Producing desirable bodies: Boundary work in a lesbian niche dating site

Abstract

This article presents an in-depth case study of the way contemporary lesbians use labels in the niche dating site, “WomynLink.com.” Drawing on five months of online ethnography between November 2011 and March 2012, I examine and compare butch, femme, and queer members’ use of labels and bodily presentations in WomynLink’s (video) chat room, forum boards, and profiles. I also conducted 21 online interviews through WomynLink’s free chat room service or external messaging services such as Skype. I draw on the boundary-making literature to illustrate how femme, butch, and queer members engage in different forms of boundary work to achieve online desirability by reconciling the tensions between their gendered bodily presentation, label use and other members’ perceptions of them. Femme members sought to highlight their femininity, butches’ boundary work made salient their sexual interest, and queer members defended their sex category as female and sexual identity as lesbian. These patterns of boundary work provide insight into how the salience of lesbian gender labels has evolved, particularly in the contemporary online era.