Seminar (MEDUSA): "Queer Experiences in Dating Apps"

Varying levels of anonymity, biased algorithms and potentially unkind, abusive and discriminatory messages - online culture dating app culture is increasingly being labelled as "toxic". Dating apps are not neutral – they are marketplaces where everyone is valued differently as a potential partner. As put forward by the Sexual Field Theory, these romantic digital environments are structured by desirability hierarchies that are informed by the sexual field’s beauty standards and pre-existing, external societal power structures. Unfortunately, these structures mostly benefit white, cisgender, able-bodied, young, gender-conforming individuals, even in queer spaces that are often imagined as more inclusive or progressive.

 

Drawing on qualitative research with queer dating app users in the UK, this seminar asks how dating apps are experienced by queer people outside of these "norms", who do not benefit from these power structures and desirability hierarchies. While centring marginalised queer voices, I explore the everyday practices of self-presentation, filtering, matching, and rejection on dating apps as well as experiences of exclusion, fetishisation, and heightened vulnerability to harassment and discrimination. Together, these experiences illuminate what it means to date while not being the default.

 

Lerelle Willden-Lewis is a PhD researcher in Media and Cultural Studies at Birmingham City University and holds an MSc in Psychology. Their research focuses on intersectionally minoritised queer people's experiences of dating apps in the UK, with particular attention to desirability hierarchies, platform design and digital intimacy. Drawing on Sexual Field Theory, sexual racism theory, queer theory and critical race perspectives, their work examines how power, difference and inequality are reproduced within contemporary digital dating cultures. Their positionality as a queer Black woman informs and shapes their research approach.