Abstract
This chapter examines queer women’s use of the popular dating app Tinder to understand how everyday practices, alongside app functions and features, shaped their sense of proximity to other queer women. Platform analysis and interview methods reveal that participants often rapidly swiped through the profiles of nearby queer women, giving rise to the feeling that queer women were scarce. This notion of scarcity was precipitated by embodied constraints on search criteria, the propensity to be recognised on the app and in physical space, and the prevalence of men, couples, and heterosexual women appearing in participants’ searches. These findings challenge the assumption that geolocational apps seamlessly co-situate individuals in digital and physical space, highlighting considerations for how dating apps can serve a wider diversity of users.
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Notes
- 1.
I adopt Gray’s (2009) definition of “queer” as “the action of identity work” (p. 26), which involves “the collective labor of crafting, articulating, and pushing the boundaries of identities” (p. 26). Queer encompasses identities in tension with presumptions that individuals are heterosexual and cisgender. I refer to “women” as female-identified individuals, aligning with how participants identified their gender, including androgynous and genderfluid women. For lack of a neutral umbrella term for people of diverse sexual and gender identities (Barker, Richards, & Bowes-Catton, 2009), I refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in aggregate as LGBTQ people.
- 2.
Race (2015) has discussed how some dating app users may only aim to engage with others through the app to exchange sexual photos or entertain fantasies without acting on them.
- 3.
In-app Grindr advertisement from the 2018 version for iPhone.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to Jean Burgess and Elija Cassidy, who contributed insights into the analysis that has taken shape here. Thanks also to those at the McGill Queer Research Colloquium where I presented some of these conclusions. I would like to convey deepest thanks to the participants who discussed their Tinder use with me.
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Duguay, S. (2019). “There’s no one new around you”: Queer Women’s Experiences of Scarcity in Geospatial Partner-Seeking on Tinder. In: Nash, C.J., Gorman-Murray, A. (eds) The Geographies of Digital Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6876-9_6
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