Beyond Commitment: Identity And Bounded Affection In Sapphic Digital Interaction
Keywords:
Bounded Affection, Friends With Affection, Sapphic Intimacy, Identity And Diversity, Digital Social InteractionAbstract
This article examines how Indonesian sapphic communities build identity, affection, and social interaction through digital platforms while negotiating family pressure, selective visibility, and safety risks. Positioned within the Identity, Diversity, and Social Interaction subtheme, the study develops Bounded Affection Theory to explain friends with affection (FWA) as a relational category that enables care, comfort, daily communication, and romantic-light exchange without requiring ownership, formal dating, or full public legibility. The research was conducted from March 2025 to March 2026 and combines descriptive analysis of 104 anonymized informant responses, semi-structured Zoom interviews with 43 selected sapphic informants, thematic analysis of 385 FWA-related X posts, and contextual reading of 1,484 broader sapphic posts. The findings show that informants practiced selective visibility, being open in trusted circles or online while remaining cautious around family, religious settings, campus, work, and hometown contexts. Digital platforms functioned as safety infrastructure through pseudonyms, second accounts, closed groups, privacy settings, trace deletion, and platform migration. FWA circulated as an active relational category through which users negotiated affection, jealousy, limits, baper, relational labels, and the boundary between friendship and dating. The study concludes that sustainable digital futures require more than connectivity: they require social arrangements that protect identity, recognize diversity, and support ethical interaction under conditions of unequal recognition.
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