Gays Under Glass: Gay Dating Apps and the Affection-Image

Why is it that gay men desire masculinity in its normative, symbolic and abstracted form? How do dating apps function to reproduce, and reinforce these codes over time through their use? In this paper I consider how this is achieved through users’ rapid parsing of what I term “affection-images”. Building off of Gilles Deleuze’s work on faciality in Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1986) and further political work with Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1988), I conceptualise affection-images as those that communicate interiority and from which we attempt to read affection. Such images are ‘facialised’ because the face is the model psychic structure that humans read affection in objects; literal faces or otherwise (Deleuze 1986). This approach will be unorthodox to broader sociological approaches because, in addition to Deleuze and Guattari, I refer to Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) as a frame for my enquiry, orienting this work more closely towards affect theory. Perhaps even more controversially, I conclude with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “microfascism” (1988) as a frame for how phenomenological orientations and inscriptions set internalised rules that govern our acceptance and rejection of such images online.