No abstract

The myth “women prioritize socioeconomic status whereas men value physical beauty” is continuously reproduced. The heterosexual online dating literature that addresses image production highlights the dominance of this gendered and heteronormative binary in self-presentations. Examining how heterosexual individuals use dating apps, this study focuses on image consumption and how profiles as the products of this beauty-status binary are perceived. Using video interviews and reenactment techniques to analyze users’ practices of swiping, i.e., mate selection, this study also offers a novel research method to the literature. The findings demonstrate how the so-called binary creates a dictatorship of clichés and how individuals affectively, though partially, respond to this visual bombardment by feeling an attraction toward naturality. It underlines that bodies are not simply shaped and controlled by cultural institutions, norms, and laws but also respond to the situations and environments in which they find themselves. This paper invites future studies to focus on what images can do to bodies and how bodies respond to them and break the beauty-status myth rather than expose it.

Architecture has always been a ;political as well as an aesthetic matter when it comes to building nations, spaces, borders, and representations. It is a crucial political and aesthetic tool for establishing domination as well as constructing imagination. In New Islamist Architecture and Negotiating Nation and Islam Through Built Environment in Turkey, Bülent Batuman focuses on the relationship between architecture and politics in the Turkish context. He argues that Justice and Development Party (JDP), since 2002 when it came to power, has built its hegemony by creating an authentic Islamist urban environment, highlighting that, for JDP, building hegemony means (re)building the nation, which is also a process of urbanization (pp. 17-19). Batuman elaborates his argument in four chapters: mosque building, housing, the revolution of the urban, and the public architecture. In "Politics of Mosque Building: Negotiating Islam and Nation," he describes mosque building as one of the architectural manifestations of the nation. Batuman demonstrates how the JDP contributed to the rise of neo-Ottomanism by both mimicking the sixteenth-century Ottoman mosque architecture, mostly the monumental ones, and using the Ottoman-Seljuk style (e.g. crown gates). This was different from the early republic during which the sixteenth-century mosques, but not the monumental mosques of this period, were replicated. Differently than the early Republican era, the modernist projects were also consciously denied by the Islamist and conservative groups, but especially by the JDP's leader, then prime minister, and now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This also displays how national aesthetics depends on the taste of one man, and how Erdogan becomes the man of taste. Aiming to become the leader of the Middle East, Erdogan invites the presidents and prime ministers of African and Middle Eastern states to the opening ceremonies of these neo-Ottoman mosques. Hence, these ceremonies were held not only for Turkish people, but also for the Islamic community in general. With regard to this, Batuman argues that these neo-Ottoman mosques represent not Islam within the nation that refers to Islam as part of the nation, but the nation within Islam, that is, the nation as the exclusive representative of Islam (p. 67). The mosque is not solely important for (re)building the nation, but also for (re)architecting the urban. In "Housing Subjects of New Islamism," Batuman tells how urban space is reorganized through the cases of

Choosing a partner has turned into swiping since the emergence of dating technologies. Today, individuals predominantly choose their partners via dating platforms by swiping their profiles with a quick thumb movement. The literature argues that mate preference is a static and disembodied disposition, where one’s intersectional background plays a role. Focusing on heterosexual individuals’ swiping practices in Turkey, this article aims to challenge this structural argument and suggests an affective approach to online dating. The concept of affect encourages more than a focus on the structures that influence mate choice. Emphasising the body’s capacity to act and be acted on, environments and thought-in-action, it draws attention to different orienting forces involved in swiping. As such focus requires a different methodology, this study uses the walkthrough and video re-enactment techniques to examine the mate selection practice. Based on interviews with 42 individuals who use Tinder and/or OkCupid, it shows how swiping is not only techno-socially shaped but also a bodily practice. Technological design, one’s mood and the sensation that arises through the encounter between the individual and the profile affect swiping decisions which can be both consistent and inconsistent with one’s techno-socially shaped criteria. By suggesting an affective perspective, this article makes both a theoretical and methodological contribution to the field.

Based on a critical literature review, this paper reveals that online dating studies on heterosexual users' motivations and mate preferences reproduce two gendered as well as heteronormative arguments. First, women use dating technologies for seeking love whereas men prefer them for arranging casual sex activities. Second, men are inclined to prioritize physical appearance while women tend to value status during mate selection or swiping in e-dating language. The article calls these beauty-status and love-sex dichotomies as the female love-male sex binary which has become a persistent myth through a continuous reproduction. This critical literature review problematizes the binary logic embedded in the literature on heterosexual online dating. To move beyond such duality, it suggests an affective turn which attracts the attention to the mostly neglected things in e-dating studies which focus on heterosexual individuals, namely the body, its capacity, and the affectivity of non-human things like atmospheres as well as images. Among various inspiring techniques in non-representational methodologies, it proposes video reenactment, cyberflaneur or technical walkthrough, and sensory writing techniques to study the online dating phenomenon and to understand motivations as well as swiping strategies of heterosexual online daters.