This piece will explore the relationship between desire and risk through user behaviour on queer dating applications like Grindr in contemporary India. Apart from algorithmic features designed into the app, Grindr users have their own subjective and individual registers for mentally mapping safe to meet users. These are often expressed through the rhetoric of ‘class’, such as education, occupation or even geographical location of other users, i.e. in which parts of the city do different users feel safe or unsafe to login to the app; these are also related to the perceived ‘disturbing’ nature of textual and visual content exchanged while sex is being solicited. The discussion around ‘risk’ associated with queer dating applications, particualrly within post-colonial societies, has focused on increasing sexually transmitted diseases among users. This piece will approach the question of risk by looking at dating applications as sites from where violence, in the form of physical abuse, extortion and non-consensual sex, can always potentially emerge. It will discuss different factors Grindr users in India consider before they decide to ‘hook-up’. These negotiations are part of the process of soliciting potential sexual partners on digital platforms. This piece will attempt to discover perceptions of precarity within India’s queer community by analyzing such contemplation of risk and violence while seeking sexual relations through digital media. Scholarship on queer sociability and subjectivity through smart technology has focused mostly on how desire is articulated through the construction of masculinity, health and race. This piece will develop an understanding of sexual desire, one that is expressed through a language of risk and caution. Through its focus on queer sexual practices via digital media, this paper will inform readers about emerging contexts of risks that members of the queer community in post-liberal India are navigating while engaging in sexual practices.
