To browse Academia. Based on an empirical study of the uses of the mobile application Grindr in Paris, we show how proximity awareness is used in the male homosexual community so that it both supports and enacts a particular use scenario involving the repetition of fleeting sexual encounters with strangers. Finally, we show how proximity awareness, being perceived as a cue for sexual availability, becomes constitutively tied to the experience of sexual arousal: location aware mobile technology and sexual impulse become fused into a hybrid actant.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 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 Newcomers often have better luck finding sex offline.
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? 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. It is well established that digital technology and code mediate bodies in space. What is less clear is what comes next for those participating in this hybridisation.
Using qualitative interviews with 36 non-heterosexual men using apps such as Grindr and Tinder in London, UK, I explore how locative media refigures conceptualisations of community, technological efficiency and boundaries between private and public space. Apps expedite searches for new partners but prove deceptively time-consuming.
