‘IT’S A CANDY STORE. YOU CAN SEE THE CANDIES, BUT THE DOOR IS CLOSED.’ (NEURO)QUEERING THE HOOK-UP APP INDUSTRY IN NON-METROPOLITAN FINLAND.

Abstract

Industrial time and space produce marginalities and resistance: Queer time rejects linearity and potentiates alternate experiences (Halbertsam, 2005). Today, many experience phones or smartwatches as mediating temporal ruptures in daily lives (Mowlabocus, 2016), and hookup app industries monetise intimacies. Given permanent online connectivity, work and leisure are more porous than in a factory, yet corporate industries mediate marginal socialities. Industrious rural queers wrestle control of spatiotemporal intimacies from totalising platforms. This study maps rural sexuality and hook-up app (dis)comfort and visualises whether hook-up contacts penetrate social networks. Seven semi-structured interviews took place in Finland. Three themes were determined: (in)visibility due to (fears of) marginalisation; categories and borders of app design inadequately reflecting indigenous/gendered, (neuro)queer, rural, linguistic, infrastructural and economic realities; and resisting spatiotemporal app logics. History has shown the rise of industry as precariously subject to queer temporal forces lacking predictable directions, ultimately declining. Nonetheless, emergent digital industries, such as queer hookup apps, re-attempt to totalise expression via universal logic. They inadequately account for the cultural, linguistic, neurodiverse, gender diverse, disabled, indigenous and local contexts of queer lives beyond major cities, just as clock-time undermined working labourers while empowering colonial interests. We hope to demonstrate the ingenuity of users in questioning and queering social norms, with the hope of building improved digital queer social worlds that do not fetishise queer bodies as visible yet unreacable products for capitalist consumption but rather facilitate spatiotemporal possibilities that fulfil rural, queer, digital, and social needs.