ABSTRACT
Grindr, the popular social networking app aimed at men who are sexually interested in other men, launched its Kindr campaign in 2018, which was designed to foster a more inclusive and respectful environment for its users. This campaign followed years of criticism regarding the racism, transphobia, femmephobia, body shaming, and HIV-related stigmatism that littered profiles and permeated interactions on the platform. While the Kindr initiative was met with applause from some quarters of the gay press, it also drew criticism from some members of the LGBTQ community, who felt that their ‘preferences’ and desires were being policed and proscribed via new practices of censorship. Through a close reading of Kindr and an analysis of Grindr’s design features, I explore the central tension the platform sets up between its new discourse of ‘kindness’ and the affordances of its software. Reflecting on these contradictions between discourse and code, and between discourse and action, I suggest that Grindr promotes an ethos of ‘polite incivility’, an ethos that provides a method for ‘managing’ discrimination and difference, and which forgoes sexual citizenship in favor of sexual consumption.
