Hello everyone, my name is Yichao Cui.
In this video, I'm going to share our work on sexual-minority women's online dating in
China.
During the presentation, I will talk about the study design and important findings.
Our work explores LGBT online dating.
The main reason is that nowadays LGBT populations still face challenges such as social discrimination
and isolation.
Dating apps can serve as an important online space where LGBT users can disclose their
sexual orientations and socialize with other users in a convenient way.
Our study primarily focuses on biseuxal and lesbian women.
Here we borrow the definition from the National LGBT Health Education Center.
That is, sexual-minority women are women who identify as lesbian, bisexual, queer, questioning,
and other non-heterosexual identities, as well as women who have same-gender partners
but identify as straight.
In China, sexual-minority women are faced with the challenges of high vulnerability
and low visibility: in other words, they struggle for recognition within LGBT populations while
enduring prevlent social stigma and the lack of public attention.
In China, dating apps exclusively designed for the SMW population have gained increasing
popularity.
They are used for seeking communities and building relationships, which can be very
difficult in offline contexts.
In this study, we explore the largest sexual-minority women's dating app called Rela, which has
over 12 million registered users.
Rela's basic features include but not limited to: search nearby, "wink" feature to show
interest in someone, recommended posts from other users, live streaming, and user-controlled
sharing of life moments.
Existing work on dating apps mainly focused on LGBT communities in Western contexts.
These studies explored self-disclosure and LGBT relationship-building.
However, few studies investigated how stigmatized populations use such platforms in different
cultural contexts, such as Chinese culture that tends to value stereotypical family roles.
In this study, we hope to understand important factors in building a safer place for SMWs
to disclose sexual orientations and building social relationships.
There are mainly three research questions to guide our study.
We first explore what factors encourage or discourage SMWs in China to use dating apps.
We then investigate in what ways SMWs self-disclose themselves on the apps.
Lastly, we explore how SMWs build online or offline relationships.
In our study, We first reached out to several SMW users on Weibo, which is one of China's
largest social media platforms.
We asked them if they want to participate in the study and whether they are willing
to invite more SMWs from their own networks.
After recruitment, we conducted a preliminary survey to better understand demographic information.
We conducted semi-structured interviews with 43 SMWs in China.
Now let's take a look at our results.
We found that some SMWs feel harassed by advertisements for formality marriages and surrogacy services.
Here I want to briefly introduce formality marriage.
In China, formality marriage is the kind of marriage in which SMWs marry other LGBT people
of the opposite sex in order to have offpsring and avoid social stigma.
Many of our participants are opposed to formality marriage because within such marriages, traditional
household inequality still exists and in turn might negatively influence their personal
lives.
They also expressed concerns on surrogacy services because surrogacy is not legally
endorsed by the government.
As a participant noted:"“I was constantly bombarded with advertisements for formality
marriage."
We also found that SMWs might deploy distinct self-disclosure strategies to avoid unintentional
disclosure.
They hope to withhold anything that might disclose their offline social identities,
such as their real names, phone numbers, and address.
For example, instead of using the “Search nearby” function, some SMWs share cues such
as photos of a corner of their classroom or a lake on their campus, which implies their
geographic location while mitigating the risks of being recognized at a glance.
As one participant stated: "Only those who are studying in my school or nearby schools
would be able to recognize the places in my photos.”
"
We also found that to avoid disclosing personally identifiable information, some SMWs prefer
to share thoughts and feelings without disclosing identifiable events.
As one participant said: "I have a large social circle at school and I’m afraid of being
recognized by my friends.
So I express my thoughts on public issues about LGBT people.
"
Another finding is that SMWs might use the dating apps to identify and connect with other
SMWs who might already be present in their daily lives.
They use dating apps' location-sharing feature to identify whether someone else is SMW in
an offline context.
As one participant noted: " I wasn’t sure if she was a lesbian.
So I checked dating profiles of nearby users who were within a hundred meters.
"
SMWs might also use Rela’s “wink” feature in novel ways to identify if someone they
met offline was SMW.
In our example, the participant said, “One day in a bubble-tea shop, I saw a girl who
dressed like a butch.
To confirm, I winked at her.
She immediately got it and winked back at me.”
The takeaway of this study is, future dating apps should pay extra attention to build a
safe self-disclosure environment for stigmatized groups.
For example, developing ways for users to avoid seeing promotional information that
they might find disturbing; enhancing apps' community-boundary management and community-member
vetting practices; and assisting users to create implicit locational cues to protect
their safety.
Thank you all for listening.
Looking forward to your questions.