Keywords

Selfies and memes are practices of Touch that have mainly been identified for the ways they can involve intimate connection (Humphreys et al., 2013; McGlotten, 2013; Petersen et al., 2017; Prøitz et al., 2017; Van Dijck, 2013); however, they can also be used and experienced as violence (Bailey et al., 2021; Dunn, 2021; Jane, 2016; Senft, 2015). In this chapter, Touch is considered to include forms of both intimacy and violence to contribute to a mapping of cultural Touch (as proposed in Chap. 3). Continuing to focus on selfies and memes as embodied practices of the technological self, where we live in media rather than with media (Deuze, 2011, p. 138), this chapter considers how social bodies are both enabled and constrained by Touch in the contexts of violence and intimacy.

Discussion of the intimacy of social media focuses on connections. Considered a positive goal for relationships, intimacy is understood to involve sharing emotions, experiences and affective bodily proximities. Describing intimacy of connections as inextricably entwined with social media, Petersen et al. write that “both intimacy and social media allow people to express and share what matters to them, and both encourage personalised connection and inter-activity” (Petersen et al., 2017, p. 4). In addition to this, it is claimed that intimacy has increased with digitally networked social media, as well as a need to communicate the intimacy of self (Humphreys et al., 2013; Van Dijck, 2013). In the work focused on intimacies of self, intimacy has been recognised as involving many textures (McGlotten, 2013), including “ugly” intimacies like heartbreak and loss (Prøitz et al., 2017) that are generally not considered to be positive.

Selfies and memes have been identified as social media that act as intimate connections through displayed gesture (Frosh, 2015, 2018; Senft & Baym, 2015) and the immediacy of the sharing, where the receiver is at one with the selfie producer (Andreallo, 2019). Furthermore, jokes are integral to how memes work to form intimate connections of identification between people (Albury, 2015; Shifman, 2007, 2014b; Shifman & Blondheim, 2010). Although it is argued that both the architecture of online spaces and the etiquette of behaving within these spaces tend to favour the dense proliferation of intimacies with others (Payne, 2014), there are also experiences of violence in social media.

Violence includes not only physical, emotional and psychological abuse (United Nations, 1979), but also technological abuse (Simonovic et al., 2018). Technology-facilitated violence, or as Suzie Dunn refers to it “TFV” (Dunn, 2021), is an umbrella term that includes cyberbullying, trolling (Lumsden & Morgan, 2018), online abuse (Matsuda, 2018), cyberviolence (Peterson & Densley, 2017), harassment, technology-facilitated coercive control, symbolic violence (Barratt, 2018; Lumsden & Morgan, 2018) and representational violence (Hall & Hearn, 2019). Research into technology-facilitated violence highlights the extent of gendered violence (Jane, 2016, 2020; Johanssen, 2021; Lumsden & Morgan, 2018), which includes rape and death threats, body shaming (Jane, 2016), misrepresentation and presentations of the feminine as aligned with incompetence or deviance (Lumsden & Morgan, 2018). Selfies and memes act as violence when used against the original producer’s intent or without their consent, violating their agency. Examples include public profile images reused in memes against the producer’s original intent and often in negative ways (Senft & Baym, 2015), as well as the recontextualisation of nude images, and photoshopping or deepfakes of people into porn images (Dunn, 2021; Hall & Hearn, 2019).

Symbolic violence (Wacquant & Bourdieu, 1992) has been considered instrumental for examining social media relationships because it provides an explanatory power not provided elsewhere (Lumsden & Morgan, 2018; Skeggs, 2004). Part of this explanatory power resides in how it locates violence beyond physical concepts. In this chapter, I extend on Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of symbolic violence, which although limited to considerations of class and race can also be extended to recognise a variety of other power relationships including gender (Lumsden & Morgan, 2018; McRobbie, 2004).

One of the critical aspects of symbolic violence is that it is the violence that is “exercised upon the social agent with his or her complicity” (Wacquant & Bourdieu, 1992, p. 167). This complicity commonly occurs in technology-facilitated violence when victims are culturally expected to remain silent and are often socially disciplined to do so through blame (Marwick, 2017), such as suggestions that they deserve the treatment or were asking for it. This is also reinforced by authorities such as police when victims are told to “take a little break from the internet”, or to “use less attractive profile images” and “engage with less provocative politics online” (Jane, 2016, p. 4). The adage of “don’t feed the trolls” also works along these lines of silencing victims (Lumsden & Morgan, 2018).

Symbolic violence and these examples highlight that when we talk about so-called social media, we need to acknowledge the contexts of social relationships positioned in cultural structures. The complexity of how forms of Touch such as intimacy and violence culturally enable and constrain bodies and ways of being requires further consideration.

In this chapter, I use the PrettyGirlsUglyFaces (PGUF) meme (and the selfies that make up the meme) (KnowYourMeme, 2021) as an example to consider how the meme is located in social relationships of intimacy in contexts of violence. I employ the five fundamentals of Touch (discussed in Chap. 3) to contribute to a map of culturally meaningful Touch, where intimacy and violence (as forms of Touch) are examined for how they both enable and constrain bodies and ways of being.

In what follows, I first discuss the positioning of the PGUF meme and selfies, which involves understanding what the meme is, who is involved, where it is located and how the social interaction is communicated through the joke. In this context, I then consider the social relationships of Touch as connection and engagement, and contiguity and differentiation, and discuss how violence and intimacy both enable and constrain.

Mapping Touch Through the PrettyGirlsUglyFaces Meme and Selfies

Positioning of the PGUF Meme and Selfies

In considering the social relationships of Touch, I will begin with the fundamental of positioning. However, positioning is only one of the fundamentals of Touch and does not function independently. Rather, the other four fundamentals—connection, engagement, contiguity and differentiation—shape aspects of positioning as much as positioning shapes them. For the purposes of this chapter, I will first establish the positioning of the PGUF meme and selfies before discussing the other four fundamentals.

Positioning is gestured through the point of view: who is being represented as looking or as actively gazing (Berger, 2008; Mulvey, 1989). Positioning is also gestured through the space something takes up, and who is visible or filling a space. The way the PGUF meme and selfies link people with shared political sentiments together, described by Senft (2008) as “networked reflective solidarity”, works to position the participants of the PGUF meme not only as a shared point of view but as a group that has the presence of the space it occupies.

Considering the positioning of Touch in social relationships requires first identifying the bodies involved, and then recognising how they are positioned within social and cultural structures, and how they position themselves in the context of selfie or meme practices. The bodies involved in selfies and memes include whoever is looking and observing, as well as the bodies performing in the selfie or meme. The PGUF meme also needs to be contextualised in time and space to position the meaning of Touch. This can include the social platform context and how the bodies are situated in the platform space, and how they are treated in broader social contexts and reported media. It also includes the history of how the bodies involved have been culturally located through various modes of representation and communication. All these attributes inform meaningful Touch, but the tools of communication are also essential. For example, the PGUF meme uses the communicative tool of jokes, a popular form of networked communication, and understanding how the joke functions socially is key to understanding the social relationships of Touch.

Positioning as a fundamental of Touch is discussed here under four themes: “what”, which introduces the focus example of the PGUF meme; “who”, which defines the looking and touching bodies involved; “where”, which historically locates the bodies and conversation, and reported and networked media conversations at the time of the meme, as well as the platforms (and spaces within and beyond them) in which the conversation takes place; and “how”, which focuses on jokes as a communicative tool employed in the social relationships of Touch.

What Is the PGUF Meme (and Uglies)?

The PGUF meme makes use of what have come to be known as “uglies” (or ugly selfies). It was Catness_NeverClean who is claimed to have first posted uglies juxtaposed with “normal faces” on Reddit on 13 July 2012, provoking the popular PrettyGirlsUglyFaces meme (Reddit, 2021a; Fig. 4.1). Since then, the PGUF meme has reached viral proportions and has continued to receive contributions to the Reddit community since 2012 (KnowYourMeme, 2021).

Fig. 4.1
figure 1

Two examples of the PrettyGirlsUglyFaces meme. The images here have had a filter applied and colour removed to preserve some anonymity when changing the context of the posts

Full size image

Ugly selfies are the selfies we do not usually share publicly. Some people keep them private, and others actively perform them to send to friends or have accounts dedicated to the performance. They are typically any twisted face or angle that you would not usually want to be captured, or that is considered an improper public performance.

The PGUF meme is not the only version of memes containing uglies, nor are ugly selfies limited to memes. The performance of ugly selfies is thought to have first appeared on Tumblr, but they are also the topic of many “seconds”, or secondary accounts, and private Facebook groups. Subreddits (communities within the Reddit social media platform) include “You are so beaut-OHGOD!” (Reddit, 2021b), and Tumblr uses the tags “pretty girls ugly faces”, “pretty girl ugly face” and “ugly selfie”. Common hashtags on Instagram include #prettygirluglyface and #uglyselfie .

Who Are the Performers of Touch?

The bodies involved in the PGUF meme are young women aged in their 20s to late 30s. The subreddit includes people mainly from the United States, New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom. The gender of the selfie subjects is specified on the site by the title of PrettyGirlsUglyFaces that includes “girls”. The concept of the feminine in this site appears limited to female bodies as a gender binary; another site, named HGUF (handsomeguysuglyfaces), has been produced for male participants. The gender binary is present in the concept of the male body being limited to handsome (a concept for masculine performance) and the female body to pretty, which suggests femininity.

The bodies involved in a meme include not only the bodies that the meme and selfies focus upon, and who is involved in the conversation, but also myself as a researcher. My interest in the PGUF meme was first through involvement directly in the Reddit group and an interest in ugly selfies. Later, this site and meme became the focus of my PhD thesis that investigated networked visual social relationships. As a researcher of this meme aiming towards more reflexive research, I note here that I am a cisgendered woman, identifying as she/her, with a mixed-Italian heritage and living on Australian land. This declaration positions to some extent the ideas and looking practices I have in this context.

Where Are the Bodies Located in the Practices of Touch?

The PGUF meme is located on the Reddit social media platform. The observations made here apply to selfies uploaded to the PrettyGirlsUglyFaces subreddit site between January 2014 and January 2015. The site is still active; however, posts now commonly include more videos than photos. Furthermore, they are not often uploaded as one juxtaposed image; instead, the viewer has to scroll through from pretty to ugly. At the time of final edits of this chapter the PrettyGirlsUglyFaces subreddit appears to be becoming superseded by the “You are so beaut-OHGOD!” subreddit.

Reddit’s culture and the platform support gendered violence (Massanari, 2017; Massanari, 2015). The site is well known to be dominated by geek masculinity that privileges the white, non-disabled, young, straight, cisgendered male over other ways of being (Massanari, 2013; Massanari, 2015, p. 129). The Reddit context of dominant masculinity (Massanari, 2015) and toxic culture (Massanari, 2017) is significant for the PGUF subreddit community, which includes female, feminine performances as practices of engagement and connection. I discuss this further later in this chapter.

The memes and conversations of the PGUF site are public, that is, these images and conversations are publicly accessible to anyone with access to the internet. The presence of the bodies of young women in an openly public space is significant, as such exposure has a long history of being considered limited and taboo. In European history, the female middle-class body has been limited to private space (D’Souza et al., 2006; Pollock, 2018), extending back to nineteenth-century Europe, where the only visible female bodies in public space and streets were sex workers. Middle-class women avoided public spaces to avoid loss of virtue. If a woman was even perceived to have lost virtue, her fortune and future were at threat. Women’s bodies were controlled through this threat. To avoid criticism, women who needed to move through city streets were chaperoned and dressed their bodies in homogeneous dress, covering even their faces with veils of lace (Kessler, 2006).

The idea of female bodies being limited to private space and immoral when in public continues into recent history. The PGUF meme was at its height of popularity during 2012–2015 (KnowYourMeme, 2021), a time in which media reports and online comments targeted selfies performed by young women as something immoral (Burns, 2015), echoing the ancient view of women performing in public space (Kessler, 2006).

How the Interaction Is Communicated: The Joke

The joke is a popular and common communicative tool in networked social relationships and has long been recognised as a central aspect of digital cultures (Albury, 2015; Andreallo, 2017; Shifman & Blondheim, 2010) and indeed memes (Davison, 2012; Dynel, 2016; Milner, 2018; Shifman, 2014b). In conversation, jokes enhance interactivity by functioning as relief and exposing incongruity, and they can also be used to imply superiority (Billig, 2005; Lynch, 2002; Oring, 2010; Shifman, 2014b). In these ways, they provide cohesion and intimacy amongst the participants of the visual conversation.

Although we often conflate things that make us laugh or are comical with jokes, something comic is not necessarily a joke (Freud, 1976, pp. 39–40). Essentially a joke deals with exposing social or cultural taboo, while something comic is humorous but does not specifically deal with such taboo. The social function of jokes has also been explained through release theory (Spencer, 1875, as cited in Freud, 1976), enabling the discharge of pent-up tension and anxiety.

Freud drew on the work of Kuno Fisher (1889, as cited in Freud, 1976) and Theodor Lipps (1898, as cited in Freud, 1976) to begin to distinguish the joke from the comical, explicitly locating the difference in active behaviour and relationship to the object. He wrote, “the characteristic which distinguishes the joke within the class of the comic is attributed by Lipps to action, to the active behaviour of the subject, but by Fisher to its relation to the object, which he considers is the concealed ugliness of the world of thoughts” (Freud, 1976, p. 40). The joke then provides a way to release social and political pent-up tensions (Benton, 1988; Mindess, 2017; Sykes, 1966), and a means through which to discuss that which is ugly and to cross social boundaries to allow people to say “what they would never dare say blankly” (Shifman & Blondheim, 2010, p. 1349).

The joke plays an integral part in how memes and selfies touch the participants. If we think of jokes as a way to discharge pent-up tensions (Spencer, 1875, as cited in Freud, 1976), then memes and selfies as jokes provide a means to access or identify cultural and social tensions, things that are perhaps usually assumed, perceived, made culturally invisible or not dared to be spoken openly. On the other hand, if the joke is, in fact, located in the active behaviour of the subject and in the object of the joke (Freud, 1976), then the behaviour and the object of the joke are a means through which the social tensions can be identified.

Although jokes might touch us by bringing joy or a form of identification, by playing with social and cultural boundaries and tensions, jokes are forms of Touch and explicitly deal with Touch. As you may recall from Chaps. 2 and 3, Touch essentially deals with boundaries: the boundaries of bodies (or entities) that are so close that no space remains between them, and the boundaries of the space in which the bodies perform. It is through these boundaries that the fundamentals of Touch—connection, engagement, contiguity, differentiation and positioning—can be identified. The joke as tensions (Spencer, 1875, as cited in Freud, 1976) is the place where cultural boundaries are crossed. Dealing with boundaries and boundary-crossing, and places of connection and identification, is essential to the joke, and these are also essential elements of the definition and our cultural understanding of Touch.

In the case of the PGUF meme, the active behaviour of the joke (Freud, 1976) is in the performance of ugliness, and the object of the joke (Freud, 1976) is the female, feminine body in public space. Here is a performance that would typically not be done in public, but instead be limited to home and hidden from social view. The distinction between private and public face is signalled by the posts labelled as, for example, “home face” or “at work, after work”. In the PGUF meme, ugly and pretty are defined as a social constraint for the young female body. The joke then is in the subversion of exposing and crossing social and cultural boundaries for female bodies and, in the juxtaposition of difference, contradicting what is the proper, socially accepted performance.

The joke of the PGUF meme is also located in the context of a culture of gendered violence on Reddit, where these posts allow some agency to the female participants. In a context where abusers feel entitled to hack women’s online accounts to steal nude photos and share them on the internet (Massanari, 2017), these photos are publicly shared by the selfie performers. Furthermore, in the context of a platform that relies on feminine stereotypes (Massanari, 2015), here stereotypes are exposed, and the judgement of being pretty enough for male desires is rejected through the performance of ugly.

Connection and Engagement of the PGUF Meme and Selfies

As discussed in Chap. 3, connection is located as one of the interdependent fundamentals of Touch and is culturally determined by the distinction of ethnicity, class, age, gender and disability. Depending on these distinctions, people have a corresponding agency to touch or be touched.

The fundamental of engagement extends beyond simply connection to capture a sense of Touch as “being with”. Furthermore, engagement recognises the polysemy of Touch that can include physical, emotional and intellectual practice, often accompanied by verbal, visual, aural and kinaesthetic practices that locate the contact as intentional. Engagement as “being with” also directs us to the concept of gesture, which includes the selfie as embodied media (Farman, 2020; Frosh, 2015, 2018) and its interplay with bounded and unbounded social spaces, including public spaces, as well as the intimate identification of “place” (Hjorth & Hinton, 2019).

The PGUF meme works as a gesture (of “being with”) in which the selfie performance of ugly and pretty is foremost a joke. One of the ways jokes act to expose social and cultural constraints is by exposing that which should not be said (Freud, 1976). Here the “emotional hook” (Bacareza Balance, 2012, p. 139) of shared affective investments in the group works by identifying ideals of performance for young women in Western culture. The statement is more than “I am here” (Koliska & Roberts, 2015) because the joke essentially works to expose social and cultural constraints. These constraints are identified through the performance. This joke also works in the greater public space where people who may not feel an affiliation with the identifications of the group (specifically the contained performance of self as a young, Western female) can still experience the humour of the performance by acknowledging that the ugly selfie is not socially acceptable public behaviour or representation. Indeed, these are the very performances that Catness_NeverClean had been told not to perform in public since she was a child (KnowYourMeme, 2021).

Experiences of people participating in the PGUF group where the joke works in the greater public space rather than on a deeper affiliation and identification through contribution can be described as types of connection rather than engagement. A connection that might be understood as similar to the example I explained earlier of brushing by or accidentally touching another, unknown person on a train, as opposed to the intentional touch of someone with whom we share a prior connection.

Engagement in the meme community on the Reddit platform must follow specific rules that are not only specified in the site group rules and defined to some extent in the group title, but identified explicitly by the cultural context of Reddit as a largely misogynistic platform (Massanari, 2017), prone to gendered violence against the bodies performing in PGUF selfies.

The gestural hooks (of “being with”) for those affiliated with the PGUF community are not limited to the meme itself but extend to the intersubjectivity (Zhao & Zappavigna, 2018) that includes the re-performance and sharing of the meme, as well as gestures of titling of posts, upvoting and commenting on selfies. Whereas simply commenting or viewing can be considered a form of connection, engagement most often involves more commitment, including actions that show identification with the idea and concept behind the memes such as contributing to the titles or contributing performances of self that affiliate with the group conversation.

The titles of the posts form part of the joke of the PGUF meme and may include sayings, popular culture references, and before and after ideas of public performance. As jokes that are the gestural hook of being with, they do this by exposing an ugliness to the world (Fisher, 1889, as cited in Freud, 1976) where the female body is a site for violence. For instance, some of the titles refer to old sayings or colloquial language such as “hit with the ugly stick”, a saying used to describe women who have suffered domestic beatings and sometimes those considered not pretty enough for feminine performance. Other titles link concepts of prettiness to virtue, one directly referencing the notion represented in the Robert Louis Stevenson (Stevenson, 1886) story of Jekyll and Hyde and specifically gendering the reference as “Miss Jekyll and Mrs Hyde”, where ugliness is revealed after tricking partners into marriage. Other titles also allude to the idea of the female as a trickster (Lumsden & Morgan, 2018) and concepts of public performance, where examples include “before wedding, after wedding”, or “me at work, me at home”.

In the PGUF meme, the concepts of pretty and ugly are performed in juxtaposition to each other. Ugly is represented by combinations of facial contortions to imply corpulence (many chins), lack of containment or control (tongue spilling out, drool, food falling out of the mouth), a large forehead or an “unnatural” appearance (too much makeup, enlarged staring eyes). Mouths are often open and directed at the camera, and staring, popping eyes intimidate the viewer. Failed selfie attributes that are exaggerated in uglies include poor lighting and the camera angled from below the face. In contrast, “pretty” performances (framed as the usual) include a narrow chin (as a feminine attribute but also in contrast to corpulence) and large eyes (but not forehead), which are also accentuated by the angle of view. The juxtaposition of ugly and pretty creates the joke; the ugly seeks to reaffirm the pretty and point out the containment and unreality of both ugly and pretty. All these entanglements of Touch act as engagement, saying not just “I am here” but also taking part in these limitations, identifications and social constraints.

Contiguity and Differentiation in the PGUF Meme and Selfies

In Chap. 3, I described how contiguity as a fundamental of Touch is signified through awareness of the boundaries that separate us from others, from objects and from the world around us. Essentially it alerts us to the conditions under which a connection takes place. I also mentioned that in social media and digital cultures such as selfies, contiguity can be understood through the examination of public and private space, and online and offline selves, as well as concepts of place (Hjorth & Hinton, 2019) that include contextualising conversations to platform rules (Katz & Crocker, 2015; Kennedy et al., 2016; Massanari, 2013, 2015).

In establishing the PGUF meme’s positioning earlier in this chapter, I presented the context of platform conversations as gendered violence, as well as historical and social spaces. What follows here is further consideration of contiguity and differentiation in the space of the meme, representations and performance.

PGUF performances signify an awareness of boundaries (contiguity) by defining who can perform in this group (young women who can perform pretty). However, by limiting performers to a binary difference, conversations in the PGUF subreddit group are primarily limited to binary notions of gender. Furthermore, understanding culturally situated jokes (such as those I mention in the forthcoming sections referencing types of violence) is part of cultural awareness. Even if a saying is understood as something repeated from previous generations, the repetition of the saying identifies a cultural knowledge and historical awareness of a phenomenon.

The exaggeration of performed ugliness juxtaposed with pretty performance exposes an everyday representation of self as absent. This absence works as “differentiation to what is beyond the boundary” (Cranny-Francis, 2011, p. 475). The pretty selfie is a “typical” selfie or selfie usually shared in public spaces. Thus, naming it as pretty defines pretty as the norm or ordinary representation of self for the participant. Although we might understand what is normal as everyday, “the norm represents the prevailing standard” (Russo, 1994, p. vii), where what is normal is not the same as ordinary (Canguilhem, 1978/2012) or every day; rather it is a culturally performed idea of normal. The exaggerated performance of ugly exposes the polar opposite of pretty as also being a performance. So, here amongst the theatricals, the everyday self remains absent. This absence is significant because that which is excluded is also an essential part of the presentation of self (Van Leeuwen, 2008), where absence can identify the social performative limitations for the performing bodies, as well as social and cultural expectations that constrain ways of being.

In most selfie practices, however, it is the uglies that are edited, cut (Warfield, 2016) and absent from public view. The uglies in the PGUF meme are the performance of self that people do not usually share. More than this, they include representations of self that do not fit culturally accepted ways of being. Because of this, close consideration of uglies has the potential to define what cultural and social standards are and how they are performed.

Overall, the uglies on the PGUF subreddit site identify the bodies involved as in disorder because they are uncontrolled or out of control, and they include exaggerated attributes of failed selfies. The ugly identifications, unlike the performance of pretty, are far more unique to each participant.

A Summary of Observations of the PGUF Meme and Selfies as Touch

So far in this chapter, the five interdependent fundamentals of Touch have provided a means through which the example of the PGUF meme and selfies within it can be mapped as relationships of Touch. Before discussing more explicitly how these practices enable and constrain ways of being and identifications, I will briefly summarise the map.

The fundamental of positioning focuses on affiliation of participants in the PGUF group identifying as young women and presents the constraints of performing in public contexts and the misogynistic cultural context of Reddit (Massanari, 2015). This is highlighted through the subversive act of performing ugly, which is located as a private or hidden version of self appearing in the public space and the digital platform.

Connections are formed through participation in the group, which might include sharing versions of the meme, sharing or simply viewing selfies, plus various other forms of participation. People engage when they identify as part of the group. This form of engagement is most commonly accompanied by other practices of contribution, such as producing, uploading, titling, commenting or upvoting, which signify the engagement as intentional. The connections and engagement all occur through identifications specific to the PGUF group, as well as through cultural identifications specific to the context identified by the group’s positioning.

Touch as contiguity in the PGUF subreddit group is observed mainly through who is included and excluded. Specifically, to engage in this group, people must be young women, who are able to perform social attributes of pretty, have access to media to perform selfies and be familiar contributors (or Redditors) in the context of the platform (Massanari, 2015). Affiliation as part of the group defines the participants in relation to the world outside the group (differentiation) and defines the participants of the group in the context of Reddit (differentiation) as a misogynist geek culture (Massanari, 2015). The affiliation of who is included in the group is defined in the title and performances of the group in relation to the female body (contiguity).

Touch signified through contiguity and differentiation also includes the topical discussion of the meme that deals with social and cultural limitations for the female body. Ugly and pretty are presented in juxtaposition, which renders the everyday self as absent. Ugly is that which is outside the boundary of sociocultural norms (differentiation). The uniqueness of individual performances of ugly, as well as the unique aspects of self in pretty performance, is observable, but they also present the stereotypical limitations of ways of being in public space, as well as limited ideas of pretty. The limited forms of presenting as pretty and ugly act as a form of continuity because the participants are bound together in this way.

Violence and Intimacy as Forms of Touch

In this section I will explore how forms of Touch such as intimacy and violence both enable and constrain bodies and ways of being, and the degrees and coexistence of both intimacy and violence in social media contexts. In the case of the PGUF meme community on Reddit, connections are constrained to people who have access to the internet to post on the public site. Furthermore, the conversation is constrained to female bodies and performance of femininity, and contributors perform within social constraints of “pretty” and being perceived as a young woman or “girl”. This is further constrained in the template of the meme and the focus of the joke, and identified in the subreddit title of PrettyGirlsUglyFaces.

However, the constraints specified by the title and website and the requirements for the performance of PGUF selfies also enable this specific group of people to enjoy engagement through familiar identifications of social constraints and ways of being. To reiterate, it is significant that this public community group has been formed in the social media platform of Reddit that is known for the dominant geek masculinity that privileges the white, non-disabled, young, straight, cisgendered male over other ways of being (Massanari, 2015, p. 129). This is a platform where members of the PGUF subreddit community would not often be welcome or included, and where young women are often stereotyped and objectified. Furthermore, the community began in 2012 (KnowYourMeme, 2021) when selfies performed by young women were commonly demonised in reported media and online comments (Andreallo, 2017; Burns, 2015). This attitude towards young women performing selfies is located in history, limiting the female body to a private space to preserve virtue (Andreallo, 2017; D’Souza et al., 2006; Kessler, 2006). In the contexts of the Reddit platform’s male geek culture and negative media targeting this specific group of people, the PGUF subreddit acts as a type of subversive act by enabling a conversation and presence for bodies that are excluded from the dominant focus group and conversations of the site. Thus, the selfie and meme producers carve out a space and enable a community to connect by enjoying agency as a photographer and sharing themselves in performance.

This struggle of enabling and constraining female bodies can be considered part of a struggle involving symbolic violence (McRobbie, 2004; Wacquant & Bourdieu, 1992). An essential aspect of symbolic violence is how the violated bodies remain complicit. To reiterate, one of the ways this is ensured in social media is by the silencing of victims or making certain bodies invisible. Examples include the adage “don’t feed the trolls”, which essentially tells victims implicitly to “put up and shut up” (Lumsden & Morgan, 2018, p. 122) meaning to be silent and continue being abused. In addition, Reddit platform communities commonly practise technology-facilitated abuse (Dunn, 2021), including trolling, stereotypical representations of women, and violations of female bodies and representation (Massanari, 2015). In this way, the Reddit culture seeks to uphold the complicity of symbolic violence and maintain a space for violence and abuse. Furthermore, traditional cultural ideals that the performance of the female body should be limited to private space or risk loss of virtue aim to control a gendered group of people by a form of complicity through fear.

The struggle here involves a group of gendered bodies with common identifications, who are normally constrained in social spaces, subverting those very spaces by enabling community visibility and speech. The PGUF community refuses to be invisible or silent or “take a break from the internet” (Jane, 2016, p. 4). In the context of Reddit, these young women share their images of themselves in opposition to the prevalence of images of women being shared without their consent throughout Reddit (Massanari, 2015) and indeed in many digital contexts (Jane, 2016; Lumsden & Morgan, 2018). This agency is also protected by moderators of the PGUF subreddit who warn that people posting sexist or derogatory comments will be removed (Reddit Pics, 2015). However, being visible, vocal and identifiable in a platform and social contexts that aim to silence presents a struggle, with experiences of violence identified through connections (of Touch).

Another aspect of the struggle and symbolic violence involves the constraint of the meme to aspirations of pretty as a cultural attribute for Western women (Burns, 2015; Lorber & Martin, 2011). Pretty is juxtaposed to ugly by performances presenting only two ways of being. These extremes are vital to the meme’s joke, where an everyday performance of self remains absent. This juxtaposition presents the ridiculousness and architecture of public presentations of self that are performed as ugly, in extreme opposition to pretty. As discussed in Chap. 2, one of the attributes of memes is the way people play with the photograph as truth and evidence (Shifman, 2014a). For example, in the “disaster girl” meme, where the background of the photographic image is replaced, one part of the joke is how it exposes the credibility of photographic evidence. In the case of the PGUF meme, the play of the photograph as an evidential document works a bit differently, but still plays with the idea of the photograph as social and cultural evidence. The presentation of pretty is exposed as performed rather than truth. The ugly representations are ones people would not usually share publicly. They include what is generally edited in the initial performance and through other filters, including the spaces in which they are shared. More than playing with the photograph as evidence, the aspiration to a performance of pretty is also presented as something expected and essential, and a cultural constraint for young women. In performing ugly, the selfie and meme contributors expose cultural constraints for young women to perform as pretty or pretty enough to be desirable. By performing ugly in public space, the PGUF community refuses to remain complicit with symbolic violence.

Ugliness is essentially that which is cast out (Kristeva, 1980/1982), and historically it is likened to failure and the outcast for a female body. Within the PGUF community, humour, a standard format on Reddit, plays a key role in exposing the social and cultural boundaries for female bodies. The joke across social platforms provides a means of connection (Albury, 2015), as well as a place of discussion and identification through the sharing (Gal et al., 2016), where young people try on and distinguish themselves from social ideals or types. In these social contexts, where the exclusion and violence include body shaming (Lumsden & Morgan, 2018), the joke works as a conversational tool that enables the PGUF meme contributor to say “what they would never dare say blankly” (Shifman & Blondheim, 2010, p. 1349). The joke also enables engagement experiences over the commonly identified topic, thus enabling (to some extent) a release of pent-up tensions (Benton, 1988; Mindess, 2017; Sykes, 1966). However, in the context that the joke is essentially the active behaviour and the object involved (Freud, 1976), then the female body and representation in PGUF memes are identified as a cultural joke, because there is no other foreseeable solution to the cultural constraints for this body and representational ways of being.

The joke is also commonly used by perpetrators of abuse to dismiss their actions (Jane, 2016). Violence and abuse have extreme detrimental outcomes for victims who cannot live freely and without fear, but jokes enable abusers to dismiss the consequences of their actions as unimportant and beyond their control. When something is identified as a joke to dismiss poor behaviour, it works as a cultural tool of complicity towards violence where the victim is silenced. However, understanding the joke as Freud defines it, based on action and object, exposes technology-facilitated violence as an action (said or done), and the object (of the joke) as a blatant target and victim. Furthermore, recognising the joke as that which one “would never dare say blankly” (Shifman & Blondheim, 2010, p. 1349) exposes and situates the abuser’s knowledge that what they are doing is not acceptable in social contexts. In the context of (so-called) social media, the question remains as to why this antisocial behaviour and complicity are accepted.

Violence and Intimacy: The Connections and Disconnections of Social Media

This chapter has contributed to a mapping of Touch in social media that identifies how Touch both enables and constrains as forms of intimacy and violence. Touch and connections are not limited to practices of intimacy, and social media also includes antisocial behaviours and disconnections. Of the fundamentals of Touch, connection and engagement are most often considered positive and social; however, contiguity and differentiation are also essential in community identification for connectivity. Despite this, all the fundamentals are essential when considering violence and intimacy because they work interdependently. In this way, they provide a means to explore the textures of Touch, where intimacy is not always wholly positive but can include ugly textures such as heartbreak and loss (Prøitz et al., 2017) and the contextual textures of types of violence and injustice. Furthermore, the interdependence of the fundamentals of Touch provides a basis to understand violence and intimacy as intertwined in everyday relationships, rather than entirely separate. Research today that concentrates on either violence or intimacy alone tends to decontextualise the everyday experiences, where violence often comes without warning (Jane, 2016) and is experienced amongst other intimate relationships.

A mapping of the fundamentals of Touch must include considerations of positioning and how the positioning works to both enable and constrain identifications and ways of being. Although it has been argued that social media must be understood as located in the rules of the platform being used (Kennedy et al., 2016), positioning is also unique to the bodies involved. This is because participants are positioned not only by platform rules but by how those rules are informed by social and cultural structures that shape limitations of the platform and rules for different groups of people. For instance, in the example of PGUF memes in this chapter, it was significant to position the memes within the community and subreddit rules, as well as how the performances functioned in the context of Reddit geek culture.

The joke as a communicative tool of Touch is also used to both enable and constrain. The joke works as a critical aspect of identifying performance through affiliation as a form of engagement. It also exposes sociocultural boundaries, differentiation and the positioning of the participants. As an integral component of PGUF memes, and as a common form of engagement in social media and a critical conversational tool, the joke is key to the examination of memes and selfies as a form of Touch. It provides a means through which participants are enabled to navigate cultural restraints, limitations and identifications. The joke, however, is also often used as a social tool that maintains violence through complicity. Abusive actions are often passed off socially as “just a joke” to dismiss severe antisocial behaviour and harm; this is also commonly done by perpetrators of gendered physical violence.

As I have described in this chapter, the joke essentially provides a means through which people play with cultural concepts of Touch because it creates engagement beyond connection. Simultaneously, the joke subverts cultural and social limitations or boundaries and, in this way, can be identified as Touch involving aspects of contiguity and differentiation.

Throughout this chapter, I have discussed how Touch enables and constrains by applying a map of the fundamentals of touch to an example of memes and selfies in the PrettyGirlsUglyFaces Reddit community. However, the considerations of the example in this chapter to support the mapping of Touch have been limited to my previous studies (Andreallo, 2017) that included observations of participants in digital conversations such as public blogs, posts, comments and visual communication. Although beyond the scope of this chapter, it is envisaged that future research using this map can engage with other examples of networked social relationships, as well as extend the map’s use to also include input from individual participants, such as interviews and observations.