Gay dating apps cultivate community and politicized intimacy rather than commitment.

Evidence

Studies of gay intimacy, for instance, have emphasized the more transformative ways in which dating apps can inhabit sexual fields to pursue “connection and community building, which is a very different notion of how to create a better a more secure tomorrow than ‘meeting the one’” (Essig 2019, 70). Such connectivities are articulated in mobile apps like Grindr (the world’s most popular platform for men seeking men), which explicitly shift focus from the importance of lasting commitment and associated claims of a secure future to a more politicized present experience of sex as an act. Politicized experiences of intimacy may take the form of more radical forms of sociality—like those examined in Dasgupta and Dasgupta’s (2018) study of Indian gay men’s use of the app PlanetRomeo, which provides “online spaces for articulating a different kind of intimate subjectivity, one that is forged through sharing stories of failure to achieve romantic intimacy or pain and melancholia” (945). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 235

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s migration story: here the politics dimension of speculative intimacy, relevant to assessing the counter-speculations chapter.
• QUESTION: The Grindr-as-politicized-present argument is worth checking against accounts that Grindr also entrenches hookup norms and racial exclusion.