Inviting the stranger in: Intimacy, digital technology and new geographies of encounter

Koch, Regan; Miles, Sam

doi:10.1177/0309132520961881

Cited by 63 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 126 publications

(181 reference statements)

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“…Instead, it offers an overlaying of physical environments with virtual connectivity and virtual and/or hybrid environments. The relationship between virtual and material worlds has become so intertwined as to now rarely be conceptualized as separate in any meaningful sense (see Barns et al 2017;Kitchin and Dodge 2011;Farman 2012;Miles 2017). As Robyn Longhurst (2013: 667) argues: 'people conduct their personal, familial, and emotional lives in a myriad of ways in a variety of different spaces.…”

Section: Situating Sexualities Cities and Technologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Contact brokered online may stay online (Miles 2019), and there is no reason why these virtual connections cannot be richly fulfilling in and of themselvesemotionally, sexually, platonically, or politically. However, where cybersexual practices are converted to in-person meetings, whether pre-arranged or spontaneously, app users are increasingly meeting in private spaces, usually the home (Giraud 2016;Koch and Miles 2020). In the process, they sidestep certain risks generated by samesex public meeting: anything from being harassed by passersby on a date to being bothered by police or security staff when cruising in public.…”

Section: The Ambiguous Impact Of Location-based Media On Existing Gaymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Let’s (not) Go Outside: Grindr, Hybrid Space, and Digital Queer Neighborhoods

Miles

2021

The Urban Book Series

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Developments in mobile digital technologies are disrupting conventional understandings of space and place for smartphone users. One way in which location-based media are refiguring previously taken-for-granted spatial traditions is via GPS-enabled online dating and hook-up apps. For sexual minorities, these apps can reconfigure any street, park, bar, or home into a queer space through a potential meeting between mutually attracted individuals, but what does this signify for already-existing queer spaces? This chapter examines how smartphone apps including Grindr, Tinder, and Blued synthesize online queer encounter with offline physical space to create a new hybrid terrain predicated on availability, connection, and encounter. It is also a terrain that can sidestep established gay neighborhoods entirely. I explore how this hybridization impacts on older, physically rooted gay neighborhoods and the role that these neighborhoods have traditionally played in brokering social and sexual connection for sexual minorities. Few would deny that location-based apps have come to play a valuable role in multiplying opportunities for sexual minorities. However, the stratospheric rise of these technologies also provokes questions about their impact on embodied encounter, queer community, and a sense of place. A decade on from Grindr’s release, this chapter evaluates the impact of location-based media on gay spaces and reflects on what the increasing hybridization of online and offline spaces for same-sex encounter might mean for queer lives of the future.

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Section: Situating Sexualities Cities and Technologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Ambiguous Impact Of Location-based Media On Existing Gaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Let’s (not) Go Outside: Grindr, Hybrid Space, and Digital Queer Neighborhoods

Miles

2021

The Urban Book Series

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“…Digital spaces are inextricably woven into our everyday practices of consumption and communication, work, play and politics (Ash et al. 2019; Gerbaudo 2012; Koch and Miles 2020; Nyabola 2018). This paper examines how WhatsApp, with its digital private spaces, has become central to everyday “political talk” in India and what the implications are for lived democracy.…”

Section: Introduction: Digital Private Spaces and “Political Talk”mentioning

confidence: 99%

No Room for Dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces, and Lived Democracy in India

et al. 2021

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WhatsApp and digital private spaces are transforming the quality of lived democracy in India today. Bringing together STS, geographies of democracy, digital and political anthropology, and feminist approaches to the home, this paper makes visible how the Silicon Valley imaginary of the “digital living room” is domesticated in India. Drawing on digital ethnographic research in urban north India we show how WhatsApp is being used by the Hindu right to digitise new party‐political intimacies. This has implications for how people at the margins of Hindu nationalist politics dwell in the “digital living room”. Framed as a home like space, we problematise Facebook’s “spatiotechnical” utopia by making visible how kinship and (domestic) politics are newly entangled in digital private spaces. Finally, we document how WhatsApp is deployed as a technology of discipline to determine modes of appropriate sociality and reconfigure spaces of digital‐physical inclusion/exclusion in the making of India’s “ethnic democracy”.

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“…I adopt a feminist corporeal theoretical framework that aligns with assemblage thinking to explore how Grindr encounters are assembled through bodies, senses, phones, pictures, objects, and homes, and the anticipations, desires, and emotions that assemble them, that allow for the emergence of sexual subjectivities and practices. Doing so, I understand the digital as a corporeal and embodied 2017, 2018, 2020. I draw on a particular area of corporeal scholarship – haptic geographies – that is sensitive to the ways touching and place are co‐constituted.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anticipating touch: Haptic geographies of Grindr encounters in Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne, UK

Bonner-Thompson

2020

Trans Inst British Geog

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In this article, I use a haptic geographical framework to explore the embodied, material and spatial anticipations of offline Grindr encountersor hook-upsthat happen in users homes. I bring haptic geographies in conversation with geographical work on sexuality and the digital to explore how a desire to touch is reconfigured when people meet in 'the flesh'. Grindr is a location-based dating/hook-up app that is used mainly by men looking for encounterssexual, romantic, friendships, dates, online and offlinewith other men. I draw on 30 semi-structured interviews and four participant research diaries from Grindr users in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in North East England. By using haptic geographies, I examine gender and sexuality at the bodily and domestic scale. I explore how touch and place are co-constituted, arguing that men who use Grindr are learning how to negotiate their erotic Grindr practices through anticipations, identities and places that encounters are situated. Focusing on the embodied and spatial anticipations enables an understanding of the ways corporeal and digital practices are co-constituted. K E Y W O R D Santicipation, digital geographies, feminist methodology, geographies of sexualities, haptic geographies, home | INTRODUCTIONWhen people meet someone "in the flesh" from a dating app, they often question and wonder "what are they going to be like." People build up expectations, imaginations, and anticipations of the people they meet after sharing pictures and texting. These anticipations can be reconfigured when people meet in the flesh, especially when platforms may not allow for voices to be heard and movements to be observedand we are not able to smell, taste, and touch bodies and places through our dating apps. Grindr is a digital dating app that is mainly used by queer men and has become a popular way of "hooking up." When these men organise their hook-ups, they often describe what they want to "do" to one anotherthe ways they will touchand share erotic pictures which lead to the formation of anticipations. When users do meet in the flesh and their bodies kiss, lick, bite, see, listen, smell, and touch, their anticipations, expectations, and imaginations are often remade and with it the desire for erotic touching. Grindr users, then, must negotiate these encounters differently than expected, often learning ways to do so.This paper explores the erotic encounters that Grindr users have in their homes as a way to examine how sexual and embodied practices emerge as people learn how to use digital dating apps. I focus on the embodied, material, and spatial anticipations, and the importance of domestic spaces in shaping how encounters are negotiated. I adopt a feminist corporeal

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Inviting the stranger in: Intimacy, digital technology and new geographies of encounter

Cited by 63 publications

References 126 publications

Let’s (not) Go Outside: Grindr, Hybrid Space, and Digital Queer Neighborhoods

Let’s (not) Go Outside: Grindr, Hybrid Space, and Digital Queer Neighborhoods

No Room for Dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces, and Lived Democracy in India

Anticipating touch: Haptic geographies of Grindr encounters in Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne, UK

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