Compilation of Selfie Culture

ENG / CSCT 708 | McMaster Vanessa Liegghio

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Queer and Proud - it truly is an honour, above all else, to be a part of this big, beautiful community built upon Love. Happy Pride 2019! 

I have chosen this as my final post for this project as it serves as a form of diverse representation, particularly through potential embodiment and identity performance. In December 2018, Marvel Studios released Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a new take on our traditional idea of “Spider-Man” as Peter Parker. In this remodel, team Spider-Verse is instead made up of five members, each of which is a unique and varied version of the hero “with great responsibility” in their own respective worlds/realms. 

The team is comprised of Miles Morales / Spider-Man: An intelligent yet rebellious teenager of African-American and Puerto Rican, Peter B. Parker / Spider-Man: Miles's reluctant mentor who is intended to be an amalgamation of all pop culture Spider-Man adaptations and interpretations, Gwen Stacy / Spider-Woman: A dimension-displaced counterpart of Gwen Stacy with spider-like abilities, who takes up the alias of "Gwanda" while at Miles' school, Peter Porker / Spider-Ham: An alternate funny animal version of Spider-Man from an anthropomorphic universe, who was once a spider, bitten by a radioactive pig, Peni Parker / SP//dr: A young Japanese-American girl from an alternative anime-like universe who co-pilots a biomechanicalsuit with a radioactive spider that she shares a telepathic link with, and finally [pause to catch breath], Peter Parker / Spider-Man Noir: A dark and monochromatic alternate version of Peter Parker from a 1930s universe. - Thanks to Wikipedia for the run-down.

The film’s takeaway (at least from my experience) exemplified strength in difference as each hero has a particular strength that adds to their ultimate triumph. Each are strong individuals who come from wildly different backgrounds, all capable of equally important contributions to their collective fight to save humanity, under the same banner.  

If only this lens could be applied to much more in the world... a queer lens of sorts, that celebrates strength in difference and fights against divisive rhetoric and regimes.

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“Communicative capitalism subsumes communication into digital networks premised on access and immediacy. Almost any feeling, image, or thought can be shared with another, instantly added to the larger flow of feelings, images, and thoughts. In this setting of ubiquitous media, where we are enjoined to participate, contribute, and share – and where we enjoy participating, contributing, and sharing – the means of literary and artistic production, reproduction, and distribution have converged. The technologies we use to communicate and create push our ideas and images into networks and onto screens. That the camera is a phone tells us that images are for communicating” (Dean 2016).

Yet... it’s still a blatant form of capitalism. Where do we draw the line? This example was brought to our attention by Shannon: the Twitter account @SheRatesDogs posts screenshots of abusive or appalling digital interactions from men, towards women. Although this may present as a form of resistance and reclamation, the account creates merchandise based on phrasing from particularly “popular” posts. Is this not an exploitation of women’s lived experience as targets of sexual violence, just in alternate form?

Dean, Jodi. “Selfie Communism.” Images Without Viewers, 2 Feb. 2016.

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Zendaya sees double at Madame Tussauds San Francisco

[ivanv]

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“Reality Stars: The Musical.” RuPaul's Drag Race, season 9, episode 5, VH1, 21 Apr. 2017.

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Darth Vader and two Stormtroopers take a group selfie - Disneyland Paris

[dorkyshidae]

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Violet Chachki - Season 7 Crowned Queen of RuPaul’s Drag Race

"Butler (1991) recognizes that while selves are constituted in discourse, they can be re-constituted or reconfigured differently in encounters with different, new, imaginative discursive arrangements (18), which can include new categories or alternative names and norms of identity encountered online" (Cover 59).

Cover, Rob. “Becoming and Belonging: Performativity, Subjectivity, and the Cultural Purposes of Social Networking.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, edited by Anne Poletti and Julie Rak, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014, pp. 55–95.

[universe-wallpapers]

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“[...] the transmutation approach, strategies for transmuting race in cyberspace reprise some of the discourse about identity and performativity that was often associated with Judith Butler "it seeks racial pseudonymity, or cyber-passing, in order to disrupt the very notion of racial categories. By adopting multiple racialized identities in cyberspace, identities may slowly dissolve the one-to-one relationship between identity and the physical body" (Nakamura 2).

Nakamura, Lisa. “Cyberrace.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 5, Oct. 2008, pp. 1673–1682., doi:10.1632/pmla.2008.123.5.1673.

[ladytoska]

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Sasha Velour - Season 9 Crowned Queen of RuPaul’s Drag Race and fan at DragCon

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Shuri and Tiana are Queens in their own right!

[luciarusso321-blog]

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“In a New York Times editorial, Malte Spitz noted that Germans, sensitized by the surveillance states of both Nazi Fascism and East German socialism, no longer trust President Obama. For six months Spitz published 35,830 pieces of metadata on himself that he downloaded from T-Mobile. The informa- tion, published online in Die Zeit, demonstrated how every aspect of his life and travels was visible with “just metadata” (Cover 93).

Cover, Rob. “Becoming and Belonging: Performativity, Subjectivity, and the Cultural Purposes of Social Networking.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, edited by Anne Poletti and Julie Rak, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014, pp. 55–95.

[tranzjohndoe]

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Yondu “let me take a selfie” Udonta

“Fitting with Braidotti’ s critique of the (humanist) human, we suggest that biopedagogies’ resolutely didactic scripts serve to produce the archetypal (masculine, cisgender, white, non-disabled, middle class, straight) citizen and autonomous human subject under neoliberal capitalism. Those considered [O]ther to this limited conceptualization of humanity are positioned to fail, never fully enacting the bodily selves of biopedagogical scripts” (Rice et al. 668).

Rice et al. “Pedagogical Possibilities for Unruly Bodies.” Gender and Education, 2018, vol. 30, no. 5, 663–682, 10.1080/09540253.2016.1247947.

[starsberrisnunicorns]

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#ItsTheRemake

[derekblairart]

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@derekblairart | www.instagram.com/derekblairart

Spideypool

[luciarusso321-blog]

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“The critical reflex is to dismiss selfies as yet another indication of a pervasive culture of narcissism. I disagree. The narcissism critique approaches the selfie as if it were analyzing a single photograph. It views the person in that photograph as the photograph’s subject. Selfies, though, should be understood as a common form, a form that, insofar as it is inseparable from the practice of sharing selfies, has a collective subject. The subject is the many participating in the common practice, the many imitating each other. The figure in the photo is incidental” (Dean 2016).

Dean, Jodi. “Selfie Communism.” Images Without Viewers, 2 Feb. 2016.

[marvel]

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Marvel Studios, Marvel Studios: Hero Acts is donating more than a million dollars to Make-A-Wish America and Starlight Children’s Foundation to help strengthen the lives of children impacted by serious illness. Learn more at wish.org and starlight.org. #DisneyTeamofHeroes

[deputypigeon-blog]

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“Importantly, and in contrast to Duguay, I argue that such investigations that take as their foundation those queer subjectivities that depend upon the straight dollar for their income will find only the reproduction of dominant ideals under palatably queer terms. Such investigations are therefore better focused on those subjectivities and individuals who reject any such heteronormative intelligibility outright” (Burbage 5).

Burbage, J. “ Modern Queers Require Modern Solutions: Subversions and affordances of Queer Instagram.” ENG/CSCT 708: Selfie/Culture. McMaster University, 14 May 2019.

[pippy92]

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“Building on this argument, we find that for [I]ndigenous peoples this enables communities to control the content of information that is about them (Niezen 2009), that social media may further provide an opportunity for groups to assert their own identity (Iseke-Barnes 2002), and that it widens and deepens engagement in their activist projects” (Rodgers and Scobie 71).

Rodgers, Kathleen, and Willoq Scobie. “Sealfies, Seals and Celebs: Expressions of Inuit Resilience in the Twitter Era.” Interface: a Journal for and about Social Movements, vol. 7, no. 1, May 2015, pp. 70–97.