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uva.nl
Global Digital Cultures GDC

Digitized Love and Intimacy on Hinge: FLINT* Individuals’ Dating Practices at the Cultural Nexus of Online and Offline Worlds

This project aims to investigate, through cross-cultural comparison, how digital dating apps reconfigure cultural attitudes to love and intimacy, and conversely how cultural attitudes influence digital dating practices. Existing literature has overlooked cultural context and primarily focused on men dating men. We focus on FLINT* (an acronym for female, lesbian, non-binary, and trans*) users of the application Hinge, whose slogan “designed to be deleted” promises users a sustained love-based dating experience rather than a hook-up. Working with Hinge users from India, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Canada, we aim to investigate the entangled relationships between the perceptions of love and intimacy by FLINT* individuals, the specific cultural attitudes to romantic relationships in their locations, and the digital materialization of dating practices within the Hinge application.

The Team

Misha Kavka is Professor of Cross-Media Culture in the Media Studies Department at UvA. She has published widely on gender, sexuality, celebrity and affect in relation to television, film and media technologies.

Ladan Rahbari is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology, a senior researcher at the International Migration Institute (IMI), and a member of Amsterdam Young Academy (AYA).

Erinne Paisley is a junior lecturer in the UvA Media Studies Department; she is currently working on a book about the digital mediation of intimacy during COVID-19.