In Visual Culture Studies: Approaches to the Selfie, edited by Derek Conrad Murray

Due to their ubiquity, immediacy and relative democratization, selfies have become the primary venue for the production, as well as the dissemination, of intersectional and hybrid trans and non-binary self-representations. Selfies are not only significant in that they facilitate otherwise unseen representations of trans and non-binary corporealities, but they challenge how we have come to define gender, photographic practices and conceptions of portraiture. To assess the impact of trans selfies on the constitution of identities, contemporary photography and art theory, this paper builds upon intersectional methods forwarded by feminist visual theorists and brings together trans studies with photography theory, art history, gender studies, and critical race studies.

As the visual field of trans and non-binary selfies continues to develop–a variety of complex, shifting, amorphous and ever-augmenting gender options emerge and expand. Bringing Judith Butler’s conception of gender and Alexander Weheliye’s formulation of racializing assemblages to bear on trans and non-binary selfies this paper argues gender and racialization are relational, co-constituted and contingent. This paper further argues how via these shifting ideological frameworks statuses of relative humanness are sutured to bodies via visual encounters, and as such, it is precisely in trans and non-binary selfies that these processes are emphasized and investigated.

Trans and non-binary selfies are engaged in performative self-portraiture on par with contemporary photographic practices, examining the limits of representations and identity formation. Trans and non-binary selfies underscore that any denigration aimed at selfies is due to the redistribution of imaging power that selfies facilitate, not due to any lack of conceptual or artistic rigor.

Building on postcolonial theories of photography and feminist visual theory I observe how selfies imaging transitioning subjects highlight the inability of a singular image to reveal the sitter. Transitioning selfies accentuate how the Euro-American conception of portraiture–rooted in the notion portraits possess revelatory potential–is ill-conceived and outmoded. In conclusion, I argue trans and non-binary selfies invite rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship, to redefine portraiture and self-portraiture based on the conceptual rigor of a work regardless of its means of production.