Selfie Aesthetics - by Nicole Erin Morse

About the Book

Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans women feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore how selfies produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers in ways that envision trans feminist futures.

Book Synopsis

In Selfie Aesthetics Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore transition, selfhood, and relationality. Morse contends that rather than being understood as shallow emblems of a narcissistic age, selfies can produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers. Through close readings of selfies and other digital artworks by trans feminist artists, Morse details a set of formal strategies they call selfie aesthetics: doubling, improvisation, seriality, and nonlinear temporality. Morse traces these strategies in the work of Zackary Drucker, Vivek Shraya, Tourmaline, Alok Vaid-Menon, Zinnia Jones, and Natalie Wynn, showing how these artists present improvisational identities and new modes of performative resistance by conveying the materialities of trans life. Morse shows how the interaction between selfie creators and viewers constructs collective modes of being and belonging in ways that envision trans feminist futures. By demonstrating the aesthetic depth and political potential of selfie creation, distribution, and reception, Morse deepens understandings of gender performativity and trans experience.

Review Quotes

"Arriving on the scene at a moment of politically charged vitriol aimed towards trans people, Morse's book presents a prescient intervention for reckoning with the materiality of the now as well as the trans futures to come. . . . By focusing on the formal techniques through which selfies are realized, Morse urges viewers to zoom in on the quotidian, to remain open to the possibilities hidden beneath algorithmic and capitalistic demands, and to critically examine the seemingly fixed and determined capacities of self-representation, self-reflexivity and self-constitution."--Drew Gonzales "Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty" (5/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"Emphasizing how the selfie expresses and creates relations of various kinds, Selfie Aesthetics is a theoretically sophisticated addition to a body of scholarship that has increasingly, over the last decade, emphasized the selfie as a set of social practices."--Alix Beeston "Journal of American Studies" (5/7/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"Morse's book not only expands upon the theoretical importance of trans selfies but is a project of political necessity in its insistence that trans lives must, without equivocation, translate into tenable futures where security and equality can be affirmed."--Francesca Romeo "Film Quarterly" (12/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Nicole Erin Morse is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.