ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the rise in online dating culture and the implications for intimacy and relationships. It considers what the turn to mediated intimacy means for gendered formations of the self, and for relationships, both online and offline. The chapter conceptualises digital intimacy, gendered subjectivity, postfeminist culture, and ‘transformations of the self’ in relation to dating practices with and through digital media. It asks how the self is constructed, de-constructed, and re-constructed symbolically via fluid, unbounded, and multiple representations through computer-mediated communication and digitised dating practices. It outlines debates on whether dating culture has become a new project of the self and led to a ‘crisis’ of intimacy, and applies the conceptual framing to empirical examples. The chapter also considers what opportunities and affordances the mediation of intimacy and sexuality through gendered digital technologies may offer (e.g. AI/avatars and affective belonging); and what limitations or forms of risk they pose (e.g. misogyny, misrepresentation and harassment, and loneliness) or subvert (e.g. through peer safeguarding practices). The chapter concludes with a clear summary, questions for reflection, and suggested further readings. The critical essay by Jaskirat at the end of the chapter takes up these themes to consider practices of intimacy by queer Indian youth on social media.
