2025/01/16 by Do Own Kim · 1 voice
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology #LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy #Gender, Feminism, and Media
paper · doi:10.1080/03637751.2024.2444299
openalex publication_date 2025/01/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This article recenters physical contexts in mediated communication, drawing on scholarship on communication and space and interviews with gay dating app (GDA) users in Seoul, South Korea. Findings suggested that GDAs virtually expanded the heavily stigmatized population’s everyday capacity to navigate and co-construct (parts of) Seoul as a fluctuating gay place(s) but with ongoing contextualizations through their physical situatedness. Physical gayborhoods’ boundedness shifted as GDAs enabled them to hybridly merge spatial contexts. Rather than simple virtualization, negotiations around societal and in-group stigmas and desires for physically grounded belonging were observed, and the gayborhoods importantly constituted the hybrid space by materially and discursively congregating diverse users. Based on the findings, I propose “layerability,” a topologically specified approach to visibility affordance.