Selfie Aesthetics

“By giving nuanced, close attention to selfies as texts and political gestures and speech, Nicole Erin Morse intervenes in the common understanding of them as flat expressions of narcissism. They illustrate how transgender creators complicate simple appeals to visibility politics through the use of selfies to construct multiple, shifting articulations of the self. With its sustained investigation of trans feminine aesthetic digital practices, this compelling book will appeal to audiences in art history, queer theory, trans studies, media studies, and cultural studies.” - Cáel M. Keegan, author of Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender

“Nicole Erin Morse’s trailblazing book theorizes the social labor of the selfie, which is created in order to be shared. Far from a symptom of narcissism, the selfie emerges in Morse’s rich readings as a complex aesthetic object that mediates new forms of social practice and ethical demand. Morse rethinks key concepts in queer and trans studies to show how transfeminine creators mobilize digital technologies not only as a means of self-empowerment but to generate collaborative encounters.” - Damon Young, Associate Professor of French and Film and Media, University of California, Berkeley

"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

"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

"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