Not your unicorn: trans dating app users' negotiations of personal safety and sexual health.

This article reflects on 14 Australian trans dating app users' accounts of feeling safer (and less safe) when using apps, as well as their experiences of sexual healthcare. We explore both app use and healthcare in the context of the interdisciplinary field of 'digital intimacies', considering the ways that digital technologies and cultures of technological use both shape and are shaped by broader professional and cultural norms relating to sexuality and gender. Drawing on Preciado's [(2013). Testo junkie: Sex, drugs and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. The Feminist Press] framework of 'pharmacopornographisation', the analysis aims to contextualise participants' experiences of being 'seen' and 'known' by health professionals and other app users. Our findings indicate that both dating apps and sexual health services rely on reductive systems of sorting and categorisation that reinforce binary understandings of genders and sexualities in order to facilitate data management and information sharing practices. Yet these same sorting and filtering technologies can also help trans app users avoid harassment, form intimate connections and seek appropriate healthcare.

Dating apps as public health 'problems': cautionary tales and vernacular pedagogies in news media.

ABSTRACT In this paper we examine how popular media reporting positions dating and hookup app use as a 'social problem' that impacts on health and wellbeing. The paper adopts a mixed-methods media studies approach to create and analyse a dataset of over 6,000 international news articles published within a 12-month period, drawing on thematic content analysis and inductive and deductive techniques. These analyses are framed in relation to online consultations with Australian sexual health professionals and app users. Applying Briggs and Hallin's theory of biocommunicability (2007) - which proposes that contemporary health professionals' scientific framing of public health problems are, in part, shaped by popular media discourses - we identify a significant category of supportive discussions of safer app use within social news and lifestyle reporting. This discursive space features what we have termed 'vernacular pedagogies' of app use, revealing app users' safety strategies, and their experiences of pleasure and playfulness. We argue that an analysis of popular media can provide valuable insights into how everyday experiences of safety, risk and wellbeing are being shaped and contested with dating and hookup app use, and that these insights can be used to develop meaningful health promotion strategies.