You have full access to this open access article. Leading theories of the recent history of sexuality have pointed to trends toward detraditionalization and precarity in intimate relations, but also to democratization and innovation.
This study grounded in 79 qualitative interviews with men seeking men online considers their experiences in light of these theories. The rise of dating apps has generated sexual fields that have shaped the sexual subjectivities of the current era in multiple ways.
The narratives of study participants show much more than the hook-up culture that dating apps are best known for. They speak to experiences of superficiality, unmet expectations, and sometimes bruising intersections with hierarchies defined by age, race, body type, gender expression, and serostatus. Yet at the same time, they show a strong aspiration to sociability, social network building, and reach for a language of affiliation beyond the kin and friendship terms of the larger society.
Generational comparisons indicate the shifting sexual subjectivities that dating apps have shaped by constituting virtual sexual fields. Socio-historical studies of sexuality and intimacy have posited two broad visions of the change in western, industrial societies over the last century and a half.
One vision, perhaps best articulated in the work of Giddens , Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth BeckGernsheim , and Bauman , constructs contemporary sexuality and intimacy as cast adrift from familiar signposts, where individuals are left to their own devices to create often fragile relationships amidst declining support from tradition, religion, or community Adam, Woltersdorff , p. For GBM in particular, dating apps sometimes referred to as geosocial networking mobile apps in the research literature , allow a largely hidden population to become visible to each other on a virtual plane and potentially to find one another, escaping, if momentarily, from regulated social environments.
