“Why Does She Have to Wear Make-up? She Looks Better Natural!” Staged Photos and Sexual Subjectivities

Abstract

ABSTRACT As women’s sexy selfie-making practices have burgeoned, so too have popular and feminist discourses of concern about them. One aspect of concern is that they are inauthentic or ‘unnatural’ presentations of self − where naturalness is assumed to be an aspirational western feminine ideal. I argue that naturalness discourses are operationalised to reinforce long-standing, classed ideals of feminine sexual presentation which marginalise some self-representations and legitimise others. In the large volume of academic work on selfies and the power structures which regulate women’s bodies, little attention has been paid to the intersection of women’s sexuality with class and the aesthetic codes which function as limits for women whose sexy selfies fall outside the norms of feminine acceptability, read in class terms as respectability. This article emerges from a project which examines the aesthetic components of the sexualisation debates through the co-creation of images between a professional photographer (myself) and women who take amateur sexy selfies.