On the ethics of looking

Abstract

Brager asserts that the selfie as a practice and product both presents itself as novel and references a long history of self-portraiture and self-representation that must be read critically, contending with race, gender, class and sexuality. Brager focuses on the ethical implications of looking, approaching the selfie via questions of visibility, celebrity, narcissism, representational politics, violence and erasure in order to ask questions about spectatorship and consumption in a cultural moment of selfie obsession.