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Lookup NU author(s): Carl Bonner-Thompson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This article explores the regulatory practices that shape the production of embodied masculinities in profile pictures in the online dating app, Grindr. Mobile dating applications are becoming increasingly enmeshed in everyday socio-sexual lives, providing ‘new’ spaces for construction, embodiment and performance of gender and sexuality. I draw on 31 semi-structured interviews and four participant research diaries with men who use Grindr in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a post-industrial city in North East England. Exploring the ways men display, expose and place their bodies in online profile pictures, revealed the production of two forms of masculinity – hypersexualised masculinity and lifestyle masculinity. I argue that the regulatory practices that shape men’s bodies in everyday spaces work to produce these masculinities. I take a visual approach that pays attention to the spatial practices that produce pictures, but that also pays attention to other senses, particularly touch. Paying attention to the visuality of the Grindr grid enables an understanding of the instability of online/offline dichotomies, as it is the interactions of online and offline spaces that enable the production of digital masculinities.
Author(s): Bonner-Thompson C
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Gender, Place and Culture
Year: 2017
Volume: 24
Issue: 11
Pages: 1611-1625
Online publication date: 27/07/2017
Acceptance date: 15/05/2017
Date deposited: 10/08/2017
ISSN (print): 0966-369X
ISSN (electronic): 1360-0524
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1356270
DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2017.1356270
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