On 'never right-swipe whites' and 'only date whites' : gendered and racialised digital dating experiences of the Australian Chinese diaspora

This paper examines the Australian Chinese diaspora's digital dating experiences afforded by both Chinese-language and global English digital dating/hook-up services. Digital dating offers an interesting context for an analysis of the Australian Chinese diaspora's interracial romantic and sexual engagements, through which we can examine how race, and its intersections with ethnicity, gender and sexuality is represented, consumed, and practised. We were able to reach three conclusions from the participant experiences presented in this article. First, digital dating and its constitutive norms play a role in maintaining certain tropes of cultural representation of racial subjects and securing cultural power within an overarching system of white racial entitlement. Second, we found that agency is key to understanding the female participants' dating experiences. Third, the male participants tended to form negative and sometimes distorted social perceptions of white Australian women as a result of being neglected on English-language dating sites.