Exploring our selfies, exploring ourselves

Today I will be exploring Instagram as a photographic platform and the special feminist potential it has for young women attempting to formulate a self-hood.

Young people - especially young women - have been tirelessly condemned as self-centered, vain, superficial and over-involved with their technologies. I believe that these arguments leveled against us fail to recognize the ways in which technology has become integrated with daily life and communication, with how you know and mediate yourself.

The Selfie is the epitome of self-involvement; it is the distilled photographic interaction between the camera and the self. Model and photographer become one, flowing through the photographic apparatus. I argue, though, that self-involvement can be a good thing. Obviously, taken too far it becomes ignorance, apathy and true self-centeredness. But a healthy involvement with your own being, your psyche, your ontological presence in the world can lead to examinations of your prejudices, beliefs and feelings. I have looked at a selfie, thinking how bad I look, only to realize that I am engaging in something much broader, a political discourse about beauty, the value of myself as an object to be looked at, and where I should find my true self-worth. Self-involvement means understanding who we are in the world around us.

Instagram, as an almost purely photographic realm (though captions are a fine art in themselves), provides a new, unique way of probing this epistemological journey. A selfie turns into something much more powerful when posted.

Photographs, since their invention, have been used to attempt to access the truth, especially of the Other. Photography, as theorist Roland Barthes claims, has "referential contingency," meaning the person in the photo must have been there, and we look for some essence of them, some trace of their living being in their photos. He even touches on, in his book, Camera Lucida, an experience we are all familiar with: finding a picture that you feel perfectly encapsulates your friend's personality. Sometimes, though, it's your own being you see on the screen - you encounter yourself in a photo and, for once, feel like it says something about you beyond that you existed in that space at that time. That feeling is an extremely powerful one that we, and the bashers of the selfie, take for granted.

The world is unfriendly for the young female psyche. Online hate messages, inappropriate pictures sent unsolicited, sexual assault threats abounding, and the ever-present media telling us we should be skinnier, prettier, taller, girlier, more self-disciplined, better dressed, more sexually active, less sexually active. Girls know, from a young age, that the digital space around them , may be about them, but it is certainly not for them.

The hatred of the selfie must be based on the presupposition that the masculine look has more truth in it than the feminine look, that men can mediate images of women and create truth. A male image of a woman (see: every art museum ever) is called a masterpiece, a true, beautiful vision of femininity as it is. This means that belief is founded on the assertion that women have no right to know themselves or mediate images of their own femininity - and certainly not without being called silly, dumb, or vain.

On Instagram, though, a young woman can easily flip this process on its head. Most phones have a camera and Insta is totally free, making it an unbelievably democratic platform. You can take pictures however you want, wherever you want, with or without makeup; you can express your gender and sexuality however you want (barring explicit photos). You can create an archive that shows the multiplicities of the female self, how it is performed differently day-to-day, moment-to-moment, breaking free of the perfect, still, silent image of a woman touted by museums and advertisements alike. The power of curatorship also comes along with an account - deciding who can see pictures, whose pictures you want to see, when your photos go up and in what order.

Young women can finally take back their images and the fundamental representational power of taking, mediating, and circulating them. Of course, no platform is ever safe from being unnecessarily flagged or hacked, but, more so than the rest of the internet, Instagram creates a safer space in which women can express themselves, see themselves differently, and connect with other like-minded young women. I have Instagram role models who keep me strong in the face of intolerance and hateful messages, who remind me to be supportive of other women but also of myself.

One selfie may not start a revolution, but a generation of women who love themselves unabashedly and represent themselves how they see fit certainly could.

~UCG~