Abstrakt
By applying poststructuralist approaches to the gender performance and visual social semiotics, this presentation discusses preliminary results of the research on signs communicated by persons, who defined themselves as #nonbinary, on their Instagram profiles. A first sample set of 200 photographs was analysed, from which 194 were selfies and 6 anti-selfies.
The findings show that the main focus was exclusively put on the face. The main questions of the presentation are what is a face in Instagram, how does this semiotic construct relate to politics and how does it over-code the body with a fixed meaning.
To answer these questions I use Gilles Deleuze's approach to face, based on reading of A Thousand Plateaus, Difference and Repetition, What is Philosophy? and Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. I argue that the self-representation under #nonbinary frees the face from the repressive effects of identity and enables "probe-heads" as alternative modes of organisation and political groupings.
