Building biliteracy and identity through Grindr in Taipei: Getting laid and beyond…

Part of: Queer Intimacies

Abstract:

“Any and all instances in which communication occurs in two (or more) languages in and around writing, being those instances, an individual actor, interaction, practice, program, situation, or society” (Gentil, 2005). This definition of biliteracy extends beyond the traditional educational contexts in which it is usually applied. A new and fascinating context for biliteracy studies corresponds to the LGBTI+ community. Within this community, “a collection of people who engage on an ongoing basis in some common endeavor” (Eckert, 2006), socialization through mobile/online networks requires its members to develop biliterate knowledge that, at the same time, helps build their identities. In this sense, this exploratory study aimed to offer a glimpse of how biliteracy operates in the gay/bisexual community in Taipei, through the app Grindr. Data from a randomized sample of 250 anonymized profiles was collected and preliminarily analyzed with the constant comparison method (Glaser, 1965), and the resulting categories were then evaluated under Hornberger’s Model for Biliteracy (Gentil, 2005), identifying different biliteracy practices (García & Godina, 2017; Jiménez et al., 1996) used by Grindr members. As a result, biliteracy in this social app works in a micro highly-contextualized level, in a successive manner, with a language that is literate, yet vernacular, plurilingual and highly convergent and pictorial (Freedman, 2018), and where the very interactional nature of this language has defined glocalized features (Medina, 2010) that pertain to Taipei and its gay/bisexual community. Further analysis might provide highlights about the interactions between Mandarin Chinese, English, and other languages, as well as the visual elements (emojis) found in this initial exploration, in an effort to understand how the biliteracy development through this app (“queered classroom” as defined by (Woodland, 1999) helps its member to build their identity further beyond simply getting laid.

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