IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN? POSTFEMINIST FEMININITIES IN FEMALE FRIENDSHIP APPS

Abstract

Friend-finding technologies for women are new media peddling an old promise: female empowerment through mediated possibilities of friendship, and software that connects them. Powered by algorithms that help structure their company, these applications (apps) turn out remarkable not for bridging women, but for shaping their femininities via a specific and exclusionary mechanics of female sociality.

In this thesis, I argue that friend-finding apps for women form crucial algorithmic sites that operationalize female friendship into a narrow relation accessible only to women exercising normative femininities, which assist in (unevenly) circulating postfeminist sensibilities through psychic-affective modes in transnational settings. The argument is developed in three parts: First, I closely read the apps for their gendered processes of feminizing identity. Second, I study the affects circulating within written accounts of women’s experiences with these apps. Lastly, I use interviews with Filipino women to expand my analysis to Manila, Philippines.