“Shifting old-fashioned power dynamics”?: women’s perspectives on the gender transformational capacity of the dating app, <i>Bumble</i>

Abstract

Digital dating apps have impacted contemporary intimacy. One popular app, Bumble, claims to be “shifting old-fashioned power dynamics” by requiring women to “go first” in conversations with “matched” men. Drawing on focus groups with predominantly white, university-educated women who have used Bumble, this article articulates the challenges to gender norms during app use. Bumble provided a safe space to subvert gendered expectations, gain confidence to initiate conversations and appreciate the societal expectations often put on men. Contributing further to feminist media scholarship, we critique Bumble’s advertising as articulating a post-feminist sensibility and expose the limits of the transformations such a sensibility claims to herald. Our focus on women’s understanding and experiences of the app gives essential insights into how technological design challenges, to some extent, the existing gendered patterns while also creating tensions between such challenges and women’s internalized gendered behaviors and expectations.