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Meeting on a dating app, “making it real” at a dining table
Mon, August 12, 8:30 to 9:30am, Sheraton New York, Floor: Third Floor, New York Ballroom WestAbstract
This study explores how intimacy in the United States is shaped through mobile-mediated dating, which is seasoned with culinary preferences and gendered conventions. I focus specifically on dating apps such as Dine and Dindr, two examples of a rapidly growing subcategory of mobile-mediated dating that has not yet been explored. These apps match partners based on their location and restaurant choices and advertise same-day and face-to-face dinner dates as their primary goal. They have pricing systems that encourage male daters to pay the first restaurant bill. Drawing on the sociological concept of mediated intimacy and attending to emotionalized culinary experiences and gendered individualism, this study asks three questions. First, how is intimacy represented by dining-dating apps? Second, how do these dining-dating apps approach “being single”? Third, what gender relations and what contradictions between romance and consumerism can be identified in dating that is managed by an app and that trades in intimate commodities? By analyzing the advertising text, testimonials, and reviews posted online, I demonstrate that individuals are not only invited to manage their intimate life through cultural consumption but are also compelled to adopt accelerated and mediated ways of engaging. I reveal that the limited and regulated access to communicative exchanges and the extended follow-up dinner dates in dining-dating apps is related to concerns about personal and relational investment. Furthermore, I argue that dining-dating apps participate in the mediation of emotions and gender relations by introducing intimate commodities that blur the borders between individualist aspiration and gendered and classed ways of experiencing intimacy.