Flashing Your Phone: Sexting and the Remediation of Teen Sexuality

Abstract

This essay offers an account of “sexting's” cultural value and social uses by examining celebrities' production and distribution of sexual imagery on Twitter. It argues that as a result of technological convergence and the prevalence of social media, teens and celebrities are using “candid” images of their sexuality to remediate themselves in a fashion that generates a specific form of user-generated capital. Ultimately, this perspective is used to argue that the anxiety surrounding high school-age sexters has less to do with teens documenting their sexuality than it does with the ways that new forms of text-based media articulate the libidinal status of teenage sexuality in contemporary culture.