Lesbian Erotic Actors and the Construction of Digital Sexual Fields

• In Event: Sociology of Sexualities Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Sexuality, Identity, Desire, and the Erotic

Abstract

Dating apps have become a cultural mainstay and an essential tool for individuals in the 21st century to find romantic and sexual relationships. The tens of millions of monthly users for apps such as Grindr, Tinder, and HER make it abundantly clear that for a significant portion of the population, relation and intimacy are being digitally mediated. Despite lesbians being more likely to use online and technologically-based methods to find sexual and romantic connections than their heterosexual counterparts, little scholarly attention has been paid to how this population of queer people traverse dating app terrains. Additionally, decreasing physical spaces for queer people, but especially sexual minority women, make dating apps an increasingly important site to understand the lives and communities of lesbian, bisexual, and other women who have sex with women (WSW). As such, in this study, I examine how lesbians utilize dating apps and other digital platforms to facilitate queer sociality and create a queer sexual field. My analysis is based on a study of 23 lesbians living in the Chicago metropolitan area who participated in in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Additionally, I conducted 17 digital walkthroughs of participants’ dating profiles. With this data, I argue that the dating apps and digital platforms used by lesbians constitute a sexual field that is co-constructed by the platform’s respective technological affordances and their lesbian users. Furthermore, I argue that lesbian users display varying levels of agency as they make decisions to either align with or refute the established habitus of the digital sexual field or aspire to leave the field altogether.

Author

• Joy Chigozirim Anyanwu, Northwestern University