Building community, one swipe at a time: hook-up apps and the production of intimate publics between women

ABSTRACT

Hook-up apps are an increasingly popular way for women to meet other people for sex, dating, relationships, and more. As a mundane and habitual form of media, the multiple uses of hook-up apps allow for the production of intimacy in surprising and complex ways. This paper draws on narrative interviews with 15 self-identifying women to explore how dating and hook-up apps help produce ‘intimate publics’ for women. The field of intimate publics available to women users of hook-up apps is broader than those afforded by in-app interactions; there is an entire network of intimacy, sociality, and publicity that forms around hook-up apps. Our findings show that while both queer and straight women use hook-up apps to find sex, hook-ups, dates, and relationships, they are also central to building community, friendship, and sociality between women.

KEYWORDS:

• Hook-up apps
• women’s health
• intimacy
• community
• public space
• technology

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mary Grace Lao as well as our two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We define ‘woman’ as anyone who self-identifies as a woman. We use ‘queer women’ as an umbrella term for women who self-identified as bisexual, pansexual, gay, lesbian, or any other non-heterosexual sexuality.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.