Abstract
The past two decades have witnessed the parallel and intersectional development of platform studies and LGBTQ studies along with the proliferation of digital technologies and the growing visibility of the queer community. A large body of queer dating app studies addresses this intersection and has offered insight into the everyday online encounters of LGBTQ people in the ongoing mediatized world. However, new questions have emerged with the localization/globalization of social-sexual platforms and growing online racism and other identity-based discrimination and violence towards LGBTQ people of color. Context-rich and intersectional studies on social-sexual platforms are in urgent need to reveal the complicated status quo of LGBTQ people of color whose lives are at constant and sometimes enforced crossing of different boundaries: online and offline, west and the east, heteronormative and homonormative, etc. Andrew DJ Shield’s book Immigrants on Grindr marks one of the ambitious and self-reflexive attempts to challenge the disciplinary border by foregrounding gay immigrants’ experience at the digital border of gay dating apps where race, sexuality and class identities meet. To be more specific, this book addresses the important questions of how gay immigrants migrate onto and engage with the white-dominant gay dating app in the west.
In Immigrants on Grindr, Shield examines the intersectionality of race, country of origin, migration status, sexuality, body and gender representation of immigrant Grindr users in the Copenhagen context. This study detours from the homonationalist gaze on gay migration issues that highlights the domestic sexuality repression toward gay immigrants in the diasporic community or home countries. With solid fieldwork findings of Copenhagen’s Grindr-using community, Shield brings us to the under-presented landscape where LGBTQ people of color suffer from everyday entitlement racism as mediated by the technological and social affordance on Grindr. Criticizing media scholars and immigration studies’ overlooking of dating apps as spaces where “race is built into the interfaces” (p. 235), Shield demonstrates that Grindr study on LGBTQ immigrants is methodologically and empirically important.
By situating personal experience and reflection in the genealogy of gay social-sexual platforms, Shield presents in this book an excellent auto-ethnography that will fascinate both academics and the broader audience. Reading along with his analysis and auto-history, readers are able to comprehend the broader social-technological transformation of gay digital culture as well as the reconfigured racial-sexual relations since 1990. To arrest the social-sexual tensions on Grindr, Shield engages with a mixture of data, including quantitative data, qualitative covert online participation and archives, and deploys interviews and online participation. His reflection on visual presentation and analysis of the skeleton profile, insider/outsider role and overt/covert participation in the field showcases what an ethical and smart ethnography work should be like. The following chapters further elaborate on the social-racial relations and cultures on Grindr with rich empirical evidence of the interaction of users, representation and the platform. Chapter four differentiates tourists and immigrants to illustrate the complicated race-sexual situation newcomers face on a geo-location dating app. Chapter five uses Grindr profiles to explore how visible racism is experienced discursively by immigrants, while chapter six focuses on the drop-down “ethnicity” menu that facilitates both in-app racism and resistance. As such, Shield correctly points out that racism is embodied and embedded in the interface design of Grindr that users are guided to perform and behave in afforded ways.
As demonstrated in this book, racism is omnipresent in Grindr in correlation to the offline social-sexual structures but, also, with its own character mediated by techno-social affordance. It cannot be emphasized more that LGBTQ platform studies should engage with the experience of queer immigrants and immigration study needs a digital communication lens. The findings are not constrained to the local gay community in the greater Copenhagen region. Shield’s book echoes the lived experience of the international LGBTQ community at the intersection of race, gender expression and nationality, and reveals the ways in which marginalized queer people’s intimate life and public encountering are reconfigured by social-sexual platforms. Taking the role of dating apps in shaping social-racial culture seriously, Shield also brings the users’ agency to the fore recognizing immigrants’ resistance and their allies’ gesture. Albeit a little optimistic, this book provides potential paths of shaping platforms by individual and on-app activism for us to face the future where social-sexual platforms will play an even more essential role in determining the social-racial culture in the LGBTQ community.
