Gay men's digital cultures beyond Gaydar and Grindr: LINE use in the gay Chinese diaspora of Australia

ABSTRACT

Recent research on gay men's digital cultures has focused predominantly on Western, English-language-based sites and populations. In the case of Australia, a country with an official multiculturalism framework in place and against a backdrop of significant levels of Asian immigration over the past several decades, a more pluralistic approach is needed to critically interrogate the dialectic between platforms, users and wider sociocultural complexities. To this end, the current paper presents research in progress on the social chat application LINE and its use amongst the Chinese diaspora of gay men in Australia. Drawing on data from participant observation carried out over several months during late 2015 and early 2016 in an Australian-based LINE group for local Chinese gay men, we highlight here how LINE functions as an important intermediary for many Chinese men engaging with gay men's digital cultures in this context. In particular, we show how LINE plays a crucial role in Chinese gay men's engagements with gay men's digital culture in Australia by (1) mediating this group's navigations of new social and cultural environments and (2) remediating their experiences within other platforms central to the broader GLBT community.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese diaspora
• digital culture
• LINE
• gay men

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Elija Cassidy is a member of the Digital Media Research Centre and Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. His research focuses on cultures and practices of everyday digital technology use, non-use and resistant appropriation, with particular emphasis on gender, sexuality and cross-cultural use.

Wilfred Yang Wang is a digital media researcher who teaches at universities in Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include digital geography, migrant internet, Asian media and China. He is currently working on a book manuscript about digital media in urban China (Rowman & Littlefield International).

Notes

1 This is a group level pseudonym, in English, of the Chinese name of the group studied for this paper to protect the privacy of those men who posted to this space during the period of our study.

2 All direct quotes included in this paper are Author 2's English translations of original Chinese language postings to the OCHG.