Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art

by Nicole Erin Morse

Overview

In Selfie Aesthetics Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore transition, selfhood, and relationality. Morse contends that rather than being understood as shallow emblems of a narcissistic age, selfies can produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers. Through close readings of selfies and other digital artworks by trans feminist artists, Morse details a set of formal strategies they call selfie aesthetics: doubling, improvisation, seriality, and nonlinear temporality. Morse traces these strategies in the work of Zackary Drucker, Vivek Shraya, Tourmaline, Alok Vaid-Menon, Zinnia Jones, and Natalie Wynn, showing how these artists present improvisational identities and new modes of performative resistance by conveying the materialities of trans life. Morse shows how the interaction between selfie creators and viewers constructs collective modes of being and belonging in ways that envision trans feminist futures. By demonstrating the aesthetic depth and political potential of selfie creation, distribution, and reception, Morse deepens understandings of gender performativity and trans experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478022756
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/18/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	17 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Nicole Erin Morse is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Table of Contents

Prologue The Monster by the Pool  vii
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction  1
1. Doubling  23
2. Gender Performatives and Selfie Improvisatives  50
3. Visibility Politics and Selfie Seriality  74
4. Selfie Time(lines)  96
5. Trans Feminist Futures  115
Coda  136
Notes 139
Selected Bibliography  163
Index  175

What People are Saying About This

Damon Young

“Nicole Erin Morse’s trailblazing book theorizes the social labor of the selfie, which is created in order to be shared. Far from a symptom of narcissism, the selfie emerges in Morse’s rich readings as a complex aesthetic object that mediates new forms of social practice and ethical demand. Morse rethinks key concepts in queer and trans studies to show how transfeminine creators mobilize digital technologies not only as a means of self-empowerment but to generate collaborative encounters.”

Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender - Cáel M. Keegan

“By giving nuanced, close attention to selfies as texts and political gestures and speech, Nicole Erin Morse intervenes in the common understanding of them as flat expressions of narcissism. They illustrate how transgender creators complicate simple appeals to visibility politics through the use of selfies to construct multiple, shifting articulations of the self. With its sustained investigation of trans feminine aesthetic digital practices, this compelling book will appeal to audiences in art history, queer theory, trans studies, media studies, and cultural studies.”

Editorial Reviews

"Emphasizing how the selfie expresses and creates relations of various kinds, Selfie Aesthetics is a theoretically sophisticated addition to a body of scholarship that has increasingly, over the last decade, emphasized the selfie as a set of social practices."

Journal of American Studies - Alix Beeston

"Arriving on the scene at a moment of politically charged vitriol aimed towards trans people, Morse’s book presents a prescient intervention for reckoning with the materiality of the now as well as the trans futures to come. . . . By focusing on the formal techniques through which selfies are realized, Morse urges viewers to zoom in on the quotidian, to remain open to the possibilities hidden beneath algorithmic and capitalistic demands, and to critically examine the seemingly fixed and determined capacities of self-representation, self-reflexivity and self-constitution."

Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Drew Gonzales

"Morse’s book not only expands upon the theoretical importance of trans selfies but is a project of political necessity in its insistence that trans lives must, without equivocation, translate into tenable futures where security and equality can be affirmed."

Film Quarterly - Francesca Romeo