Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: This research provides a grounded analysis of how dating apps are being adopted by young middle-class heterosexual and non-heterosexual women and gender minorities in Mumbai. In urban India today, the smartphone has become an important mode through which young middle-class people are navigating their lives. And, while there is a burgeoning literature on smartphone-hosted platforms such as ridesharing apps, food delivery apps, healthcare apps, payment apps in the Indian context, there is relatively little known about the dating app. Motivated by this blind spot, this research seeks to examine how dating apps are reconfiguring socio-spatio-digital relations in Mumbai. Literature on both digital technologies and sexuality in ‘global South’ geographies have tended to sit within universalising, problem-centred narratives, largely focusing on the global poor. Instead, this research takes leisure and pleasure as analytics to examine dating app use among middle-class digital users in Mumbai. In doing so, it considers how dating apps are taken up against a backdrop of sexual surveillance and regulation for heterosexual and non-heterosexual women and gender minority groups, the potentials of data and algorithms in enabling these groups to transgress social norms of desire, and the relationship between dating apps and the city. These analyses provide an understanding of how digital dating practices have emerged in a place where digital take-up is far from universal and sexual life is regulated in context-specific ways. This thesis is based on 9 months of mixed methods fieldwork in Mumbai and 9 months of fieldwork online, including interviews and focus groups with 57 individual dating app users. The thesis engages closely with four key dating apps – Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and TrulyMadly. This research finds that dating app use in Mumbai, for young middle-class heterosexual and non- heterosexual women and gender minorities is circumscribed by what I call suitability. I show how this concept which has a specific lineage in the Indian context, most often associated with practices of arranged marriages for cisgender individuals, mediates the digital dating app in three ways. First, I argue that these young dating app users navigate suitability by relying on the digital affordances of dating apps that enable them to use these apps secretively through what I call, building on Taussig (1999), a ‘digital public secret’. I show how dating app companies also contribute to this secret through their visual media campaigns. In doing so both users and companies can avoid the sexually regulating institutions of society including families, communities and the state. Second, I show how dating app users, data and algorithms come together to create new regimes of exclusion. I argue that data and suitability fuse together to 2 create a new techno-hierachy of ‘data-bility’, determining who is seen as (un)suitable on the dating app. Third, I argue that this exclusion is implicated spatially. I build on Arora (2019) to show how suitability is spatialised through what I call a ‘digital-urban leisure divide’, which results from the exclusionary spatial process that occur co-constitutively on both dating apps, and in the city. These arguments come together to show how, even for those who sit within marginal gender and sexual identities, dating app use is mediated by suitability. While dating apps offer sexually transgressive potentials for young middle-class heterosexual and non-heterosexual women and gender minorities, they are simultaneously circumscribed by logics which are implicated in the organisation of society and space in Mumbai. That is, the logics of vilification and exclusion of working-class men.
Author: Dattani, K
Language: English
Topic: Gender and Feminist Studies
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7006191908