Generation and Aging in Apps: Affective Experiences and the Use of Relationship Technologies Among Gay Men in the Countryside of Santa Catarina, Brazil.

Abstract (English)

Based on analyses of the rise of dating websites and apps as vectors of a global affective culture, driven by digital technologies, which structures affective and sexual relationships through dominant sexual capital, this communication presents partial results from a PhD research project in Social Anthropology. The research examines the relationship between masculinities, homosexualities, and aging among men who use dating apps in the countryside of Southern Brazil, employing digital ethnography as the methodology, focusing on a dating app for male-to-male sexual encounters. Drawing from a previous study, I identified the centrality of these apps in the construction of affective and sexual relationships among digital-native university students in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, which partly highlighted their adoption of a global affective culture. In contrast, it became evident that countryside contexts exhibit local particularities in the use of these apps, generating exclusions and forms of agency. Utilizing the analytical category of "complex alterities," I explore how sexual and gender dissident subjects experience sexuality through these apps in both urban and rural contexts in the countryside of Santa Catarina, Southern Brazil. By incorporating the category of age into these experiences, it is observed that youth is objectified as sexual capital, with older men often being overlooked by other profiles in the apps. From this, I highlight two analytical dimensions: the acquisition of technological literacy regarding apps, given that the participants of this research developed their sexual desires in a pre-commercial internet era, and the approach to aging, which, through ageist lenses, restricts the possibilities for affective and sexual relationships for certain subjects.