Investigating sexual racism and interactions of grindr app users

Abstract

Drawing on sexual fields theory and sexual racism literature, this paper explores racialized sexual desires of Grindr users in Singapore. 24 semi-structured interviews with Grindr users were conducted between December 2019 and February 2020. Within this specified field (Grindr in Singapore), this paper finds a preoccupation with pigeonholing users into racial categories tethered to stereotypes, which sustains a hierarchy where Chinese users are generally considered more desirable than Malays and Indians. This preoccupation habituates users to verify the racial identities of other users, especially through photos—adding a previously unexplored dimension to existing accounts of how technical features structure user interactions. This paper also enriches sexual fields theory by offering a classificatory framework to study sexual fields as possible sites of contestation against existing hierarchies. Racial minority respondents’ strategic responses to sexual racism are sorted into three groups: playing the same game (recognizing and legitimating the existing hierarchy), challenging the rules (recognizing but resisting the hierarchy), or playing a different game (not recognizing the same hierarchy). Finally, this paper discusses why some users unexpectedly deviate from recognizing the racial hierarchy in the predominant way.