Liminal Intelligibility Among Chinese Young Gay Men in an Algorithmic Age
2026-07-07
Recent scholarship has increasingly examined sexual minorities in critical algorithm studies but often neglects the effects of behaviourist algorithmic epistemology on queer people. This study addresses that gap by exploring how such epistemology shapes the intelligibility of queer users. Drawing on 65 semi-structured interviews with young gay men in China, we identify four strategies—puzzle solving, alternative storytelling, playful resonating and flexible manipulating—through which informants negotiate (un)intelligibility. From these practices emerges a dynamic form of intelligibility, which we term liminal intelligibility . We develop this concept to describe how the algorithmic epistemology allows our informants to seek intelligibility in human-human interactions and articulate their sexual subjectivities in alternative ways that are permitted by the algorithmic scrutiny. In this way, we argue for the vital importance of juxtaposing human-human and human-technology interactions, with a particular focus on the intelligibility of queer users, in understanding queer sexualities in an algorithmic age.