An Intersectional Study of Audiences: Cisgender and Heterosexual Youth in Dating Apps

Abstract

From the perspective of feminist media studies and within audience research, the article aims to account for some of the intersectional principles that rule consumption practices of cisgender and heterosexual users in dating apps among Buenos Aires youth (between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five) in 2023. The endeavor undertakes an intersectional approach aiming to study how gender, sexuality, and class shape erotic-affective sociability that spins around them drawing on users' lived experiences. Queer theory, materialist feminism, and Bourdieu's sociology were respectively the theories used in the task.

With regard to the methods, twenty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted with users from different social classes, resulting in a total of 24 hours of video and audio recordings. This article presents two main findings from the analysis. Firstly, dating apps consumption is socially stratified, which reinforces class homogamy and produces a plataformization of social space that reproduces in the digital the differences and inequalities of the offline world. Secondly, interaction is ruled by a cisheteronormative courtship ritual that punishes and disciplines those who attempt to transgress it. The interviewed women who want to start dating women and don't succeed are a prime example. In the slipstream of the massification of feminism, subjectivities change faster than interactional structures and hysteresis takes place. Finally, the article tackles the theoretical implications of the results, and new research problems are proposed.