Grindr: immoderation vs sin in the global virtual gay bar

Grindr: Immoderation vs Sin in the Global Virtual Gay Bar Dr David Kreps, ISOS, University of Salford July 2010

Agenda

Agenda ✤ Introduction - Sexual Social Networking ✤ Foucault’s History of Sexuality ✤ Queer theory ✤ Grindr ✤ Conclusion

Sexual social networking research

Sexual social networking research ✤ Participant observation ✤ Member of Gaydar (since 2000), Fitlads (since 2004), and Grindr (since 2009), as observer and conversationalist ✤ Time on ChatRoulette (since January 2010) meeting people from around the world ✤ Post-structuralist approach to concepts of identity, gender, sexuality - speciﬁcally Foucault, Butler, Deleuze (since 1995) ✤ Queer theory since 1990s, challenging hetero-normativity - Weeks, Halperin, Warner, Sedgwick, Butler - all heavily inﬂuenced by Foucault ✤ ‘Masculinities’ - Whitehead’s Foucauldian ‘masculine discursive subject’ ✤ Situated within the broader phenomena of online social networking and of sex and the internet

Sexual Social Networking publications

Sexual Social Networking publications ✤ Kreps, D (2009) “Performing the Discourse of Sexuality Online: Foucault, Butler, and Video- sharing on Sexual Social Networking Sites” - focussing on Gaydar and Fitlads - at AMCIS 2009, San Francisco ✤ Due to be published as book chapter in Warburton, S (ed.) “Social Media and Digital Identity” IGI Global, early 2011 ✤ Kreps, D (2010) “My Social Networking Proﬁle: Copy, Resemblance, or Simulacrum? A Poststructuralist Interpretation of Social Information Systems”, European Journal of Information Systems 19 p104-115 ✤ Kreps, D (2010) “Foucault, Exhibitionism and Voyeurism on ChatRoulette” - at CATaC 2010, Vancouver ✤ Kreps, D (2010) “Introducing Eco-Masculinities: How a masculine discursive subject approach to the Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT impacts an environmental informatics project” - at AMCIS 2010, Lima ✤ Working towards a journal paper on sexual social networking

Home porn

Home porn ✤ ‘The Swinger’ - Polaroid Camera ✤ 70s phenomenon “instant photography and instant pornography” ✤ Production of pornography -> from broadcast mode to distributed mode

Sex on the internet

Sex on the internet Saucy Polaroid now almost indistinguishable from professional pornography Naked photos and videos on Internet dating sites

Sexual Social Networking

Sexual Social Networking ✤ Adult Friend Finder - some 20m users ✤ Gaydar.co.uk “the world's most successful online dating site” (Guardian 2009) - over 3 million members [QSoft] ✤ Niche sites continue to grow while larger ones stagnate [TechCrunch] ✤ Subscriptions worth almost $1bn in US, €0.5bn in Europe http://trust.mindswap.org/cgi-bin/relationshipTable.cgi

Foucault’s Scientia Sexualis

Foucault’s Scientia Sexualis ✤ History of Sexuality vols 1,2 and 3 ✤ what appears as a "repression" of sexual drives is a huge increase in the discussion of sex ✤ Discourse on sexuality - confession > consultation ✤ from the Christian confessional box to the sexologist’s, in the 19th century, and then in the 20th century the psychoanalyst’s couch Michel Foucault ✤ Consultation + Web2.0 = Chat: sexual discourse now the domain of all

Scientia Sexualis Videre

Scientia Sexualis Videre ✤ More than just self-advertising ✤ Competitive sexual exhibitionism ✤ more to do with communication about sex – albeit that that communication is visual rather than oral or textual – than it is about sex itself

Video-discourse

Video-discourse ✤ As Nakamura (2008) has described, digital images are as open to interpretation as Foucauldian visual “discourse-objects” (Foucault 1995:140) as are vocal and written statements. ✤ the exchange of imagery online becomes a confessional sexual activity in its own right, quite apart from the physical meetings that may or may not be arranged through the website

The Use of Pleasure

The Use of Pleasure ✤ Christian taboos on non-procreative sex ✤ Anything non-procreative considered a transgression of ordained ‘natural’ activity ✤ Homosexuality intrinsically sinful ✤ Classical pagan concern with moderation ✤ Anything goes but best approach is ‘all things in moderation’ ✤ Homosexuality institutionalised, ‘normal’ but subject to subtle restraints

Queer Theory

Queer Theory 1. “a conceptualization of sexuality which sees sexual power embodied in different levels of social life, expressed discursively Sexuality and enforced through boundaries and binary divides” 2. “the problematization of sexual and gender categories, and of identities in general. Identities are always on uncertain ground, Identity entailing displacements of identiﬁcation and knowing” 3. “a rejection of civil-rights strategies in favor of a politics of carnival, transgression and parody which leads to deconstruction, Carnival decentering, revisionist readings and an anti-assimilationist politics” 4. “a willingness to interrogate areas which normally would not seen as the terrain of sexuality, and to conduct "queer" readings of Queer ostensibly heterosexual or non-sexualized texts.” Stein and Plummer 1996

Queer Theory and reality

Queer Theory and reality 1. Radical deconstructionism - Sexuality and Identity “superimposes a postmodern self-concept onto the homosexual subject, thereby glossing over the enduring institutional organization of sexuality….” 2. Radical subversion - Carnival and Queer readings “superimposes a politically marginal self-concept onto the homosexual subject, thereby grossly oversimplifying complex developmental processes attendant to sexual identiﬁcation.” Green A, “Gay but Not Queer: Toward a Post-Queer Study of Sexuality” Theory and Society, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Aug., 2002), pp. 521-545

Grindr

Grindr ✤ Location based service - ‘Gay GPS’ ✤ 500,000 members worldwide ✤ iPhone, Blackberry, Android ✤ Who’s online, how many metres away from you... ✤ Very simple personal proﬁles ✤ Chat application

Restraints

Restraints ✤ Steve Jobs April 2010 ✤ “You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there.” [Seeking Alpha] ✤ New Guidelines issued by Grindr shortly afterward - subject of some discussion online

Vancouver attack This is NOT the boy in question

Vancouver attack ✤ Grindr condemned the attack on a 15yr old boy by a Vancouver 54 yr old. ✤ Police blamed the geo-tagging iPhone app Grindr available on Apple Itunes for a sexual assault on a 15-year-old boy. ✤ Bren Tynan, 54, from Vancouver was charged with sexual assault, sexual interference and invitation to sexual touching. ✤ “Grindr strongly condemns the inappropriate and criminal use of our service and actively cooperates with local authorities on any alleged illegal activity on our service,” Grindr spokesman ✤ Inter-generational sexual contact becomes an ‘attack’ when the boy is under the ‘legal’ age. At different times in recent history this age was 21. In Holland the age is 14, where in this case no ‘criminal’ act would have taken place. This is NOT the boy in question

Promiscuity

Promiscuity ✤ Does Grindr ✤ promote promiscuity? ✤ facilitate promiscuity? ✤ encourage promiscuity? ✤ celebrate promiscuity?

Anti-normalisation

Anti-normalisation ✤ Promiscuity one of several ‘kinds’ of sexual activities, including inter- generational sexual contact ✤ Both outside of hetero-normative behaviours and outside of assimilated ‘gay’ coupling - the healthy economic unit ✤ Associated with closeted individuals: ‘men who have sex with men’ ✤ Associated with AIDs ✤ Liberated or libertine culture? ✤ Anti-normalisation post-queer theory simply attempting to allow space for such non-assimilated behaviours

Conclusion

Conclusion ✤ Grindr epitomises activities outside heteronormative, assimilated gay coupling, and attracts opprobium because of it ✤ Neither the Christian concept of non-procreative ‘sin’ nor the more liberal classical pagan focus upon ‘moderation’ would seem to approve of the contacts and activities Grindr facilitates ✤ The AppStore iPhone platform contrains at the same time as allowing Grindr ✤ Niche Sexual Social Networking moving off the web into mobile location-based services pushing at the boundaries of social acceptability

Contact

Contact ✤ Dr David Kreps ✤ Director, Centre for Information Systems, Organisations and Society ✤ http://www.isos.salford.ac.uk ✤ http://snipr.com/davidkreps ✤ d.g.kreps@salford.ac.uk

Grindr: immoderation vs sin in the global virtual gay bar

by David Kreps on Jul 16, 2010

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Grindr: immoderation vs sin in the global virtual gay bar — Presentation Transcript