Asexuality and online sharing of a minority experience. Social and identity quest on relationship platforms

This article examines the uses of a community website for asexual people. A detailed examination of the interfaces allows us to understand how tools with different relational characteristics can function within the same space. We note that these tools correspond to different desires of the users, some of whom wish to initiate purely friendly relationships, while others hope to establish romantic relationships through physical encounters. By analysing some users’ face-to-face interactions, we consider the emergence of a tacit relational norm. What we ultimately show are the ways in which the uncertainty and relative indeterminacy of the interfaces and uses correspond to the uncertainties surrounding asexuality itself, both from an identity point of view and from a social and relational point of view. Asexual people’s uses of the websites thus constitute a stage on an often complex path of research on themselves.