Presentation Schedule
Reading Desire Across Borders: Digital Intimacy, Citizenship, and Belonging in South Korea (102124)
Session Chair: Robert Hamilton
This presentation will be live-streamed via Zoom (Online Access)
Wednesday, 7 January 2026 14:20
Session: Session 1 (Parallel)
Room: Live-Stream Room 5
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
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Dating apps in South Korea promise connection but often deliver exclusion. This paper examines how everyday moments on these platforms—the tentative opening line, the sudden silence, the repeated self-adjustment after rejection—dramatize negotiations over race, belonging, and national identity. Drawing on autoethnography experience and qualitative observations, I analyze how these interactions create what I call digital bordering: the subtle ways intimacy becomes a site for sorting insiders and outsiders.
These practices shape forms of intimate citizenship—the uneven distribution of recognition and desire within the imagined national community. South Korea’s global image as modern and democratic collides with the intimate exclusions enacted through dating platforms in ways that expose how personal longing and public hierarchy intertwine.
The paper interprets these digital encounters as cultural texts, tracing how private desires reproduce broader logics of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary life.
Authors:
Robert Hamilton, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea
About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Hamilton studies digital intimacy, citizenship, and transnational belonging across race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary South Korea.
See this presentation on the full schedule – Wednesday Schedule
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