Fun, flirtation and fear : selfies in teenage girls digital exchange cultures

Abstract

This paper explores teenage girls' engagement with digital images on social media. Using new feminist materialism, we foreground digital images as an assemblage of materialities (human and more-than-human) filled with affective potentials that materialise in/capacities. Drawing from interviews and focus group discussions, we show how the production and sharing of selfies through posting and sexting unlocked new ‘becomings’ through expressions of heterosexual desirability and pleasure but also generated fear through sexual objectification, sexual double standards and harassment. A recognition of digital images as materially embodied through which unequal gender power relations materialise is vital to addressing online sexual risk.