MirrorCameraRoom: the gendered multi-(in)stabilities of the selfie

Abstract

This paper proposes benefits of the entanglement of feminist new materialist theory with post-phenomenology. The paper focuses on an empirical study of interviews using photo-elicitation with four young women to document their lived experiences producing self-images to share via social media. Drawing on post-phenomenology, the cellphone is discussed as a multi-stable technology wherein the selfie is experienced at once as a mirror, a camera, and a window to social media platforms. But this paper also draws on glitch feminism, which, via metaphors of technological failure, challenges ossified conceptual boundaries between the body, desire, and technology. Through this coupling the paper suggests that what are identified as corporeal, photographic, and performative glitches by the participants are worked out, thereby erasing any experiential delineation between mirror, camera, and cellphone. Whereas post-phenomenology often refrains from examining the complex power dynamics that shape technological–human relations, this paper argues that such dynamics are crucial when examining gendered technological phenomena like selfies. Contributing empirical data to recent post-phenomenological work on cellphones, this paper details the gendered material-discursive dimensions of the selfie via the work of contemporary feminist new materialist thinkers.

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