The gentrification of queer in Brazilian digital territoriality

technopolitical devices in the Grindr app

Abstract

The concept of gentrification, which emerged in the last century, refers to a process of urban requalification that affects neighborhoods, cities, and/or regions in order to change the composition of the place, so that they become noble regions that were previously popular. However, epistemological mutations have been less interested in studying the physicality of this phenomenon and more in its symbolic effects and exclusion strategies. In view of this aspect, this research takes as its object of study Grindr, an app for sexual and affective encounters for gays, bisexuals, and transgender people, to consider how the notion of gentrification operates in cyberspace. To this end, this study proposes the notion of queer gentrification, a diagram that uses technopolitical devices that endorse territorial surveillance practices in order to gentrify the sociabilities and dissident subjects of the digital environment of that app. Therefore, this qualitative research uses genealogy as its methodology. Gentrification, when it enters digital territoriality, acts as a regime of exclusion and oppression whose devices are intertwined and form a diagram that controls users; the gentrification of queerness displaces the dissident experience into an asymmetrical volume of surveillance that normalizes queer marks in this application; and the interaction of technopolitical devices provokes compulsive invisibility, the remaking of subjectivities, the negotiation of privacy, and the reprogramming of a certain mode of intimacy.