Beyond recognition: Identification and disidentification in visual resistance to stigma

Abstract

This article theorizes visual practices of stigma resistance as a continuous play with identification and disidentification. Based on an ethnographic study of young, stigmatized activists’ self-images, I argue that the oft-employed concept of recognition only partially captures visual/digital resistance to stigma. In addition to claiming recognition, I show how creating unrecognizability is a key component in subverting stigmatizing categorizations. Complementing existing analyses on how we fight stigma by ‘presenting ourselves differently’ to others, my analysis of self-images looks at how the activists relate to themselves differently: how they negotiate and work with identifications. I distinguish two strategies of visual stigma resistance: resignification and opacity through multiplicity. Resignification – the visual interpretation of reclaiming – refers to one (temporarily) identifying with a derogatory label but redefining it into a source of pride. Multiplicity, in turn, operates by portraying the self as multiple and transforming, destabilizing potential categories and names, and rendering the self unintelligible. By showing stigma resistance as a play with becoming visible and unintelligible, the article argues for moving beyond recognition and stigma as binary concepts.

Introduction

Sociological scholarship on stigma has increasingly offered recognition as the opposing force against stigmatization (Honneth, 2014; Lamont, 2023; Lamont et al., 2016). This scholarship argues that it is by ‘seeing others’ and appreciating the equal value of all individuals and groups, that we can dilute the power of stigma. Taken literally, recognition means being seen and identified – seeing someone as someone (Adut, 2018, pp. 122–124). It thus necessitates visibility (Magalhães & Yu, 2022, p. 77) and operates through the frames and concepts we have available to make sense of the people around us.

In this article, I argue that ‘claiming recognition’ only partially captures visual practices of stigma resistance. By analysing marginalized activists’ self-images, I show how creating unrecognizability is an equally important practice of stigma resistance. I describe how the activists resist stigma both by resignifying the stigmatized identity through which they are recognized, but also by becoming less recognizable, opaque. To better understand both how visual resistance of stigma works, and the potential of unrecognizability in stigma resistance, I suggest complementing current theorizations of stigma resistance with the concept of disidentification from Jacques Rancière and queer theorists’ work. With these tools, I develop a theory of visual resistance to stigma as a continuous play with identification and disidentification.

I base my argument on visual ethnographic research among young activists with marginalizing experiences. I have closely followed young people with experiences of homelessness, mental ill health, physical disability, or a gender or sexual minority identity, for several years, observing their offline lives in tandem with their social media presence and posts with the snap-along ethnographic method (Luhtakallio & Meriluoto, 2022). To theorize visual resistance to stigma, I analyse the activists’ publicly posted self-images as unique opportunities to see a person’s relationship with themselves (Meriluoto, 2023). As stigma is a form of power that also operates through the ways in which we know ourselves (Tyler, 2020, p. 98), it is vital to not only focus on how we fight stigma by ‘presenting ourselves differently’ to others, but to equally analyse how we relate to ourselves: how we work with and negotiate identifications.

To access these negotiations of identification, I suggest looking at self-images as tools of public self-coordination not (primarily) from the point of view of the spectator, and thus through concepts such as representation of performance. Instead, I propose analysing selfies to investigate how we look at, and relate to, ourselves, how this negotiation and cultivation takes place in public, and how this public self-exploration can be mobilized in resisting stigma.

In my analysis, I read the activists’ self-images through the concepts of identification and disidentification (Butler, 1993; Muñoz, 1999; Rancière, 1999). I detect two strategies that forge distinct relationships with the activists’ selves: resignification and opacity through multiplicity. Resignification is a visual interpretation of the practice of reclaiming, where one (temporarily) identifies with a derogatory label but redefines it into a source of pride (Butler, 1993; Rand, 2014; Saguy & Ward, 2011; Yoshino, 2006). This strategy foregrounds the arbitrariness of the basis on which people are valued and renders previously stigmatized selves legible through new significations. Opacity through multiplicity, in turn, operates by portraying the self as multiple and transforming, destabilizing potential categories and names. I propose that the introduction of multiple categories renders the self temporarily unintelligible (Bey, 2022), and thus escapes the norms that govern how we ought to be. This strategy plays with the possibility of anonymity afforded by the digital media (Asenbaum, 2023; Forestal & Philips, 2020), and deploys it as a tool of stigma resistance.

I show how, in addition to reclaiming their stigmatized identities, the activists engaged in visual practices where their aim was, inversely, to achieve unrecognizability. Instead of reassigning worth, this strategy of stigma resistance seeks to destabilize the categorizations available and questions the entire mechanism of ‘totalizing knowability’ (Bey, 2022, p. 207). I show how temporary identification and disidentification are tightly intertwined and interdependent practices in stigma resistance, and subsequently theorize visual practices of stigma resistance as a play with identification and disidentification.

I first discuss how stigma as a form of power conditions and constrains the self, and the practices thus far identified in resisting it. I focus, in particular, on stigma power’s manifestation in naming and labelling. I then briefly discuss the selfie as a format of self-coordination, and how they have thus far been explored as responses to stigma. After presenting my data and methods, I present reclaiming and opacity through multiplicity as strategies of visual resistance to stigma. Finally, I consider how the practices identified contribute to our understanding of stigmacraft and the possibilities of subverting it.

Stigma power and resistance

Imogen Tyler (2018, 2020) has reconceptualized stigma as ‘a form of classificatory violence “from above” which devalues people, places and communities’ (2020, p. 27). In her critique of Goffman’s interactionist approach and definition that situates stigma as a discrediting attribute of an individual (Goffman, 1963, p. 3), Tyler demonstrates how stigma, instead, should be theorized and investigated as a form of power (2018, 2020). She coins the concept of stigmacraft to sketch ‘A new understanding of stigma as a technique of social classification, a governmental strategy of social sorting, a mechanism through which inequalities are inscribed and materialised’ (Tyler, 2020, p. 89). In opposition to the Goffmanian microsociological approach, Tyler’s concept of stigmacraft redefines stigma as a form of governmental power that is used to reify existing hierarchies and inequalities.

At the heart of stigmacraft are processes of valuation that operate through naming, labelling and classification (Tyler, 2015, 2020, p. 190; see also Link & Phelan, 2001). It is by crafting and assigning people names that we can (seek to) define them, and suggest truths through which they can be ‘known’ and (de)valued – by others as well as by themselves (Tyler, 2018; see also Lamont et al., 2014; Rancière, 1992, 1999). As Tyler notes (2020, p. 36), it is a form of pedagogical violence through which you are taught to ‘know yourself’ as specific kind – as inferior, as excluded, as less worthy. Often this means the creation of new, devaluing names and labels for groups of people, such as ‘the sink estate’ (Slater, 2018), ‘the benefit brood’ (Jensen & Tyler, 2015), or ‘the undeserving poor’ (Shildrick & MacDonald, 2013).

Rooted in Goffman’s interactionist take on stigma, resistance to stigma has thus far been widely theorized as ‘destigmatization strategies’ (Lamont, 2018) through which an individual manages their stigmatizing identity (Tyler & Slater, 2018; see e.g. Anspach, 1979). Studying stigmatization among young Muslims in Australia, Harris and Karimshah (2019), for example, identify how ‘proving their ordinariness’ was a prominent strategy to counter stigma, and often involved performances of ‘supernormality’, displaying themselves as exemplary Australians. Building on Axel Honneth’s work on social esteem as justice, Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça (2011, p. 954) finds similar practices in which individuals suffering from leprosy ‘claim of contributing to the accomplishment of social goals’ or ‘demonstrate personal achievements’. Saguy and Ward (2011) call these ‘assimilation strategies’ as opposed to ‘radical political strategies’ that emphasize difference. As the Goffmanian focus has been on how the individual manages to save their face despite their ‘devaluing attributes’, the practices of resistance identified have also focused on how the individual manages their self in a favourable light, thus adapting to and cultivating themselves in line with the norms that contribute to their stigmatization (e.g. Lamont et al., 2016; Yoshino, 2006).

If we commit to understanding stigma as a form of power that operates through one’s practices of knowing and cultivating one’s self, we also need to rethink resistance to stigma as ways of ‘knowing oneself differently’. In their analysis of different ‘destigmatization strategies’, Lamont and Mizrachi (2012) suggest how destigmatization happens by destabilizing the devaluing category and its frame of valuation, and replacing it with a new category, such as ‘humankind’ (see also Lamont, 2023; Tyler, 2020). Tyler (2018) offers an example of such a recategorization from the 1960s US black freedom struggles where Stokely Carmichael acclaimed: ‘I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black, I am a human being, and therefore I have the right to go into any public place’ (Carmichael, 1966, cited in Tyler, 2018, p. 91). With the statement, Carmichael offered another possible name and an evaluative category for himself, thus destabilizing the name and the frame within which he was currently being made sense of and devalued. Queer scholarship, in turn, has identified a strategy termed reclaiming, where a group identification is accepted, but redefined as a source of pride (Rand, 2014; Saguy & Ward, 2011; Worthen, 2023). Beyond group categorizations, Moya Lloyd (2019) contends that to contest the norms of recognizability, people need to be given names and identities – they need to be made individuals (see also Butler, 2009). Tyler identifies a similar strategy to be recognized as an individual in her analysis of Poverty Truth Commissions, where an activist pledged the audience to ‘see me as a person, not a number. See me as living. I am flesh and blood’ (Tyler, 2020, p. 162).

However, crucially, these practices of stigma resistance remain attached to the same identificatory logic that enables stigmacraft in the first place (see also Fraser, 1997, p. 27, 2000). They operate by either assigning a new, positive worth to the stigmatizing label, or by suggesting another name for one’s identity. Be it a broader, more inclusive category, such as ‘humankind’, or a unique and individual name, these practices refute stigma by playing with and reassigning value to identity categories. Nancy Fraser (1997) has termed these affirmative strategies of claiming recognition, as opposed to transformative strategies that target the roots of the logic of classification.

Jacques Rancière’s work, in contrast, has theorized the subversive practices that target the very logic of naming and categorizing (1992, 1999). He argues that devaluation and stigmatization can be disrupted by a practice he terms ‘disidentification’ – the refusal of the names and labels assigned by the police order. Instead of replacing the derogatory name with another identity that would then again enable the governing through this name, disidentification creates an ‘improper name’ – a misnomer that enables the formation of a subjectivity but does not abide by the positions imposed by the police order (Rancière, 1992; see also Deseriis, 2015). Disidentification leaves the subject in a grey area between the exact, identifiable positions imposed by ‘the police’ and full imperceptibility, creating an in-between state that Rancière calls subjectivization (1992; see also Butler, 1999).

The idea of disidentification as resistance has been pushed further in queer theorists’ work. José Esteban Muñoz (1999) proposed the term ‘disidentificatory performances’ to make sense of how queer artists remake their selves to dislodge the cultural codes and representational hierarchies of identity performance. Muñoz argues how the artists in his study turned towards ‘strategic obliquity that is anti-identitarian’ (1999, p. 177): an effort to disrupt the very logic of assigning and operating with identity. In their work, Marquis Bey (2022) develops a theory they call ‘black trans feminism’, whose strategy of remaining opaque and unidentifiable works towards the abolition of identity altogether. Opacity, Bey writes, ‘staves off certainty, invites troubled orientations, ill-abides taxonomy’, and ‘allows us to let go of the stability’ by ‘unfixing ourselves’ (2022, pp. 13–14). Moving beyond Rancière’s idea of disidentification as a form of self-assigned and flexible subjectivities, queer theorists’ notion of disidentification seeks the abolition of identities as a form of carceration (Martins & Coelho, 2022). As such, it provides us tools to grasp the significance of unrecognizability in fighting stigma.

The digital spaces, in particular, have been long theorized to offer tools for the confusion and disassembling of identity (Bhandari & Bimo, 2022; Haimson, 2018; Haraway, 1985/1991; Turkle, 1996; Walther & Lew, 2022). In his work, Hans Asenbaum (2021) has suggested how anonymity afforded by the digital media allows constructing a self free from pre-set evaluative categories and gazes. Alongside anonymity, the digital space now provides us tools to present multiple versions of ourselves simultaneously – to form a collage of the different selves we are made of – and compose them in a way that demands them to be seen side by side. I offer, next, a brief glossary of how self-visibility online has thus far been understood as potentially political, and what implications it may have for the study of stigma resistance.

Politics of self-visibility

Stigma power is profoundly visual. The origins of the term, as Tyler (2020, pp. 34–35) points out, is in the tattooing of enslaved people. It was a visual penalty, a humiliation, that would be forever carved into one’s skin. It would forever dominate how one is looked at, and – equally – how one looks at oneself.

In our age of hypervisibility, permeated by visual social media (Hand, 2020), the significance of the visual both in exerting and resisting stigma power has only increased. Today, stigma power operates, for example, through stigmatizing media depictions and offensive visual representations that reduce the person to their stigmatizing experiences (Eisenhauer, 2008; Heuer et al., 2011; Saguy & Ward, 2011; Triburgo & Van Dyck, 2022). Prior research notes equally that especially young people increasingly use their self-images as a tool to fight stigma, to ‘imagine themselves differently’ (Rettberg, 2017, p. 436) or to assume a subversive position towards hegemonic representations (Adut, 2018, p. 122; Kuntsman, 2017; Tiidenberg, 2018).

In our visual-digital societies, selfies have also become prominent tools by which we shape our selves (Meriluoto, 2023; Tiidenberg & Gómez Cruz, 2015). Brager (2015) argues that selfies can be understood as tools of becoming individuals in public debate, through which a person is allotted a space, a name and an identity. Hardesty and colleagues (2019) argue that ‘in the world of selfie citizenship’, visibility equals access to the virtual public sphere. It is by being visible as yourself that you are seen as part of the public debate, as someone worthy of being listened to and noticed (Proulx, 2016). Selfies are a way of constructing and coordinating oneself within the cultural norms of legibility, now increasingly negotiated and produced through the socio-technical affordances of the digital platforms (Meriluoto, 2023; Proulx, 2016).

Most selfies published on social media align with, and hence contribute to the affirmation of culturally dominant norms of appearing (Caldeira et al., 2021; Grindstaff & Torres Valencia, 2021). In terms of responses to stigma, they can be conceptualized as ‘stigma management’ – as tools in proving ordinariness or highlighting one’s unique accomplishments (see Harris & Karimshah, 2019). Some selfies, however, are taken and posted precisely to counter the cultural norms that guide how we ought to appear. Some selfie-posters deliberately show stigmatized features of themselves in order to visually politicize present schemes of valuation, ways of seeing and norms of recognition (Meriluoto, 2023; Tiidenberg & Whelan, 2017). For example, Mark Rademacher (2018) has investigated how people with ostomies use their selfies as tools to fight ostomy stigma. Mikhel Proulx (2016, p. 116) shows how feminist activists ‘depict unladylike imagery of [their] unshaven, menstruating or hysterical body’ to contest standardized norms of appeal. The logic of subversion identified in these analyses is that selfies seek to normalize stigmatized features and selves by displaying in public something that has thus far been deemed shameful and undisplayable.

In this article, I deepen our understanding of how visual online self-making can be harnessed as a tool in stigma resistance. To do this, I suggest looking at self-images as devices in dynamic and continuous process of self-coordination that offer us a unique access to see one’s relationship with oneself (Meriluoto, 2023). As Elena Esposito (2022, p. 58) shows, the technological properties of a selfie offer an entirely novel way of coordinating with the self; by way of a specific function in the smartphone’s photo software, the image is inverted ‘so that it looks like what one would normally see in a mirror’ (italics added). It is a way of showing others our way of looking at ourselves, largely unattainable before smartphones and visual social media.

I thus use selfies as a way to investigate how we look at, and relate to, ourselves, and how this negotiation and cultivation take place in public. This notion of the self as a process (Lloyd, 2005) opens an entirely new landscape of possibilities on how the self can serve as a basis for political action. If the self is not a stable and pre-fixed gathering of definitions and labels, but an active and continuous process, then it is this process that now provides the basis for public action (Asenbaum, 2021). This article also contributes to the debate on identity politics by illustrating how this process – in essence the trying out and performing the multitude of the self – can be understood as the basis of political action, and how it could be employed to resist stigma power.

In my examples, I argue that the forms of subversion afforded by visual social media take shape as a skilful play between identification and disidentification. I present two strategies: the first, resignification, refers to becoming visible in ‘unaccepted’ and presently devalued ways, temporarily identifying with, and redefining the stigmatized identity. As stigma shames one into hiding, the act of being visible resists stigma power by crafting and showing an alternative way of relating to one’s stigmatized features or experiences. The second strategy, termed opacity through multiplicity, operates by performing the self as multiple and constantly changing, hence making definitions and categorizations ill-fitting and more difficult. Both resignification and multiplicity, I argue, cannot be grasped through the stigma–recognition dichotomy. Instead, I propose that we need to acknowledge the value of disidentification and unrecognizability in stigma resistance as an equally important practice of subversion.

Methods and data

The empirical data for this article are produced as part of a larger research project on visual political action (Luhtakallio, 2018). With a specific focus on experience-based activism, I have closely followed 18 young Finnish activists who have stigmatizing experiences, and who use these experiences as a basis for their activism. Initially, I followed two groups: one with experiences of homelessness and another that shared experiences of mental ill health. With a snowball sampling, I then also contacted individual queer and disability activists. Importantly, most youth studied shared intersecting experiences of stigma: a mental health activist might also have experiences of homelessness, a homelessness activist might also be part of a gender or a sexual minority, and so forth.

I followed the activists with a snap-along ethnographic method (Luhtakallio & Meriluoto, 2022), observing them and their visual practices simultaneously online and offline. The method recognizes the decreasing significance of the distinction between the online and the offline, especially in the everyday lives of the youth, and follows image-taking, sharing, commenting and sensemaking both in the physical world and on online platforms. After having contacted the participants either through their group or through direct messages on social media, I first met with them, and carefully explained the study, its design and the ethical commitments and safeguards that were in place to protect the participants. I explained that the images collected and analysed would never be published without a separate, and explicit consent by the participants. I also reminded the participants regularly of their continuing observation online. I started collecting online data from their social media accounts only after gaining explicit written consent from the participants.

I followed both the homelessness and the mental health activists for two years, and participated in their group meetings, activism trainings and in the events they hosted. During fieldwork, my specific focus was on the image-practices of the young: of what, how and when they took photos, how they used photos in their everyday lives, how they discussed photos, etc. Simultaneously I followed the participants’ online image-practices on social media. During fieldwork, and after having obtained a written consent from the participants, I took screenshots of every image they posted on their Instagram accounts, and of the captions and possible comments that accompanied them. In total, I followed 18 activists for a period varying between 6 and 48 months. I also conducted 32 interviews with the activists where I further enquired about their views on visual social media, society and their activism. As part of the interviews, we discussed and analysed the participants’ images they had pre-chosen as particularly meaningful for their activism.

The first part of my data originates from a civil society-run project where people with experiences of homelessness organized ‘alternative walking tours’ in a big Finnish city. Some of the guides had been sleeping rough for years, some had been couch-surfing at friends’ and relatives’ places, while others had backgrounds in childcare and other institutions. Most participants had suffered other social and health problems alongside homelessness: mostly substance abuse, but also mental health problems and somatic illnesses. At the time of data collection, all but one of the activists had their own apartments that they had secured either via the city’s public housing scheme or in a supported housing unit with individual apartments. I followed the group and the consenting individual activists between 2018 and 2020.

The group of mental health activists were equally a CSO run project that I followed from the beginning of 2020 until the group dispersed in 2023. The group consisted of about 30 active people (most of them identifying as women), aged between 20 and 35, sharing experiences of mental health problems. As described in their Guide for activists, most group members were ‘white, Finnish-speaking and have an upper-level education, making the group rather homogenous in this regard’. The group relied on creative and artistic forms of activism: they organized club events where people shared their experiences of mental health in the form of performances; they published a book, a board game and, for example, new, mental health themed lyrics for Christmas carols that they then performed on the stairs of the Finnish parliament. The group provided regular activism training for its members. The participants were self-defined ‘digital natives’, using their smartphones and social media habitually.

In addition to the two groups, I have contacted and, following explicit consent, observed individual disability and queer activists both online and offline. The offline observations took place in political events, such as demonstrations and panel discussions, but also everyday situations, like spending time at their homes.

For the purposes of my analysis, a crucial feature of all participants’ activism is their creative use of alternative visibility in public spaces. The walking tours were designed as platforms for the activists to be perceived of as ‘tour guides’ instead of through the dominant devaluing gaze of homelessness. Similarly, the mental health activists’ political action focused strongly on how people with mental health concerns are being perceived. The group was very active and vocal on social media, particularly Instagram, where their common modus operandi was the reclaiming of devaluing framings of people with mental ill health. The individual disability and queer activists also made political claims by being visible as themselves, and were subsequently included in this study. All groups and participants explicitly expressed ‘fighting stigma’ as their political objective.

In my analysis, I focused on the activists’ ways of being visible as themselves. I analysed their self-images by asking what kind of relationship the image creates with the activists’ past self-performances, and with the categories through which they can be known. Do the self-images construct a linear narrative of identity, or are they rather marked by ruptures and change? What different kinds of selves, and subsequently possible categories through which to know them, do the activists portray? The analysis followed an abductive logic (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014), where initial categories of relating to the stigmatized self were first crafted based on empirical analyses and were then re-read informed by prior literature. I identified the category of resignification as a form of reclaiming quite early on, but the other main category remained unexplained with existing stigma literature until I applied the lens of disidentification to the analysis.

As the focal point of my argument concerns the participants’ relationship with their selves, its publicity and potential political use, I considered it necessary to involve them closely in the research process. I discussed my analyses with the activists during interviews, fieldwork and the preparation of this manuscript, including the selection of images and their interpretation. In addition, I organized a co-theorizing workshop for my research participants in February 2024. In the workshop, 11 informants joined together for 4.5 hours to discuss identity, its connections to political action, and the two strategies suggested in this article. Based on the workshop, I revised the theoretical propositions of this article to reflect the intertwinement of the two strategies, to critically examine the level of freedom in the discussed examples of visual self-making, and to include a discussion on the positionality of the interpreter.

The images in the following analysis are presented with explicit consent from the research participants. All names in the following analysis are pseudonyms. The fieldnotes and interview extracts have been translated from Finnish to English by the author.

Resignification

Last year, I had this radical moment in my life when I had started to dare to express my gender in a more masculine way, and I had stopped shaving my leg hair. Over the summer, I had received quite a bit of shouting because of it . . . and I wanted to reclaim my body hair. So, I posted selfies with as much hair as I possibly could with captions like ‘Well here they are then, do come and have a look’. . . . The way I see it, people tried to take something from me but now I reclaimed it for myself. . . . For me, it was a tool to express something that had been devalued, ridiculed, and belittled about me, in my own terms. (Utu 29.11.2019)

Above Utu, a transgender person in their early thirties, describes how they used their self-images to forge a new relationship to a stigmatized feature, their leg hair. With the images that display ‘as much hair as possible’, they make visible something that ‘ought to be hidden’ (Yoshino, 2006), but transform its meaning to themselves, and show this newly assigned meaning for others. By displaying a stigmatized feature, the images serve as visual proof of a new way of relating to one’s stigmatized identity.

This is a practice of resisting stigma I term resignification (see Butler, 1993). It is a visual interpretation of the practice of reclaiming (Rand, 2014; Saguy & Ward, 2011). Resignification includes a temporary identification with a stigmatizing label or a feature but reworking its meaning. This form of subversion ‘works the weakness in the norm’ (Butler, 1993, p. 181): it is simultaneously constrained by the norms that it politicizes through their subversive reiteration. In other words, when resignifying their stigmatizing feature, the activists temporarily accept the accompanying identity, but redefine the way one ought to know oneself as a result. Instead of relating to oneself as someone inferior or unworthy, the stigmatized feature becomes a tool to know and relate to oneself differently. Through resignification, the person remains legible to others, but they offer their alternative way of seeing themselves as the interpretative lens through which they should be made sense of.

On social media, practices of resignifying a stigmatized identity are increasingly commonplace. Alongside smiling selfies in scenic locations, we are increasingly seeing norm-defying bodies and selves proudly taking the screen. Jessika, a mental health activist in her twenties, posts selfies and Instastory videos where she cries almost daily. She posts selfies with red eyes, wet cheeks and snot running from her nose to share her distress after a particularly hard therapy session, to communicate her despair over the pandemic and Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, or to show us how insomnia feels. With the images, she makes visible and identifies with mental health concerns: with visual cues culturally associated with depression and distress, she affirms that yes, this is indeed who she is (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Jessika after a therapy session.

By making herself visible in non-normative ways, Jessika tackles the valuation structure that currently devalues mental distress. Her crying selfies, while establishing a temporal identification with the role of a mental health patient, also contribute to a resignification of how such a role should be regarded and valued. The crying selfies acclaim how this is indeed who Jessika is, but it shouldn’t be seen as a problem. With a touch of irony, in Figure 2, Jessika makes clear that her experiences of trauma and mental illness are not negative by default. As she reworks her background into a ‘Barbie name’, she temporarily assumes these labels as her identity, but simultaneously resignifies them as a source of pride.

Figure 2.

‘This Barbie is traumatized and chronically ill’.

Loviisa, an all-round mental health, queer and body positivity activist, in turn, frequently posts images where her body looks ill-fitting to the narrow social media norms of (female) beauty. She may raise her arms to show sweaty armpits or squeeze her tummy to show that it is not entirely flat. In spring 2023, she posted a video on her Instastories where she tries on her old summer clothes and throws away any that are too tight around the waist. Shortly after posting the video, she posts a comment saying: ‘I’ve now looked through this video repeatedly, thinking “Wow, what an amazing body! – In all its softness, my body is strong, which brings me joy”’ (Figure 3). Loviisa is keenly aware of the (literally) tight beauty norms imposed upon young women, and she deliberately posts images that defy these. By making visible the subversive relationship she has with herself when looking at these images, she resignifies her soft and strong body as something she is happy and proud of.

Figure 3.

Loviisa tries on trousers.

Non-normative selfies gain much of their power from the fame-based logic of social media (Luhtakallio & Meriluoto, 2023; Malafaia & Meriluoto, 2024). It is an environment where we trade with popularity and acclaim, and thus bring forth the versions of ourselves that we value most. As Silja, a mental health activist, explains, it is precisely amid ‘happy vacation images and success stories’ where images of mental distress, depression and despair catch our eye as norm-defying. Many of the activists stress how social media self-performances epitomize the harmful values of efficiency, self-reliance and resilience, and for that reason, it is a particularly important and powerful environment to ‘appear differently’. In her account, Silja wants to ‘show the sides of life that do not count as displayable’.

Drawing on prior research, we can note that resignification as a strategy of stigma resistance requires a distance to be created between the stigma and one’s sense of self. For the stigmatized characteristic to become available for resignification, one needs to be able to create space between the derogatory label and one’s sense of who one is. This can happen through temporal distance, as Alice Bloch’s (2022) work with descendants of holocaust survivors has shown. Bloch has studied people who have chosen to take a tattoo of the number that had been tattooed on their parents or grandparents at Auschwitz. The stigma of the tattoo, Bloch notes, had been resignified over generations, leading the grandchildren of survivors to resignify the tattoo as a badge of pride, and as a defiant sign of survival. The resignification of the concept of ‘queer’ offers another example (e.g. Butler, 1993). Here, the distance comes from a combination of mass mobilization and a process of increasing theoretical engagement. As Erin J. Rand (2014) describes, the development of queer theory and the queer movement are inextricably linked. The possibility to consider the stigmatizing concept not from a place of individual experiences and hurt, but more abstractly as a vehicle to renew theory on identity, allowed for a space where a process of resignification became possible.

Here, I suggest that the digital media offer another possibility of detaching the stigma from one’s self, making it possible to rework and reclaim stigmatizing features as tools of subversion. This affordance of the digital media comes in the form of temporariness: while one can show and identify with one’s stigmatized self in some posts, in others, one can hide it. What a person shows is in their own hands – at least more so than in the physical world. If you choose to sometimes become visible with the stigma, you remain free to other times present yourself differently. As a result, resignification is intertwined with another strategy of visual resistance to stigma, which I term opacity through multiplicity.

Opacity through multiplicity

Lilja, a homelessness activist in her late twenties, and I are sitting in the University cafeteria, planning a presentation for professionals who work with people with homelessness experiences. Lilja, who usually comes across as quite cool, calm and collected, is suddenly extremely agitated:

What really sets my teeth on edge is that I am only regarded as a former homeless person. I am not just a recovering addict, I am not just someone with substance abuse problems, I am a human being! . . . Fucking stereotypes! They drive people to a role where they are diminished to their mere experiences. There’s the scale of valuation that I want to be disassembling. That no one’s experiences are that person. Their past isn’t their identity. And what is identity anyway? It is always in flux. (10.9.2019)

Lilja’s angry quote above is the experience of stigmatization summarized: a feeling of being reduced to one’s (unwanted) experiences and having all other sides of oneself disregarded entirely. At the same time, however, Lilja’s exclamation also sets the stage for the second strategy in confronting a stigmatizing gaze: pressing onto the multiplicity – and fluidity – of the self. As the identity assigned from the outside is extremely dismissive and hurtful, the activists frequently tapped into the multiplicity and changing character of their selves as their tool for public action. Crucially, the exploration of this multiplicity and change was conducted in public and as such served as their tool in politicizing the devaluing categorization that presently dismisses and devalues them.

I propose that, visually, stigma resistance also takes place by creating unrecognizability. This happens by introducing multiple possible names and categories through which one can be seen, thus making one’s identity harder to pin down. I call this strategy of stigma resistance opacity through multiplicity. By suggesting alternative and changing identities for themselves, the activists not only highlight the plurality and ambiguity of categories, but also become partially invisible, not fully intelligible, opaque. By making categorizations impossible, the activists disrupt the frame through which their devaluation has succeeded thus far. As they can no longer be fully accounted for from within the one, devaluing frame, a plurality of other potential categories is introduced, and thus, their stigmatization politicized.

This fugitivity and the multiple, constantly changing self is one of the key affordances of the digital media. Now, we can be multiple and in multiple places simultaneously: we can play with identification and disidentification, foregrounding the self as a process of becoming instead of a fixed identity (Asenbaum, 2023). This enables resisting stigma by becoming uncategorizable and thus ungovernable. Online multiplicity is also a much less costly strategy for the individual. Instead of having to manage one’s stigmatized self by performing ordinariness or tackling the stigmatizing labels head on to resignify them, multiplicity allows an escape route: by being multiple and thus uncategorizable, you escape the devaluing gaze and the stigma power imposed upon you.

Lilja’s Instagram account, for example, is full of images of herself as different kind: she is dancing flamenco, playing tunes as a DJ, lifting weights in CrossFit, cuddling her friends’ babies, cooking with her partner. Figure 4 presents Lilja’s 10 most recent self-images from her Instagram wall at the time of writing this article. In all its variety, it’s a very common-looking glimpse into a young person’s life – and it is no accident:

On my Instagram account, I’m showing my life as quite an ordinary young person’s life. And by showing that I want to say that my life is pretty ordinary despite the stigma and all. (Lilja 7.11.2019)

Lilja explains the versatility of images and roles in her account as a deliberate choice. Highlighting all the other aspects of her life alongside her substance abuse and homelessness background was her argument against the stigmatizing ‘scale of valuation’. As Martin Hand (2020) notes, the visual social media afford such an exploration of the multifaceted self in spades, as images on social media are, by definition, never in their ‘fixed nor final stage’. As they can be indefinitely edited, captioned, shared in different contexts, etc., the sense of the self as something forever malleable is further enforced. I argue that in addition to the ability to edit the images, it is visual social media’s unique affordance of displaying self-images alongside one another, making us see the different selves simultaneously, that is particularly powerful in resisting stigma. We can be made to look simultaneously at selves from the past, present or the future, from different contexts and roles, portraying all the different categories through which one can be seen.

Figure 4.

Multiple Liljas.

At times, these different categories coalesce in a single self-image. Virva’s Instagram account is a powerful example of this. Virva is a wheelchair user and terms herself a disability activist, frequently posing in her wheelchair and with her other aids. However, in most of her images, she also wears black mesh, black lingerie, chains and spikes as a reminder of the many other things that she is. Virva is also a queer activist, a sexual counsellor, and frequently shares her insights on the BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) culture. By sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a black corset and a collar around her neck, she powerfully shows herself through multiple categories at once, forcing the spectator to consider them simultaneously (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Virva’s selfie.

This multiplicity, I argue, plays skilfully with both disidentification and identification. By introducing alternative possible categories through which one could be seen, it detaches the activists from the devaluing category, but also establishes the self as something always fugitive – as something that cannot fully be named or grasped. Loviisa, who we met above, puts this succinctly when describing her social media presence:

However much you see me online, it is never the entire me. At any given time, it is the version of me that I have then felt like seeing and being. A part of me, as a pussy activist, as a puppetry artist, as a hammock-trekker. . . . It gives me a permission to be something I am by being it in public. (11.9.2020)

Loviisa makes it very explicit that it is by being all sorts of things in public that she is also able to broaden her identity as she experiences is. By appearing also as a puppetry artist or ‘a pussy activist’, she broadens her stigmatized category of appearance as a mental health patient not only in the eyes of others but also for herself.

The political mobilization of multiplicity, however, also entails a balancing act. As my research participants explained, the multiplicity of the self is only seen as an act of subversion in the context of stigma, which is why the stigmatizing (self)gaze needs to be made visible from time to time. Amidst looking at themselves in ever-changing and different ways, the activists explained how they needed to occasionally post images where they related to themselves through the stigma to give power to all the other self-images. As one participant said, ‘you still have to be different enough’ for the multiplicity to maintain its subversive power. The two strategies of reclaiming and opacity are thus closely intertwined. This requirement to occasionally ossify the identity is also an indication of how Bey’s utopian vision of opacity as the abolition if identity is not (yet) realized. However, I argue that the activists’ strategy of multiplication can be understood as an empirical operationalization of the concept, explaining how the activists take steps towards opacity.

Subsequently, I propose understanding resistance to stigma as a continuous process of identification and disidentification. Distinct from disidentification as defined by Rancière, this process of identification/disidentification does not seek anonymity, but individuality. Instead of suggesting another possible category through which one would want to be seen, multiplicity as resistance insists on the individuality of the activists. The activists do not offer or seek an alternative identity coalition that they would want to identify with or base their political action on, as it is the very boundaries of all classifications that multiplicity seeks to question. Instead, it is the individuality of each activist that is sought after and built through the unique daily collage of the kind of selves I can be. Visual disidentification, then, includes refusing categories, but demanding a name.

Conclusions

In this article I have suggested two strategies of visual stigma resistance. A strategy I have termed resignification operates by being visible in norm-defying ways, redefining previously stigmatizing ways of knowing the self. The strategy of opacity through multiplicity, in turn, emphasizes the plurality and transformativity of the self. The first strategy involves a temporary identification with, and redefinition of a stigmatized visibility. The second establishes disidentification from the stigmatized identity by introducing multiple other categories through which one could be seen and valued, hence insisting how the self remains always unintelligible and beyond reach. These interdependent strategies blur and disrupt existing categorizations and classifications, and result in the creation of a unique, yet ever transforming self.

Both strategies of stigma resistance play with identification and disidentification. The first, in Rancière’s terms, demands to be named and counted, but reworks the values associated with those names and categories, suggesting a subversive in-between subjectivity for the activists. However, distinct to the Rancièrian notion of improper names, these activists do not seek to establish a collective subjectivity, but work individually under the auspice of a project of self-multiplication. This strategy disturbs the ways of counting and naming, and relies on a radical strategy of subjectivation as a unique and ever transforming individual that escapes all attempts at definition.

Both strategies urge us to rethink the self and identity in increasingly digitalized societies. Now, the self increasingly emerges as a sequence of temporary identifications that are constantly reworked as a result of intense and technologically amplified self-monitoring and reflection (cf. Cooley, 1972; Rettberg, 2014). Subsequently, the dichotomous view of recognition as the polar opposite to stigma needs to be reconsidered, as disidentification, refusal and opacity emerge as equally important strategies of stigma resistance. A framework focusing on recognition may not only hinder observing these key strategies but may also inadvertently uphold the same classificatory systems that produce stigma in the first place.

In addition to theorizing visual resistance to stigma, the article contributes to the burgeoning discussion on how the self could serve as the basis of political action without confining it to a stable, pre-existing identity. I have shown how a public exploration and change in the self can form the basis and the vehicle for activism. I have also demonstrated how disidentification can take shape by multiple identifications. In addition to the possibilities of anonymity afforded by social media (Asenbaum, 2021), disidentification can take shape through the introduction of multiple possible selves, thus establishing the self as something constantly fugitive.

The implications of such self-reflexive activism for democracy are contradictory. While there is inevitable radical potential in both the subversive identifications and the disrupting disidentifications outlined in this article, these forms of activism do not seem to lead to, or even allow for, novel coalitions. Rather, the multiplicity of the self in public appears as a continuing process of self-exploration in opposition to stigma. It is by constantly being differently in shifting patterns that the stigmatizing gaze is continuously battled. It is thus a form of political action that seems to operate between individuals and in an in-between place within the person. This profound individualization of both the repertoire and the sphere of activism, I argue, is the result of radical democratic identity politics. The age of hypervisibility and self-reflection contributes to a form of politics of the self where it is the uniqueness of the self and its right to constantly change that are defended above all else.