In 2015, Kim Kardashian published Selfish, a book composed entirely of self-portraits. The following year, at the Webby Awards, she doubled down, promising "nude selfies til I die." Critics were swift. Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Jones declared that "the selfie marks the end of the age when people thought photographs could be refined works of art," and positioned Selfish as the tombstone of aesthetic ambition. The controversy was revealing. Not merely as a skirmish over taste, but as a springboard for deeper, complex anxieties regarding identity, image, and who controls representation in the digital age. That a single photograph, taken by oneself, of oneself, could provoke such a strong cultural reaction says less about the selfie than it does about the tensions it exposes.

Feminist scholars have been particularly attentive to what the selfie encodes. For many, it functions less as self-expression than as self-commodification. In Pain Generation (2021), L. Ayu Saraswati develops the concept of the 'Neoliberal Selfie', describing self-portraits on social media as personal branding exercises, driven by individualist logic that is animated by a hollow, 'postfeminist' sense of empowerment. The problem, Saraswati argues, is structural. Feminist activists online find themselves performing the role of 'good' neoliberal subjects (appealing, inspiring, entertaining etc) because the platforms they inhabit reward these qualities. Ostensibly, the radical potential of their work is quietly neutralised in the process. Even activists operating in good faith are shaped by the architectures through which they speak. The algorithms their work is platformed by. A protest image, cropped and filtered to perform well on Instagram, is already a different kind of object than it was intended to be.

Saraswati's critique extends beyond the selfie itself to digital feminist practice more broadly. She argues that online platforms coerce users into channelling pain toward self-care and personal responsibility, rather than toward accountability and structural transformation. The concept of 'self-love' is a case in point. Once a politically charged idea rooted in Black feminist thought, Audre Lorde's insistence that self-care was an "act of political warfare" emerged from a specific context: the experience of living in a body that dominant culture sought to diminish, ignore, or destroy. It was a refusal, not a retreat. Self-care, in Lorde's formulation, was inseparable from collective struggle and from an unflinching reckoning with the forces that made such care necessary in the first place. That political grounding has since been absorbed and repackaged by neoliberal logic. Rather than pointing toward systemic inequalities, platforms offer individualised products as their remedy. A skincare routine. A wellness subscription. The wound is dressed; the cause goes unexamined. What was once a radical refusal of dehumanisation becomes, in the hands of the attention economy, an aesthetic lifestyle choice.

Yet this critique, compelling as it is, risks foreclosing possibilities that transnational feminist perspectives keep open. Lilie Chouliaraki (2017) argues that the selfie carries the potential to function as a significant "ethico-political spectacle" within spaces of Western publicity. From this vantage point, a self-portrait is not primarily a commodity but a declaration of presence and a tool of self-determination for those whose visibility has historically been denied or distorted. For the marginalised, the act of photographing oneself and circulating that image can be a refusal of erasure; a way of insisting on one's own humanity before an audience that has consistently looked away.

This claim finds particular force in the context of refugee migration. Roopika Risam (2018) argues that refugee selfies facilitate the inclusion of experiences that would otherwise remain invisible, embedding them within the digital cultural record of humanity. In a media landscape where refugees are routinely reduced to statistics, spectacles of suffering, or security threats, the selfie offers something different: a first-person account, an assertion of individuality, a counter-narrative authored by those whose stories are usually told by others. When a person fleeing violence photographs themselves at a border crossing and shares that image online, they are not simply documenting a journey. They are insisting on being seen as a subject rather than an object of news. They are choosing the frame, the angle, the expression; small acts of authorship that mainstream media routinely denies them. The selfie, here, is not the end of something, not the death of art that Jones lamented, but the beginnings of an archive.

And yet the tension between these two frameworks is not easily resolved. Saraswati's critique does not simply dissolve when applied to marginalised subjects. Refugee selfies, too, circulate within the same digital ecosystems governed by algorithmic logics, virality, and the consumption appetites of Western audiences. The danger of humanitarian aestheticisation, where images of suffering are absorbed into feel-good narratives of resilience and shared humanity without prompting structural change, is real and well-documented. An image that moves people to feel solidarity does not automatically move them to act. Liberation and co-optation are not mutually exclusive; they can occur within the same scroll.

What emerges, then, is not a clean opposition between neoliberal selfie and liberatory selfie, but a more unsettling picture. The same image can simultaneously resist and reproduce the logics of the systems it navigates. A refugee's self-portrait can assert dignity and become lost in an algorithm, framed against AI slop within the same moment. An activist's carefully composed image can build community and feed an. algorithm that profits from her labour. The selfie is neither simply a symptom of narcissistic capitalism nor straightforwardly a tool of the oppressed. Its meaning is contingent on who takes it, who sees it, and what structures mediate its circulation. Jones was wrong to mourn it as the death of art. But the more utopian readings risk their own form of naivety. Any feminist analysis of the form must hold this complexity, sitting with the contradiction, rather than resolving it too quickly in either direction.