For queer lovers and friends
An exploration of queer connection by design in the Lex mobile app
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7154263 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alexandra Teixeira Riggs (0000-0002-5244-9198, Georgia Institute of Technology, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 1574-1592 |
| Publication date | 2025-10-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Media Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1468-0777 • E-ISSN: 1471-5902 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14680777.2024.2372463 |
| OpenAlex | W4400129826 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 47 |
What does it mean for a dating app to be queer by design? In this article, I examine the extent to which Lex, the queer dating and social app, diverges from algorithmically heteronormative interface paradigms to express queer temporalities and relationalities. To do so, I analyze Lex’s 2019–2022 interface using the walkthrough method, which involves critically engaging with an app’s features and functionality, vision, operating model, and governance, to uncover embedded cultural meanings and assumptions. With walkthroughs, I analyze Lex’s software components, terms of use, privacy policy, community guidelines, and branding discourse, while considering the platform’s original references to archival personal ads. From this analysis, I argue that Lex’s affordances queer dating app design by resisting compulsory data collection, countering binary sorting and categorical definitions of gender and sexuality, and disengaging from economies of visibility through text-based interaction, highlighting situated histories of queer information networks amidst normative frameworks. I extend this work to characterize how queer affordances in digital infrastructures can encourage fluid identities and pluralistic modes of connecting that draw upon rich histories of resistance in queer information practices, reinforcing calls for increased intersectionality in interface design
Aesthetics · Art · Media studies · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · Digital Games and Media · Engineering · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
The Misgendering Machines
Queer dating during social distancing using a text-based app
A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors
Theorizing Affordances
Personal but Not Private
Feminist, Queer, Crip
It's Complicated
Algorithmic heteronormativity
Respectable promiscuity
Fields, features, and filters
Affordance, conventions, and design
Constructing and enforcing "authentic" identity online
Gendering” the Self in Online Dating Discourse
Programming Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
Information Activism
The construction of gender in dating apps
Tinder’s lesbian digital imaginary
Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook
The walkthrough method
Remediating pornography
Wanting Pictures After Feminism
The digital ephemeral turn
Poetics of relation
Becoming Null
Introduction
Venus in Two Acts
The Queer Art of Failure
Mediated Superficiality and Misogyny Through Cool on Tinder
Baking Gender Into Social Media Design
Screened Intimacies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |