Consensual sexual selfies: everyday exposure in teen girl media

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexting
• selfies
• social media
• privacy
• teen media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cara Dickason

Cara Dickason is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Communication and Media Studies at Goucher College. She earned her Ph.D. in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University, where she was also a Mellon Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research explores the intersection of surveillance and spectatorship in contemporary girl’s and women’s television and media. Her work has been published in Flow and the edited collections Mediated Girlhoods vol. 2 and From ABC Family to Freeform.