- Between weeks 8 and 14, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
So far, I have began the process of conducting interviews and have been reaching out to people to schedule these interviews. So far, I have done two interviews but plan to do more in the next week.
I am a bit behind on the readings, but I will update this weekend when I catch up to Nicole on the annotated bibliography. I also hope to have this done in the next week, so we can get started working on our final product.
I hope to update this more, when I have time to catch up on work for this project. I wanted to put something up brief though until then.
Here is an update with my annotations!
Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.
Goffman’s book helps ground our work in classical sociological theory, and it helps makes sense of how people’s presentations of self appear on Tinder. Goffman introduces his dramaturgical model to help make sense of how individuals create certain performances in specific social situations, dependent on setting, audience, and timing. Goffman ties this to the “front” or front stage of performance, which we can physically see when someone acts out a performance (13). In contrast, there is additional a “back” or back stage of performance in which a performance is thought out and potentially fabricated (69). These two parts of Goffman’s work will be most relevant to our project, as we will be looking at how identity is constructed on this app. The front stage is clearly the profile itself, while there is a back stage element of curation as well.
Han, C. W. 2021. Racial Erotics: Gay Men of Color, Sexual Racism, and the Politics of Desire. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
In Han’s book, he considers the experience of gay men of color and discusses how gay culture and community has progressively become “whitewashed” and how sexual racism plagues the gay community in a way that prioritizes whiteness (11). While the text does not mention Tinder explicitly, it does engage in a larger discourse about how gay men of color present themselves and respond to stereotypes promoted by white gay men. Han introduces the topic of the “good gay,” which looks at how certain gay men, most often white, privileged, and embodying normative behavior, are seen as having more social worth and worthy of support (18). Han’s work also touches on the topic of “erotic capital,” which looks at the intersection of “bodily capital…, gender capital…, racial capital…, age capital… and class” (21). These terms will provide a useful lens in terms of looking into how gay men of color fair on apps like Tinder, which will be particularly interesting in the context of predominantly white Maine.
These readings brought up some interesting questions for Nicole and I to consider.
Who has the most erotic capital here in the state of Maine? Who are the “good gays” of Maine? How can these platforms be more inclusive?
Also, what front stage performances do specifically Bowdoin students do? What back stage performances? How does the wealth and whiteness of Bowdoin’s campus play into it?