Part of: Queer Intimacies
Authors: Spencer Chen, Carter Higgins
Abstract:
This paper examines how affective experiences of intimacy, desire, and queer (dis)belonging are narrated, circulated, and re-embodied through platformed sexual sociality. Drawing on publicly shared recounts of Grindr encounters circulated under tags such as #grindrlife across social media and podcasts, the paper approaches these narratives not as retrospective anecdotes or fantasies, but as semiotically accomplished interactional artifacts through which participants negotiate inclusion, exclusion, recognition, and rejection within digitally-mediated queer spaces. Through narration, participants reconstitute affective states—anticipation, excitement, discomfort, shame, attachment—as well as experiences of racialized and sexual(ized) desire, desirability hierarchies, and fragile community formation that emerge through, but are not resolved by, platform-mediated encounters.
Rather than treating intimacy as culminating in physical co-presence, the article argues that affect circulates recursively across platform interfaces, embodied encounters, and post hoc narration, producing layered forms of attachment and estrangement that complicate what it means to “belong” in queer social worlds. Grindr interactions do not end with the hookup or non-hookup; they persist as affective residues that are reorganized through storytelling, evaluation, and public sharing. In this sense, narration functions as a technology of affective continuity, allowing bodies to be re-felt, re-evaluated, and socially situated after the fact, and enabling narrators to position themselves within—or at the margins of—queer collectivities structured by platform logics.
Situated within linguistic anthropology and platform studies, the article contributes to ongoing efforts to move beyond an affect–semiotic divide by showing how affective experiences are socially and technologically accomplished through narrative practice. By focusing on sexual sociality as a privileged site of intensified mediation, the paper demonstrates how digital platforms shape not only interaction and self-presentation, but the conditions under which queer subjects experience belonging, (mis)recognition, vulnerability, and community in technologically saturated social worlds.
