ABSTRACT
The mobile application called Grindr, pioneered the integration of location awareness into what was basically a digital dating service. Based on an analysis of how Grindr users notice and select potential contacts, this chapter discusses how such a location-aware mobile application is used mostly as a resource for the initiation of a particular framing of the encounters, which participants call a 'plan cul' in French. It focuses more specifically on the way Grindr users navigate through town and the app interface; that is, how they articulate attention and mobility practices so that serendipitous opportunities for sexual encounters of a certain kind might emerge. Grindr offers us an example of how sexual arousal may be experienced through the screen-mediated perception of spatial proximity of potentially willing strangers. Grindr enables gay users to weave together different strands of prior practice into a distinctive use.
