Making the Cut: An Agential Realist Examination of Selfies and Touch

This article leverages the work of Karen Barad to analyze digital self-imaging research. Drawing on findings from four interviews with avid selfie authors, this article argues that agential realism can provide a rich ontological framework for examining selfies that goes beyond the representational paradigm in some studies of socially mediated digital images. Rather than beginning the study with the presumption that bodies, photos, cameras, and expressed selves are distinct and pre-existing entities that then interact with one another, or touch, selfies here are construed as networked material–discursive entanglements wherein bodies, photos, cameras, and expressed selves are always and already touching. Within this entangled phenomenon, then, this article suggests that what reads as touch (images that grab or repulse/efface) is in a sense the opposite of touch—it is a pulling apart of the entangled phenomenon wherein agential cuts demarcate the desired boundaries of entities like bodies, images, and self. This article further suggests that what makes and doesn’t make the “cut” is not natural but emerges within gendered apparatuses of bodily production.