Investigating sexual racism and interactions of grindr app users

• Main Authors: Ang, Ming Wei, Tan, Justin Ching Keng, Suah, Cheryl Sher Ning
• Other Authors: Chen Lou
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Social sciences::Communication::Communication theories and models; Social sciences::Sociology::Social structure
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/137488
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

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.