Jenae Cohn, J.J. Sylvia IV, Lauren Rae Hall, Bridget Sweet, Annie Fee, Stephen Groening, Magdalena Olszanowski, Lev Manovich, Jill Rettberg, and Theresa Senft
HASTAC forum: February 19.
Publication year: 2015

The “selfie,” a photograph taken of and by the same person, is a surprisingly malleable genre. Selfies can be taken of one person or of groups, at different angles, in different environments. The photographer-subject can be clothed, intending to showcase their OOTD (“outfit of the day”) or nude, aiming to entice romantic partners. The filters offered by popular platforms like Instagram can make a selfie appear as if it was taken forty years ago. The image geotagging feature of most cell phone cameras even allow users and viewers to use selfies to track the subjects’ daily whereabouts. There are also “selfie” offshoots: “belfies” are of photographer-subjects’ derrieres and the primary subject of “lelfies” are legs. In recent years, the selfie has become something more than a means to capture a look or moment; selfies, in all their forms, have been deployed for a variety of creative and critical purposes.

This forum takes up the hows and whys of selfie creation and circulation, paying special attention to the ways selfies act as a means of asserting agency in a variety of different contexts. Our hope is to combine perspectives on gender, sexuality, and surveillance as well as historical selfie precursors and the use of selfies in the classroom into one concentrated, scholarly forum. In our minds, the benefit of this forum over a scholarly article is that it can showcase the many ways the purposes and functions of selfies clash and create new configurations of creativity and power.