Full Description
The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways.
This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a site to explore the themes of self-making, place-making, gender, subjectivity, and power. Highlighting the specific contexts of production, the authors examine the array of self-expressive capabilities realized in a multitude of uses of the selfie that simultaneously reconfigure the self, the space, and the world.
An important study of visual social media culture, the volume will be useful for interpreting everyday media experiences and will be of interest to students and researchers of image studies, visual studies, photography studies, visual culture, media studies, culture studies, cultural anthropology, digital humanities, popular culture, sociology of technology, and South Asian studies.
Contents
1. Introduction 2. Still/moving images: Performing masculinity and making place in Delhi's ' hotspots'3. Probing 'Insta-worthiness': Siting the Selfie 4. Putting the selfie to work: Image making and work/ time discipline in the margins of the Indian state 5. Posthumous selfy memory: Fan identities and the making of superstars 6. Creating and curating the performing object: Self-making on #Bookstagram and #Inktober
