Sylvia Pritsch

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet /décembre / 2014 -julho/dezembro 2014

– on the difficulties of constructing ethical forms of life under queer-feminist perspectives

The article describes an ambivalent relationship between Foucault’s concept of the aesthetic of existence as technology of the self and queer-feminist approaches based on the technological (and/or networked) self. A comparison of the Foucauldian form of the ethos of the self with that developed by the historian of science Donna Haraway in the 1990s show remarkable differences concerning the programmatic impacts that seem to vanish in later concepts of the networked self. Finally, it asks how the forms of technological selves discussed could be used to assess a current contested technology of the self: the selfie.

The work of Michel Foucault figures prominently in feminist debates about the issue of subjectivity. His notion of disciplinary power and its subjecting forces in the context of (neo)liberal governmentality have especially been used as starting points for gender-orientated analyses of modern subjectivities. The question of whether Foucault’s concept of the aesthetics of the self, developed in his later texts around The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (Foucault 1990, 1988, 1988a), should be adopted as a queer/feminist strategy, has been asked for at least 25 years and is still contested: some theorists feel that this problemization of the self seems to be too individualistic to be used for strategies of resistance against domination.

Lois McNay has criticized the underlying rationality of the ethics of the self as an “isolated aesthetic autonomy” (1992: 180) that appears too atomized to be able to explain how individuals’ actions may contribute to a radical reworking of social practices. For this purpose, norms seem to be indispensable. Especially in light of neoliberal rationalities, McNay qualifies the practices of the self as too close to the conception of the self as enterprise to represent an alternative to neoliberal governance (McNay 2009, 57). Foucault described the homo economicus as a form of subjection under neoliberal governmentality that produces the self in an entrepreneurial logic that is oriented towards competition, efficiency and self-responsibility.[1]

Others have seen new chances for developing queer-feminist subject positions and critical practices on the basis of ethical practices of freedom described by Foucault (different approaches in Taylor and Vintges (eds.) 2004). Recently, these practices have been reclaimed as perspectives on feminist strategies in the past, as well as for the future (McWhorter 2013), or as a central part of a queer feminist project that is “[…] aimed at opening up possibilities for thinking and being, testing the limits of the possible” (Sawicki 2013: 87).

Underlying these approaches are different interpretations of the Foucauldian concept of the self: does the aesthetic approach reflect a rupture compared to the concept of the (disciplinary) subject, produced by and completely involved in power structures (and, as such, not capable of articulating domination)? Or is it, on the contrary, more adequate to deal with figures of power within postmodern, neoliberal discourses, because power has changed its character from repression towards punctual emergence of power constellations so that new feminist strategies are required (see McWhorter 2013: 72f)?

Both attitudes assume a grounding difference between conceptions of biopower or disciplinary power, by which Foucault described processes of subjugation and aesthetics of existence that seem to allow self-fashioning as an act of relative freedom. Foucault also supported this interpretation when he presented technologies of the self as a set of practices that

“[…] permit individuals to affect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves” (Foucault 1988: 18).

But beyond the apparent strengthening of the individual through self-styling, Foucault clarified that the productive act of self-formation does not tell, in itself, anything about its effects, which could likewise be normalizing, disciplining or contrary.

Meanwhile, philosophical discourses began to accept the insight that Foucault had not proposed a mere individualized aesthetization of the self while neglecting power effects, but rather added the analysis of self-practices as a third dimension in order to describe different historical conditions of the constellations of subject, knowledge and power (with reference to Foucault 1982 :777f). Technologies of the self as such can be seen as ambiguous within Foucault’s texts, as they are described as different practices of internal and external ways of governing and producing a self in different historical contexts by different power constellations. In this genealogic perspective, self-determination, responsibility, freedom of choice, or other characteristics of the autonomous (emancipatory) subject could also appear as instruments of neoliberal governmentality (Lemke et.al. 2000: 29f), which has made it difficult for feminists to easily adopt this approach.

An uneasy adoption of some key elements took place in texts written by Donna Haraway, a feminist historian of science, in the 1980s and 1990s. In retrospect, her approach is important here in two regards. First, it can be read as an (implicit) translation of the Foucauldian ethos, a concept of critically questioning the being of the self and its conditions and related self-technologies. At the same time, the Foucauldian perspective is extended by technoscientific developments that ground conceptualizations of the technological, networked self. Second, the appropriation and changes of Foucauldian terms shaped some general differences between Foucault’s technologies of the self and queer-feminists ones. Finally, a current and contested technology of the self will be introduced: the selfie. On the basis of the aesthetics of the self and the form of the technological self, some queer-feminist research perspectives will be sketched.

A way of reflecting critical thinking and acting that is also widely accepted within queer-feminist contexts is Foucault’s request of a critical ontology of ourselves. In What is Enlightenment? (1984), Foucault appropriated a certain notion of the modern attitude of Enlightenment as a starting point for reflecting upon the present. He described such an attitude as a philosophical ethos, an activity guided by a “limit attitude.” By “ethos” or “attitude,” he referred to a “[…] mode of relating to contemporary reality” that should take shape in “a permanent critique of our historical era” and that occurs “through a historical ontology of ourselves” that enables transgression:

“[…] it has to be conceived of as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (ibid, 41f: 45).

Critical inquiry is to be aimed at using breaks with the totality of hegemonial norms and such to open up “spaces of freedom” (Foucault 1997: 283) that enable transformations. Here, two strategies are important: on the one hand a refusal of “what we are” and a kind of fading out normalizes discourses by cutting and silencing and, on the other hand, a pluralization of discourses disempowers the hegemonial ones (see Foucault 1982, esp. :. 182; for the latter Foucault 1984).

Foucault described these hegemonial discourses along the constellations of subjugating disciplinary power of domination, normalizing and productive forms of biopower in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and liberal or neoliberal governmentality under the leading ideas of competition and efficiency. Foucault identified the underlying rationality as instrumental, legitimized through modern legal, scientific, and religious discourses. Code-orientated morals ground universal laws to which the knowing subject has to subject itself in order to become (Foucault 1984: 37).

In contrast, Foucault found a model of alternative rationality in the ancient world, where questions of morals (such as how to lead a good life) and aesthetic techniques for organizing one’s life were not based on universal codes or on the divided individual, as the modern ones are. In various texts around The Use of Pleasure (Foucault 1990), he described a model of “ethic-orientated” morals that emphasize the practices of self-care organized around pleasures instead of the prevalence of symbolic codes and the question of truth and desire. This understanding of the self differs clearly from the modern one, as the other plays an important role in the constitution of the self, so that the self in not based on a strict split between subject and object, inside and outside. In effect, the self appears neither as an identity based on a substantial core nor as a self-determining agent, but as a space of styling, une forme de vie (“a way of life”) that enables the alterations of self-relations and the inventions of new forms (Foucault 1997a).

Against the dividing practices of modern power, Foucault thus set aesthetic practices and a corresponding philosophical ethos that links the self, the other, and the world together in common nets of knowledge production. This ethos entails some formal guidelines for ensuring responsible dealings with the self and the world that do not fall back on misleading questions about universal or personal truth; instead it favors a critical, relational, contextualized, and plural understanding of the self that gains shape through its historical framework which, simultaneously, is the key to deferring its own conditions.

The absence of programmatic concepts has made an adoption of the aesthetic of the self difficult within feminist discourses. Alternatively, Donna Haraway, the famous feminist historian of science, developed the figure of the feminist cyborg in the mid-1980s. This can be seen as an embodiment of a feminist normative program in adoption of the productive character of power and with similarities to the ethos described by Foucault. On an ontological level, the cyborg is an articulation of existence under postmodern conditions:

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (Haraway 1991 : 150).

With that then-provocative statement in her Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway marked a fundamental breach created by the melding of science and technology under late-capitalist conditions.

In certain aspects, Haraway’s story of technoscience can be read as a postmodern continuation of Foucault’s history of the modern episteme. It is characterized by a new quality of productive power named technobiopower that works through a rationalized mode of production under the auspices of cybernetics (Haraway 1997:12). Haraway asked for the construction of reality through the logic of technobiopower—applied and distributed by biotechnology and technologies of information—and for new regulations of identities through technoscientific practices (ibid., 51).

She picked up the Foucauldian critique of instrumental logic for her criticism of the technoscientific logic of combining heterogeneous living and non-living elements under the regime of feasibility, regardless of ethical or other reservations. Haraway supposed the effect to be an “implosion” of dichotomies of order, mainly those of nature/culture, human/animal and organism/machine. She theorized that they would lead to new hybrid modes of existences like the cyborg, not only in the laboratory but also in everyday life, as demonstrated by people wearing implanted pacemakers or working at a computer terminal, or by pop-cultural icons such as the Terminator (Haraway 1991, 151f). In sum, the cyborg is an embodied artifact as well as a metaphorical figure that demonstrates the contemporary conditions of existence and thus works as a basis for the construction of feminist selves. Haraway proposed that “[…] the cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code” (ibid.: 163).

Like Foucault, Haraway did not want to return to a stable subjectivity, but to an analysis of possibilities of existence. She described a self characterized by differences in a way that we would now call intersectional: by the overlapping of multiple relations within and between dominant forms of gender, sex, ethnicity, class, cultural and other identities which add to, substitute for or contradict each other. Multiplied in different texts, figures of the cyborg constitute, on an epistemological level, an analytical and critical stance concerning sociotechnological developments. Figurations and narrations play an important role in the socioconstructivist approach proposed by Haraway:

“Figurations are performative images that can be inhabited. Verbal or visual, figurations are condensed maps of whole worlds. In art, literature, and science, my subject is the technology that turns body into story, and vice versa, producing both what can count as real and the witness to that reality” (Haraway 1997: 179).

The power of images is described in a socioconstructivist framework as the productive power of creating world-views and of interpellating subjects into being. The reference to Althusser underlines the subjugating force of discursive structures that is comparable to Foucault’s disciplined subject. Figuration can thus be understood as a technology of the self in both senses: it produces the subject-object by subjection and appellation and it provides self-identities on the basis of hybridity and construction attributed to self-reflection.

Similar to Foucault, Haraway used the image of the net to describe power relations and to figure agency, cognition and experience as a collective practice of creating relations in which meanings emerge. Instead of the traditional entities of ‘subject,’ ‘object,’ or ‘society,’ we now find structural networks of ‘knots’—figured as ‘cyborgs’—that can be reworked over and over again by linking their elements to different nets (Haraway 1997: 272). Through this model of networking, which is similar to Foucault’s practices of knowledge (taken over by Latour, to whom Haraway refers directly), Haraway evades the assumption of an outside or of determining hierarchical organizations in favor of strengthening interstices and breaches.

In contrast, the freedom of creation here is limited: the feminist selves are not seen to exist in a pure, rather formless form, but are linked to what is estimated to be their determination: to become social beings structured on the basis of sex and gender. In this context, a formal understanding of the net that is judged only by its possibilities for enabling or disabling connections—meaning that plurality becomes a value in itself—seems no longer adequate, so Haraway finally returns to modified normative principles. But the early narrative of the “political myth, faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” (1991: 147) is at risk of being as teleological as the modern salvation history it should counter. Later, a modified constructed standpoint claims a privileged perspective based on a “vantage point” defined by principles of responsibility, situatedness, embodiment, and relatedness (Haraway 1997, 35f).[2] In the discussion about the necessity of norms and their subjugating impacts, Haraway’s decision was finally in favor of norms.

Thus, the cyborg can be read as the figuration of a modified ethos in the Foucauldian sense: as a practice and an attitude of a self that is directed towards the production of gendered knowledge about the world. Different from Foucault, the autonomous subject is not (or not only) transformed into a self-shaping, permeable form, but is turned into a platform for collectivity. The constructed collective self—or the collectively constructed self—based on ethical principles, is the agent of social change that comes into play as an antidote to totalizing and individualizing power effects.

Donna Haraway’s texts have been inspiring within feminist discussions, as they not only criticized contemporary sociotechnological developments but offered new perspectives of empowerment through feminist self-constructions and the use of technological improvements. The controversial debates about cyberfeminism in the 1990s and early 2000s bore witness to that (see, e.g. “Women and New Media”, n.paradoxa Vol 2. 1998). While, on one side, exclusions (“gender gap”) and repressive effects were highlighted, a certain affinity between women/feminists and digital media was projected onto different technologies and devices. Early mailing lists and virtual chatrooms, homepages and, later, social networks and messaging services have not only been used to build feminist networks in a pragmatic sense, but have also been seen as media that open up new possibilities of empowerment and feminist self-building. The basis for both is the concept of the self-determined subject of enlightenment, which either profits in regards to self-fulfillment or appears to be robbed of it (Paulitz 2005 : 12).

Instead, conceptualizations of digital media as technologies of the self provided a fruitful approach also for feminist discussion, as they avoid unilinear descriptions of subjugation. Self-constitution in and through media technology has been analyzed as a productive process that treats individual and collective efforts of self shaping seriously. In this context, Tanja Paulitz described new forms of networked subjectivities, based on empirical research into different electronic networking platforms (including a feminist one) (Paulitz 2005, 2007).

The “social self” results from the “dispositive of the net” that works through discourses of knowledge that build the framework for the development of internet technologies, as well as forming subjectivity. In Paulitz’s perspective of co-construction of technology and—individual as well as collective—selves, networking technologies appear to be technologies of the self in a Foucauldian sense (Paulitz 2005: 21). They appear to be fundamentally ambivalent: While networking is an important element of feminist practices for self-empowerment and political change, it has become important as a social resource under neoliberal conditions (ibid.: 35f) and works as a form of governing the social self. The economic aspect was described as the efficiency of the working net, whereas the openness lies in freedom of choice of partners and forms of interactions (ibid.: 268).

As these technologies and the produced subjects are clearly situated in the tension between economic requirements and self-empowerment, the Foucauldian spaces of freedom can also be localized here. Following Paulitz, the networked selves gain their agency simply through the interwovenness of efficiency and freedom. As a result, the power articulated by these practices cannot be described as repressive or liberating, but as contextual forms of the social self.[3] In an instructive way, Paulitz demonstrated (with and against Foucault and other approaches since Castell, 1996) how the net-self has advanced to a favorite form of the self through actual practices. But how these practices can be qualified in a queer-feminist understanding—the question Haraway would not have left open—still remains to be discussed.

Another technology judged by its fans to be “a hallmark of modern pop culture” (Tatum 2014) appears similarly ambiguous: the technology of using digital cameras or mobile phones to take self-portraits, called selfies. Interestingly, the public, mostly academic, blog debates do not question—or explain how—the practice of taking and posting photos of oneself would be a matter of self-technology in a broad sense. Primarily, the discussions widespread in blog posts and online articles are about how it should be qualified, often described in Foucauldian terms of a disciplining, subjugating truth-regime or powerful self-styling.[4]

Taking selfies— largely practiced by female-identified teenagers and women—can also be reclaimed as queer-feminist technology, as is shown in some examples of internet activism. The #365FeministSelfie campaign joined the idea of taking one photo of oneself each day over one year and publishing it on different social media channels and proposed it as a collective practice of and for women. Veronica Arreola, who initiated this campaign on her blog Viva La Feminista at the end of 2013, highlighted the positive aspects of selfies as an answer to sharp criticism of selfie practices as not only narcissistic but harmful for girls: Critics assert that selfies reduce girls to decorative objects, make them accustomed to “immediate e-validation” and foster dependence on it (Ryan 2013). In contrast, Arreola argues that selfies offer new possibilities for people who “rarely see themselves reflected in media,” such as women of color, “people over a size 4” or transgender persons. With a similar intention, a Twitter campaign was started under the hashtag #feministselfie; it shared the assumption that “the selfie is an aesthetic with radical potential for bringing visibility to people and bodies that are othered” (Eler 2013).

In these discussions, a feminist attitude is associated with empowerment (“One of the most empowering elements of selfies is choosing how you represent yourself to the world,” cecylik, n.d.), self-expression, and self-esteem. This not only results from visibility as such, but also from being the subject of the photography process that controls publishing and being able to break the norms of visibility like “beauty” by showing “real women” (Bennett 2013, Arreola 2014).

The practices of selfies can be seen as veritable aesthetic care of the self in the Foucauldian sense of developing a set of practices that enable individuals to modify themselves. Feminist modifications aim toward first-line, new ways of self-perception that lead to independence through a self-confident way of conduct and “self-love” (see Tatum 2014). The internet offers rules and instructions for these practices, such as:

“Try to integrate selfies into your self-care routine. If you’re feeling down, put on your favorite outfit, attempt a new hairstyle, or just make a funny face. Do whatever feels right” (ibid.).

The photo image serves multiple functions in the selfie discourse. On one hand, it provides the classical mirror function that supports identity in the shape of autonomous subjectivity (see Silverman 1996, related to photography Brandes 2010: 29ff). In addition, it has become an educational assignment, an instrument for styling one’s behavior in correspondence to this presentation of subjectivity. The character of the image might then be modified in the sense of not being understood as an authentic representation of oneself, but as an authentic self-construction that is addressed to oneself and to others.

On the other hand, the photo image appears not as an image and a substitute for face-to-face communication, but as the speech act itself: “In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say ‘Hello, this is me.’”(James Franco, see Arreola 2013). There appears to be an increase in the assumed documentary function of photography (see Brandes 2010, 72ff): it is used not only to document ‘authentic’ reality, but to perform it. The instrumental understanding of self-production by use of photos under the conduct of an autonomous subject—that itself constitutes in this way—does not come into view.

In contrast to a practice of taking explicitly “positive selfies” (Arreola 2013), this technology has been described as repressive: instead of giving girls control about their self-expression (Bennett, 2014), the possibilities are sometimes seen as limited: “selfies are developing a kind of quick-start grammar that arranges poses and situations in formulaic ways” (Morrisson 2014). The supposed benefit of selfies as “social currency” (Bennett 2013) that is used as a kind of social capital in visual cultures has been countered by referring to norms of social belonging that must be fulfilled while proving to be a “good consumer of images of other, of learning how to discipline your subjectivity into preset representational moulds” (Morrisson 2014).

Regarding the structure of digital markets, the idea that we have control of our photos is claimed to be illusory (Murphy, 2013). Instead, photos risk being circulated among spectators (especially male) and even becoming commercial pornography. The women who take these selfies—far from being self-determined—often try to fit into these marketable pictures and objectify themselves by overtaking the male gaze in order “to stake a claim in the dating and mating market” (Ben Agger, ibid.). In this perspective, the statements defending a positive or feminist use of selfies are often qualified as “simple emancipatory narratives that conflate use of a self-documenting technology with self-awareness” (Losh, n.d.).

This criticism implies the importance of taking broader contexts into consideration. These contexts should not only include the traffic of photos, but also the impacts of publicly posted photos in regard to surveillance practices and biopolitical taxonomies.[5] On the other side, these contexts may include previously neglected aspects that are not adequately expressed by terms like “narcissism” or “self-repression.” So impulses can be observed towards community-building that transgress individuals’ orientations toward mutual support in their everyday lives, accompanied by an emphatic affirmation of women and women-identified persons who become “friends” based on their common passion for selfies (Arreola 2014). This can—and has been—cautiously linked to former feminist strategies such as consciousness-raising and “finding a voice” (Bennett 2013).

Moreover, from a Foucauldian perspective, positive sefie-practices can be seen as an attempt to pluralize the selfie discourse with the possibility of gaining breaches and spaces that can be appropriated. An ethos can, at best, be implicitly found in expressions of appreciation for the diversity of women’s lives or for the joined actions of giving and receiving images (see articles and comments on Viva La Feminista). Programmatic statements (i.e., in the sense of a feminist cyborg ethos described above) are rarely able to be found.

Returning to the starting point of this analysis, I would ask how the Foucauldian critical ontology of ourselves can be used to analyze selfie practices. Foucault proposed the historical analysis of forms of the self in order to understand their limits (see 1.). The net(worked) self seems to be an appropriate description of actual forms of life under reconsideration of their technological constitution. It is (i.e., in Paulitz’s approach) deeply interwoven with the Foucauldian homo economicus, the form of subjection under neoliberal governmentality (see above). As a classification in “liberating,” “repressive” or “normalizing” effects, it would be too simplistic; a model of co-construction of social, economic, and digital technologies seems to be useful. This would also provide an analytical framework for the practice of taking selfies. By understanding selfies as a technology of the technological self—in the sense of a networked self—key concepts of the discourse could be seen in a differentiated manner and analyzed in relation to a production of a self that also fulfills feminist requirements as neoliberal ones.

Coincidentally, “empowerment” thus might also appear as a strengthening of the autonomous subject as a community-building force. “Visibility” can reclaim public space and/or proliferate practices of classification and surveillance. “Self-estimation” might lead to collective consciousness-raising processes and designate practices of evaluating one’s worth in relation to different markets.

Such an approach could analyze the interrelatedness between the diverse aspects in public discussions. However, it still leaves the question of how to decide between practices of freedom that are reclaimed for a queer feminist project “aimed at opening up possibilities for thinking and being, testing the limits of the possible” (Sawicki 2013: 87), and practices that do not. This persistent question cannot be disposed of by referring to the productive character of power that fabricates selves under certain historical conditions by different technologies.

In Technologies of the Self (1988), Foucault distinguished the technology of signification as a different mode than technologies of the self that install relations between the self and sociopolitical institutions. This could be a starting point to link the queer-feminist research of powerful meaning productions by images to a Foucauldian analysis of power (see Pritsch 2004, 2008, 129, 410). In this context, the powerful production of subjectivity through images and photography, theorized widely in queer-feminist research of visual culture, has to be taken into account.

Related questions could be: How is the relationship shaped between self and selfie? What does it mean to identify with the self as other? And, with regard to Haraway: How does the self come into being through the means of the selfie? What kind of figuration power can be observed? The historical dimension must also be questioned: How are the portrayals linked to a history not only of objectified (or abjected) female bodies, but also of identifying and classifying photographs constructing bodies of “the other” (i.e., via mug shots; see Brandes 2010, 76ff)?

Already the choice of view (e.g., profile, front, whole body) and the composition of the image imply gendered, racialized and other norms. Here it is not enough to verify that selfies reproduce and create norms by poses; nor that ruling beauty norms are countered by “ugly faces”, posted on different net-channels. Rather, it must be asked how these relate to cultural archives of images that rule the possibility of presentation in the field of visibility (see Silverman 1997, esp. 49). In this context, also the productive or restrictive force of different channels plays an important role, in addition to that of technical and social filters in the form of apps (e.g., for mug shots) or “likes” (Rittberg 2014, Morrisson 2013). What is at stake here, is a fundamental questioning of the of power/knowledge relations concerning the technology of the selfie in order to identify possible spaces of freedom.

Apparently, the existence of Foucauldian spaces of freedom became less obvious under the current neoliberal régime; nevertheless, they are still important as they remind us of the limits. The Foucauldian questions—What are the limits? What is not necessary?—help us concentrate attention on whom or what has been left out. Different forms of queer-feminist ethos of the self would fill in the gaps using their own guidelines – as Haraway did by the cyborg-ethos; as McWhorter has done by identifying practices of freedom based on a common combat against oppressive structures (2013, 71); as Sawicki has proposed by experimental queer practices (2013, 87) and many more already have explored. In effect, the Foucauldian terms are not—and never were—unmediated and easy to adopt.

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.”Women and New Media” n.paradoxa international feminist art journal,. Vol. 2 (July) 1998.

Sylvia Pritsch, PhD, is a research associate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Women and Gender (ZFG) at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg and a lecturer in Gender Studies/Cultural Studies. Her research interests include (postcolonial) Gender Studies, concepts of community in different media, and theories of text and culture. Her latest publications addressed concepts of community in German and French literature (“Gemeinschaft in der Literatur,” ed. together with M. Brink, 2013) and different cultural forms of migration from gender perspectives (“Wanderungen,” ed. together with A. Pherson, B. Paul, M. Unseld, S. Wenk, 2013). Her dissertation addressed concepts of postmodern/feminist subjectivity (“Rhetorik des Subjekts” 2008).

[1] Foucault (2008), summarized by Sawicki (2013, 82f): “Within this regime of power/knowledge, individuals are encouraged to differentiate themselves, be responsible for themselves, and govern themselves within a legal and social framework structured to regulate and promote competition. Active self-governance replaces submission. Furthermore, neoliberal governmentality can accommodate a range of social differences and values within its flexible market mechanisms. It operates at a distance from individuals, conducting their conduct from afar (consider marketing strategies used within Google or Amazon) rather than within myriad and costly disciplinary institutions focused on developing and training individuals.”

[2] For the construction of queer-feminist standpoints and a discussion of the modification of Haraway’s story about the “feminist-socialist antiracist cyborg” (1991) towards a more open and liberal version on the basis of a utilitarian ethic that seeks freedom “rooted in the reinvented desire for justice and democratically crafted and lived well-being” (Haraway 1997:267), see Pritsch 2004.

[3] In this context, Sawicki's proposition to divide practices of freedom from their economic senses (2013) seems to be unrealistic, as the described network platforms would not exist in these forms (or would have been created unpaid).

[4] (see the article posted by hcdavi11 2013 or “An open Letter [..]” at the site Making Selfies/ Making Self; see for the discussion also The Selfie Researchers Network, www.selfieresearchers.com, Rettberg 2014.)

[5] Here attention should be pointed to the actual developments of selfie technology. “Selfiecity” is a project of selfie taxonomies with a focus on their styling in different cities (see also Losh n.d.).

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet /décembre / 2014 -julho/dezembro 2014