The promise of intimacy: gay Filipino men on mobile digital media in Manila and Los Angeles

This multi-sited ethnographic study examines how gay Filipino men in Manila and Los Angeles generate beliefs and practices on and about mobile digital media platforms as they sought potential intimate connections—sexual, romantic, platonic. By mobile digital media, I mean socio-sexual dating apps (like Grindr and Tinder), social media (such as Facebook and Instagram), and messaging platforms on mobile phones (that include WeChat, WhatsApp, and Viber). My study suggests that unequally interconnected social, technical, and affective infrastructural systems or sociotechnical infrastructures influence how gay Filipino men create multiple and overlapping digital worlds. In their pursuit of intimate connections, gay Filipino men in my study experienced frequent forms of failure generating various affective responses that shape their actions and beliefs. I use the concept of sociotechnical infrastructures as an analytical lens to study gay Filipino men’s unequal arrangements and access to complex systems that inform qualities of social interaction and definitions of attractiveness. These complex systems include the built-in platform interfaces, transportation infrastructures, access to technological hardware and data storage, along with social differences such as class and gender as forms of power that inform different ideas of aesthetic beauty. I also incorporate affective components or structures of feeling that are difficult to articulate through words and text as essential to my thinking of sociotechnical infrastructure. Through the everyday interactions, language use, beliefs about digital media, and group affiliations among the gay Filipino men in my study, I enumerate the multiple affective motivations toward pursuing the promise of intimate connection, where its interrelated social, organizational, and technical dimensions become more transparent for analysis. The experiences of my study participants led me to think through the literal and social traffic in which gay Filipino men must navigate everyday life in order to fulfill their desire for connections. These affective experiences attach to social aspirations that align with and/or work against what constitutes a desirable connection as gay Filipinos pursue the promise of intimacy. These interactions cumulatively create the complex sociotechnical infrastructures of gay Filipino digital intimacies. Gay Filipino men’s beliefs and practices of these digital platforms allow potential openings that may seem insufficient in the face of social exclusions and hierarchies, but they continue to move and to be moved toward the potential of intimate connection.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Atienza, Paul Michael Leonardo

Contributors dc:contributor

• Manalansan IV, Martin F.
• Davis, Jenny L.
• Chan, Anita
• Greenberg, Jessica

• ethnography
• digital studies
• queer studies
• Filipino studies
• Philippine diaspora
• genders and sexualities

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115727

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115727