‘The meat market’: production and regulation of masculinities on the Grindr grid in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

Abstract

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.