UC EVENTS

7 November 2023
7:00 PM – 8:00 PM (AEDT)
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (EET)
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CET)

Abstract

The presence and visibility of the self, particularly its political potential, has received renewed attention in our era of ‘hypervisibility’ (Butler 2015, 56). Smartphones with high-quality cameras paired with an increasingly visualized social media (Hand 2020) have given rise to forms of politicization where the visibility of the self in public makes a political argument. In addition to bodies assembling in demonstrations (Butler 2015) or demanding to have a voice in political institutions (Phillips 1995), bodies increasingly assemble and make claims in a hybridized offline/online space with visual means.

In this paper, I explore and conceptualize a form of politicization where the ubiquitous focus on visibility afforded and demanded by visual social media has brought forward. I will focus on how activists in stigmatized and marginalized positions politicize their devaluing and how they counter the stigma assigned onto them. The key question addressed is how the marginalized self serves as a basis for political action in the hybridized online/offline visual space. I suggest the concept ‘self-activism’ to describe the repertoire of politicization that operates by means of being visible.

Today, examples of self-activism are easy to come by: on social media, the full bodies of body positivity activists, the crying faces of mental health activists and the aching joints of disability activists demand our attention. Prior research notes that young people especially increasingly use images of oneself as a tool of activism; to fight stigma, to ‘imagine themselves differently’ (Rettberg 2017, 15) or to assume a subversive position towards hegemonic representations (Tiidenberg 2018; Kuntsman 2017). Crucially, as I will show, such forms of politicization do not build on a unitary notion of either individual or collective identity, but rather make use of the multiplicity and fluidity of the self as the basis of their political action.

This seminar will be chaired by Hans Asenbaum.

About the speaker

Taina Meriluoto is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a visiting fellow at the University of Essex. She works on (visual) politicization, democratic theory and practice, and focuses especially on the interrelations between the self and political action. Her recent publications include ‘The self in selfies – conceptualizing the selfie-coordination of marginalized youth with sociology of engagements’ in the British Journal of Sociology and ‘Snap-along ethnography: Studying visual politicization in the social media age’ (2022) in the journal Ethnography.