Enclosing Intimate Possibility: Production Cultures in Dating and Ancillary App Industries in India
Das, Vishnupriya
2021
Abstract
This project considers how ideas about intimate possibility are imagined, navigated, and contained by producers operating within India’s dating and dating adjacent app industries. Currently, extended research on dating and dating adjacent apps tends to focus on user experiences and app interface dynamics. Providing an alternative viewpoint, I situate my analysis within the production cultures of a nascent dating app corporate ecosystem in order to better map the emergent, complex, and contradictory ways the logics of digitally mediated intimacy get reified and adapted within a particular regional context. By situating my fieldwork within the corporate media/tech industry in India I show how some of the frictions inherent in the process of rapid national digitization get worked through in this emergent site. Under the backdrop of a rapidly digitizing nation (India), dating and dating adjacent apps, I argue, tend to foreclose the possibilities of many forms of intimate connection in order to create ‘new’ zones (both digital and physical) for intimate encounters. To this end, I present three case studies. Each case examines production practices of app companies within a different frame of reference: starting with cultural politics of gender, moving on to imaginaries of queerness, and finally ending in an examination of the politics of space. Observations I make in these cases are based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in large technology hubs in India (e.g. Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai) conducted between 2016 and 2019. In the first case study, I explore outreach and branding efforts of two large dating app companies (Tinder and TrulyMadly) as they approach the Indian userbase for the first time to illustrate how corporate narratives of appropriate forms of desire and desirability are highly gendered and framed around an urgent need for safety and protection of middle-class women from lower class men. Additionally, I look at how discourse delineating who these apps are for dynamically adapts to user demands. In the second case study I take an in-depth look at the production decisions of India’s first “homegrown” queer dating app – Delta. Here, I analyze how the malleable, transient, fluid qualities of queerness intersect with the pressures of funding, norms of digital design, and consequences of criminalization of homosexuality in the region. In the third case study, I center questions of space and place briefly highlighted in previous chapters through a close examination of online ‘love hotel’ aggregation app StayUncle as a way to highlight the considerations involved in coordinating the transition from communication online to embodied intimate experiences offline in India, particularly in smaller towns. Doing so, I reference the ways in which private spaces for intimate contact are curated and made visible to the public through digital platforms like StayUncle. Throughout the project, I articulate how regional conditions influence the complex and contradictory approaches app producers take.Deep Blue DOI
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dating apps india
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