age of eighteen, for
which he was in prison for two years. Despite the fact that he attended
community college, graduated and transferred to University California,
Los Angeles, Miguel is unable to have a job or be in the country legally
because he does not qualify for DACA. His story highlights the ways poor
immigrant communities are left out of the immigration limelight. Miguel
used the chupacabras mask to position himself as a student. His selfie is a
tool that describes the way Miguel has been left out of civil society due to
the alleged threat his legality (Abrego 2014) poses.
Yessica, another college student from San Diego, CA, was first intro-
duced to the criminal justice system at the age of eleven when she got her
notice of removal in the mail the day of her first communion. Until the age
of sixteen, Yessica went to court every year ‘to prove that she was not a
criminal’. Having to go to court with her mother every year influenced
Yessica to question the justice system. Yessica, wearing a white dress, put a
crown of flowers on the chupacabras mask and took selfies in the mirror as
a representation of being othered on a very important day in her life.
Marcela’s experience underscores how the law fails to protect the most
vulnerable. After experiencing domestic violence for over twenty years,
Marcela decided to call the police on her abusive husband. However,
when the police arrived, they arrested her instead. She was transferred to
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where she was detained for four-
teen days rather than the few hours she had been promised. When Marcela
finally got out, she returned to an empty home where all her belongings
were missing and her husband had kidnapped her two youngest children
to Mexico. Marcela has not seen her children since June 2010. Marcela
wore the mask and prepared a meal as a symbolic gesture of being

dehumanised as a mother and victim of domestic violence.
Caught in the nexus of a xenophobic and patriarchal society, trans-
women like Bamby have been left in the shadows of the immigration
discourse. In the film, Bamby shares her story of crossing the border and
being harassed due to her gender. She explains the horrible conditions of
detention facilities. Policies like DACA and DAPA have done little to
address the needs of transgendered migrants, some argue that it further
stigmatises them, making them the most impacted group by the privately
ran detention industry (Arkles 2009; O’Day-Senior 2008).
Likewise, Jonathan, the final person in the film, describes the moments he
kept his sexuality a secret while in detention. He knew the homophobia of
other inmates and officers that could threaten his life. As an Afro-Latino,
Jonathan sided more with the black immigrant community. Voices of black
immigrants are often ignored. The policies that target undocumented immi-
grants also target poor black and Latinos, criminalising them further.
The participants wore the chupacabra mask for part of their interview to
make a satirical statement about the way society perceives them. Holding
the mask to her face, Bamby stated: ‘Lots of people may ask, who is this
person? It’s me!’ The chupacabra mask became a powerful metaphor by
which each of these individuals asserted their humanity by mocking the
dehumanising ideals that make them ‘bad’ immigrants.
CHUPACABRAS SELFIE PROJECT

The day of the first film screening in Los Angeles, CA, about seventy five
people packed a small venue. Families, students and different community
organisations were present. After screening the film, we had a dialogue
where people expressed their agreement to these points of views. Students
explained that it was important for undocumented youth to counter the
‘good immigrant’ and ‘DREAMer3’ mentality, which seeks to only take
into account exemplary students. Students expressed that they would
rather be called ‘bad’ or ‘illegals’ rather than DREAMers, a view that
until now had not been shared or embraced.
Others were glad the film was satirically funny about serious heart-
wrenching topics. It was clear that the film and dialogue left people with
more questions than answers. In a way, the viewers also wanted to become
the chupacabras, and because we had the mask with us, this was possible.
People were given the opportunity to transform into the chupacabras by
wearing the mask and either sharing what it meant to them or taking a selfie
holding a sign that on one side read #NotYourChupacabras and on the
other #YourChupacabras. These photographs were posted on Facebook,
Instagram and Twitter. Grandmothers and youth alike expressed that what
they saw in the film was a reflection of their lives or how they felt. For the
public, too, putting on the chupacabras mask was a way of gaining control
over that stereotype. By taking on the opportunity to side with the ‘bad’
immigrant, people expressed their solidarity, thus, creating a community of
highly visible people without endangering the individuals without
documents.
CONCLUSION
What is unusual about the Chupacabras Selfie Project as opposed to many
other selfie-based actions on social media (and elsewhere) is that they are
selfies without the self. This Zapatista-inspired artivist project reappropri-
ates both a violent symbol and a self-centred genre that is part of the social
media gestalt for collective representation and voice. By putting on a
chupacabras mask, the subject resists erasure by highlighting dehumanisa-
tion, thus creating a collective voice and building solidarity with other
dehumanised and criminalised immigrants. This solidarity in turn chal-
lenges respectability politics that pressure immigrants to aim for an impos-
sible perfection. The film Chupacabras: The Myth of The Bad Immigrant
provides the stage for people to reiterate their humanity through the
Chupacabras Selfie Project.
Currently, the film is being expanded to include more stories of immi-
grants in bordering states. The ‘bad’ immigrants are given a space and place
to share their story and ‘good’ immigrants can question their own subjectiv-
ity. Thus through selfies and associated actions of ‘hashtag solidarity’
(Mottahedeh 2015), anyone can join in on the opportunity to challenge
hegemonic ideals on immigration. Cohen explains that the impact of choos-
ing deviance and resistance creates counter public and private spaces where
autonomy is chosen daily. ‘Through the repetition of deviant practices by
multiple individuals, new identities, communities, and politics emerge where
seemingly deviant, unconnected behaviour can be transformed into con-
scious acts of resistance that serve as the basis for a mobilised politics of
deviance’ (Cohen 2014: 32). Some of the perceived pitfalls are that this
project might not encompass all stories of dehumanised immigrants.
However, this should not be the only film, hashtag or project that addresses
these issues. It simply provides a small space for the great work that is yet to
be done. My hope is that the film and selfies will contribute to the effort of
dismantling respectability politics/the myth of the bad immigrant and for
this project to be a tool for communities still fighting and resisting.
NOTES
1. The film can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acp87_
6qPVE.
2. Respectability politics was coined in 1993 by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
to explain the involvement of black women in the Baptist church.
Higginbotham specifically referred to African American’s promotion of
‘temperance, cleanliness of person and property, thrift, polite manners,
and sexual purity’ as a reform strategy where African Americans are encour-
aged to be respectable (Higginbotham 1993). In turn people of colour are
also responsible to show white Americans that blacks can be respectable and
good (Harris 2003). Respectability politics was adopted by middle- and
working-class black women alike; it was an effective way to combat racist
narratives about black women’s sexuality, work ethic and the constant
positioning of black family as abnormal (White 2010).
3. ‘DREAMer’ is a popular term used in reference to undocumented students
who quality for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act
that would legalise the status of undocumented youth who attend college or
enrol in the military; the bill was first introduced in 2001 and has yet to pass.
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Perez-Huber, L. (2009). Challenging racist nativist framing: Acknowledging the
community cultural wealth of undocumented Chicana college students to
reframe the immigration debate. Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 704–730.
Sandoval, C., & Latorre, G. (2008). Chicana/o artivism: Judy Baca’s digital work
with youth of color. In A. Everett, D. John, & C.T. MacArthur (Eds.), Learning
race and ethnicity: Youth and digital media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Santa Ana, O. (2012). Juan in a hundred: The representation of Latinos on network
news. Texas: University of Texas Press.
Thompson, G., & Cohen, S. (2014, 6 April). More deportations follow minor
crimes, records show. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/
2014/04/07/us/more-deportations-follow-minor-crimes-data-shows.html.
Accessed 1 March 2016.
Union, K. W. R. (2000). The criminalization of the poor. University of

Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, 5(1), 1–12.
White, E. F. (2010). Dark continent of our bodies: Black feminism & politics of
respectability. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Silvia Rodriguez Vega is a doctoral candidate in the César E. Chavez

Department of Chicana/o Studies at University of California, Los Angeles.
Before that, she earned a Masters of Arts in Education from Harvard University
and double-majored in Transborder Latina/o Chicana/o Studies and Political
Science at Arizona State University. Her primary research interests include crim-
inality, detention/deportation, children in mixed status families, digital media,
ARTivism, poverty/inequality, and the prison industrial complex.
CHAPTER 16
‘My Face Is Not for Public Consumption’:

Selfies, Surveillance and the Politics
of Being Unseen
Sanaz Raji
Abstract Using her own activist experience, Raji explores the ways acti-
vists use selfies to brand themselves within radical-chic aesthetics, on the
one hand, and the aesthetics of normalcy, on the other, in response to the
increased policing and criminalisation of direct action protesting in the
UK. The chapter seeks to entertain other possibilities for selfie activism:
selfies without the face, selfies that interrogate the politics and culture of
state and corporate surveillance, and, more broadly, selfie activism that
allows a space for those who want to engage in radical political discourse
but do not want to be subjected to further state violence.
Keywords Branding Clicktivism Invisibility Normalcy Surveillance

State violence
Ever come across this situation? You are eating your meal in a group dinner
with other like-minded activists and some person whom you have never met
before or made acquaintances with starts taking random photos on their
smartphone of people they may or may not know without their permission?
Some person did that last night.
S. Raji (*)
Independent Scholar and Activist, UK
e-mail: sanaz.raji@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_16
150 S. RAJI
I was eating and talking with others who were at the party. Then a
woman who I had neither been introduced to, nor have met before the
party, began taking photos on her smartphone of me and others. She didn’t
even introduce herself, but had the audacity to take my photo while eating.
Then she turns to me:
Woman taking photos: What’s your name?

Me: Sanaz.
Woman taking photos: (While fiddling with her smartphone). I can’t find
you on Facebook?
Me: Excuse me, why are you looking for me on
Facebook? What’s the purpose?
Woman taking photos: I want to tag you in this photo.
Me: I never asked to you to take my photo. In fact, I have
never met you before. The polite thing to have done
was to introduce yourself to me and then ask if it
would be okay to take my photo. It is unacceptable
to take photos of people without their permission.
Woman taking photos: So, you don’t want to be associated with [xxx]
group?
Me: That is not the point. I don’t know you. We have
never met before until this evening. I don’t even
know your name. It is not acceptable to point your
phone and take photos of people without their
knowledge and/or consent to do so!
This awkward verbal altercation happened during a Christmas dinner

organised by an activist group that I would like to keep anonymous. I
have participated with this group in many demonstrations and protests
over the past year. As a poor campaigner and an ‘out-of-place’ scholar,
any celebration that involves restaurant dining is a particular treat. I had
saved up my pennies for this gathering and only knew four or five
people by name. The rest of those who attended the Christmas party
were a complete mystery to me. Unfortunately, the way the dining
space had been configured did not help in fostering new introductions.
However, my annoyance gave way to utter anger at the way a certain
member of this group operated their smartphone in a cavalier manner,
taking photos of me and others, without our permission and uploading
these photos on their Facebook wall, indicating the exact location and
place we were all dining at. As an activist with a precarious immigration
16 MY FACE IS NOT FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION . . . 151
situation, I did not feel safe for my whereabouts to be so publicly

known to all on social media.
Interestingly the people dining that evening have often said and
stated both in person and online how we must remain vigilant against
state and corporate surveillance on activists, especially those involved in
anti-racist, migrant rights, environmental and Palestine solidarity work.
However, it seemed we could not escape the surveillance that we were
enforcing on each other through our smartphones and social media at
large. And to be sure, it wasn’t smartphones and social media forcing
them to take those photos, but group pressure to be seen and to be
noticed, especially in the small, tight-knit, radical activist community.
Group members who attended the dinner seemed more annoyed with
my insistence on not being photographed tagged into photos that were
uploaded onto Facebook while we were dining than with my right to
eat in privacy without having my whereabouts ‘outed’ and publicised.
More than a month later, in February, I attended a protest outside of a

high-end British department store, opposing the selling of ‘blood diamonds’
that are complicit in furthering pro-Zionist interests. As I entered the
protest area, I was aware of the high concentration of police with video
cameras that monitored our movements. I chatted with someone who was
also taking part in the protest who I hadn’t seen for some months. All of a
sudden through the corner of my eye I could see someone taking photos of my
friend and I engaged in a conversation. I immediately knew the photo-
grapher by name, a white person who I had met in numerous protests both in
Leeds and Manchester. I implored with them to refrain from taking a photo
of my face and asked that they instead take a photo of the placard I made in
solidarity with the protest.
The photographer said, ‘Why don’t you want your face in the photo?’
I whispered, ‘It’s complicated. I really don’t want to go into this here and
now.’ What I couldn’t say at that instance is that I did not want to have a
long drawn out discussion about my precarious immigration status especially
with the heavy police presence watching our every move. They then shouted at
me in an exacerbated tone, ‘It’s a public area. I’m well in my right to take a
photo of you. If you don’t like it then get out of the protest!’ Interestingly, this
very same photographer once had chronicled a No Borders Leeds demonstra-
tion in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants that took place
outside the Home Office in Leeds sometime in 2013. They respected our
collective wish for our faces not to be shown in photos taken – especially as
152 S. RAJI
Black, Muslim and people of colour (PoC) refugees and asylum seekers who
took part in the demonstration were still battling with the Home Office for
the right to remain lawfully in the UK. Some of those who had joined us on
the day of that demonstration had spent time at immigration detention
centres like Yarl’s Wood, and had experienced the worst of British state
violence. Somehow this photographer had conveniently forgotten that they
have in the past accommodated my very simple request for other precarious
individuals in activist groups. I loudly and angrily responded: ‘It may be a
public area, but you do not have the right to take a fucking photo without
permission! I asked you politely the first time not to take my photo. I don’t
have to give you a reason why I don’t want my photo taken. You should
respect my request. If you can’t do this one simple thing then don’t take photos’
The photographer proceeded to heckle me as they took photos of other
protesters, mocking me for not being a ‘team player’ and ‘being a pain in
the ass’ and saying that others were showing true courage and solidarity for
having their faces photographed. I stood there alone while my fellow comrades
were all too eager to pose for the photographer, not at all inclined to defend
me from this onslaught of abuse. I was one of perhaps two or three people of
colour at a largely white demonstration. Outside of London, it isn’t uncom-
mon to be one of a few Black and/or PoCs in a demonstration for leftist,
Palestine, and migrant rights causes. In retrospect, it seemed that the photo-
grapher was more upset that they could not use my brown face to make the
argument for how ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’ this event was.
Towards the end of the protest, two fellow protesters came up to me to
apologise for the photographer’s harassing behaviour and lack of respect for
my request to not have my face photographed. Then one of the protesters asked
if they could take a photo of my placard. As they were taking a snap on their
phone, they commented, ‘I think it was wrong of that photographer to take
photos of you without your consent. I got what you were saying but felt it
wasn’t my place to get involved.’ To which I responded, ‘I thank you for
asking my permission to take a photo of the placard and for respecting my
wishes. But it is very much in your place to help protect people like me who
wish to remain anonymous because of our precarious status in this country, be
it due to citizenship, racial or gender violence, and disability.’
It has been nearly a year since both incidents, but I cannot stop
thinking that we as activists and academics (or both) need to have a closer
interrogation of the refusal to engage in visible protesting and, more
broadly, of the politics of remaining unseen. Within the past few years,
the British public and, in particular, the activist community have learnt the
extensive and intrusive manner in which police surveillance and infiltration
were used on environmental and anti-racist activists. Not only did police
spies monitor these activist groups, but in many instances began fraudu-
lent relationships with women activists they were gathering intelligence
on, had children and then when their surveillance operation came to an
end, suddenly and mysteriously left, not to be located again. However, it is
not just police spies that we need to be concerned about. It is also the
pervasive level of state surveillance in the UK of Black, PoC, Muslim and
migrant bodies through UK Visa and Immigration (UKVI), the anti-
extremism policy of PREVENT and ‘stop and search’. As Simone
Browne (2015) has shown through her research, we cannot divorce state
and corporate surveillance from racism and, in particular, the historical
links to anti-Black racism and now Islamophobia.
So how does that connect to the activists’ use of self-portraits or the
refusal of such practice?
Much has been written about the emancipatory qualities of selfies in
giving women, Black, PoC, disabled and other non-normative groups a
voice, through a personalised visual presence, and that in contrast with
the overall dismissal of selfies as purely narcissistic and apolitical. However,
I would like to shift this conversation away from both the dismissal and the
celebration of selfies into exploring other, long-neglected questions con-
cerning selfie activism. We need to be asking ourselves, who can occupy
the selfie activism space? And what individuals or groups might feel,
instead, that selfie activism is limiting? How does selfie-activism act as a
neoliberal branding for ‘clicktivism’ – a recently emerged form of civil
participation that is limited to online petitions and other similar forms of
Internet ‘clicking’ (White 2010)? How do activists use selfies to portray
themselves as ‘normal’ in times when the right to demonstrate and protest
are being criminalised both in the UK and the USA? How can we create
selfie activism that does not act as a conduit for further state and corporate
surveillance?
In thinking through these questions, I would like to entertain other
possibilities for selfie activism – namely not shaming or deriding those of
us who decide to not make our faces visible for campaigns, but focusing,
instead, on the message of the banners and signs we hold in our hands.
In doing so, I hope that my discussion of remaining invisible in an activist
selfie will lead to reconsidering questions of activist self-care, on the one
hand, and surveillance, on the other.
154 S. RAJI
SELFIES, CLICKTIVISM AND CHASING THE CELEBRITY ACTIVIST

DREAM TO NORMALITY
Yasmin Nair’s (2016b) thoughtfully detailed piece on the Twitter ‘hashti-
vist’ Suey Park illustrates the neoliberal manner in which hashtag activism
(and also selfies) can be used to brand and rebrand online activists into
marketable commodities. With regard to Twitter and other social media
activism, she notes:
The contemporary emphasis on ‘monetising’ and ‘branding’ oneself emerges

from this neoliberal sphere, where people are required to craft themselves
into investment commodities. Twitter and other forms of social media play a
role in this construction of the self as a money-making enterprise, with
millions hoping to become profitable brands. (Nair 2016: n.p.)
Park, a former anti-racist Twitter activists, who came to fame for her well-
known hashtag, #NotYourAsianSideKick and later to infamy with
#CancelColbert, successfully parleyed her hashtivism into a profitable
speaking career, from lecturing at leading universities in the USA and
Ireland, to speaking at venues like Social Media Week. However, Park is
not the only online activist who has been able to use social media to
constantly rebrand and keep herself in the public eye. DeRay Mckesson, a
former administrator for ‘Teach for America’, a corporate education outfit
complicit in union busting, later caught fame as being one of the few visible
faces of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, with over 300,000 followers on
Twitter. Mckesson is yet another hashtivist who has been able to rebrand
himself and use the networks he made from the corporate world while using
the cultural capital he amassed from his activism with #BlackLivesMatter to
run for the mayor of the city of Baltimore. Mckesson’s election campaign
was funded by a triumvirate of social media companies, which include
Netflix, YouTube and Twitter (Franklin 2016). It is not surprising that
the Black and anti-racist grassroots activists did not warm to his corporate
interests, particularly the heavy reliance on social media in a city where 30%
of the population is not online are some of the many reasons why he was not
elected mayor (Woods 2016). As one Baltimore resident writes,
Organising in Baltimore is relational. In Baltimore, grassroots leaders

don’t earn their stripes on twitter or on the protest line; Here you earn
your stripes by serving and being in the community when there are no
cameras. (Wooten 2016: n.p.)
Like Nair, I believe there is a correlation between the ‘entrepreneurial’

manner of how some activists use social media as an entry to trickle down
radical political and activism in a neoliberal manner for networks, connec-
tions and, more importantly, the launching of political careers. I see that
selfie activism is often used in the similar manner by white, Black and PoC
activists within mainstream student politics in the UK. Long before
Beyonce’s 2016 Super Bowl performance, Black Panthers and Che
Guevara motifs were increasingly being employed within selfie activism,
sometimes done in solidarity with the historical significance of their respec-
tive messages. However, more often, this brand of selfie activism aesthetic
was used merely to appear radical. I refer to this as ‘Malcolm X/Angela
Davis drag’ – the cosmetic performance of acting and appearing radical,
while having very little to show for one’s supposed radical activism.
Meanwhile, those very same individuals who engage in this sort of drag
play occupy positions of power with access to numerous platforms that can
be complicit in actively silencing those engaged in the grassroots work of
building truly radical spaces of activism. After all, in this day and age of the
social media celebrity culture, showcasing the aesthetic of radicalness to
one’s followers carries far more cache and glamour than actually doing the
unglamorous toll of grassroots activism.
For those involved with direct action work, not only are we competing
with hashtivists and ‘radicals dragsters’ who are able to network their highly
neoliberal and individualistic activism into lucrative careers, but also with
general clicktivism mediated by major social media petition sites like
MoveOn, Change.org and 38 Degrees. As Micah White powerfully argues,
‘political passivity’ becomes the end result of digital petition campaigns that
use catchy advertising and the lingo of social media that ‘draw attention away
from genuinely radical movements’ (White 2010: n.p.).
And as digital petitions, much like hashtivism and selfie activism, dom-
inate the world of online activism, they can also lull activists into another
sort of passivity – that of investing labour into looking and appearing
normal. In a time when protests are heavily monitored, when then
Prime Minister David Cameron accused Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn,
of being a terrorist and when Green Party members found themselves
under state surveillance, it is not surprising that activists are not only
adopting vestiges of radical-chic aesthetics, but also the aesthetics of nor-
malcy. The aesthetics of normalcy, to which the selfies of mundane actions
– riding a bus, smiling with a friend, eating a meal – are central, is often
used by activists to show how ‘every day’ ordinary we are, despite being
156 S. RAJI
engaged in direct action on a daily basis. Often, this is done to dispel the
terrorism label that right-wing and establishment media are painting many
left-wing, anti-racist, migrant rights and pro-Palestinian activists with a
very broad stroke. This is especially true in an age where direct action work
is under constant policing and criminalisation, when activists are portrayed
by the media as either dangerous outcasts or unstable people with too
much time on their hands.
And despite some romantic depictions in films and media that represent
activism as exciting and noble work, the everyday grunt labour that
activists do is often thankless and emotionally exhausting. It is standing
in the pouring rain leafleting about a protest to stop the NHS from
privatisation, only to see people take your leaflet to toss it directly into
the trash. It is standing in freezing weather by the Home Office with
refugees, asylum seekers and migrant rights activists holding banners,
while dealing with rude hand gestures from vehicles passing by, shouting
at us to ‘get a fucking life’ or that we ‘deserve to be deported to ISIS’.
It is no surprise, then, that the aesthetics of selfie normalcy is appeal-
ing, and comforting, to so many activists – and indeed, is a form of self-
care that should not be dismissed. I realised right after the Christmas
dinner described in the opening of this piece, that the woman who was
taking photos of us eating and talking was not just taking photos for
posterity sake; unconsciously, it seemed, she was using her selfies with
other activists who attended the dinner, as well as some group selfies, to
show how normal we are as an activist group so violently disparaged by
right-wingers and those invested in settler colonialism. Our neat appear-
ance, animated faces and smiles became something for those consuming
these images to see us in a relatable light; no different from any other
person who attends a festive holiday occasion. Yet, in posting those
selfies on Facebook, tagging individuals photographed in addition to
the location of our dinner party, her act of reclaiming the everyday
normalcy could also endanger and mark us for the very police surveil-
lance we are facing, and resisting.
SAYING NO TO VISIBILITY AND YES TO ETHICAL SELFIES

This is not to mean that selfies and activism cannot merge. However, we
need to think of ways of using selfies that engage with self-care, protecting
those at the margins of society who are often victimised by both state and
vigilante violence. Here I am taking my inspiration from Aria Dean, who
interrogates the racial dynamics of selfie feminism which continues to

position positively white passing, young, cisgender and able-bodied
women (Dean 2016). Dean then explores the content of Black feminist
selfies, and the ways they critique the racist and misogynoir issue of gaze
while refusing to be visible. As Dean rightly notes, ‘In 2016, catapulting
our selves [sic] into circulation as image-fragments no longer makes for a
resistance or revolution’ (2016: n.p.) In thinking of selfie activism, to
remain unseen is a direct conversation to the racialised politics of surveil-
lance that Browne has expounded upon that has criminalised and restricted
the voices and politics of Black and PoC communities. After all, at the
protest outside the swanky British department store, my face did not make
the difference, rather it was the importance of my placard’s message.
Selfie activism does not have to be solely about the face or the body in
order to count. It can, and should, also be about the message that one is
attempting to convey, even when – especially when – one decides to
remain unseen. A hand covering the face, a face hidden by a banner or
placard all are at times even more powerful and politically subversive, for
they point to the very surveillance, the very structural oppressions that
are used to silence our critical interventions. For activists, in a time of
constant discourse around self-care, it is crucial that we position this not
as individual but as community care, especially in protecting those of us
from the very surveillance that fuels the violence against our bodies and
our work. Otherwise, we are strengthening the very surveillance that
marks the Black and PoC activist bodies that are actively resisting this
branding every single day.
REFERENCES
Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Dean, A. (2016, 1 March). Closing the loop. The New Inquiry. http://thenewin
quiry.com/essays/closing-the-loop. Accessed 11 May 2016.
Franklin, D. (2016) Why Deray Mckesson’s Baltimore campaign looks like it
comes right out of teach for America’s playbook. Alternet. http://www.alter
net.org/news-amp-politics/why-deray-mckessons-plan-baltimores-schools-
looks-it-comes-right-out-teach. Accessed 15 May 2016.
Nair, Y. (2016). Suey Park and the afterlife of Twitter. Yasminnair.net. http://
www.yasminnair.net/content/suey-park-and-afterlife-twitter-0. Accessed 11
May 2016.
158 S. RAJI
White, M. (2010). Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism’, The Guardian. http://

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/clicktivism-ruining-lef
tist-activism. Accessed 15 May 2016.
Woods, B. (2016). Baltimore mayoral primary: Catherine Pugh wins as DeRay
McKesson struggles. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/
2016/apr/27/baltimore-mayoral-primary-catherine-pugh-wins-deray-mckesson.
Accessed 25 November 2016.
Wooten, J. (2016). Deray: Who sent you and who will you serve? KineticsLive.
com. http://kineticslive.com/deray-who-sent-you-and-who-will-you-serve/.
Accessed 15 May 2016.
Sanaz Raji is an independent scholar and activist, who campaigns against the
neoliberalisation of higher education, racism, migrant rights, and the culture of
surveillance affecting migrants, Black, PoC, Muslims and the disabled. Sanaz
established the Justice4Sanaz campaign three years ago after experiencing institu-
tional racism and victimisation that contributed to her being forced off her PhD
studies. She also helped to established #UnisResistBorderControls, a campaign
against UK Visa and Immigration surveillance of international students, lecturers,
and university worker, particularly those who are Black, Muslim and PoC. She is a
published author and writer in the field of Iranian diaspora studies, critical race
studies and social media. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Tehran
Bureau/PBS in addition to academic journals and books.
Epilogue
CHAPTER 17
On the Ethics of Looking
JB Brager
Abstract Brager asserts that the selfie as a practice and product both
presents itself as novel and references a long history of self-portraiture
and self-representation that must be read critically, contending with race,
gender, class and sexuality. Brager focuses on the ethical implications
of looking, approaching the selfie via questions of visibility, celebrity,
narcissism, representational politics, violence and erasure in order to ask
questions about spectatorship and consumption in a cultural moment of
selfie obsession.
Keywords Ethics Spectatorship Representational violence Virality

Consumability Being political
We are producing more images than ever before – the eye is pulled from
image to image in the endless scroll of social media. The selfie emerges
within the media feed as a mundane product in an overwhelmingly satu-
rated visual field. As a practice and a product, it is marked by concerns of
virality and fame, but also surveillance and legibility within the always
already exclusionary rubric of the human as a visual project.
JB Brager (*)
Women’s & Gender Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
e-mail: j.brager.art@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_17
162 JB BRAGER
In this current moment, the selfie is a flashpoint in conversations about

self-representation because it is, in its specific iteration, the product of a
particular and new technological move; the smartphone, the front-facing
camera, even the selfie stick. The question arises – in relation to refugees
who send selfies to loved ones after a successful ocean crossing, activists in
the streets, prisoners in solitary confinement who have not seen their own
faces for decades, perpetrators of State and non-State committed terror – of
who gets to have a smartphone, whose selfies are mocked, venerated or
maligned. The selfie as a product constructs a consumable subject within
rubrics of humanitarian sentimentality. The failure of humanitarianism as a
sentimental project, then, becomes a failure to see violence when it is
happening, against certain populations, and also a failure to see certain
populations as anything other than victim, wholly lacking agency.
The selfie as a representational politic marks a particular technological
moment but also a longer struggle. Contemporary contestations around
selfie politics are productively read, for example, within histories of
intersectional writing about Black women artists. In the essay In Search
of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker wrote of the ‘genius of a great-
great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white
overseers lash’ instead of making the art that she might have made or
whose work hangs in a museum under the nom de plume ‘anonymous’
(Walker 1983). This might frame conversations about selfies as part of a
much older discourse, about who has the ability to represent themselves
and who is always represented by others, and the material effects of such
representational violence.
When looking at the selfie – critically, ethically – one is forced to ask
where we are looking from, as well as who we are looking at, within
political frameworks of visibility, hyper-visibility, erasure and misrepresen-
tation. Because of these ongoing representational violences, conversations
about selfies and citizenship are not easily separated from conversations
about selfie narcissism. A relationship emerges along lines of familiarity or
consumability between the selfie and these much older discourses, about
the location of racialised and gendered bodies within the representational
violence of modernity. Aria Dean, in the 2016 article ‘Closing the loop’,
describes the ways in which, in no time at all, the ‘life- and difference-
affirming politic [of the selfie] . . . whittled itself down to its most palatable
iteration’, particularly around the reification of whiteness (Dean 2016). In
tracing which selfies go viral within the networks of likes and shares online,
which selfies lose followers, which selfie-takers become celebrities and
17 ON THE ETHICS OF LOOKING 163
which selfie-takers are marked for death, which selfies are viewed as sexy
activism and which are viewed as undesirably political, a set of questions
and answers emerges about the relationship between the selfie and poli-
tical selfhood.
Who is allowed to have politics and who is expected to always already
be political? What privilege is there in the ability of a selfie-taker to not be
political? Who is labelled as narcissistic and who is not allowed to be
self-centred? Who is expected or made to feel shame around the ‘bad
behaviour’ of selfie taking? Who will be captured within disciplining
rubrics, who is subject to violence and then to reprimand? The selfie, as
definitionally a self-portrait that is specifically uploaded, that is shared in
networks of social media, does not necessarily constitute, produce or
follow from a politic but rather may function as a cipher or avatar – we
upload already marked bodies and existent political contestations, we are
captured by old and entrenched ways of looking at each other.
REFERENCES
Dean, A. (2016, 1 March). Closing the loop. The New Inquiry. http://thenewin
quiry.com/essays/closing-the-loop/. Accessed 1 March 2016.
Walker, A. (1983). In search of our mothers’ gardens: Womanist prose. San Diego,
CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
JB Brager is a writer and illustrator, and a PhD candidate in Women’s & Gender
Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Their research contends with visual
and material archives of violence, contested narratives in the aftermath of genocide
and crimes against humanity, as well as ethics and representation in contemporary
photography and art.
INDEX
A disaster recalled with, 120–123

Activism, self-expression and, 54 effect of camera phone agency, 120
Affectiva, 92 emergent modes for life,
Affective citizenship, 14 extension of, 120
Altruism, 56 emotional performance, 120
Art works, in(ter)jection into, 4 grief, collective role of, 121
Autonomy, institutionalized grief and emotion, relationship
formats and, 56 between, 120
intimacy, magnification of, 120
jeong, concept of, 122
B
memorialisation process,
Baey Yam Keng (Singaporean
participation in, 122
MP), 76, 77, 84
misrecognition, 123
charismatic engagement, 75–85
numbness, 123
digital presence, 77–78
online memorials, 121
digital vernaculars, use of, 84
posthumous practices
‘human touch,’ voter
with, 119–123
acknowledgement of, 84
selfie agency, localization
personal branding, 81
of, 123–124
strategic selfies, 78, 81
selfie performativity, 122
vote for my selfie, 75–85
Sewol disaster, 121–123
voter reactions to, 81
shock, trauma, memorialization
Black and white bodies, 4
and grief, beginnings
Bodyscan video, 94
of process of, 121
Bullying, 56
CamFind, 94
Celebrity management, 66
C Celebrity performances,
Camera phones styles of, 68–71
bereavement literature, 121 Chupacabra Selfie Project, 137–145

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8
166 INDEX
Chupacabra Selfie Project (cont.) connective actions, social media

anonymous participation, civic and, 51–53
form of, 138 as consumption, 52, 53
collective representation and voice, cultural citizenship, notion of, 33
self-less selfies and, 138 Dahlgren’s focus on, 32–33
construction of ‘bad’ digital citizenship, selfies
immigrants, 140 and, 114–115
criminalization, 140, 141 fun and, compatibility of, 57
Deferred Action for Childhood gender-based violence,
Arrivals (DACA), 139 citizenship and, 131
Deferred Action for Parents of global citizenship, notion of, 41
Americans and Lawful Permanent individual articulations of,
Residents (DAPA), 139 importance of, 32
dehumanization, challenge to, 138 Isin’s notion of, 23
digital artivism, 139, 141 media citizenship, 52–57
disenfranchisement, challenging notion of, 16, 23, 130
exclusivity and, 142 patriotic messages of, 32
expansion of film, 144 performance through selfies of, 23
first film screening, 143 performative citizenship, 23, 26
Guerrilla Girl, 138, 141–142 political and ethical complexities
humanity, assertion through surrounding, 43
selfies of, 138, 143 practices and acts of, distinction
immigrants other than human, between, 34
notions of, 139, 141 selfie campaigns and double
immigration laws, changes in, 139, approach to, 53
140 selfies and, 17, 162
individuals highlighted, 142 self-reflections on, 31
polarization, 140 social and media citizenship,
selfie genre, re-appropriation by ‘actualization’ of, 54–56
undocumented immigrants, 138 social citizenship, 52
self-less selfies, 138, 141–142 social exclusion, inequality and, 131
social justice, critical engagement social theory and, 57
with, 141 ‘speaking out’ and, 50, 129
subject identities, masking of, 141 teen identity, social and cultural
topics highlighted, 138, 140, 142 citizenship and, 53
Zapatismo, spirit of, 138 trauma recognition, citizenship
Citizen journalism, 26, 42, 46 and, 129, 130
Citizenship See also ‘Dronie’ citizenship;
acts of, survival and, 131 Selfie citizenship; Selfies
affective citizenship, 14 Clicktivism, 153–156
approach to, 53 Collective memories, construction
biometric citizens, 16, 89–95 of, 31
INDEX 167
Connective actions, logic of, 51 ‘otherie’ practice of, 100

Consumer-oriented machine vision panoramas, focus on, 99
systems, 92 persons, depiction of, 99
Criminalisation, 4, 156 pleasure in use of, 103, 104
Cultural citizenship, notion of, 33 politics of verticality, 100, 101, 103,
Cutiebpocs, 4 104
privacy of people, deprivation by, 102
social defence, military drones
D and, 101
Democratic rights in Pakistan, 22 surveillance, vertical politics of, 102
Digital Innovation at Manchester tracking, aerial methods of, 101
Metropolitan University, v verticality, aspect of, 99–101, 103
Digital media, event mediation vertical visibility, power of, 102
through, 32 view from above, interpretation
Digital petitions, 155 of, 98, 100, 101, 103
Digital technologies, adaptation xeno-technicality, 100
of, 16, 40 zooming effect, 99
DiversifyMyEmoji campaign, 50, 51, 56
‘Dronie’ citizenship, 16, 97–104
case for, 103–104 E
gendered stratification of ‘dronie’ Emotient, 92
users, 103 Everyday life, traumatized subjectivity
political implications of, 98 in, 128
proposal for, 98 Expression analysis software, 92
selfie evolution and, 98
Dronies
aesthetic genealogies of, 98 F
aesthetic practice, perception Facebook
of, 100, 102 facial recognition algorithms, 92
citizens under drones, 104 influence of, 66
citizens with drones, 104 messaging on, 55
civil rights, ‘cynegetic war’ and in Singapore, 77
deprivation of, 101 Facial recognition techniques, 15,
‘cynegetic war’ and, 101 90–92, 94
ego-technical appropriation, 99, Facial recognition technology, 92
101, 103 Focus group discussions, 32
empowerment by, 100, 102
genealogies, 98–100
hijacking surveillance, 102 G
images, reception of, 99 Gadget-affine blogosphere, 98
landscape, focus on, 99 Gender identities, 4
miniaturisation of drones, 98 Global Poverty Project, 51, 52
168 INDEX
H M
Habitus, Bourdieu’s concept Machines, vision of, 90
of, 34, 35 MakeItHappy campaign, 51,
Hashtag Solidarity 53, 56
and the Transformation Media censorship, fear of, 22
of Online Life, 60 Media events, 16, 29–35
Hashtivism, 154, 155 diversity of experiences of, 31
Homonormativity, 14 Media techniques, celebrity
Homophobia, 143 representation and, 67
Homosexualität Exhibition, Schwules Micro-media, major effects
Museum, 3, 14 and, 31–33
Humanitarianism, failure of, 162 Mobile devices, event mediation
through, 31, 32
Mobile technology, 22, 120
I Modernity, representational
Instagram violence of, 162
celebrity politics
on, 66–68
influence of, 66 N
infrastructure of, 68 Narcissism, 41, 50, 56, 123, 162
International Journal Nationalism, 32, 40
of Communication, 41 Nepal, earthquake in, 40–43
Internet access in Pakistan, 22 Dharahara Tower, representations
Interpretation of messages, of, 40, 44, 46
Chinese acuity in, 35 digital technology, role in response
Invisibility, politics of, 27 to, 40
Iris scanning, 91 mobile media, role in response
Islamic Republic of Iran to, 41
defence of people in, 60 online campaigns following, 40, 43
networking of people in, 61 selfies, acts of ‘bad’ global
political co-option citizenship with, 39–46
of selfies, 61 selfies, acts of ‘good’ global
relevance of people in, 60 citizenship with, 43–44
selfies and networking in, 61 selfies and responses to, 40, 43
sloganeering, 61 selfies, global phenomenon of, 41
social revolt in, 61 selfies, good and bad in bearing
viral content of selfies, 61 witness, 42
selfies, ‘other’ and, interplay
between conceptions of, 40
L selfies, reposition as political
Locational search, 32 action, 41–42
Looking, ethics of, 161–163 selfies, selective imagery in, 44
INDEX 169
selfies, viral tragedies and dangers R

of, 41 Racist erasure, undoing of, 14
selfie-takers, public outcry about, 44 Radical activism, cosmeticism in, 155
visual representation, limits and Rape victim-survivors, Project
possibilities of, 42 Unbreakable and, 127–135
witnessing tragedy in digiital age, 42 activist selfies, power of, 129
Normalcy, aesthetics of, 155 affective politics of being
moved, 128–129
childhood sexual abuse, survivors
O of, 131, 132
Oppression by inclusion, 142 citizenship, acts of, 129–132
citizenship, notion of, 130
emotion in survival, 131
P feminists, rape threats to, 133
Pakistan Movement for Justice (PTI) gender-based violence, citizenship
Freedom March, 21 and, 131
Pathologisation, 4 hetero-patriarchal capitalist
Peer knowledge sharing, 54 societies, 132
People’s Action Party (PAP) in messages from selfies, 129
Singapore, 76 naming individuals, 128, 129
Perception, management of, 90 networked reflective solidarity,
Performative citizenship, 23, 26 articulation of, 132
Performative styles, 68 networked reflective solidarity,
Performative turn in online political victim-survivor selfies
communication, 66 and, 132–135
Personal autonomy, 56 poverty, sexual violence and, 132
Photographic harassment, 152 selfie activism of, 128, 130
Photography, development of, 91 selfies, visual (and fleeting) nature
Photo tagging of, 130
permissionless, 149–150 sensitivity of subject, 128–129
Police spying, 153 sexual violence, shattering illusions
Political identity, active performance about, 134
of, 27 social exclusion, inequality and
Politicised use of selfies, 14 citizenship, 131
Post-optical time, 90 speaking out, notion of, 129, 131
Privacy, Bauman’s perspective on, 97 survivor faces positioned alongside
Privacy, rights to, 151 words of rapists, 128
Project Unbreakable, 127–129, 133 survivor rage, disruptive potential
Protest policing, 14, 149 of, 133
Public areas, rights of photography survivor selfies, 128–135
in, 151–152 survivor testimony, 129
Publicness, performative view of, 50 timing of posts, 129
170 INDEX
Rape victim-survivors, Project emancipatory qualities of, 153

Unbreakable and (cont.) ethical selfies, saying yes
trauma recognition, citizenship to, 156–157
and, 132 of everyday life, 11, 68
victimhood, survivorhood and, 130 ‘family’ selfies, 26
victim-survivor as activist citizen, funeral selfies, 111–112
re-articulation of figure of, 135 gestural imagery and, 23
Real Eyes, 92 global phenomenon of, 41
Representational violence, material good and bad in bearing witness, 42
effects of, 162 at Holocaust sites, 110
humanity, assertion through selfies
of, 138
S indexicality of, 91
Selfie activism, 17, 128, 130, 133, Instagram selfies, 26, 51, 67
135, 153, 155, 157 inter-celebrity connectivity, 68–70
Selfie citizenship, 13–18, 40, 137–145 intimacy in, illusion of, 72
analysis of, 22, 24, 66 ‘me me’ generation and, 50
biometric governance and, 15 messages from, 129
Selfiecity project, 93 mobile witnessing by, 112
Selfies mobilisation of, 14, 15
activist selfies, power of, 129 as moment of complex
acts of ‘bad’ global citizenship negotiation, 115
with, 44–45 multifaceted messages in, 115
acts of ‘good’ global citizenship narcissism and, 50, 56, 162
with, 43–44 networked reflective solidarity,
at Auschwitz, 45, 110, 111 victim-survivor selfies
as avatars, 163 and, 132–135
azadimarch on Instagram, 22–27 networking in Iran and, 61
backgrounds in, 25 nonrepresentational aspects of, 90
celebrity activism in, 154–156 ‘other’ and, interplay between
celebrity selfies, 67, 70 conceptions of, 40
as ciphers, 163 out of place, 109–116
citizenship and, 17, 162 parenthood, depictions of, 71
civic awareness and, 49–57 payment-by-selfie system
collective representation and voice, (Mastercard), 91
self-less selfies and, 138 performance through selfies of
constant circulation of, 66 citizenship, 23
definition of, 163 performative force of, 23, 26
digital citizenship and, 114 performative view of publicness
disciplinary perspective on, 60 and, 50
documentary moments in, 110–112 performativity and, 122
Dosomething.org and, 50, 52–54 perspective of, ethics and, 46
INDEX 171
phatic communion and, 67 virtual communities of, 55

on pilgrimage to Mecca, 111 visual (and fleeting) nature of, 130
placemaking selfies, 110–112, 114 youth self-expression and, 50
political co-option of, 16, 23 Selfie taking, 14, 77, 163
politician as celebrity in, 68–70 motivations for, 27
politician selfies as charismatic Selfie visibility, 17
engagement, 75–85 Self-witnessing, digital citizen
politician’s use of, 67 and, 109–116
politicised use of, 14 Sexuality, 4, 134, 143
power of place in, 110–111 ShowYourSelfie campaign, 51, 54–56
premeditated management of, 68 Singapore, media climate in, 76–77
promotional potential, 15 Smartphones
quotidian collective, alignment usage in Singapore, 77
with, 59, 60 See also Camera phones
reposition as political action, 41–42 Sociability, production
as representational politic, 162 and maintenance of, 67–68
responses following Nepal Social context, fragmentation of, 52
earthquake to, 43 Social interaction, new forms of, 66
selective imagery in, 44 Social sorting, 98, 101
selfie activism, alternative Social spectatorship, 34
possibilities for, 17, 23 SuperStressFace campaign, 50,
selfie-based gamified 54–56
entertainment, 16 Surveillance
self-less selfies, 138, 141–142 active vigilance against, 151
self-representation in, 100, 162 pervasiveness of, 153
self-witnessing aspect of, 109–116 politics of being unseen
sexually provocative selfies, and, 149–157
resistance against, 94
Snapchat selfie lenses, 93
social capital and sharing of, 17 T
social space and, 112, 114, 115 Taking It Global, 53
strategic selfies, 78, 81 Technocultural affordances, 22
‘street view’ selfies, 24, 25 Tiananmen Square, 29, 30,
survivor selfies, 128–130, 33–35
132–135 media manipulation in, 34
of Swedish politicians, 66, 68 reflections on V-Day celebrations
thematic change in, 30 in, 31, 33
time-lapse selfies, 93 Time Magazine, 50
tracing effects of, 162 Transbodies, 4
V-Day selfies in Beijing, 29–35 Transphobic erasure, undoing of, 14
viral content of, 61 Twitter
viral tragedies and dangers of, 41 BlackLivesMatter hashtag, 154
172 INDEX
Twitter (cont.) V
CancelColbert hashtag, 154 Visual protesting, refusal of
influence of, 76 engagement in, 152
messaging on, 55 Visual Social Media Laboratory, v
NotYourAsianSideKick
hashtag, 154 W
self-branding on, 99 WeAreAble campaign, 51, 56
in Singapore, 78
Y
U Youth campaigns, 50
UpdateYourStatus campaign, 51, 56 categorisation of, 50

(Adi Kuntsman (Eds.) ) Selfie Citizenship

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Selﬁe Citizenship

ISBN 978-3-319-45269-2 ISBN 978-3-319-45270-8 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955854

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: Modern building window © saulgranda/Getty

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The discussion about selﬁe citizenship began at the Selﬁe Citizenship

1 Inject/ed: Self(ie) Determination 3

2 Introduction: Whose Selﬁe Citizenship? 13

Conversation I Acts of Selﬁe Citizenship

3 Performing Citizenship: Freedom March Selﬁes by

4 V-Day Selﬁes in Beijing: Media Events and User Practices

5 Selﬁes for/of Nepal: Acts of Global Citizenship and

6 Youth’s Civic Awareness Through Selﬁes: Fun

7 The People: The #Selﬁe’s Urform 59

Conversation II The Selﬁe Genre and Its New Adaptations

8 Performative Intimacies and Political Celebritisation 65

9 Vote for My Selﬁe: Politician Selﬁes as Charismatic

10 Biometric Citizens: Adapting Our Selﬁes to Machine Vision 89

Conversation III Selﬁes and the Politics of In/visibility

12 Selﬁes, Self-Witnessing and the ‘Out-of-Place’ Digital

13 Visual Afterlife: Posthumous Camera Phone Practices 119

14 Like a Stone in Your Stomach: Articulating the

15 Selfless Selfie Citizenship: Chupacabras Selfie Project 137

16 ‘My Face Is Not for Public Consumption’: Selﬁes,

17 On the Ethics of Looking 161

Fig. 1.1 (a–f) ‘Inject/ed: self(ie) determination’, selected images/

Inject/ed: Self(ie) Determination

Keywords Transgender Queer of colour Haunting Whiteness

In response to ‘The Homosexualität_en’ exhibition at Schwules museum,

© The Author(s) 2017 3

As I walked through the guided tour of the art exhibition at the

Fig. 1.1 (a–f) ‘Inject/ed: self(ie) determination’, selected images/selﬁes from

Fig. 1.1 (continued)

Fig. 1.1 (continued)

Fig. 1.1 (continued)

Fig. 1.1 (continued)

Fig. 1.1 (continued)

Introduction: Whose Selﬁe Citizenship?

Abstract In the introductory chapter, Adi Kuntsman presents the con-

Keywords Visibility Intimate citizenship Dataisation Biometric

© The Author(s) 2017 13

governance of intimacies and performed feelings, or ‘acts of citizenship’

gesture or a vital format of citizen political mobilisation. Contributors in

technologies’ violent origins and their current and future dangerous

and contestation rather than that of playful celebration. By examining the

Adi Kuntsman is Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK,

Acts of Selﬁe Citizenship

Performing Citizenship: Freedom March

Abstract Drawing on a close reading of ‘Freedom March’ selﬁes, published

Keywords Selﬁe Citizenship Performance Instagram #azadimarch

© The Author(s) 2017 21

organised as ﬁnal action following a series of smaller rallies. It was subse-

SELFIES: A CITIZEN RIGHT AND A DIALOGICAL GESTURE

fashion and touristic content. Therefore, selﬁes published under #azadi-

#AZADIMARCH: FRIENDS, WOMEN AND FAMILY

documents a signiﬁcant shift in attitude of Pakistani citizens towards demo-

acts to be developed in different ways. In this case, freedom march selﬁes

V-Day Selﬁes in Beijing: Media Events

Gabriele de Seta and Michelle Proksell

Abstract Zipai, or ‘taking a picture of oneself’, is an extremely popular

Keywords China Media events Media practices Micro-media