Abstract
This article is situated within larger research on crime and queer intimate economy in contemporary India. Specifically, the article focuses on how users of popular queer dating applications like Grindr manage their anxieties about risk while seeking intimacy through the application. Participants in this study acknowledged that it is their inability to manage and discipline ‘intimacy urgencies’ that causes a lapse in their judgement, and expose them to risk. Consequently, users devise their own rituals, processes and routines to ‘do trust’, and secure a safe environment for sexual intimacy, devoid of violence and abuse. However, the technological affordances that Grindr provides users to ‘do trust’ entail seeking social, educational, economic and cultural legibility and sameness. For example, users ‘trust’ those who link their allied social media profiles like Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to their Grindr profile. This article examines how users with limited ‘digital capital’ that legitimise participation in neoliberal forms of consumerism, pop culture and professionalism are perceived as being unsafe. ‘Doing Trust’ on Grindr in contemporary India is a way to seek ‘sameness’, a familiarity that is felt and known through caste and class habitus and privilege.
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Notes
(India: Smartphone Users 2040 | Statista, n.d.).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Grindr XTRA comes at 549 INR a month, while Grindr Unlimited at 3599 INR a month, in a country where the official minimum wage is 178 INR per day. To give some perspective, I find the cost of Grindr Unlimited to be bordering on the unaffordable.
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This study has been funded by Indian Council of Social Science Research.
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Bose, C. “People are desperate for intimacy”: ‘Intimacy Urgencies’ and ‘Doing Trust’—How do Grindr users Respond to Risks of Violence in Contemporary India?. Sexuality & Culture 28, 1255–1275 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-023-10178-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-023-10178-9