RESEARCH INTO THE TRANSACTION LANGUAGE OF HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY ON GRINDR
January 2023
Experimental Visual Communication
Equal rights regarding gender identity is a critical and widely discussed social issue in our era, the masculinity is controversial for gay men. I have proved through the research of online dating apps for gay men that hierarchy and discrimination are constructed from the internal, which is absurd. The transaction language and behavioural images in the gay culture reveal that everything is objectified.
PART 1
What is your type?
According to the images and the chatting languages I researched on Grindr, I found the reason behind the masculinity hierarchy is users on dating apps are not only trying to give these labels to themselves but also using transaction language to promote themselves. So I sorted images out based on the user’s self-described habits, visualised the hierarchy in the posters, and used the ‘LIKE’ function of Grindr to engage audiences to interact with and make the audience intuitively discover the masculinity hierarchy in gay men's culture.
PART 2
DO I TURN YOU ON
I made a catalogue of the language and emoji used by users on Grindr as the basic reading material.
Then I created a video based on the psychology of users who want to be more popular, it tells how a plug-in of Grindr helps users to improve their profiles to obtain higher attention. This plug-in uses ironic language to expose the various transaction languages and the phenomenon of user self-objectification on Grindr.
