Making her feel like a fairy : a study of young women engaging with selfie applications in China

Abstract: It’s not unusual for young people these days to take and edit a selfie. With the rise of consumerist culture and the popularity of mobile Internet, nowadays selfie applications, including beauty cameras and photo-beautification applications, have become the most well-accepted products/brands among Chinese women, who have grown accustomed to showing only one exquisitely edited face in digital photos without any dirt or blemishes. Selfie applications led by Meitu and Ulike present a new form of technologies allowing individuals to exploring the self and constructing new kinds of relationships with themselves. What this thesis sets out to do is to investigate and understand how young women engaging with such technologies to change their digital appearance and represent themselves on social media. The utilisation of Annette Hill’s spectrum of media engagement can give us answers of the modes of young women’s engagement with selfie applications. Ana Peraica’s secondary pathological narcissism, Laura Mulvey’s and Jacques Lacan’s ideas of the ‘gaze’, and Michel Foucault’s views on human body can help us gain an insight into women’s self-representation through taking, editing and posting selfies with the assistance of digital technologies, and how users of mobile apps get themselves involved in China’s contemporary selfie culture. Researching urban Chinese women between the ages of 20 and 30 who use selfie applications such as Meitu and Ulike, this thesis reveals that selfie culture is a multilayered and multidimensional offering fantasy and entertainment, while also creating anxiety and mental health issues due to users’ awareness and reflection on discrepancies between a digital self and an actual self. Through the mediation process, selfie app users try to meet their wishes of being authentic to themselves, Chinese moralities, as well as fitting into the ideals of modern women and beauty standards in the eastern part of the world. Even though they are aware of the pressure of discipline, young women are still unable to give up ‘beauty’ as not only personal pleasure but also social capital. Beauty practice on selfie apps has become a common and indispensable part of their daily media practices.