Dissertation Title: A Match Made in Heaven?: Queer Christians and Dating Apps

“Queer Christians often feel they will never be loved or able to marry, and there's no app for that. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Mx WE King University of Washington Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

Dating apps pose particular challenges for queer Christians, complicating an already sensitive combination of social and cultural commitments, values and beliefs. Internet research has explored dating apps in relation to privacy, authenticity, and data cultures, examining usage among women, as well as gender and sexual minorities. However, there is a gap in understanding dating app usage by religious gender and sexual minorities, in both internet studies as well as religious studies. This research explores the ways queer Christians use dating apps as well as dating app interfaces and expected uses that shape the ways queer Christians use dating apps. The goal of this project is to gain an understanding of how gender, in the context of dating apps, is socially constructed in relation to Christian and queer cultures. This proposed study uses Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (Brock, 2018) as a framework that views dating apps as cultural representations and social structures that contribute to cultural understandings of gender. This approach privileges the perspectives of queer Christians in the analysis. This research involves studying both a technology artifact (dating app) as well as users in-situ (queer Christian dating app users).