Selfie Aesthetics Form Performance And Transfeminist Politics In Self Representational Art

Selfie Aesthetics: Form, Performance, and Transfeminist Politics in Self-Representational Art analyzes selfies by trans women and transfeminine artists to reveal how they produce new ways of being and relating in the digital era. Looking beyond how selfies are usually read-as a symptom of cultural narcissism or as a liberatory tool of self-actualization-my dissertation reveals a more complicated set of political, theoretical, and aesthetic issues within this contemporary self-representational mode. Combining readings of individual images with accounts of selfie spectatorship, I identify four key themes that constitute "selfie aesthetics": the visual rhetoric of doubling, an ambivalence toward the logic of visibility, interventions into the archive, and the production of posthuman intimacies.