Selfies and Self-Writing

This article explores the aesthetic genealogy of the cue card confession social media trope, where producers create a self-portrait or vlog featuring handwritten cards to relate an autobiographical narrative. Returning to Michael Foucault’s theories of self-writing as a confessional discourse of the self that creates a correspondence of ethical perception between the writer and reader by way of contemporary theorizations of the demand for authenticity and consumability in social media, I argue that the cue card confessions constitute an important mode of self-writing that uses the visual spectacle of the body and the discursive demands of confessional discourse to invoke mediated witnessing as a mode of ethical engagement.