Safe on my phone? Same-sex-attracted young people’s negotiations of intimacy, visibility and risk on digital hookup apps

This paper draws on focus-group interviews with same-sex-attractedAustralian men and women aged 18-29, to reflect on their accounts of theperceived risks and opportunities offered by hook-up apps such as Grindr,Blendr and Hornet. Until recently, scholarly accounts same-sex attractedmen hooking up online have primarily focused on measuring the safety ofsexual encounters in relation to HIV and ‘risky’ sexual practices. This paperextends previous health-related studies by considering the ways that theexchange of sexually-explicit digital self-portraits (or selfies) feature withindigital sexual negotiations, and also exploring same-sex-attracted women’sperceptions of safety and risk in relation to dating and hook-up apps andwebsites. It draws on recent scholarship on Grindr and other geo-locativehook-up apps (such as Brubaker et al. 2014, and Blackwell et al. 2015), toexplore the material role that mobile phones and apps play in establishinga sense of safety, intimacy and/or risk within flirtations and sexualinteractions, and the ways that young people’s ‘off-label’ (or non-sexual)uses of hook-up apps might facilitate (and diminish) their sense of queeridentity and visibility