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Towards Hookup Apps Studies: Sexual Cultures, Digital Queers, Locative Media

Sat, May 23, 13:30 to 14:45, Caribe Hilton, Flamingo A

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

As location-aware media have become increasingly common, dating and hooking up have emerged as some of these technologies' “killer apps.” Geosocial networking applications, or “hookup apps,” offer users social networking platforms that leverage location to connect individuals based on their geographic positions, common interests, and mutual attraction. These apps offer users a convenient way to share images and profiles, initiate conversations, and make decisions about meeting face-to-face. While popular attention to features like the first-impression-based “social swipe” creates a perceived mode of rapid-fire engagement, geosocial networking services present a range of affordances, prescriptions, and on-the-ground uses. How do hookup apps circulate in relation to digital sexual cultures, how do we study this, and how do queer communities incorporate hookup apps into long established gay social networks?

Hookup app culture prompts new possibilities for interpersonal interaction, which in turn require new approaches to long-standing traditions of media research. A growing body of literature on hookup apps emerges from shared research questions across media and cultural studies, queer studies, and science and technology studies. This works brings together the history of online communities and dating, sexual cultures and queer counterpublics, and social media’s integration of location information. These areas of study have focused on community formation and maintenance, identity and boundary play, and the hybridization of everyday space across web-based and mobile technologies.

Collectively, this panel suggests that attending to a development of “hookup app studies” offers theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights that introduce new perspectives in mobile communication and locative media. This panel’s approach to hookup apps moves beyond established modes of inquiry and perceived popular use toward a more cultural approach to digital life that foregrounds how issues of gender and sexuality are articulated to the politics of platforms. In individually distinct and overlapping ways, each paper addresses what hasn’t been fully considered in how we study hooking up: sustained attention to temporality as an analytic; historical-comparative work on how apps position and are positioned by markets, publics, social media brands, and the prescription of identity; how boundary work in communities changes based on interplatform flows and modularity; user responses to and workarounds within privatization efforts; and, how established modes of privacy and surveillance are adjusted by user-driven efforts to shape pleasure out of affordance. Finally, concomitant with the theme of ICA 2015, we consider how hookup apps contribute to a reshaping of the expectations surrounding normative life course chronology.

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