[PREVIEW] Immigrants on Grindr: Race, Sexuality and Belonging Online (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) (original) (raw)
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Grindr culture: Intersectional and socio-sexual
ephemera, 2018
This research note is based on ethnographic work in the greater Copenhagen area on the socio-sexual networking app Grindr and on interviews with twelve recent immigrants who use this platform. As an online space primarily for gay men, Grindr is a unique subculture in which to conduct research about intersections of sexuality with other socio-cultural categories such as race and migration background, but also gender and ability. I find that user experiences with exclusion and discrimination relate to Grindr’s interface, such as its drop-down menus, to the discourses circulated by Grindr users in profile texts, and to user- to-user interactions in private messages.
Gay Immigrants and Grindr: Revitalizing Queer Urban Spaces
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2018
In this (open-access) essay, I assess the idea that Grindr and related apps render urban gay spaces obsolete, and offer three counter-arguments based on my research with immigrants and tourists who use Grindr. In short: newcomers who use Grindr might actually bring new life to queer urban spaces, because... 1. Newcomers don’t use Grindr in the same way they use (physical) queer spaces; 2. Newcomers use Grindr *in* queer spaces; and 3. Newcomers often have better luck finding sex offline. The essay is part of the "Spotlight on Disruptive Urban Technologies" by the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Media and Communication, 2019
Upon arrival to Europe, young adult gay migrants are found grappling with sexual norms, language demands, cultural ex- pectations, values and beliefs that may differ from their country of origin. Parallel processes of coming-out, coming-of-age and migration are increasingly digitally mediated. Young adult gay migrants are “connected migrants”, using smartphones and social media to maintain bonding ties with contacts in their home country while establishing new bridging relation- ships with peers in their country of arrival (Diminescu, 2008). Drawing on the feminist perspective of intersectionality, socio-cultural categories like age, race, nationality, migration status, and gender and sexuality have an impact upon iden- tification and subordination, thus we contend it is problematic to homogenize these experiences to all young adult gay migrants. The realities of settlement and integration starkly differ between those living on the margins of Europe—forced migrants including non-normative racialized young gay men—and voluntary migrants—such as elite expatriates including wealthy, white and Western young gay men. Drawing on 11 in-depth interviews conducted in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with young adult gay forced and voluntary migrants, this article aims to understand how sexual identification in tandem with bonding and bridging social capital diverge and converge between the two groups all while considering the interplay between the online and offline entanglements of their worlds.
Media and Communication
Upon arrival to Europe, young migrants are found grappling with new language demands, cultural expectations, values, and beliefs that may differ from global youth culture and their country of origin. This process of coming-of-age while on-the-move is increasingly digitally mediated. Young migrants are “connected migrants”, using smart phones and social media to maintain bonding ties with their home country while establishing new bridging relationships with peers in their country of arrival (Diminescu, 2008). Drawing on the feminist perspective of intersectionality which alerts us socio-cultural categories like age, race, nationality, migration status, gender and sexuality impact upon identification and subordination, we contend it is problematic to homogenize these experiences to all gay young adult migrants. The realities of settlement and integration starkly differ between desired migrants – such as elite expatriates and heterosexuals – and those living on the margins of Europe – ...
This article identifies and provides examples of five recurring speech patterns on dating platforms that users might experience as racist and/or xenophobic. Empirical material comes from over 3000 Copenhagen-based profile texts on Grindr and PlanetRomeo—two platforms that cater primarily to men seeking men—as well as from interviews with twelve recent immigrants to the greater Copenhagen area who use these platforms. Theories of everyday racism (Essed, 1991), sexual racism (Callander, 2015), and entitlement racism (Essed, 2013; Essed and Muhr, 2018) informed the formulation of these five patterns, which I identify as the following: persistent questions about the origins of people with migration background; racial-sexual exclusions; racial-sexual fetishes; conflation between (potential) immigrants and economic opportunism; and insults directed at immigrants based on race, nationality, or religion. As an exploratory study, this article mainly serves to inform readers of the various ways immigrants and people of color can experience racism and xenophobia while participating in online sexual and social networking platforms; but secondly, the chapter archives the mercurial and fleeting (albeit historically embedded) discourses on these platforms for future researchers interested in comparing racisms over time and across cultures.
Online technologies and social networking sites (SNS) have provided gay men with new spaces for participation, interaction and connection with other gay men. Geo-location based dating applications such as Grindr offer the opportunity to create queer cyberspace in heteronormative environments. However, this ‘safe’ space which produces new social subjectivities, also creates space for the rise of new discourses which regulate bodies, aesthetics, races and masculinities. Drawing from Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge, this research project analyses how the representations of gay men in the media focusing on body culture and promiscuity are re-enacted on Grindr. By using semi-structured interviews, I aimed to investigate how gay men who use Grindr construct their online identities and negotiate the circulation of discourses related to race, body aesthetics and masculinity on the application. The results demonstrated that identities are conflicted on Grindr. On the one hand, the group of subjects expressed distinctive individualism compared to other Grindr users, notably in terms of how others portrayed and expressed themselves. Yet, on the other hand, a certain conformity to the aesthetic norms was observed. Grindr, through its architecture and design, fragmented identities even more by perpetuating a system of labelling and categorisation.
Identity formation is an ongoing process that evolves over time depending on the cultural and geographical setting where one is located. This is particularly accurate for gay men who grow up in countries such as Iran where homosexuality is strictly forbidden, and immigrate to countries such as the United States, where same-sex marriage has recently been legalized. By using semi-structured interviews, I aimed to investigate how gay Iranian men navigate their online identities, cross-culturally, between their country of origin, Iran, and the country they have immigrated to, the United States. The medium utilized to observe gay Iranians online selves is the dating application Grindr. The results demonstrated that sexual identities are conflicted. On the one hand, the participants expressed unforeseen racism, stereotyping and fetishism coming from an alleged inclusive Western gay community. On the other hand, the group of subjects demonstrated similar identity patterns notably in regards to their maintained discretion.
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.
The Politics of Global Gay Dating Websites
American Anthropology Association
These days, queer social networking/dating/hook-up websites and mobile apps, such as gay.com, gaydar, manhunt, gay romeo, manjam, and mobile apps like grindr, and scruff, are wildly popular. In fact, phone app Grindr, whose tag line is find gay, bi, curious guys near you, recently reported that a record-setting 37.5 million messages were sent in the 24 hours of September 30, 2012. Men use these sites to meet other men for chatting, friendship, and most often for sexual and romantic encounters. Users create profiles, and, through these profiles, can see, search, and interact with one another, with the eventual purpose of moving online encounters offline. Each time users log on, they are introduced to masses of images, texts, ideas, practices, and subjectivities epitomizing queer sexualized and identitarian meanings within . These sites, according to Fletcher and Light, are cultural artefacts, defined by a range of social and political discourses and structures that frame sets of inherent queer discourses, imaginaries, and collective representations, to which users conform when constructing