Theatre of the Selfie: Staging Ill Health in Visual Autopathographies

Subject to the scrutiny of a clinical gaze, the diseased body is constituted by medical specularisation and clinical archiving. Through X-rays, CT scans, MRIs and diagrams the ailing body is visualised and documented; archived into existence. Mobilising what photography and selfie scholar Tamar Tembec refers to as ‘a politicised dramaturgy of the lived body’ (2016, p.1), this paper will consider selfie-taking as a political act of subjective reclamation in the context of serious illness. The analysis draws on autopathography, a branch of autobiography concerned with self-narrating the lived reality of illness and disease, to consider how selfie-taking, as an affective and performative practice, offers a tangible means of experiencing, living, owning, and communicating the diseased body. The intention is to illustrate the critical value of self-representational images of illness and disease, alongside exposing the historicity of said criticality by drawing on a genealogy of painting, photography, and performance art. The paper considers self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, examples from Hannah Wilke’s Intra Venus series (1991-93), and images from Karolyn Gehrig’s #HospitalGlam selfie campaign on Instagram (2014 – present). Employing a feminist new materialist lens, the discussion considers the agential entanglement of the ailing subject -body as a performance material. Reading these examples through the lens of Marvin Carlson’s performance ontology, ‘consciousness of doubleness’ (2018), the analysis questions how ‘selfies of ill health’ (Tembec 2016) disrupt the specularity of illness because they position the ill or diseased self in conflation with additional (and agential) roles such as artist, icon, or fashionista. The analysis considers self-representation as an act of self-archiving that resists the homogenisation and fetishization of the clinical gaze, a ‘dramaturgy of the lived body’.

Claire Hampton recently completed a PhD at Brunel University London. Her research examines selfies through the lens of performance studies, specifically mobilising the concepts of dramaturgy, performativity, eventness, and theatricality, to consider the relationship between selfies and feminist new materialist politics of subjectivity. Her work employs an autoethnographic methodology to reflect on the performative and affective potential of selfie –taking as an embodied and authorial act of space-making and self-witnessing, particularly for female self-narrating subjects who are negotiating trauma and illness. She is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance.