Leah Junck | An Ethnography on the Embodied Experiences of Tinder Users in Cape Town
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2020-04-24

Leah Junck | University of Cape Town, South Africa

Full presentation title: Between Phallus and Freedom: An Ethnography on the Embodied Experiences of Tinder Users in Cape Town

Presentation description: 

This paper grapples with the question of whether dating applications like Tinder reinforce rigid gender and other identities as well as with the potential of technologically enhanced selves to contest them. Notions of identity and aspects of power and agency are discussed by referring to ethnographic fieldwork on dating applications usage conducted in Cape Town. My research lays bare the challenges and opportunities that navigating desires via technology hold in the complex post-Apartheid context. It engages with the everyday embodied experience of research participants in establishing intimacy and their perceptions of self in the process while looking at the online and offline as hybrid experience. The focus lies on the ways in which relationships may become democratized in this highly diverse context with the fieldwork revealing that the pervasiveness of gender roles becomes perpetuated by dating applications. This is partially due to a lack of open discussion and carefulness in the process of unraveling and navigating the rules of the dating game whilst maintaining a sense of self that is not to be rendered more evaded by hurt, heartbreak, ghosting and a perceived loss of autonomy than it already is. However, those who break free from this hesitation and leave their comfort zone at least to degrees tend to narrate stories in which nuances of the self are discovered, thus adding to social scripts. This involves the transgression of particular and embodied gendered/racialized/classed roles and is not without hurdles and backlash. The maneuvering of various crossroads while embodying continuously changing notions of identity that are guided by – and sometimes clashing with – social scripts brings various challenges to the fore and renders it difficult to create even a momentary sense of coming home to the self. The continued search for desire and meaningfulness by tinderers in spite of these challenges and even after episodes of defeat and the deletion of apps can be interpreted as a move away from strict identity categories.

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