"Do I really look like that?": unpacking discourses of control and discursive and visual dissonances in young women's selfie-practices.

In this article, I explore how discourses of control, imbued with the logic of postfeminist and neoliberal empowerment rhetoric, are used by young women to recount their experiences of selfie-practices. In doing so, I examine how these accounts complicate popular analyses of the phenomenon as either "empowering" or "disempowering," arguing instead that control discourse reveals a complex entanglement of agency and vulnerability that centres on participants' ability, or lack thereof, to control their image in online environments. This desire for control versus the moments when such control is undermined or compromised produce discursive and visual dissonances which shift formerly positive assessments of one's selfie towards the ambivalent and the self-critical. Thus, I propose that control discourse and its dissonant effects mark a site of return, offering temporary relief from the demands of specular femininity by providing the means to achieve its standards via the selfie, only to return young women to a state of disempowerment when their assessment of their image (and by extension, their embodied selves) sours in response to factors they cannot control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]