On ‘never right-swipe whites’ and ‘only date whites’: gendered and racialised digital dating experiences of the Australian Chinese diaspora

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the Australian Chinese diaspora’s digital dating experiences afforded by both Chinese-language and global English digital dating/hook-up services. Digital dating offers an interesting context for an analysis of the Australian Chinese diaspora’s interracial romantic and sexual engagements, through which we can examine how race, and its intersections with ethnicity, gender and sexuality is represented, consumed, and practised. We were able to reach three conclusions from the participant experiences presented in this article. First, digital dating and its constitutive norms play a role in maintaining certain tropes of cultural representation of racial subjects and securing cultural power within an overarching system of white racial entitlement. Second, we found that agency is key to understanding the female participants’ dating experiences. Third, the male participants tended to form negative and sometimes distorted social perceptions of white Australian women as a result of being neglected on English-language dating sites.

KEYWORDS:

• Online dating
• Chinese diaspora
• femininities
• masculinities
• sexuality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 All participant names in this article are pseudonyms; some details have been altered to protect anonymity. Quotes from participants have been translated from Mandarin by the authors.

2 It would be impractical to present all participants’ trajectories on each of the platforms discussed in this paper. Therefore, noting that not all participants used all digital services mentioned in this paper, we only briefly introduce the three major digital dating services used by our participants here.

3 For an introduction of OkCupid on Wikipedia, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OkCupid#2019_alleged_credential_stuffing_incident.

4 The figure was reported in a Chinese news platform, TMTPOST, see http://www.tmtpost.com/3093499.html.

5 Sometimes they used ‘foreigners’ or ‘Westerners’ to refer to other people without eastern Asian appearance, and they used these terms very loosely. e.g. One participant also used ‘Westerner’ to refer to people from middle east.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Scholarship Council: [grant number 201608410108].

Notes on contributors

Xu Chen

Xu Chen is a PhD candidate in the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. Xu’s PhD project looks at how the Australian Chinese diaspora engage with dating apps Tinder and Tantan, with a focus on the interplay between digital platforms and diasporic identities.

Tingting Liu

Tingting Liu (PhD) is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. She used to be a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and a part-time lecturer at the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Her research interests center on new media, gender, sexuality, and their intersections. Recent publications include peer-review journal articles on China Information, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Television & New Media and Feminist Media Studies. [email protected]