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In this presentation, I take as my object of analysis the cellphone application Grindr, the first dating “app” designed exclusively for queer men’s use and one that, due to its widespread adoption and cultural recognition, has had a consequential effect on queer men’s capacity to fashion their sexual selfhood. Posing the question of Grindr’s relationship with the formation of queer men’s digital-sexual subjectivity, I introduce the notion of the digicidal interval, which marks the matrix of circumscription of queer men’s capacity to imagine politically transformational configurations of desire and pleasure in digital space. Drawing on a theoretical edifice that brings together insights from Afropessimism, psychoanalysis, and feminist science and technology studies, I demonstrates how Grindr, in its exposure of the queer male subject to the digicidal interval, captures queer men at the most fundamental level of their subjectivity and forecloses the impulse to envision alternative sexual futures and modes of sexual self-fashioning. I argue that the felicity of this capture, that is, the magnetic field of force relations constitutive of the digicidal interval, is structured by the particular logics of repetition compulsion in a neoliberal, homonormative contemporary. Grindr’s capacity to capture its users within the field of the digicidal interval is premised on its provision of sexual experience that promises to recuperate the non-normativity of queerness. Grindr’s digital-sexual space transforms queer men’s relationship with desire and pleasure, but it is in the conditions of this transformation, I argue, that the possibility for the subject’s ethical reconstitution may be found. 

Sponsored by: Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies

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Latasha Simms

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