Safe on My Phone? Same-Sex Attracted Young People’s Negotiations of Intimacy, Visibility, and Risk on Digital Hook-Up Apps (original) (raw)
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2018
This research study explores the gay dating smartphone app Grindr and the role it plays in influencing young gay men’s attitudes towards HIV and risky sexual behaviour, looking closely at the social norms within the app itself. Grindr was specifically chosen as the focus of this research project as it is the largest gay dating app in Europe, and has begun to be considered an important communications tool for public health and communications professionals looking to tackle the spread of HIV. The study used qualitative research methods, implementing semi-structured interviews to gain a rich and in-depth insight into the knowledge and attitudes of young gay men who use Grindr, aged between 18-25 years old. The research findings identified that while Grindr users perceive the app to be highly sexualised and crude, they do not perceive the social norms of the app to directly influence their attitudes towards risky sexual behaviour and that pressure to engage in risky sexual behaviour is ...
The Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality, 2017
This chapter considers the recent history and practices of promoting sexual health through social media. It considers dating/hook-up apps such as Grindr and Tinder, and common social media platforms like Facebook. In the past decade, public health researchers have entered these spaces to extend their reach to key populations, particularly the designated 'risk populations' of young people and men who have sex with men (MSM). Through its attention to new media, public health often expands its risk focus beyond the concept of sexual 'risk behaviours', to encompass digital media practices as risky, or as contributing to sexual health risks. This has generated claims that social media users (particularly users of geo-locative dating/hook-up apps) are more likely to engage in sex that puts them at risk of HIV/STI transmission. However, there is disagreement on these claims, and media studies and cultural studies approaches have offered more complex understandings of how risk and safeties are negotiated through digital and social media. This can be seen in accounts of the opportunities and affordances of these media. This chapter will trace some of these tensions within recent public health and cultural/media studies literature.
Gender, Technology and Development, 2019
Social networking applications (SNAs), such as Grindr, are shaping the identities and sexual practices of gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (GBM). This qualitative study aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the role of such technologies in social sexual practices, particularly in relation to risk management and prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted blood-borne infections (STBBIs). Poststructuralism and queer theory were used to critically examine the relationship between GBM and SNAs in a sample of people who use Grindr. Sixteen people, identifying as men who used Grindr, were interviewed. Discourse analysis was employed to critically examine the relationship between GBM and SNAs, and three threads of discourse emerged: Language and images, Filtering, and Trust. These threads of discourse provide insight into how the sexual beliefs, values, and practices of GBM are shaped on SNAs.
AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research
Dating and hook-up apps constitute spaces of intense negotiation around issues of sex, identity and intimacy, in which norms are tested and reinforced. This paper examines discussions of ‘ideal app use’ which emerged in qualitative workshops conducted in 2018 with 23 LGBTQ+ app-users aged 18-35 in urban and regional New South Wales. We explore how a reading of in-app practices - such as messaging, picture-sharing and blocking - through a lens of queer ethics can inform LGBTQ+ young people’s ‘rules’ for app use. Participants were invited to create 'how-tos' for ideal app use, and describe the ways they distinguished ‘good’ (or trustworthy) profiles from ‘bad’ (untrustworthy) profiles via creative design activities. In their discussions, participants articulated their ‘rules’ for filtering matches in relation to particular design features of apps which enabled (sexed and gendered) cultures of accountability to others. As in Duguay’s (2017) research on queer women’s deployment ...
Hooking up with friends: LGBTQ+ young people, dating apps, friendship and safety
Media, Culture & Society, 2021
Research exploring digital intimate publics tends to consider social media platforms and dating/hook-up apps separately, implying distance between social and sexual communication practices. This paper troubles that delineation by drawing on LGBTQ+ young people’s accounts of negotiating safety and risk in dating/hook-up apps, in which friendship practices are significant. We explore four key themes of friendship that arose in our analysis of interviews and workshop discussions: sharing mutuals (or friends-in-common) with potential dates/hook-ups; making friends through apps; friends supporting app negotiations; and friends’ involvement in safety strategies. Through analysis of these data, we firstly argue that friendship is often both an outcome and an organising force of LGBTQ+ young people’s uses of dating/hook-up apps, and secondly, that media sites commonly defined as social (e.g. Instagram) or sexual (e.g. Tinder) are imbricated, with friendship contouring queer sex and dating p...
Trust in Friendship: LGBTQ+ Young People and Hook-Up App Safeties
AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2019
Digital media research commonly explores the use of social media platforms and dating/hook-up apps separately, implying distance between social and sexual communication practices. By exploring how friendships enfold into LGBTQ+ young people’s use of dating/hook-up apps, this paper troubles that delineation. In 2018, we ran four workshops with LGBTQ+ young people (18-35 years) about negotiating safety in dating/hook-up apps. Discussion of friendship featured in all workshops, mostly related to four key themes: the safety of having mutual friends with prospective dates/hook-ups; friend-making through apps; friend-involvement in safety strategies; and friendship advice on app use. Through analysis of these data, we highlight how friendship is an organising force in LGBTQ+ young people’s dating/hook-up app practices, and argue for greater attention to the porousness of media sites commonly defined as social (e.g. Instagram) or sexual (e.g. Tinder). Participants demonstrate that trust in...
As an out gay man who used Grindr as a tool to meet other homosexual men, I often believed that such applications and their innate focus on sex were significantly changing the ways in which gay culture behaved. Had it changed the way gay men presented themselves? Is it implicit in the refocused efforts on HIV/AIDS awareness? Through an investigation into digital spaces such as Grindr I am able to draw similarities between the postmodern societies we currently live and that of the birth of gay culture throughout the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. This study looks at elements of gay culture including semiotics, social construction, sexual desire and gender identity and how these have been remediated within digital gay culture in the form of Grindr, which results in a convergence of queer and heteronormative concepts. Concepts, which originated from prolific queer theorists such as Judith Butler and Michel Foucault.
Bleeding boundaries Domesticating gay hook-up apps
Mediated Intimacies: Connectivities, Relationalities, Proximities. London, 2018
In this chapter, we interrogate the process of domesticating ‘“strange” and “wild” technologies’ (Berker et al., 2005, p. 2) in non-monogamous gay male relationships. Drawing on interviews, we examine the way in which hook-up apps are ‘house-trained’. In focusing on people in non-monogamous relationships that inherently operate across different social, sexual and intimate scenes, we shed light on the domestication of new media technologies and the way in which they interweave with intimacy. Approaching the relationship between medium and practice as a dynamic intersection acknowledges both the moulding force of the medium (Hepp, 2013) and – equally important – the way in which people mould the medium to fit their cultural setting (Jansson, 2015a). We combine this (mediatisation) perspective with an understanding of intimacy as a kind of (mediatised and affective) action that produces (new) boundaries between public and private. Thus, in this chapter we ask: How are hook-up apps domesticated in the context of sexually non-monogamous, gay relationships?
Queering Sexting and Sexualisation
Recent Australian research on ‘sexting’ (the production and exchange of naked and semi-naked digital pictures) has observed that formal legal and educational discourses have failed to fully account for young people’s understandings and experiences. While there is a proliferation of scholarly and popular texts focusing on the risks that sexting might pose to young (heterosexual) women, there is a relative absence of academic, educational or popular discourse acknowledging same sex-attracted young people’s participation in cultures of creating and sharing pictures via dating and hook-up apps. This article draws on focus-group interviews with young people in Sydney (aged 18–26) to present alternative accounts of sexting, and reflect on same sex-attracted men and women’s strategies for negotiating safety and risk within online and offline sexual cultures.
E-dating, identity and HIV prevention: theorising sexualities, risk and network society
Sociology of Health and Illness, 2006
This paper addresses how London gay men use the internet to meet sexual partners, or for e-dating. Based on qualitative interviews conducted face-to-face or via the internet, this research develops an account of how information technologies mediate the negotiation of identity and risk in connection with sexual practice. E-dating itself is a bricolage, or heterogeneous DIY practice of internet-based-communication (IBC). A central aspect of IBC is 'filtering' in and out prospective e-dates based on the images and texts used to depict sexual identities. Interpretations and depictions of personal HIV risk management approaches in IBC are framed by the meanings of different identities, such as the stigma associated with being HIV positive. This paper argues for a sexualities perspective in a theory of network society. Further, HIV prevention in e-dating can potentially be addressed by considering the interplay of the HIV prevention imperatives associated with different HIV serostatus identities. There is a case for encouraging more explicit IBC about risk in e-dating and incorporating the expertise of e-daters in prevention activity. There is also a need to rethink traditional conceptions of risk management in HIV prevention to make space for the risk management bricolage of network society.