Psychological, Social and Imaginary Dimensions of LGB People who use Dating Apps: A Netnography Approach

Social networks and dating apps increasingly represent a novel way to meet people as opposed to traditional face-to-face communication. Virtual platforms are particularly important for gays and lesbians due to the social stigma related to their sexual orientation and are diversified according to their users: the former use Grindr and the latter Wapa. Our research involved a group of users from Campania, in southern Italy, and employs a mixed methods approach. We first studied users’ profiles in both dating apps and then focused on qualitative interviews to reconstruct the psychological (emotional and affective dynamics) and social (sexual script) dimension of the imaginary underpinning online interactions. We aim at filling the partial gap in the Italian research between virtual media and homosexuality, highlighting the communication methods and relational approaches through which gay and lesbian people (and partially also bisexuals) relate through social networks. The first section reviews the relevant literature, connecting it to the relation between new media, affectivity, and sexuality. It explains the notion of sexual identity, an essential epistemological preamble for comprehending the possible phenomenology through which people relate to their own sexuality. The second section explores the apps’ social mechanism, showing gay’s and lesbians’ trends on the emotional, sentimental, or sexual approach. Our purpose is to verify the existence of a different gay or lesbian approach in both applications (in the purpose of its usage and in some of the imaginary dimensions) or if those apps modify the sexual behaviour, thus producing new forms of social and relational homologation. Keywords: sexual scripts, app for dating online, gay and lesbian studies, gender models.

“Echo’s Bones”

The once-censored “Echo’s Bones” demonstrates how fully Beckett’s creative imagination responds to the crisis of political commitment in the 1930s. “Echo’s Bones” satirizes recent Irish revolutionary history in the context of longer European literary and political traditions, the French and Russian revolutions. It skewers Yeatsian Ascendancy sympathies, and it engages James Joyce’s narrative politics as well. In addition, the story deserves careful analysis because Beckett links formal invention to political critique with techniques that his later, maturer work will adapt. These techniques include making conservative political and religious salvations ironically literal, corporeal, and sexual. This bawdy sexual approach to political modernity allies Beckett with writers such as the Marquis de Sade: interested in comically overthrowing societal expectations, coded as rigid sexual mores and abuses, Beckett’s story is nevertheless unclear about the benefits and basis for securing morality, freedom, or fulfillment through revolutionary politics and sexual liberation.