Book Review: The Politics of Dating Apps: Gender, Sexuality, and Emergent Publics

Abstract

policies, from a zero-case strategy to an allegedly abrupt opening up. If anything, it shows how policy makers, like layman, are guided by opaque rules and ideas, a fuzzy logic, a radical contingency, and large doses of uncertainty.While the outcome of this turn is unclear, Yang’s study nods to the resilience of citizens, the affordances of social media, and, simultaneously, the responsiveness, media savviness, and indeed agility of the nation-state. It would be illuminating to see more case studies from different places, also to steer away from a sense of Chinese exceptionalism that a single case study, even if unwanted by the author, risks. It is also the hope of this reviewer that Guobin Yang will soon publish a sequel, either as article or as book, in which he includes developments after Spring 2020, among which the Shanghai lockdown, the Urumqi fire, the empty A4 protests, and the change in policies. It is also hoped that other researchers make good use of this study as a source of inspiration and comparison, to draw linkages with other places in the world, in which similar lockdowns stirred up different forms of protest and resistance. So much more work is indeed to be done.