Research

Love and Sex on the Edge of Tomorrow: Economization and Subjectivity on Dating Apps (DFG proposal in preparation)

Discourses around love and sex are increasingly characterized by an economic vocabulary. Building on psychological reflections on human mating behavior in terms of ‘sexual economics‘, this understanding of intimate interpersonal relationships has spread not only to anti-feminist fringe groups in the so called “manosphere” but also to pop-cultural discourses. At the same time new technologies that mediate in novel ways how we get to know each other, how we date, with whom we have sex, and who and how we love are becoming widely accepted. Unlike their forerunners, location-aware dating apps create a virtual space that is often labelled the “sexual marketplace” of today’s generation. This research project scrutinizes the complex interrelations between these two cultural transformations. Against the assumption that a sexual marketplace exists by itself, the starting point of this investigation is how individuals’ practices mediated by digital technologies such as dating apps are becoming economized/marketized, with particular attention to the ways in which dating apps mediate our relationships with ourselves and others through processes of abstraction, gamification and valuation.