Encoding fat stigma: body ideologies and digital dating architectures

Previous research demonstrates a modest but consistent relationship between use of networked media, such as social networking sites and dating apps, body image disturbance, and disordered body-related behaviors. However, most studies approach these technologies either as repositories of social comparison stimuli or channels for appearance feedback, effectively reducing them to passive intermediaries of interpersonal influence and overlooking the discursive significance of their own architecture. Using a digital walkthrough method, the current study explores how ideologies of embodiment are encoded within and perpetuated by the affordances and auxiliary media of several popular dating apps, including Tinder, Bumble, and Grindr. The dominant body ideology that animates contemporary Western society was found to be expressed through dating apps primarily via the twin logics of corporealization/objectification (bodily considerations are important, to the point that they take precedence over most others) and normalization/stigmatization (bodily states are morally unequal, with slender muscularity being superior to fatness). Depending on the accuracy of early and prominent claims that digital media are ushering in an era of disembodied sociality, wherein experiences of identity and group belonging are radically ungrounded from the “physical facticity” of human bodies, the present findings suggest that dating apps either represent a strong counterexample or betoken the reversal of this trend. In the current digitally mediated moral order, bodies matter as much as ever, perhaps even more so than previously, and there continue to be clear winners and losers.