Negotiated Affordances: The Digital Sexual Safety among Gay Men on Geo-Social Apps in Taiwan.

Abstract

Despite growing discussions on digitally mediated safer sex practices, little research has examined how gay men negotiate safety and perform identity through geo-social applications (apps) in non-Western contexts. This article integrates the materiality of digital technologies with the subjectivity of users to explore how gay men navigate their sexual safety on social apps. Bridging the concept of affordance with user agency, this article proposes a framework of negotiated affordances to contemplate how gay men situate their sense of safety and leverage the affordances of social apps in the post-AIDS era within the sociocultural context of Taiwan. Drawing on interviews and participant observation on Grindr and Hornet, I identify relational, textual, and temporal affordances as three interrelated modalities through which user-technology interactions unfold on social apps. This article describes how "safer sex" is socialized, communicated, or differentiated through the sociality, textuality, and temporality woven into sexual negotiations in digital contexts. The findings demonstrate how gay men repurpose the affordances of social apps to navigate potential risks in virtual environments and call for culturally tailored digital health interventions that recognize the everyday strategies they deploy to arrange intimacy, manage digital risk, and construct sexual safety.