Problems, devices and designs in the construction of the gay sexual marketplace

• In Event: Digital Sexualities, Biomedical Practice, and Queer Realities: HIV & Queer Mobility

Abstract

Drawing on previous work in which I have approached digital sex as amarketplace and conceived hookup apps and online cruising sites as market devices, this paper argues that tech developers tend to rely on some problematization of the existing sexual marketplace, as it is being enacted, in their efforts to improve the prospects of specific groups of participants, qualify their products and secure a niche in the digital marketplace. Drawing on a rare interview with its founder, I discuss how the world’s largest hookup site for men looking for other barebackers, BarebackRT.com (‘BBRT’), was conceived and designed to address certain problems its developers perceived in the gay sexual marketplace as it was digitally and practically enacted at the time of the site's conception. Its innovations in format and search criteria demonstrate how clinical indicators, among other personal and technical specifications, can emerge as criteria for discriminating between prospective partners, populating personal profiles and qualifying the self in the pursuit of sexual encounters. More surprisingly, they now inform a growing range of apps and websites which propose to contribute to better HIV outcomes among MSM internationally. This demonstrates how innovations in digital culture can eventuate from convergences between digital and clinical media and how such convergences effect differences in the market qualification of social networking applications. But it also stages the categories according to which members are required to present themselves online as provisional, historically situated, and available to experimentation and critical transformation.

Author

• Kane Race, University of Sydney