Respectable Promiscuity and Cybercarnality; Or, "Never show your face on pictures with your naughty bits"

• In Event: 034 - Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology Paper Session. Bodies and Sexualities in Science and Technology Studies (co-sponsored by the Section on Body and Embodiment)

Abstract

This paper draws on data from a digital ethnography to identify a key paradox of Grindr, a gay “hook-up app.” The app facilitates casual sex between relative strangers, enabling practices that are stigmatized as promiscuous. However, Grindr also facilitates the movement of public sex culture into private spaces, thereby participating in the homonormative project of “cleaning up” gay public spaces, and reinforcing a queer politics of respectability. This paradox, which I call “respectable promiscuity,” reveals the complex relationship between technology and sexuality in the context of queer liberalism. Respectable promiscuity is embodied in Grindr users’ sexual practices. Users’ digitized bodies, in public profiles and private exchanges of pictures and text, and their material bodies, in “face-to-face” interactions, are a medium through which respectability and promiscuity are negotiated. The concept of respectable promiscuity plays with the mutual exclusivity of respectability and promiscuity within both hetero- and homo-normative discourses, in order to draw attention to the inherent paradoxes of sexual practice, sexual subjectivity, and sexual discourse. “Respectable promiscuity” captures the negotiations individuals engage in as they enact stigmatized sexual practices, manage sexual reputations, and give meaning to their sexual practices within a specific socio-political context. Grindr is a rich case study for the concept of respectable promiscuity because it reveals the role of technology in these negotiations.

Author

• Jody Ahlm, University of Illinois-Chicago