Consensual sexual selfies: everyday exposure in teen girl media

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite its everydayness, girls’ digital exposure is often conceived as scandalous. Concerns about the potential of leaked nudes to “ruin” a girl’s life are part of a long history of moral panics about girls and technology that mask fears about the public expression of female sexuality. Much teen media, however, counters this panic by exploring the social and technological dynamics at play in practices of sending sexual selfies. This article analyzes teen magazines and TV series to map the alternative mainstream discourse through which girls might frame their practices of self-exposure. Teen media incorporates the exposure built into everyday technological interactions in ways that allow girls’ consensual sexuality to exist, visibly, as everyday. Magazines like Rookie and Teen Vogue and series like Riverdale and Pretty Little Liars employ such discourses in ways that often protect the hegemony of white femininity, even as they defend girls’ right to privacy and expose the unique consequences of exposure queer girls. Teen media begins to offer alternative discourses of young women’s sexual selfies that are aligned with the social and technological realities of digital culture, and which girls can mobilize to deconstruct exclusionary norms of privacy and visibility.