Jody Ahlm

 Visweswaran grapples with the epistemelogical problems of a discipline founded in the study of the Other. She suggests, among other things, two epistemelogical shifts related to the positionality of the researcher and her subject. In “hyphenated ethnography,” the researcher makes use of her hybrid positionality, or hyphenated identity, to study a culture that she is neither entirely a part of, but which constitutes an aspect of her hybridity. Visweswaran also suggests a shift away from fieldwork, in favor of “homework.” One way of decolonizing anthropology is by focusing on demographics instead of geographies, and exploring the meaning of “home”.

In my current research on Grindr, I find myself neither at home, nor away from home. As Visweswaran discusses, studying “home” often means exploring the difficulty of defining that term and the impossibility of “being home.” The online space of the app I study, and the space of the interviews I conduct, is comfortable in many ways. Yet I often find myself questioning what affinity I have with my subjects and whether I “belong” in that space at all.  Not because of it's geography, but because of it's demography. Of course, belonging and home rarely have an easy relationship. One does not necessarily imply the other.

What, then, is my positionality in relation to my subjects when studying gay men's sexual culture? Am I traveling to “the field” or am I doing “homework”? Am I a hyphenated researcher, studying a place and a culture that is not quite my own, but not quite foreign? There is a familiar moment when I turn to face a man in a gay bar who has just made a suggestive pass at me. Knowing that I have been misrecognized, I prolong that misrecognition by hesitating before responding, when inevitably my voice will betray my femaleness and I will become, in a second act of misrecognition, undesirable.

Yet it is this field of my misrecognition that I find myself studying. Grindr is a virtual gay cruising space. There is a continuum of sexual and non-sexual interactions and intentions, but it is widely known to be a “hook-up app,” and as such, is a sexualized space. It is also a highly gendered space, so much so that it goes unmarked. Profiles can include race/ethnicity, height, weight, and relationship status, but not gender. There is literally no place for gender, unless you include it in the small text box that many people don't read. My profile includes the disclaimer that I am a “queer masculine woman,” an identity that I am more at home in than most others, but which fails to capture my positionality when considered relationally and in the context of the space I study.

The disclaimer was an addition made after discovering how tedious keeping up with messages can be, and wanting to filter out those guys who wouldn't continue a conversation beyond the disclosure of my gender. This itself was a lesson in the routines and social practices of Grindr users. Profile construction and message management are essential for tailoring the app to a user's goals. Visweswaran warns against a generalized notion of hybridity that ignores power relations and the relative ability to “choose” certain identities. My generalized hybridity would be that I am a gay-woman. But in my “field”, my gender is more salient than my sexuality. Only if I were a man would my sexuality matter. On Grindr, desire is first and foremost gendered, and the affective space of the app centers around desire. Does my hybridity, then, even matter? Undesirable because of my gender, am I an insider in this space in anyway?

However, close reading of other users' profiles isn't a universal practice, and I still have conversations that begin and end with misrecognition. In fact, I am unintelligible to many people I encounter on Grindr.  Misrecognition is inevitable in many cases.  But does home imply recognition? Can some place be home if we are constantly misrecognized? Visweswaran's accounts of her own work reflect the impossibilities of feeling at home while doing hyphenated ethnography. Misrecognition occurs often, by strangers as well as relatives. In reflecting on my own motives for my research, my “more than accidental academic trajector[y]” (127), I've come to wonder if there is sometimes pleasure in misrecognition. There is also alienation, disappointment, even anger, but I think part of any “homework”, or of any hyphenated ethnography, is a pleasure in certain misrecognitions that actually legitimize the fractures and ambiguities of our identities.