QUEER DIASPORA AND DIGITAL INTIMACY: CHINESE QUEER WOMEN’S PRACTICES FOR USING RELA AND HER IN AUSTRALIA
Haili Li
BA, MA
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Digital Media Research Centre School of Communication Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice Queensland University of Technology
2021
Keywords
Australia Chinese diaspora Chinese queer women Cross-cultural context Digital intimacy HER Identity Negotiation Lesbian social and dating apps LGBTQI Queer diaspora Rela
Queer Diaspora and Digital Intimacy: Chinese Queer Women’s Practices for Using Rela and HER in Australia i
Abstract
This research explores how social and cultural contexts play into Chinese queer women’s experiences of and practices for using lesbian social and dating apps, such as Rela and HER, in Australia. Rela is a Chinese lesbian social app, and HER is an English-language Western lesbian dating app. This research deploys the app walkthrough method (Light, Burgess, & Duguay, 2018) to analyse these two lesbian dating apps’ respective development trajectories and primary technological features and explores how key design elements are intertwined with the social and cultural contexts in which Rela and HER are situated. This data is then combined with semi- structured in-depth interviews with 25 Chinese diasporic women who use Rela and/or HER to unpack their digital practices for socialising and dating as mediated through lesbian social apps in the Australian context.
With its Chinese social media design logic, Rela is shown to have consistently foregrounded multifunctionality since its launch and established stringent censorship mechanisms to cope with China’s online censorship system. However, HER is marked by its minimalistic and single-functioned design, which coheres with popular English- language dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble, developed in the Western context. The app’s transition from a copy of male-oriented dating/hook-up app design to a service with more female-oriented features and functions is also shown to reflect changing perceptions around gender and sexuality and the nature of mobile lesbian social cultures in a global context (especially in the West). Thus, despite their clear differences, both Rela and HER are seen to have iteratively developed into platforms targeting broader and more diverse user groups than simply ‘lesbian women’. Moreover, social and cultural contexts have been instrumental in shaping these two apps’ technological infrastructures to this end.
Findings from this research also suggest that Chinese queer women have felt both enriched and challenged by using Real and HER in Australia. For example, digital intimacy enabled by lesbian social apps has assisted users in feeling a sense of belonging and security while living in Australia. This occurs through building connections with (primarily Chinese) queer women’s communities, both in the transnational and local contexts, and by allowing them space to explore their own
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sexual identities and desires, negotiate family pressures, and experience a different kind of life. At the same time, however, perceived privacy and safety risks, race-related prejudice, disputes and tensions- particularly in the context of interracial and intercultural communications and connections- also challenged the women in this research, aggravating their underlying concerns about mobile lesbian socialising and dating.
By shedding light on Chinese queer female diaspora’s practices for using lesbian social and dating apps in Australia, this study contributes to enriching existing work in the domain of lesbian social and dating apps and their user practices, particularly in non-Western and cross-cultural contexts, which remains largely understudied. In a broader sense, this research also offers insights into understanding digital intimacy practices and cultures within queer diasporas, highlighting how migration experiences and sociocultural contexts play into queer diasporic groups’ digital media use.
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Table of Contents
Keywords ...... i Abstract ...... ii Table of Contents ...... iv List of Figures ...... vii List of Tables ...... viii List of Abbreviations ...... ix Statement of Original Authorship ...... x Acknowledgements ...... xi Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Research Background ...... 4 1.1.1 Development of mobile dating apps in the Chinese and global context ...... 4 1.1.2 Homosexuality and heteronormative values in Chinese society ...... 7 1.1.3 Chinese diaspora in Australia ...... 10 1.2 Research Design ...... 11 1.2.1 App cases: Rela and HER ...... 12 1.2.2 Walkthrough ...... 14 1.2.3 Semi-structured in-depth interview ...... 15 1.3 Thesis Outline ...... 21 Chapter 2: Dating Applications and Digital Dating Cultures ...... 25 2.1 Introduction ...... 25 2.2 Dating App Studies ...... 26 2.3 LGBTQI Digital Dating Studies ...... 29 2.3.1 Gay men’s digital dating studies ...... 29 2.3.2 Queer women’s digital dating studies ...... 32 2.4 Non-Western and Cross-Cultural Dating App Studies ...... 37 2.4.1 Non-Western dating app studies in the Chinese context and beyond ...... 37 2.4.2 Cross-cultural dating app studies ...... 42 2.5 Chinese Diaspora’s Digital Practices in Australia ...... 45 2.6 Conclusion ...... 47 Chapter 3: Walkthrough of Rela and HER ...... 51 3.1 Introduction ...... 51
Queer Diaspora and Digital Intimacy: Chinese Queer Women’s Practices for Using Rela and HER in Australia iv
3.2 Walkthrough of Rela and HER ...... 52 3.3 Walkthrough Findings of Rela ...... 56 3.3.1 Multifunctional design and community building ...... 57 3.3.2 Ubiquitous censorship and surveillance ...... 66 3.4 Walkthrough Findings of HER ...... 72 3.4.1 Rebranding and transformation: From a ‘Grindr-like’ model to a lesbian social community ...... 73 3.4.2 Community building and event design ...... 78 3.5 Conclusion ...... 85 Chapter 4: Networked Chinese Queer Women: Connection Building and Development ...... 89 4.1 Introduction ...... 89 4.2 Transnational Togetherness Through Rela ...... 91 4.2.1 Rela Live: Virtual gathering and imagined physical intimacy building ...... 91 4.2.2 Rela ‘discover’ practices: Looking for ‘interesting soul’ ...... 94 4.2.3 Rela groups: ‘Home’ for emotional togetherness ...... 97 4.3 Networking in the Diasporic Context ...... 101 4.3.1 Establishing nearby intimacy through searching people nearby ...... 102 4.3.2 Sticking together: Strong ties sustained among Chinese queer women ...... 107 4.4 Digital Intimacy Building Impacting Diasporic Life ...... 111 4.4.1 Improved satisfaction with local life ...... 111 4.4.2 Exclusion and conflict ...... 117 4.5 Conclusion ...... 119 Chapter 5: Challenged Intimacy: Concerns, Prejudice and Tensions ...... 122 5.1 Introduction ...... 122 5.2 Privacy and Safety Concerns ...... 123 5.2.1 Social concerns: Misrepresentation, identification and harassment ...... 124 5.2.2 Institutional concerns: Surveillance and data tracking ...... 130 5.3 Subtle and Ambiguous Racial Prejudice ...... 135 5.3.1 Race-based sexual prejudice: Subtle versus blatant forms ...... 135 5.3.2 Ambiguities around individual preference and racial prejudice ...... 139 5.3.3 Bidirectional and multidirectional racial prejudice ...... 143 5.4 Conflicting Intimacy ...... 145 5.4.1 Disputes and frictions in the digital dating context ...... 145 5.4.2 Patriotism and fragile intimacy ...... 151 5.5 Response Strategies ...... 154
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5.6 Conclusion ...... 162 Chapter 6: Identity Navigation and Negotiation ...... 165 6.1 Introduction ...... 165 6.2 Identity Exploration and Negotiation ...... 167 6.2.1 Exploring and navigating identities and desires ...... 167 6.2.2 Constructing dual identities and co-situating in different contexts ...... 171 6.3 Negotiating Family Values and Expectations ...... 177 6.3.1 Resisting heteronormative values and family expectations ...... 177 6.3.2 Fulfilling family expectations through ‘staying in Australia’ ...... 180 6.3.3 Path-paving for identity communication ...... 182 6.4 Conclusion ...... 185 Chapter 7: Conclusion ...... 188 7.1 Major Research Findings: Chinese Queer Women’s Digital Intimacy Practices in Australia ...... 188 7.2 Significance of the Research ...... 196 7.3 Research Implications, Emerging Questions and Limitations ...... 198 References ...... 202 Appendix ...... 225
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List of Figures
Figure 3.1 Rela ‘Live’ section ...... 59 Figure 3.2 Rela live streaming room (advertisement image) ...... 61 Figure 3.3 Rela Live’s virtual gifts ...... 62 Figure 3.4 Rela ‘Featured Topic’ section ...... 63 Figure 3.5 Rela ‘Nearby Users’ ...... 65 Figure 3.6 Rela ‘World Roaming’ ...... 65 Figure 3.7 Warning texts (reminders) of ‘Rela Internet Police’ in Rela live streaming room ...... 67 Figure 3.8 Reminder in Rela Instant Chat ...... 69 Figure 3.9 Logo of HER’s rebranding in May 2018 ...... 75 Figure 3.10 HER’s ‘Feed’ section ...... 79 Figure 3.11 HER’s ‘Communities’ section (1) ...... 80 Figure 3.12 HER’s ‘Communities’ section (2) ...... 81 Figure 3.13 HER-The ‘Feed’ section of ‘Queer Womxn of Color’ community ...... 81 Figure 3.14 HER online event: Trans Womxn Community Meetup (6 April 2020) ...... 84 Figure 3.15 HER online event: Butt Stuff-Lube, Plugs, Beads & Toys (28 August 2020) ...... 84 Figure 3.16 Word cloud of HER’s Community Guidelines ...... 85
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List of Tables
Table 1.1 Rela and HER...... 12 Table 1.2 Interviewees in this project ...... 17
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List of Abbreviations
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation BBS Bulletin board service GFW Great Fire Wall LGBTQI Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex MSM Men who have sex with men UK United Kingdom US United States
Queer Diaspora and Digital Intimacy: Chinese Queer Women’s Practices for Using Rela and HER in Australia ix Statement of Original Authorship
The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.
Signature: QUT Verified Signature
Date:
Queer Diaspora and Digital Intimacy: Chinese Queer Women’s Practices for Using Rela and HER in Australia x
Acknowledgements
I would not have completed my final thesis and PhD journey so smoothly without the support and help from a lot of amazing people.
First, I would like to express my gratitude to my PhD supervisors, Dr Elija Cassidy and Professor Jean Burgess, who have always provided guidance, care and encouragement for my PhD study. Thank you, Elija, for always being a considerate supervisor and so attentive to all of my questions and problems. I truly appreciate your deep engagement with my research project and all the invaluable help you offered to my academic thinking and writing. My sincere appreciation also goes to Jean. Thank you for consistently providing constructive, high-level feedback on my thesis writing and always inspiring me to think more broadly and deeply about my research. I have been incredibly lucky to work with both of you over the past three years.
I would also like to thank Professor Terry Flew and Dr Rosalie Gillett for providing insightful feedback on my PhD thesis draft during the final seminar. My thanks also to Associate Professor Daniel Angus and Dr Jenny Zhengye Hou for your helpful feedback on the research project in the PhD confirmation seminar. I also want to express my gratitude to Dr Lisa Hill, who helped me edit this thesis with passion and wisdom.
Thank you to all my interviewees for participating in this project. Without your contribution in sharing your invaluable experiences, stories and viewpoints, I would not have been able to complete this thesis. I am deeply indebted to you all for your enthusiasm and generous assistance in disseminating the recruitment information, looking for potential interviewees, and updating me with your latest experiences of using digital media and living in Australia in relation to my research.
I also want to express my heartful gratitude for the financial assistance I received from QUT to support my PhD study, including the Australian Government Research Training Program Stipend (International) and QUT HDR Tuition Fee Sponsorship. Additionally, I appreciate the scholarships I received to support my academic activities during my PhD study, including the Computational Social Science Summer School Scholarship and the 2019 ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School Scholarship.
Queer Diaspora and Digital Intimacy: Chinese Queer Women’s Practices for Using Rela and HER in Australia xi
Thank you to all of the amazing teachers, colleagues and friends I have known through my doctoral study at QUT in the Digital Media Research Centre, Creative Industries Faculty, Graduate Research Education + Development events, and HDR writing drop-in sessions: Tai-Cheng, Peilin, Rachel, Stacey, Yi, Yayu, Xu, Wilma, Ariadna, Felicia, Smith, Bondy, Eddy, Christel, Ehsan, Delfi, Katherine, David, Nanthy, Shan, Xiaoting, Flora, Linjing, Ziyi, Ying, Georgia, Fei, Alba and Arcadia. I also want to express my thanks to all the academic friends that I have known through participating in academic seminars and activities in Australia, Estonia, Germany and China during my doctoral study: Tianhui, Monica, Jenny, Marie, Clare, An-Chun, Yibei, Gefei, Karen, Jing, Yefei, Ellina, Banaji, Feilin, shan, teng-yu, Zilin, han and qiulin. I truly appreciate all of your encouraging and inspirational words, and have enjoyed every one of our talks about academic study and real life.
My sincere gratitude also goes to all of my lovely friends in Australia, Europe, China, Japan and other parts of the world: Vivian, Sonali, Stacey, Kevin, Natasha, Victoria, Allan, Daisy, Sophia, Zixin, Shanshan, Lufei, Xueyu, Chenqi, Kelun, Meng, Irol, Aoi, Chiyoko, Himira, Setsuko, Ruan, Sihe, Jung-Chin, Fung-Lu and Chris. Thank you for all your company, care and support — physically and virtually — during my PhD study. I cherish every moment that we share happiness, excitement and sufferings in our everyday life!
Finally, I want to thank my parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and all my beloved family members in China, Japan, Singapore and the US, who have always given me unconditional love and support. Although we are dispersed across the globe, I truly appreciate the closeness and solidarity we have consistently established and maintained, especially during the difficult times of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Chapter 1: Introduction
By early 2016, when I was studying for my master’s degree in Beijing, popular Chinese dating apps like Momo and Tantan had become nearly omnipresent. Their advertisements pervaded every corner of Beijing and were also seen across popular online platforms. Indeed, from 2014 to 2016, a wide array of dating apps with similar functions and designs had emerged and burgeoned in the Chinese dating market. ‘Yue pao’ (hook-up) became a buzzword across online news reports, social media topics and people’s everyday conversations. Attracted by the allure of mobile dating and the unprecedented popularity surrounding such apps, I installed Momo on my smartphone and became a late adopter of the app. In the process of using Momo, I witnessed its constant transformation. It morphed from an initially sex-centred app generally described as a powerful tool for ‘getting laid’ and ‘hooking up’ (yuepao shenqi) to later versions that focused on providing diverse features and functions — such as live streaming, short video and group formation — to facilitate communication and socialising between strangers more broadly (Liu, 2016; Xu & Wu, 2019). The experience of being a user and witnessing Momo’s transition ignited my initial interest in studying this and other dating and social apps, including, for example, their business development, iterative design and transformation.
Another incident that significantly expanded my interest in researching mobile dating apps was participating in a research project in the later stages of my master’s study. The project focused on exploring how social media use affected homosexual (tong xing lian) young people’s psychological wellbeing. This research experience opened up an opportunity for me to gain insights into same-sex-attracted university students’ social media practices, which I had minimal knowledge about previously. The stories shared by the research participants about their use of dating apps like Blued, LesPark and Momo further enriched my thoughts concerning the study of dating apps. Dating apps seemed to play a more significant role in these young people’s lives than that of their heterosexual counterparts, particularly in mitigating anxiety, reducing personal struggles and exploring same-sex desires. Collectively, these day-to-day and sporadic self-experience of using dating apps and research practices shaped my interest in studying non-heterosexual Chinese young people’s use of dating apps.
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
After coming to Australia to pursue my doctorate, I was exposed to a more diverse range of dating apps, particularly those that have been quite popular globally, such as Tinder, OkCupid and Bumble. Despite knowing these apps existed, I had never accessed them while living in China due to the Great Fire Wall (GFW) — the state- mandated block on access to a list of selected non-Chinese websites. Out of curiosity, I tried out Tinder and Bumble. However, I soon discovered I had limited interest in using these apps because they are significantly different from the Chinese social and dating apps I had used in terms of their interface designs and primary functions. This reduced my interest in using Tinder while helping me realise that my mobile social app practices had been significantly shaped by long-term use of Chinese apps, and this would make it difficult for me to adapt to the non-Chinese dating apps popular with my new Australian peers. However, this also led me to think about how other Chinese dating app users would experience and cope with similar situations caused by the social and cultural differences associated with coming to Australia. Further, this might be reflected in their experiences of using social media and particularly dating apps. Specifically, I was interested in how the different sociocultural environments that Chinese dating app users have experienced while living in China and Australia, respectively, shape their experiences and practices of using dating apps. As a female researcher interested in exploring non-heterosexual dating apps and user experiences, I decided to focus specifically on the Chinese female diaspora and their use of lesbian social and dating apps in Australia to explore how their user experiences and practices are intertwined with the different social and cultural contexts.
In the following sections of this chapter, I will first delineate key elements of the social and technical background against which this research takes place. Then, I illuminate the design of this research project, noting the central research questions and methods underpinning the study. I conclude by outlining the structure of the thesis and its component chapters.
As the terms ‘queer women’, ‘LGBTQI’ and ‘diaspora’ are used throughout this thesis, I want to briefly illustrate each of their meanings and how they are used in this project. I am fully conscious of the complexities around using the term ‘queer’, which has a long and contested history and is translated, interpreted and applied differently in various social and cultural contexts. Nevertheless, ‘queer women’ is used in this research as a shorthand term to refer to people who identify themselves as women who
Chapter 1: Introduction 2
are attracted to women. ‘LGBTQI’ is an umbrella term used to refer to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex. However, different terms in different social and cultural contexts are also used to denote people who identify as non-heterosexual and non-cisgender, such as tong xing lian (homosexual) in the Chinese context, which is explained further in the following sections of this chapter. Meanwhile, the Chinese terms such as lala and leisi, which refer to women with same-sex desire and attraction, are often used as the equivalent of the English term ‘lesbian’ by Chinese queer women to describe and label their identities. The term ‘diaspora’ has been defined by previous research on migration. In the context of modern migration, ‘diaspora’ has become a commonly used term to denote people who live outside their home countries but maintain sentimental, social and material connections with their home societies (Marino, 2015; Sheffer, 1986). Although I am aware that there are a host of theories and studies surrounding the use of this term, the research focus of this project is examining the practices for using lesbian social and dating apps of particular individuals with Chinese backgrounds or heritage currently living in Australia, instead of the whole Chinese diasporic community and culture. ‘Diaspora’ is used as a shorthand term to represent people who have migration or mobility experiences from China to Australia, rather than a central concept for this project. Therefore, the history, development and complexities surrounding the term ‘diaspora’ are not discussed in this research.
As will be illustrated in Chapter 2, the focus of dating app research to date has been predominantly gay male and heterosexual-oriented dating apps and their user practices. Comparatively, lesbian dating apps and their user practices have received significantly less scholarly attention. This research imbalance means that key aspects of our understandings of digital dating at present are based predominantly on the apps and experiences associated with male users of these tools. Research about heterosexual women’s digital dating experiences also tends to focus on how men interact with women in these spaces (see, for example, Gillett, 2019). This lack of emphasis on women’s apps and interactions within digital dating contexts means the current study represents not only an opportunity to shine a light on queer women’s digital dating cultures, but to further enrich our understanding of digital dating more broadly. Furthermore, as prior digital dating research has employed theories in media, communication and cultural studies, such as uses and gratification (U & G), impression
Chapter 1: Introduction 3
management, domestication, and intersectionality, to study gay male and heterosexual dating apps and their user practices (Miao & Chan, 2021; Timmermans & De Caluwé, 2017), apart from adding new perspectives and knowledge to the digital dating research area, studies of dating apps and their users have also greatly enriched the above theoretical frameworks. The underemphasis of queer women’s digital dating cultures in digital dating studies to date, has thus also been a missed opportunity to further enrich these established theories through applying them in these contexts. Therefore, this research aims to expand digital intimacy studies, by adding new knowledge to this field specifically about queer women’s apps and experiences. It also extends the application of existing theories, such as the social and institutional privacy theory (Raynes-Goldie, 2010) and the subtle and blatant prejudice theory (Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995), to the study of queer women’s digital dating practices.
1.1 RESEARCH BACKGROUND
This section provides an overview of the contexts upon which this project builds. These include the development of social and dating apps geared towards LGBTQI people, particularly in the context of the Chinese and global mobile dating markets; the state of homosexuality and heteronormative values in Chinese social, cultural and political environments; and baseline information about Chinese diasporic communities in Australia.
1.1.1 Development of mobile dating apps in the Chinese and global context A variety of social and dating apps have emerged and flourished in recent years. Tinder, Grindr, Bumble and OkCupid, for example, have become leaders in different domains of the mobile dating market. Tinder, in particular, has become a mainstream symbol of dating apps due to its popularity. For instance, the United States (US) former first lady Michelle Obama recently said something along the lines of ‘You can’t Tinder your way to a long-term relationship’ (Hosie, 2020). Tinder is reported to have reached approximately 50 million users, of which 10 million are daily active users, and has facilitated 20 billion matches by 2020 (Iqbal, 2020). Simultaneously, the booming development of dating apps has also driven mobile dating to become commonplace and trend globally. For example, data from the Pew Research Center shows that by 2016, the use of dating apps among American adults (18-24 years old) had increased threefold since 2013 (Smith, 2016). While 30% of opposite-sex couples report having
Chapter 1: Introduction 4
met their partners online, the trend is much higher among same-sex couples, with figures suggesting approximately 70% of same-sex couples meet this way (Ansari, 2015; Rosenfeld & Thomas, 2012). For people with diverse genders and sexualities, dating apps provide opportunities to look for relationships privately and anonymously and satisfy less-common desires (for dating, sex and friendship) (B. Carlson, 2020; Dhoest, 2016a, 2016b). More importantly, dating apps also carve out spaces for users with LGBTQI identities and desires to seek out a sense of belonging among a like- minded community of users while simultaneously empowering them with a sense of safety by mitigating risks associated with public exposure (B. Carlson, 2020; Dhoest & Szulc, 2016).
As dating apps developed in the Western context (e.g., Tinder and Grindr) are primarily banned in China through the GFW, China has developed its own dating apps to cater to people’s needs for dating, sex and socialising. For example, Chinese social and dating apps Momo, Tantan and Blued have garnered enormous popularity and business success in both the Chinese and overseas digital dating markets. Launched in 2011, Momo has become a top popular social and dating app in China and Chinese mobile dating market leader (especially for heterosexual dating) (Chan, 2019a; Xu & Wu, 2019). Momo’s registered users reached 1 billion in 2014, and its monthly active users exceeded 1.033 billion in March 2018 (Momo Baidu Baike, 2020). Besides dating apps primarily marketed at heterosexual user groups (e.g., Momo and Tantan), Chinese social and dating apps geared towards people with diverse genders and sexualities, such as gay social apps Blued and Aloha and lesbian social apps Rela and LESDO, have also gained increasing popularity in recent years. For instance, Blued, which was launched in 2012, has become the world’s largest gay social networking app, with 49 million registered users and 6 million active monthly users (Liao, 2020). Outside China, Blued has also garnered significant popularity across the broader digital dating market, particularly in the Asian region. For example, 49% of the app’s users are located outside China, covering around 210 countries and regions worldwide (Zhang, 2020). Among these, India, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam take the largest market share (Liao, 2020; Zhang, 2020). This widespread popularity has helped drive Blued to enormous business success. Blued’s parent company, BlueCity, was listed on Nasdaq on 8 July 2020, rendering it the first business focused on LGBTQ dating and socialising to go public in the world (Zhang, 2020).
Chapter 1: Introduction 5
Compared to the burgeoning market for heterosexual and gay men’s social apps, lesbian dating apps have grown relatively slowly in the context of the global mobile dating app market (Choy, 2018; Murray & Ankerson, 2016; Tang, 2017). For example, a small number of lesbian dating apps, such as Brenda and LesPark, emerged between 2011 and 2013 in the Western dating app market (Murray & Ankerson, 2016; Tang, 2017). However, most were designed as near-identical copies of their gay-oriented counterparts in terms of technical features and functions, rather than apps tailored specifically to lesbians’ tastes and dating practices. Thus, these apps were largely unappealing to lesbian communities, resulting in their failure to sustain users and continuous growth (Murray & Ankerson, 2016; Tang, 2017). Gay and heterosexual dating apps gained quick success and popularity by providing functions for hook-ups and casual sex. However, as Bussel (2013), Murray and Ankerson (2016) and Nichols (2011) have argued, it is much more difficult for lesbian dating apps to replicate this success by merely duplicating such functions due to the ways lesbians make social and sexual contact. A notable exception is the lesbian dating app HER (formerly named Dattch). Launched in 2013, HER is one of the few pioneers in lesbian mobile dating that has successfully grown into a popular app specifically targeting lesbian, bisexual and queer women, and managed to carve out a place in the global mobile lesbian dating market.
In the context of the Chinese mobile dating market, although dating apps targeting heterosexual and gay male user groups (e.g., Momo and Blued) have similarly taken the lead, a handful of lesbian dating apps — including Rela, LESDO,
LesPark and Butterfly — have nevertheless emerged and garnered considerable attention and popularity among female users (Tang, 2017). For example, Rela is reported to have accumulated over 12 million registered users since its launch in 2012 (Sutuwang, 2018) and expanded its user market from mainland China to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and the US (mainly among Chinese speaking communities) (StreetInsider, 2018). These high levels of popularity and the innovative development trajectories of HER and Rela render them valuable case studies for this project. More detailed reasoning for choosing these two apps as focal points for this study is given in Section 1.2. It is important to note here that the steady growth of lesbian social and dating app markets in both the Chinese and global contexts offer an opportunity for this project to explore queer women’s practices around using lesbian apps. To date,
Chapter 1: Introduction 6
queer women’s digital dating has been largely overlooked in research on dating apps (Duguay, 2017b; Murray & Ankerson, 2016; Tang, 2017). This body of research has primarily focused on apps designed for gay men and heterosexual user groups in Western contexts (Blackwell, Birnholtz, & Abbott, 2015; David & Cambre, 2016; Ranzini & Lutz, 2017).
1.1.2 Homosexuality and heteronormative values in Chinese society The burgeoning development of gay and lesbian dating apps not only reflects growing consumer demand from users with diverse genders and sexualities, it also implies that a growing segment of modern Chinese society has become increasingly open-minded about the issues and cultures around homosexuality (Liu, 2019; Ren, Howe, & Zhang, 2019; Wong, 2015). In particular, well-educated young people living in urban areas in China tend to be more open and tolerant towards LGBTQI cultures and likely to accept and embrace them (Wong, 2015; Ren et al., 2019). Besides the growing uptake of gay and lesbian social apps by Chinese users, the flourishing pink economy, the enactment of the appointed guardianship system,1 and the increasing visibility of LGBTQI issues and cultures on social media (e.g., Weibo Hot Topics and WeChat public accounts) also demonstrate Chinese society’s increasing openness to homosexual topics and cultures. For example, the ‘pink economy’, driven by LGBTQI people’s purchasing power, has become immensely lucrative in China in recent years (Shan, 2016). The booming social and dating apps designed for LGBTQI people are reflective and a crucial part of the rapidly growing pink economy in China. According to China Daily, the ‘2016 China LGBT Community Report’ estimates that after Europe and the US, China has become the world’s third-largest LGBT market, as China’s LGBT community has at least 70 million people and is valued at $300 billion per annum (Shan, 2016). Beyond dating apps, the pink economy also operates heavily within tourism, fashion, cosmetics, marriage planning, entertainment (e.g., gay and lesbian clubs) and overseas surrogacy (Shan, 2016).
However, despite becoming increasingly open to diversity, the general social, cultural and political environments in mainland China remain highly heteronormative. Traditional Chinese social and cultural value systems, such as the Confucian cultural
1 Appointed guardianship is a system that allows adult citizens to select a trusted person to make decisions for them in cases such as medical rescue (Zhou, 2019).
Chapter 1: Introduction 7
system, which advocates patriarchal power and filial piety 2 through heterosexual marriages, have lasted thousands of years from ancient Chinese society to the modern era. These traditional cultural systems have significantly influenced Chinese society and its family traditions, expectations, values and attitudes towards homosexuality. For instance, throughout China’s entire history, forming a heterosexual marriage has been perceived as a Chinese social norm or an institution designed to continue the family’s line and fulfil the Confucian ideal of filial piety and family obligation (Burger, 2012; Kong, 2010; Rofel, 2007). In China’s male-centric culture, homosexuality and women’s non-marital sexual activity were long considered a threat to patriarchal power and the institution of marriage (Chou, 2001; Hershatter, 2007; Wei, 2007; Wu, 2003). In this regard, same-sex love and relationships are generally regarded as deviance from traditional Confucian values and failure to fulfil family obligations and social expectations, thereby damaging the ‘face’ (mian zi) of the family (Poon & Ho, 2002; Ren et al., 2019; Rofel, 2007). Lesbian women, especially those who remain unmarried, often experience more pressure and intensive surveillance from their families and broader society than their male counterparts because women’s value and social responsibilities are more closely associated with heterosexual marriage and reproduction abilities in contemporary Chinese society (Huang & Brouwer, 2018b; Liu, 2017). Therefore, restricted by traditional (conventional) Chinese social and cultural norms, Chinese women who identify as lesbian, bisexual and queer still mostly risk being stigmatised and condemned if they fail to fulfil their family obligations and social expectations, such as entering opposite-sex marriages and playing social roles of wives and mothers (Kong, 2010; Liu, 2017). The one-child policy, which was implemented from 1979 to 2015 to control population growth in China, also aggravated family pressures on homosexual individuals, as parents usually have high expectations of their only child (Ren et al., 2019).
While social and cultural values in China heavily highlight heteronormativity, China’s official stance towards homosexuality tends to be ambiguous. The Chinese government implements the ‘three noes’ policy by ‘not encouraging (bu zhichi), not discouraging (bu fandui), and not promoting (bu tichang)’ homosexuality (Hung, 2011,
2 ‘Filial piety’ is a central Confucian virtue in social ethics. It is defined as the attitude of obedience, devotion and care towards one’s parents and elder family members that is the basis of individual moral conduct and social harmony (Zed, 2016).
Chapter 1: Introduction 8
p. 379). Consequently, LGBTQI issues are rarely discussed in public or mainstream media in China (Lau, 2010). Nevertheless, the recent increasing visibility of LGBTQI topics on Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo and WeChat suggests that the Chinese government allows a certain amount of room to discuss homosexuality publicly. Yet, despite its ambiguous official stance, the tight controls over homosexual content in public forums consistently imposed by the Chinese government also indicate an unsupportive and repressive attitude towards homosexuality in government agencies. For example, China has enforced strict censorship and surveillance on LGBTQI-related content by banning and censoring news, television shows, dramas, films and social media threads associated with LGBTQI topics in order to promote normative social and family values (Wang, 2020c). LGBTQI-oriented dating apps such as Blued and Rela, for example, have experienced being shut down entirely by the Chinese government due to their involvement in LGBTQI events that were deemed ‘unhealthy’ by Chinese officials (British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC], 2017; Liao, 2020). Another indication of the government’s cautious and ambiguous attitude towards homosexuality is that while homosexuality was decriminalised in 1997 and removed from the list of mental health disorders in 2001 in China (Bao, 2018; Burger, 2012), the Chinese government has not yet published any law, except for the aforementioned appointed guardianship system, to acknowledge and protect LGBTQI people’s rights.
Chinese LGBTQI individuals have developed diverse strategies to escape and contest pressures related to heteronormative values and social and familial expectations while simultaneously satisfying their desires for same-sex attraction, love and relationships. These include using gay and lesbian social and dating platforms, forming contract marriages (xinghun), and going abroad. Notably, contract marriage has become a commonly used strategy for Chinese LGBTQI people to avoid homophobia, resist (heterosexual) marriage pressures from their families and society, and fulfil heteronormative social expectations in the Chinese context (Cheng, 2018; Huang & Brouwer, 2018a; Ren et al., 2019). Driven by the relatively conservative social environment towards LGBTQI cultures and lack of policies protecting LGBTQI people’s rights in China, going abroad has also become a popular tactic used by Chinese LGBTQI individuals pursuing greater sexual freedom. For example, Yu and Blain (2019) and Kam (2020) have respectively examined how Chinese gay men and
Chapter 1: Introduction 9
queer women deployed migrating to Australia as a strategy to live away from family pressures and experience a different kind of life. For example, focusing on Chinese queer women’s transnational mobility experiences from China to Australia, Kam (2020) observed that for some Chinese queer women, moving to Australia provided opportunities to stay away from family and societal constraints in China — such as heterosexual marriage and gender conformity — while enabling them to pursue and enjoy a desirable life by freely living with their queer identities. Thus, the multicultural, liberal and tolerant social environment towards LGBTQI communities in Australian society is highlighted as a primary attraction for Chinese gay men and queer women coming to Australia (Kam, 2020; Yu & Blain, 2019).
1.1.3 Chinese diaspora in Australia The history of the Chinese diaspora in Australia dates back to the ‘gold rush’ in the 1850s (Gao, 2015). In this sense, the Chinese diaspora has constituted a significant part of the multicultural Australian society since its inception. According to the Australian Government Department of Home Affairs (Home Affairs, 2020), after the United Kingdom (UK), China has become the second-largest migrant community in Australia. By June 2018, the Chinese diaspora represented 8.9% of Australia’s overseas-born population and 2.6% of its total population (Home Affairs, 2020). In addition, Chinese international students accounted for 43.3% of all international students in Australia, or 166,000 in 2017 (Koziol, 2018). The large scale of the Chinese diaspora in Australia has attracted scholars’ attention to this community’s interests and experiences. Among existing studies, research focused on the LGBTQI Chinese diasporic communities in Australia and their social media practices (Cassidy & Wang, 2018; Kam, 2020; Yu & Blain, 2019) has provided a particularly important research backdrop for this project. For example, the work of Kam (2020) and Yu and Blain (2019) on Chinese queer women and gay men’s migration from China to Australia to pursue their desired lives have both underscored the differing attitudes and social environments towards LGBTQI cultures in Chinese and Australian society, and how these factors significantly influence Chinese LGBTQI individuals’ life options. Building on this previous research (Kam, 2020; Yu & Blain, 2019), the current project aims to explore further how such disparate social and cultural environments between China and Australia influence Chinese women’s attitudes and experiences concerning
Chapter 1: Introduction 10
love, relationships, sex and marriage, and their practices for using lesbian social and dating apps.
Constrained by the GFW and internet censorship policy, queer women have limited access to Western websites and dating apps, such as Tinder and HER, while living in China. Simultaneously restricted by traditional Chinese social and cultural values, Chinese women are relatively cut-off from representations of same-sex love, relationships and marriage (Choy, 2018; Rofel, 2007; Tang, 2017). However, after transferring to Australia, they are no longer circumscribed by these traditional social norms. Moreover, Australian policies regarding LGBTQI communities (e.g., same-sex marriage legislation) empower the Chinese diaspora with greater freedom and space to explore and express their sexual identities. Meanwhile, they have access to diversified Western and non-Western online sexual content and can freely use Western dating apps while residing in Australia. This may subsequently impact the Chinese diaspora’s practices for using digital media such as dating apps. Therefore, in this thesis, I will examine how the migration experiences and different sociocultural contexts Chinese women have experienced while living in China and Australia respectively, influence their practices for using lesbian social and dating apps.
1.2 RESEARCH DESIGN
Building upon the above research context, this project aims to explore how social and cultural contexts influence the design of lesbian social and dating apps Rela and HER, and Chinese women’s practices for using these apps in Australia. The overarching research question proposed to achieve this objective is:
How do social and cultural contexts play into Chinese women’s experiences of and practices for using lesbian social and dating apps Rela and HER in Australia?
The four subsidiary research questions developed are:
1. What are the primary features of Rela’s and HER’s development trajectories and technological infrastructures? 2. How have social and cultural contexts influenced Rela’s and HER’s development and technical design? 3. How do Chinese women use Rela and HER in Australia?
Chapter 1: Introduction 11
4. How does using Rela and HER impact Australian-based Chinese women’s diasporic lives?
1.2.1 App cases: Rela and HER The high popularity and large numbers of users that Rela and HER have respectively garnered render the two apps ideal cases for this project. More importantly, Rela and HER have been developed within different social and cultural contexts and have undergone different processes of transformation since their inception. This offers opportunities for this research to comparatively examine the two apps’ development, technological architectures and user practices, and interrogate how these elements are shaped by social and cultural contexts. Table 1.1 shows key information about both Rela and HER, including their launch date, headquarters, parent companies or developers, number of registered users, and primary features and functions. I also briefly overview Rela’s and HER’s respective launches and development stories to provide sufficient background for the walkthrough analysis of the two apps presented in Chapter 3.
Table 1.1 Rela and HER
App Rela (热拉) HER
Launch November 2012 September 2013
Headquarters Shanghai, China Moving from London to San Francisco in 2015 Parent Company or Hangzhou Re Lan Network Dattch Ltd. Developer Technology Co., Ltd. Registered users 12 million 5 million Main features and Live (streaming), Moments, Featured Swipe, Communities, functions Topic, Speed Match, User Nearby, Feed, Events World Roaming, Audio Books
Rela positions itself as a lesbian social app aiming to help Chinese lesbian, bisexual and queer women to find dates and stay connected to the larger Chinese LGBTQI community (Cision PR Newswire, 2018; Google Play-Rela, 2020). Its Chinese name is 热拉, which translates literally to ‘hot lesbian’ (lala). When initially released in 2012, Rela branded itself as ‘The L’, which stood for ‘The Lesbian Social Network’. It was rebranded as ‘Rela’ in 2016. Since its launch, Rela has constantly
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added new features and functions and developed into an inclusive lesbian social platform with multiple functions. In 2015, Tech in Asia described The L as more than a social app; it was also a ‘portal for movies, literature, and other resources, ranging from event information for lectures on LGBTQ topics to contact details for overseas marriage services’ (Erik, 2015). The two events that most shaped the course of Rela’s development and helped it gain global attention were being temporarily shut down in 2017 due to participation in an offline LGBTQI event in Shanghai, China (BBC, 2017; Linder, 2018) and landing on New York’s Time Square for its ‘Rela Idols’ campaign in 2018 (StreetInsider, 2018). While the shutdown incident became a key driver for Rela to heighten its censorship mechanism, the ‘Rela Idols’ campaign facilitated Rela’s repositioning from a social platform targeting lesbian women to one targeting broader and more diverse female user groups. Compared to similar Chinese lesbian social and dating apps like LesPark and LESDO, Rela emerged and became established much earlier, and has a longer history in the lesbian mobile social market. Rela has also steadily developed by extending its in-app services and providing multiple functions to become a highly popular and inclusive lesbian social platform in China. Rela’s complex development process (i.e., being shut down, reopening and remarketing) is underpinned by the dynamic interplay between the Chinese social environment, state power (e.g., censorship) and the app’s incremental technological development. All of this renders Rela a great object of analysis for research seeking to analyse how social and cultural representations are embedded into technological mechanisms in digital dating contexts.
HER positions itself as a dating and social app for lesbian, bisexual and queer women. Like Rela, HER has also undergone multiple stages of rebranding since its inception in 2013. It began as ‘Dattch’, was renamed HER in 2015, and then shifted to ‘HER’ (with the four-barred ‘E’ in its new logo) in 2018 (Whitlock, 2018). Simultaneously, HER’s technological infrastructure and marketing strategy have also changed, repositioning the app from a ‘Grindr for girls’ to more of a conversation- facilitator model (Murray & Ankerson, 2016), and to the current version that foregrounds technical features such as Swipe, Communities and Events. Despite many lesbian dating apps in the global context emerging during the past several years, HER is still highly popular among queer women, especially in Western contexts, as represented by its steadily growing user numbers (Bearne, 2016; Lasher, 2017). HER’s
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constant transformation has been driven by and is also reflective of changes in both contemporary lesbian communities and mobile dating cultures (especially in the Western context). This makes it a useful site, alongside Rela, for examining how dating apps’ transition and development processes are intertwined with changing social and cultural environments, particularly around gender and sexuality. This project employed qualitative methods to address the research questions listed earlier, including the app walkthrough method (Light, Burgess, & Duguay, 2018) and semi- structured in-depth interviews. Specifically, the app walkthrough method was used to study Rela’s and HER’s environments of expected use, technological affordances, unanticipated uses, and embedded social and cultural values. The semi-structured in- depth interviews were applied to explore Chinese women’s experiences of and practices for using Rela and HER in Australia. Qualitative methods such as interviews (including individual and focus group interviews) (Newett, Churchill, & Robards, 2017; Orosz et al., 2018), participant observation (Ahlm, 2017; Cassidy & Wang, 2018; David & Cambre, 2016), textual analysis (Brennan, 2017; Rodriguez, Huemmer, & Blumell, 2016) and the walkthrough method (Ferris & Duguay, 2020; Wang, 2020a) have been widely employed for studying dating apps. Scholars have observed that qualitative methods are suitable for conducting ‘exploratory and interpretive’ (Cassidy, 2013, p. 19) research in these contexts and allow researchers to dive deep into complex questions (Gudelunas, 2012). Given this research aims to extensively examine the two lesbian social apps Rela and HER, and explore individual users’ experiences engaging with them, qualitative methods that highlight in-depth exploration and description of specific experiences (Corrine, 2011) are suitable for this project.
1.2.2 Walkthrough Developed by Light, Burgess and Duguay (2018), the walkthrough method is a way to engage with an app’s technical interface directly, and thereby examine its technical infrastructure as well as embedded sociocultural contexts. This method helps researchers understand how an app guides its users and shapes their experiences of using the app. In this research project, the app walkthrough method was used as a three-step technique to examine and interpret Rela’s and HER’s respective (a) environments of expected use, including visions, operating models and governance, (b) technological affordances, such as features, functions and the flow of activities, and (c) unanticipated uses (Light et al., 2018, pp. 887–895). Based on the examination
Chapter 1: Introduction 14
of Rela’s and HER’s technical infrastructures, how social and cultural contexts are embedded within these two apps was then explored (Light et al., 2018). Notably, the walkthrough examinations of Rela and HER were conducted multiple times in the process of completing this project. To gain foundational knowledge about the apps and better guide the interview design phase of this project, I conducted the first round of walkthrough observations of Rela and HER prior to the interview process. However, as Rela’s and HER’s features, functions and interface designs kept updating during the interview process, I also conducted walkthrough examinations several times during and after completing the interviews. This allowed me to track any changes in the two apps and assess how these newly updated features might influence user practices. Chapter 3 offers a comprehensive introduction to the walkthrough method and how it was applied to analyse Rela and HER, together with present findings from this process concerning the two apps’ respective technological architectures and sociocultural foundations.
1.2.3 Semi-structured in-depth interview Semi-structured in-depth interviews allow researchers to discuss pre-determined topics while remaining open to alternative issues that interviewees may want to discuss (Bryman, 2012). The conversations are free to vary and may change substantially between interviewees (Miles & Gilbert, 2005; Weerakkody, 2015). In terms of this research, the semi-structured in-depth interview is the most appropriate method to investigate users’ experiences of using lesbian apps due to its flexibility and capacity to investigate participants’ deep thoughts and experiences. The interview method has been widely applied in dating app studies for exploring user practices (e.g., see Blackwell et al., 2015; Choy, 2018; Fitzpatrick & Birnholtz, 2018; Hobbs, Owen, & Gerber, 2017; Ma, Sun, & Naaman, 2017; Newett et al., 2017; Tang, 2017). Semi- structured in-depth interviews were employed in this study to generate deep investigations of individual users’ experiences of using Rela and HER, thereby generating a rich account of their mobile dating and social practices. Below, I overview the interview processes in this project, including recruiting interviewees, conducting interviews and analysing interview data.
As this project focuses on exploring Australia-based Chinese women’s experiences of using Rela and HER, eligible interviewees were expected to meet several requirements. They needed to be (a) aged 18 years or over, (b) current or past
Chapter 1: Introduction 15
users of Rela and/or HER, (c) self-identified as Chinese women (e.g., having Chinese heritage or originally coming from the Greater Chinese area, such as mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao), and (d) living in Australia at the time of participating in the interviews for this project. Notably, potential interviewees did not need to identify as queer women explicitly. Although some Chinese women are users of lesbian social and dating apps, they may not label themselves as queer or identify as part of the LGBTQI community. This may be due to various considerations and factors, such as social stigma, uncertainty about their sexual identities, lack of familiarity with various terminologies to describe same-sex attractions, and pressures from their families and society.
To reach a broad range of potential interviewees, I disseminated the recruitment information through a range of social networks in which I have been involved. These included chat groups formed through Facebook (e.g., the ‘Chinese diaspora in Brisbane’ group), WhatsApp, WeChat (e.g., the ‘Chinese international students in Australia’ group) and Tencent QQ (a Chinese instant messaging software), and Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo and Douban. Meanwhile, the two apps Rela and HER were also deployed as channels to recruit app users directly. In the ‘researcher profiles’ I constructed during the walkthrough examination of Rela and HER, I clearly identified myself as a researcher and posted participant recruitment information. Any user of Rela and/or HER who was interested in participating in the interviews and met the aforementioned criteria was directed to contact me via my institutional email for further information regarding the interview process. Simultaneously, drawing on the snowball-sampling method (Atkinson & Flint, 2003), I also asked eligible interviewees to help me disseminate the recruitment information through their personal social networks (e.g., Rela WeChat groups they have joined), which enabled me to approach a larger number of potential interviewees.
From May 2019 to January 2020, I conducted 26 interviews. However, one interviewee contacted me over concern that her story being presented in my thesis may lead to her being identified as lesbian by other people, and thus expressed her desire to withdraw from the project two months after finishing her interview. According to the ethics guidelines, interviewees can withdraw their interview data at any time without reason or question. I expressed my gratitude for the interviewee’s participation and instantly deleted her interview data from my database. Therefore, the final
Chapter 1: Introduction 16
interview data represented in this thesis is comprised of 25 interviews. Sixteen interviews were conducted online through WeChat audio and video calls, while nine interviews were conducted face-to-face in my QUT campus office. Interviews ranged from 43 to 142 minutes. Twenty-one interviews were conducted in one sitting, while four interviews were completed across two timeslots due to interviewees’ schedules. All of the interviews were audio-recorded with the interviewees’ consent. After completing their initial interviews, some interviewees contacted me to offer more insights regarding their mobile social and dating practices. Therefore, in addition to the formal interviews, I also gained useful information through ad hoc discussions with interviewees.
Interviewees were aged between 19 and 34 years old. All of the interviewees identified themselves as Chinese women. The majority of interviewees were originally from mainland China, except for five who came from Malaysia (1), Hong Kong (2) and Taiwan (1). The length of the time they had been in Australia varied from 9 months to 7 years. At the time of the interviews, all of the 25 interviewees were Rela users, while 18 were also HER users. Interviewees associated themselves with a wide range of identity labels, including queer, lesbian, bisexual, bicurious, fluid and uncertain. Table 1.2 contains more specifics about the 25 interviewees’ situations at the time of their respective interviews.
Table 1.2 Interviewees in this project
Pseudonym Age District of Sexual Occupation Length of Apps used origin identity time in Australia Amanda 25 Mainland Bisexual Student 2 years Rela & HER Amelia 26 Malaysia Lesbian Student 13 months Rela & HER Amy 25 Mainland Queer Student 1.5 years Rela & HER Anne 32 Mainland Bisexual Nurse 6 years Rela & HER Cathy 24 Mainland Lesbian Student 16 months Rela Cindy 29 Mainland Bisexual Designer 7 years Rela & HER Jiang 24 Mainland Queer Student 14 months Rela & HER Jing 23 Mainland Bicurious Student 9 months Rela & HER Kathy 24 Mainland Queer Student 17 months Rela & HER Kailun 34 Mainland Bisexual Social 7 years Rela worker Lina 24 Mainland Uncertain Student 1 year Rela & HER Lin 26 Taiwan Bisexual Student 3 years Rela & HER
Chapter 1: Introduction 17
Lu 31 Mainland Queer Nurse 5 years Rela & HER May 27 Mainland Queer Student 2 years Rela & HER Mingyu 31 Mainland Queer Restaurant 5.5 years Rela owner Sara 25 Mainland Fluid Student 19 months Rela & HER Shujie 25 Mainland Bisexual Student 2 years Rela & HER Su 22 Mainland Uncertain Student 1.5 years Rela Sylvia 32 Mainland Queer Teacher 7 years Rela Wenwen 23 Mainland Bisexual Student 3 months Rela & HER Weiwei 29 Mainland Bicurious Research 4 years Rela assistant Xinran 23 Hong Kong Lesbian Student 2.5 years Rela & HER Ying 29 Hong Kong Bisexual Nurse 5 years Rela & HER Yajie 19 Mainland Lesbian Student 9 months Rela Zeyin 24 Mainland Queer Student 15 months Rela & HER
All of the 25 interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese. In the data analysis phase, I transcribed the recordings into Chinese scripts and then translated them into English. Each interviewee was asked to provide a pseudonym for use in this thesis. Interview discussions were based on a pre-designed interview question list but not limited to it. The interview questions mainly revolved around interviewees’ experiences and practices for using Rela and/or HER in Australia. For example, they were asked about their motivations and actual practices for using Rela and/or HER, how their migration experiences affected their use of lesbian apps, and how their use of lesbian social/dating apps is entangled with their practices for using other social media platforms. The pre-designed interview questions are listed in the Appendix. To gain deep insights into interviewees’ intimacy practices around using lesbian social apps, I encouraged them to speak freely about everything they thought might be relevant or related. Simultaneously, elements of ‘scroll back’ (Robards & Lincoln, 2017) interviewing were also incorporated into the process to help interviewees recall memories about their experiences of using Rela and/or HER. Scroll back interviewing was initially developed as a method to examine and trace users’ prior and current digital media practices (e.g., posts and disclosures on digital media). It helps participants recall memories and interactions by examining and reviewing their practices on digital media platforms in the course of the interview process (Robards & Lincoln, 2017). For example, it was initially used to trace participants’ Facebook Timelines in Robards and Lincoln’s (2017) research. In the interviews conducted for
Chapter 1: Introduction 18
the current research project, the scroll back method was generally used to help interviewees remember any relevant specifics they forgot about their experiences of using Rela and HER by scrolling back through their apps. For example, during the interviews, users relied on ‘scroll back’ information to enrich their descriptions of the kinds of messages/pictures they received from other users, the discussion topics they participated in on Rela, and the conversations they saw or engaged in within their chat groups.
Originally developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967), the grounded theory approach was deployed in this project to analyse the interview data. According to Strauss and Corbin (1990, 1994), by applying the grounded theory approach, the analysis should be ‘grounded in data’ instead of relying on existing theoretical insights. Hence, by adopting a bottom-up approach, I inductively interpreted my interview participants’ responses and then refined the key themes in the data analysis process. Specifically, following Strauss and Corbin’s (1994) instruction of the three-step coding procedure, I first conducted ‘open coding’ by classifying my interview data into several different categories based on their themes. Then in the ‘axial coding’ phase, I compared the relations between different categories, integrating them into similar groups of data or dividing them into sub-groups. Finally, by ‘selective coding’, I identified the most significant and representative data categories/groups to produce primary themes. Key themes around Chinese queer women’s practices for using Rela and HER arising from the interview data and representative quotes from the interviewees include, for example, expectations and motivations for using Rela and/or HER, preferences for the apps’ functions and features, connection building and maintenance, cross-platform social and dating practices, privacy concerns regarding the use of the apps, self-presentation on the apps, and identity management on the apps. Details regarding these themes will be presented in the following chapters. The qualitative software application NVivo was deployed to analyse the English transcripts and inductively identify patterns and dominant discourses. As will be explained in the following chapters, this project found that social and cultural contexts played instrumental roles in shaping Chinese women’s digital intimacy3 practices around
3 In this thesis, digital intimacy is used in a broad sense to denote people’s experiences and practices for using diverse forms of digital media, such as dating apps (e.g., Rela and HER) and the more generic social apps (e.g., WeChat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger), to establish, form and develop close and intimate personal and/or group relationships, such as friendships, romantic relationships and family
Chapter 1: Introduction 19
using Rela and HER in Australia. For example, Chinese women interviewed for this study used Rela to build and develop connections with Chinese queer women’s communities in both transnational and local contexts. They experienced diverse challenges, such as privacy and safety risks, race-related prejudice and discrimination, disputes and conflicts, especially in the process of having intercultural and interracial encounters and further developing them into more intimate relationships. Living in the host society also exacerbated their concerns about the use of lesbian social and dating apps due to a lack of familiarity with the local environment, cultures and people in Australia. However, living in Australia, coupled with the experience of using lesbian social and dating apps, also helped Chinese women in this study contest/resist pressures from their families and home societies while discovering the possibility of living the kind of life they desired.
In demonstrating the above, this research contributes to our understandings of digital intimacy academically and practically. Specifically, this research adds more knowledge to the relatively understudied area of queer women’s digital dating, while simultaneously expanding knowledge of dating app use in non-Western and cross- cultural contexts. In a practical sense, this research offers insights into understanding Chinese queer women’s diasporic communities and their digital intimacy practices, particularly as they play out in Australia. As noted above, Australia has become an attractive place for Chinese LGBTQI people to pursue and experience the kind of life they desire (e.g., with the opportunity to form same-sex marriages) due to its accommodating policies and sociocultural environments towards LGBTQI communities (Kam, 2020; Yu & Blain, 2019). China has also become the source of the second-largest immigrant community in Australia (Home Affairs, 2020). In this regard, my research provides indications for policymakers in the population and immigration domains in Australia about the ways Chinese queer women experience Australian communities. Particularly, this allows policymakers to better understand the diversity of the Australian Chinese diaspora when it comes to making relevant and related policies. Additionally, the examinations of Rela and HER provided here offer useful information for designers and developers of lesbian dating apps seeking to gain
relations. Digital intimacy practices, then, are any elements of user behaviour that occur in the context of seeking, developing, and maintaining these broad sets of relationships.
Chapter 1: Introduction 20
greater insight into app development and users’ demands and practices within this market.
1.3 THESIS OUTLINE
This thesis compromises seven chapters. This introductory chapter has illustrated the backdrop against which this research project was developed and overviewed the research questions and objectives this thesis aims to address. It discussed the role of the app walkthrough method, interview techniques and the grounded theory approach used to collect and analyse data for the project and how they were implemented.
Chapter 2 reviews existing literature in the domain of dating app studies, including dating apps’ technical designs and development and users’ diverse practices for using these apps in different social and cultural contexts. I analyse studies on dating apps targeting a broad range of genders and sexualities (e.g., Tinder) and those designed specifically for LGBTQI people (e.g., Grindr and Butterfly), emphasising lesbian dating apps and users’ practices for engaging with these apps in particular. I argue that extant studies have predominantly focused on heterosexual and gay men’s use of dating apps while largely overlooking lesbian dating apps and their users’ practices. I then examine dating app studies situated in non-Western and cross-cultural contexts, focusing on Chinese dating apps and Chinese diasporic groups’ dating app practices in the Australian context. There has been an uptick in the number of studies on the Chinese gay dating app Blued since around 2018 (Miao & Chan, 2020a, 2020b; Wang, 2019, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c) due to the app’s burgeoning development in the global context in recent years. However, my analysis of existing work shows that compared to dating app studies in the Western context, to date, only a small amount of scholarly attention has been paid to non-Western and cross-cultural dating app research. To understand the broader contexts around Chinese queer women’s experiences using lesbian dating apps in Australia, I also provide an overview of pertinent studies on the Chinese diaspora’s more general social media practices in Australia to show how migratory experiences and sociocultural contexts (both in China and Australia) shape this group’s digital practices.
Chapter 3 presents the walkthrough analysis of the two lesbian social and dating apps, Rela and HER. I illustrate the walkthrough method and how it was employed
Chapter 1: Introduction 21
step-by-step to examine the two apps’ technological affordances and sociocultural representations. Then, I present the findings from the walkthrough examination of Rela and HER, respectively, drawing comparisons of the apps’ key similarities and differences. This analysis shows that despite being developed in different social and cultural contexts, Rela and HER share important similarities in their technological designs; for example, by foregrounding community building through multiple features and functions. However, we also see that the two apps offer users significant differences in terms of their most prominent features. I also explore how social and cultural contexts play crucial roles in dynamically shaping these two apps’ technological architecture and driving their transformation. For example, Rela has developed a multifunctional design and stringent surveillance and censorship mechanism significantly influenced by the Chinese social media design logic of ‘all- in-one’ apps and the long-standing Chinese internet censorship policy. However, since its launch, HER’s development trajectory also reflects changing perceptions around gender and sexual diversity and fluidity and the nature of mobile lesbian social cultures in the global context (especially in the West).
Chapters 4–6 provide the analysis of Chinese queer women’s experiences using Rela and HER in Australia, based on the interview data. Chapter 4 examines Chinese queer women’s practices for building and maintaining connections with queer women’s networks in their homeland (predominantly mainland China) and host country (Australia) that are mediated through Rela and HER. The findings suggest that developing social networks with queer women’s communities — especially among Chinese queer women — through multiple functions enabled by lesbian dating apps such as Live Streaming, Topic and User Nearby, has become an important part of digital intimacy practices for the Chinese queer women in this study. However, although these women actively and deeply engaged with Rela’s features, functions and associated networks, they showed significantly less interest in participating in HER’s related activities. Moreover, their digital intimacy practices indicate that rather than develop an international social network with queer women from diverse ethnic, racial and cultural groups, the Chinese queer women in this study tend to stick together with their co-nationals and develop strong ties within existing niche groups of Chinese queer women in Australia. In tandem with the Chinese social app WeChat, Rela played a significant role in facilitating this pattern of sociality, assisting with intimacy
Chapter 1: Introduction 22
building among Chinese queer women in both transnational and local contexts in Australia.
Chapter 5 examines the challenges and tensions that Australia-based Chinese queer women in this study have experienced while using Rela and HER, and how they responded to unexpected and undesirable experiences by developing a diverse range of strategies. Drawing on Raynes-Goldie’s (2010) differentiation between social and institutional privacy, I found that interviewees’ social privacy concerns (including misrepresentation, identification and harassment) were more likely to be associated with their use of HER. Meanwhile, their institutional privacy concerns (revolving around censorship and the potential tracking, leaking and trading of their data) tended to be intertwined with their practices for using Rela. Race-based prejudice and discrimination, particularly articulated in subtle and ambiguous forms, was also an unwanted experience that Chinese queer women commonly encountered in the context of interracial and intercultural interactions on lesbian dating apps. Prejudicial encounters exacerbated Chinese queer women’s feeling of being excluded and reluctant to interact with and integrate into the local Australian society. Further, they contributed to shaping their biases and prejudice towards white Australian queer women. This chapter also reveals how ‘political discussions’ (discussions around Chinese sociopolitics) between interviewees and those encountered on lesbian dating apps gave rise to disputes, conflicts and what they perceived as bullying behaviours (e.g., verbal abuse, trolling and malicious attacks), underpinned by different cultural backgrounds and political standpoints. Specifically, patriotism was found to lead to fragile intimacy in the context of cross-cultural lesbian dating app use. To cope with these tensions, Chinese queer women in this study developed diverse strategies, ranging from ignoring to accepting and confronting other users with different political viewpoints. Despite being unwanted, these experiences provided opportunities for Chinese queer women in this study to reflect upon and transform their digital practices around the use of Rela and HER to better fit into their diasporic lives.
Chapter 6 explores how Chinese queer women interviewed for this study took coming to Australia and using lesbian social apps as an opportunity to explore and experience a life that they desired while negotiating their sexual identities and pressures from their families and home societies. Despite each undergoing individual, different struggles and difficulties in exploring their sexual selves and coping with
Chapter 1: Introduction 23
family pressures, this chapter reveals how interviewees shared commonalities in their negotiation practices. For example, they took advantage of living in Australia to circumvent the pressures imposed by their families’ expectations for them to live a heteronormative life. They also used lesbian social apps to explore and indulge their same-sex desires. For some interviewees — particularly those who plan to go back to their home countries after finishing their studies in Australia — these tactics can only serve as temporary approaches while leaving the issue of negotiating sexuality in their everyday lives still unresolved. For others, even after coming to Australia and deeply engaging with lesbian social apps, they remained largely constrained by Chinese traditional cultural norms and family values, which hindered their abilities to achieve a desired queer life and more freely engage in identity exploration and negotiation.
Chapter 7 concludes the thesis by underscoring the major findings of this research based on the walkthrough and interview data. For example, Chinese queer women in this study sustained strong ties with Chinese queer women’s communities while keeping loose connections with networks of non-Chinese queer women. Interviewees encountered diverse challenges (e.g., privacy risks, prejudice and conflicts) in their dating app practices and developed corresponding strategies to tackle these various problems. Also, interviewees took coming to Australia and using lesbian social apps as an opportunity to explore their identities, negotiate their same-sex desires and familial and social pressures, and experience the kind of life they have long desired. Building on these main findings, I summarise this study’s significance from both academic and practical perspectives. I propose the indications and emerging questions for future research and pinpoint the limitations of this project. Potential questions that emerged from this project include, for example, how Chinese queer women build and develop connections with diasporic queer women’s communities (from diverse ethnic, racial and cultural groups) in Australia.
Chapter 1: Introduction 24
Chapter 2: Dating Applications and Digital Dating Cultures
2.1 INTRODUCTION
The number of dating app studies has dramatically increased since 2016, triggered by the rapidly growing diffusion and uptake of various dating apps worldwide (Global Web Index, 2018). However, my review of the existing literature in the dating app research field suggests the majority of existing studies focus on heterosexuals’ dating app practices (David & Cambre, 2016; Ranzini & Lutz, 2017) and gay men’s use of dating apps (Blackwell et al., 2015; Corriero & Tong, 2016). In contrast, research on digital cultures associated with queer women’s use of dating apps (Ferris & Duguay, 2020; Tang, 2017), dating websites (Hightower, 2015) and other social media platforms (e.g., Instagram) (Duguay, 2016b, 2017b) is much less voluminous. Moreover, studies in the area of digital dating have thus far predominantly concentrated on Western, English-language based dating apps and user groups, particularly in Western sociocultural contexts such as the US, the UK and Australia (Albury & Byron, 2016; Ranzini & Lutz, 2017; Zervoulis, Smith, Reed, & Dinos, 2020). However, scant research attention has been paid to apps and user groups outside of this setting (for recent exceptions, see Cassidy & Wang, 2018; Tang, 2017; Wang, 2020a). Therefore, alongside other pockets of work that have begun to emerge in the domain of non-Western and cross-cultural dating app studies, this project delves into Chinese queer women’s practices for using lesbian social and dating apps Rela and HER in Australia. Specifically, it examines how these apps’ designs and user cultures are shaped by and intertwined with Chinese and Australian sociocultural contexts. This chapter draws together these intersecting threads of research to synthesise pertinent literature mainly from the following categories: dating app studies, LGBTQI digital dating studies, non-Western and cross-cultural digital dating studies, and studies on Chinese diaspora’s digital practices in Australia.
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2.2 DATING APP STUDIES
This section reviews research on dating apps targeting a broad range of genders and sexualities, such as Tinder, and their users’ practices, suggesting that most studies have concentrated on Tinder and heterosexual user groups’ dating app practices, and emerge from the field of behavioural and psychological research with the aim of examining dating app users’ behaviours (e.g., motivations and concerns around use) and the implications of using digital dating technologies. For example, the key reasons for people’s use of dating apps have been an area of intense interest. Research indicates that users’ multiple motivations for using dating apps encompass meeting people or socialising (Beauchamp et al., 2017; Griffin, Canevello, & McAnulty, 2018), self- validation and self-esteem enhancement (Orosz et al., 2018; Timmermans & De Caluwé, 2017), alleviating boredom as an entertainment tool (Orosz et al., 2018; Ranzini, Lutz, & Gouderjaan, 2016;), travelling (James, Condie, & Lean, 2019; Timmermans & De Caluwé, 2017), keeping up with trends (Sumter, Vandenbosch, & Ligtenberg, 2017; Timmermans & De Caluwé, 2017) and looking for love or relationships (Orosz et al., 2018; Sumter et al., 2017). While my research is based in media and communication studies, which focuses more on understanding dating technologies and user practices from media and cultural perspectives, I have read widely and explored literature in diverse disciplines to provide more inspiration for this project. For example, the above behavioural and psychological research studies concentrating on user motivations for using dating apps offer indications for this project to further examine the match and/or mismatch between Chinese queer women’s motivations and actual practices for using lesbian social and dating apps.
Impression management in the context of dating apps has received significant scholarly attention, particularly at the early stage of dating app research (Ranzini & Lutz, 2017; Ward, 2017). Based on their infrastructure designs, most dating apps currently rely heavily on profile photos and brief textual information (Ellison, Hancock & Toma, 2012), which give users restricted space for presenting themselves (Birnholtz et al., 2014; Van Berlo & Ranzini, 2018), and users are thus corralled into making decisions based on these limited cues. However, users have crafted different strategies to manage their impressions according to specific features of different platforms. For instance, Tinder users select specific profile photos to present their ideal yet authentic selves, to show their desirability, and to provide other indicators such as education
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level (Ward, 2017). Momo users, however, optimise their profile pictures to attract replies, manage their picture galleries on the app to represent lifestyles and dreams, and constantly update to prove their reliability and involvement in the app (Zhang & Seta, 2015). In particular, Tinder users developed diverse presentation modes, including presenting authentic/actual, ideal, ought-to and false selves, among which users with high self-esteem were found to be more prone to reveal their real selves rather than false/deceptive selves (Ranzini et al., 2016; Ranzini & Lutz, 2017).
Dating apps’ technological affordances play crucial roles in shaping user practices. Tinder’s features and functions have garnered the most scholarly attention due to its high popularity. For example, studies have examined Tinder’s significant Swipe feature (David & Cambre, 2016; Krüger & Charlotte Spilde, 2019; LeFebvre, 2018; Ward, 2017), its function in facilitating hook-ups (David & Cambre, 2016; LeFebvre, 2018), users’ connection building (Hobbs et al., 2017; Newett et al., 2017), and users’ practices for self-branding and self-commodification (Hobbs et al., 2017). Notably, users’ practices for branding and commodifying themselves on dating platforms have also been highlighted by other research in the mobile and online dating contexts. For example, similar to Hobbs et al. (2017), Hooff (2019) also underlined that branding and commodifying oneself by, for example, creating attractive photos was a pivotal tactic deployed by Tinder users to improve their competence in the dating app market. Focusing on dating websites and their user practices, Arvidsson (2006) and Heino, Ellison and Gibbs (2010) have both pointed out that the features and functional designs of online dating sites (e.g., Match.com and Connect.com) encouraged their users to brand, market and commodify their desirability for the purpose of getting prospective matches. It has thus been argued on numerous occassions that digital dating platforms motivate users to adopt marketplace or commodification strategies in their online dating practices. Bumble, another popular dating app that claims to be ‘100 percent feminist’ (Yashari, 2015) and is known for its design feature whereby ‘women talk first’ (i.e., only women can start a conversation), has also recently received growing scholarly attention (Bivens & Hoque, 2018; MacLeod & McArthur, 2019; Pruchniewska, 2020). Notably, these studies have highlighted that although Bumble provides women with the feelings of control and empowerment in managing interactions — especially in initiating conversations with male users — it nevertheless failed in achieving its objective of gender equality and
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protecting women from harassment, while simultaneously reinforcing heteronormativity and cisnormativity (Bivens & Hoque, 2018; Pruchniewska, 2020). Additionally, blurring the boundary between online and offline spaces and helping users flexibly co-situate and be co-present in physical and digital worlds are acknowledged as benefits enabled by mobile dating apps (Cohen, 2015). Notably, these advantages (e.g., co-situation and co-presence) have also been explored in the context of lesbian (Choy, 2018) and gay men’s dating app research (Ahlm, 2017; Blackwell et al., 2015; Miles, 2017; Roth, 2014). The above research provides examples for this research to examine Rela’s and HER’s feature and function designs and how these technological elements influence users’ digital dating practices.
Dating apps’ specific features and functions have also induced some potential risks and user concerns, such as privacy and safety risks (Albury & Byron, 2016; Lutz & Ranzini, 2017), harassment (Hess & Flores, 2018; Pruchniewska, 2020; Thompson, 2018), racial discrimination (B. Carlson, 2020; Chen & Liu, 2019), trolling (March, Grieve, Marrington, & Jonason, 2017), risky sexual behaviour (Green, Turner, & Logan, 2018), exacerbating sadness and anxiety (Her & Timmermans, 2020), and controversial adaptations such as Humanitarians of Tinder (Mason, 2016; Richey, 2016). These issues encountered in the dating app practices also lead to users’ reluctance to use and tendency to quit dating apps (Pruchniewska, 2020). Nonetheless, users were also found to deploy multiple strategies to cope with these adverse effects. These strategies include curating and limiting the amount of information in dating profiles to alleviate privacy concerns and carefully screening and vetting other users’ profiles to avoid potentially harmful dates (Pruchniewska, 2020). The above research has unpacked the problems and risks associated with using dating apps, mainly in the heterosexual dating context. However, these studies have served as crucial references for this project, particularly in examining the multiple risks my interviewees have encountered and the strategies they developed to tackle these issues. As my research findings suggest, Chinese queer women have also experienced diverse risks and challenges (e.g., privacy and safety concerns, racial prejudice) in the context of lesbian dating apps (see Chapter 5).
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2.3 LGBTQI DIGITAL DATING STUDIES
2.3.1 Gay men’s digital dating studies
Research on gay men’s digital dating cultures begins with the study of online dating websites. In particular, the most popular gay male dating website, Gaydar, which was a precursor to Grindr, became a research subject for several studies to examine gay men’s dating practices and cultures in the mid-2000s (Cassidy, 2013, 2016; Light, 2007, 2008; Mowlabocus, 2010). Grindr, which was launched in 2009, can be regarded as the leader that opened the mobile dating and hook-up market (Zervoulis et al., 2020). Accordingly, the burgeoning field of research on dating apps that currently exists also has its origins in gay male dating apps. Aside from Grindr, other gay male dating apps, such as Blued, Jack’d, Scruff and Aloha, have also become the subjects of academic research due to their popularity in the gay dating app market (Chan, 2016; Roth, 2014; Wang, 2019, 2020a; Yeo & Fung, 2018). In particular, there has been a rapid increase of studies on the Chinese gay social app Blued since around 2018 (Miao & Chan, 2020a, 2020b; Wang, 2019, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c) due to the app’s growing popularity and prevalence both in China and worldwide. The growing body of research on Blued has significantly contributed to understanding the Chinese gay dating app market and expanded gay men’s dating app research, which has been consistently dominated by studies in the Western context. This section analyses the existing gay dating app research according to the following themes that are implicated with my own project, including users’ motivations for using gay dating apps, gay dating apps’ multiple uses, and potential risks induced by gay dating apps. Notably, the research topics in gay men’s digital dating studies share prominent similarities with broader dating app research dominated by heterosexual dating apps (see Section 2.2).
Similar to work in the broader dating app research area mentioned in the last section, users’ motivations and gratifications for using dating apps have also been a focus of research on gay men’s digital dating cultures. Research has revealed that users’ motives for using Grindr include entertainment (Duncan et al., 2018), finding (sexual or romantic) partners and/or friends (Gudelunas, 2012), building social connections (Gudelunas, 2012) and accumulating sexual networks and capitals (Gudelunas, 2012). Further, Miller (2015) identified seven gratifications of men who have sex with men (MSM) regarding their dating app use, encompassing safety, control, ease,
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accessibility, mobility, connectivity and versatility. While research has mainly focused on the reasons why gay men use dating apps, Brubaker, Ananny and Crawford (2016) highlighted gay men’s motivations (e.g., time-consuming) and practices for their non- use and quitting of Grindr due to technological and social considerations. In this sense, Brubaker et al.’s (2016) research served as a crucial example and provided indications for the current project to study Chinese queer women’s suspended use/leaving of lesbian dating apps. As detailed in Chapters 4 and 5, Chinese queer women conducted diverse practices to disconnect themselves from Rela and HER in various circumstances.
Self-presenting through photos and texts on dating apps is perceived as an important factor to attract other users by gay men (Birnholtz et al., 2014; Lemke & Merz, 2018; Ranzini & Lutz, 2017; Ward, 2017). A host of studies have examined users’ self-presentation on gay men’s dating apps from multiple dimensions. The first category focuses on the use of textual language, including femmephobic textual language (Miller & Behm-Morawitz, 2016), textual body language (Miller, 2018), and language used to manage stigmatised behaviour (Birnholtz et al., 2014). Body presentation has become another research focus. Several studies, for example, have examined users’ disclosure of the nude body (Lemke & Merz, 2018) and sexualised selfies (Enguix & Gómez-Narváez, 2018) on gay dating apps. In particular, despite previous research demonstrating the negative implications of body presentation, Lemke & Merz (2018) emphasised the positive viewpoint of presenting nudity, incorporating attracting attention, attaining empowerment, and self-verification or affirmation. Furthermore, Miller (2019) delved into the factors connected with gay men’s body-presentation on dating apps, including a higher drive for muscularity, more self-perceived masculinity, and stronger anti-effeminacy attitudes. The third category of research concentrated on gay men’s face-disclosure practices on dating apps. For example, several studies consistently pointed out that the majority of gay male users presented their faces in their profile photos (Miller, 2015, 2019). However, Chan (2016) found that sociocultural context played a crucial role in gay men’s face presentation practices. Chinese MSM (men who have sex with men), for example, were less likely to show their faces on Jack’d compared to their American counterparts due to the stronger stigma of homosexuality in the Chinese context. Fitzpatrick, Birnholtz, & Brubaker (2015) also revealed that older users, and users who shared race
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information were less prone to disclose their faces, whereas higher body mass index (BMI) users, users who disclosed relationship status, and users who stated that their goals are seeking friends or relationships were more likely to disclose their faces. Jaspal (2017) and Miller (2019) both underscored that the degree of outness was an important factor affecting gay male users’ face-disclosure on gay dating apps. Additionally, other studies have also uncovered that self-presentation is correlated with users’ loneliness (Taylor, Hutson & Alicea, 2017) and co-situation practices (Blackwell et al., 2015).
Except for its original function of facilitating hooking up and casual sex (Licoppe, Rivière, & Morel, 2016; Miller, 2015; Stempfhuber & Liegl, 2016), gay dating apps such as Grindr and Blued were found to be commonly used for a wide array of purposes, including urban exploration, mapping, touristic souvenir collection, and performing and watching live streaming (Fitzpatrick & Birnholtz, 2018; Shield, 2017; Stempfhuber & Liegl, 2016; Tziallas, 2015; Wang, 2019, 2020a). Among this body of work, the adverse effects triggered by the use of gay dating apps have also come to light; for example, privacy and safety risks caused by sensitive and intimate data (e.g., sexual identity, age, geolocation) (Albury & Byron, 2016; Corriero & Tong, 2016), racial discrimination (Callander, Holt, & Newman, 2016; Lauckner et al., 2019), deception and harassment (Lauckner et al., 2019), and negative consequences for individual wellbeing (e.g., loneliness and dissatisfaction with life) (Zervoulis et al., 2020). The above studies have provided important insights and comparative value for this project to understand the multiple challenges and risks that LGBTQI users, such as gay men and queer women, have encountered in the same-sex digital dating context.
The gay dating app market was established and developed ahead of other dating app markets. Thus, research themes in the gay dating app research area prominently overlap with that of broader dating app studies, which have been dominated by the heterosexual context. For example, both of these research fields covered topics such as users’ motives for using apps and the potential risks caused by dating apps. However, these research themes have been largely understudied in queer women’s digital dating cultures. In this sense, the analysis of literature in these fields is of great importance for this project to draw upon useful theories and methods to study queer women’s digital dating cultures, thus contributing to expanding limited scholarly knowledge in the lesbian dating context.
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2.3.2 Queer women’s digital dating studies
Despite various lesbian dating apps emerging in recent years, the lesbian dating app market has been comparatively slow to develop (Murray & Ankerson, 2016; Tang, 2017). In particular, the market share that lesbian apps enjoy has been much lower than that of gay male and heterosexual dating apps (Murray & Ankerson, 2016). Thus, compared to the significant amount of research on heterosexual and gay men’s dating apps and user practices, lesbian dating apps and queer women’s digital dating practices have received limited scholarly attention. Of the work that does exist on lesbian dating apps, a large percentage emphasise Western dating apps and user groups (Ferris & Duguay, 2020; Murray & Ankerson, 2016). However, a small but increasing number of studies have also begun to explore lesbian dating apps and user practices in non- Western contexts, particularly the Chinese context (Choy, 2018; Liu, 2017; Tang, 2017).
Similar to gay men’s digital dating studies, queer women’s digital dating research also stems from work on lesbian dating websites and queer women’s practices for using online dating sites, albeit primarily in the Western contexts (e.g., French and American contexts) (Chaplin, 2014; Hightower, 2015). For example, concentrating on Minitel, a now-defunct online video/audio network, Chaplin (2014) found that lesbian activists utilised the online system to foster community formation, communication and connection during the 1990s. Hightower’s (2015) in-depth case study compared users’ use of different labels (e.g., butch, femme, queer) and body presentations on the lesbian niche dating site WomynLink. The comparison showed that femme users highlighted their femininity, butches foregrounded their sexual interest, and queers labelled their sex category as female while defending sexual identity as lesbian. Hightower’s (2015) analysis, in this regard, offers insights into understanding lesbians’ self-representation via different lesbian gender labels in online dating environments.
In recent years, Stefanie Duguay’s (2016a, 2016b, 2017b) research has consistently explored queer women’s participation and representation across different contemporary digital media platforms (e.g., Tinder, Instagram and Vine). Notably, she developed the concept of ‘identity modulation’ to explain how queer women negotiate their sexual identity performances on different platforms. Specifically, through examining queer women’s representation practices on Tinder, both Duguay (2017b) and Ferris and Duguay (2020) revealed that the frequent permeation by users with
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diverse genders and sexualities (e.g., heterosexual women, cisgender-presenting men) on Tinder and the hope of attracting other queer women users intensified queer women’s desire to signal their queer identities. Thus, they took stereotyped strategies such as using lesbian stereotypes and tropes in their profiles to intentionally increase the visibility and recognisability of their sexual identity on Tinder.
Despite offering benefits for queer women’s digital intimacy practices (e.g., rendering finding dates easier and more convenient), the use of Tinder has also induced risks such as harassment, discrimination, privacy and safety concerns, and damage to self-esteem and confidence (Duguay, 2017b; Duguay, Burgess, & Suzor, 2020; Petrychyn, Parry, & Johnson, 2020; Pond & Farvid, 2017). For example, through examining the governance systems of Tinder, Instagram and Vine, and queer women’s engagement with these, Duguay et al. (2020) found that these platforms’ formal policies, such as terms of service and community guidelines, and content moderation mechanisms, which heavily relied on user reporting, failed to effectively protect their users from harassment and discrimination. Also focusing on Tinder, Pond and Farvid (2017) investigated bisexual women’s experiences of using the app in New Zealand. Their findings indicate that Tinder provided an unfriendly space for queer women due to dominating heteronormativity and bisexual phobia within the app, which led to bisexual women experiencing prejudice from both heterosexual and queer users. More importantly, the use of Tinder posed multiple risks to bisexual women, including catfishing, online deception and online stalking (Pond & Farvid, 2017). These studies have provided crucial insights into understanding the diverse types of risks and challenges that queer women have experienced in their dating app practices.
For queer women, aside from finding dates and sexual encounters, using dating apps for community and friendship building has also been a prominent practice. Petrychyn et al. (2020) suggest that while queer women indeed used dating apps to seek dates and hook-ups, they also use them to find friends and build communities. The practices of community and friendship developing thus marked the distinction between queer women and straight women’s dating app use, as straight women mainly use dating apps for finding dates, relationships and sex instead of friends. Similarly, Albury and Byron (2016) underscored that hook-up apps played pivotal roles in facilitating intimacy, friendships and a sense of belonging among same-sex attracted male and female young people. These studies highlight the importance of using dating
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apps for community building among queer women’s digital dating practices (mainly in the Western contexts), thus offering indications for exploring Chinese queer women’s community building practices in their use of lesbian dating apps.
Concentrating on the Western lesbian dating app Dattch, which rebranded as HER in 2015, Murray and Ankerson’s (2016) work has offered prominent value for the current project in terms of understanding HER’s development and transformation since its launch. The authors critically analysed Dattch’s development and iterative design processes across different stages, from its inception to reconfiguration and then rebranding. Specifically, the authors explicitly illuminated Dattch’s failure in launching merely as a copy of Grindr by positioning itself as ‘Grindr for girls’ (Murray & Ankerson, 2016, p. 55) in its early start-up phase. This forced its subsequent adjustments to function as a conversation starter that could speed up women’s social process. While the proximity-led Grindr model, which facilitates quick and nearby hook-ups, works for gay men, it was ill-fitted for queer female users (Murray & Ankerson, 2016). The failure reflected the difference between gay men and queer women’s needs/habits for using dating apps. Specifically, their research highlighted queer women’s desire for a slower and tentative process of building and furthering relationships, which has also been echoed by other research on queer women’s digital dating practices (Comunello, Parisi, & Ieracitano, 2020; Duguay, 2017b). In its reconfiguration process, Dattch repositioned itself as an app ‘where women meet women’ (Murray & Ankerson, 2016) to reduce its lesbian emphasis while making it more widely accessible/relevant for all women who want to seek women. In this vein, Dattch garnered more opportunities to reach a broader and more diverse user group, which also offered users and investors/advertisers more imaginary space. Then in February 2015, Dattch rebranded to HER. The new name, HER, is interpreted as ‘a definitive turning point for the app as an orienting object that places sex under erasure in favour of erecting gendered boundaries’ (Murray & Ankerson, 2016, p. 65).
Since HER is one of the research subjects of the current project, Murray and Ankerson’s (2016) research has offered critical knowledge to understand the crucial moments in HER’s transformation. Continuing with Murray and Ankerson’s (2016) work, my project further examines HER’s developmental trajectories (especially after its rebranding to HER in 2015), transformation, key features and functionalities, and the embedded sociocultural representations. Further, my project contributes to
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expanding Murray and Ankerson’s (2016) research on the development of HER to delve deeper into actual user experiences through examining a group of Chinese queer women’s use of the app in Australia.
While the aforementioned studies have predominantly concentrated on queer women’s dating app practices and the development of lesbian dating apps in Western contexts (Duguay, 2017b; Duguay et al., 2020; Ferris & Duguay, 2020; Murray & Ankerson, 2016; Petrychyn et al., 2020; Pond & Farvid, 2017), to date, four studies have focused on non-Western contexts. Among these, three studies have examined lesbian dating apps and their user practices in the Chinese context. These studies have provided crucial knowledge for understanding Chinese lesbian dating apps and Chinese queer women’s mobile dating practices. For example, Liu (2017) has contributed a short analysis of the Chinese lesbian dating and community building app LESDO, whereas Choy (2018) and Tang (2017) have both concentrated on the Hong Kong forum-based lesbian social app Butterfly. Through exploring the functions and features of LESDO’s online community, Liu (2017) discussed the possibilities and challenges of providing virtual community-based care through digital dating platforms for Chinese queer women. Chinese lesbian social apps LESDO and Rela share similarities in their feature designs; for instance, the ‘Topic’ section, which plays an important role in facilitating in-app community building. In this sense, Liu’s (2017) research offers indications for my project to further unpack how Rela’s technological affordances contribute to its community building and provide help for its users through its diverse community-based activities.
The two studies of Butterfly, however, demonstrated different research foci. For example, Tang (2017) uncovered lesbian and bisexual women’s expectations and longings to use Butterfly to initiate and develop romantic relationships, whereas Choy (2018) analysed users’ co-situation practices enabled by Butterfly’s features and functions. More specifically, the investigation of Tang (2017) revealed the issues that Chinese lesbian and bisexual women faced in engaging in romantic relationships developed through Butterfly, including challenges associated with new technology in general and the restriction of traditional Chinese cultural norms. It also indicated that despite Butterfly allowing users to explore different types of relationships, most women still favour long-term monogamous relationships. In this vein, Tang’s (2017) study provided insights for understanding how Chinese queer women’s dating app
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practices are influenced by traditional Chinese social and cultural contexts. Building on Tang’s (2017) research, Choy (2018) further explored how Butterfly’s features, such as spatiality and mobility, enabled its users to co-situate in online/offline and public/private spaces. Further, how it simultaneously empowered users with greater freedom and control to disclose or conceal their lesbian identities in the complicated social, cultural, political and religious contexts in Hong Kong. Thus, Choy’s (2018) work served as a crucial example for the current project to explore the interplay between contexts (e.g., sociocultural, online/offline, private/public contexts) and Chinese queer women’s digital intimacy practices.
Another study focusing on lesbian dating apps in non-Western contexts is Narin’s (2018) examination of Turkish lesbians’ gender performances on the lesbian dating app Wapa. Like Petrychyn et al. (2020), Pond and Farvid (2017) and Tang (2017), Narin (2018) highlighted the importance of lesbian dating apps like Wapa for its users to find other lesbians, as lesbians have few opportunities to communicate with each other offline in Turkey. Despite the advantages, Narin (2018) also highlighted the challenges mobile dating app technologies pose to lesbians’ dating practices — for example, sexual stereotyping and online stalking — echoing the risks queer women encountered in their dating app practices in Western contexts (Comunello et al., 2020; Duguay, 2017b; Ferris & Duguay, 2020; Petrychyn et al., 2020; Pond & Farvid, 2017).
Overall, the body of literature representing queer women’s digital dating research is significantly smaller than that of gay men’s digital dating research, as well as the broader dating app research area, which has predominantly focused on the heterosexual dating context. The studies that have examined lesbian dating apps and queer women’s digital practices in both Western and non-Western contexts provide significant value for my project. However, there is scant research exploring queer women’s dating app use in the cross-cultural context. Thus, my project expands emergent non-Western lesbian digital dating studies by adding more knowledge to understanding diasporic Chinese queer women’s digital dating and social practices in the cross-cultural context.
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2.4 NON-WESTERN AND CROSS-CULTURAL DATING APP STUDIES
2.4.1 Non-Western dating app studies in the Chinese context and beyond
Although a small amount of research has focused on the non-Western and cross- cultural domain of digital dating studies, a growing number of scholars have begun to pay attention to this area, particularly since 2016 (e.g., see Cassidy & Wang, 2018; Chan, 2016, 2018b; Wang, 2020a). Dating app studies focusing on the non-Western contexts have so far primarily concentrated on the Chinese contexts, including mainland China (Chan, 2018b; Liu, 2016, 2017; Wang, 2020a) and Hong Kong (Choy, 2018; Tang, 2017; Yeo & Fung, 2018). In particular, research on the Chinese gay dating app Blued and/or its user groups in mainland China has demonstrated a relatively rapid increase since 2018 (Huang, Cai, & Lu, 2019; Miao & Chan, 2020a; Wang, 2019). Meanwhile, dating app studies concerning non-Western contexts beyond China, such as the Philippines (Atienza, 2018; Ong, 2017), Turkey (Narin, 2018), South Africa (Tanner & Huggins, 2018), India (Dasgupta, 2017; Eveslage, Shah, Parker, George, & Baishya, 2018) and Serbia (Milosavljevic, 2017), have also emerged in recent years.
Before the advent of non-Western dating app research, many studies were done in non-Western contexts in the pre-app age of online dating (Chin, 2015; Fu, 2015; Wen, 2015). In fact, work on non-Western digital cultures of sexuality was quite prominent prior to the development of dating apps. However, as Western dating apps led the market at the beginning stage of dating apps’ advent and growth, most studies have paid attention to these apps, such as Tinder and Grindr, and their user groups. Recently, with Western apps also becoming popular in non-Western areas and an increasing number of non-Western dating apps (e.g., Blued, Momo and Tantan) emerging and developing rapidly, non-Western dating app studies have begun to appear and grow in volume. In this section, I categorise and analyse non-Western dating app studies according to the regions/contexts they are situated in and the apps they studied. As my project focuses on the Chinese lesbian dating app Rela and Chinese user groups, I will mainly examine research associated with Chinese dating apps, especially those designed for LGBTQI people, and their user populations. Nonetheless, to offer a comprehensive understanding of non-Western dating app
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studies, research related to non-Western contexts (e.g., Philippines and India) beyond the Chinese context will also be briefly summarised.
A growing body of research has examined Chinese dating apps such as Momo and Tantan, which are market leaders in the heterosexual dating app market in China, and their users’ practices in the mainland Chinese context. For example, Liu (2016) examined Momo’s transformation from a sex-oriented app to a more generic social platform. This involved reducing its sexual features and changing its function to operate more as a mainstream social media application in the complex political, cultural and economic context of post-socialist China, which underpinned this shift. Specifically, Liu’s (2016) research highlighted that the Chinese government’s censorship policy became a key driver for Momo’s transformation. It thus provided crucial indications for my project to explore the links between Rela’s transition and the government’s censorship policy in the Chinese sociopolitical context (see Chapters 3 and 5).
Also focusing on Momo, Zhang and Seta (2015) and Xu and Wu (2019) explored how people used this app in their everyday lives in contemporary urban China. Their findings indicated that Momo functioned as an important platform for users to meet strangers (Mosheng ren), 4 engage in communications and develop relationships. Chan’s (2018b, 2019a, 2019b) series of work has explored both heterosexual female and male users’ practices for using Momo and Tantan. Findings from his work suggest that users use dating apps for multiple purposes, including exploring and experiencing sexualities, seeking casual sex, looking for love, romantic and serious relationships, making friends and accumulating social capital (e.g., for business) (Chan, 2018b, 2019a). Additionally, his research revealed that female dating app users were more likely to encounter social stigma (e.g., negative judgements from others) and sexual harassment in their dating app practices (Chan, 2018b). Although the above studies have primarily focused on heterosexual user groups’ practices for using Chinese dating apps, their findings offered critical insights into understanding Chinese users’ digital practices for using dating apps (e.g., multipurpose use).
4 The term ‘stranger’ is translated as Mosheng ren in Chinese in the work of Xu and Wu (2019), which refers to unfamiliar and unknown people.
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Aside from studies on heterosexuals’ practices for using dating apps, a growing body of research has begun to pay attention to the Chinese dating apps designed for LGBTQI people, particularly gay men, and their use of dating apps in the context of mainland China. In this sense, several scholars have made prominent contributions to enriching Chinese gay men’s dating app studies by predominantly focusing on the Chinese gay social app Blued and its users’ practices. For example, Wang’s(2019, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c) research has consistently concentrated on Blued, particularly on its Live Streaming function design, to explore its gay male live streamers and viewers’ digital intimacy practices. His studies have explored different aspects of Blued and its user practices by presenting different research emphases, including Blued’s algorithms (Wang, 2020a, 2020b), monetisation practices (Wang, 2019), platform labourers and data production (Wang, 2020b), and gay streamers’ pursuit of online fame (Wang, 2020c) in contemporary China. Findings from Wang’s (2019) research underscored that Blued live streaming reinforces heteronormativity and homonormativity because it provides opportunities for Chinese heterosexually married gay men to indulge their same-sex desires by participating in intimacy-centred activities while maintaining a heterosexual façade in their everyday lives. Live streamers on Chinese gay social apps such as Blued and Aloha generally faced the stigma of ‘slut-shaming’ and ‘money- shaming’ because of their sexual performance and virtual gift-receiving (Wang, 2019, 2020c). However, despite the challenges and issues it posed, these gay dating apps (e.g., Blued and Aloha) have contributed to the Chinese gay male community’s increased visibility in the mainland Chinese context (Wang, 2019, 2020b, 2020c). Thus, Wang’s research on Blued live streaming and user practices offered great value for my project to study Rela live streaming and Chinese queer women’s engagement with this feature.
While existing studies mostly took a user-centred perspective to explore Chinese gay men’s dating app practices (Wang, 2019, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c; Wu & Ward, 2020), Miao and Chan’s work (2020a, 2020b) focused on the corporate side to examine the production, development and transformation of Blued, and its workers’ negotiation of their sexual and professional identities in the Chinese sociopolitical context. Importantly, Miao and Chan (2020b) highlighted that the main reason Blued consistently and tactically foregrounded its role as a health education platform and transformed itself from a hook-up app to a social app was to gain the trust of the
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Chinese government, and thereby ensure its survival and long-term development. This finding aligns with Liu’s (2016) observation that the Chinese dating app Momo downplayed its sexual role while transforming to a mainstream social app to cope with the Chinese government’s censorship and sustain its survival. By analysing the dynamic relationship between state censorship and Chinese dating apps’ transformation, Miao and Chan (2020b) and Liu (2016) both underscored a prominent challenge- sexual censorship- that Chinese social and dating apps have to face and negotiate in their developmental process. These studies, in this sense, provide insights into understanding the impact of China’s online censorship on Chinese dating apps’ development and transition, while simultaneously serving as crucial examples for my project to study how the Chinese lesbian dating app Rela negotiates the state censorship and its own business development.
Two further studies on Chinese gay men’s dating app use are Wu and Ward’s (2020) exploration of Chinese urban single gay men’s experiences of developing relationships on dating apps and Huang, Cai and Lu’s (2019) computational analysis of Blued users’ opinions, behaviours and sentiments. Specifically, Wu and Ward (2020) identified Chinese gay men’s preference for casual conversations with interesting people versus their objection towards ‘sex-oriented pragmatic conversations’. Platform switching between dating apps and WeChat for initiating and developing relationships was also highlighted in these gay men’s digital intimacy practices. These findings are important in understanding Chinese gay men’s digital dating preferences and habits, thereby offering my project an opportunity to compare the differences and similarities between Chinese gay men and queer women’s dating app practices. As Chapter 4 demonstrates, my project’s findings significantly cohere with Wu and Ward (2020), indicating a similar antipathy shown by the Chinese queer women interviewed for this study towards sex-centred discussions on lesbian dating apps, and their cross- platform practices between Rela and WeChat.
While the above research has largely concentrated on the mainland Chinese context, several studies have examined Hong Kong users’ practices for using dating apps. These studies have investigated the experience of sexual abuse (Choi, Wong, & Fong, 2018) and risky sexual behaviour (Choi et al., 2016) among heterosexual user populations, and lesbian and gay male users’ experiences of using dating apps for relationship development (Choy, 2018; Tang, 2017; Yeo & Fung, 2018). Moreover,
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Yeo and Fung’s (2018) findings coincide with Tang (2017), pointing to the fact that although gay and lesbian dating apps such as Jack’d, Grindr and Butterfly allow users to explore different types of relationships (e.g., seeking casual sex and hook-ups), most of their research participants (gay men and lesbian women) still favour stable, long- term monogamous relationships. Importantly, the above studies demonstrated that irrespective of whether the dating apps are Western (e.g., Grindr and Jack’d) or Chinese (e.g., Butterfly), a cultural clash exists between the apps’ original design intentions (e.g., facilitating casual sex and temporal relationships) and Hong Kong users’ preferences and practices for using these apps. This provides the inspiration for my project to delve into the specific situation of Chinese women’s experiences of using Rela and HER in the cross-cultural context, particularly on the match or mismatch between the apps’ functions/intentions and users’ actual practices for using them.
Beyond the Chinese context, studies have also explored queer people’s dating app use in other sociocultural contexts, including the Philippines, India, Serbia and Turkey (Atienza, 2018; Dasgupta, 2017; Eveslage et al., 2018; Milosavljevic, 2017; Narin, 2018; Ong, 2017). For example, Ong (2017) and Atienza (2018) have examined the use of dating apps among gay Filipinos. Focusing on Filipino gay men’s digital intimacy practices after a typhoon disaster, Ong (2017) uncovered that hook-up apps and the presence of foreign-aid workers relaxed local Filipinos’ anxieties and helped them freely express their queer identities, sexual desires and intimacy practices. Research has also paid attention to gay men’s digital dating practices in the Indian context. For instance, Dasgupta (2017) explored Indian queer men’s various digital practices on platforms such as Facebook, Grindr and PlanetRomeo. He found that Indian queer culture is an intersection of both online and offline practices, which excludes India’s queer community from national identities conceiving queerness as anti-national. Meanwhile, Eveslage et al. (2018) collected Grindr users’ location data and information on specific user density at different times and spaces to construct density maps. They demonstrated how these maps could effectively guide HIV outreach services and activities in Mumbai by identifying reachable audiences on dating apps in a specific time and space. The above studies have again focused on gay men’s use of dating app in different non-Western contexts, highlighting the dearth of research on queer women’s dating app practices.
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2.4.2 Cross-cultural dating app studies
Several studies have explored diasporas’ dating app practices in different social and cultural contexts, including Chinese diaspora’s dating app use in Australia (Cassidy & Chen, 2017; Cassidy & Wang, 2018; Chen & Liu, 2019; Yu & Blain, 2019), Asian gay men’s dating app experiences in the US (Chan, 2016; Chan & Lee, 2016), gay male immigrants’ digital practices in Belgium (Dhoest, 2016a, 2016b, 2018; Dhoest & Szulc, 2016) and racialised experiences among gay male immigrants in Copenhagen (Shield, 2017, 2018a & 2018b). However, these studies have mostly concentrated on gay male diasporas’ digital dating practices. This section focuses on analysing studies related to Chinese diasporic groups’ dating app use in cross-cultural contexts, particularly in Australia, and briefly summarises research associated with other diasporic groups and contexts.
By exploring heterosexual Chinese diaspora’s practices for using both Chinese and Western dating apps (e.g., Tantan, Tinder and OkCupid) in Australia, Chen and Liu (2019) highlighted the gender differences between male and female users and the racialised experiences of these users. Their findings indicated that female Chinese dating app users showed either strong preference or rejection for dating white men due to the different perceptions (or biases) they have developed towards white men and Chinese men, respectively. While women users rarely experienced rejections by their male counterparts on both Chinese and Western dating apps, Chinese male users unanimously demonstrated negative, stereotypical and even skewed attitudes towards white Australian women due to their own experiences of being frequently rejected by these women. Chen and Liu’s (2019) study provides crucial insights into understanding the prejudices and biases that the Chinese diaspora has both encountered and developed towards white Australian women and men in the context of dating apps. Another study focusing on the Chinese diaspora’s dating app practices in Australia is Cassidy and Chen (2017), which explored heterosexual and gay male Chinese diasporas’ respective use of Chinese dating apps Blued and Tantan. They found that these apps are both communication tools and important ‘cultural products’ that shape and are shaped by users’ ‘transnational and cross-cultural experiences’ (Cassidy & Chen, 2017).
Unlike the above research’s primary focus on dating apps, several studies examined more general practices for using diverse social media platforms among
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Chinese gay men in Australia (Cassidy & Wang, 2018; Yu & Blain, 2019). To provide a more specific focus on the dating app practices in this section, I mainly interrogate their findings associated with Chinese gay men’s dating app use. However, as these studies are central to understanding the Chinese diaspora’s digital practices in Australia for my project, a more comprehensive analysis is presented in Section 2.5. Cassidy and Wang (2018) highlighted the role of the social chat app LINE as a crucial space for Chinese gay men to share and discuss their experiences of using dating apps such as Jack’d and Grindr, and a tool for avoiding ‘context collapse’ (Marwick & boyd, 2011). This finding of the Chinese gay male diaspora’s cross-platform practices for using dating apps and LINE offered inspiration and great comparative value for my project. It directed me to explore further Chinese queer women’s innovative and collective use of lesbian social apps in tandem with diverse social applications, such as WeChat and WhatsApp in Australia (see Chapter 4).
By studying Chinese gay men’s place-making practices in Australia, Yu and Blain (2019) posited that gay dating apps (e.g., Blued, Grindr and Jack’d) provide important spaces for the Chinese gay diaspora to explore gay sociality, such as looking for sex and developing transcultural friendships. However, although gay dating apps opened up opportunities for Chinese gay men to experience intercultural and interracial (sexual) encounters in Australia, they also posed issues of racial prejudice and discrimination. This result echoed Chen and Liu’s (2019) finding of Australian- based Chinese (heterosexual) diaspora’s racialised experiences on dating apps.
Chan (2016) examined Asian gay men’s experiences of using dating apps in the US. Specifically, Chan (2016) indicated that compared to American gay men, Chinese gay men were less prone to show their faces on Jack’d due to the stronger stigma of homosexuality in the Chinese environment. Also, Chinese gay men mentioned fewer relational goals than American gay men in their dating profiles, suggesting that users’ expression and communication models are relevant to China’s high-context culture and America’s low-context culture. Chan’s (2016) study underscored the association between sociocultural contexts and gay men’s dating app use, thus offering insights and indications for my research to explore how different cultures and environments (e.g., Chinese and Australian contexts) play a role in Chinese queer women’s dating app practices.
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Dhoest (2016a, 2016b, 2018) and Dhoest and Szulc (2016) have consistently examined the digital media practices among gay male migrants in Belgium. Their findings suggest that internet/online media are particularly important for sexual refugees and second-generation migrants to explore and represent their sexual identities (Dhoest, 2016b; Dhoest & Szulc, 2016). Specifically, gay chat and dating sites/apps (e.g., Grindr) carved out safe and anonymous places for these diasporic gay men to explore their sexualities, look for hook-ups, and mitigate the risk of context collapse (Dhoest, 2016b; Dhoest & Szulc, 2016). Shield (2017, 2018a, 2018b) has consistently explored gay male immigrants’ online dating practices in Copenhagen, emphasising the racial discriminations his participants experienced. Importantly, by examining gay immigrants’ experiences on Grindr and the online dating platform PlanetRomeo, Shield (2017, 2018a, 2018b) identified several pronounced race-related issues these immigrants encountered, including racial-sexual exclusions, racial-sexual fetishes, everyday racism and entitlement racism. I drew on these crucial concepts in my project while analysing Chinese queer women’s racialised experiences.
Notably, the racism, prejudice and discrimination encountered by diasporic communities in their intercultural and interracial intimacy practices, as suggested by the above studies (Chen & Liu, 2019; Shield, 2017, 2018a, 2018b; Yu & Blain, 2019), echoed a broader discussion on the power dynamics in interracial intimacies foregrounded by extant research. For example, by studying same-sex daters’ online dating preferences, Rafalow, Feliciano, and Robnett (2017) revealed that compared to minority same-sex online daters (e.g., Asian, Latino, and Black lesbian and gay daters), Whites were less into racial heterophily and more likely to reject daters from different racial groups from them. Lin and Lundquist (2013) and Lundquist and Lin (2015) found that White online daters enjoyed privilege in the possibility and potential of being messaged and receiving messages from other users. Meanwhile, Lin and Lundquist (2013) further suggested that both White female and male online daters tended to be more passive in responding to messages from Black men and women. This strand of research thus underlined the power dynamics, particularly regarding dating preferences, in the interracial and interethnic intimacy practices.
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2.5 CHINESE DIASPORA’S DIGITAL PRACTICES IN AUSTRALIA
The significant number of Chinese migrants in Australia and their use of diverse social media platforms in everyday life has attracted increasing scholarly attention. As suggested by previous studies (Cassidy & Wang, 2018; Yu & Blain, 2019), diasporas’ dating app practices often intertwine with their use of diverse forms of social media, particularly social chat apps like LINE and WeChat. Therefore, to gain insights into how the migratory experience and sociocultural contexts (in both homeland and host countries) shape Chinese diasporic groups’ digital practices, this section synthesises existing studies regarding the Chinese diaspora’s practices for using digital media in cross-cultural contexts, particularly in Australia. Notably, the research analysed in this section somewhat overlaps with the studies on the Chinese diaspora in Australia examined in Section 2.4 (cross-cultural dating app studies). However, as mentioned above, Section 2.4 specifically focuses on Chinese diasporas’ dating app practices, while this section probes into the more general practices for using a wide range of social media platforms among this diasporic community. In this section, I mainly focus on Chinese diasporic groups’ digital practices in Australia while also briefly summarising their social media use in other host societies, thus providing a thorough understanding of the Chinese diaspora’s digital practices in cross-cultural contexts.
Several studies focusing on Chinese gay male diaspora’s digital media practices have highlighted the significant roles played by diverse social apps — including social chat and networking apps (e.g., WeChat and LINE) and social and dating apps (e.g., Blued, Grindr and Tinder) — in facilitating these gay men’s place-making and sense- making experiences in Australia (Cassidy & Chen, 2017; Cassidy & Wang, 2018; Yu & Blain, 2019). For example, Cassidy and Wang (2018) and Yu and Blain (2019) revealed several prominent functions of social networking/chat apps (e.g., WeChat, QQ and LINE) in Chinese gay men’s digital practices in Australia, including seeking and exchanging information, establishing local networks, exploring gay cultures, and negotiating sexual identities and desires. Specifically, Yu and Blain (2019) observed that social apps helped Chinse gay men in Australia maintain connections with families and friends in their homeland (China) and thereby gain emotional support.
Digital practices among Chinese heterosexual diasporic populations in Australia, particularly Chinese international student groups, have also received growing research attention in recent years (Chen & Liu, 2019; Lu, 2017; Martin & Rizvi, 2014; Zhao,
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2019). For example, studies have consistently suggested that Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo, WeChat and QQ crucially facilitate the Chinese diaspora’s navigation and adaptation into local life through information seeking and network building, thereby helping them gain a sense of belonging in Australia. Simultaneously, these digital tools enabled Chinese migrants to maintain connections with the social networks (e.g., families and friends) in their homelands and keep updated with news about China (Lu, 2017; Martin & Rizvi, 2014; Zhao, 2019). As noted in Section 1.1.3, Chinese international students accounted for 43.3% of all international students in Australia, with over 166,000 in 2017 (Koziol, 2018). These students are deemed digital natives who grew up with the rapidly evolving social media technologies and platforms (Yu & Blain, 2019; Yu & Sun, 2019). Thus, research attention has been directed to these student groups’ digital practices. For example, Martin and Rizvi (2014) and Zhao (2019) underscored Chinese social media platforms’ crucial roles in helping Chinese international students’ local survival and transnational connectivity. Aside from addressing the importance of WeChat and QQ in developing intimacy between Chinese students and their families, Zhao (2019) argued that Chinese international students in Australia tactfully used these platforms to maintain a type of ‘disconnective intimacy’ with their families in China. In doing so, they achieved a balance between family closeness, parent surveillance and a sense of autonomy. The above studies offer diverse perspectives and valuable insight into Chinese gay male and heterosexual diasporic communities’ digital practices in Australia. Thus, they served as important examples/references for my project to explore Chinese queer women’s digital intimacy practices mediated by lesbian social and dating apps and other social media platforms such as WeChat (see Chapter 4).
However, research regarding Chinese queer women’s digital practices in Australia is rare. Although scholars such as Lucetta Kam (2020) and Audrey Yue (2012) have paid attention to the mobility of Chinese queer women from China to Australia, these studies have not engaged significantly with Chinese queer women’s digital media practices in their migration processes. For example, they have not explored how digital media use is intertwined with these women’s migratory and diasporic lives. Notably, Kam (2020) uncovered that the transnational movement enabled Chinese queer women to negotiate their sexual desires and identities, resist heteronormative values in China, and experience a different kind of life (e.g., living
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with the queer identity freely in Australia). As one of the few studies focusing on Chinese queer women in Australia, Kam’s (2020) research offered significant value for my project to gain insights into the experiences of moving to and living in Australia among this diasporic group alongside the impact on their everyday diasporic lives. In this regard, my project further expands Kam’s (2020) work by adding more knowledge about Chinese queer women’s digital intimacy practices in Australia.
Several studies conducted in different social and cultural contexts have focused on the Chinese diaspora’s use of social media in their host countries, including Russia (Koreshkova, 2018), the US (Zhou & Liu, 2016; Zhou, Wen, Tang, & Disalvo, 2017), Singapore (Zhou & Liu, 2016) and Germany (Pang, 2018). These studies have congruously underlined the important role played by social media, WeChat in particular, in enabling Chinese diasporic groups to maintain connections with their homeland networks while simultaneously building and expanding social networks in their host countries (Koreshkova, 2018; Pang, 2018; Zhou et al., 2017). Notably, WeChat has been particularly significant in the Chinese diaspora’s digital practices in cross-cultural contexts, ranging from helping them develop social capital, integrating into host societies and improving psychological wellbeing (Pang, 2018; Zhou et al., 2017).
2.6 CONCLUSION
Dating app research has become a burgeoning research terrain, with a proliferation of studies around 2016, followed by continuous growth. However, existing studies have primarily focused on heterosexuals and gay males’ use of dating apps while paying scant attention to queer women’s digital dating practices. Moreover, studies in the above categories have predominantly concentrated on Western and English-language based dating apps, such as Tinder and Grindr, and their user groups, while the proportion of non-Western studies in dating scholarship is still small. Also, diasporic groups’ dating app practices in cross-cultural contexts have so far received limited scholarly attention, and existing literature in this domain has been predominantly restricted to diasporic gay men’s dating app practices. That is to say, queer women’s digital dating research has not yet moved in a cross-cultural direction. This opens up the opportunity for the current project to enrich existing studies by
Chapter 2: Dating Applications and Digital Dating Cultures 47
adding more knowledge regarding queer women’s dating app practices in the cross- cultural context.
Research focusing on the technical features and function designs of dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble and Grindr (Bivens & Hoque, 2018; David & Cambre, 2016), as reviewed in this chapter, indicated that these apps’ technological infrastructures could potentially impact and shape users’ digital dating practices. This body of work provides crucial examples for my project to study lesbian dating apps’ technological designs, alongside the implications of users’ experiences and practices for using these apps. As demonstrated in the following chapters (see Chapters 3 and 4), Chinese queer women’s preferences, habits and practices for using Rela and HER were significantly affected by their respective technological affordances. Similarly, studies on the risks induced by dating app use (Hess & Flores, 2018; Lutz & Ranzini, 2017) and users’ concerns around using dating apps (Albury & Byron, 2016) reviewed in this chapter also serve as important examples for my project to explore the challenges and risks Chinese queer women encounter in their dating app practices and how they tackle these issues (see Chapter 5). However, as existing research is mainly based in behavioural and psychological fields, my project offers further insights into understanding users’ concerns from a media and cultural analysis perspective.
Although the volume of research on queer women’s dating app practices is relatively small, existing studies have offered crucial insights into understanding lesbian dating apps and queer women’s digital intimacy practices in different sociocultural contexts. Murray and Ankerson’s (2016) examination of Dattch (HER), for example, provided important knowledge for understanding the lesbian dating app HER, including its history, developmental trajectories and transition since inception. As shown in the following chapters (e.g., Chapter 3), this work has become a vital reference for my walkthrough analysis of HER. Importantly, continuing with Murray and Ankerson’s (2016) research, my project provides insights into HER’s more recent transformation (especially after its rebranding in 2015) while simultaneously explicating knowledge on users’ experiences of using this app. Research of Duguay and other scholars (Duguay, 2017b; Duguay et al., 2020; Ferris & Duguay, 2020) focusing on queer women’s digital practices, particularly involving Tinder, also offers insights into understanding dating apps’ governance systems and the challenges (e.g., harassment and discrimination) that queer women users encountered on Tinder. As
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will be explained in Chapters 3 and 5, my thesis also highlights these issues in the context of Chinese queer women’s use of Rela and HER, enriching existing research by adding non-Western analysis. Research focusing on Chinese lesbian social and dating apps, such as Liu’s (2017) analysis of LESDO and Tang (2017) and Choy’s (2018) analysis of Butterfly and their users’ practices, are significant in my project’s foundational understanding of lesbian dating apps and their users’ mobile dating practices in the Chinese context. Thus, my research further expands these Chinese- focused lesbian dating app studies by bringing about the case study of Rela and Chinese queer women’s use of lesbian apps in the cross-cultural context.
This chapter has highlighted the significant contribution of the growing body of research on the Chinese gay social app Blued to provide insights into the Chinese gay digital dating market and expand the gay men’s dating app research domain, which has been dominated by Western studies. Simultaneously, these studies offered an important opportunity for my project to compare the differences and similarities between the development trajectories of Blued and Rela in the Chinese sociopolitical context (e.g., online censorship), and Chinese gay men and queer women’s practices for using dating apps. Dating app research based in cross-cultural contexts has emerged since 2016, primarily focusing on gay male diasporas’ dating app practices. These studies were instrumental in understanding the dating app practices among diasporas from diverse ethnic and cultural groups in their host societies, thus functioning as examples for this project to explore the Chinese queer women’s digital intimacy practices in Australia and how their practices are intertwined with transnational and local contexts. For example, as explained in Chapter 4, the social and cultural contexts play instrumental roles in Chinese queer women’s practices for building and maintaining connections with (primarily Chinese) queer women’s communities in China and Australia.
As prior research suggested, the Chinese diaspora’s practices for using dating apps in their host countries often intertwined with their use of multiple social media (Cassidy & Wang, 2018; Yu & Blain, 2019). These studies provided important indications about how the use of diverse social media platforms helped Chinese diaspora with information seeking and sharing, local life navigation, connection building and maintaining with the homeland and local societies, emotional support and belonging seeking, and identity exploration and negotiation in Australia as well as
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other societies. Importantly, they also served as examples for this project to explore how the combined experiences of using Rela and HER and other more generic social media platforms (e.g., WeChat) impact Chinese queer women’s digital intimacy practices in Australia. By exploring Chinese queer women’s dating app practices for using lesbian social and dating apps in Australia, my project further expands existing studies in the domain of queer women’s dating app studies, non-Western and cross- cultural dating app studies, and Chinese diaspora’s digital practices. More importantly, this project sheds light on how Chinese queer women’s dating app cultures are shaped by and intertwined with both Chinese and Australian sociocultural contexts.
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Chapter 3: Walkthrough of Rela and HER
3.1 INTRODUCTION
This chapter focuses on the two lesbian social and dating apps Rela and HER, to analyse their development processes, primary technological features, and how these elements are shaped by and reflective of the social and cultural contexts in which these two apps are situated. The walkthrough method provided a useful analytical framework to analyse Rela’s and HER’s environments of expected use, technological affordances (e.g., key features and functionalities) and embedded sociocultural representations (Light et al., 2018).
As illustrated in this chapter, there are stark differences between Rela’s and HER’s development trajectories and technical designs. For example, Rela is famous for its multifunctional design, which coheres with the design logic of Chinese social media platforms, and the ubiquitous censorship and surveillance mechanism within the app, which is closely associated with China’s long-standing internet censorship policy. However, HER’s technological infrastructures — represented by the swipe functionality and relatively minimalistic interface design — also indicate its affinity with Western dating apps (e.g., Tinder and Bumble) in general.
Despite being developed in different sociocultural contexts and demonstrating prominent differences, Rela and HER also showed some similarities in their transformation processes. For instance, both apps have changed their marketing strategies from targeting only same-sex attracted women (lesbian, bisexual and queer women) at their initial developmental stages to targeting broader and larger female user groups of diverse genders and sexualities. Further, both Rela and HER position themselves as a lesbian social community, foregrounding connecting users and building supportive and inclusive communities as central to their mission. However, while Rela and HER have undergone similar significant transitions in their development processes, they were driven by vastly different factors. For instance, Rela’s transition was likely driven by the Chinese government’s relatively conservative and repressive attitudes towards LGBTQI-related issues and cultures, which created unpredictable risk/pressures for Rela simply due to being a lesbian
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social app in the Chinese context. Conversely, HER’s transformation was primarily motivated by changing ideas about genders and sexualities (e.g., from fixed to fluid) in the global context, business goals for attracting investment and advertisement, and users’ demands.
In the following sections, I introduce the walkthrough method and how it was employed to examine Rela and HER. Then, I present the walkthrough findings of these two apps, respectively, providing analysis regarding their technological infrastructures and how they are embedded within the sociocultural contexts in which the apps are situated. The differences and similarities between Rela and HER in relation to their development and transformation trajectories, technical infrastructures and embedded sociocultural representations are also analysed based on the walkthrough examinations.
3.2 WALKTHROUGH OF RELA AND HER
Developed by Light et al. (2018), the walkthrough method is a way to directly engage with an app’s technical interface and thereby examine its technical infrastructure and embedded sociocultural contexts. By carrying out a walkthrough examination, the mutual connections between the app’s interface elements and its embedded social and cultural contexts can be further explored (Light et al., 2018). Thus, this method helps researchers understand how an app guides its users and shapes their experiences of using the app. In this project, the app walkthrough method was employed as a three-step technique to examine Rela’s and HER’s respective (a) environments of expected use, including visions, operating models and governance, (b) technological affordances, such as features, functions and the flow of activities, and (c) unanticipated uses (Light et al., 2018, pp. 887–895).
Although newly developed, the app walkthrough method draws on a long history of similar observation-based research methods that have been employed to study digital platforms and mobile applications, such as material-semiotic analysis (Bivens & Hoque, 2018; Murray & Ankerson, 2016) and screen documenting analysis (MacLeod & McArthur, 2019). As an approach specifically tailored for app analysis, the walkthrough method has been widely applied to study dating apps developed in diverse cultural contexts. For example, Duguay (2017a, 2017b), Ferris and Duguay (2020) and Duguay et al. (2020) have utilised the walkthrough method to examine the authenticity verification and governance mechanism of the English-language dating
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app Tinder, and Wang (2020a) used this method to study the data structure and algorithms of the Chinese-language gay social app Blued. Building upon prior research, this project applies the walkthrough method to examine both the Chinese and English- language based lesbian social and dating apps. While previous work has mostly conducted the single walkthrough analysis by focusing on one app, this research employed a comparative walkthrough examination approach, suggested by Dieter et al. (2019), to better understand the distinctions and similarities between Rela and HER.
Regarding how to apply the walkthrough method in practice, Light et al. (2018, p. 882) have suggested that a ‘step-by-step observation’ should be conducted to generate field notes (e.g., screenshots) and recordings. The following sections outline the three steps involved in performing an app walkthrough examination following Light et al. (2018) and explain how each step was implemented in the context of my research on Rela and HER.
Step 1: Establishing Rela’s and HER’s environments of expected use
The first step of the app walkthrough process is to establish an app’s environment of expected use by examining its three aspects: (a) visions, (b) operating models, incorporating business models and revenue patterns (e.g., prices, in-app purchases and advertising, memberships and premium services), and (c) governance (e.g., rules and guidelines designed by Rela and HER) (Light et al., 2018, pp. 889–891). To establish Rela’s and HER’s respective environments of expected use, I collected and examined materials associated with the two apps from multiple data sources, including:
• formal platform policies, such as their terms of service, community guidelines and privacy policies
• official websites and social media channels, including Rela’s official accounts on WeChat, Douyin, Weibo and Facebook, and HER’s official accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr
• app stores, including Baidu Handset Assist (a Chinese app store, used to examine Rela given its Chinese background) and Google Play (used to examine Rela and HER) to investigate the apps’ in-app products and purchases, sample pictures, user reviews, rules and terms of app use, and developers
Chapter 3: Walkthrough of Rela and HER 53
• news articles (e.g., regular news and interviews of the two apps’ representatives and developers) and marketing/industry reports (e.g., annual and quarterly operation materials)
• public discussions regarding Rela and HER (e.g., user discussions/posts around Rela on Weibo, Douban, Douyin and Baidu Tieba, and around HER on Twitter and Facebook).
The above materials were collected from Rela’s launch in 2012 and HER’s launch in 2013 until August 2020. Some of the information was also collected directly through the two apps’ platforms. For example, Terms of Use and Community Guidelines are stated on the welcome page when first registering on Rela and HER; and operating models such as payment, memberships and in-app purchases became evident while engaging in Rela’s and HER’s in-app activities. Therefore, the above components (visions, operating models and governance) were collectively examined at the first and second steps of the walkthrough process.
Step 2: Examining Rela’s and HER’s technological affordances
The second step of the app walkthrough is to examine the four parts of an app: user interface arrangements, functions and features, textual contents and tone, and symbolic representations. This is done through a three-stage walkthrough technique: registration and entry, everyday use, and app suspension, closure and leaving (Light et al., 2018, pp. 891–895). Following the ‘step-by-step observation’ technique (Light et al., 2018, p. 882), I started the app walkthrough analysis by downloading the Android version of Rela and HER through the app stores Baidu Handset Assist and Google Play. Next, I registered three user accounts on Rela and HER, respectively, and created researcher profiles on each of them. Light et al. (2018) observed that the experience an app provides might vary between different user groups due to the disparate information users provide (e.g., age, gender and location). Thus, to examine the different activities and services offered to different user groups, I created multiple researcher profiles with various user information on Rela and HER at the registration stage. In these profiles, I identified my role as a researcher, specified that the profiles were created for research purposes only, and included a brief description of this project. I also stated in the profiles that as they would only be used for research, these accounts would not engage in any type of contact with users (e.g., swiping, liking, messaging
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or reply). I also asked users to avoid making any type of contact with these accounts.5 As mentioned earlier, the environments of expected use of Rela and HER were also examined at the registration and entry stage; for instance, by examining the two apps’ welcome screens, terms and rules.
After completing registration, I then moved into the second stage of the app walkthrough — everyday use — to experience the regular activities registered users would normally engage in on the two apps. At this stage, I mainly examined Rela’s and HER’s (a) interface arrangement (e.g., the placement of menus and icons/buttons), (b) features and functions (e.g., Live, Topic, Nearby Users and World Roaming on Rela, and Swipe, Feed, Communities and Events on HER), (c) textual content and tone (e.g., drop-down menu options and sexual identity categories), and (d) symbolic representations (e.g., colour, font and cultural symbols).
After finishing the above procedures, I closed all of the accounts that I had created for research purposes on Rela and HER in the final step of the technical walkthrough process. This stage was intended to examine whether Rela and HER would continue to contact me as a user — for example, by sending text messages and emails after my departure — or whether the apps would delete (or retain) my data thereafter.
While conducting the technical walkthrough examinations of Rela and HER, I took detailed field notes and recordings, including screenshots, audio recordings of my thoughts, and video recordings of the phone screens. Notably, only screenshots of Rela’s and HER’s technological infrastructures (i.e., visions, interfaces, features and functions, textual contents and tone, symbolic representations) were taken during the technical walkthrough process. Although incidentally observed in the course of examining the app, no user information (e.g., profile, age, user ID and location) was recorded out of respect for users’ privacy and safety. The technical walkthrough element of this study helped me further explore how users participate in and interact with Rela and HER.
Step 3: Unanticipated uses
5 For example, I wrote in my research profiles, ‘Please do not swipe me or send any message to me as this profile is only created for research purposes’.
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The third step of the app walkthrough is to examine the non-normative and unanticipated uses of an app and help cross-check findings from the technical walkthrough stage, providing the researcher with richer context about the environment of expected use. (Light et al., 2018, p. 895). To examine the unanticipated uses of Rela and HER, I collected related information — such as users’ discussions about their complaints, dissatisfaction and unpleasant experiences around their use of the apps — through news articles and social media forums (e.g., Douban Rela Group, Baidu Tieba Rela Group, Rela’s Douyin account, Rela’s Weibo account and HER’s Twitter account).
The walkthrough method provides an analytical framework to guide researchers’ examination of an app’s technological affordances and sociocultural values. Nevertheless, it has limitations in terms of understanding user perceptions, behaviours and experiences (Duguay, 2017a; Gillett, 2019; Wang, 2020a) as this method ‘does not directly collect and analyse user content, activity or attitudes’ (Light et al., 2018, p. 896). Therefore, this study combined the walkthrough method with semi-structured in-depth interviews to gain further insight into users’ experiences of and practices for using Rela and HER. The in-depth analysis of Chinese queer women’s practices for using Rela and HER based on the interview data is presented in Chapters 4–6. Thus, the walkthrough analysis of Rela and HER presented in this chapter provided foundational knowledge for designing the interview questions so users’ dating app experiences and common practices could be explored further.
3.3 WALKTHROUGH FINDINGS OF RELA
Founded in 2012 by Hangzhou Relan Science & Technology Co., Ltd. in Shanghai, China, Rela has become one of the most popular Chinese lesbian social apps. According to Lu Lei, the co-founder of Rela, the number of Rela’s registered users6 has reached over 12 million (Sutuwang, 2018), among which 6 million are active users 7 (Cision PR Newswire, 2018; Google Play-Rela, 2020). These statistics underscore Rela’s popularity in the mobile lesbian social app market. Based on the walkthrough examination of Rela, next, I elucidate the two prominent features of the
6 Registered users denotes users who have create a profile on the app. 7 Active users refer to users who visit or interact with the app over a given interval or period, including for example, monthly active users, weekly active users, and daily active users.
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app’s technological infrastructure, namely multifunctional design and community building (see Section 3.1.1). These features are closely associated with Chinese social media platforms’ design logic generally and Chinese social and dating apps like Momo, specifically. Then, I unpack Rela’s ubiquitous censorship and surveillance system, which is reflected in its platform policies and technological affordances and identified as another crucial characteristic of the app’s technical architecture (see Section 3.3.2).
3.3.1 Multifunctional design and community building
Multifunctionality has become a prominent feature of Rela’s interface design. For example, Rela provides a wide array of functions and features, including Featured Topic, Live (live streaming), Moments (users’ posts), Nearby Users, Amusement Park (games), Speed Match, World Roaming (locating a place on a world map to browse users nearby) and Audio Books. Although various functions and features have been iteratively added and updated since Rela’s launch in 2012 (Qianbidao, 2016; Sutuwang, 2018), multifunctionality has consistently been the most significant feature in Rela’s development trajectory. Rela’s multifunctional interface design coheres with the design logic of many Chinese social apps generally, which are driven by the motivation to design an ‘all-in-one’ app that integrates multiple functions tailored to users’ diverse needs and practices.
Many factors play into Chinese digital platforms’ adoption and practices of the all-encompassing design logic and commercial strategy. The development trajectories and histories of Western and Chinese digital platforms, for example, is one of the important reasons. Western tech companies and digital media platforms, such as Facebook, Amazon and PayPal, have emerged and developed much earlier than their Chinese counterparts, and have individually developed advanced technologies and services in the fields of messaging, social networking, e-commerce, entertainment and financial payment (Chen, 2018). Chinese tech companies have thus gained the opportunity to acquire the experience of their Western counterparts, integrating the diverse services and functions/features into their own platform designs and operational models, and thereby foster the all-encompassing user experience (Chen, 2018). Additionally, Chinese users’ preferences and accustomed practices for using all- encompassing platforms to satisfy their diverse needs (Chen, 2018; Chen, Mao & Qiu, 2018) also become an important factor for the Chinese digital media platforms’ adoption of the all-in-one design ideology. This design logic has been strategically
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and widely deployed by Chinese app developers to sustain users and intensify their loyalty and desire to stick to the apps. For example, the Chinese social and dating app Momo has been designed as an ‘all-in-one’ app that includes diverse functions used for multiple purposes, including looking for casual sex, seeking love, making friends and establishing business connections (Chan, 2019a). More generic Chinese social apps, such as WeChat and Alipay, have also been developed into ‘all-in-one’ apps (Wang, 2017), or the so-called ‘super apps’, which work effectively as ‘a closed ecosystem of many apps’ (Nikolaienko, 2019) to satisfy the multiple demands in users’ everyday lives. Notably, Western digital platforms and services such as Google, WhatsApp, and Facebook being blocked in China and the Chinese government’s support of Chinese big tech companies such as Tencent and Alibaba also provided significant benefit for these Chinese digital platforms (e.g. WeChat and Alipay) to develop and try out their diverse services/features, and thereby to capture and cultivate user preferences and practices. In this way, the design logics of Rela and other Chinese social and dating apps are significantly different from their Western counterparts, such as Tinder, Grindr and HER, which are characterised by a relatively minimalistic interface and function design.
Through examining the flow of activity (i.e., the order of screens and functions) and user interface arrangement on Rela, I found that despite its wide variety of functions, Rela actually focuses on different functions to varying degrees, mostly hinging on their popularity, economic and business value, and user preferences. For example, as one of Rela’s main revenue models,8 Live Streaming is designed as a single section with a striking and easily-recognised icon among the five primary sections of Rela (see Figure 3.1) due to its significant economic value. By contrast, other functions are generally integrated into shared sections on Rela. For example, Featured Topic and Moments are placed in one section, while Speed Match, Instant Chat, Nearby Users and World Roaming are arranged into a shared section.
8 Rela’s revenue models mainly consist of three aspects: (a) a virtual added-value channel, including live streaming and membership emoji store; (b) film and cultural products, including television drama and idol production; and (c) advertisements (collaborating with brands across industries) (Investment Circle, 2015).
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Figure 3.1 Rela ‘Live’ section
In its developmental trajectory, Rela has consistently emphasised the concept of ‘community9’ through its branding, slogan, advertisements, marketing campaigns, technological affordances and governance mechanism. For example, when Rela was launched in 2012, its name was ‘The L’, standing for ‘The Lesbian Social Network’ (Cision PR Newswire, 2018). Rela positioned itself as a social network to help lesbian, bisexual and queer women in China find dates with other users and stay connected to the larger LGBTQI community (Cision PR Newswire, 2018). Rela’s slogan, ‘Together,
9 I am fully aware of the complications around and diverse uses of the term ‘community’, which has been deployed in multiple ways and contexts to denote and describe different subjects. For example, ‘community’ has been used by digital platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tinder) to refer to the platforms’ user communities. Meanwhile, the term has also been used to denote the communities formed by different groups of people in different sociocultural contexts, such as queer communities and Chinese diasporic communities. In this thesis, the term ‘community’ has been primarily used in the following three ways. First, it has been employed as a core concept/ideology by Rela and HER to refer to their platforms’ user communities. Second, it refers to a specific technological feature (i.e. the Community feature) of the dating app HER. Third, it denotes the queer women's communities formed by different groups of people in different social and cultural contexts (e.g., Australian queer women community and Chinese queer women community).
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we belong’, highlights a sense of togetherness and solidarity among its users, foregrounding its mission to build a community. Simultaneously, Rela’s platform policies, such as Convention (Rela, 2020a) and Community Rules (Rela, 2020b), also tactically stress the importance of following community guidelines and rules, thus invoking and intensifying users’ sense of responsibility for building and maintaining a harmonious community. Co-founder Lu Lei explained his motivation for building the Rela community since the launch of the app in an interview. First, the community design was used to distinguish Rela from other Chinese social and dating apps, such as Momo, which primarily focused on developing dating and hook-up functions at its initial stage. Second, after gaining deeper insights into the mobile lesbian socialising and dating cultures and technologies, Lu Lei realised that lesbian women have strong desires to form connections and seek emotional resonance and support from other lesbian women. In this regard, building a lesbian community to connect Chinese lesbian women and provide them with support and backup has become a key motivation for Rela (Qianbidao, 2016).
Rela’s technological infrastructure is also significantly reflective of the community concept and the app’s core objective to facilitate virtual togetherness among Rela users. For example, Rela’s functions and features such as Live, Featured Topic, Moments and Nearby Users provide opportunities for its users to gather in a virtual space and stay connected with each other and the broader Rela community. For example, Live Streaming enables users to gather in a virtual setting, such as a streaming room, and engage in streaming activities and discussions with streamers and viewers. Since being added in 2016, live streaming has become one of the most popular and profitable functions of Rela. As noted above, Rela’s live streaming section is designed as a single category with all streams displayed on the same page. This differs significantly from the arrangement and operation of live streaming channels on other Chinese social and dating apps, such as Momo and Blued (Wang, 2019, 2020a), on which live streams are generally classified into different categories such as singing, dancing, talk-show, gaming and outdoor. Live streamers of apps like Blued and Momo are thus required to perform specially organised talents, shows and activities centred around the Live categories’ themes. However, while observing Rela’s live streaming activities, I found that live streams on Rela are organised in a relatively casual way, represented by the random topics and organic nature of discussions between streamers
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and viewers. Without the restriction of Live categories (or channels), one live stream can cover a wide array of topics. Instead of acting as a performer focusing on showing prepared talents and skills, Rela live streamers tend to share their more ordinary and banal everyday lives with viewers and answer viewers’ random questions through friendly chats. In this regard, streamers and viewers on Rela can have casual talks in a relatively informal and relaxed manner. As shown in Figures 3.2 and 3.3, while watching live streams, viewers can synchronously interact with streamers and other viewers in multiple ways. For example, they can post texts and emojis and send virtual gifts of varying value (e.g., flowers, lollipops, crowns and castles) to show their affection to streamers. Rela Live offers opportunities for users to meet, communicate and develop connections, thereby achieving the goal of ‘staying together’ that Rela has consistently stressed and aims to foster.
Figure 3.2 Rela live streaming room (advertisement image)
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Figure 3.3 Rela Live’s virtual gifts
Featured Topic is another core component of Rela’s community design. Once the registration process is complete, Rela users are directly guided to the page that integrates Featured Topic and Moments whenever the app is opened. This technical arrangement demonstrates Rela’s efforts to build a virtual community and foster users’ communications and interactions. Similar to a bulletin board service (BBS) forum, Featured Topic (see Figure 3.4) is a discussion space that displays the topics posted by both the Rela official team and ordinary users. Users can freely browse existing topics and participate in discussions or initiate their own topics. Featured Topic covers a diverse range of topics, including queer-related discussions, such as sharing experiences/questions/confusions about managing relationships, contract marriage, surrogacy, overseas marriage, discussing sexual identities with family members (e.g., coming out to families), as well as more general topics such as job hunting, graduate examinations (in mainland China), property, film, television shows, music and food. The Featured Topic section offers users opportunities to exchange information and knowledge, share confusions and problems, release emotions and pressures, seek/offer advice, help and support, and develop diverse connections (e.g., romantic relationships,
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friendships and professional relationships). The walkthrough analysis of users’ discussions in Featured Topic on Rela suggested that users have generally developed positive perceptions of Featured Topic. For example, some users described Rela’s Featured Topic as a ‘Lesbian Baike’, where they can find various information that helps to address their confusions and satisfy their curiosities about lesbian life. Here, ‘Baike’ refers to Baidu Baike, which is generally regarded as the equivalent of Chinese Wikipedia. The walkthrough examination also suggested that even though Rela users are generally unfamiliar with each other, they still actively engage in topic discussions, providing suggestions and comfort to users who post questions and/or ask for help. These findings thus highlighted the important role played by Featured Topic as a virtual lesbian community for Rela users to stay connected, share knowledge and attain support from each other.
Figure 3.4 Rela ‘Featured Topic’ section
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Notably, like Rela, Liu (2017) indicated that another Chinese lesbian social app, LESDO, also highlights its community design by developing its public message board, where users can freely post and browse others’ posts, and ‘Hot Topic’, a section for topic discussion that resembles Rela’s Featured Topic. For example, Liu (2017) argued that LESDO’s Hot Topics section functions as a crucial space for its users to seek information and advice, particularly related to their same-sex identities. This has special meanings for lesbians in the context of Chinese society, where same-sex relationships are still a highly sensitive topic, and queer females remain largely invisible. Rela’s and LESDO’s topic discussion design is the point of commonality between these two Chinese lesbian social apps, both of which foreground their community concept and features. In this regard, Rela and LESDO both function as important spaces for lesbian, bisexual and queer women in China to stay together, attain a virtual sense of belonging, and navigate and indulge their desires for love, sex and intimacy in the Chinese sociocultural context, which has thus far provided limited space for same-sex desires to be publicly acknowledged and discussed.
Another two proximity-based functions of Rela, Nearby Users and World Roaming, also support the app’s focus on community design by enabling users to explore nearby users, seek opportunities to establish romantic and social connections, and achieve the sense of being situated in a virtual community. For example, the Nearby Users section (see Figure 3.5) provides a grid of nearby users’ profiles with calculated distances and some basic information (e.g., ID name and profile photo) displayed. Users can click any profile to browse the rest of a user’s disclosed information, such as age, star sign, height, weight, sexual role, relationship and Moments. Through searching nearby people, users on Rela can see the existing user community surrounding them. In this regard, my research findings align with those of previous studies, that the function of searching for people nearby on dating apps such as Tinder, Grindr and Butterfly (a Chinese lesbian social app) enabled LGBTQI users to feel connected in the same digital spaces and thus alleviated their feelings of loneliness and isolation (Blackwell et al., 2015; Choy, 2018; Duguay, 2017b). However, World Roaming can be used to explore Rela users in different regions of the world. After clicking anywhere on the world map (see Figure 3.6), users can see Rela users around that area. This function resembles the Passport function of Tinder. Both Nearby Users and World Roaming open up opportunities for users to search and attain
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a virtual sense of the existing Rela community, either in a specific area or in a broader global context, thus helping users achieve the virtual togetherness Rela consistently endeavours to facilitate.
Figure 3.5 Rela ‘Nearby Users’
Figure 3.6 Rela ‘World Roaming’
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3.3.2 Ubiquitous censorship and surveillance
Censorship and surveillance have become the core of Rela’s governance mechanism, represented by the various ‘prohibitions’ stipulated in its formal policies — such as Convention (Rela, 2020a) and Community Rules (Rela, 2020b) — and the censorship warnings/reminders pervasively embedded within the app’s technical features and interface design. Multiple factors have driven the establishment of Rela’s censorship system. Most notable are mainland China’s long-existing internet censorship policy; the Chinese government’s comparatively conservative and repressive attitudes towards LGBTQI issues in recent years; Rela’s nature as a lesbian app; and the app’s previous experience of being shut down by the government due to its demographic focus. In this section, I discuss how Rela has established the censorship and surveillance system through its formal platform policies and technological infrastructures, and how the censorship mechanism has affected user experiences, based on data collected through my walkthrough analysis.
When examining Rela’s formal policies, such as Convention (Rela, 2020a) and Community Rules (Rela, 2020b), I found that these documents place great emphasis on stipulating the many ‘prohibitions’ on user behaviours on Rela. The use of a harsh and cautionary tone is common in this regard. Notably, aside from specifying bans on a wide array of content — including obscenity, pornography, violence, drugs, guns, gambling, spam, scam, commercial advertisements and promotions — Rela also specifically highlights prohibitions on politically sensitive topics. For instance, Rela stresses in both its Convention and Community Rules that:
Speech against the Communist Party of China, the Chinese government, military and religious policy, endangering state security, leaking state secrets, damaging state honour, interests and national unification is prohibited on the platform and may incur severe punishment (Rela, 2020a, 2020b).
Rela’s censorship policy on politically sensitive content coheres with previous studies that found topics criticising Chinese politics are strictly censored on various Chinese social media platforms, including WeChat (Ruan, Knockel, Ng, & Crete- Nishihata, 2016), Sina Weibo (Bamman, O’Connor, & Smith, 2012) and video streaming platforms (Knockel, Crete-Nishihata, Ng, Senft, & Crandall, 2015). Thus, the strict bans on the wide range of topics designed and developed by Rela in its rules and guidelines can also be understood as an active response to the government’s online
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censorship policy. Corresponding to the strict bans and rules of governing user behaviours, Rela has also developed a rigid, punitive system, as stated in its Convention:
Rela conducts strict standards for all users. If users post prohibited content, their posts will be directly deleted, and their accounts may also be suspended. Particularly, if users’ behaviours violate laws and regulations, they will be reported to the police and/or procuratorate (Rela, 2020a).
This kind of harsh warning not only corresponds to the aforementioned cautionary tone taken by Rela in its conditions of use documents, but it is also repeated by the censorship warnings and notifications ubiquitously embedding within multiple technological features of the app. For example, beyond issuing the specific policy document, Rela Live Streaming Governance Guidelines, to govern live streaming activities on the app, Rela also sets up a censor team, namely ‘Rela Wangjing’ (Rela Internet Police), to monitor streamers’ and viewers’ behaviour in live streams. As shown in Figure 3.7, Rela sets the static yellow, squared warning texts in each of its live streaming rooms, stressing that ‘reactionary, pornographic, drugs and violence are prohibited during Live’.
Figure 3.7 Warning texts (reminders) of ‘Rela Internet Police’ in Rela live streaming room
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My walkthrough observation of Rela Live also suggested it was not uncommon for live shows to be suddenly suspended due to viewers’ and streamers’ undesirable behaviour (e.g., malicious attacks, trolling or talking about forbidden topics such as self-harm and suicide). However, the walkthrough conducted for this study also indicated that despite repeatedly highlighting its strict surveillance and censorship approach to live shows, Rela did not appear to consistently implement harsh governance measures to streamers and viewers who broke live streaming rules and guidelines. For example, Rela specifies in its policy that live streamers are not allowed to show tattoos or engage in inappropriate conduct, such as smoking (including electronic cigarettes) and drinking alcohol. However, my observations revealed that Rela did not take any measures, such as suspending the live streaming or imposing punishments upon streamers who smoked electronic cigarettes in their live streams. This inconsistency of censorship may be attributed to Rela’s monitoring capability. For example, a video introducing Rela’s staff team posted on its official Weibo account showed that only three or four staff members are responsible for censoring content on Rela. The relatively small-scale censorship team implies Rela’s limited capability to monitor all the app’s live streaming rooms simultaneously and detect and censor all prohibited content. Some Chinese video streaming platforms, such as YY, Sina Show and Guagua, have developed automatic censorship mechanisms to more effectively detect, filter and censor live streaming content (Knockel et al., 2015). However, Rela has not yet developed this kind of censorship system and still requires the involvement of human labour. Thus, Rela is more likely to rely on user reporting for the surveillance and censorship of live streaming activities, as suggested by the reminder that appears in every live streaming room encouraging user reporting (see Figure 3.7). Therefore, if users do not report streaming activities, it is nearly impossible for Rela to detect all of its stated forbidden behaviours.
Meeting users’ demands and thereby gaining commercial profit by playing what is referred to as ‘edge ball’ in Chinese contexts is also a main cause of the palpable inconsistencies between Rela’s claimed stringent censorship guidelines and more relaxed governance approach in practice. Here, ‘edge ball’ (ca bian qiu) refers to the approach sometimes taken by Chinese social media platforms when skirting around the edge/boundary of acceptability according to government-set censorship guidelines, subtly and tentatively violating the rules for the sake of commercial profits. For
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example, by playing edge ball, Rela can ignore or overlook some of the live streamers’ and/or viewers’ behaviours that its policies claim to prohibit. Then, it can cater to and satisfy users’ interests/needs (e.g., for sexual and erotic content), encourage users’ engagement in activities within the app, and thereby achieve its commercial profit. As noted above, playing ‘edge ball’ is not unique to Rela but an approach commonly practised by other Chinese social media platforms. While studying the live streaming industry in China, Cunningham, Craig and Lv (2019) found that Chinese live streaming platforms and streamers commonly engage in ‘edge ball’ violations of Chinese surveillance policies and rules. Other Chinese social and dating apps, such as Momo and Blued, have similarly engaged in such practices, which has even led these platforms receiving official warnings, penalties and even temporary shutdown by the Chinese government at multiple points in their development (Liu, 2016; Nijjar, 2017). Beyond warning texts set up in live streaming rooms, ubiquitous censorship is also present within the technological features of other Rela elements. For example, whenever users start a chat with new users, a reminder automatically appears (see Figure 3.8), stating:
Please use civilised terms when communicating with strangers. To ensure your personal security and financial safety, please be careful with disclosing any private information and personal contacts. If this user causes any trouble or disturbs you, you can click ‘block’ [with hyperlink] or ‘report’ [with hyperlink].
Figure 3.8 Reminder in Rela Instant Chat
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The frequent notification of topics being deleted in the Featured Topic channel (e.g., ‘This topic does not exist’) and the updated information about live streamers’ accounts being shut down due to violating regulations in Rela’s public message board further substantiate the ubiquitous nature of Rela’s approach to censorship to govern user behaviour.
To examine users’ unexpected practices for using Rela, I analysed posts relating to unpleasant and unsatisfactory experiences of using Rela on various (Chinese) social media platforms, including Weibo, Douban and Baidu Tieba. Most Rela users stated that they had grown accustomed to Rela’s censorship due to their long-term experience of using social media platforms in the context of broader Chinese internet censorship. However, some were dissatisfied with the opacity and ambiguity of Rela’s censorship mechanism, the heavy reliance on user reporting, and the lack of automatic filters. For example, users complained in Baidu Tieba Rela Group that they did not think their posts in Moments and Featured Topic, and messages they sent to other users through individual chats broke Rela’s community rules. Still, their posts/messages were deleted, or accounts were suspended. Further, except for receiving a generic notification of their posts being censored on Rela (e.g., ‘Your posts have been deleted due to the violation of our community rules’), users failed to receive more explicit explanations about the content deletion and account suspension by Rela. Thus, users’ complaints suggested that a lack of clarity and transparency on Rela’s content moderation was confusing, which gave rise to their dissatisfaction with using the app. This finding echoes prior studies’ assertions that the opacity of a platforms’ content moderation policy can potentially trigger users’ frustration and reluctance to use that platform (Roberts, 2018; Suzor, 2019; West, 2018).
Other reasons for concerns associated with using Rela disclosed on social media forums outside the app were associated with advertising and privacy issues. For example, some users complained that they received many unsolicited advertisements from other users and the practice of repeatedly blocking and reporting spam significantly disrupted their Rela experiences. Thus, Rela’s reliance on user reporting and the lack of an automated keyword filtering system triggered some users’ disappointment and even reluctance to use the app. Notably, users’ concerns regarding Rela’s ‘imperfect’ censorship system were also intertwined with their worries about
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the app’s data privacy. In 2019 it was reported that over 5 million user profiles and associated private data on Rela — including user nicknames, dates of birth, heights and weights, ethnicities, sexual preferences and interests, and precise geolocations — were exposed due to a technical weakness (Whittaker, 2019). This news triggered users’ concerns around Rela’s information leak and their discussions of the app surveillance on Rela and social media platforms (e.g., Weibo and Baidu Tieba Rela Group).
Strict censorship and surveillance mechanisms can be regarded as an instrumental strategy developed by Rela to cope with the Chinese government’s online censorship policy and ensure the app’s survival and normal operation in this environment. As all Chinese social media platforms and companies are required to comply with China’s Internet censorship policy, they are at risk of being censored and cracked down on, and Rela is no exception in this regard. Indeed, in the current Chinese sociocultural context, LGBTQI-related issues are considered sensitive subjects by the government, which has consistently held conservative, unsupportive and repressive attitudes towards LGBTQI cultures (Bao, 2018; Rofel, 2007). Thus, Rela has constantly faced heavy pressure and the risk of being strongly scrutinised, or even shut down, by the Chinese government merely for being a lesbian social app. For example, Rela was shut down by the Chinese government in May 2017 for its involvement in an offline ‘dating market’ event that aimed to help parents find dates for their LGBTQI sons and daughters in a park in Shanghai (BBC, 2017; Linder, 2018). This event attracted the government’s attention due to its promotion of homosexual lifestyles (BBC, 2017). Rela was shut down, removed from app stores, and its official website and Sina Weibo account suspended (BBC, 2017). Rela was subsequently required to ‘purify’ itself by purging content concerning both online and offline activities that are deemed ‘illegal’ in China (e.g., the offline homosexual ‘dating market’) (BBC, 2017; Linder, 2018). Rela’s shutdown corroborates Knockel et al.’s (2015) and Ruan et al.’s (2016) observations of the risk of Chinese social media platforms being subjected to fines or even lose their operating licences if they are found to violate the rules or contradict the Chinese government’s will. Thus, the governance system Rela developed — characterised by its stringent censorship policy and ubiquitous surveillance warnings/reminders embedded within its technological features — constitutes a pivotal strategy for demonstrating ‘loyalty’ to the Chinese government by actively responding to and complying with its regulations. Therefore,
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these strict surveillance measures also serve as a ‘cover’ to protect Rela from the potential risks of being fined or shut down, while simultaneously maintaining its normal operation. This finding corresponds to prior findings that Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, and video streaming platforms (e.g., YY, Sina Show) have developed and enforced strict self-censorship mechanisms to ensure their compliance with the government’s censorship policy, and more importantly, the survival of their business (Bamman et al., 2012; Knockel et al., 2015; Ruan et al., 2016).
In addition to establishing a surveillance and censorship system, Rela has developed other strategies to tackle the Chinese government’s tightening censorship of sexual and LGBTQI-related content. For example, Rela launched a marketing campaign in March 2018 to rebrand itself from a ‘lesbian social network’ to an ‘online lifestyle platform for Chinese new women’ (StreetInsider, 2018). The term ‘Chinese new women’ refers to women who are independent and confident in themselves (StreetInsider, 2018). Through this rebranding, Rela aims to target a larger and broader female population in China, instead of only the lesbian community, while simultaneously functioning within the bounds of the Chinese government’s media rules, which still regard LGBTQI topics as highly sensitive.
3.4 WALKTHROUGH FINDINGS OF HER
Launched in September 2013 in London, HER has become one of the most popular English-language lesbian dating and social apps in the world. Like Rela, when initially released, HER had a different name and was later rebranded. Initially, it was called Dattch, standing for ‘date catch’ (Bearne, 2016). Dattch rebranded to HER in February 2015 and ‘HER’ (with a four-barred ‘E’ in its new logo) in May 2018 (Whitlock, 2018). HER’s registered users are reported to have reached 5 million across 113 countries (Alptraum, 2019; Google Play-HER, 2020). By conducting a walkthrough analysis of HER, I found that the app has undergone multiple rebranding phases in its development trajectory. For example, its key features and functionalities have been iteratively updated in the transformation process. By identifying and focusing on several instrumental moments in HER’s evolution, this section analyses the app’s rebranding and transition process alongside broader changes to mobile lesbian social and dating cultures. A key part of this analysis is HER’s transformation
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towards ever greater ‘community’ design and community development as a primary focus of the app; developer Robyn Exton has highlighted this feature as the most prominent factor differentiating HER from other social and dating apps. Thus, in Section 3.4.2, I examine how HER has fostered community building through its technological architecture and governance system. Specifically, I explore how HER has leveraged the COVID-19 pandemic to invigorate its community development by designing and launching a wide array of online events.
3.4.1 Rebranding and transformation: From a ‘Grindr-like’ model to a lesbian social community According to Robyn Exton, the founder and developer of Dattch (later HER), the key motivation for creating Dattch was to design a dating app specifically for lesbian and bisexual women (Murray & Ankerson, 2016). Inspired by the popular gay dating app Grindr, which foregrounds quick user connections based on proximity, Exton launched Dattch in early 2013. The app adopted a location-based model and was described as ‘Grindr for girls’ (Murray & Ankerson, 2016). However, the ‘Grindr-like’ model proved unsuccessful due to gay men’s and lesbians’ different approaches to using dating technologies (Bussel, 2013; Curtis, 2015). Previous studies have underscored these differences, noting, for example, that gay men are more likely to be used to and enjoy immediate and impulsive nearby hook-ups, as that is what Grindr and other gay dating apps advocate. However, queer women tend to have a greater need for socialising (e.g., talking and interacting) than immediate hook-ups, and prefer a slower and more tentative process to build familiarity and trust before meeting (Curtis, 2015; Duguay, 2017b; Murray & Ankerson, 2016). After realising queer women’s demands for a slower relationship development process, Dattch adjusted its design to a conversation-focused model that emphasised facilitating contact and interaction building between its female users (Murray & Ankerson, 2016). In this sense, Dattch’s transformation from the ‘Grindr-like’ model to a communication facilitator indicates that a first-impression-based and impulsive hook-up culture was unsuited to queer women, at least at the early stages of Dattch’s existence (around 2013–2014). However, as I will discuss later in this section, HER’s current interface design (e.g., the swipe function) partly contradicts this finding, suggesting there has been a re- emergence of dating cultures that foreground immediate and quick contact building among queer women in recent years.
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To reach a broader and more diverse user group and to offer users, investors and advertisers more imaginary space, Dattch reduced its lesbian emphasis while positioning itself as an app ‘where women meet women’ in 2013 (Murray & Ankerson, 2016). This made it more broadly accessible and relevant to all women who want to seek women. Notably, Dattch’s repositioning strategy is similar to Rela’s marketing strategy (see Section 3.3.2), as both aimed to expand their market audiences from same-sex women only to a larger and broader female audience made up of diverse genders and sexualities. This was to attract investment and open up opportunities for future development.
As Exton explained in an interview with Time Magazine, the realisation that ‘having a few defined sexualities doesn’t exist anymore’ and that the app ‘couldn’t be so specific with sexuality and even more so gender identity’ (Lasher, 2017) had driven the transformation of the brand from Dattch to HER, which took place in late February 2015. Another reason behind the rebranding at this time was its name. Put simply, Dattch is hard to remember and spell in comparison to HER (Bearne, 2016; Hunter, 2019). Alongside the new branding, HER also moved its headquarters from London to San Francisco, enabling it to be closer to its primarily US-based investors and simultaneously situated in the thick of the burgeoning social networking scene in Silicon Valley (Bearne, 2016).
Importantly, the rebranding from Dattch to HER also signified that HER had officially extended its remit from a dating-centred app to a broader and more diverse social app (Alptraum, 2015). Aside from its function for seeking dates, HER also stressed that it served as a platform for users to participate in a wide array of activities, including keeping updated with LGBTQI news, exploring local events, building friendships and professional relationships, and sharing everyday lives (Bearne, 2016; Hunter, 2019; Moss, 2016; Whitlock, 2018). Having realised that users employed the app for diverse types of activities, HER began to foreground and develop its multipurpose functionality (Bearne, 2016; Moss, 2016). Meanwhile, users’ broad deployment of HER for socialising — particularly for deep connection building — drove HER to pay more attention to its community focus and design (Hunter, 2019).
Inspired by the belief that the future of gender and sexual identities was fluid, HER launched its second rebranding in May 2018 (Whitlock, 2018). As shown in Figure 3.9, the new logo uses a four-barred ‘E’ to represent diverse gender identities,
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gender expressions and sexualities (Scriver, 2018). This rebranding aimed to show HER’s advocation of the fluidity of genders and sexualities (Scriver, 2018; Whitlock, 2018). Alongside the new branding, HER also adjusted its options for gender identities and sexual identities, expanding profile options for users from the initial three gender identities and five sexualities available when launched in 2013 to a more inclusive 23 gender identities and 18 sexualities in 2015 (Asselin, 2020; Bains, 2018). My walkthrough analysis of HER’s gender and sexuality options indicated that new gender identities available to users included gender-fluid, non-binary, questioning, androgyne and two-spirit. New sexual identity categories included androsexual, skoliosexual, heteroflexible and flexisexual, which were unique identifiers for the HER community. To further demonstrate its inclusive and supportive attitudes towards diverse genders and sexualities, HER also encourages its users to propose any expressions of gender and sexual identities they want and promises to add them as new identifiers in the app’s options (Bains, 2018). The continual transition of HER suggests the app has become increasingly inclusive and open towards diverse genders and sexualities. Simultaneously, HER has consistently placed focus on its community building post- 2015 by establishing diverse types of communities, designing (online and offline) events, and facilitating interactions among users.
Figure 3.9 Logo of HER’s rebranding in May 2018
Beyond HER’s rebranding and redevelopment to expand its commitment to diversity and community engagement, the app has also made a significant shift (both symbolically and technologically) in its inclusion of the swipe mechanism. Initiated by Tinder, the swipe logic has been widely deployed by a variety of social and dating apps in diverse sociocultural contexts, such as the English-language apps Bumble and OkCupid, and the Chinese-language app Tantan. As a key functionality of these apps, swipe plays an instrumental role in helping users find/search nearby users, browse profiles and get matches (David & Cambre, 2016; Duguay, 2017a). Similarly, HER has also foregrounded the swipe feature in its more recent interface design. Once the
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registration process is complete, whenever users open HER they are directed to the user profile section (generally nearby users). Users’ profiles mainly include their basic information, such as name, age, gender and sexual identity, distance and ‘fun facts’ (including a variety of labels users use to describe themselves, like hobbies, relationship status, relationship goals and personality). To enhance the desirability of the dates that users seek, they can set up the two freemium filters, namely age and distance, and/or premium filters, including gender identity, sexual identity, relationship status, height, political views, religion, star sign and diet. Similar to the swipe logic of other social and dating apps, swiping right means ‘like’ while swiping left means ‘dislike’ on HER. Users who mutually like each other’s profiles have the opportunity to start a conversation.
Although swipe has been made a salient technical feature of HER since its rebranding in 2015, it was initially perceived as ill-fitted for queer women’s mobile dating habits and practices during the app’s original development phase, the Dattch period. As noted above, Dattch’s failure in using a ‘Grindr-like’ model and the subsequent investigation of this failure revealed that first-impression-based and impulsive matching in technical design, both of which are inherent in the swipe, do not broadly appeal to its users. This is because queer women tend to prefer a slower and more tentative engagement process that builds trust, familiarity and relationships (Murray & Ankerson, 2016). In this sense, HER’s adoption, removal and re-adoption of immediacy-based design through the social swiping function can be considered a reflection of its users, or more broadly, queer women’s changing preferences around dating processes. That is, queer women’s dating and hook-up practices and cultures seemed to change in line with developments in broader digital dating cultures, from slow and tentative to immediate and quick relationship building. However, this does not mean that all users of HER were in favour of this shift. As my examination of users’ posts in the Feed section on HER and related news articles demonstrated, the swipe function also triggered users’ dissatisfaction. For instance, some users complained that HER lacks the uniqueness to attract them to stick with it, particularly noting that its ‘swipe function’ is near identical to Tinder or even become a mere ‘copy of Tinder’.
Another feature of HER that induced users’ dissatisfaction was the perception that the authenticity verification process through profile photos was operating ineffectively and, indeed, paradoxically. This is because HER (2020) constantly
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stresses in its Community Guidelines that ‘fake people’ and ‘fake profiles’ are prohibited on the app and encourages users to report these profiles. One approach employed by HER to ensure users’ authenticity and the safety of its community is to ask users to login with their Facebook account, Instagram account or mobile phone number; methods commonly employed by other dating apps (e.g., Tinder) as well (Duguay, 2017a, 2017b). Another of HER’s identity verification methods is requiring users to upload profile images of themselves. The app’s Community Guidelines stipulate: ‘It is required to have a profile image of yourself to verify your identity’ (HER, 2020). However, HER also noted the potential discomfort and insecurity that this approach may trigger and promised that it would design a tool to mitigate these risks. For instance: ‘We understand not everyone feels comfortable/safe enough to do so, we will be releasing a tool in the near future to help with this’ (HER, 2020). However, my walkthrough analysis suggests that HER has not made any adjustment to this controversial verification rule, and no tool has been released as yet. By observing users’ posts in the Feed section of HER, I found that some users complained about their accounts being suspended for not following the requirement of uploading their profile pictures. They described the rule as ‘ridiculous’, ‘unfair’ and ‘rash’. Other users questioned the ‘usefulness’ of this guideline and the potential harm it may trigger. For example, one user described her experience of finding out that other users were uploading celebrity photos instead of their own, asking, ‘Is that [the requirement] really useful? What if people are cheating by uploading others’ photos?’ Users’ complaints and questions indicated that HER’s compulsory requirement of a profile image could trigger users’ concerns of cheating behaviours and privacy violations. Indeed, the inauthenticity issue and users’ privacy concerns triggered by the authenticity verification process are not unique to HER and its users but a common problem faced by other social and dating apps and their users. For example, Duguay (2017a) has analysed Tinder’s framing of authenticity through linking users’ Tinder account with their Facebook profile, while Lutz and Ranzini (2017) and Griffin et al. (2018) have highlighted Tinder users’ privacy concerns over the authenticity issue of other users’ profiles. Also, HER’s (2020) stipulations in its Community Guidelines that this rule may trigger users’ discomfort compared with its response of actually doing nothing indicated that the app lacks the immediacy to address users’ concerns even though they have realised the issue and its underlying risks.
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3.4.2 Community building and event design
As mentioned in Section 3.4.1, HER has placed great emphasis on community building since its rebranding in 2015. This community focus has been made salient through multiple features, including Feed, Communities and Events. HER (2020) also emphasises the concept of community through its platform policies, such as Community Guidelines, to invoke users’ responsibility for building a friendly, supportive and inclusive community. This section analyses how HER has fostered its community building by examining the above technological affordances (Feed, Communities, and Events). Given that both Rela and HER have made community- focused design an instrumental part of their development, the community building approaches these two apps deployed will be compared.
As shown in Figure 3.10, Feed is a section for users to freely post texts and images, browse other users’ posts and interact with each other through liking, commenting and sharing. When users create their posts, they are asked to choose a community they have joined to share the posts. Then, their posts are displayed in both that particular community and the Feed section. In this regard, Feed constitutes a space that congregates users’ posts from all communities on HER. Additionally, Feed also operates as a public announcement board for HER’s official team to post stories, events, statements (e.g., function/feature/version upgrade) and advertisements from sponsors and business partners (e.g., Bright Cellars, b-Vibe). If users do not want to be bothered by advertisements, they can choose to upgrade to HER premium.10 HER’s Feed section, in this sense, is similar to Rela’s Moments section in that both function as public communication spaces for their users to share, browse and interact with the in-app communities. However, my walkthrough analysis of the two apps suggested that both Feed and Moments facilitated limited interactions among users on HER and Rela, respectively. For example, the interaction frequency between users was relatively low, represented by the limited numbers of likes, comments and shares below users’ posts on both of these sections. Specifically, by observing users’ commenting practices, I found that users’ interaction patterns tended to replicate a type of polite public
10 The price of HER premium at the time of writing was AU$12.99 for one month, AU$60.99 for 6 months and AU$80.99 for 12 months. By upgrading to HER premium, users can get unlimited swipes, advanced filtering, view who liked them, rewind to undo skip, see who is online in real-time, change locations and avoid advertisements.
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communication among strangers, represented by relatively superficial interactions — such as one-sided greetings (e.g., ‘Hey!’) and simple likes/endorsements (e.g., ‘good pic!’, ‘pretty!’) — with limited potential for development into deep connections. However, while conducting a walkthrough analysis of Rela’s Featured Topic section, which functions similarly as a space for Rela users to browse and engage with other users’ discussions (of topics), I found that users’ interaction frequency was significantly higher and tended to involve deeper communications that could potentially translate into personal connections. For example, users indicated in their replies (to others’ posts) that they can transfer to personal chats on Rela and exchange WeChat accounts. However, this potential for transforming the in-app encounters to closer personal connections on Rela was rarely seen in HER’s Feed section. Also, in comparison to the superficial interactions between users in HER’s Feed section, heated and intense discussions around specific topics among users were observed in Rela’s Featured Topic.
Figure 3.10 HER’s ‘Feed’ section
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HER’s Communities section (see Figures 3.11 and 3.12) consists of 20 communities at the time of writing, designed around users’ identities, ages, passions and interests. Examples include Trans Womxn, Trans Men, 40+ Community, Queen Womxn of Color, Movies & TV Shows, and Recipes & Foodies. All of these communities are created and organised by HER. There is no limitation on the number of communities that users can join; that is, users can join as many or as few (if any) communities as they want. After joining a community, users can then freely browse other users’ posts and create their own posts. While the aforementioned (general) Feed section on HER congregates the posts from all 20 communities, the Feed section in each community is more like a sub-Feed section (see Figure 3.13), including the posts that users from that particular community only create.
Figure 3.11 HER’s ‘Communities’ section (1)
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Figure 3.12 HER’s ‘Communities’ section (2)
Figure 3.13 HER-The ‘Feed’ section of ‘Queer Womxn of Color’ community
As Exton has consistently stressed in interviews, ‘community’ has been strategically highlighted as the most prominent technical design/feature and a strong differentiator that makes HER distinct from other dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble (Bains, 2018). My walkthrough analysis of HER suggested that the
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Communities section enables users to congregate in diverse types of sub-communities based on their interests, identities and ages to share their thoughts, opinions, emotions and lives, and interact with other users. However, like the Feed section, users’ interactions in these sub-communities were limited, with active communications and interactions rarely observed in the walkthrough examination. Further, through comparing users’ interactions on HER and Rela, I found that more discussions and connection-building practices among users occurred within the Rela community, facilitated by the app’s Featured Topic and Live streaming affordances. For example, both live streaming activities and topics (in Featured Topic) on Rela play a ‘glue’ type role in this community, enabling users to gather around to share their stories, experiences and opinions, and seek/offer advice, help and comfort, thereby facilitating connection building. However, within HER Communities, as users can only post their individual posts and browse others’ posts, their in-app activities are likely to be individual, dispersed and sporadic. Therefore, although users gather in the same space (e.g., a sub-community) on HER, there is nothing like the diverse topics initiated by the Rela team and users that can function as the ‘glue’ to enable users to engage in real-time, collective topic discussions and interactions as occurs on Rela. Thus, there is nothing that so strongly assists with the development of connections between users on HER. Simultaneously, the examination of the app store reviews, in-app discussions and social media posts relating to HER also suggested users’ dissatisfaction with the app’s community design. Their complaints mainly revolve around HER Communities offering limited opportunities for them to find interesting people and content while becoming a place for advertisements and ‘weird pictures and words’ (e.g., photos and texts that are deemed embarrassing and meaningless).
Further to Feed and Communities, Events is another crucial component — described by Exton as a key ‘pillar’ (Moss, 2016) — of HER’s community functionality. Notably, the events HER typically designed and organised before the COVID-19 pandemic were primarily offline and geolocation-based. HER has organised a wide range of events in different places around the world, including, for example, camping trips in Australia, queer burlesque shows in London, arts and crafts fairs in Los Angeles, and lesbian Pride festivals in Canada (Bains, 2018). To make the events better cater to users’ tastes, HER also encouraged its users to submit ideas for and proposals about the events that they wanted to have. However, before HER
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launched online events in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, users could only find events that were held in the cities in which their profiles were located (and not all cities had events). There was no access to events in other places because of the app’s location-based technical design. For example, when I was situated in Brisbane, Australia, and Qingdao, China, no events were found in either of these locations. Thus, I was initially unable to apply the walkthrough method to analyse HER’s Events feature due to my locations. However, HER’s active response to the COVID-19 pandemic in designing and launching a wide variety of online events, and making all of them accessible in the Events section regardless of user location, provided me with a later opportunity to examine the Events feature. More importantly, it allowed me to understand how these events are used to boost interactions and communications within HER communities.
HER has launched a wide range of Zoom-based online events (see Figures 3.14 and 3.15) during the COVID-19 pandemic. These include (a) community-based events (e.g., Mindfulness & Wellbeing Community Meetup, Trans Womxn Community Meetup, and Trans Womxn Community: Coming Out Stories; (b) location-based activities, represented by speed dating events in different cities (e.g., NYC/Chicago Virtual Speed Dating, Sydney/Brisbane/Melbourne Online Speed Cruising); (c) interest-centred events (e.g., I Direct Queer Porn-Ask Me Anything, Workout for Bottoms with Wellness Coach Angie), and (d) sexual health and knowledge workshops (e.g., The Art of Anal Play, Butt Stuff- Lube, Plugs, Beads & Toys). My walkthrough analysis demonstrated that most users’ posts related to HER’s Events in the Feed section were users expressing their thirst for and curiosity about event participation and positive feedback based on their experiences of joining these events. Targeting various aspects of queer women’s love and relationship practices, HER’s design and launch of multiple online events can be regarded as a strategy for boosting interactions and connection building in its different sub-communities and the HER community generally. The COVID-19 pandemic has somewhat hindered social and dating apps by restricting offline events. However, HER has leveraged this opportunity to facilitate users’ virtual gatherings without location restrictions by innovatively organising online events, thereby reinforcing users’ communication and connection development within the HER communities. Unlike HER, Rela did not make any active response to the pandemic, such as designing and organising online activities. Yet, this may be
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attributed to Rela’s live streaming feature, which plays a similar role in creating opportunities for users to gather and interact, thereby strengthening its community engagement.
Figure 3.14 HER online event: Trans Womxn Community Meetup (6 April 2020)
Figure 3.15 HER online event: Butt Stuff-Lube, Plugs, Beads & Toys (28 August 2020)
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Like Rela, HER (2020) also emphasises the concept of community in its platform policies, particularly in its Community Guidelines. For example, a word cloud derived from HER’s Community Guidelines (see Figure 3.16) shows the word ‘community’ has the highest frequency (25 times, accounting for 3.64% of all the words) in the document. Further, HER also attempts to evoke users’ responsibility for building a harmonious community by encouraging users to help govern the community by reporting inappropriate behaviours (e.g., discrimination, racism, harassment, shaming and bullying). For example, HER (2020) foregrounds its limited in-house content moderation capacity by stating: ‘It is important that as a community member, if you see a post or comment that breaks community guidelines, please report it so that we can get it removed as quickly as possible.’ However, unlike the harsh and cautionary tone that Rela adopts around content warnings and prohibitions, HER invokes a relatively mild tone when communicating with users about the behaviours the app encourages/facilitates and prohibits.
Figure 3.16 Word cloud of HER’s Community Guidelines
3.5 CONCLUSION
This chapter employed the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018) to examine the developmental trajectories and technological infrastructures of the two lesbian social and dating apps, Rela and HER. The walkthrough analysis underscored that both of these apps had undergone development processes regarding their technical designs and branding and marketing strategies that are intertwined with the social and cultural
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contexts in which they are situated. For example, Rela’s multifunctional design reflects the social media design logic in the Chinese context, while its censorship system has been significantly shaped by the online censorship policy in China. Similarly, HER’s return to a swipe feature design coheres with other dating apps (e.g., Tinder and Bumble) in the Western context, reflecting a transition in lesbian dating cultures from tentative contact building to immediacy and first-impression-based dating patterns.
The walkthrough analysis of Rela highlighted its three prominent features: multifunctionality, community building, and the ubiquitous censorship and surveillance mechanism. Rela’s multifunctional design echoes the design logic of many other Chinese social and dating apps, driven by the motivation for designing an ‘all-in-one’ app that integrates multiple functions to tailor to users’ diverse needs and practices. The concept of community has been consistently emphasised and strengthened by Rela’s (re)branding, slogan, marketing campaigns, governance mechanism and technological affordances. The app’s multiple features provide crucial opportunities for users to gather virtually in the same spaces. This is particularly important to users, as Chinese society offers limited visibility for same-sex desires to be publicly acknowledged and discussed. Hence, Rela’s efforts to facilitate the building of a lesbian community is significant for queer women in China. It provides a space to talk through their confusions about and indulge their desires for same-sex love and relationships by engaging with diverse in-app activities, and thus gain solidarity and achieve a sense of virtual togetherness and belonging. The ubiquitous censorship and surveillance approach has been developed as an instrumental strategy to address China’s online censorship policy while also serving as a ‘cover’ to ensure its survival and normal operation. Notably, however, there is an evident contradiction between Rela’s claimed stringent censorship approach and its practical, more relaxed attitude towards prohibited behaviours in its live streams. The practice of playing the edge ball by ignoring or subtly violating the government’s censorship guidelines is primarily associated with Rela’s limited capability in censoring content (e.g., small- scale manual labour censor team) and its motives for catering to users’ demands and gaining commercial profit.
This chapter also shows that the Chinese government demonstrates a seemingly ‘ruthless’ attitude and strict censorship of Rela (e.g., the shutdown event). In response, Rela persistently endeavours to show its loyalty to the government and prove itself as
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a ‘healthy’ and ‘positive’ app by establishing censorship mechanisms and organising various charity events, such as mask donation activities during COVID-19. Indeed, other similar kinds of Chinese LGBTQI-focused apps, such as the gay social app Blued, have also actively engaged in organising activities that the government deem positive — including the HIV online test and various health lectures and workshops — to craft and project a ‘good’ image. In this sense, complying with the Chinese government’s guidelines and building positive images function as crucial strategies employed by Chinese dating and social apps to support their business’s survival in the complicated Chinese political, social and cultural contexts.
HER has also undergone multiple phases of updates and rebranding since its launch. This chapter has analysed HER’s two significant rebranding practices and how they are intertwined with the app’s transformation in marketing strategies and technological affordances. Notably, the transition of HER, from its removal of the first-impressed-based design due to the failure of the early Dattch stage ‘Grindr-like’ pattern to the adoption of the swipe functionality after rebranding HER, seems to reflect changes in its users’ dating and hook-up cultures from slow and tentative to immediate and quick relationship building. Realising that users engage with the app for multiple purposes, HER extended its role from a dating-centred app to a broader, more diverse social app, placing its core focus on facilitating community building. Its multiple technical features, such as Feed and Communities, create spaces for users to congregate, share information and interact with each other. However, users’ interactions within HER communities remain mostly superficial and lack ongoing communication. Nevertheless, HER’s active response to the COVID-19 pandemic by designing and launching a diverse variety of Zoom-based online events has significantly invigorated users’ engagement with the apps’ activities and interactions within the community.
The walkthrough analysis also offered insights into understanding the similarities and differences of Rela’s and HER’s development trajectories and transformation in different sociocultural contexts. For example, both apps have emphasised fostering community building through multiple technological features and interface designs, highlighting their ability to offer users help and support. To broaden and bolster their future business development, both Rela and HER have expanded into multipurpose lesbian social platforms. They have grown their market audience from
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same-sex attracted women only to the broader and larger audience group of diverse gender and sexual identities, including all those who identify in some way as female. However, the transformation of the two apps’ positions/roles and the market expansion were driven by different factors associated with their respective social and cultural contexts. Rela’s transition was more associated with the Chinese government’s conservative and repressive attitudes towards LGBTQI issues and cultures and the precarious and unpredictable risk/pressure it faced as a lesbian social app in the Chinese context. However, HER’s transformation was primarily driven by its changing perception of genders and sexualities (e.g., from fixed to fluid), business opportunities (e.g., attracting investment and advertisement) and users’ demands.
Building on previous research that applied the walkthrough method to study social and dating apps like Tinder and Blued (Duguay, 2017a, 2017b; Duguay et al., 2020; Ferris & Duguay, 2020; Wang, 2020a), this research further expands the walkthrough analysis to lesbian social and dating apps in both Chinese and English- language contexts. Moreover, it offers insights into the comparative walkthrough examination (Dieter et al., 2019) by comparatively analysing Rela and HER. This research sheds light on the two lesbian social and dating apps’ developmental trajectories, transformation, technological functions and features, and how they have been intertwined with the social and cultural contexts in which they are situated. Additionally, the walkthrough analysis provides foundational knowledge for the design of interview questions to best explore users’ dating app experiences and common practices. Thus, the walkthrough method is combined with semi-structured in-depth interviews to gain further insights into users’ experiences of using Rela and HER in this research. Data from these interviews are presented in Chapters 4–6.
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Chapter 4: Networked Chinese Queer Women: Connection Building and Development
4.1 INTRODUCTION
This chapter explores how Chinese queer women have built and maintained connections with queer women’s networks in their homeland and host society through Rela and HER while living in Australia. It shows how the desire to join what interviewees described as an ‘organisation’ to seek companionship and a sense of belonging in the host society has become a key driver for Chinese queer women to develop connections with diverse queer women’s communities. Prior research has predominantly examined gay male and heterosexual diasporas’ practices for connection building and development with their social networks in the homeland and host society (Cassidy & Wang, 2018; Dhoest, 2016a). However, it has overlooked queer women’s digital practices for managing social connections in the diasporic context. The current research project extends existing studies by exploring Chinese queer women’s practices for building digital intimacy in Australia. Research has highlighted the cosmopolitan nature of gay men’s connection building as they have formed a relatively international network of friends within the LGBTQI community (Yu & Blain, 2019; Dhoest, 2016a). However, data from my project shows that rather than developing an international social network with queer women from diverse ethnic, racial and cultural groups, Chinese queer women preferred and tended to stick together with their compatriots and develop strong ties within existing niche groups of Chinese queer women in Australia. This echoes what Koreshkova (2018) observes about the Chinese diaspora having ‘a strongly developed sense of homeland and belonging to the people and culture of their country’ (p. 1818). Indeed, the Chinese lesbian social app Rela and the Chinese social app WeChat have, together, played significant roles in facilitating the building of intimacy between Chinese queer women, both in the transnational and local context, in Australia.
All of the 25 interviewees in this study were users of Rela, while 18 of them were also users of HER at the time the interviews were conducted. However,
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throughout the interview process, it was clear that there existed what I would describe as ‘imbalanced affection’ among interviewees towards Rela and HER. For example, most interviewees shared rich details about their experiences using Rela while only lightly touching on their experiences using HER. Moreover, Rela was viewed as a ‘home’ and a ‘treasure’ by interviewees — an app to which they developed a strong emotional attachment. I could see immediately from their stories that these Chinese women deeply engaged in intimacy development on Rela but showed little interest in HER. I contend that this is primarily due to the Chinese women in this study being long-term users of Chinese social apps, who were more accustomed to Rela’s interface design (see Chapter 3) and its embedded Chinese-based sociocultural representations. For these reasons, they preferred to use this app much more. In particular, some interviewees consistently mentioned that the use of Rela created a specific feeling of still being close to home and their homeland surroundings. For example, Amanda (25, student) said, ‘I always feel that I am not in Australia but in China whenever I watch live streams or browse topics [on Rela].’ Most interviewees had not developed this kind of familiarity and intimacy with HER or its interface design, embedded language (English) and socially and culturally contextual elements of its use, which differed from Chinese cultural norms. This made interviewees feel less familiar and even ‘uncomfortable’ with HER. As this chapter shows, interviewees’ rich experience of using Rela and their limited engagements with HER have created a ‘Rela-centric’ set of digital dating practices.
The following sections of this chapter start by examining how Chinese queer women in this study use Rela to develop connections with the Rela community in the transnational context (e.g., in mainland China) through engaging in diverse activities, including live streaming, topic discussion and Rela groups. For example, I show how Rela’s technological affordances facilitate transnational co-presence (Nedelcu, 2012) between interviewees and their Rela contacts across physical distances, thereby facilitating and reinforcing intimacy building. Next, I explore how interviewees used Rela and HER to develop local networks with queer women from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds in Australia. By analysing interviewees’ connection-building practices, I examine how and why Chinese women in this study maintain strong ties with their co-nationals while keeping relatively loose contact with queer women from non-Chinese ethnic groups. In the subsequent section of this chapter, I analyse the
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multifaceted impacts of using Rela and HER for connection-maintenance on these women’s broader diasporic life in Australia, for example, in terms of diversifying their everyday experiences of Australia, helping them accumulate social capital and obtain a sense of belonging. Simultaneously, I also discuss how interviewees’ encounters with culture clashes and exclusionary behaviours in digital dating contexts shaped their negative perceptions of networking with queer women from non-Chinese ethnic, racial and cultural groups. This reduced their desire for interacting with non-Chinese women in Australia more generally.
4.2 TRANSNATIONAL TOGETHERNESS THROUGH RELA
Functioning as the ‘social glue of transnationalism’ (Vertovec, 2004, p. 219), digital media have become important tools for geographically dispersed diasporas to maintain transnational connections with the social networks in their home countries (Schrooten, 2012; Laguerre, 2010). Branded as a lesbian social network, Rela provides a space for Chinese queer women in Australia to develop transnational social networks with Rela users across the globe, particularly the Chinese Rela community. This section explores how Rela was used by Chinese queer women in this study to establish and maintain connections with (mainly) the Chinese Rela community. Specifically, it looks at their engagement with Rela’s features/functions such as Live streaming and Featured Topic, and app-extended activities such as Rela WeChat groups.
4.2.1 Rela Live: Virtual gathering and imagined physical intimacy building
Rela live streaming enables dispersed Rela users to be co-present in the same space across large geographical distances, facilitating the establishment of diverse relationships such as friendships and romantic relationships. Based on observation of the interactions between live streamers and viewers, and interviewees’ experiences engaging with Rela Live, I found that most Rela streamers and viewers are located in China. However, there is also a relatively small group of viewers, like my interviewees, engaging from different parts of the world. In this way, Rela Live facilitates relationship building within the Rela community in China and among Rela users worldwide.
As discussed in Chapter 3, all Rela live streams are designed and organised in a single category. Without the restriction of channel categories, Rela streamers generally
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cover a wide range of topics in their streams. This arrangement shapes streamers’ casual and inclusive streaming style, fostering accessible friendships between streamers and viewers. As casual real-time streams do not need to cover curated topics, Rela streamers can project their image as real, easy-going and friendly, which facilitates interactions between live streamers and viewers. As Jiang (24, student) described, ‘I feel there is no distance between us [streamers and viewers]. We’re just like normal friends, and we can talk about everything and ask any question in live streams.’
Functioning as both a social venue and social activity, Rela Live allows its users to have diverse encounters, form connections and build relationships. For example, this occurs by engaging in live streaming directly or attaching themselves to streaming- extended activities, such as fan group chats (e.g., WeChat groups established by live streamers and/or viewers and joined by people who like or support the streamers). Wenwen (23, student), who called herself a ‘zi shen fen si’ (senior fan) of Rela Live, said that live streaming significantly simplified her friend-making process. ‘You don’t need to intentionally look for people to socialise. Just entering the [streaming] room, you can then easily find many interesting people out there’, she said. In the process of making friends with several Rela streamers, Wenwen found that compared to streamers from other platforms, Rela streamers are more sincere and willing to “show their heart to viewers”. Like Wenwen, Shujie (25, student) also described herself as a ‘zhong fen’ (loyal fan) of Rela live streaming. From Shujie’s perspective, Rela streamers are ‘special’ as they are not streaming for money and gifts; they care about viewers. Indeed, it was a common perception among interviewees that, compared to the effort required to befriend streamers on other Chinese streaming platforms, such as Momo and DouYu, making friends with Rela streamers was much easier and, importantly, more worthy. For example, May (27, student) said she felt no pressure to play jokes with streamers or ask them questions without sending a virtual gift. In particular, she enjoyed listening to streamers sharing their own life experiences of handling various problems and thereby learned some useful skills from them.
The social gathering enabled by Rela Live not only facilitates networking between viewers and streamers but also among viewers themselves. However, most interviewees saw forming connections with viewers as an unexpected practice and outcome of engaging in live streaming activities. As Shujie noted, ‘I thought live
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streaming is just for fun and have never expected that I would meet so many friends here’. Frequently meeting in the same streaming room and engaging in discussions were reported by several interviewees as the key elements that facilitated networking between initially unfamiliar viewers. As Shujie recalled, she joined some chats about K-pop music during streams and, through that process, came to know and befriend some stream viewers who had the same interests as her:
I thought it’s the same love [of K-pop music] that brings us together. Once during a live stream show, the streamer saw us being so engaged in the discussion [of K-pop music]. So she said, ‘why don’t you guys form a group’. Then a viewer instantly established a WeChat Rela group and we all joined.
Rela Live also provided opportunities for Chinese women interviewed for this study to invigorate and restore romantic relationships with their transnational partners. The transnational co-presence enabled by Rela Live creates an imagined physical intimacy and sense of togetherness between geographically dispersed couples. Thus, live streams were deployed in these contexts as a strategy to remedy the lack of common topics between interviewees and their distant partners. For instance, Sara (25, student) had been in a long-distance relationship with her girlfriend, who lives in China, for over two years. Physical absence and the lack of common life experiences caused many problems between the couple. ‘We’ve both got the feeling that we have become increasingly unfamiliar with each other, and particularly, the lack of common ground has become a prominent problem for us’, Sara said. Accidentally, an unexpected happy chat about a Rela streaming show with her girlfriend prompted Sara to realise that watching Rela Live might be a useful way to create some common topics between them:
We can chat a lot every night during or after watching the [live streaming] show, and most of our talks were actually inspired by the streaming stuff … I feel like watching Rela live stream has become a daily routine for us, as it provides the indispensable ‘ingredients’ for our everyday chats.
Interacting in the streaming room, for example, by flirting and joking, also facilitated intimacy rebuilding between Sara and her girlfriend. As she said, ‘We comment and interact a lot during the showtime. It’s fun and seems like work quite well for rebuilding our tacit understanding’.
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Rela Live creates opportunities for users to be co-present in the same semi-public space across vast geographic distances. The interface design of Rela Live, presented as a single category, shapes the inclusive friend-talks between streamers and viewers. It thus enables interviewees to engage in developing multiple intimate relationships, including friendships with their Rela contacts (e.g., streamers and viewers) and transnational romantic relations with their significant others in China. Prior studies have mainly examined the relationships established between streamers and viewers in the context of social and dating apps (Wang, 2019, 2020a, 2020b) and only lightly touched on the relations formed among viewers. Thus, this study extends existing research by highlighting the diverse relationship building that occurs through live streaming in the digital dating context, particularly by focusing on a group of Chinese queer women’s connection development in the context of Rela Live.
4.2.2 Rela ‘discover’ practices: Looking for ‘interesting soul’
‘Discover’ practices on Rela conducted by Chinese women in this study were mainly enabled by the app’s three key features: Featured Topic, Moments and World Roaming. Through engaging with these practices, interviewees aimed to look for interesting people and things, expand their social networks, and maintain connections with the broader Rela community. This section explores how these technological features and functions of Rela foster interviewees’ discover practices in various ways.
As described in Chapter 3, Featured Topic offers Rela users an opportunity to freely browse and initiate various topics and participate in related discussions, enabling dispersed users to gather and share information and emotions. In this regard, browsing and participating in topic discussions to keep up with the latest news and trends, learn new knowledge, satisfy curiosities, and seek/offer help from/to each other became crucial practices that made interviewees feel connected to the Rela community. For example, facing the heavy pressure and deep fear of disappointing her family due to her same-sex identity, Amy (25, student) said she felt frustrated and wanted to find someone to talk to about her worries. However, she could not post her feelings on WeChat (Moments) as most of her WeChat friends did not know she is queer. More importantly, she also worried that her parents might find out about her identity through her WeChat posts. Seeing many posts from people expressing similar concerns in the Featured Topic on Rela, Amy realised it might be an ideal place for her to speak about her worries without being surveilled by her friends and family:
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I posted my concerns through initiating my own topics and joining other topic discussions [in Featured Topic]. It’s amazing that many users replied to my questions and offered great advice. Some of them even offered to talk to me and share their personal experiences of dealing with these issues [handling parents’ concerns about same-sex issues]. I felt very touched and appreciated, and this also motivated me to help others.
Like Amy, several other interviewees also discussed their experience of using Featured Topic to speak about their concerns and share emotions. From interviewees’ perspectives, posting on WeChat Moments was perceived as ‘risky’ as it would be likely to trigger ‘context collapse’ (Marwick & boyd, 2011) and unwanted disclosures due to the acquaintance-based social networks. However, lesbian social apps such as Rela were considered safe, professional and controllable places for interviewees to talk about same-sex related issues. This is because they could stay away from the pressures of being identified by their families and friends who they do not want to disclose their sexualities to while simultaneously seeking and receiving expert guidance and help from users who had experienced similar issues (e.g., coming out to parents, forming cooperative marriages and overseas marriage). Interviewees’ perceptions towards WeChat and Rela also indicated that compared to generic social media platforms, lesbian social apps were considered more specialised spaces for discussing sexuality- related topics. This perception echoes Dhoest and Szulc’s (2016) finding that gay male migrants tended to view gay dating platforms as more compartmentalised spaces than Facebook to explore sexual identities.
Engaging in Rela topic discussions also helped interviewees gain a sense of belonging and security by sharing similar concerns/problems and offering each other encouragement/support. For example, Lu (31, nurse), who had lived in Australia for around five years when interviewed, said that before using Rela she felt quite disconnected from her social networks in her homeland, mainland China, especially after disclosing her queer identity in her WeChat Moments. ‘I can feel that some of my friends in China began to avoid me, perhaps they think I choose a wrong way to go’, Lu said. Experiencing the social contraction of her homeland network and having a limited number of friends in Australia, Lu noted she always felt lonely and empty. However, the situation had begun to change since Lu started to use Rela. Specifically, spending time browsing Rela topics became an ideal method for Lu to pass the time
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and assuage bouts of loneliness and helped her to expand her friend network. Lu explained:
I found that the more discussions [in Featured Topic] I engaged in, the more emotionally attached I feel to them [the Rela community] … Actually, I have a very negative character, but I found there are a lot of positive things in the topics, and I feel like I’ve even been affected by the positive energy.
Rela Moments offers an opportunity for users to browse other users’ posts and interact with them through liking, commenting and recommending. Among interviewees, looking through other users’ posts was commonly practised to alleviate boredom, indulge curiosity in knowing what other people are doing, and look for interesting people. In some cases, Rela’s Moments, Live and Featured Topic features were collectively used by interviewees to discover interesting people and things. For example, Zeyin (24, student) stated that whenever she found a user posting an interesting topic or comment in Featured Topic or during live streaming, it would intrigue her curiosity and interest to know more about that user. She would check that user’s profile and Moments, trying to find ‘some interesting things’ about that person. Notably, Zeyin’s practices of seeking interesting people were echoed by several other interviewees such as Jiang and May. As Jiang indicated, ‘I think everyone expects to meet interesting people and want to find some interesting stuff. This [Moments] is a good way to look for you qu de ling hun11 [interesting soul].’ The finding that the participants desired to find ‘interesting souls’ through Rela and HER in this research aligns with Wu and Ward’s (2020) argument that their urban single Chinese gay male participants’ primary motivation for using gay dating apps was to seek out and socialise with interesting people. Despite focusing on different groups of Chinese dating app users, the common ground between this research and Wu and Ward (2020) implies that Chinese social and cultural contexts and values played a significant role in shaping these Chinese queer women and Chinese gay men’s expectations, preferences and practices for using dating and social apps.
As discussed in Chapter 3, World Roaming is a feature that can enable users to discover Rela users in any part of the world. My interviewees’ experiences suggested that World Roaming was mainly used for indulging their curiosity to discover who
11 ‘You qu de ling hun’, which can be literally translated as ‘interesting soul’, is a Chinese internet parlance used for describing interesting people.
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was using Rela in different places across the world and pre-searching for users in places where they planned to travel. These motivations and practices facilitated the building of Rela contacts across the globe for Chinese queer women in this study. For example, Amelia (26, student), who is from Malaysia and identifies as Chinese- Malaysian, had used World Roaming to unexpectedly make friends with several Rela users, including her current girlfriend who lives in China: ‘Initially I was just very curious, like what I can do with it [World Roaming]. Can it be used for dating?’ Driven by curiosity, Amelia randomly searched a few places in southeast China and sent messages to several Rela users located there: ‘I had thought that people might think “wow, this person is crazy” and would probably just ignore my messages.’ However, Amelia received quick replies from most Rela users, except for one who responded to her after two days: ‘I was very excited. It’s like an exciting new game. We then began to talk and I was so absorbed into chatting with them. We even added WeChat’. Amelia explained she had never expected to build friendships with Rela users in this way, and particularly that one of these relationships would turn into a romantic relationship. Interviewees’ experiences of using Rela’s diverse features and functions for various practices — for example, using Rela Live for establishing friendships and reinvigorating romantic relationships, employing Featured Topic for discussing concerns and seeking help, and drawing on Rela Moments for discovering interesting people — allude to the fact that dating apps’ different technological features significantly shape and facilitate users’ digital practices in different trajectories.
4.2.3 Rela groups: ‘Home’ for emotional togetherness
Rela groups, formed through WeChat based on Rela connections, are a significant part of the process of maintaining connections between women interviewed for this study and the more niche Rela community. Throughout the interview process, I noticed that interviewees often used the term ‘Rela groups’ to refer to WeChat groups they have joined that are associated with their Rela contacts. The K-pop WeChat group established by several viewers during a Rela live streaming show discussed earlier in this chapter is just one example. Consequently, following my interviewees’ phrasing, I use ‘Rela groups’ as an umbrella term to refer to group chats formed through WeChat based on Rela connections. Gathering in virtual spaces such as Rela Live and Featured Topic enabled interviewees to network and build connections with other users. However, these relations are generally ephemeral and transient in nature. Thus,
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forming Rela groups was considered a crucial tactic to transform and extend these temporary relationships that emerge in these spaces into stable, long-term connections, which resonates with Wu and Ward’s (2020) argument that WeChat affords more stable connections than dating apps. However, this does not mean that WeChat groups guarantee the relationships formed within the groups are permanent and stably maintained. Conversely, in some cases, WeChat groups have dynamics that make them vulnerable to being temporary arrangements. For example, WeChat groups face the risk of being disbanded for violating the rules and regulations designed by WeChat according to the Chinese government’s requirements around spreading rumours or posting inappropriate and sensitive content (Ruan et al., 2016). This section explores interviewees’ practices for using Rela groups to maintain transnational connections with the Rela community.
The cross-platform practice of using Rela and WeChat highlights the pivotal role WeChat plays in interviewees’ connection and intimacy building in the transnational context. As the most popular social app in China, WeChat has over 1 billion users worldwide (Iubal, 2019) and enjoys high levels of popularity among Chinese diasporic communities (Zhao, 2019). Prior research has suggested that Chinese international students perceive WeChat as ‘home’ due to the meaning of homeland and sense of belonging it represents (Zhou et al., 2017). WeChat also embodies these kinds of significant meanings for my interviewees and plays important roles in their digital intimacy practices. For example, all 25 interviewees had used WeChat for furthering connections they had established through Rela. From their perspectives, Rela is more likely to be used for having encounters and initiating contacts, while WeChat is often used as a tool for deepening relationships. As Amelia described, adding someone known from Rela to WeChat means ‘there is a possibility for developing this relationship’. This echoes Wu and Ward’s (2020) finding that as opposed to maintaining relationships, Chinese gay men tended to use dating apps only for initiating relationships. However, there is also a nuanced difference between the findings of their research and my study. For example, Wu and Ward (2020) highlight the ‘platform switching’ practices conducted by their gay male participants from dating apps to WeChat to explore their dating contacts further and develop relationships. Whereas, my research finding underlined that Chinese queer women’s practices for using Rela and WeChat to develop personal and group connections are
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characterised by their collective, synchronous and interactive nature, instead of the unidirectional switching or shifting from one app to another. For example, while interviewees were watching live streaming on Rela, they would simultaneously discuss the live shows in Rela groups. When they had heated discussions around a topic in Rela groups, they would also post that topic on Rela Featured Topic to trigger more users’ participation. Notably, interviewees’ cross-platform practices of using Rela and WeChat also correspond to Schroeder’s (2010) multimodal connectedness theory, which highlights that people use various modalities or technologies to maintain relationships and connections with each other in their everyday life (p. 79).
The interviewees indicated that they joined diverse types of Rela groups, which were established for multiple purposes and used for maintaining various connections. For example, fan groups are one of the most common types, generally established by Rela live streamers or viewers and joined by Rela users who like and support those streamers. However, discussions within the fan groups are not limited to Rela live streaming only; they also cover a wide range of other topics. For instance, Jiang is an active member of the Rela fan group ‘Go! Siqi’ (Siqi is the name of a Rela live streamer), which has almost 500 group members, most of whom live in China. Jiang’s initial motivation for joining this Rela fan group was to indulge her desire to connect with Siqi by effectively ‘staying with her for 24/7’ and being updated with the latest information from and about Siqi. However, the longer Jiang stayed in the fan group, the more familiar she became with the group members. By having numerous interactions with Siqi and other group members, Jiang said she gained ‘precious friendships’ from the fan group members. Moreover, the group became one of the most important social connections for her, providing her with company in her daily life in Australia: ‘I feel that it [the fan group] has become part of my daily life. As I don’t have many friends here [in Australia], I cherish the friends that I have made from our group.’
Information exchange and sharing was also a primary motivation for Chinese women in this study to join/form Rela groups and a key practice that emerged. The heavy censorship of LGBTQI information and the comparatively conservative social environment towards homosexuality in China have caused some information about these issues to be silenced or blocked. Therefore, Rela groups have become important channels for Rela users who live overseas to transfer information from Western social
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media platforms back to China, thereby enabling Rela users who live in China to know more about the outside world and the state of global queer issues and politics. For example, Zeyin casually shared a screenshot of a lesbian event happening in Canberra to the Rela group, and said, ‘I just thought the picture is very beautiful and want to share with you’. However, she did not expect that this picture would trigger a long debate about LGBTQI issues in different countries among group members. Some group members subsequently asked Zeyin to share more information about overseas LGBTQI events with the group. ‘I’m very happy to share everything I saw from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as most of our members are in China and have limited access to this information’, Zeyin told me. In turn, Zeyin said she also benefited from being updated with the latest news in China from members of this group, which helped her avoid missing important information from home. Similarly, while exploring the use of social chat app LINE among Chinese gay male diasporas in Australia, Cassidy and Wang (2018) also revealed that these Chinese gay men used the LINE group to seek and share information between those located in Australia and those outside Australia (in China and elsewhere) that might assist with navigating local life in Australia either immediately or a planned future entry to the country for study or work. In this sense, my research finding of Chinese queer women’s practices of using Rela groups for exchanging information echoes Cassidy and Wang’s (2018) findings.
Apart from being used for information exchange and updates, Rela groups also played an instrumental role in enabling interviewees to feel emotionally connected with the broader Rela community, thus strengthening their emotional attachment to their broader home societies. While studying transnational family relationships, Alinejad (2019) observed that the behaviour of sharing information could also be identified as a way of sharing emotions. Similarly, the information sharing between Rela group members also constitutes emotion sharing. As Amy (25, student) explained:
Sometimes a piece of information can lead to the whole group’s [expression of] happiness or anger. While other people [group members] were sharing their emotion, I felt I was also motivated to share my emotion. This made me feel especially connected with the whole group.
Through participating in the group discussions and sharing her own emotions, Amy gained a strong sense of emotional togetherness and belonging from the Rela group. ‘Although I live far from most of our members who live in China, I still feel we
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are very close as we always talk to each other. It’s like we are always emotionally together’, Amy said.
Functioning as small communities, Rela groups helped their members construct a sense of communal belonging through engaging in group discussions and relationship maintenance. For example, Lu (31, nurse) found it was hard for her to find the same sense of belonging in Australia as she had in China. She felt that her Australian host city, Brisbane, was more a place where she lived than a real home. Driven by the desire to find a ‘zu zhi’ (organisation) to belong to and rely on, Lu joined a Rela group about six months before her interview and regarded it as ‘one of the wisest decisions’ she had ever made. Staying with ‘zu zhi’ helped Lu relieve her loneliness and recreate a sense of community belonging she had lost by living in Australia. ‘We talk about everything in the group, like news, funny stuff, and our members’ own stories. The feeling is like I finally got somewhere that I can call as home’, Lu said.
Digital media play two main roles in the diaspora’s lives: ‘informational and networking’ (Yu & Blain, 2019). Rela groups, enabled by the synchronous and interactive use of Rela and WeChat, created diverse types of niche communities through which the Chinese women in this study could maintain connections with the Rela community in the transnational context. Further, these Rela groups enabled interviewees to attain a sense of communal belonging, which might otherwise be hard to attain due to feeling like ‘a guest’ in the host society. Rela groups vary in terms of types and how they were formed and organised, as did the particular Rela groups to which interviewees belonged. Nevertheless, these groups showed similar functions in satisfying interviewees’ needs for sustaining ties with their Rela contacts (e.g., live streamers and viewers), updating information and forming communities. Specifically, these Rela groups enabled the temporary and ephemeral relationships formed through instant encounters on Rela to be transformed into relatively long-term and stable ones and thereby afforded users the ability to further develop and enjoy their diverse Rela- based connections.
4.3 NETWORKING IN THE DIASPORIC CONTEXT
Social media platforms are regarded as a bridge for keeping social connections with the homeland and host society (Sleeman, Lang, & Lemon, 2016). In this regard,
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lesbian social and dating apps Rela and HER also functioned as a bridge for Chinese women in Australia to develop ties with queer women’s communities. For example, the previous section showed how the Chinese lesbian social app Rela had been employed by women interviewed for this study to develop transnational connections with the Rela community. In terms of developing local networks in Australia, this section illustrates how Chinese women used Rela and HER to build connections locally with queer women from diverse ethnocultural backgrounds, including Chinese queer women, non-Chinese diasporic queer women and Australian queer women. Through analysing Chinese women’s practices for developing these relations in Australia, I found that interviewees showed clear preferences for developing ties with their compatriots, particularly through the Chinese apps Rela and WeChat, due to cultural identity issues. The strong ties developed within Chinese queer women’s groups helped interviewees gain a deep sense of belonging in the host environment. Conversely, interviewees maintained relatively loose contact and weak ties to queer women from non-Chinese ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds. Thus, the strong connections maintained between Chinese queer women in both transnational and local contexts demonstrate the ‘strongly developed sense of homeland and belonging’ (Koreshkova, 2018) interviewees felt towards the people and cultures of their own countries.
4.3.1 Establishing nearby intimacy through searching people nearby
As geo-location-enabled apps, Rela and HER can be both used for searching nearby users. Searching People Nearby was reported as one of the most frequently used functions by interviewees. However, interviewees’ engagement with this feature on Rela and HER were significantly different. As boyd (2011) and Bucholtz (2019) have shown, platform affordances can affect users’ communication and participation practices. This section demonstrates that the different technological designs around the People Nearby feature in Rela and HER shaped interviewees’ different experiences and practices for users’ exploring and connection building.
As analysed in Chapter 3, Rela’s technological feature People Nearby can be used for searching and browsing nearby users and their profiles. According to interviewees, People Nearby provided opportunities for them to indulge their curiosity about others’ lives and seek out users with whom they want to network. For example, Jiang noted that ‘the most enjoyable thing’ about searching people nearby was to look
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at nearby users’ moments (i.e., texts/images/videos posted by Rela users). This not only satisfied her curiosity about other people’s lives, it also helped her find the ‘interesting souls’. Jiang stated:
I always look at nearby users, just to see what they’ve posted, as I’m very curious. Sometimes if I found some you qu de ling hun [interesting soul] who triggered my interest through [looking through] their Moments, I would actively talk to them.
Similarly, Su (22, student) also considered People Nearby a useful and easy way to expand her social network, particularly after moving to a new place. She explained that it is the most ‘practical’ function of Rela:
It’s quite convenient as we [nearby users on Rela] live very close to each other. Some of us even live in the same building. So we often have some improvisational activities, like visiting one’s house and going outside for dinner.
Su thought that without Rela, even though Chinese lesbians had the desire for knowing other lesbian friends, they might have limited opportunities to meet and interact with each other, especially in a host environment. But now, with the help of Rela, she felt people were easily connected.
Searching and networking with nearby users on Rela helped Chinese queer women in this study gain a sense of company and security while simultaneously alleviating their loneliness caused by living in the host society. However, unlike Jiang and Su, Sara said she had never actively contacted nearby users on Rela, but had received winks12 and messages from several nearby users and had many ‘very happy’ conversations with them. ‘I’ve met two of them offline and we’ve become very good friends’, said Sara. Nearby users on Rela became an intangible form of company for Sara, from which she gained a sense of security while living her lonely life in Brisbane. ‘It’s good because at least I know that there is a group of people using Rela, and I’m not alone’, Sara said. While studying diasporic gay men’s use of social media, Dhoest (2016b) and Dhoest and Szulc (2016) asserted that dating platforms and mobile apps provide crucial channels for gay men in migration situations to connect with each other
12 If a user receives a Rela wink from another user, it means the latter is interested in initiating a conversation with the former.
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and establish relationships. Likewise, Duguay (2017b) also indicated that the practice for identifying queer women nearby enabled by Tinder’s Swipe feature can mitigate queer women’s feeling of isolation. Similarly, this has been experienced by my interviewees, who were more able to attain a sense of company and security through searching people nearby on Rela. Notably, however, Duguay’s (2017b) research focused on Western queer women (e.g., from Canada and Australia) and their experiences of using the Western dating app Tinder, while my project examined Chinese queer women’s practices for using the Chinese app Rela. Nevertheless, the similar findings between our research allude to the fact that apart from helping queer women get matched, dating apps’ People Nearby feature plays a more important role in lessening the isolation and loneliness of queer women and enabling them to feel connected and accompanied. The intangible social networks formed by nearby users were also utilised by Chinese women in this study as social resources for posting enquiries and seeking help while travelling to a new place. For example, Xinran (23, student) said she had not realised how important the People Nearby function was until she lost her way late at night during a trip to Perth, Western Australia: ‘I was so afraid because it [Perth] is not like Sydney. There was not even one person on the street at night, and I had no one to ask and talk to.’ Suddenly, Xinran thought that perhaps she could seek help from users on Rela: ‘I was very scared, so I messaged almost every user that I had seen on the nearby user list.’ Luckily, Xinran received an instant reply from a user who proposed to guide Xinran back to her hotel safely. Xinran’s experience of seeking and gaining help by using People Nearby indicated the potential benefit that the intangible social networks Rela possesses in coping with social emergencies, such as the travel emergency in Xinran’s case.
Like Tinder’s swipe for a date match, HER also employs the swipe design to help users look for nearby dates and get matches. Users can look for other users based on their preferences by setting freemium filters, including age (19–65 years) and distance (1–300 miles). Premium filters, which require users to buy a monthly membership starting from US$14.99 (HER, 2020), can further satisfy users’ needs for ideal partners, including gender identity, sexual identity, relationship status, religion and diet. Compared to Rela’s People Nearby, which interviewees praised as fitting into Chinese users’ networking habits, these same women perceived HER more negatively for being ‘too direct’ and ‘only for hook-up’. Hence, even on the Western app HER,
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interviewees showed a common preference for making contact with Chinese users. For example, Lu described the conversations she had with users on HER as mostly sex- oriented:
With talking only for a few words and without even being close to each other, some people just directly asked me where I live or whether I’d like to meet outside. It gives me a feeling that they’re only into sex.
May also mentioned that the sex-focused talks on HER, namely ‘quick conversations aiming for hook-up’, made her feel uncomfortable and not want to use the app any longer. In their research of Chinese urban single gay men’s dating app practices, Wu and Ward (2020) highlighted that ‘sex-oriented pragmatic conversations’ were perceived as a type of undesirable communication practice by their gay male participants The similarity between Chinese queer women and Chinese gay men’s dislike for sex-oriented talks, especially at the initial stage of establishing a relationship, has thus been foregrounded in the digital dating context. More importantly, it further indicates that these Chinese dating app users have been significantly impacted by the traditional Chinese social and cultural norms, which remain relatively conservative towards (immediate and casual) sex and value a more tentative process of establishing and facilitating relationships.
However, my interviewees’ encounters with sex-oriented conversations, which triggered their antipathy, seemed to primarily happen during their contact with non- Chinese users on HER. Compared to hook-up directed discussions, most Chinese women interviewed for this study clearly indicated their preference for ‘slow talks’, or what they called ‘zhu bu shen ru’ (which literally translates as ‘progressive penetration’). This kind of contact-building practice generally denotes conversations that initially proceed slowly, back and forth between two users, to form general friendships that potentially turn into romantic relationships later. Although slow talks can be ai mei [flirtatious, ambiguous and implicit] in nature, they are not initiated for sexual purposes. However, according to interviewees, slow talks mostly happened between women who were both Chinese, or at least Asian. Lu explained why she thought Asian women prefer to have slow talks:
I think most Asian lesbians are not that open to hook-up culture. In our cultures, having sex without knowing each other very well has not been widely
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acceptable. We generally started from making friends and then gradually develop into the (love) relationship.
Murray and Ankerson (2016) contend that compared to gay men, queer women prefer a slower and more tentative contact-building process on dating apps. Similarly, while studying queer women’s dating app practices, Duguay (2017b) and Comunello et al. (2020) both uncovered that queer women preferred having long-term communications before having face-to-face meetings. Consequently, my research findings cohere with the above research of queer women’s preference for progressing relationships slowly in the mobile dating context and show that interviewees’ Chinese cultural backgrounds further reinforce their preferences, habits and desires for a slow and tentative relationship development process.
Because of this preference for ‘slow talks’ and their affinity with Asian ethnic cultures, Chinese queer women in this study were generally more interested in liking Asian women’s profiles on HER, particularly Chinese women. For instance, Lu noted, ‘Though not many Asian users can be found on HER, almost all of the profiles that I liked are Asian. Talking with them made me feel more comfortable.’ This preference for using HER to build relationships with other Asian women in Australia somewhat reduced interviewees’ interactions with queer women from broader ethnic, racial and cultural groups.
Using Rela and HER to ‘sneakily’ check a nearby stranger’s gender and sexual identity and initiate conversation also became common practice among interviewees. For example, Cindy (29, web designer) said that sometimes when she saw a nearby stranger ‘who looks cool or looks like a queer’, she would go to Rela or HER to do a ‘quick search’ to see whether this person can be found on these apps. ‘Sometimes my intuition was correct, as when I swiped on HER, that person’s profile just appeared’, Cindy added. However, as Cindy felt embarrassed to approach the person to talk face- to-face, she usually liked the stranger’s profile (on Rela or HER) and waited for the chance to be liked in return before initiating conversation. ‘It’d be embarrassing if I suddenly approached her and started the conversation in person. So it’s better to do this on apps, as I can pretend that I casually met her on the apps’, Cindy explained. Jiang recounted similar experiences:
Sometime when I was waiting for the bus or shopping somewhere and noticed someone who seems like lesbian, I would quickly open Rela to check whether
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I could find her. If she happened to be a Rela user, I would follow her [account on Rela] and pretend that I inadvertently discovered her on the app.
Interviewees’ experiences of using Rela and HER to ‘target’ a nearby user in an offline (public) venue but initiate contact in the online (private) environment — as with Cindy and Jiang — showed these apps’ propensity to blur the lines between public and private spaces, and online and offline contexts, and afford users the hybridity of (in)visibility. This supports Choy’s (2018) and Blackwell et al.’s (2015) contentions that lesbian and gay dating apps blur the boundaries between online and offline spaces, thereby offering their users opportunities to be co-present and co-situate between physical and digital contexts. For Chinese women in this study, these blurred social contexts offered important possibilities for constructing their intimacy practices more slowly and comfortably. Duguay (2017b, p. 57) has observed that using Tinder enabled queer women to form a ‘loosely connected public’. Similarly, my research findings indicated that the intangible or latent queer social networks enabled by Rela and HER created opportunities for Chinese queer women to discover nearby users and facilitate networking. Further, they largely alleviated interviewees’ loneliness and insecurity caused by living in a host environment.
4.3.2 Sticking together: Strong ties sustained among Chinese queer women
As with the Rela groups formed through WeChat used for maintaining transnational connections with the Chinese Rela community, Chinese queer women in this study also joined chat groups and other queer social networks based around their local Rela and/or HER contacts to maintain connections with local queer women’s communities in Australia. Notably, some of these chat groups only included Chinese queer women, while others included queer women from diverse ethnic and racial groups. This section explores how Chinese queer women interviewed for this study built and maintained connections with local queer women’s communities from diverse cultural backgrounds in Australia through engaging in various group chats. Two key elements that shaped interviewees’ practices around connection-maintenance through chat groups were group members’ ethnocultural diversity and the social platforms on which these groups were formed. For example, interviewees were much more likely to develop strong ties with a chat group solely or primarily consisting of Chinese queer women and maintain relatively weak or loose ties to groups with mixed ethnic and racial backgrounds. Compared to the superficial participation they reported in chat
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groups formed through Facebook and WhatsApp, interviewees noted that they engaged more actively in developing connections within WeChat groups. For example, they contributed considerable time to these groups and paid close attention to group discussions.
Amy (25, student) joined two queer women’s chat groups after coming to Brisbane. The first is a WeChat group that mainly comprises Australia-based Chinese women, most of whom are users of Chinese lesbian social apps such as Rela, LesPark and LESDO. The other is a WhatsApp group established by an Australian lesbian woman comprising mostly Australian women and a small number of women with diasporic backgrounds. Amy joined both the WeChat and WhatsApp group chats through her Rela contacts. During our interview, I noticed that Amy frequently mentioned the WeChat group she joined without any prompting and voluntarily showed me the record of her group discussions, and seldom touched on her experiences with the WhatsApp group. Specifically, when I asked about the WhatsApp group, Amy’s answer was mostly ‘Eh ... I don’t know’, ‘I haven’t checked it for a while’, or ‘I don’t have much interest in it’. Amy said she never posted anything in the WhatsApp group other than a two-sentence introduction when she first joined. Amy relayed that the topics discussed in the WhatsApp group rarely triggered her interest and frequently made her feel uncomfortable because ‘they were very sexy, stereotyped and white- dominated’. ‘I found it’s hard for me to join their discussions, not to mention enjoy them, as I have very different perspectives from them’, Amy explained. Amy perceived significant cultural differences between China and Australia when it comes to dating, love and sex, which she described as the ‘implicit and respectable Chinese culture’ versus the ‘direct and open Australian culture’.
Compared to the ‘unhappy experience’ she recalled with the WhatsApp group, Amy said she had many memorable and precious memories in the WeChat group: ‘We [Rela group members] are the same people and we share the same culture[s]. We can freely flirt, play jokes, and share funny stuff.’ The discussions in Amy’s WeChat group covered a wide variety of topics, but most were associated with the local life in Australia: local survival information about life/study/work in Australia and information about local events such as the Brisbane Festival and Pride Month. At the time of her interview, keeping updated with the WeChat group information and actively engaging in the group discussions had become an indispensable part of Amy’s
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everyday life in Australia. ‘We form very close connections within the group, which made me feel very secure. It’s like I know I have a group of friends whom I can rely upon when I encounter problems in my life’, Amy said.
At the time of the interview, another two interviewees, Amanda and Shujie were in the same WeChat group with Amy. Amanda described the WeChat group as being like a ‘home’ for her, where she got connected with friends, received useful information and shared emotions: ‘Almost all of the lesbian friends that I’ve known are from this [WeChat] group. I feel like I’m much more connected with them than with my other [WeChat] groups.’ Like Amy joining a lesbian WhatsApp group, Amanda joined a lesbian Facebook Messenger group through a Korean friend she knew through HER. ‘People in our [Messenger] group have very diverse cultural backgrounds, like locals, Asians, and Latin Americans. They are so active in the group’, Amanda said. At the time interviewed, Amanda had been a member of the Messenger group for over a year but said she never felt she was part of the group or belonged to it. The Messenger group encouraged and highlighted cultural diversity and Amanda did not report the depths of uncomfortable feelings that Amy did; nonetheless, Amanda still said it was difficult for her to integrate into the group. ‘[It’s] unlike our WeChat group. [In the WeChat group] I feel free to do anything with our members and have a strong feeling of belonging’, she said.
Prior studies have shown that migrants prefer to interact with their co-nationals while living in host societies (Komito & Bates, 2009; Lim & Pham, 2016) because it helps them keep an emotional attachment to their home countries (Lim & Pham, 2016). This is supported by Amy and Amanda’s experiences of easily building a strong connection with the Chinese queer women in the WeChat group while struggling to engage with queer women from other cultural backgrounds in their WhatsApp and Messenger groups, respectively. However, while studying gay male diaspora’s use of social media in the host environment, Dhoest (2016a, 2018) and Yu and Blain (2019) uncovered that gay male diasporas in Belgium and Australia are more cosmopolitan in their approaches and tend to have an international group of LGBTQI friends. Therefore, the findings from my project contradict research on gay men’s diasporas. Although Chinese queer women in this study had also formed social networks with queer women from diverse ethnic, racial and cultural groups, most of them showed strong preferences for sticking to the Chinese queer women’s communities. This was
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attributed to the sense of belonging and security they felt from networking with queer women sharing the same/similar ethnic and cultural identities.
Compared to using Western social chat and networking apps, Chinese queer women interviewed for this study also showed a preference for developing their social connections within the lesbian community through WeChat, due to the strong emotional attachment they have developed towards this app through its ubiquitous use in China. Most interviewees had never or seldom used Facebook and/or WhatsApp while they were in China. Although they had free access to Western apps upon coming to Australia, they had not transitioned to these apps in any significant sense. For example, Amanda said she used both WeChat and Facebook to check her friends’ posts every day. However, she also admitted that she had very different emotional attachments to these two apps:
If one day I couldn’t be able to log on to my WeChat, I would be so afraid, worried, and desperate. But I don’t think this would happen to the use of Facebook. Now I live here [in Australia] so I need to use it to access information, but I know Facebook would never play the same important role as WeChat in my life.
Amanda’s different feelings towards WeChat and Facebook significantly shaped her practices for using these two apps to maintain group connections in different ways. ‘I don’t want to miss even one message from my WeChat friends, so every day I spend a lot of time checking WeChat messages’, Amanda said. However, checking Facebook messages, for Amanda, was more like a ‘daily task’ for social survival in the host society. Amanda’s longer-term habit of using WeChat had facilitated an emotional attachment between her and the app. It continuously shaped her digital media practices even when overseas, as it did for other interviewees in this study. While studying Chinese diaspora’s practices for using social media, Zhou et al. (2017) and Zhao (2019) noted that WeChat was viewed as being embedded with meanings of home and belonging. As discussed earlier, Chinese queer women in this study also described the Rela WeChat groups and other lesbian WeChat groups they joined as ‘home’, which helped them find belonging, security and warmth while living in Australia. Thus, the practices centred around Rela and WeChat among these Australia-based Chinese queer women underscore Chinese social media’s crucial role in their mobile lesbian dating and social practices.
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4.4 DIGITAL INTIMACY BUILDING IMPACTING DIASPORIC LIFE
Practices on Rela and HER for building and maintaining connections with social networks in their homeland and the host society influenced the diasporic life of Chinese queer women in this study in multiple ways. Strong ties built through Rela with the Chinese Rela community and Chinese queer women’s communities in Australia facilitated Chinese queer women’s satisfaction with their diasporic lives. For example, interviewees noted how managing various social connections developed through lesbian social apps had diversified and enriched their everyday lives and alleviated some of the loneliness and emptiness associated with being single and newly arrived in Australia. Specifically, the social networks these women built through Rela helped them accumulate social capital within both the homeland and the host society, helping to build a sense of belonging in their new environment. However, the culture clash and sense of exclusion these women experienced through their attempts to build connections with queer women from diverse ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds also shaped their negative perceptions of digital intimacy via social and dating apps, reducing their desire to interact with non-Chinese queer women in Australia. This section elucidates how the connection-building practices mediated through Rela and HER influence Chinese queer women’s diasporic life in Australia in both the positive and negative sense.
4.4.1 Improved satisfaction with local life
Fulfilling everyday life
Chinese queer women in this study described the move from their homelands to Australia as having transformed their lives from ‘full and colourful’ to ‘tedious’. Accustomed to the everyday bustle of life at home, filled with the company of their families, friends and others and numerous social events, they began to experience boredom, loneliness and even emptiness after moving to Australia. This shift resulted from a contraction of their social lives, lack of familiarity with the local environment and the removal of physical contact with homeland networks. The interviewees cited boredom as a key driver for their use of Rela and HER, alongside the hope that these tools would help with new connections and networking. Indeed, when I asked my interviewees what their motivations were for using lesbian social apps, they all had
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similar answers revolving around killing time, getting rid of loneliness, looking for fun and finding company. However, dating was very much secondary.
Engaging in the diverse range of activities available on Rela, such as watching live streams, browsing Rela topic discussions and other users’ moments, and participating in Rela group discussions, became a pivotal way for Chinese queer women in this study to kill boredom and feel accompanied by the Rela community. For example, Xinran described her life in Brisbane as a ‘closed cycle’: ‘It [my life] is very simple. Every day I repeated doing the same things, studying, eating and sleeping, like a closed cycle.’ Xinran said she knew of Rela when she was in Hong Kong but did not download the app until coming to Brisbane: ‘When I was in Hong Kong, I’d never felt that lonely and I didn’t have the motivation to install an app like this [Rela].’ However, her single and lonely overseas life motivated Xinran to try out Rela. Watching Rela live streaming and looking through topic discussions became highly enjoyable for Xinran. She said sometimes she spent up to three hours engaging in live stream shows on Rela without doing anything else. Specifically, this occurred after Xinran joined a fan group established by her favourite Rela live streamer, and she began spending more time keeping herself updated with various group messages:
I often immersed in our discussions [in the Rela group] without noticing that time had passed so quickly. But the good thing is that once I got into these things [Rela live streaming and Rela group discussions], I had no time to feel bored.
Like Xinran, Lu also spent considerable time engaging with Rela activities. These practices helped her kill boredom but also enriched her life more broadly; for instance, helping her learn new things and expand her social networks. Thus, Lu described Rela as a ‘treasure’. ‘Every time when I browse the topics on Rela’, she said, ‘I can always learn something new, like surrogacy, overseas marriage, advice for managing relationships. All are important things for me to know’. Since joining two Rela groups (a fan group and a surrogacy group) about one year prior to her interview, Lu became busier with checking group updates: ‘I check almost all of the messages in our group, and I also need to answer some members’ questions as they are interested in studying or migrating to Australia and they know I’ve got the permanent residency.’ Through interacting with group members in her Rela WeChat groups and with users on Rela directly, Lu quickly expanded her social networks. She described the virtual
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Rela network as ‘much larger’ than the small ones she had maintained with Rela contacts in Brisbane. Although maintaining transnational connections with Rela groups had occupied significant amounts of Lu’s time, she felt fulfilled and enjoined being surrounded by the virtual Rela community.
Like Lu, most interviewees also mentioned that they enjoyed spending time engaging with Rela activities. However, these practices also became a disturbance in their everyday lives. For example, Lina (24, student) described the Rela group she joined as a ‘sweet burden’ that brought delights to her single life but also occupied much of her time. Due to the time difference between Beijing and Melbourne, Lina sometimes had to sacrifice her sleep to watch the live streams from her favourite streamers on Rela. ‘I know it has disturbed my normal sleep cycles. But as a part of this group [the Rela fan group], it is important to keep regular interactions with them [streamers and viewers] as I really enjoyed it’, she explained. Amy also reported similar interruption problems. Although she enjoyed being updated with information from her Rela group and joining in group discussions, the ubiquitous message alerts and considerable time spent checking messages from the group chat had become an interruption for her:
I’m afraid of missing any important information so I basically check all the chat records to look at what people are talking about in our group. I like receiving information from the group, but it always takes me a lot of time. This makes me kind of struggle.
Accumulating social capital
The social connections Chinese queer women maintained through Rela and HER helped them accumulate social capital both in the host society and in their homelands. Li and Chen (2014) and Lin et al. (2011) both asserted that social media platforms such as Facebook are deployed as an important means by international students to access social capital, such as local information regarding college study, accommodation and job opportunities in their host countries. Among the 25 interviewees, 16 were Chinese international students studying in Australia at the time of participating in this project. These student interviewees highlighted their practices for using chat groups formed with local queer women’s communities, such as the Australian-based WeChat groups of Chinese queer women, to seek and exchange information regarding local job-seeking, migration policies, courses to study,
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accommodation and travel. Notably, information shared within these groups helped interviewees better understand how to live successfully in the host society. For example, Amy was close to finishing her master’s program in social work and planned to apply for a Skilled Independent Visa (or 189 Visa) to stay in Australia following her studies. The WeChat group she had formed with other Chinese queer women in Australia had offered Amy ‘valuable help’ in this regard:
I found that quite a few members in our group had applied or are planning to apply for 189 Visa. We shared a lot of information about the visa application, job-seeking and interview. [Our group] members who’ve already got the visa provided particularly useful advice.
In the same WeChat group with Amy, Shujie also mentioned that the group helped her collect comprehensive information about job opportunities and immigration policies across different parts of Australia:
I prefer to go to Sydney or Melbourne as there are more opportunities, but I don’t know much about working and living in those places. Luckily, we have [group] members situating in different parts of Australia, they are always very generous in answering our questions and giving us helpful guidance.
Contrary to the local-contact-based WeChat groups that focus on local survival information, the Rela groups interviewees formed with their transnational Rela networks facilitated social capital bridging primarily with their homelands. For example, Zeyin noted in her interview that she was not sure she should go back to China or stay in Australia after her graduation and thus paid attention to job opportunities in both of these countries. Majoring in media studies, Zeyin wanted to find a job in public relations, but it was hard for her to find a satisfying internship in Australia:
One day I just asked about this [seeking internship] in our [Rela WeChat] group. I didn’t expect that they were so enthusiastic that they not only recommend job-seeking platforms to me but also sent me relevant recruitment posts they have found from Weibo and WeChat.
Zeyin eventually received a job offer from the company a Rela group member recommended to her.
Attaining a sense of belonging
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‘Gui shu gan’ [sense of belonging] was consistently mentioned by Chinese queer women in this study while talking about their practices for using lesbian social and dating apps for connection building with queer women, especially Chinese queer women, in the diasporic context. Specifically, they noted how sticking to Chinese queer women and Chinese social media platforms — including participating in Rela- based activities and maintaining connections with Chinese queer women in the transnational and/or local contexts — helped them gain a strong sense of belonging while living in Australia.
Prior research has suggested that sustaining ties with social networks in the homeland, such as family and friends, offers diasporas emotional support and virtual companionship as they adjust to new and unfamiliar surroundings in the host society (Cemalcilar, Falbo, & Stapleton, 2005; Lim & Pham, 2016; Pang, 2018). Chinese queer women’s connection-maintenance practices with the transnational Rela networks in this study also demonstrated that the close ties sustained with their home networks empowered them with a greater sense of belonging and security while living in Australia. Before moving to Australia, most interviewees had lived in China for over 20 years and thus regard China as their first home. Although some of these women later migrated to Australia, gained permanent residency and lived here for some years, it was still hard for them to feel a strong sense of belonging by simply living in the country. For example, Lu’s nationality had become Australian officially. Nonetheless, she noted that she still thinks of herself as Chinese: ‘For me, China is always my home where I belong, while Australia is only a place where I live and work’. In Lu’s eyes, the app Rela and the Rela groups she joined on WeChat functioned as ‘organisations’ for staying connected with her homeland, mainland China, and obtaining companionship and a sense of belonging. Jing (23, student) expressed her similar perspective on the sense of belonging she gained from staying with other Chinese queer women in the Rela group. Jing had lived in Australia for over nine months, but at the time of her interview, she only had a small social network, and none of the friends in her network was also queer or knew she identified as such. Feeling like she was ‘living as a guest’ in Australia, Jing joined a few WeChat groups, including a Chinese international student group, a migration consultation group and a Rela group, trying to expand her social network and mitigate the sense of isolation. Among these
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WeChat groups, Jing perceived the Rela group as the one to which she was most emotionally attached. Recounting joining the Rela group ‘We’re together’, Jing said:
I felt that I’d finally found an organisation where I belong to after joining ‘We’re together’ for a while. Although I seldom posted anything, I do enjoy the feeling of staying together with my Rela friends. Especially, I feel very secure as I know I can speak about any of my concerns in the group, and other people will help me. It’s just as the name [of the group] shows, we are together.
Pang (2018) and Koreshkova (2018) focused on Chinese migrants’ use of WeChat for developing connections in the host countries of Germany and Russia, respectively. Both affirmed that using WeChat to maintain connections with other Chinese migrants played pivotal roles in facilitating new Chinese migrants’ adaptation and sense of belonging to the host society. In this regard, my research findings support prior research, showing the significant role played by WeChat in Chinese diasporas’ everyday lives in their host countries. For example, interviewees perceived the Rela WeChat groups they joined with other Chinese queer women in Australia as ‘home’, a zone of comfort that helped them gain a sense of belonging in Australia. Compared to other chat groups they had joined, interviewees found the atmosphere in these WeChat groups especially warm, and the bonding between group members more solid. For example, after encountering some Rela users living nearby in Melbourne by searching nearby users on the app, Su initially established person-to-person relationships with several of them. She then realised that forming a group might be a better way to build a closer connection with all of them. Hence, Su posted in her Rela Moments that she wanted to create a WeChat group to connect nearby users and invited users interested in joining the group to add her WeChat account. Unexpectedly, Su received 31 messages within just four hours from users who wanted to join the WeChat group:
Some said they saw my post through Rela, but they are not living nearby so they asked me whether they could join [the WeChat group]. I said ‘of course!’ I’m not surprised that I got so many messages, as I know most of us are keen to get connected with others, and we just need someone to take the lead. But I was indeed surprised that I got their replies within such short period of time.
Su established the WeChat group with 32 members (including herself). At the time of her interview for this study, the number of group members had increased to 94.
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‘We share everything that we think is useful and interesting in the group chat’, Su said. As some group members lived close to each other, they often met and went on outings together: ‘It’s like a small social club. We talked a lot and did a lot of things together.’ Sue said that because of the WeChat group, she had managed to make many friends in Melbourne and built a very close network. Being with her group members gave Su a feeling of being at home, accompanied by friends and engaging in familiar discussions, as if she had never left China.
4.4.2 Exclusion and conflict
While interacting with queer women from various ethnic, racial and cultural groups in Australia, Chinese queer women in this study had also encountered difficulties borne out of deep cultural differences and language barriers. The culture clashes and conflicts they experienced often left them feeling excluded and discriminated against, which reduced their desire to interact with queer women from diverse ethnocultural backgrounds in Australia.
The cultural conflicts that the participants reported were mostly related to the different social and cultural values they and their dating app contacts have demonstrated towards sex and intimacy issues, such as (casual) sex, long/short-term relationships and monogamy versus open marriage. For example, Amy (25, student) noted that while she had not posted any of her own opinions in the WhatsApp group she joined, she saw other group members having ‘fierce disputes’ caused by different opinions:
I remember someone initiated the topic about ‘Why Women Kill’ [an American TV drama], and then the discussion turned to the open marriage between Taylor, Jade and Eli [characters in a drama]. Some local girls began to say something like ‘Wow, open relationship is so cool ... should have a try’. Then a Chinese girl said she thought the open relationship could cause many problems. Another Chinese girl also said it’s betrayed to true love. Then they began to argue, and finally, it became a personal attack on Chinese ethnicity and cultures. Those local girls satirised our [Chinese] culture[s] and our people, saying we are conservative and left behind by using very ironic words.
Despite only being an onlooker of the group discussion, Amy felt uncomfortable and angry with the ‘unfriendly words’ said about Chinese people by local members. According to Amy, this was not her first time witnessing such conflict in the
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WhatsApp group. Consequently, these perceived ‘negative’ experiences heightened Amy’s reluctance to connect with local queer women, reinforcing her idea that ‘a big difference’ regarding sex and relationships exists between Chinese and Australian cultures. ‘You couldn’t solve it [culture clash] and you would be hurt by it. So the best way is to stay away from them [local queer women]’, she said.
Several other interviewees also mentioned that the experience of using HER had made them feel afraid of being asked if they would like to meet. For example, Jing said she was asked by different users on HER to meet numerous times, but she never said yes:
Once a girl asked me why you don’t want to [meet]. I said I’m not used to meeting someone so quickly without getting familiar. And then the girl said, ‘Because you’re Chinese?’ I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ Then she said, ‘Because many Chinese people are like you … don’t want to meet people’. I was like … what?
Jing said she was confused with that user’s words, so she asked her to explain. The user refused to explain and instead laughed at her with what Jing perceived as ‘very stereotyped words’. Like Amy, Jing also said during her interview that different opinions about sex could easily lead to culture clashes: ‘I found, from some users’ perspectives, having sex is just for fun. We don’t need to be familiar before meeting or having sex. But I think our [Chinese] culture is different. We are not that casual.’ Lina discussed similar experiences that made her feel uncomfortable using HER for seeking encounters:
On Rela, people seldom ask you whether you want to have sex or join a threesome after only talking for a few sentences. I think this is the difference between us [Chinese people] and them [non-Chinese people]. It’s like our personalities are different. They [non-Chinese people] are too direct and open, but we [Chinese people] are kind of implicit.
Both Jing’s and Lina’s words about cultural difference also indicated their objection to sex-oriented conversations in the context of lesbian social apps, echoing the point illustrated earlier in this chapter. To avoid the embarrassed and uncomfortable feelings caused by these encounters, Lina said now she only liked other Chinese users on HER. She found she had more things in common with Chinese queer women and did not experience culture clash problems. The kinds of uncomfortable
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encounters on WhatsApp and HER discussed here by Amy, Jing and Lina were found to be quite common in interviewees’ dating app experiences. This has shaped their deeply negative perceptions about the prospect of developing intimate relations with non-Chinese queer women and thus reduced their motivation to interact with these communities.
Komito and Bates (2009) argued that the digital connections developed with homelands could hinder migrants’ integration into local life in the host society. Similarly, Pang (2018) posited that the close ties maintained within diasporic groups with the same ethnocultural background could impede their participation in local society. With the satisfaction of gaining a sense of belonging and companionship from the close ties maintained with the Chinese Rela communities in the transnational context and the Chinese queer women’s communities in Australia (through both Rela and WeChat), Chinese queer women in this study lacked motivations for reaching out and engaging with non-Chinese queer women’s communities in Australia. As Amy explained:
I enjoy the network that I’ve sustained with our members [from Chinese queer women’s Rela WeChat group]. I don’t want to make extra efforts to integrate into them [the WhatsApp group]. I feel easy and relaxed to connect with my people.
Lu also suggested her desire for company was ‘fully satisfied’ by the Rela groups she joined, leaving her feeling less motivated to establish new social networks with non-Chinese queer women in Australia. Similarly, while comparing the process of interacting with Chinese and non-Chinese queer women, Cathy described the Chinese queer women’s network as a ‘comfort zone’, which was ‘so comfortable’ that she did not want to step out of it:
We talked about this in our [Chinese queer women’s WeChat] group. I can see that most of us prefer to stay with our people. It’s a very natural thing, as we don’t have any barriers in communication and understanding each other’s language and culture.
4.5 CONCLUSION
This chapter has highlighted that networking and building connections with queer women’s communities, particularly Chinese queer women’s communities, has
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become a key motivation and a significant part of Chinese queer women’s practices for using Rela and HER in Australia. However, these women’s connection-building practices mainly revolved around Rela, with comparatively superficial levels of participation occurring on HER. Specifically, Rela was perceived as a virtual ‘home’ by Chinese queer women to seek companionship, emotional support and a sense of belonging while living in Australia. Simultaneously, WeChat has functioned as a crucial tool for Chinese queer women to develop and maintain their queer social networks. While Rela was mostly used for encounters and initiating contacts, WeChat was more likely to be used for sustaining and deepening relationships. Thus, interviewees’ active and dependent use of Rela in tandem with WeChat for mobile lesbian dating and socialising highlighted the crucial role of Chinese-language social media in their everyday use of technology. Their familiarity with the Chinese language and cultures embedded within Chinese social media and the long-term habit of using these Chinese platforms made it easier for Chinese women in this study to participate in digital intimacy practices, particularly in the diasporic context. Comparatively, a lack of familiarity with Western social apps and their embedded cultural elements hindered interviewees from developing strong emotional attachments to these apps, leading them to engage only superficially in queer networks formed through HER, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
Chinese queer women interviewed for this study developed transnational connections with the Rela community through engaging with Rela’s diverse features and activities such as live streaming and topic discussion and Rela WeChat groups, and developed local networks with queer women in Australia through Rela’s and HER’s People Nearby features and by joining group chats formed by queer women. However, looking for encounters among nearby users on HER mostly harmed interviewees’ local network building and intimacy practices beyond Chinese queer women’s communities. The comparatively sexualised conversations that interviewees had observed and encountered with other users on HER were perceived as unsuited to Chinese queer women’s more tentative and implicit approaches to developing intimate relationships (e.g., the aimei practices).
Chinese queer women in this study showed strong preferences for networking with their compatriots. They used Rela to maintain strong ties with the transnational Chinese queer women’s communities and niche groups of Chinese queer women in
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the Australian host society. They had only developed relatively weak ties and loose contact networks with queer women from non-Chinese ethnic, racial and cultural groups. However, the Chinese-centric queer networks developed by Chinese queer women in this study is remarkably different from those discussed in existing research. Yu and Blain (2019) and Dhoest (2016a) found that gay male diasporic groups maintained an internationally oriented network with their queer friends from diverse ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds. This suggests potential differences between gay male and queer female diasporas’ digital connection building patterns in the transnational context.
The close connections sustained within transnational and local communities of Chinese queer women greatly increased interviewees’ satisfaction with living in Australia. It helped enrich their everyday life, bridge social capital, alleviate loneliness and boredom and, ultimately, find some sense of belonging in Australia. Although maintaining these networks (e.g., keeping updated with the group chat information) also disturbed Chinese queer women’s life patterns (e.g., through lack of sleep), they saw this effort as a ‘sweet burden’, as these sacrifices ultimately brought them overwhelming gratification and a strong sense of digital intimacy. These burdens were also considered far more acceptable in the cross-cultural context of Australia, where interviewees felt culture clashes were frequent and inevitable when they attempted building relationships with queer women from non-Chinese ethnic, racial and cultural groups. The much easier practices for keeping close ties with Chinese queer women and the negative experiences of feeling excluded during interactions with non-Chinese queer women had significantly reduced interviewees’ motivation to develop a globally oriented queer social network in Australia.
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Chapter 5: Challenged Intimacy: Concerns, Prejudice and Tensions
5.1 INTRODUCTION
Dating apps bring users plenty of joy but also cause some concern regarding privacy and safety (Albury & Byron, 2016; Lutz & Ranzini, 2017), racial discrimination (Callander et al., 2016; B. Carlson, 2020, sexually risky behaviour (Sawyer, Smith, & Benotsch, 2018), sexual abuse (Choi et al., 2018) and cyberbullying (Lauckner et al., 2019). However, existing studies have primarily concentrated on heterosexual and gay male user groups’ use of dating apps while overlooking queer women’s dating app practices. Therefore, this chapter further explores the challenges a group of Chinese queer women in Australia have encountered in using lesbian social and dating apps such as Rela and HER, and the diverse strategies they developed to cope with these risks and tensions in various circumstances.
As Chapter 4 suggested, using Rela and HER has largely fulfilled and enriched the diasporic lives of Chinese queer women in this study through positive outcomes and by bringing them plenty of delights. For example, they have formed networks and built connections with Chinese queer women’s communities in home societies and in Australia, which helped them stay current with the news and information from home, maintain emotional attachment to home societies, adapt to local lives and cultures in Australia, and attain a sense of belonging and safety. However, this chapter interrogates the flip side of these women’s experiences using Rela and HER in this context and their negative experiences of the digital dating and social process. When I asked the interviewees what they thought of these disturbing experiences and how they had affected their diasporic lives, they expressed varying attitudes. Although interviewees mostly described disruptions as unwanted experiences and indicated a dislike for them, they also stressed their awareness of the joy gained from using dating apps being inevitably accompanied by concerns and sufferings. For example, Lu described the situation as the balance of ‘happiness and pain’. Accordingly, despite the frustration, upset and irritation caused by using Rela and HER, most of the
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interviewees were well accustomed to these disruptions and had found ways to manage them.
The following sections analyse interviewees’ experiences of various concerns that arose through their use of Rela and HER, starting with privacy and safety concerns. Then, I examine the racial prejudice and discrimination interviewees had experienced, focusing on subtle and ambiguous racialised encounters, how they interpreted these experiences, and how these race-related encounters affect their own discriminatory practices towards queer women from non-Chinese racial and ethnic groups. Next, I explore how ‘political discussions’ intersected with interviewees’ experiences of digital intimacy, causing them tension and conflict with other users on Rela and HER. Finally, I summarise the types of strategies interviewees developed to tackle these challenges and disruptions and prevent them from arising in the first place in the practices around using Rela and HER.
Overall, this chapter demonstrates how the challenges interviewees encountered in their use of Rela and HER worked together with the positive experiences (as per Chapter 4) to shape their colourful and diverse digital intimacy practices. Various unwanted and unexpected experiences challenged interviewees’ love, passion and loyalty for Rela and HER, which sometimes led to reduced trust and even disconnection from these apps. However, interviewees’ active efforts to cope with these challenges also created opportunities for them to reflect upon and transform their lesbian social and dating practices, thus highlighting the very dynamic nature of their digital intimacy practices.
5.2 PRIVACY AND SAFETY CONCERNS
Recently reported high-profile data breach cases, such as those on Facebook (Carrie, 2018), Tinder (Demolder, 2020), WeChat (Huang & Soo, 2019), Momo (Lee, 2018) and Rela (Whittaker, 2019) have made the privacy risks of social and dating apps more salient. Scholars have suggested that most users are unaware and/or not concerned with the privacy risks inherent in their everyday use of mobile social apps (Almuhimedi et al., 2015; Karanja, Engels, Zerouali, & Francisco, 2018). However, I found that most Chinese queer women interviewed for this study were aware of the privacy and safety risks associated with their use of Rela and HER and demonstrated multidimensional apprehensions about their digital intimacy practices in this regard.
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While studying Facebook users’ privacy concerns, Raynes-Goldie (2010) proposed two concepts, ‘social privacy’ and ‘institutional privacy’. Social privacy denotes privacy violations conducted by users, such as being harassed with unwanted messages from individual users. Institutional privacy refers to privacy invasions conducted by institutions, such as being surveilled by social media platforms and third- party companies (Raynes-Goldie, 2010). These two concepts have been applied to study social and dating platforms such as Facebook (Young & Quan-Haase, 2013) and Tinder (Lutz & Ranzini, 2017). Through analysing interviewees’ experiences in this study, I found that their privacy and safety concerns around using Rela and HER mainly involved other users (i.e., their social and romantic contacts on the apps), the apps themselves, and the Chinese government. Therefore, based on Raynes-Goldie’s (2010) differentiation, I have classified interviewees’ privacy and safety concerns into the two categories of ‘social’ and ‘institutional’ concerns, which are detailed below.
5.2.1 Social concerns: Misrepresentation, identification and harassment
Interviewees’ social privacy concerns associated with their lesbian dating app practices involved misrepresentation, identification and harassment by their dating app contacts. Users misrepresenting personal information was identified as a top concern by Chinese queer women in this study. As Amanda noted, ‘It’s more common to see the lies than the truth in people’s profiles [on dating apps]’. Indeed, lying in one’s profile dates back to the early online dating era. For example, Toma, Hancock and Ellison (2008) found that approximately 80% of heterosexual dating website users wrote content in their profiles contradictory to their characteristics. Gibbs, Ellison and Lai (2010) also identified lying in dating profiles as a significant concern that can trigger safety risks in online dating. While studying dating and social apps, Corriero and Tong (2016) and Griffin et al. (2018) affirmed that misrepresentation of identities was a frequently reported concern by users. Regarding their experience of users lying about their profiles and in personal chats on Rela and HER, most interviewees noted this to be a concern over safety and privacy, but they demonstrated diverse attitudes to this topic. For instance, some interviewees adamantly asserted that any type of lying about one’s age, weight, height, occupation, salary and profile photo constitutes cheating and deception. Specifically, they perceived this behaviour as damaging trust in an interpersonal relationship, which also poses safety risks. For example, May noted, ‘Many people said that lying about age and occupation is not a big deal, but I think it’s
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very dangerous. If someone lies to you about small things, then she can also tell some big lies.’ Jiang also accentuated the underlying risk of lying in the context of mobile dating apps and linked it to her feeling of insecurity. She explained:
These liars made me feel quite unsafe when talking about some very personal things, not mention to form a close relationship. Today they cheat you with their fake photos and occupation [information], then tomorrow they can cheat you on love and relationships.
Lina expressed a similar sentiment:
I found that some people lied about their relationship status on Rela … I had met people who wrote ‘single’ in their profiles, but then I found out that they were actually involved in dating relationships, and not only one [relationship]. It’s so absurd! As I believed they are single, I shared my personal and secret things with them … I feel like now I couldn’t believe anyone on these [dating] apps, and I always have this kind of suspect that they’re all somewhat lying.
Lina’s experience echoes Lauckner et al.’s (2019) finding that observing others’ deceptive practices on dating apps can result in users’ reduced trust towards potential dates, mobile dating and the apps more generally. Similar to Lina, other participants also mentioned that they had disclosed some private information to their dating app contacts before realising that these users were lying or cheating. It thus made them feel regretful and worried as they were afraid that their information might be improperly exploited. The participants’ privacy concern over their personal information being inappropriately disclosed due to other users’ misrepresentation and the consequences it may incur was thus highlighted in their digital dating practices.
However, other interviewees perceived small lies motivated by the desire to beautify or glorify themselves in the hope of attracting more attention from other users as harmless, understandable and acceptable. For instance, Anne (32, nurse) stated, ‘I thought these lies [lying about age and weight] are small lies that wouldn’t cause real damage to our relationship, so I’m OK with it.’ Lu showed a similar attitude, viewing lying about one’s personal information such as profile photo, age and occupation as only aiming to beautify themselves but not harm others. Nevertheless, although these interviewees perceived misrepresenting one’s profile as harmless, they admitted that being cheated by other users triggered their discomfort and frustration. As Cathy (24, student) noted, ‘Whenever I accidentally found out that I was cheated by someone [on
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dating apps], I always felt uncomfortable and got upset.’ Agreeing with Cathy on the ‘uncomfortable’ feeling caused by dishonest behaviour, May also spoke of her worries towards safety:
If I found someone kept lying to me, I would be more suspicious about her real intention. I mean maybe she tried to set a trap for me, and I’m afraid that I would get into some troubles and dangers.
These concerns about discomfort and safety caused by other users’ misrepresentations, as described by Cathy and May, correspond to Lauckner et al.’s (2019) suggestion that experiencing deception on dating apps can lead to negative emotions such as fear and anger.
Being identified by other users was another key concern cited by interviewees. Similar to misrepresentation, identification can also trigger negative emotions such as discomfort, shame, embarrassment, insecurity and apprehensions about social judgement caused by an unspoken queer identity, or what is sometimes referred to as ‘being outed’ (Birnholtz, Fitzpatrick, Handel, & Brubaker, 2014; Blackwell et al., 2015; Corriero & Tong, 2016). While recalling her experience of being recognised by her classmates on Rela, Zeyin described it as ‘the most embarrassing and shameful moment’ in her life:
I felt so embarrassed and ashamed when they [the two girls in Zeyin’s language class who were also users of Rela] asked me whether I was also on Rela, as I didn’t tell them about my identity and I don’t have any plan to let them know about this.
Unlike Zeyin, Jing had not been recognised by others on Rela or HER. However, she said that from the first day of using Rela, she had been constantly concerned with being identified by acquaintances. ‘I always worry about this. What if they recognised me on the apps [Rela and HER], especially my friends who don’t know I’m queer. It must be very embarrassing’, Jing said.
In Zeyin and Jing’s cases, their concerns of being identified by acquaintances on lesbian social and dating apps stemmed from the worry of being found out about their undisclosed sexual identities or ‘being outed’, as prior research has suggested (Birnholtz et al., 2014; Blackwell et al., 2015; Corriero & Tong, 2016). For example, while studying Grindr users’ concerns, Corriero and Tong (2016) noted how ‘being outed’ can trigger users’ feelings of being stigmatised, such as through ‘slut-shaming’
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due to Grindr being largely perceived as a vehicle for engaging in casual sex and hook- ups. However, I found that rather than being apprehensive about the social stigma regarding using lesbian dating apps specifically, interviewees were mostly concerned about their sexual identities being exposed, thereby triggering social judgement. Here, ‘social judgement’ refers to what interviewees described as the discussions and gossip happening behind their backs among acquaintances. For example, Zeyin frequently spoke of her misgivings about the ‘gossips’, which she had consistently suspected and feared that may happen to her due to being identified by her classmates:
I suspected that they [the two girls who identified Zeyin on Rela] might have already told other classmates [about my sexual identity]. I’m afraid that they would gossip about me. It always made me feel embarrassed and irritated whenever I thought of this.
The apprehension and fear regarding their same-sex identities being exposed or disclosed expressed by participants, such as Jing and Zeyin, suggested that they have been somewhat accustomed to hiding their identities because this approach provided them with a sense of security while living in Chinese society, which remains highly heteronormative and relatively conservative towards LGBTQI cultures. Even though Chinese queer women in this study physically left their home environments and moved to Australia, which offers a more inclusive and open sociocultural environment regarding gender and sexual diversity, the participants still held onto their original concerns regarding identity disclosure. The unchanged mindset thus implied that the Chinese social and cultural environments and norms tended to generate long-lasting impacts on these Chinese queer women’s attitudes to sexuality, digital dating and social practices.
Harassment in varying forms, such as unsolicited advertisements, unwanted (e.g., sexual, erotic and threatening) messages, and digital and physical stalking by other users on Rela and HER, was also reported as interviewees’ primary privacy and safety concern. Being harassed with unsolicited advertisements sent by other users, which were described as ‘flagrant junk ads’, was identified as a form of harassment that specifically existed on Rela. For example, Anne described her experience of being consistently forwarded the ‘junk ads’:
Unlike people on other dating apps who want to promote their products would hide their intentions and pretend to flirt with you first and then sell you their
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products, people on Rela are quite lazy. I met a few people who directly began their promotion by asking me ‘Hey mei nv [beautiful girl], are you interested in buying what what…? Have a look at this [their product] and my store’, and then they just sent me the link of their products without my permission.
Despite showing dissatisfaction towards ‘junk ads’ on Rela and labelling commercial approaches ‘disturbing’ experiences, most interviewees perceived these practices as harmless and posing no or limited threat to their own dating practices.
However, interviewees showed less tolerance and acceptance towards sexual messages, dirty jokes and erotic pictures/videos, including naked or uncovered bodies and body parts that they received mainly from HER contacts. These unwanted experiences also gave rise to interviewees’ stereotypes and biases towards HER and its user groups (e.g., ‘Users on HER are abnormal as they are only into your nude body’). This led to their reluctance to use the app and reduced interactions with other users on HER. For instance, both Jiang and Jing had received erotic text messages and pictures from users on HER and described it as ‘disrespectful’. As Jiang explained, ‘I had asked them to stop sending any of those kinds of pictures to me. But they just ignored my words… This is very disrespectful and I felt quite offended.’ Examining gay men’s use of dating apps, Lauckner et al. (2019) identified ‘sexual coercion’ as being asked to perform unwanted sexual acts. My interviewees also reported experiences of sexual coercion as a type of harassment occasionally encountered on HER with the receipt of what they deemed ‘improper’ requests from their dating app contacts, such as being asked to take off their clothes and send nude pictures. Jing mentioned that several users on HER had both implicitly and directly asked to see her ‘uncovered top’, which instantly induced discomfort and irritation, and eventually led to her leaving HER:
They sent me their nude pictures without my permission, which had already made me feel very strange and angry. And then they indicated that they wanted to see my [naked] pictures.… Once a girl even pressured me to answer her video call with the request of taking off my clothes to show my body to her. It’s so ridiculous! I feel I don’t have the mood to use HER anymore, and I even don’t want to see this app on my mobile phone, so after that I immediately uninstalled it.
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The coercion Jing experienced with being pressured to send nude pictures supports Lauckner et al.’s (2019) finding that gay men have been sexually harassed and coerced to perform sexual acts on dating apps. Also, the attitudes interviewees demonstrated towards the women who sent them nude pictures, such as objection and rejection, also cohere with Comunello et al.’s (2020) findings that their lesbian participants reported disliking profiles of women who presented themselves in an explicit way (e.g., exposing their bodies) on dating apps such as Bumble. Prior studies have suggested that primarily heterosexual women and gay men experience sexually harassing behaviours from male contacts in the context of dating apps (Comunello et al., 2020; Gillett, 2019; Lauckner et al., 2019). However, my findings indicate that queer women are equally committing and/or disturbed by sexual harassment in the context of lesbian social and dating apps.
Beyond harassment, the most problematic concerns interviewees raised about their use of dating apps was the potential for stalking — and the combination of harassment and stalking — which caused them to feel panic and terror. Interviewees’ fears were further intensified by their lack of familiarity with the environment, culture and people in the Australian host society, coupled with language barriers. For example, Amanda compared her experiences of being harassed and stalked while in China and Australia, respectively, and acknowledged that the stalking encounters in Australia made her much more frightened:
I had received numerous harassing messages from a user on Momo [a Chinese social/dating app] when I was in Huadu [her hometown in China], and he [a male user on Momo] even threatened me that he knew where I live and would follow me all the time. … I was worried but I didn’t concern that much because at least I know if I encounter the risk, whom I can call, how to ask for help, where to find the police, and where I can run if he got me stuck somewhere.… But here [in Australia] when I got those [threatening] messages [from a user on HER], I feel like I was so helpless as I know nothing, and I was so unfamiliar with everything [here]. To be honest, I even have no idea what I could do if I got into some troubles.
Because of deep concerns about her safety in the unfamiliar host environment in Australia, Amanda instantly reported the user to HER and blocked her on the app after receiving the threatening messages:
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I refused to have the [face-to-face] meeting because I was kind of worried. But it seemed like she got irritated because of my rejection so she said something like, ‘Hey don’t forget I know how you look like. It won’t be hard if I want to find you. I’ll look for you from now on, and I’ll knock your door.’
Several other interviewees, including Cathy, Jing and Xinran also mentioned their experiences receiving threatening messages from users on Rela and HER who intimidated the interviewees by indicating they would be searched for and stalked. Interviewees consistently highlighted living in Australia as a crucial aspect of their concern about not being able to handle the safety risks of being stalked. This suggests that living in the host country played a role in exacerbating these women’s social privacy and safety concerns around harassment and stalking.
Notably, the location-based feature of dating apps — which has been identified as an important trigger of users’ privacy and safety concerns around being located, tracked and stalked while using these apps by prior research (Hoang, Asano, & Yoshikawa, 2017; Farnden, Martini, & Choo, 2015; Lutz & Ranzini, 2017) — did not feature in my interviewees’ concerns about harassment and stalking. Indeed, most interviewees did not ascribe their concerns about being stalked to the location-based design of Rela and HER. Instead, they highlighted the merits of the location-based function, such as the convenience of easily finding users nearby, and indicated that harassers and stalkers should be responsible for their behaviours despite location-based app designs. This aligns with Birnholtz et al.’s (2014) finding that disclosure of users’ location information did not appear to concern gay dating app users.
5.2.2 Institutional concerns: Surveillance and data tracking
Chinese queer women’s institutional privacy and safety concerns — as reported in this study — primarily centred on the apps themselves (i.e., Rela and HER), the Chinese government, and third parties such as data analysis companies, and involved surveillance and censorship, data tracking and analysis, and information leaking and trading.
As discussed in Chapter 3, ubiquitous surveillance and censorship has become a prominent feature of Rela’s interface design and platform governance. However, its existence triggered interviewees’ significant concerns over their privacy and safety while engaging in activities on Rela. As Lu stated, the warnings about prohibited topics
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in every live streaming room on Rela always reminded her of what Rela forbids, and thus made her feel uncomfortable and unfree while using the app. However, unlike Lu, who felt uncomfortable seeing the reminders, most interviewees indicated they had simply grown accustomed to such warnings. This is because, in the Chinese social media ecology, using warnings to remind users to pay attention to their words is not unique to Rela: the vast majority of Chinese social media apps/platforms function in this way as a response to Chinese online censorship policies. For example, Amy noted, ‘It’s OK for me as I’ve been so used to it [warning texts on Rela]. You can easily see the same warnings on every Chinese app.’ Su agreed, ‘Those [warning] words wouldn’t bother me too much. I think it’s pretty normal as every [Chinese] app has something like this.’ Although interviewees were mostly unbothered by warnings existing on Rela per se, they were indeed bothered by the strict and seemingly ubiquitous censorship implemented on Rela, which restricted their use of the app in ways that made them feel ‘unfree’ and ‘anxious’. For example, Su described her anxiety triggered by Rela’s stringent censorship policy:
I’ve seen quite a few people, including both ordinary users and live streamers, being suspended [by Rela] for varying reasons.… I don’t know that Rela forbids us from talking about smoking. I remember one day a streamer was showing us her electronic cigarettes, and suddenly Rela wang jing [Internet police] came into our [streaming] room and shut the streaming off because the streamer was reported by a viewer. After that, I’ve encountered a few times that though some streamers and viewers saying something which did not seem to be problematic, they were still reported by other viewers and their live streams were thus suspended. It made me feel kind of scared that I even don’t want to say anything while watching live streams.
Several other interviewees also expressed their fear of speaking about something violating Rela’s rules, which might lead to their accounts being suspended by the app. Notably, the concerns behind the anxieties interviewees like Su reported were actually fears that Rela would put them on a ‘blacklist’ and report them to the Chinese government. As Su explained:
I don’t worry about Rela’s suspension. What I really worried is what if Rela puts this [users’ censored acts] on record and submits it to the [Chinese] government. If it [the Chinese government] knows my identity, I’m worried
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that they will take some actions, like putting me on a blacklist, or hindering me from applying for jobs in the government and state-owned enterprises.
Lina expressed similar concerns regarding the Chinese government’s surveillance and potential consequences for her future development in China:
If Rela shares its data with the government, then it means the government knows everything about us, like knowing we’re lesbians, what we’ve said, and what we’ve done on Rela. I’m kind of worried if I come back to China after my graduation, I will be in danger. I mean my job, promotions and future life.
In this sense, Su and Lina’s concerns about using Rela not only speak to the surveillance conducted by Rela and the Chinese government generally. They are also associated with the potential consequences of surveillance (e.g., the potential risk of their sexual identities being revealed) coupled with the Chinese government’s unsupportive and repressive attitudes towards LGBTQI communities (Bao, 2018; Burger, 2012; Cheng, 2018).
In the walkthrough analysis of Rela’s censorship and surveillance in Chapter 3, I discussed the apparent contradiction between the app’s claimed strict censorship policy and its practical, more relaxed governance approaches — what I described as ‘edge ball’ practices. Notably, this paradox was echoed by interviewees’ experiences of using Rela. For example, although Rela (2020b) states in its Community Guidelines that the word ‘yue pao’ (hook-up) is not allowed to appear on the platform, several interviewees noted often seeing live streamers and viewers mention ‘yue pao’ in live shows, topic discussions and user posts in their Rela Moments. However, others asserted that Rela upholds the stringent censorship policies it promotes, based on their own experiences of using the app (e.g., posts being deleted or accounts being suspended). This discrepancy in interviewees’ viewpoints and experiences further demonstrates the inherent inconsistency of Rela’s censorship approaches.
Despite interviewees expressing concerns over Rela’s censorship, two interviewees — Amanda and Cathy — also spoke of the merits of such surveillance, arguing, for example, that it creates a safer environment within Rela for socialising and dating. Specifically, Amanda compared her experiences of using Rela and HER, and stressed that Rela empowered her by giving her a better sense of security because of the app’s stringent prohibitions on violence and pornography:
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To be honest, I feel much safer on Rela [than HER] perhaps because of its strict bans. I feel like Rela tries to protect us [users]. I’ve seen several streamers talking about violent and pornographic stuff, which might mislead users about wrongdoings, were punished [by Rela] and their accounts were suspended. But I feel on HER everything and everybody is pretty free, or maybe too free. I don’t feel very safe while using HER as there are a lot of erotic stuff.
Interviewees also expressed their concerns about privacy and safety on Rela and HER over the apps’ engagements in data tracking, analysing, leaking and information trading between the apps and third parties. Lighter concerns were proposed over data tracking and analysis by Rela and HER, while greater apprehensions were expressed towards information leaking and trading. However, interviewees’ most common attitude while speaking of their institutional concerns about Rela and HER was that they ‘cannot do anything but accept the fact’.
While studying Tinder users’ privacy concerns, Lutz and Ranzini (2017, p. 10) identified ‘Tinder tracking and analysing personal data’ as a prominent institutional concern. Similarly, my interviewees also commonly spoke about their worries regarding Rela’s and HER’s data tracking and analysis. Nonetheless, most of them considered it acceptable and understandable, and some interviewees even deemed it advantageous in the context of big data and the evolution of digital media. For example, Anne took a positive view on data tracking behaviour and situated it in the larger environment of dating apps’ development:
I wouldn’t say I’m not worried at all, but it seems like this data analysis] is a prevailing trend that every app or company is doing.… It’s good for their improvements like their user service, so I can accept my data to be analysed.
Amelia also said that although she felt ‘a bit creepy’ while thinking of her information being analysed, she still thought there were many advantages. ‘I enjoy the new function [of Rela], World Roaming, and I don’t think the user map can be made without tracking users’ location [data]. As it doesn’t cause any harm to us, I’m perfectly OK with it’, she explained.
Interviewees’ reported concerns over user information leakage and trade centred around both unintentional data leaks caused by technical weaknesses and the intentional leaks and trade of user data, such as selling data to other companies for
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commercial purposes. Lutz and Ranzini (2017, p. 10) revealed that Tinder users’ most pronounced institutional privacy concern was ‘Tinder selling personal data to third parties’. Likewise, Chinese queer women in this study also reported their concerns regarding data trading between Rela/HER and other companies. At the time of the interviews, their concerns had been exacerbated by the recent news of several social and dating apps’ experiencing data leakage, including Rela, Tinder, Momo and Facebook. However, most interviewees stated they cannot do anything about the data leakage but accept it. As Lu expressed:
It seems like this [user data leakage] has become a common issue these days. I know both Rela and Tinder were reported to expose their user information because of what they claimed as technical issues. But except for worries, I don’t know what we, as users, can do about this.
Cathy agreed: ‘Except for wishing the apps put more efforts to protect our data, I have no idea what we can do’. Lu and Cathy’s words suggest that while interviewees were aware of the potential risks of dating apps’ data leaks and concerned with this issue, they failed to develop any coping tactics and instead effectively chose to accept the problem as inevitable.
Compared to other social privacy and safety violations, interviewees expressed the greatest concerns over, and active responses to, being harassed by other users. This included receiving unsolicited advertisements and unwanted (e.g., sexual, erotic and threatening) messages and being stalked virtually and physically. However, among institutional privacy/safety concerns, being surveilled by Rela and the Chinese government was the most pronounced concern. While several studies have uncovered that social media users are more concerned with social privacy (Raynes-Goldie, 2010; Quinn & Epstein, 2018; Young & Quan-Haase, 2013), Lutz and Ranzini (2017) suggested that Tinder users were more concerned about institutional privacy. However, my study found that interviewees’ concerns around privacy and safety differed when it came to their practices for using different apps. For example, interviewees showed more institutional concerns (e.g., surveillance and censorship) over their use of Rela, while they were more likely to be concerned with social privacy threats — especially harassment — when it came to their practices around HER. These privacy and safety concerns resulted in interviewees’ reduced trust towards users on Rela and HER and the apps themselves, exacerbating their reluctance to use these apps.
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5.3 SUBTLE AND AMBIGUOUS RACIAL PREJUDICE
A growing body of research has interrogated the racial discrimination users experience in their use of dating apps (Callander et al., 2016; B. Carlson, 2020; Shield, 2017, 2018a, 2018b). However, these studies have exclusively examined user practices for Tinder and Grindr while overlooking lesbian dating apps and their user groups’ associated practices. This section explores the race-based biases and prejudices experienced by Chinese queer women in this study around their use of Rela and HER in Australia. I argue here that this is mostly subtle and ambiguous racial prejudice and examine, specifically, how interviewees interpreted and responded to racially discriminatory encounters and how these experiences, in turn, have affected their everyday intimacy practices while residing in a multicultural host society. Bidirectional and even multidirectional race-based discrimination were also highlighted in this chapter. While participants placed the focus on their experiences of being subject to racial prejudice when developing interracial relationships on lesbian dating apps, they ignored and somewhat downplayed their own discriminatory behaviours towards queer women from non-Chinese groups. In this regard, this research contributes to enriching the existing scholarship on queer women’s mobile dating practices and broader scholarship on racial prejudice and discrimination in these contexts.
5.3.1 Race-based sexual prejudice: Subtle versus blatant forms
Racial prejudice has become pervasive in the online and mobile dating environment. As Mason (2016) asserts, ‘digital dating is — like everything else — racialized’ (p. 826). For example, the popular gay dating app Grindr has been charged with being a space where racism thrives (B. Carlson, 2020; Robinson & Frost, 2018). Gay male diasporic communities with diverse ethnic backgrounds, in particular, have been identified as facing more risk of discrimination because of their race in the online and mobile dating environments (Callander et al., 2016; Shield, 2017, 2018a, 2018b). For example, while studying gay male immigrants’ racialised encounters on online dating platforms in the Danish context, Shield (2018b) revealed several patterns of racism, encompassing ‘everyday racism’, ‘sexual racism’ and ‘entitlement racism’. ‘Sexual racism’ denotes practices associated with racial prejudice and discrimination in the context of dating and sex, including racial exclusions and racial preferences (or
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racial fetish) (Bedi, 2015; Callander et al., 2016; Shield, 2018b). ‘Entitlement racism’ refers to insulting or offensive statements directed at immigrants, ethnic minorities and minority cultures relating to their race, nationality or religion (Essed, 2013; Shield, 2018b). Corresponding to Shield (2018b), sexual racism was also found to be a type of racial prejudice my interviewees had commonly experienced in their dating app practices in the Australian context. Notably, in some cases, these women’s experiences of sexual racism were also intertwined with entitlement racism. A typical example showing this entanglement was interviewees being told they were not ideal sexual partners, as ‘Chinese girls have poor knowledge of sex’ (Jing, 23, student).
Compared to racial fetishisation, racial exclusion was reported to be much more commonly experienced by interviewees on lesbian dating apps. As Lu explained, ‘It [racial exclusion] always happens, anywhere and anytime’. However, this kind of racial exclusion was mainly associated with interviewees’ experiences using HER and attempting to develop interracial and intercultural relationships. As a popular English- language lesbian dating app, HER provides a space for interviewees to meet people from diverse racial, ethnic and cultural groups while situated in a multicultural society like Australia. This potential to facilitate intercultural and interracial encounters and relationships became part of the app’s allure for Chinese queer women in this study. Comparatively, interviewees reported that they rarely experienced racial exclusions on Rela, the Chinese lesbian social app, due to the relatively homogeneous ethnicity (mainly Chinese) of its user populations. As Amanda explained:
I don’t think we have this problem [racial exclusion] on Rela, probably because the vast majority of us [Rela users] are Chinese. So there is no discrimination [related to race]. But on HER, it was so common to encounter people who either intentionally or unintentionally attack you because of your race, as the ethnicities [of HER users] are quite mixed and diverse.
Racial exclusions were frequently encountered by interviewees in one-to-one and group chats on HER while developing social and romantic relationships. Being rejected, being abruptly suspended or interrupted in a conversation, and being ignored were several types of racial exclusions that interviewees reported they had frequently encountered. Importantly, most of these racial prejudices were displayed subtly and implicitly, which can be interpreted as what Callander et al. (2016) identified as ‘subtle sexual racism’ (p. 10). Pettigrew and Meertens (1995) have argued that the nature of
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subtle prejudice is ‘cool, distant and indirect’ (p. 58). For instance, Jiang noted that most of the racial-sexual exclusions she had experienced on dating apps, such as HER, were conducted in a careful and strategic manner:
I got the feeling that the reason why they rejected me or purposely ignored me was that I’m Chinese, though they didn’t speak it out directly. And I can tell they tried to do this carefully and tactically, and didn’t want you to find out that they are prejudicing you.
Other interviewees also described similar experiences of encountering subtle prejudice in their use of HER. For example, May recalled her experience of being suddenly interrupted in a seemingly cheerful conversation with a user on HER and then the user ghosted:
I remember we were having a happy chat and we were even about to meet each other. But then it was like she suddenly interrupted me by asking something like, ‘So, you are from China, ha?’ I replied ‘Yes’. And then she just stopped talking to me. I sent her a few messages after that, but she had never replied.
Although May initially could not understand why her potential date abruptly ended their conversation and ghosted, she intuitively felt it was related to her Chinese ethnicity. As she explained, ‘I feel she has some problems with my Chinese ethnicity. It might be the reason why she suddenly lost her interest in talking to me, though I’m not 100% sure.’ Amy also spoke about her similar experience of being disrupted in conversations with several users on HER:
I felt that they intentionally did this, as a sign of rejection. Though it’s not that kind of direct rejection, like telling you ‘I don’t want to talk to you because you are Chinese’, I can feel it’s the same thing.
Jiang, May and Amy’s descriptions highlighted that the prejudice they experienced was something they ‘feel’. This corresponds to Callander et al.’s (2016) identification of the ‘felt’ expression as a prominent feature when gay and bisexual men speak of the subtle racism they have experienced online. Callander et al. (2016) assert that the ‘felt’ expression suggested that ‘online sexual racism is predominantly subtle in its expression’ (p. 12). Moreover, interviewees’ use of the term ‘feel’ also implied their uncertainty and ambivalence towards the subtle prejudice.
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Significantly, the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak was perceived as a turning point by the interviewees — one that fuelled existing anti-Chinese sentiment and racial discrimination on HER, turning it from subtle to more overt forms. Notably, I finished the interviews with all 25 interviewees in this study by mid-January 2020. But since late January 2020, several interviewees intermittently contacted me to speak about their more recent racialised experiences on HER, most of which were associated with the original outbreak of COVID-19 in late January 2020 in China. Unlike the subtle prejudice most interviewees had previously experienced and discussed in their original interviews, the race-based prejudices triggered by COVID-19 took more direct, explicit, intentional and aggressive forms. Pettigrew and Meertens (1995) refer to this as ‘blatant prejudice’, characterised by ‘hot, close and direct’ expressions and behaviours (p. 58). For example, Callander et al. (2016) and Shield (2018b) have both pointed out that statements such as ‘No Asian’ and ‘No Black’, which have been presented in user profiles on Grindr, represent a typical form of blatant racial exclusion encountered by gay male dating app users. Until the COVID-19 outbreak in late January 2020, my interviewees hardly reported seeing racist statements like these on user profiles on either Rela or HER. However, several interviewees reported that they had since received racist messages such as ‘No Chinese, Pls!’, ‘No Chinese virus’, ‘No virus, thanks!’, and ‘No bats, thx!’ from their social contacts on HER. For example, Lu described HER as ‘a place that is full of racists who aim for attacking Asians’ amid the COVID-19 outbreak. Jiang also shared her experience of encountering blatant racial prejudice on HER during this period:
When I received the message ‘No bats, thx!’, I didn’t get her point and didn’t link this to the coronavirus and race stuff. So I continued to talk to her. Then she suddenly asked me, ‘You’re from China, right?’ It was at that moment I suddenly got what she meant, and I felt it was so insulting to me.… She used ‘bats’ to refer to us [Chinese]. I felt she did this purposely to satirise, prejudice and insult all of the Chinese people, as if we all eat bats and carry the virus.
Sara also described her experience of being subject to overt prejudice with the ‘poor excuse of curiosity’ by a user on HER:
She was like, keeping asking me all kinds of questions about the coronavirus in China. I’ve been driven crazy and told her that I haven’t been back to China for a long time, so I don’t know about the situation in China.
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Although Sara indicated that she did not want to continue the conversation and wanted to shift to other topics, the user she was talking to simply ignored her requests and insisted on proceeding with the coronavirus-related conversation:
She began to ask me more questions which made me feel like she was insulting me purposely, like ‘Hey, I hope you don’t mind. Do Chinese people really like eating bats? What about dogs? Just curious though’, and ‘Have you also tried wildlife, like bats? How did they taste like?’ It made me feel so offended and angry.
Compared to the subtle expressions of racial prejudice, blatant prejudice tended to trigger interviewees’ more negative emotions, such as anger, frustration and distrust. This further aggravated these women’s reluctance to use HER and develop interracial relationships. Meanwhile, both subtle and blatant prejudice facilitated the shaping of interviewees’ stereotypes and prejudice towards users from non-Chinese racial and ethnic groups on HER, which is explained later in this section. Interestingly, while comparing her experiences of subtle and blatant prejudice on HER, Lu suggested her emotions were more likely to be affected by how racial prejudice was expressed, rather than the prejudice per se:
I found that normally I didn’t get offended if someone indicated that she has no interest in me because I’m Chinese in a mild and indirect way. And this didn’t affect my desire to use Tinder and HER.… But I did feel ostracised when I saw the words like ‘No Chinese, pls!’. It’s absurd and made me feel very uncomfortable that I even want to quit it [HER].
5.3.2 Ambiguities around individual preference and racial prejudice
Sexual racism, in the context of dating apps, takes the form of exclusion and racial preference (Callander et al., 2016; Mason, 2016). Like racial exclusion, racial preference is also associated with stereotypes, bias and a lack of familiarity with other racial or ethnic groups (Shield, 2018b); however, it is always disguised as a personal preference (Callander et al., 2016). Callander et al. (2016) and Shield (2018b) have both identified that racial preference is a pattern of racism that gay and bisexual men have commonly experienced in the context of dating and sex. However, my research showed that when it came to racial-sexual prejudice, Chinese queer women in this study predominantly gravitated to their exclusionary experiences related to race while overlooking their encounters with racial preference on lesbian dating apps. Further,
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most interviewees viewed race-based preference as a normal stereotype and indistinguishable from individual preference. For example, several interviewees mentioned that they were ‘cool’ or ‘OK’ with users on HER who eagerly and passionately expressed their fetishes to them because of their Chinese or Asian ethnicity. As Jing described:
When she [a user on HER] told me that she had a crush on Asian girls because she thought we are more loyal [to] and submissive [in a relationship], I didn’t feel uncomfortable. I know she has those kinds of stereotypes towards us, but I thought it was normal and I’m cool with it.
Likewise, Kathy (24, student) also mentioned that she had met several users on HER who showed her particularly intense interest because of ‘their special like of Asian girls’:
She told me directly that she likes my figure and appearance because ‘it is very Asian style’. Then I found that she has that kind of special like of Asian girls because she thought compared to locals [Australian women], Asian girls are generally thinner and more shapely. I think it’s funny, but I wouldn’t call it racism. And to be honest, I don’t think it’s abnormal.
Thus, Jing and Kathy’s statements support Shield’s (2018b) finding that some of his interviewees (gay and bisexual male immigrants in Copenhagen) do not regard racial-sexual preferences as racist.
Perceiving the expressions of racial-sexual prejudice as individual preference was also a viewpoint commonly held by interviewees in this study. From several interviewees’ perspectives, setting up race as a criterion was similar to setting up age, weight and sex role as criteria while looking for matches on dating apps. For example, Shujie noted:
I’m OK with the words ‘No Asian’ and any rejections or likes based on race. It’s like I also have my own standard for finding dates. Like I’d like to date women who are at the similar age with me and I don’t like dating women who are much older than me, so I set up the age range on HER. It’s the same with race. We all have our own likes and dislikes, and it’s nothing about prejudice.
Wenwen expressed a similar opinion:
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I think it’s just our focuses and tastes are different. Some people care about race, while others like me care more about weight. For example, I don’t like dating people who are too fat. But it’s essentially the same.
Callander et al. (2016) suggested that gay and bisexual men regard race as a way to express and articulate desire and ‘a matter of individual preference and taste’, rather than expressions of racial prejudice. This reflects my interviewees’ perceptions that race-based exclusions and fetishes were more associated with individual preference and thus understandable and acceptable.
Unlike Shujie and Wenwen, who perceived the expression of race-based sexual prejudice as simply individual taste, several interviewees indicated that often confusions, ambiguities and complexities were involved with racial prejudice, as if there is a blurred line between racial preference and individual preference. For example, Lina expressed confusion regarding race-based sexual fetish:
I’m OK with the fetish thing, and prefer to view it as someone’s personal choice. But it indeed made me confused sometimes. Some messages [from users on HER] made me feel like they chose me only because I’m Chinese, and I felt I was biased in this regard.
Lu expressed a similar opinion regarding the blurred boundary between racial preference and individual preference. ‘It’s hard to set a boundary between the real preference and preference based on race. You can’t tell their thoughts behind the messages as it can be understood in different ways’, she said. By expressing their confusion, both Lina and Lu highlighted the ambiguity around expressions of race- based sexual preference. Lu’s statements, in particular, indicated that a blurred line seemed to exist between racial-sexual preference and individual preference, making understanding the entanglement of intimacy and prejudice more complicated in the mobile dating context.
However, three other interviewees had a different opinion and adamantly insisted that expressions of race-based sexual preference should be regarded as a pattern of racial prejudice even when conveyed subtly and tactfully. As Sara explained, the exoticism that some users on HER showed towards Chinese culture made her feel uncomfortable. She perceived it as a kind of ‘pretended interest’ or a strategy to meet curiosity arising out of racialised bias:
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They always did something that seems like they were so interested in me and the Chinese culture, but they kept asking me all kinds of weird questions. So when I read these messages again, I found that they were just showing their pretended interest and their stereotypes, which were mostly out of their unfamiliarity with our culture. It’s easy to get confused with the flirtatious talks sometimes, but I know it’s not the real like. Rather, it’s a kind of bias.
Agreeing with Sara, Lin (26, student) and Sylvia (32, teacher) also perceived sexual fetish related to race as a type of prejudice, which seems ‘harmless’ but can trigger great discomfort. Notably, interviewees’ diverse perceptions and interpretations of racialised experiences in the context of lesbian dating apps indicated the ambiguous and ambivalent nature of the subtle racial prejudice. Simultaneously, it aligns with Callander et al.’s (2016) finding that, instead of taking a single position on understanding racialised desires online, gay and bisexual men formed diversified opinions about the racism they encountered online and actively engaged in building ‘critical reflections and insights’ (p. 10) on these racialised encounters.
The diverse forms of racialised experiences interviewees had encountered on lesbian dating apps significantly impacted their practices for using the two apps focused upon in this study. This was particularly the case with HER, which facilitated interracial encounters between heterogeneous racial and ethnic groups for interviewees while living in Australia. The experiences of racial-sexual prejudice on HER, especially racial exclusions, were mostly perceived as interruptions to their digital intimacy practices. Racialised experiences significantly exacerbated interviewees’ apprehensions, reluctance and resistance to use HER for developing interracial relationships. As Amanda mentioned, the race-based exclusions she had encountered already cast a shadow over her, which made her feel afraid of using HER. Similarly, Lu noted that she had intentionally reduced the frequency of using HER amid the COVID-19 pandemic because she did not want to be targeted by racists. In the meantime, Lu also spoke about her ‘leaving-comeback’ experiences of using HER:
Sometimes I feel I wasn’t in the right mood to use HER so I just left it, like not using it for a few weeks, logging out, or even uninstalling it. Though it wasn’t every time that it [the leaving of HER] was caused by the racist stuff, it is indeed a critical factor that made me reluctant to use it [HER]. I know I couldn’t avoid this [racial prejudice] outright, but I always have the hope that
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it [HER] can do better. And this is the reason why I always came back and restarted using HER.
Lu’s practice of leaving HER echoes Brubaker et al.’s (2016) finding of users’ technological departure of Grindr, namely ‘leaving Grindr’, and the ‘disconnective strategies’. Also, Lu’s ‘leaving-comeback’ practice coheres with Light’s (2014) disconnective practice theory, specifically the ‘geographies of disconnection’, which includes users leaving or suspending using social media platforms for some time. While ‘leaving’ reflected Lu’s reluctance and resistance to using HER, her ‘comeback’ can be seen as a pivotal step towards actively responding to the challenges (e.g., racial exclusions) arising from her dating app practices.
5.3.3 Bidirectional and multidirectional racial prejudice During the interview process for this study, it became commonplace for interviewees to underscore their experiences of being subject to racial prejudice on dating apps such as HER, while simultaneously overlooking or attempting to play down their own discriminatory practices and prejudices. This occurred, for instance, by interviewees either being unconscious of or trying to defend their own prejudiced conduct or position. Thus, these women’s descriptions of their dating app experiences made it clear that racial prejudice in this context is not unidirectional; in most cases, it is bidirectional or even multidirectional. For example, when it came to the experience of screening dates on HER, several interviewees mentioned that they scarcely liked or replied to women from non-Asian ethnic and racial groups, as they believe a vast majority of these women are ‘only into sex’. Kathy noted, ‘Most women such as locals are only interested in your body and having sex with you, like asking you to send nude pictures. I would rather ignore their likes and seldom replied.’ Kathy also admitted that she had probably developed ‘certain perceptions’ towards Australian women, but these perceptions were solely reflections of her taste rather than race-based stereotypes and prejudices. However, as Shield (2018b) asserts, the behaviour of intentionally ‘ignoring’ other people’s likes can be interpreted as a type of racial prejudice, and ‘merely ignoring someone’ (p. 98) can be viewed as racism in the dating app context. Likewise, Callander et al. (2016) described the practice of ‘ignoring’ users as a common type of subtle racism in the dating app context.
Unlike Kathy, who described her approach to local users of HER as a product of personal taste, Amy described her negative perceptions of white Australian women as
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largely the outcome of her own experience of being racially prejudiced by several female HER users who self-identified as Australian:
They [white Australian women] are ignorant and arrogant. It seems like you should feel greatly honoured if they like your profile. And they always want to control the conversations. After seeing a few people behaving like this, I lost my interest in talking to them. I think most of them have inherent racial prejudice. It’s just some people speaking it out while others hiding it.
Amy’s statement echoes the sentiments of participants in Chen and Liu’s (2019) study, which found that due to being neglected on English-language dating sites, members of the Chinese male diaspora formed negative and distorted perceptions of white Australian women (e.g., about them being over-sized and promiscuous). Like Kathy and Amy, many other interviewees also spoke to me about their attitudes towards white Australian women, using a range of negative stereotypes, such as stating they were generally ‘overweight’, ‘rustic’, ‘ignorant’, ‘arrogant’ and ‘only into sex’. While interviewees discussed their own experiences of feeling subject to racial prejudice, this tendency clearly foregrounded the bidirectional nature of racial prejudice in the context of lesbian dating apps such as HER.
Residing in a multicultural society like Australia offered Chinese queer women in this study abundant opportunities to encounter people from diverse ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds and helped facilitate the formation of interracial relationships. Apart from the bidirectional prejudice interviewees developed towards non-Asian women, such as white Australian women, their dating app experiences also showed that they had constructed multidirectional stereotypes and prejudices towards a range of different ethnic and racial groups. For example, Jing and Xinran both mentioned that they mostly pretended they had not seen likes from ‘black women on HER’, and preferred to keep silent in these instances. Xinran explained:
I just ignored and never replied. I don’t want to say that like ‘I don’t like you’ directly and don’t want to embarrass them, but it is simply because I don’t want to date black people, like people from Africa. It’s just my taste.
Like Kathy, Xinran viewed ‘ignoring’ and ‘keeping silent’ as merely an individual preference rather than racial prejudice. However, while engaging in similar behaviours, Jing took a contrary position. She indicated an awareness that her approach was problematic but justified her behaviour because she had not engaged in any direct
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or abusive behaviour: ‘I know that I ignored people’s likes [on HER] sometimes, which actually are the same with what some white girls did to me. I mean they ignored my likes. It’s probably also a kind of prejudice.’ However, Jing repeatedly stressed that she did not think ignoring others’ likes could cause any direct harm. This concurred with other interviewees who took the perspective that ‘ignoring’ users is an acceptable strategy for delivering rejections subtly and harmlessly when encountering unwanted approaches. In using expressions such as ‘strategy’ and ‘harmless’ during their discussions of these issues with me, interviewees were demonstrating their reluctance to admit their own race-based prejudices, trying mostly to justify their behaviour by defending it as merely personal taste and choice, or as a means to protect others from direct harm.
5.4 CONFLICTING INTIMACY
This section examines tensions and frictions Chinese queer women interviewed for this study experienced in their use of Rela and HER in Australia, sparked by what interviewees called ‘political discussions’. These discussions generally centred around the Chinese sociopolitical context and topics from that environment that attracted widespread public attention in Australia, such as the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests, Xinjiang re-education camps, #MeToo movement, and the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. Conflicting viewpoints on these issues created disputes, tensions and what interviewees perceived as bullying behaviours (e.g., provocation and verbal abuse) between them and other Rela and HER users. I demonstrate in this section how interviewees’ patriotism played a vital role in intensifying these frictions while undermining intimate relationships.
5.4.1 Disputes and frictions in the digital dating context
Discussions associated with the Chinese sociopolitical context, commonly described as ‘political discussions’, were widely perceived as a communication practice that triggered disputes and conflict between interviewees and their social/romantic contacts on Rela and HER, particularly in forming intercultural relationships. In some cases, these arguments escalated into what interviewees described as cyberbullying, including outright verbal abuse, malicious attacks, online aggression, trolling and even the total breakdown of relationships. According to the interviewees, these political discussions and the bullying they were said to trigger
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mainly occurred in one-to-one conversations and group chats on Rela and HER, particularly in Rela Live and Featured Topic. They also occurred with contacts from the two apps on WeChat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. For example, the 2019- 20 Hong Kong protests 13 were reported as the source of ‘political discussions’ interviewees most frequently had with other Rela and HER users, and also the one that was most likely to trigger conflict.
The conflict between interviewees from mainland China and their Rela/HER contacts from Hong Kong was most prominent among those highlighted by interviewees, which were attributed to these groups’ conflicting viewpoints on the Hong Kong issue (e.g., territory and sovereignty). The interviewees from mainland China largely perceived the reported conflicts as a result of the different ‘li chang’ (stand or stance, generally used to denote ‘political stance’). For example, when it came to disputes with users from Hong Kong on Rela and HER, ‘li chang bu tong’ (different stances) was consistently noted as the reason by interviewees from mainland China. For example, Jing (from mainland China) stated:
It’s the problem of li chang, I believe. Most of us [mainlanders] see Hong Kong as a part of China. But I know most Hong Kongers don’t think like this. I think this is the reason why we always argue.
Amy, who is also from mainland China, suggested:
It’s our li chang bu tong. Those Hong Kongers often attacked our government in the group [a WhatsApp group that Amy joined], and our Chinese members [from mainland in the WhatsApp group] always argued with them about this [Hong Kong protests].
Cathy (from mainland China) described seeing group members in a Rela WeChat group she joined commence seemingly ‘normal’ discussions about the Hong Kong protests but end in ‘ugly’ ways, with users cursing and attacking each other:
Initially, everything was quite normal, and then the atmosphere suddenly changed. I remember someone sent a short video which says Hong Kong has almost become a hell that is dominated by riots, and more people were incited
13 According to BBC News (2019), the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests, starting from 9 June 2019, are a series of protests conducted in response to the Fugitive Offenders amendment bill, which would subject Hong Kong residents and visitors to the jurisdiction and legal system of Mainland China. This would subsequently affect the region’s autonomy and people’s civil liberties and infringe on privacy and freedom of speech laws.
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to join the protest.… We were just talking about how dangerous Hong Kong looks like. But then two girls, who seem are a couple from Hong Kong, began to attack us abruptly, first criticising that we’re ignorant and ridiculous as we don’t know about Hong Kong’s real situation, and then cursing us with the very…you know, ugly words. And then they [other members] had the fierce arguments with them [the two girls] and kicked them out [from the Rela group].… It was a terribly unpleasant experience.
Cathy explained that this was not the only time she witnessed and experienced conflict sparked by political discussions on Rela and in her Rela WeChat group: ‘In most cases, the talks started in a pretty normal way. But then you would see people starting to argue and attack each other. Sometimes they even ma [abuse] each other with curses’. Several other interviewees, who had encountered similar situations, agreed that attacks and verbal abuse sometimes happened during conversations that initially seemed entirely normal. The disputes and conflicts caused by the political discussions in the Rela WeChat groups cohere with Chu & Yeo’s (2020) finding that the political discussions between people with different viewpoints can cause quarrels, personal attacks and insults on social media, which may thus lead to their disconnective practices in politics on social media.
‘Tiao xin’, which literally translates as ‘provocation’, was also reported to be commonly encountered in interviewees’ dating practices during involvement in discussions on topics such as the Hong Kong protests. Tiao xin generally refers to the behaviour of internet users who post something intending to create conflict and provoke others’ angry responses, which can also be understood as a form of ‘online trolling’ (Buckels, Trapnell, & Paulhus, 2014; March et al., 2017). Several interviewees reported their encounters with other users’ tiao xin behaviours on Rela and HER. For example, Wenwen (from mainland China) and Lu (from mainland China) both felt that some users intentionally posted provocative words in Rela Live and Featured Topic to trigger or incite fights among Rela users. As Wenwen explained:
I found at least a few times that while Meike [a Rela live streamer] was talking something about Hong Kong [in her live streaming], like her previous study and work experience in Hong Kong, there were always some people posting something maliciously by purpose. For example, ‘Why are you keeping saying good words about Hong Kong? Are you pro-Hong Kong protesters?’ or ‘Are you Chinese? Since you love Hong Kong that much, why don’t you go there
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and never come back!’ Sometimes it indeed provoked some viewers’ anger and led the streaming into a messy situation, like the fights between them [streamers and viewers].
Lu also noted that her profile on HER was strategically ‘liked’ by users who seemed to intentionally trigger her anger:
She [a user on HER] knew I’m Chinese [mainlander] from my profile. So after saying ‘hi’, she directly initiated that topic [Hong Kong protest]. I was surprised because I felt it was weird and kind of abnormal to talk about this on a dating app.
However, Lu later found out that this user, who comes from Hong Kong, is ‘a strong supporter of Hong Kong independence’:
I showed my support for China. But she began to attack the Chinese government and Chinese people and said something like ‘China is a robber’. I don’t want to continue the conversation, so I told her to stop.
After Lu showed her unwillingness to continue this discussion, the user began to demonstrate what Lu perceived as a ‘more aggressive attitude’. ‘She behaved so aggressively and that really pissed me off, so I just got her blocked’, Lu added. Like Lu, several other interviewees highlighted what they described as ‘weird’ and ‘incongruent’ experiences of having political conversations in an intimate space, such as a dating app like HER. From interviewees’ perspectives, political discussions, along with the tensions they sparked, were unexpected and unwanted experiences, which caused interruptions and discord within their mobile dating practices.
In addition to the frictions they experienced with their dating app contacts from Hong Kong, interviewees from mainland China also reported clashing with other users from non-Chinese ethnic and cultural groups while having political discussions on Rela and HER. The different cultures (between China and other countries) and ‘pian jian’ (bias) towards Chinese society shown by other users were identified as two key triggers of this kind of conflict by interviewees from mainland China. For example, while speaking about disputes she had with a user on HER regarding the Chinese sociopolitical system, Lina (from mainland China) highlighted the interplay between culture and bias:
I think first it’s the cultural thing. They don’t know much about China, like politics and society, and they used to look at China from their foreign cultural
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perspective. Also, they’ve developed some pian jian [bias] towards us and hence tended to show their hostility towards the [Chinese] government.
From interviewees’ perspectives, pian jian towards China was an important factor that easily caused tensions in intercultural communications and relationships formed on dating apps. As Zeyin (from mainland China) stated:
Some of them [users of HER] asked me about the things happening in Xinjiang [re-education camps].14 Through talking to them, I found some users have very deep pian jian about China, the [social and political] systems and the government. No matter how hard I tried to explain what these so-called ‘camps’ really are, they just don’t want to believe me. So we argued this for quite a few times. Some of them even told me something like, ‘I’m worried that you’ve been brainwashed and manipulated by your government’. I was like, it’s bullshit. It’s so obvious that they have those very deep-rooted stereotyped opinions about China.
Clashes like these triggered by political discussions were regarded as disturbing experiences by interviewees. They considerably heightened their reluctance to engage with other users on dating apps who might show ‘bias’ and/or different stands from them on these apps. This meant that interviewees were more reluctant to engage with users from non-Chinese ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds, and particularly HER users. This finding aligns with Hail’s (2015) contention that conflicting standpoints on China’s politics and society can sometimes cause tensions between Chinese overseas students and their host country peers.
The two interviewees from Hong Kong, Ying (29, nurse) and Xinran, also reported encountering conflict while having conversations with users who were mostly from mainland China regarding the Hong Kong protests on Rela and HER. Through comparing Hong Kong and mainland interviewees’ descriptions of their experiences, I found that the aforementioned li chang (stance) played a crucial role in these disputes. For example, Ying said that she did not encounter significant frictions regarding political discussions about topics such as the Hong Kong protests on Rela and HER.
14 According to The Guardian, China has built around 400 camps in Xinjiang to detain Uighurs and people from other Muslim minorities (Graham-Harrison, 2020). The Chinese government asserts that these camps were built for education and vocational training purposes, which already benefited millions of workers in Xinjiang (BBC, 2020).
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However, she did stress that most users she had talked to showed their ‘care’, ‘curiosity’ and ‘bias’ regarding the ‘Hong Kong issues’:
After knowing I’m from Hong Kong, they would normally show their care, by asking me ‘Oh I know what is going on in Hong Kong recently. I hope that everything is OK with you’, or ‘I hope you and your family stay safe in this special period’.
Ying said she would strategically reply with ‘Thank you, we’re good’ to avoid their further questions and then try to shift to other topics:
Because I found that some of them were very curious and eager to ask me about things in Hong Kong, just to meet their curiosity. But I felt it was strange to talk about this on dating apps. We were supposed to talk about love, right? But why were we discussing politics?
Ying’s expression that she ‘felt strange’ speaking about the Hong Kong protests on dating apps echoed exactly the previously mentioned sentiments of Lu and several other interviewees who said they felt ‘weird’ and ‘incongruent’ about having political discussions on dating apps. Specifically, Ying noted that her discomfort was triggered by the way other users expressed their perceptions of Hong Kong and the protests, as she felt ‘there is very obvious bias’ in their questions:
Most of them would use words like ‘unsafe’, ‘dangerous’ and even ‘chaos’ to describe Hong Kong, especially some users from China. I think it’s simply because Chinese don’t know what protests are like and thus tended to label them as danger as this is what the [Chinese] government told them.
However, Ying said that she would not ‘argue with them’ and chose to ‘ignore’ the words and questions that made her uncomfortable because she wanted to keep the ‘biao mian de he xie’ (superficial harmony) of their talks. ‘I just don’t want to argue with them. I think it’s unnecessary, so I just ignored those words’, Ying explained.
In contrast to Ying’s calm approach to conversations about the Hong Kong protests, Xinran expressed outrage over this topic. She recalled, ‘Most of the Chinese I met on Rela are very ridiculous. One even told me that ‘it’s not right that Hong Kong wants to be independent’. She’s been severely brainwashed by her government.’ According to Xinran, the conflicting disputes were mostly triggered by talks of ‘sovereignty’, ‘whether Hong Kong is a part of China’, and the ‘one country, two
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systems’ arrangement. Rather than adopting Ying’s strategy of keeping ‘superficial harmony’, Xinran tended to argue with users who showed different opinions:
I’ve argued with them a lot. For some [of those talks], we even came to the point of ma [insulting and cursing] each other. Some Chinese have very distorted and crazy thoughts that Hong Kong is a part of their country [mainland China] and should listen to their government.
Thus, while the interviewees from mainland China pointed out the ‘bias’ Hong Kong users held towards mainland China’s political and social situation, interviewees from Hong Kong suggested users from mainland China demonstrated ‘bias’ regarding the Hong Kong sociopolitical situation. For example, both Ying and Xinran perceived the idea expressed by some mainland Chinese users that ‘Hong Kong became risky and dangerous because of the ongoing protests’ as biased, and the notion that ‘Hong Kong is a part of China’ as a ‘distorted’ viewpoint. Similarly, mainland Chinese interviewees regarded being told ‘Chinese people have been brainwashed and manipulated by the Chinese government’ as a biased and offensive standpoint, and the idea ‘Hong Kong is not a part of China but an independent region’ as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘incorrect’. This highlighted the conflicting views on topics such as the Hong Kong protests between interviewees from mainland China and Hong Kong, which can be linked to the previously analysed different ‘stands’ and educational and cultural backgrounds.
5.4.2 Patriotism and fragile intimacy
Li chang (stance), cultures and pian jian (bias) were identified as key triggers of the conflicts caused by political discussions in interviewees’ practices for using Rela and HER. However, perhaps equally important for the context of dating apps, interviewees’ patriotism also played a pivotal role in not only generating and intensifying tensions, but also undermining existing intimate (social/romantic) relationships. This was particularly evident in intercultural relationships developed through the use of dating apps. Notably, throughout the interview process, I found that most interviewees did not directly speak about their patriotism or call themselves patriotic. However, their patriotism was easy to see through their descriptions of experiences clashing with other users. Prior studies have indicated that the experience of studying and living overseas can increase sojourners’ emotional attachment to their home countries (Coelho, 1958) and the salience of their national identity (Hail, 2015).
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Hail (2015) found that a stronger sense of emotional attachment and loyalty were provoked when Chinese overseas students experienced criticism and attacks against their nation from people in the host country, making them likely to refute or dismiss criticism of China and become more defensive. My interviewees’ experiences support this finding in the context of dating apps. For example, Wenwen spoke about this sense of increased patriotism while facing criticism of the Xinjiang re-education camps from an Australian woman on HER:
I feel like she tried to purposely tiao xin [provoke] me by keeping criticising the [Chinese] government and our people, like saying we [Chinese people] don’t know what human rights are, and calling our political system as specifically designed for brainwashing. Can you imagine how angry I was when seeing these words. How can she slander and insult my country in this way! So I punched her back. I called her an ‘ignorant and stupid pig’, and also said some ironic words like what she said to me.
While recalling her experiences of arguing with other users about ‘Chinese issues’, such as the Xinjiang re-education camps, on dating apps such as HER, Wenwen was adamant that she could not ‘tolerate and allow anyone to insult China’. Wenwen’s experience and attitude indicated a strong sense of patriotism. However, she denied that she was particularly patriotic and instead expressed the paradoxical nature of her patriotism:
This is not the only time that I argued with other people about these issues. I found that I’m quite ambivalent as I also criticised the [Chinese] government a lot, especially while I was in China. But I felt offended when other people criticised China, especially when they spoke negative things about China with their ‘you se yan jing’ [tainted glasses].
Wenwen also stressed that while she was in China, she did not think she loves China and tended to view China’s sociopolitics negatively. However, after living in Australia for over three years, Wenwen found that she had ‘unconsciously developed the love of China’ and preferred to view China positively. Wenwen’s perception was echoed by other interviewees, who found themselves ‘lov[ing] China more’ after living in Australia for several years.
The patriotic feeling of ‘lov[ing] China more’ became a critical factor that intensified conflicts between interviewees and their social/romantic contacts on Rela
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and HER, and even resulted in the weakening and breakdown of their relationships. Indeed, interviewees’ experiences demonstrated that deeply felt patriotism could render even long-established intimacy unexpectedly fragile. For example, Cathy (from mainland China) implied that she had never expected ‘politics’, which seemed ‘so far away’ from her life, would play a role in breaking the ‘very cherished’ relationship she had developed with her ex-girlfriend. Cathy had known Vivi (from Hong Kong) through Rela live streaming activities and maintained a relationship with her for over two years. Although the couple seldom met in person because of living in different cities in Australia, they had maintained close contact through daily WeChat audio and video calls. After the Hong Kong protests commenced in early June 2019, Cathy found Vivi always posted ‘something against China’ on her social media accounts like WeChat Moments, Facebook and Instagram. Sometimes she even attacked Rela streamers/viewers who spoke out for the Chinese government in live streams. Cathy said she and Vivi argued about the ‘Hong Kong issue’ a few times, after which she always ‘got irritated’: ‘We always argued about this as our li chang [stances] are so different’. Cathy perceived Vivi’s anti-Chinese posts ‘bu ai guo’ (unpatriotic), which was opposite to her stance and crossed her ‘bottom line’. Finally, Cathy chose to break up with Vivi. When I asked whether she felt regretful for the breakup, Cathy showed her sadness but adamantly claimed, ‘I think this is the best way [of dealing with this relationship] as I couldn’t accept to have someone [as my partner] who doesn’t respect China but is against it’. Like Wenwen, Cathy also refused to call herself patriotic. However, Cathy’s breakup experience suggested that deeply held feelings about patriotism had played a crucial role in ending her ‘cherished’ romantic relationship with Vivi. Additionally, participants such as Cathy who showed the attitude of being unable to develop a relationship with people having different political stances from them also suggested the significance of political views in a relationship formation and development. It thus echoes Chan’s (2021) finding that dating app users preferred and tended to seek politically like-minded romantic partners particularly in the increasingly polarised political environment like Hong Kong. For instance, most of the respondents in his research perceived political stances as a crucial factor in seeking and developing romantic relationships.
Similarly, several other interviewees from mainland China spoke about their experience of ending relationships with friends and romantic partners they had met
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through Rela and HER. In their experiences, patriotism had also functioned as a key trigger of irreconcilable conflict and led to an eventual breakup. Notably, interviewees tended to describe the people they had conflicts and broke up with as those who ‘stand at the same side with Hong Kong’ (e.g., supportive of protesters and Hong Kong independence) and are ‘against China’ (e.g., critical of the Chinese political system). Tensions in these relationships generally arose through users criticising and attacking China while interviewees defended China. These women consistently emphasised that maintaining intimate relationships with people they perceived as ‘anti-China’ was unacceptable. For example, Jiang mentioned that when encountering people on dating apps intentionally attacking or insulting China, she would directly hit back and then ‘g[e]t them blocked’, no matter how much she enjoyed their conversations or relationships. Amanda also stressed that she has a ‘zero tolerance’ approach towards people who ‘said bad things against China’. She normally chose to end a relationship from Rela over these matters, even with her ‘valued friends’. Hence, these interviewees’ practices highlight the role of patriotism in triggering intense rejection reactions even in (cherished) intimate relationships, particularly intercultural relations, and in rendering intimacy unexpectedly fragile in the context of dating apps. Simultaneously, the patriotism expressed by these participants in the dating app context also echoes the broader rise of patriotism among young people (netizens) in Chinese society. For example, by examining Chinese young people’s participation in online events related to politics, several studies have pointed out that these netizens have increasingly engaged in digital/online activism to show their patriotism and nationalism for China across both Chinese and Western social media platforms (e.g., Weibo, Zhihu, Facebook and Twitter) (Bi, 2021; Yang, 2019; Zheng, 2020).
5.5 RESPONSE STRATEGIES
Building on the prior analysis of the concerns and challenges that interviewees experienced using Rela and HER, this section examines their response strategies to mitigate these ‘disturbing’, unexpected and unwanted experiences. Actions taken over what interviewees perceived as privacy and safety violations, racial prejudice and attitudinal conflicts ranged from taking a ‘keep silent’ to a ‘hit back’ approach. Here, I identified six types of user response strategies: ‘ignoring and accepting’, ‘seeking social support’, ‘suspending and leaving’, ‘switching’, ‘verifying and misrepresenting’, and ‘confronting’.
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Ignoring and accepting
Ignoring threats and potential conflict through an ‘I don’t care’ attitude was one of the most common responses interviewees reported they took towards perceived transgressions by other users on Rela and HER. Several interviewees noted that while they saw other users posting disrespectful and insulting content, they preferred to ignore it because they did not want to be involved in any conflict. For example, while speaking about the attitude she generally took towards aggression initiated by other users, Amanda said, ‘There is no need to get into trouble, so I would just ignore and pretend that I didn’t see them.’ In terms of her reaction to receiving aggressive messages, Ying concurred, saying ‘There is no point to argue against them because some people did this purposely to make you angry. If I take this seriously, it would only be me who got hurt.’
Regarding privacy issues, accepting risks and invasions without taking any action was also frequently cited as an appropriate response, although interviewees’ reasons for ‘accepting’ or not reacting in these instances varied. Some interviewees indicated that they did not take direct actions in response to concerns about privacy violations because they had limited knowledge about coping with the privacy risks, particularly institutional privacy concerns over issues such as data tracking and analysis. ‘I cannot do anything about it’ and ‘I don’t know what I can do’ were representative of some interviewees’ attitudes and responses to privacy concerns they experienced. However, other interviewees took no actions in response to institutional privacy concerns associated with dating app use due to apathy or laziness. Lin admitted:
I know it’s better to turn off the location function of my phone when I don’t use it [Rela] … ‘But I’m just very lazy to do this. It’s quite inconvenient as you need to repeatedly open and close.
Lu and Anne also suggested that although they were worried about the privacy risks using Rela and HER potentially posed, they did not take any actions in response to these concerns ‘simply because of the laziness’. As Lu explained:
After seeing the news that Rela leaked so much user data because of its technical issues, I was quite shocked. My friends suggested to change the way of registration on Rela to better protect my data. Actually, I also have this awareness, but I’m just too lazy to do it.
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This attitude of ‘accepting’, along with its underlying intentions — either through lack of understanding or laziness — suggests what Barnes (2006) has identified as a ‘privacy paradox’ exists within interviewees’ use of Rela and HER. Although they realised the privacy risks posed by their engagement with these apps, they are not good at managing these risks.
Seeking social support
Another key response strategy of interviewees dealing with difficult dating app experiences was seeking social support. They did this by sharing threats and clashes encountered through lesbian dating apps and the emotions these experiences triggered (such as fear, anxiety and anger) with friends. For example, when Cathy was continuously harassed by one of her contacts on HER who requested video calls, offline meetings and photos from her, she said she felt ‘very desperate’ and ‘frightened’. Cathy turned to her friends for support:
I wanted to get her [the user on HER] blocked, but she threatened me that she would take revenge if I do so. I have no idea what I should do so I came to my friends. I showed them the messages and they helped me report her to HER and comforted me. I feel like my worries eased a lot after talking to them.
Other interviewees also mentioned that turning to friends helped them release their negative emotions and find comfort. It also offered them opportunities to ‘brainstorm’ with their friends to figure out solutions to their difficulties. For some interviewees, talking to friends about the risks they had encountered was ‘a big relief’. As Amanda suggested, ‘We couldn’t completely get rid of discrimination [on dating apps], but at least I can get rid of anger through talking to my friends’. Previous studies have also suggested that reaching out to friends to seek social support, including advice and comfort, was a useful strategy to mitigate negative consequences caused by racial discrimination (Callander et al., 2016; Lee & Ahn, 2011).
Suspending and leaving
Suspending their use of Rela and HER (e.g., not opening the apps), adjusting elements of their app use practices and temporarily leaving Rela and HER altogether (e.g., uninstalling the apps or deleting profiles on the apps) were also tactics interviewees reported using to manage their safety and happiness in dating app contexts. For example, several interviewees who had encountered racial exclusions on
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HER spoke about how they suspended their use of HER by not opening or using the app but keeping it on their phones for periods ranging from several weeks to several months. Other interviewees simply left HER by uninstalling the app from their mobile phones. After returning to use the app or reinstalling it, they stopped liking ‘users who look like locals’ because of their experiences of racial discrimination on HER by white Australian women. For instance, Jing explained how her changed behaviour on HER was caused by encounters with racial exclusion: ‘I didn’t want to use HER during that period because I felt there were a lot of racists. And when I came back [to HER], I only liked users who have Asian looks.’ Lu recalled her experiences of ‘leaving- comeback’, which involved uninstalling HER from her mobile phone and then reinstalling it after a few weeks or months due to her encounters with harassment, conflicting disputes and racial prejudice. She said, ‘I felt sometimes I don’t have the mood to use it, so I just left it’. Like Jing, Lu also implied that her use of HER transformed in the process of repeatedly leaving and returning to the app:
[Previously] I wouldn’t actively mention some racial topics with them [users on HER]. But now I just want to make sure the person I am talking to is normal and not a racist, so I would pretend to unintentionally bring the racial stuff into the topic, like a piece of recent news about Asians being attacked in Brisbane. I would just wait and see how they would react to it.
Lu’s practice of ‘screening’ and ‘testing’ other users on HER by initiating discussions of race-related topics, and Jing’s practice of ‘only liking users who have Asian looks’ clearly indicate they had changed their app use practices to circumvent the potential risk of being subject to racial prejudice. This approach coheres with the ‘adaption’ strategy that Callander et al. (2016) identified among gay and bisexual men who adapted their intimacy practices (e.g., date-seeking behaviour) to circumvent racialised conflicts. Additionally, the strategy of temporarily suspending their use of HER or some of its specific functions and features also echoes the disconnective practices identified by other studies (Brubaker et al., 2016; Callander et al., 2016; Light, 2014; Light & Cassidy, 2014), which generally take various forms in different social contexts (e.g., preventing connection, suspending or removing connection). Although most interviewees chose to temporarily suspend their use of the app and came back later, one interviewee, Xinran, had permanently left HER. Having been stalked by one
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of her potential dates on HER, Xinran said the app had posed severe threats to her life, and returning was not worth the risk.
Switching
A crucial strategy employed to manage interviewees’ institutional concerns over privacy and safety was switching to non-Chinese social apps and registering with non- Chinese social media accounts or phone numbers that users attained by living overseas. This strategy was triggered, in particular, by concerns over the surveillance of Chinese social platforms such as Rela and WeChat and the Chinese government. For example, due to the fear of being censored, monitored and ‘put onto blacklist’ by Rela and WeChat for having ‘sensitive conversations’ (on topics banned by the Chinese government), interviewees generally compartmentalised their use of Chinese apps and non-Chinese apps. For example, they used Rela for having encounters and initiating contacts, then switched to non-Chinese social chat apps, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and KaKaoTalk (a Korean social chat app) for further discussion/chat and relationship development. For example, Amanda indicated that she had heard several friends talking about their Rela and WeChat accounts being temporarily suspended (for 3–7 days) for posting content associated with pro-LGBTQI issues (e.g., same-sex marriage and activism) and the Hong Kong protests, which the Chinese government viewed as ‘sensitive’ topics. Fearing platform surveillance, Amanda and her friends in the same Rela WeChat group decided to switch to WhatsApp. ‘We formed a similar chat group on WhatsApp, and that made us feel much freer and safer without worrying of being suspended and put onto the blacklist’, Amanda explained. Other interviewees echoed Amanda’s feelings of being ‘freer and safer’ by switching to non-Chinese social media platforms to circumvent surveillance on Rela and WeChat. Interviewees reported using their Australian phone numbers to register Rela accounts and logging into Rela with their Facebook accounts to prevent the information related to their Chinese identities (e.g., Chinese identity cards and Chinese phone numbers) from being tracked by Rela and the Chinese government. For instance, Shujie noted:
f I use WeChat or my Chinese phone number to sign up [on Rela], I’m pretty sure that they can easily identify who I am because we have that [real-name registration] system that our phone numbers and WeChat accounts are connected with our Chinese IDs.
Verifying and mispresenting
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Regarding social privacy and safety risks, verifying (or attempting to verify) other users’ authenticity through cross-platform engagement was commonly deployed as a strategy by interviewees to mitigate their concerns over other users’ misrepresentation. However, the strategy of misrepresenting or hiding their own authentic identities by making fake profiles was also used by interviewees to manage their concerns about being identified by other users on Rela and HER. For example, Lina mentioned that she had a ‘double standard’ for other users and herself. She carefully checked other users’ profiles on Rela and HER, WeChat Moments and Facebook, while simultaneously disclosing her fake identity by providing a fake Facebook account she registered:
I don’t want to be cheated, so after exchanging our social media accounts, like WeChat and Facebook, I would check whether they exactly exist on these platforms and would also google them. But sometimes I wouldn’t give them my real Facebook account. Instead, I prefer to give them the fake one, which I registered with the fake information of my name, age and major.
Conducting cross-platform verification by turning to Facebook, Instagram and WeChat to check the identity and personality of a user encountered on dating apps was also reported by other interviewees as a useful method to alleviate their concerns over others’ misrepresentation. Notably, this also coincides with prior research that identified cross-platform practice as a common method for verifying dating app users’ authenticity (Beauchamp et al., 2017; Duguay, 2017a; Lauckner et al., 2019). Additionally, asking other users to send photos or have video chats was also employed as a strategy by interviewees to check users’ authenticity, which affirms the strategies used by LGBTQI people for evading potential safety risks in Albury and Byron’s (2016) and Lauckner et al.’s (2019) research.
Disclosing fake identities by making fake profiles on HER, Rela and other social media platforms such as Facebook was also deployed to manage interviewees’ concerns over recognition. Like Lina, other interviewees also admitted ‘cheating’ their dates by misrepresenting themselves on dating apps and other associated social media accounts. Anne, Amy and Zeyin spoke of HER’s requirement for users to include a ‘face’ in their profile photos (see Chapter 3). They identified it as an ‘unreasonable rule’, which triggered their discomfort and concern about their identity disclosure. All three of these interviewees’ accounts had been suspended by HER for failing to upload
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profile photos that included their face. They were informed by the app that they had violated its guidelines and had been reported by other users. To have her suspension lifted, Zeyin adopted the strategy of ‘uploading a fake photo’. She explained:
I don’t want to show my face because you don’t know who will see your profile and recognise you. To avoid the embarrassment, I uploaded the photo which I found from Baidu with a girl’s face who doesn’t look like me at all.
Amy and Anne employed a similar strategy by uploading others’ photos on HER to avoid the risk of being identified. Like the previously mentioned fake Facebook profile in Lina’s case, Amy and Zeyin both reported that they registered two Facebook accounts and made one of them ‘xiao hao’ (a social media account without disclosing one’s real identity). Some interviewees indicated that when they exchanged social media accounts with their dating app contacts, they preferred to provide xiao hao, especially with those they did not develop ‘enough trust’ with or were unsure about whether to disclose their true selves. Zeyin explained, ‘While I was at the very initial stage of dating someone, I feel kind of insecure to show a completely true self. So I would strategically disclose part of myself by giving them my xiao hao’. These interviewees’ strategies of disclosing a ‘fake self’ or ‘part of true self’ align with what Orne (2011) has identified as the practice of ‘strategic outness’, denoting that individuals evaluate specific social circumstances (e.g., on social media/dating apps) and then decide what they will disclose.
Confronting
The strategy of ‘confronting’ refers to interviewees taking relatively active and straightforward actions in response to challenges they had encountered on dating apps. Compared to the circumvention and indirect problem-solving action represented by other approaches, ‘confronting’ highlights the response of interviewees actively trying to tackle threats and conflicts directly with the users they perceived to be problematic. As demonstrated below, the ‘confronting’ strategy varied in its nature and prevalence regarding different points of concern.
‘Hitting back’ was identified as a common strategy used by interviewees when they encountered aggression, trolling, malicious attacks, racial prejudice and harassment. While recalling the racial prejudice, conflicts and personal attacks they had experienced on dating apps, Xinran and Kailun (34, social worker) indicated that
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‘hitting back’ by arguing with users who attacked them was an effective strategy to address their negative emotions (e.g., irritation) and gaining ‘instant gratification’. For example, Xinran, who is originally from Hong Konger, said whenever she met users on Rela and HER questioning or criticising Hong Kong, she adamantly hit back by using similar or even more severe critical and insulting words. She explained, ‘Why do I need to suffer their criticism and attacks without any reaction? That would only make me angrier. Abusing them back is the best way to address this issue.’
Another common ‘confronting’ strategy deployed by interviewees was reporting Rela and HER users whose behaviours caused them to feel at risk or threatened. However, although some interviewees felt that reporting privacy and safety violations, harassment, bullying and discrimination was a useful strategy and were satisfied with the apps’ methods for dealing with these behaviours, other interviewees expressed dissatisfaction with how the apps tackled their reporting of such behaviour. Through comparing interviewees’ descriptions of their experiences reporting cases and communicating concerns with Rela and HER, I found they were more likely to be satisfied with Rela’s response but disappointed and suspicious of HER’s actions. For example, Anne had received harassing (advertisements and malicious attacks) and xenophobic messages from users on both Rela and HER and reported the messages and related users to both platforms. However, the apps’ responses to her reporting shaped Anne’s different perspectives towards Rela and HER:
Rela was quite responsive and responsible. They [Rela team] replied to my report very quickly and I can feel that they took a very serious attitude while investigating my case. They also informed me how the users I reported got punished, like giving them warnings, suspending them [their accounts] for one month, etc.… But HER was quite slow in a sense that though they said they would tackle the report within 48 hours, they didn’t get back to me until I asked them, and I kind of suspected whether they took actions as what they claimed.
Similarly, Lu expressed suspicion about the unexpectedly long time HER took to process her report and indicated dissatisfaction with the seemingly ‘passive’ attitude the app demonstrated in attending to her report:
They had never actively informed me about the progress [of the case I reported], and I always need to inquire them. I feel speechless about their
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passive attitudes in tackling this problem. It seems like it is me that forced them to do this [investigating the report], and they’re very reluctant. They did a very lousy job.
5.6 CONCLUSION
This chapter has interrogated the diverse forms of challenges, tensions and concerns the Chinese queer women in this study encountered and experienced in their use of Rela and HER in Australia. These challenges represented what interviewees referred to as the ‘dark side’ of mobile lesbian social and dating and served to damage their trust in users on Rela and HER and the apps themselves. However, coping with the ‘dark side’ of their dating experiences by developing various strategies also invigorated interviewees’ digital intimacy practices. It offered them opportunities to reflect upon and transform their digital practices, enabling these practices to better fit into these women’s diasporic lives in Australia.
Confirming prior research that identified privacy and safety concerns as primary concerns among dating app users (Corriero & Tong, 2016; Lutz & Ranzini, 2017), my research also indicated that interviewees’ concerns over privacy and safety became increasingly prominent after moving to Australia. For example, a lack of familiarity with the host environment in Australia exacerbated their worries about being threatened and stalked. I analysed interviewees’ privacy and safety concerns in this context by drawing on Raynes-Goldie’s (2010) definition and differentiation between social and institutional privacy. It became clear that interviewees’ social privacy and safety concerns mainly revolved around other users’ misrepresentation, identification and harassment. Their institutional concerns spoke to surveillance, censorship, and data tracking, leaking and trading. Harassment and safety violations were identified as the most pronounced concerns regarding social privacy, while concerns over surveillance conducted by Rela and the Chinese government were the most significant issue among institutional concerns. Additionally, interviewees’ concerns around using Rela were more likely to be institutional privacy concerns, whereas their concerns regarding HER centred around matters of social privacy.
A growing body of research has paid attention to racial discrimination in the context of dating apps (Callander et al., 2016; B. Carlson, 2020; Shield, 2017, 2018a, 2018b). However, most of these studies have focused on racialised encounters among
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heterosexual and gay male users. Therefore, this chapter enriches these prior studies by examining Chinese queer women’s racialised experiences in the context of lesbian social and dating apps. My findings revealed that the most common racial prejudice interviewees experienced in this context were racial-sexual exclusions. These were mostly expressed in subtle and strategic ways, corresponding to what prior researchers have described as subtle prejudice (Callander et al., 2016; Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995). These kinds of racial prejudice — taking the forms of indirect and implicit expressions and behaviours — made it difficult for interviewees to distinguish them clearly from individual preference as though a blurred line exists there. Interviewees’ confusion and ambivalence, represented by their reliance on the term ‘felt’ when describing their experiences of prejudice, also suggests the ambiguities and complexities of racial prejudice. This chapter also demonstrated how interviewees’ own digital intimacy practices revealed that racial prejudice, in most cases, was bidirectional and multidirectional. That is, despite experiencing racial prejudice from users on Rela and HER, the women I spoke to also developed stereotypes about and biases towards women from certain racial, ethnic and cultural groups, such as white Australian women.
Discussions around Chinese sociopolitics, or what interviewees called ‘political discussions’ on controversial topics (e.g., the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests and Xinjiang re-education camps) sparked diverse forms of disputes between interviewees and their contacts on Rela and HER. Some of these even caused frictions and transformed into various types of attacks, verbal abuse and trolling, which were all perceived as ‘bullying behaviours’ by interviewees. Specifically, while developing intercultural relationships, different ‘stands’ and cultural backgrounds, as well as ‘bias’ towards/against Chinese social and political situations, were reported as triggers of disputes and conflicts. These clashes also resulted in interviewees experiencing the complete breakdown of otherwise solid friendships and romantic relationships. In this sense, patriotism also played a vital role in intensifying tensions and undermining intimate relationships, rendering intimacy unexpectedly fragile in the context of lesbian dating apps.
To mitigate the variety of concerns and challenges interviewees experienced in the context of Rela and HER, these women had developed various response strategies, including ‘ignoring and accepting’, ‘seeking social support’, ‘suspending and leaving’,
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‘switching’, ‘verifying and misrepresenting’, and ‘confronting’. These approaches reflected the variety of attitudes and actions (direct and indirect) interviewees developed towards the challenges and concerns they experienced. These strategies also suggest interviewees’ capacity for flexibly and adeptly managing the diverse challenges and problems they have encountered in their digital intimacy practices in the diasporic context.
While comparing their experiences of using Rela and HER, I also noted that most interviewees tended to associate their distasteful experiences with their use of HER. HER (2020) claims in its Community Guidelines that it aims to build up a friendly and inclusive space for users with different racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. App users, such as my interviewees, generally expect to find a tolerant environment/atmosphere within the app and a welcoming local community. However, as outlined in this chapter, interviewees commonly had experiences at odds with these expectations. Instead, their use of HER was characterised by experiences of racial prejudice, social exclusion, harassment, disputes and attacks, suggesting that HER’s in-app environment and its user community tended to be intolerant, exclusionary and somewhat problematic for interviewees to navigate. These perceived undesirable/unpleasant experiences considerably contradicted these women’s original expectations of HER, and thus contributed to the shaping of their negative impressions of the app and its user community, particularly white Australian women.
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Chapter 6: Identity Navigation and Negotiation
6.1 INTRODUCTION
Contemporary Chinese society has become increasingly open and tolerant towards LGBTQI issues, communities and cultures (Hon et al., 2005; Li, Holroyd, & Lau, 2010; Ren et al., 2019). However, it is still largely dominated by traditional Chinese cultures and values such as Confucianism, which advocates heteronormativity and filial piety (Kong, 2010). Accordingly, homosexuality is predominantly perceived as deviance from the traditional Confucian values (Ren et al., 2019) or even ‘a failure’ to one’s family and society (Poon & Ho, 2002; Tran, 1993). Despite acknowledging an increasingly accepting attitude towards LGBTQI people in present-day Chinese society, all of this project’s 25 interviewees had, to varying degrees, expressed their disappointment in the general societal environment in China by saying, for example, ‘It’s hard and a struggle to live as a queer in China.’ Specifically, the interviewees underscored the diverse challenges queer people generally face while living in China, including the lack of legal recognition and protection, and pressures and biases from their families and the broader society. Therefore, both coming to Australia, which has a relatively open and tolerant environment towards LGBTQI communities, and using lesbian social and dating apps became tactics commonly employed by interviewees to escape and contest the highly heteronormative environment they perceived in China while simultaneously gaining more sexual freedom. This chapter explores how Chinese queer women interviewed for this study negotiated their identities and same- sex desires, family values and expectations, and social lives by virtue of their experiences of living in Australia and using lesbian social and dating apps such as Rela and HER.
The following sections analyse interviewees’ diverse identity negotiation practices. First, I examine how living in Australia and using lesbian social apps carved out liberal spaces for the interviewees to freely explore and navigate their same-sex desires without being constrained by heteronormative environments and family surveillance in their home environment. Then, I elaborate on how interviewees
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deployed their overseas living experiences and diverse social media to construct dual identities, co-situate and switch between different contexts. Primarily, these tactics entailed the use of WeChat to pass a crafted heterosexual identity to their home networks (e.g., in WeChat Moments), which allowed them to avoid potential values- based clashes that may cause harm to family relationships and damage family harmony. Simultaneously, using Rela allowed them to indulge their desires for same-sex intimacy and living the kind of life they wanted. Finally, I examine how the interviewees utilised their experiences of living in Australia and using lesbian social apps to negotiate their own same-sex desires and family expectations, which are dominated by heteronormative values from their home countries. Specifically, I discuss how interviewees resisted but also fulfilled their family expectations while also paving the way for harmonious communication with their families about their sexual identities.
Overall, this chapter argues that coming to Australia opened up opportunities for Chinese queer women in this study to explore and negotiate their identities in a much freer and more autonomous way. This was enabled by the liberal and open local environment (especially towards LGBTQI cultures) and its safe and comfortable distance from their relatively conservative home environments. Meanwhile, the use of lesbian social and dating apps such as Rela also empowered these women to find opportunities to indulge their desires for same-sex intimacy, release stress, and gain support and solidarity to contest the heteronormative social and cultural contexts at home. In this sense, both living in Australia and using lesbian social apps helped interviewees realise and achieve the possibility of living a different kind of life. Importantly, however, the women I interviewed were also aware that each of these contexts (Australia and dating apps) were likely to be used only as temporary solutions to sexual-identity-based dilemmas. In particular, for interviewees who planned to go back to their home countries after finishing their overseas stay in Australia, while the transnational move certainly helped them flee their home environments and gain sexual freedom temporarily, it left the issue of negotiating sexuality in their everyday lives unresolved. For others who had gained permanent residency in Australia or planned to stay in Australia for their future life, even after coming to Australia and deeply engaging with lesbian social apps, Chinese traditional cultural norms and family values still largely constrained their approach to newly acquired freedoms for
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identity exploration and negotiation. This hindered them from managing negative emotions and achieving desired lifestyles through tendencies towards self-shaming and the like.
6.2 IDENTITY EXPLORATION AND NEGOTIATION
The combined experiences of living in Australia and using lesbian social and dating apps have played a key role in Chinese queer women’s exploration and negotiation of their identities and same-sex desires in this study. Concentrating on interviewees’ digital intimacy practices and identity exploration, this section examines how interviewees took advantage of their experiences of living in Australia and using lesbian social and dating apps to explore and navigate their same-sex desires and identities. Further, it explores how they used this situation to negotiate their fantasies of queer life and real-life struggles through managing dual identities and co-situation in different contexts.
6.2.1 Exploring and navigating identities and desires
Living in Australia enabled interviewees to freely access various LGBTQI social media platforms, such as lesbian dating app HER, and abundant LGBTQI-related information from Western social media platforms (e.g., YouTube, Facebook and Instagram) that are generally blocked in China. According to interviewees, these experiences gave them opportunities to indulge themselves with various LGBTQI- related information, enabling them to become more open-minded, interested and curious about their own sexual identities. This finding corresponds with Yu and Blain’s (2019) argument that coming to Australia opened up space for Chinese gay men’s ‘self-discovery and identity re-negotiation’. For example, Amanda described how coming to Australia resulted in ‘an unexpected journey’ of knowing herself, as the move facilitated her exploration of her same-sex identity and changed her use of dating apps. Amanda realised she was attracted to girls when she was 18, in her third year of high school in China. However, due to the lack of resources about homosexuality and heavy pressure from gao kao (the Chinese college entrance examination), Amanda had little opportunity to learn more about her sexuality:
I found I was easily attracted to girls. I roughly know that I’m probably homosexual, but it was hard for me to make sure about it, not mention to do something like a consultation.… We were not allowed to talk about this
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[homosexuality] at our school, and I have no one to speak to about my confusion. I was really struggled at that time, and thus always had some negative thoughts in my mind.… I remembered at that time the majority of the information I heard from news and other people were ‘homosexuality is deviant, abnormal, unhealthy, and needs to be treated [with medical therapies]’. I felt quite terrible, and I was afraid that if my parents know I like girls, they would definitely go crazy and mad.
Amanda was able to seek more information about homosexuality after entering university. She joined a Tencent QQ chat group (consisting of users who are interested in lesbian-related topics) to connect with other lesbians and tried to get more information. However, her university’s generally conservative environment and wider Chinese society did not open up much space for Amanda to explore the confusion she was experiencing around her lesbian identity and her curiosities about broader LGBTQI cultures. As she noted:
Though more information [about LGBTQI] can be found online at that time and even in recent years [in China], I still feel it was not enough to satisfy my need. Particularly, this kind of information was always regarded as sensitive and can be abruptly deleted at any time.
Amanda’s demand for freely searching LGBTQI information and knowing more about her sexuality was greatly satisfied by coming to Australia, some two years prior to her interview for this project. She explained, ‘A lot of LGBT activities and festivals are happening here [in Australia]. And you can find many interesting [LGBTQI] content online through YouTube and Facebook without any restriction.’ More importantly, the experience of living in Australia also transformed Amanda’s perception of how to confront her queer identity:
While at home [in China], I didn’t tell anybody that I am queer. I kept it as a secret because I felt it was embarrassing and might be humiliating sometimes, and most people would probably regard you as weird and abnormal. But here [in Australia] it’s quite normal to identify as lesbian, gay, queer, and other [different kinds of identities]. We have classmates and teachers who identify themselves as gay and lesbian and talk about this very openly in our class. Now I feel there is nothing shameful to be queer.
Other interviewees, such as Zeyin and Cathy, agreed that after living in Australia for some time and seeing how LGBTQI people identify themselves, they felt much
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freer to speak about their identities in front of other people without ‘feeling that embarrassed like before’. For example, Cathy noted, ‘I feel here [in Australia] I can be whomever I want without concerning too much about how other people think about me’. In this sense, Amanda and Cathy’s experiences of feeling freer to confront their identities and speak about them support existing findings. Kam (2020) argued that the transnational move from China to Australia enlightens Chinese queer women about the possibility of living as queer people in another society. Further, while studying rural migrant queer women in China, Liu (2019) affirmed that queer women in contemporary Chinese society commonly face struggles with emotions of self- shaming and acknowledgement of their sexualities to others. Thus, Amanda and Cathy’s experiences of keeping their same-sex identity secret in China due to perceiving it as ill-fitted for Chinese society coheres with what Liu (2019) referred to as the common experience of self-shaming among Chinese queer women. Simultaneously, interviewees’ narratives also reflected what Yu and Blain (2019) suggested was a common narrative for Chinese gay men coming to Australia. Their move signals the start of ‘a new chapter without suppressed same-sex desires’ enabled by the country’s relatively liberal environment towards LGBTQI issues and communities (Yu & Bain, 2019). For interviewees like Amanda and Cathy, coming to Australia helped them to know themselves better, especially with regards to their identities and desires. More importantly, it showed them how to live the kind of life they had always desired and imagined, as Cathy suggested, ‘feeling free and relaxed instead of pressured or ashamed to be queer [after coming to Australia].’
Becoming better acquainted with LGBTQI cultures and knowing more about their own sexualities through living in Australia also affected interviewees’ perceptions about same-sex love and intimacy. This led to a transformation of their digital intimacy practices, including their use of lesbian social and dating apps. Indeed, interviewees consistently indicated that their experiences of using dating apps in China and Australia were conspicuously different. For example, some interviewees mentioned that they had not previously used lesbian dating apps or tended to use these apps in a relatively ‘secret’ and ‘underground’ way while living in China. This is due to the social stigma associated with homosexuality (e.g., ‘self-shaming’ emotions [Liu, 2019]) and the fear of being discovered, especially by their parents and acquaintances. However, others noted that they had mainly used Chinese lesbian social apps such as
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Rela and LESDO for limited purposes, such as entertainment (watching live streaming) and relationship building (mostly friendships, see Chapter 4). They had seldom used the apps for dates and hook-ups, despite the apps being primarily known for these functions. However, living in Australia enabled interviewees to access and try out a wider range of dating apps that are generally blocked in China, such as Tinder, HER, Bumble and OkCupid, thus greatly expanding their digital intimacy practices. Motivated by the more liberal social environment and less concern over being stigmatised and surveilled (e.g., by parents), some interviewees also changed their use of dating apps from a secretive to a much more open aspect of their lives. Some also began using dating apps for seeking both casual sex and serious relationships.
Except for these changes to their intimacy practices, using lesbian dating and social apps for identity exploration was among my interviewees’ most prominent practices. For those who were uncertain about their identities and/or doubted their sexualities, lesbian social and dating apps like Rela and HER played particularly crucial roles in their identity exploration and navigation processes. Interviewees’ self- exploration practices mainly revolved around using Rela and HER to better understand their same-sex identities and desires. They did this by accessing useful information/facts, addressing curiosities, sharing personal struggles, and working through confusions around their same-sex desires and identities. For example, Amanda began using Rela, HER and other dating apps such as Tinder after coming to Australia. Rela functioned as an important space for Amanda to gain knowledge about same-sex identities and solve personal puzzles by participating in activities such as live streaming and topic discussions within the app:
I felt it’s weird that except for girls, I was indeed sometimes also attracted to boys. I’m not sure whether I’m bisexual or maybe more complex, like today I like girls but tomorrow I would become heterosexual. And then I found that many people on Rela actually have the same confusion with me.
Observing other users sharing their experiences and confusions on Rela made Amanda realise that she was not alone. More importantly, it helped her learn more about what she described as ‘the fluidity of one’s identity’ and the ‘complicated queer life’. Similarly, Zeyin affirmed Rela’s key role in helping her share and figure out her confusions about the ‘lesbian world’. In particular, Zeyin highlighted the usefulness of Rela Featured Topic in her identity navigation process:
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One of the best things about Rela is that it has a Topic section. For me, it’s more like a Q&A section.… I had been very confused with my unstable sexual orientation, and I had indeed read numerous discussions [in Rela Topic]. I can see that many people expressed the same concerns and confusions with me. From other people’s sharing, I’ve also begun to realise that it’s normal and common to have confusions, like they [users in Rela Topic] said, being queer per se is confusing. This made me feel much released.
Liu (2019) has observed that ‘realizing one’s attraction to the same sex can be overwhelming and confusing, especially for those who lack any previous knowledge of homosexuality’ (p. 10). Therefore, gaining help from online spaces such as lesbian social apps can help mitigate these women’s concerns and confusions. Amanda and Zeyin’s practices of using Rela to work out confusions around their identities underscored the crucial role played by lesbian social and dating apps in identity exploration and navigation. Interviewees reported using other social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Douyin, TikTok and Douban to attain knowledge about same-sex identities and LGBTQI cultures. However, the women in this study showed a strong preference for lesbian social apps, perceiving them as more professional, intimate and safe digital spaces (e.g., low risk of being discovered). Such perceptions align with the findings of previous studies, such as Dhoest and Szulc (2016), Gudelunas (2012) and Light (2014), that identified gay dating sites and apps as more ‘compartmentalized’ places (Dhoest & Szulc, 2016) for gay men’s sexuality exploration than general social media such as Facebook. Specifically, these gay dating platforms offer more controllable environments, allowing users to explore and express their sexual selves discreetly without the concern of ‘context collapse’ (boyd, 2011).
6.2.2 Constructing dual identities and co-situating in different contexts
After coming to Australia, motivated by the more open local sociocultural environment and/or a stronger sense of self-identity, some interviewees in this study decided to disclose their sexualities to their families, friends and broader social networks. Others chose to continue to conceal their sexualities or were still in the process of conceiving strategies for revealing their sexualities to their families and social networks due to various concerns, such as incompatibility between their family values and/or expectations and their same-sex identities, religious affiliations, potential harm to family relationships, and their own emotions of guilt and shame over
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their sexualities. For interviewees who kept their identities concealed, creating a balance between their outwardly performed heterosexual identity and their more inwardly authentic (same-sex attracted) identity became a common challenge. This section focuses on these interviewees to examine how they took advantage of the combined experience of living in Australia and using lesbian social apps to manage to construct dual identities and co-situate or switch between different contexts in their everyday lives.
Living in Australia offered interviewees the opportunity to distance themselves from home environments, which was perceived as a ‘you li tiao jian’ (advantageous condition) for strategically hiding their same-sex identities from their families, relatives, and friends in their home countries. Constructing dual identities — namely heterosexual and homosexual identities — to show different sexual selves to specific groups, particularly through social media, was reported as a common tactic to maintain this divide. Performing a heterosexual identity to families, especially parents, while keeping their same-sex identities to themselves and the people they wanted it disclosed to enabled interviewees to achieve a balance between simultaneously hiding and satisfying their same-sex desires. For example, Jiang expressed that the geographical distance between her and her parents who live in China acted as a ‘natural wall’, which gave her ample space to craft a persona with a heterosexual identity for her parents while at the same time keeping her authentic self. In this context, WeChat was reported to be the digital tool that interviewees most commonly used to craft and present dual identities. Specifically, interviewees’ practices revealed that managing different sexualities through WeChat was primarily achieved by separating their WeChat contacts into different groups and then choosing which posts are seen by which group when updating WeChat Moments. 15 Making specific Moments only viewable to specific groups to present different people with different identities and life conditions was commonly practised by interviewees. For example, Lina put her parents, relatives, teachers and other contacts she did not want her same-sex identity disclosed to in a group labelled ‘Don’t show anything’ to remind herself to hide Moments associated with LGBTQI content from this group. ‘It would be terrible if they [people in the ‘Don’t show anything’ group] see those [LGBTQI-related] Moments. They would
15 WeChat Moments, which is also called WeChat Friend Circle, is a function for users to share their own updates while also following the updates of their WeChat contacts.
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definitely think I’m abnormal and crazy’, she said. Conversely, Lina intentionally crafted Moments showing (pretend) heterosexual desire to this group:
I actually made a lot of stories. I posted Moments regularly to lead them [in ‘Don’t show anything’ group] to believe that I’m interested and eager to start a [heterosexual] relationship as they have insistently pushed and required, but it’s just I’m too busy with my coursework. In this way, they would not give me too much pressure [about opposite-sex dating and marriage]. For example, I had posted something like, ‘I saw a handsome guy on the street today. Wanna get into a relationship at that moment’, and ‘Can I get a boyfriend falling out from the sky?. I know it’s quite artificial, but I have to make it seemingly real to let them believe that I’m normal [heterosexual].
Other interviewees also shared similar experiences of separating parents and relatives from other WeChat contacts and posting Moments directed to this group to purposely show a crafted heterosexual identity and keep their families unaware of and unconcerned about their sexual orientation. During these anecdotes, living in Australia was consistently described as a point of merit that enabled interviewees to be freer and less concerned about presenting dual identities. As Jiang explained:
They [my parents] basically know my life only through my Moments and our chats. I wouldn’t do this [constructing dual identities] if I’m still living with them as it would be easy to be discovered. But now I don’t need to worry about being discovered because I’m in Australia.’
By utilising the function ‘making contents (un)viewable for specific users’ enabled by WeChat Moments, interviewees could craft their heterosexual identity and life while hiding their inwardly authentic (same-sex attracted) identity. Meanwhile, this practice also enabled these women to freely enjoy their desires for same-sex intimacy by sharing LGBTQI-related posts and interacting with their WeChat friends (e.g., Rela contacts) who could view their WeChat Moments.
Previous studies focusing on LGBTQI people’s practices for managing their sexual identities by using social media have mostly foregrounded the role of Facebook in separating audiences (contacts), primarily among gay men. For example, Madianou and Miller (2012), Christensen (2012), Duguay (2016c), and Dhoest and Szulc (2016) assert that LGBTQIs use Facebook to keep their sexual identities unknown to their families. They did so by deploying very similar strategies to those used by interviewees
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in this study, including separating family circles from general contacts and gay friends, and tailoring performances to specific groups to avoid ‘context collisions’ (Duguay, 2016c). Thus, my findings contribute to expanding existing studies by offering insights into the continuity of these practices for Chinese queer women across WeChat, who similarly utilise this application to manage dual identities by separating specific groups of contacts and crafting a heterosexual persona.
While using WeChat to manage dual identities was a common tactic for negotiating their identities and social lives, it also posed challenges and risks to interviewees, such as negative emotions like anxiety and stress, and the risk of ‘context collapse’ (boyd, 2011). As indicated by Jiang, ‘Crafting a fake me is like lying. It’s pretty stressful. There were a few times that I made mistakes inadvertently and got myself into trouble.’ The ‘mistakes’ Jiang referred to were times when her carefully separated social contexts collapsed or collided in her WeChat Moments. For instance, Jiang explained:
I went to the Pride [festival in Sydney] with my friends and posted several photos [in Moments]. I was too rush to post the picture that I forget to make it unviewable for my parents, so they were kind of suspected why I was there as I never mentioned I’m interested in those [LGBTQI] activities. They were pretty conservative and the event was unacceptable to them.
Inadvertent ‘context collapse’ in different circumstances concerning crafting dual identities, alongside the worries and anxieties these induced, became a prominent concern raised by interviewees in this study.
Notably, several studies have proposed the concept of ‘double lives’ while describing gay men’s living conditions in China. They suggest that Chinese gay men commonly keep their sexualities undisclosed in public (or during the daytime) while longing for same-sex intimacy in private (or at night) (Ho, Jackson, Cao, & Kwok, 2018; Wang, 2019; Yu & Blain, 2019; Zheng, 2015). Similarly, interviewees’ experiences of using Rela and HER also suggested that they used these apps as a key avenue to live different kinds of lives, particularly those who kept their same-sex identities mostly undisclosed. For instance, Ying indicated that she felt she had lived in two different worlds for a long time when she was ‘still in the closet’ and broadly concealed her sexual identity, being heterosexual in everyday life while being queer on lesbian social apps. ‘I had to pretend to be heterosexual when I was at the hospital
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[her workplace] or with my boyfriend’, Ying said, ‘but I changed back to queer when I was on the apps [Rela and HER].’ In this way, lesbian social and dating apps provided spaces for interviewees such as Ying to experience the kind of life they desired. This was one in which they could release and indulge themselves with same-sex desires and temporarily disconnect themselves from their real life (heterosexual life) and recharge with energy.
Interviewees used Rela and HER to meet their yearnings for same-sex love and intimacy and live a life in accordance with their desires. Constrained by concerns of ‘getting into trouble’ by jeopardising harmonious family relationships and being stigmatised, Weiwei (29, research assistant) decided to hide her sexuality: ‘Except for my Rela friends, almost no one knows my sexual orientation’. However, concealing her same-sex desire by maintaining a heterosexual identity increasingly pressured Weiwei. Empowered by the tolerance the local society showed towards LGBTQI people after coming to Australia four years earlier, Weiwei said she was very tired of ‘pretending to be heterosexual’ and extremely eager to release the longings in her heart for same-sex love and relationships. Weiwei was in this state when she found Rela, which she described as ‘a secret garden’ that allowed her to satisfy her desires for same-sex intimacy and her imagination of the lesbian world. As she explained:
When I first saw Rela from the app store, I was pretty curious how a lesbian app would look like.… After using Rela for a while, I feel it’s like a secret garden. In particular, people are so open and frank about sharing and talking about their desires, stories, and secrets in the Topic section. I was like picking up everyone’s secret and also sharing my own secrets, which I basically just buried in my heart before, as I cannot speak out them anywhere else. While I always need to be cautious [about my sexuality] in real life, I can be fully free here [on Rela].
Shujie expressed a similar opinion, stating that the use of Rela allowed her to find a way to live a life that is ‘zheng chang de’ (heterosexually ‘normal’) without giving up her same-sex desires. Unlike Weiwei’s use of Rela Topic, Shujie relied heavily on Rela Live’s streaming activities and her Rela WeChat group:
I watch [Rela] live streaming almost every night. I especially enjoyed interacting with them [live streamers and viewers], and we’ve had so many
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happy talks. Though I couldn’t be able to meet them in real life, it’s been quite enough for me.
The intimate relationships formed through and facilitated by virtual interactions through her participation in live streaming activities and Rela group chats greatly satisfied Shujie’s needs for developing same-sex intimacy with other queer women. Simultaneously, it helped her see the possibility of living a different life by maintaining what Wang (2019) referred to as a ‘heterosexual façade’. Specifically, while studying Chinese gay men’s practices around using Blued, Wang (2019) argued that Blued live streaming offered viewers an opportunity to meet their same-sex yearnings while also enabling them to sustain a ‘heterosexual façade’ in reality.
The use of Rela and HER, in tandem with other more generic social apps such as Douyin, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr, carved out spaces for interviewees to temporarily disconnect themselves from the heterosexual contexts of their everyday lives. As Ying explained, ‘It’s quite oppressed to pretend [to be heterosexual] for 24/7. Those [apps] are somewhere I can take a break.’ Weiwei also described how Rela and Douyin functioned as ‘fresh air’ that allowed her to temporarily disconnect from her life pretending to be heterosexual, which helped her regain the energy to return the next day to what she described as ‘normal life’, or the life disguised by a heterosexual persona:
It’s like every night swiping Rela and Douyin is something that I have to do. It’s somewhere I can set myself free to follow my favourite streamers and to see their updates [on Rela or Douyin]. I can live a normal [heterosexual] life as they [my parents] expected, but there has to be somewhere I can be true to myself, or at least I can do whatever I want.… They [Rela and Douyin] are like fresh air because they help me to refresh my life and then to be able to come back to normal again.
Examining Hong Kong lesbian and bisexual women’s practices of using the Chinese lesbian dating app Butterfly, Choy (2018) asserted that ‘Butterfly allows users to cosituate in the individual lesbian fantasies and heterosexual sociocultural, political, and religious contexts’ (p. 10). This argument has been echoed by my interviewees, such as Shujie, Weiwei and Ying’s experiences of using lesbian social and dating apps such as Rela and HER, which opened up possibilities for them to co-situate or switch between different social contexts (e.g., heterosexual context in public and lesbian
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context on apps/Rela WeChat groups). Tactics such as constructing dual identities also underlined the intricacies of striving to balance family expectations, social pressure and stigma, and interviewees’ own longings for same-sex intimacy in their everyday lives. In this sense, their practices for co-situating or switching between different contexts enable a sense of autonomy and freedom. Facilitated by the use of lesbian social and dating apps, interviewees mastered the autonomy to flexibly switch their identities and life patterns, and co-situate in different worlds/contexts to better manage struggles and pressures from one life model (e.g., heterosexual life ) while indulging their desires for another (e.g., same-sex life). Living in Australia empowered interviewees in this study with a similar sense of freedom to discover the possibility of living a new and different kind of life, which supports Kam’s (2020) work on Chinese queer women’s experiences of coming to Australia.
6.3 NEGOTIATING FAMILY VALUES AND EXPECTATIONS
Negotiating same-sex identities and desires alongside family values, traditions and expectations that are generally dominated by heteronormative rules (e.g., forming heterosexual marriage and reproduction), was underscored as a prominent concern and struggle that Chinese queer women in this study have consistently faced. However, coming to Australia and using lesbian social and dating apps created opportunities for them to find a way to mitigate or solve these struggles. These include resisting/contesting but also fulfilling family expectations, paving the way for their ‘coming out’, and reconciling their same-sex desires and family values.
6.3.1 Resisting heteronormative values and family expectations Moving from China to Australia was a tactic used by interviewees — either intentionally or unintentionally — to cast off the family and societal pressures they felt from their home countries to live highly heteronormative lives and avoid the stresses associated with life as a queer woman, especially one who might choose to remain unmarried. For example, May used coming to Australia as a ‘ji ce’ (tactic) to purposely distance herself from her family, particularly her parents, and her broader home society:
I don’t want to be constantly pressured into dating and getting married, so I told them [my parents] I want to go to Australia to pursue my master [degree]. In this way, I hope they can stop pushing me. Well, they basically did. I finally got released.
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However, several other interviewees indicated that their initial motivations for coming to Australia were study and migration, including accumulating overseas study experience, obtaining educational qualification(s) and gaining migration opportunities. Nonetheless, they subsequently (unexpectedly) discovered that living in Australia provided them with opportunities to explore and indulge their same-sex desires while staying away from family pressures and societal expectations from their home countries. Indeed, the clash between interviewees and their families regarding heterosexual marriage and reproduction was consistently noted as the most pronounced pressure my interviewees faced. This was not unexpected, as previous studies have also offered the common insight that, for Chinese LGBTQI people, families — and especially parents — are the most complicated and difficult struggles associated with negotiating non-heteronormative sexualities (Bie & Tang, 2016; Engebretsen, 2009; Huang & Brouwer, 2018a; Kam, 2012; Rofel, 2007; Wong, 2015).
Contemporary Chinese society is predominantly characterised by heteronormativity (Kong, 2010; Wong, 2015), with homosexuality widely considered deviant from traditional Chinese cultural values (Ren et al., 2019). The general societal environment regarding sexuality significantly affects individual family’s values and cultures. As interviewees commonly indicated, their parents expected them to live a ‘zheng chang de’ (normal) life: entering a heterosexual marriage upon reaching marital age (e.g., late 20s to early 30s) and having children shortly thereafter. Thus, marriage pressures from families arose as a recurring theme in the interviews for this study, particularly when it came to interviewees’ struggles to negotiate their same-sex identities. This echoed Liu’s (2017, 2019) findings that women’s social roles and value are more likely to be associated with heterosexual marriage and reproduction in the Chinese context. Compared to gay men, lesbian women — particularly those who have reached a marriageable age but remain unmarried — generally face more intensive surveillance and pressures from their families and broader society in contemporary China (Huang & Brouwer, 2017b; Liu, 2017; Ren et al., 2019). Perceiving ‘being urged to marry’ as oppressive and stressful, coming to Australia and turning to lesbian social apps such as Rela became a common strategy used by interviewees to extricate themselves from marriage pressure and their families’ surveillance. For example, Mingyu’s (31, restaurant owner) experience showed how using Rela and coming to
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Australia were intertwined and helped her resist familial expectation to form an opposite-sex marriage:
They [my parents and relatives] always urged me to marry when I was still in China, by asking me ‘Will we see you bring a boyfriend back when we are still alive?’. It was really annoying and oppressive, so I frequented Rela at that time.… I remembered it [Rela] has some topics like ‘How to come out to your parents’ and ‘How to handle parents’ objection towards your same-sex relationships’. I always checked out those topics, and it was quite helpful to glean some useful advice regarding coming out.… Once I saw a person sharing her experience of going to New Zealand, staying there after graduation, and then getting married to her girlfriend. She depicted a seemingly really ideal and cheerful life, and it was quite inspirational for me. I always thought that the decision I made to come here [Australia] was somewhat affected by the sharing of her as well as people who have similar experiences.
For Mingyu, coming to Australia was used as a strategy to create physical distance with her family and avoid marital pressure imposed by them. However, Rela provided a space for her to find advice, for example, on managing stress from family and coming out to parents without damaging family relationships. As Mingyu indicated, even after coming to Australia, she could not get rid of the family pressures completely, as she was consistently asked when she would bring a boyfriend back to her family:
I didn’t feel that oppressed as I felt at home [in China], because now we live quite far from each other and the stress has been indeed reduced a lot. However, I do need somewhere to release the pressure that they passed on me, and to stand with people, especially those who face the similar pressures with me, to talk about our struggles and provide support with each other.
Rela and the two Rela groups formed through QQ and WeChat that Mingyu joined, functioned as vital spaces for her to release pressures and find solidarity to resist/contest the marital pressures from her family:
We have many people sharing their experiences about how they confront the marriage expectation/requirements from their parents. We always encourage each other in our [Rela] groups to be ourselves instead of submitting to the families’ arrangements and requirements.
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At the time of participating in this interview, Mingyu said she had consulted some of her group members who had already come out to their families and decided to come out to her parents in the near future. She explained, ‘I feel like I get a lot of power from them [Rela users], and I’ve been prepared to have an open talk with them [my parents], though I know it might be very difficult’. Thus, Mingyu’s story demonstrates that lesbian social and dating apps such as Rela, along with its associated networks such as Rela groups, serve as vital spaces for Chinese queer women in this study to attain solidarity, support and power to persist with attempts to live the kind of life they desire and resist family expectations and pressures about heterosexual marriage and reproduction. This finding corresponds to Choy’s (2018) argument that the Chinese lesbian dating app Butterfly functioned as a private space for its users to ‘contest the heteronormative social, cultural, political, and religious powers in the offline context’ (p. 100). Moreover, it resonates with findings from prior research that the internet plays a crucial role in LGBTQI people connecting and forming communities, accessing information (about health and sex) and mitigating the stress of being minorities (Amichai-Hamburger & Furnham, 2007; Gauntlett, 1999; Gray, 2009; Grov, Breslow, Newcomb, Rosenberger, & Bauermeister, 2014).
6.3.2 Fulfilling family expectations through ‘staying in Australia’ While coming to Australia was used as a strategy to resist family expectations/requirements and gain sexual freedoms, becoming a permanent resident of Australia — what interviewees referred to as simply ‘staying in Australia’ — was also commonly perceived and used as a means to fulfil their families’ desires (for their children’s better future) and maintain face for their families. Importantly, I found that ‘staying in Australia’ was likely to be viewed as a ‘compensation’ for interviewees’ families due to their children’s resistance to family expectations. Sylvia elaborated on how she fulfilled her family expectation and her desired life by ‘staying in Australia’. As Sylvia recalled, after being in Australia for about a year, she came out to her parents over the phone. However, they showed anger and disappointment and refused to accept the fact that she loves women. Specifically, Sylvia’s father angrily warned her, ‘Do not mention this in front of us anymore!’ and referred to her coming out as an ‘unprecedented humiliation’ for their family.
As previously noted, homosexuality is commonly regarded as deviance and ‘a failure’ to one’s family in China (Poon & Ho, 2002; Ren et al., 2019). Like Sylvia,
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other interviewees, such as Lu and Shujie, also recounted their experiences of being told they were responsible for ‘losing the family’s face’ and the ‘shame of the family’ when they came out to their parents. For example, Lu recalled, ‘I remembered very clearly that he [my father] said he was so regretted to have me as his daughter, because I disgrace him and our family. He called it [homosexuality] as abnormal and unhealthy.’ Both Sylvia and Lu spoke about their parents caring about their family’s ‘face’ more than their daughters’ happiness. As Sylvia mentioned, ‘Even though he [my father] knew I’m lesbian, he chose to ignore it while still keeping urging me to marry [a man] and have children’. These interviewees’ experiences foreground the prominence of ‘face culture’ in the Chinese family context, particularly regarding children’s same- sex attractions and identities. In particular, Sylvia’s experience of being pushed to marry coheres with Huang and Brouwer’s (2018a, 2018b) and Ren et al.’s (2019) findings that to maintain the family’s face, some sexual minorities’ parents in China asked their children to make sacrifices. This involved entering a heterosexual marriage and living a heteronormative life, despite knowing about their children’s same-sex- attractions and identities.
Coming to Australia provided Sylvia with an opportunity to temporarily escape marital pressure — what Kam (2020) referred to as an ‘exit’ — but she still wanted to find a way to mitigate the tension between her and her parents caused by her coming out. ‘I don’t want our [family] relationships to be always like this, and I want to know how other people handle it’, she said. Lesbian social and dating apps Rela and LESDO offered a great opportunity for Sylvia to seek advice and learn tactics. ‘Gaining career success’, ‘achieving high-level financial independence’ and ‘staying overseas’ (specifically, becoming the permanent resident of the host country) are strategies that Sylvia had gleaned from these apps:
There were some topics on Rela and LESDO about how to tackle these issues, and I’ve also seen people who have come overseas speak about how they utilise their successful migration to gain their parents’ forgiveness and even turn the disadvantage [the tension within families] into advantage.
Sylvia said she was inspired by other people’s ‘successful experiences’ and decided to attempt to ‘stay in Australia’ and renegotiate with her parents about her sexuality and desired life. Sylvia’s parents’ attitudes gradually began to transform after she found a decent job and gained permanent residency in Australia. From her parents’
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perspective, staying in Australia represented ‘glory’ for their family, which enhanced the family’s ‘face’ and reputation and is worth ‘showing off’. More importantly for Sylvia, staying in Australia offset what her father called ‘humiliation’ to their family caused by her same-sex-attraction and identity. Sylvia explained, ‘Although they [my parents] thought I lost the family’s face when I told them I’m lesbian and I won’t marry a man, I finally found another way [staying in Australia] to maintain their face.’
6.3.3 Path-paving for identity communication Staying in Australia could be used as a ‘compensation’ for resisting family expectations and damaging the family’s ‘face’ by interviewees who failed to get understanding and support while disclosing their sexualities to their families. However, coming to Australia and using lesbian social and dating apps also opened up possibilities for interviewees whose sexual identities remained concealed to conceive better strategies for coming out and reaching a reconciliation with their families. In relation to disclosing their sexualities, families (and especially parents) remained the most pronounced concern for most interviewees in this study, particularly how to communicate their identities to their parents in a ‘peaceful’ and ‘harmonious’ way that would cause minimum harm to family relationships. As Bao (2018) illustrated, it is ‘a matter of politics’ for Chinese LGBTQI people to decide when to disclose or conceal their identities and to whom. Yu and Blain (2019) have also emphasised that ‘coming out’, especially to parents, remains a matter of ‘unspeakable pain’ for Chinese gay men, who deploy multiple strategies for survival. Similarly, for my interviewees who kept their sexualities hidden from their families, finding appropriate approaches to communicate with their families about their sexualities was a significant and consistent concern. However, the experience of living in Australia and using lesbian social and dating apps helped them conceive strategies and pave the way for future identity negotiation with their families and achieving some kind of reconciliation.
Most interviewees perceived coming out as a difficult and ongoing process and feared potential repercussions (e.g., damage to family relationships). Consequently, the women in this study preferred to take the ‘gradual penetration’ approach; that is, a strategy that involves gradually, strategically, subtly and carefully letting parents guess or know about their sexual identities to pave the way for their future coming out. Within this process, living in Australia provided an advantageous condition for interviewees to tactically show Australia’s open and inclusive LGBTQI cultures to
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their families through sharing related news and events. For example, Amanda and Kathy both indicated that living in Australia provided ‘enough space’ for them to sound out their parents by intentionally sharing some LGBTQI-related news. As Amanda described:
Initially their attitudes were pretty critical, and they also questioned why I always pay attention to these things. However, as I oftentimes sent them this kind of information [LGBTQI news], it seems like they have grown accustomed to it and began to be more open to this information.’
Kathy also noted:
I can see that they’ve changed their attitudes towards lesbian, same-sex marriage, and surrogacy a lot after the unremitting efforts I made through sharing the [LGBTQI] information, like showing some events I’ve joined, such as our university’s LGBT activities and the local queer festival. I just want to break the stereotypes they’ve developed towards queer and let them know that being queer is very normal in Australia. I feel like if I come out to them after I obtain my [master] degree, find a good job, and finish the migration process or maybe have more achievements, they would be more willing to accept it [the fact that I’m queer].
Lesbian social apps like Rela, coupled with Rela groups formed through other social media platforms such as WeChat, offered spaces for interviewees to collect useful information to mitigate their own concerns and figure out confusions around coming out, but also to gain social support for these approaches to information sharing back at home. As Kathy indicated, she learned through Rela Topic that a necessary condition for ‘successful coming out’ is ‘gaining more achievements’, which coincides with the statements from Mingyu and Sylvia earlier in this section about the importance of achievements as ‘compensation’ for their families. Kathy had also found some useful strategies for coming out through Rela Live. ‘Some live streamers are like experts in this field [of coming out],’ she said, ‘as they provided many useful suggestions for users’ different situations. I had learned a lot through watching live streaming.’ In this regard, Rela was instrumental as a space for interviewees to gather with peers to share the challenges and struggles they faced and also advice through collective wisdom, which helped interviewees like Kathy find appropriate strategies for their own coming out.
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Interviewees also described finding useful resources for communicating with their parents on Rela-related official channels/accounts on WeChat, Weibo and Douyin, for example, in the short videos and articles provided on those channels. Sara indicated that her parents ‘probably’ might have guessed that she is ‘different’, even though they had not openly talked to her about it yet:
It’s kind of embarrassing for us to have a coming out talk. My parents are quite conservative and traditional and don’t know how to communicate this kind of problem with me, and I also don’t know how to speak to them about this.
Once, Sara saw Rela’s WeChat account publishing a short video titled ‘Mom I want to tell you…’, which documented the words Rela collected from its users regarding what they wanted to say to their parents to gain their support and understanding. Sara was motivated by the video and attempted to communicate with her parents about her sexuality. ‘That video really touched my heart as there are some very similar words that I want to say to my parents’, Sara said, ‘so I shared the video with them.’ Subsequently, Sara also began to share some same-sex-related content with her parents. Despite hardly receiving replies from her parents regarding this kind of information, Sara thought it was a good opportunity to let her parents know more about her mind through the online resources:
At least they know what I am thinking even though I didn’t speak it out in a direct way, and it would not be that hard for them to accept my identity if I formally come out to them in the future.
Notably, from Sara’s perspective, sending through LGBTQI-related information through WeChat to her parents and thereby giving them some hints about her sexuality constitutes an ‘informal’ way of coming out, while directly speaking to her parents about her sexuality is a ‘formal’ way of coming out. This perspective differs from the general understanding of the term ‘coming out’, which indicates the unique understandings towards ‘coming out’ in the Chinese family context developed by Chinese queer women in this study. It also echoed interviewees’ perception that paving the way for the ‘formal coming out’ by taking the ‘gradual penetration’ strategy (e.g., sending online resources) is necessary and important.
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6.4 CONCLUSION
The combined experience of coming to Australia and using lesbian social and dating apps is essential in Chinese queer women’s identity exploration, navigation and negotiation practices in this study. Coming to and living in Australia opened up an opportunity for interviewees to experience a more liberal and multicultural environment, especially towards LGBTQI communities and cultures (Yu & Blain, 2019). Without being constrained by their home environments — which were mainly considered conservative and highly heteronormative — and families’ surveillance, the interviewees gained greater freedom to explore and navigate their same-sex desires and identities. More importantly, living in Australia, coupled with using lesbian social and dating apps, and especially Rela, offered opportunities for interviewees to discover the possibility of living a life that satisfies their same-sex desires while simultaneously presenting an expected heterosexual self to their families.
As discussed in Chapter 4, compared to the active participation in Rela’s activities, Chinese queer women interviewed for this study had a relatively superficial engagement with HER due to a variety of factors. One key factor was that their social media habits had been significantly shaped by their long-term experience of using Chinese social media, familiarity and affinity with Chinese social media technologies, and embedded sociocultural and language contexts. This largely explains why these women’s digital intimacy practices, including connection building (see Chapter 4) and identity navigation and negotiation, primarily revolved around Rela. WeChat and Rela together played crucial roles in helping interviewees with constructing dual identities and co-situating or switching between different contexts and life patterns. For example, WeChat helped interviewees present/perform their crafted heterosexual personas — or a ‘heterosexual façade’ (Wang, 2019) — while also maintaining inward authentic selves by virtue of living in Australia. However, Rela served as a space in which they could temporarily disconnect from heterosexual life models; indulge their desires and imaginations for same-sex intimacy, love and relationships; and offer useful information for solving their confusions and mitigating their concerns about their sexual attractions and identities.
Corresponding to previous studies (Bie & Tang, 2016; Huang & Brouwer, 2018a; Kam, 2012; Rofel, 2007), family was considered the most prominent concern by Chinese queer women in this study when it came to disclosing one’s sexual identity.
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Interviewees mostly noted that their family values, traditions and expectations are dominated by heteronormative values (e.g., forming heterosexual marriage and reproducing to carry on the family line), which they perceived as incompatible with their same-sex attractions and identities. Thus, coming to Australia offered interviewees the opportunity to manage family surveillance and pressures flexibly, and thereby resist family expectations of entering heterosexual marriage and reproduction. Specifically, ‘staying in Australia’ through gaining permanent residency was viewed and employed as a strategy by interviewees to compensate for their resistance to family expectations and the damage to families’ ‘face’ caused by their same-sex identities. Thus, ‘staying in Australia’ was also used to fulfil their family expectations for children’s career and life success, which was perceived as maintaining the family’s ‘face’. Rela and Rela WeChat groups served as important spaces for interviewees to release pressures, attain support and find solidarity to resist and contest the heteronormative cultures and values in their home societies by sharing struggles and advice on negotiating same-sex desires with families. The use of these queer digital tools also enabled interviewees to realise the possibility of living a different kind of life that they have long desired and imagined. More importantly, both coming to Australia and using lesbian social apps carved out spaces for interviewees to conceive strategies and pave the way for their identity-based communications with their families.
For interviewees in this study, the experience of living in Australia provided them with different opportunities and possibilities for identity negotiation. For example, for interviewees such as Sylvia and Lu, who had gained permanent residency in Australia, ‘staying in Australia’ was a ‘permanent’ approach. It empowered them with the freedom and autonomy to manage marital and reproduction pressures from their families and the Chinese society and simultaneously to pursue their desired life. However, the other interviewees were mostly aware that living in Australia was more likely to be a temporary strategy to help them elude pressure from their families and home societies. This was particularly the case for the student interviewees who were uncertain about their migration opportunities and outcomes and/or those who planned to return to China after graduation. As a temporary strategy, the issue of negotiating sexuality in their everyday lives remained unresolved. That is, after returning to China, they still need to face similar (or even greater) pressures from their families and the broader society about their same-sex attractions and identities and resistant behaviours
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to the heteronormative values. Similarly, interviewees also acknowledged using lesbian social and dating apps as a temporary strategy that enabled them to disconnect from the heterosexual context and switch to another life pattern rather than an alternative to their everyday life in the real world. Nonetheless, as shown in this chapter, interviewees showed their gratification and appreciation towards the experience of living in Australia and using dating apps, as it offered them opportunities to conceive better strategies for identity communication with their parents. That is, the combination of lesbian app use and residing in Australia became a genuine path-paving experience for interviewees.
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Chapter 7: Conclusion
7.1 MAJOR RESEARCH FINDINGS: CHINESE QUEER WOMEN’S DIGITAL INTIMACY PRACTICES IN AUSTRALIA
Building upon previous studies, this research contributes to expanding the largely under-researched area of queer women’s digital dating, particularly in the non- Western and cross-cultural context. This research brings to light many aspects of queer women’s mobile dating and social practices that have rarely been discussed in prior work. This section highlights the primary findings of this research, which have been presented in Chapters 3–6. Chapter 3 documented findings from the walkthroughs of Rela and HER, examining the two apps’ respective development journeys, technological infrastructures, and embedded social and cultural representations, thereby answering Research Questions 1 and 2:
• What are the primary features of Rela’s and HER’s development trajectories and technological infrastructures?
• How have social and cultural contexts influenced Rela’s and HER’s development and technical design?
Chapters 4–6 answer Research Questions 3 and 4:
• How do Chinese women use Rela and HER in Australia?
• How does using Rela and HER impact Australian-based Chinese women’s diasporic lives?
By presenting the interview findings regarding Chinese queer women’s experiences of and practices for using Rela and HER in Australia alongside the impact of use on their everyday diasporic lives, these chapters reinforced the crucial roles of social and cultural contexts in these women’s digital intimacy practices.
Chapter 3 provided the walkthrough reflection of Rela and HER, depicting and examining the two lesbian social and dating apps’ development and transition trajectories, primary technological features, and how social and cultural contexts constantly influenced their growth paths. While Rela is known for its multifunctional design, HER is characterised by its relatively minimalistic technical design. This
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discrepancy in technological design reflects the social media design logics — or more broadly, the digital media ecosystems — within the different social and cultural contexts of China and the US/UK.
Chapter 3 also demonstrated that both HER and Rela underwent significant struggles and difficulties during their development processes, which became key motivations for each app’s eventual transformation. However, there are palpable differences between the two apps’ transition trajectories and motivations behind their changes. HER’s transition from a Grindr-like model to a broad-ranging community- oriented digital service was primarily driven by the evolution of gender and sexual identity (e.g., broader acceptance of the diversity and fluidity of gender and sexual identity categories) in the global context (Lasher, 2017); competitors in the mobile dating market; and its own goals for further business achievements. Rela’s change to consistently strengthen its multifunctionality and surveillance mechanism was also driven by its business goals and competitors (mainly in the Chinese lesbian dating app market), but most importantly, it needed to fit within the Chinese government’s rules and requirements. Therefore, the analysis of Rela’s and HER’s transitional development in this chapter suggests that this dichotomy of driving forces indicates the extent to which social and cultural environments have been instrumental in shaping Rela’s and HER’s development trajectories and technological infrastructures.
In terms of their platform governance systems, HER establishes a more open, liberal and relaxed digital environment towards sex, love and relationships than Rela. However, its user interactions and engagements in the in-app activities available seem to remain superficial, with limited deep communications and connections being formed and developed within the app. Conversely, despite building a more constrained in-app environment, represented by the ubiquitous censorship warnings, reminders and strict censorship policies, Rela remains an important space for its users to facilitate in- depth communications and interactions (e.g., in Rela Live and Rela Topic). This contrast between Rela and HER highlights the dynamic interplay between sociocultural contexts, app development and user practices. Specifically, HER users, particularly those who have grown up in the Western context, consistently have the freedom to access sexual content without being hindered by online censorship. Thus, they may not regard HER as a space that has special meanings to them (e.g., in accessing information and support), but more likely an app similar to other lesbian
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social platforms they have used. However, Rela users, most of whom are from mainland China, have not enjoyed the equivalent freedoms to access same-sex content due to the government’s heavy censorship of sex and LGBTQI-related content. These users have limited opportunities to satisfy their same-sex curiosities and desires. Thus, as seen in Chapter 3, the advent of Rela has more special meanings to its Chinese female users, as the app has become one of the few places Chinese women can explore and engage in discussions on lesbian-related topics, talk about their concerns and confusions around same-sex issues, and seek help and support from each other.
The walkthrough examination of Rela and HER in Chapter 3 also indicated that despite being developed in different social and cultural contexts, Rela and HER both foregrounded the concept of ‘community’ through their technical features, such as Rela Live, Rela in-app activities (e.g., ‘Cloud Music Concert’ and ‘Pick Your Favorite Rela Live Idol’), HER Communities, HER Events, and their platform policies and developmental processes. Realising lesbian, bisexual and queer women’s needs to form communities and develop multiple connections were the key drivers for the two apps to emphasise their community building (Asselin, 2020; Bains, 2018; Qianbidao, 2016). This indicates that changes within Rela’s and HER’s technological affordances have been intertwined with and reflective of their users’ changing demands and practices around mobile lesbian dating and socialising while also underlining the importance of community building for queer women in the digital social and dating environment.
Chapter 4 examined Chinese queer women’s practices for building and maintaining diverse connections with queer women’s networks both in their homeland (mostly mainland China) and the Australian host society, as mediated through Rela and HER. Previous studies highlighted social media’s important role in helping diasporic groups maintain connections with their transnational families and friends. However, the research focus has been primarily placed on generic social chat and networking apps, such as WeChat, QQ and Facebook (Dhoest & Szulc, 2016; Lu, 2017; Zhao, 2019). Existing dating app research has rarely examined how dating apps are used to facilitate transnational connection building and development, particularly for same-sex attracted women. Therefore, it was significant to find out that lesbian social apps, such as Rela, were instrumental in Chinese queer women’s practices for building and maintaining connections with Chinese queer women’s communities in the
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transnational context, through multiple in-app activities such as live streaming, topic discussion and cross-platform practices (e.g., Rela WeChat groups). While this finding highlights the uniqueness of Chinese queer women’s mobile lesbian social and dating practices, it also corroborates that Rela’s endeavours facilitate community building (as discussed in Chapter 3) have, to some extent, paid off.
Chapter 4 also demonstrated that Chinese queer women’s connection-building practices revolved primarily around the Chinese apps Rela and WeChat, due to the strong sense of familiarity, closeness and emotional attachment developed with Chinese social media platforms, and the cultural and language contexts embedded within these digital tools. However, these women engaged superficially with HER and other Western social apps (e.g., WhatsApp and Facebook) in their digital dating practices due to cultural differences and a lack of familiarity with Western social media. Similar to sticking with Chinese apps, Chinese queer women in this study also mostly showed strong preferences for networking with their compatriots in Australia. For example, they maintained strong ties with queer women from the same/similar ethnic, racial and cultural groups but keeping relatively loose and weak contact with queer women from non-Chinese ethnic backgrounds. A wide array of factors played into this situation, including the ease of interacting with co-nationals versus the difficulties (e.g., mainly cultural and language barriers) and social exclusions interviewees felt they experienced when networking with queer women from non-Chinese ethnic communities. Chapter 4 also revealed that the connection building and maintenance practices primarily among Chinese queer women’s communities mediated through Rela and WeChat, greatly benefited Chinese queer women in this study. For example, they enriched their diasporic lives in Australia by relieving loneliness and boredom, providing companionship and emotional support, and offering a sense of belonging while residing in the host environment.
The type of ‘Chinese-centric’ platform use and queer social networking practices developed by Chinese queer women in this study, as noted in Chapter 4, indicate the central role of homeland belongings and attachments in these women’s mobile lesbian social practices while residing in the host environment. This finding significantly differs from the internationally oriented, diverse ethnic and cultural queer networks that Chinese gay men in Australia have established, as suggested by Yu and Blain (2019). However, it does echo findings from prior diasporic studies, particularly on
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Chinese diasporas, in terms of their dependent use of Chinese social media and the strong connections maintained with their transnational family and friend networks. In this way, my research findings on how Chinese queer women’s diasporas use social media for social networking and connection building shows more affinity with diasporic media research than existing LGBTQI and dating app studies.
While Chapter 4 underscores the positive impacts of using Rela and HER for Chinese queer women in this study, Chapter 5 uncovers the concerns and struggles these women experienced in their mobile social and dating practices, together with the strategies they developed to cope with these issues. Interviewees’ concerns mostly coalesced around unwanted experiences, including privacy violations, racial prejudice, attitudinal conflicts and what interviewees perceived as ‘bullying’ behaviours in the context of lesbian social and dating apps. The analysis of interviewees’ attitudes and responses to these encounters indicated that they viewed them as undesired and disruptive to their digital dating experiences. These experiences even led to the interviewees’ reduced trust and heightened reluctance to use lesbian social apps. Yet most interviewees showed a degree of acceptance regarding these undesirable incidents/user behaviours. They had not only grown accustomed to these challenges in the context of lesbian dating apps but also tended to normalise them as part of their digital intimacy practices.
Chapter 5 drew upon Raynes-Goldie’s (2010) differentiation of ‘social privacy’ and ‘institutional privacy’ and classified interviewees’ privacy and safety concerns regarding their use of Rela and HER into these two categories. Interviewees’ social privacy concerns were more associated with their use of HER, involving misrepresentation, identification and harassment by their dating app encounters. Their institutional privacy concerns tended to revolve around their use of Rela, including surveillance and censorship, potential data tracking and analysis, and information leaking and trading. Due to the fear of their private information being monitored by the Chinese government, which may cause trouble for their future career building and development in China, interviewees were most concerned with Rela’s censorship system. Living in Australia was another factor that significantly exacerbated interviewees’ safety concerns. Most interviewees were concerned about not being capable of properly handling legitimate risks to their safety due to a lack of familiarity with the social systems, geography, cultures and people in Australia, which were
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magnified by concerns about language barriers. Thus, these findings indicate that social and cultural contexts, such as the Chinese censorship system and the Australian social environment, played crucial roles in aggravating Chinese queer women’s privacy and safety concerns associated with their use of lesbian dating apps.
Chapter 5 also highlighted interviewees’ encounters with racial prejudice and discrimination, particularly in the context of forming interracial and intercultural relationships on lesbian social apps. Although most interviewees experienced subtle prejudice, the COVID-19 outbreak and its spread to Australia became a trigger for these women experiencing greater Sinophobia and racial discrimination articulated in more overt and aggressive forms. In conjunction with the diverse forms of social exclusions interviewees experienced (as per Chapter 4), these race-based prejudices significantly reduced the interviewees’ desire and motivation to interact with women from non-Chinese ethnic, racial and cultural groups and integrate into the multicultural Australian society. However, while it was quite common for interviewees to underline their experiences of being subjected to prejudice, they tended to overlook, downplay or defend their own similarly discriminatory practices by claiming or justifying them as merely individual preferences. In this sense, interviewees’ descriptions of their dating app experiences made it clear that racial prejudice in this context is mostly bidirectional and even multidirectional. This echoes Chen and Liu’s (2019) contention that prejudices in the context of Chinese heterosexual diaspora’s dating app practices are not unidirectional. Some of these bidirectional racial biases originate from the social and cultural environments in which they were raised (e.g., media discourses in China). Others were formed or aggravated by the exclusions and prejudices they experienced while living overseas.
Chapter 5 also uncovered the disputes, frictions, tensions and breakdown of relationships encountered by interviewees in the context of intercultural encounters on lesbian social apps. These were mostly triggered by ‘political discussions’ around Chinse sociopolitics, such as the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests and Xinjiang re- education camps. Patriotism played an instrumental role in intensifying conflicts and undermining even long-established intimacy/relationships, especially when interviewees encountered criticism and attacks against their homelands on Rela and HER. This chapter showed that discrepancies between beliefs, political standpoints, education and cultural backgrounds gave rise to disputes and collisions, thereby
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reinforcing the important role of social and cultural contexts in shaping user perceptions, attitudes and behaviours in mobile dating settings.
Chapter 5 concluded with a summary of the various strategies that interviewees developed to cope with the concerns and challenges encountered while using lesbian social and dating apps. These included ‘ignoring and accepting’, ‘seeking social support’, ‘suspending and leaving’ dating apps, ‘switching’ to other social media platforms (e.g., WeChat), and ‘confronting’ other users. These tactics, alongside interviewees’ attitudes, indicated that Chinese queer women’s practices for using Rela and HER are highly adaptive, resilient and responsive. Consequently, interviewees’ attempts to actively tackle challenges posed by their use of Rela and HER created opportunities for them to reflect on and transform their digital social/dating practices, which enabled them to fit more seamlessly into their diasporic lives.
Chapter 6 explored how Chinese queer women interviewed for this study navigated and negotiated their identities, same-sex desires and pressures from family expectations to live a heteronormative life, and their experiences of coming to and living in Australia and using lesbian social and dating apps such as Rela and HER. Most interviewees indicated that the combined migratory experience and use of lesbian social apps opened up possibilities for them to discover and experience a different kind of life. Specifically, interviewees from mainland China consistently mentioned positive changes in their everyday lives after coming to Australia. That is, rather than hiding and repressing their curiosities, desires and confusions about same-sex attractions, love and relationships as they did while living in China, interviewees were more willing to face them and attempt to find solutions to address these issues. This transition indicated that living away from their homelands (including families and social environments) and residing in Australian society, with its more inclusive cultures and policies towards LGBTQI communities, empowered these Chinese women with greater freedoms and opportunities to positively reflect upon and confront their desires and identities, as well as tensions with their families.
The findings in Chapter 6 that show Rela carved out a vital space for Chinese queer women in this study to glean and access useful information to address their curiosities, share confusions and doubts, and seek advice and emotional help, echoed the finding in Chapter 3 that Rela’s Live and Topic sections served as important spaces for its users to seek various information and support. In particular, compared to other
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social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, interviewees perceived lesbian social apps such as Rela as more professional and controllable spaces for accessing lesbian-related information and exploring and expressing their sexual selves discreetly without the concern of ‘context collapse’ (boyd, 2011). This indicates the indispensable role Rela played in interviewees’ same-sex digital social practices and the deep trust these women have developed towards the Chinese lesbian app.
Chapter 6 also suggested that living in Australia and using lesbian social apps offered opportunities for interviewees to craft dual identities, co-situate in different contexts, and switch between different life patterns. Enabled by Moments and group separation functions on WeChat, interviewees managed to create a balance between performing a heterosexual identity and tailoring specific performances to WeChat contacts within different groups. Meanwhile, interviewees could still satisfy their desires for same-sex intimacy by turning to lesbian social apps. By using lesbian social apps, interviewees mastered the practice of flexibly switching their identities and life status/modes while co-situating in different worlds/social contexts. In this way, they could better manage the struggles from one kind of life (e.g., perceived heterosexual life) while satisfying desires for another type of life (e.g., same-sex life). These findings support both Choy’s (2018) conclusions on Hong Kong lesbians’ co-situation experiences through Butterfly, and Blackwell et al.’s (2015) results on gay men’s co- situation practices mediated through Grindr. Notably, while some interviewees expressed feeling fatigued from crafting dual identities and shifting between different contexts and life patterns, others gained excitement from co-situation practices and even ‘got addicted to’ living with dual identities. This paradoxical mindset indicated that despite having the desire to experience different lives, some Chinese queer women were so constrained and affected by Chinese social and cultural norms (e.g., heteronormative family values) that they actually preferred the everyday labour associated with hiding their sexualities from their families.
Findings presented in Chapter 6 also indicated that although living in Australia and using lesbian social apps were utilised to circumvent and contest pressures from families and societies (e.g., regarding forming a heterosexual marriage), Chinese women in this study were mostly aware that these tactics could be used merely for short-term purposes. While the transnational move from their homelands to Australia indeed helped them temporarily flee their home environments and gain more sexual
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freedom, it left the issue of negotiating sexuality in their everyday lives somewhat unresolved. In particular, interviewees who were going back to their home countries after finishing their overseas stay would still face the same (or similar) issues and pressures from their families and home societies. Nevertheless, most interviewees expressed their happiness and satisfaction in deploying these tactics as temporary approaches and preferred to take a positive view of the outcomes that may be triggered for their future life.
7.2 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RESEARCH
By exploring the sociocultural aspects of the technological infrastructures of lesbian social and dating apps Rela and HER, and Chinese queer women’s practices around using these two apps, this research contributes to understanding lesbian dating apps and their user practices, and digital media use within queer diasporas.
First and foremost, this research contributes to expanding knowledge of queer women’s dating app cultures. However, it is also important for the attention it pays to non-Western dating apps and the use of these technologies in cross-cultural settings. Compared to studies focusing on gay men and heterosexual-oriented dating apps and their user practices, research on lesbian dating apps and queer women’s digital dating practices have been much less voluminous (Ferris & Duguay, 2020; Tang, 2017). In this regard, this research adds more knowledge to the understudied domain of queer women’s dating app use. For example, it focuses on Chinese queer women’s ‘Chinese- centric’ platform use and queer networking practices; their normalisation of undesirable and disruptive practices and the adaptive and resilient strategies they developed to tackle these challenges; and these women’s flexible use of social media for identity negotiation and management in their digital intimacy practices in the cross- cultural context. Second, a vast majority of the existing studies on cultures of dating app use have concentrated on English-language dating apps (e.g., Tinder and Grindr) and user groups in Western contexts, particularly in the US, the UK and Australia (Albury & Byron, 2016; Ranzini & Lutz, 2017; Zervoulis et al., 2020). However, there has been limited scholarly attention on dating apps and user groups outside this setting. Therefore, this research contributes to enriching the field of non-Western dating app studies, particularly Chinese social and dating app research, which has shown an uptick in publications since around 2018, particularly on Blued, the burgeoning Chinese gay
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social app (Miao & Chan, 2020a, 2020b; Wang, 2019, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). Finally, only a small number of studies in the dating app research area have examined users’ dating apps practices in diasporic or cross-cultural contexts. Further, none of these studies has thus far examined queer women’s diasporic digital dating practices. Therefore, this research provides insights into understanding queer women’s digital dating practices in the transnational and cross-cultural context generally, and contributes to understanding how Chinese queer women use lesbian social apps in the Australian context specifically. Particularly, the research findings highlight that both Chinese and Australian sociocultural contexts played pivotal roles in shaping Chinese queer women’s perceptions and practices for digital intimacy. Furthermore, albeit physically leaving and geographically far from their home countries (e.g., China), these women’s digital dating and social practices in Australia were still deeply affected by Chinese social and cultural values and norms.
This research contributes to enriching theories in media, communication and cultural studies and their application in studying queer women’s digital intimacy practices. As mentioned in the Introduction chapter, the current research imbalance in the digital dating research domain, caused by the overemphasis on gay male and heterosexual digital dating studies and the neglect of lesbian digital dating research, has resulted in a shortage of knowledge in relation to women’s (and especially queer women’s) digital dating cultures and thus hindered theoretical development in this area more broadly. This research extends the application of the existing theories, such as the social and institutional privacy theory (Raynes-Goldie, 2010) and the subtle and blatant prejudice theory (Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995), to study queer women’s digital dating practices in the cross-cultural context, and thus add new perspectives and knowledge to these theoretical frameworks and their application in different research contexts.
This research offers insights into understanding Chinese queer female diasporic communities and their digital intimacy practices in Australia, thereby providing useful information for policymakers and experts in the population and immigration fields in Australia. Prior research has highlighted that Chinese LGBTQI people (mainly gay men and queer women) migrate to Australia to pursue the kind of life they desire because of Australia’s more inclusive social environment and friendly policies towards LGBTQI communities (Kam, 2020; Yu & Blain, 2019). As China has become the
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second-largest migrant community in Australia (Home Affairs, 2020), Chinese migrants have played crucial roles in facilitating social and cultural development in Australia. Apart from Chinese queer women’s use of dating apps, this study also highlighted how this group’s digital intimacy practices are deeply connected to Chinese social media such as WeChat, and Chinese queer women’s communities in both China and Australia simultaneously. In this sense, findings from this research offer further insights into how Chinese social media can be used within the context of Chinese diasporic communities’ everyday lives (e.g., finding survival information and forming social networks) to facilitate integration into Australian society.
The walkthrough analysis of Rela and HER and the in-depth exploration of their user practices also offer practical indications for the designers and developers of dating and social apps, particularly lesbian social apps. For example, users’ unwanted, unpleasant and dissatisfactory experiences, as well as concerns around their use of Rela and HER (as per Chapters 3 and 5), can offer inspiration for app developers to improve their app design and platform governance approaches. Users of Rela and interviewees in this study both expressed their dissatisfaction with Rela’s censorship system, perceiving it as obscure and unclear when it comes to censoring specific content. This finding can help Rela designers address the problem regarding the app’s governance and surveillance system. Also, for Western dating app developers who want to target Chinese users, this study sheds light on Chinese users’ specific demands and common practices for using lesbian social apps and offers an understanding of how these tools interplay with specific sociocultural contexts.
7.3 RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS, EMERGING QUESTIONS AND LIMITATIONS
Based on the experience of conducting this research, I propose several topics that have not been explored in the dating app research fields, hoping to provide some indications for future research. Prior work has suggested that gay male migrants prefer to form more international social networks, comprising LGBTQI friends from diverse ethnocultural groups (Dhoest, 2016a, 2018; Yu & Blain, 2019). However, my research revealed that the Chinese queer women interviewed for this study preferred to interact with queer women with same/similar ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds (e.g., Chinese or Asian women). They showed little interest in networking with queer women from non-Chinese or non-Asian communities. Indeed, factors such as cultural
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differences, language barriers, and perceived prejudicial and exclusionary experiences have worked together to shape Chinese queer women’s preferences around digital networking. However, given the qualitative nature of this study and its focus on a small group of Chinese queer women, this study’s results cannot be generalised. Therefore, it is suggested that future studies place more focus on the interracial and intercultural communications and interactions between Chinese queer women and queer women from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. One example of a question emerging from this project is, ‘How do Chinese queer women (in Australia or other countries) develop connections with queer women from non-Chinese ethnic, racial, and cultural groups (e.g., diasporic and local groups) in the digital dating context?’
This research has mainly examined users’ experiences around using lesbian social and dating apps. However, the walkthrough examination and interviews revealed that in addition to using Rela and/or HER, the women in this study generally engaged with a wide range of social media platforms, including WeChat (e.g., ‘Shake’ and ‘People Nearby’), Douyin, TikTok, Weibo, Uber, Tinder and Momo. While originally built for various other purposes, these apps are oriented around real-time location-based design, enabling users to search LGBTQI-related content and seek same-sex encounters and potential dates. This multi-platform use, or what has been referred to as ‘multimodal connectedness’ (Schroeder, 2010), could be developed into another research topic: ‘How do queer women use general social media platforms for dating and social practices?’
The limitations of this research mainly include three aspects. First, the findings of this project only represent a small group of Chinese queer women’s practices and cannot be generalised due to the study’s qualitative approach. Therefore, more quantitative studies based on larger volumes of data — such as a questionnaire-based investigation of queer women’s digital intimacy practices and the textual analysis of users’ discussions (or public discourses) within lesbian dating apps (e.g., topics) and around lesbian dating apps across other social media platforms (e.g., Weibo, Twitter, TikTok) — are needed to provide a more thorough understanding of users’ perceptions, sentiments and experiences of mobile lesbian dating and socialising. Second, this project mainly focused on the user perspective by conducting interviews with users of Rela and HER. Although the perspectives from app developers and designers have been included in this study by conducting the walkthrough analysis of online materials
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(e.g., news articles and industry reports) related to Rela and HER, these are mainly second-hand/indirect information and do not provide all the answers to the questions arising from studying Rela and HER. For example, while interviewees perceived HER as ‘lazy’ and ‘reluctant’ in responding to their reports (reporting undesirable behaviours and users), it is not known exactly how HER attends to users’ reports or how their content moderation team works to address similar issues. As this project did not conduct any interviews with Rela’s and HER’s official teams, it somewhat failed to get the direct and timely information about Rela and HER nor multiple perspectives to understand the experiences and practices (especially those unexpected and unpleasant ones) reported by users associated with their app experiences. Thus, future research could include perspectives from both the users and app developers, thereby providing a more comprehensive analysis of dating apps. Third, the 25 Chinese queer women interviewed for this study were mostly from the 19–34 years age bracket. Of these 25 interviewees, 14 were aged 20–25 years. Consequently, the research findings have potential limitations in understanding digital dating experiences among Chinese queer women across different age groups. As Chinese queer women of different ages may have varying experiences and practices for using lesbian dating apps, it would be important to examine the practices among Chinese women outside the age range in this research.
By exploring a group of Chinese queer women’s experiences of and practices for using lesbian social and dating apps Rela and HER in Australia, this research highlighted the dynamic and colourful nature of these women’s digital intimacy practices in the cross-cultural context. Chinese queer women in this study have attained joys through networking and building connections with diverse queer women’s communities, co-situating in different contexts and switching between different life patterns enabled by lesbian social apps. They also experienced various struggles, collisions and concerns in their digital dating and social practices. Social and cultural contexts were found to play instrumental roles in these women’s practices for using lesbian social apps. For instance, these contexts shaped their dependence on and preferences for using Chinese social media, particularly the combined use of Rela and WeChat, and networking with Chinese queer women. Further, their concerns about potential safety issues due to a lack of familiarity with the Australian host environment were exacerbated, which empowered them to craft diverse strategies for negotiating
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their same-sex desires and family pressures. This research project contributes to the knowledge on lesbian social and dating apps, queer diasporas and their digital intimacy practices.
As already discussed in this thesis, various situations happening around the world during this study, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and some sociopolitical events (e.g., Hong Kong protests), became triggers or factors in Chinese queer women’s experiences of racial exclusion, disputes and conflicts. This subsequently contributed to the interviewees’ reluctance to use Western dating apps and shaped their pinions towards Western platforms and their user groups. However, recent changes to some Western dating platforms in response to the current global environment also caught these Chinese women’s interest, and they showed more willingness to embrace some of these new features. For example, to cope with the disruption to face-to-face dating caused by COVID-19, dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble and Hinge have made active changes to their apps by adding a new ‘virtual dating’ functionality (e.g., live video chat or live streaming) (Carlson, 2020; Costa, 2020; Thompson, 2020), which has long been included as a primary feature in most Chinese social/dating apps (e.g., Rela, Blued and Momo). These newly updated features also suggest that Chinese and Western dating platforms are becoming increasingly intertwined in their functional design. Additionally, the growing popularity of Chinese-owned social media platforms such as TikTok and Blued (International) among Western users globally also indicates that the boundary between Chinese and Western social media platforms are somewhat blurring. These phenomena demand further investigation so we can better understand how the blending of digital media ecosystems in different sociocultural contexts impact users’ digital dating and social practices more broadly.
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Appendix
Semi-Structured In-Depth Interview Guide
1. Could you describe your first experience of using Rela and/or HER?
2. Why did you decide to download these apps? What were your expectations when you downloaded these apps? –Can you remember if there were any areas where the app was different from what you thought?
3. What are your most and least favourite functions and features of these apps? –What are some highlights/special experiences (e.g., exciting, frustrating, unpleasant experiences) that you have had while using these features and functions?
4. While transferring from China to Australia, what roles have these apps played in your social life, either with people here or in China?
5. Have you encountered any conflicts or misunderstandings between people with Chinese and Australian backgrounds while using these apps?
6. (For people who use or have used both Rela and HER) –How would you describe the differences between these two apps? –Do you use each of them differently?
7. What do you use these apps for?
8. Do you switch between this app (e.g., Rela or HER) and other social media apps/ platforms while using it, for example, to look people up on Facebook/Instagram/ WeChat?
9. Have you left or tried to leave your account(s) on these apps? –What triggered you to do this?
10. Have you had any concerns regarding the use of these apps? –What kinds of actions have you taken to tackle with your concerns? 11. What kinds of influences do you think these apps have had on your life?
Appendix 225