Love Costs: The Labor of Digital Desire

• In Event: 30855 - What’s race got to do with it? Race and Intimate Relationships

Abstract

As contemporary American society has shifted from face-to-face interactions to digitally mediated networks of romance and intimacy, online dating applications augment the socio-political contexts in which online daters live. This study explores how Black women find love and potential partners in online dating spaces and how they navigate interactions specific to their experience as Black women on dating apps through their profile and identity curation, evaluation of potential matches, and user behavior. Drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews with self-identified Black American women, ages 21-40, this research situates and centers Black women’s narratives in broader frameworks of digital spaces as sites of a racialized gender order and reinforcement of colonial beauty standards. While addressing the critical gaps in the literature on digital economies of romance and desire, the study finds that digital spaces render and locate Black women as sites of sexualization, rejection, degradation, and invisibility. The analysis of the findings suggests that Black women compete with algorithms and racialized dating preferences by meticulously curating the front stage self to rewrite the socially imposed narratives of Black women’s desirability and femininity while imagining possibilities of love, belonging, and companionship.

Author

• Jada Marie Daniel, Northwestern University