Article Selfies, Image and the Re-making of the Body Katrin Tiidenberg Tallinn University Edgar Go ´ mez Cruz University of Leeds Abstract This article explores the relationality between women’s bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women’s experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical elaboration on what sexy selfies are and do by analysing interviews, selfies and blog content of nine women in the NSFW self-shooters community on tumblr. For our participants, self-shooting is an engaged, self-affirmative and awareness raising pursuit, where their body, through critically self-aware self-care, emerges as agentic, sexual and distinctly female. Thus, this is a reading of selfies as a practice of freedom. Keywords body, body-image, internet, nudity, photography, qualitative analysis, selfie Introduction Image-centred social media platforms like Instagram and tumblr, and apps such as Snapchat and WhatsApp, are growing in numbers of users and importance. On the social media behemoth Facebook, too, an increasing amount of communication happens through images. In this article we explore how taking and sharing selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr 1 blogs make possible different experiences of Corresponding author: Katrin Tiidenberg. Email: katrin.tiidenberg@gmail.com Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org 1–26 ª The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1357034X15592465 bod.sagepub.com Body & Society by guest on July 7, 2015 bod.sagepub.com Downloaded from