Lecture: Damon Ross Young, “Century of the Selfie” 

Date: Monday, 2 June, 16.00-18:00
Location: Utrecht University – Janskerkhof 15A room: 101. Utrecht 

The talk will be followed by a discussion moderated by lieks hettinga (Gender Studies), Jaap Verheul (Screen Media) and Mia You (English Literature). The program is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided. 

The selfie – perhaps the most ubiquitous image form of the 21st century- also appears banal and superficial, a symptom of narcissism or of the superficiality of a culture of circulation. In this talk, Damon Ross Young argues that its preeminence in networked culture indexes a larger transformation of subjectivity, akin to the kind Walter Benjamin, one hundred years ago, associated with the invention of early photography. While it shares a genealogy with other forms of self-portraiture, the selfie also belongs to a media ecology that generates the GIF, the meme, the TikTok video, an ecology and economy of overtaxed and monetized attention. But if the selfie is emblematic of the contradictions of its historical moment, it also (like all forms of self-representation) has an existential dimension: we put it on view, into circulation, for who? For the Other. At the fault line between historically transforming media paradigms in their intersection with transforming paradigms of gender, sexuality, and desire, the selfie allows us to take the measure of the tensions that shape the contours of a contemporary cultural logic and its registers of desiring subjectivity.

Damon Ross Young is associate professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches in the Program in Critical Theory. He is author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Duke, 2018, shortlisted for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize), as well as numerous essays on film theory, psychoanalysis, queer theory, pornography and digital media. He is co-editor, most recently of Meme Aesthetics, a special issue of Representations, and his current book project, Century of the Selfie, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.

This event is co-organized and sponsored by the Netherlands Research School Gender Studies (NOG), the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL), and the Modern and Contemporary Literature Research Group and the Media and Performance Research Group of Utrecht University’s Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON).