This project aims to intervene in Grindr Studies by introducing theoretics of Zionism and homonationalism to contextualize harms on the Israeli-founded app. Part 1 thinks through desirability-based filtering on Grindr as an exercise in Zionist-homonationalist eugenics, focusing on “Right Now” as a key feature in the construction of the homosexual settler self. Part 2 explores Grindr’s distinct geolocative surveillance interface and its commitment to capital, through the lens of pinkwashed benevolent branding.
Right Here, Right Now
visiting for the weekend. show me around boys 😈
In the dark quiet of his bedroom, he logs on for a session. He has been waiting all day for this. Finally assured that no one is watching over his shoulder, he eagerly presses the bright purple “Let’s Go” button. The interface goes dark right as the signature grid reshapes itself into a “Right Now” feed. A countdown timer starts ticking. In a second’s time, his body enters combat mode, as adrenaline races inside with both anticipation and release. This is the most private one-hour of his day where he can be ruthlessly perverse and perversely ruthless. His unsatiated desire is now remade as the unfulfilled promise of his dominion. Fuck the target, win the game, close the app.
As an Israeli-founded app, Grindr embodies a (homo)sexual politics of conquest, akin to simulating war for the sexual settler-citizen-subject globally. "More cities, more connections, less waiting – Right Now makes finding a hookup faster than ever.” So reads the PR promise of Grindr’s “Right Now” feature launch last year.[1] It is a an “intent-based feature” offering users timed 1-hour sessions to look for immediate sex “‘without the guesswork.’” “Optimized for real-time engagement” within the hour-long timebound, Right Now allows the horny Grindr user to pinpoint hookups, like targets, with tempo. It is nothing short of a surgical strike: precise, calculated, and oriented towards the final act of release, which consummates the entire user experience. Custom-designed for your liking, these affordances are implicit with 10-minute promises of sex, almost akin to the 10-minute promises of delivery apps emerging across the world for the shared end of instant gratification.
Right Now is not just an avatar mode that literally toggles on and off: it functions as a metaphorical pair of digital goggles that reconfigure bodies in space as prizes to be claimed. On Grindr, faces and torsos have always been displayed in an endless geolocative feed of identical dark squares, and as a myriad of scholars have demonstrated,[2] working-class, racialized, transgender, and caste-oppressed bodies are made uniquely available for consumption and dominion. When wearing Right Now’s crimson-stained glasses of desire, undesirable bodies fulfill their final teleological promise as sites of capital – war spoils to be both destroyed, and won, by the homonormative desiring crusader against a ticking bomb clock. Although not essentialized, there are distinct categories of users predetermined at the runtime of the app itself: well before Right Now is ever switched on, you know if you are to play the part of soldier or that of bounty.
On this twisted digital battlefield, (homo)sexual socialities with the Other (the same Other whom one might normally shudder to fraternize with in the real world, beyond the everyday practices of labor extraction) metamorphose into libidinal tasks of connection-as-conquest. Rather than framing settler colonialism as a one-time land-grab event, scholar Patrick Wolfe has insisted on attending to negotiations around the “conquest of labor” and the laboring body, to grasp the relational structure of a “settler-colonial society.”[3] On Grindr, this labor is sexualized. Exciting because it is shameful and perverse because it is permissible, Right Now distends the normative libidinal economy of gay cruising to make room for a more treacherous kind of pleasure, derived from aggression and enhanced through immediacy – on the sole condition that it is always spelled in the language of victory.
Every man, queer, bisexual, or simply curious, can now live the libidinal double life of the “Israeli soldier, praised for killing terrorists in their homes, and adored as a gay prince charming,” in the words of scholar Adi Kuntsman. Akin to the classically Zionist genre of murderous homosexual fantasy, Grindr now stands as the smoke screen barrier between that which he loathes and that which he desires. These are the “seductive erotics of war”[5] – or what Anna M. Agathangelou, M. Daniel Bassichis, and Tamara L. Spira call “intimate investments” in empire.[6]
***
“The World's Biggest, Scariest Gay Bar"
On March 25, 2009, the iOS-based app Grindr first emerged, founded by Israeli-American entrepreneur Joel Simkhai.[7] A location-based gay dating platform, Grindr originated as a way for queer men to view, e-chat, and meet other potential friends and partners in their area, with the free version displaying 100 profiles and the paid version displaying 200. Since then, the app has become an indisputable and ubiquitous fixture of gay culture and life, now boasting over 13 million users across the globe and ranking as the top LGBTQ+ social networking app online[8], eventually earning the title of “World's Biggest, Scariest Gay Bar” in a 2011 Vanity Fair feature.[9]
Simultaneous to its rosy advertising, over the last decade, researchers of Grindr and pop-cultural common sense alike have testified that “scariest” is a fitting label indeed. Academia has charted the manifold ways in which power, identity, and differential experience are produced on the gay dating app. Deploying a range of auto-theoretical, statistical, anecdotal, and ethnographic methods, scholars have named poignant and alarming concerns around racism, femmephobia,[10] transphobia, casteism,[11] and many other modalities of violence. In no uncertain terms, everyday interactions on Grindr’s platform are mired in networked forms of disparity and marginalization. While these multiple forms of harassment on Grindr are notable and condemnable, this piece asks what such lines of analysis might be missing in failing to center Grindr’s origin as an Israeli-founded app that emerged amidst concerted Zionist-homonationalist effort to “pinkwash” the colonial project.[12]
To define some key terms: Zionism specifically refers to the racist, fascistic and settler-colonial ideology behind the ethnostate of Israel, as first articulated by Theodore Herzl in 1896.[13] In the contemporary register of modernity, homonationalism, as Jasbir Puar theorizes, is an exceptionalist politics of homosexuality that “operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual subjects.” Later, Puar clarifies homonationalism – “not simply a synonym for gay racism, or another way to mark how gay and lesbian identities became available to conservative political imaginaries;... not another identity politics, not another way of distinguishing good queers from bad queers, not an accusation, and not a position.”[14] Rather, homonationalism is itself “a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive and fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality.” In this milieu, pinkwashing emerges as a crucial homonationalist tactic (not to be “conflate[d]” as a “parallel phenomena” of homonationalism itself, but just “one manifestation and practice made possible within and because of [it]”). Infamously deployed by the Zionist state, as well as other settler-colonial entities, pinkwashing discourses affirmatively promote a liberal-democratic justification of Israel’s occupation vis-a-vis the queer (and ‘terrorist’) “monstrosity of Palestine and Islam.” In practice, this means media, cultural, artistic, political, religious and common-sensical riffing on the age-old dichotomy between Israel (‘Occident’) as gay-friendly, and Palestine (‘Orient’) as essentially homophobic, in service of liberal arguments that ultimately justify settler-colonial occupation, apartheid and genocide as heroic and protective.[15] Largely, this entire conceptual etymology is at best ignored, at worst explicitly dismissed, amongst Grindr researchers.
Echoing the work of scholar Joshie Tikka, I am interested in telling a different story about Grindr.[16] If we take seriously Israeli-American founder Joel Simkhai’s Zionist-homonationalist investments (financially, libidinally, emotionally, and politically) as the de facto basis of Grindr: the racist, transphobic, and exclusionary violence rife on the platform appears not incidental but inevitable – colonial, by design, as made most apparent by the targeted experiences of queer Palestinian users.[17] In feature, filter, aesthetic, and design, the app reflects deeply eugenicist metrics of fitness and a libidinal ethos of militaristic conquest that are indivisible from its Zionist origins.
Yet, today’s current libidinal climate has morphed: we live in the strange era of “homonationalism in Trump times,” as Puar notes. Anti-Palestinian genocide has been made more explicit than ever before, all while its neoliberal cover has been partially punctured, as we witness the global rollback of trans and queer rights around the world. Pinkwashing as a strategy has persisted, but perhaps in a more insidious form; homonationalist politics continues to proliferate, but from different sites. Against the vacuum created by anti-queer state policy, a platform like Grindr becomes all the more of a mainstay. In a relationship of mutual symbiosis, the State can go full-fledged right-wing in its use of force against marginal bodies – because, and so that, the neoliberal burden of pinkwashing and providing ‘gay safe spaces’ can be displaced onto privatized platforms. An extreme ideological instantiation of ‘public-private partnership,’ where Grindr can play ‘homo’ while the State unabashedly plays ‘nationalist’ to consolidate new right-wing forms of gay subjecthood. Look no further than the Grindr-sponsored White House Correspondents’ Dinner Party in April 2026.
How do Grindr’s material investments in Zionist-homonationalism inform the militarised coloniality of the app’s design? Can Grindr be situated as an Israeli “technology of occupation” – extending Antony Loewenstein’s framework to the realm of queer dating apps too?
I ask all these questions from my own uncomfortably familiar standpoint within these digital economies – as a brahmin-savarna trans woman, with family wealth accumulated from technology, venture capital, and my father’s own participation and material investments in the Israeli/Indian startup ecosystem.[21] I aim to center complicity (rather than positionality or privilege) as not merely a one-sentence declaration, but as the beating heart of a larger, destabilizing theoretical intervention into discourse about Grindr. These reflections ultimately stem from my own experiences across scholarship and organizing for caste/class reparation, trans women’s liberation, and accountability.
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The Gap in Grindr Studies
This project aims to intervene in Grindr Studies by introducing theoretics of Zionism and homonationalism to contextualize both of these harms – where the spectacle of queer racialized “terror” is always made hypervisible and violent according to the rhythms of capital and state power.
In Part 1 of this piece below, I explore how filtering on Grindr is well-understood to reproduce hegemonic forms of desirability, analyze Right Now as a key feature in the creation of the homosexual settler self. Part 2 explores Grindr’s distinct interface of anonymized and geolocative surveillance, and the libidinal economy of its benevolent branding. In both these parts, I draw from Michael Dieter’s study of traps, enclosures, and asymmetries as modes of interface critique on Grindr.[22] With a multi-modal pictorial and textual analysis, this critique further corroborates the Zionist-homonationalist elements that continue to live on in the bread-and-butter workings of the app functionality itself, fifteen years after Grindr’s initial origins. This is not to trace any simple, or vindictive straight line between Simkhai’s nationality and critiques of his app. I am interested in Grindr not solely because of its Israeli founder, but for the way in which its tracking, filtering, and goal-oriented interface fundamentally recreates relations that are endemic to Zionist-homonationalism. As such, what I aim to flesh out is a larger skeletal framework for how the broader political-economy of an app’s design is always inseparable from its barebone functionality and, accordingly, how coloniality is often hard-coded into digital life.
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Filtering for Desire
Across sociopolitical concerns and physical geographies, filtering on Grindr is well-understood to reproduce hegemonic forms of desirability. For instance, anti-caste queer scholar Dhiren Borisa explains that many caste-oppressed people who openly assert their caste identities have explicitly been barred from participation in Grindr.[23] Even for those who are not explicitly assertive about their identities, caste is marked on the digital avatars of Grindr users through proxy identifiers such as surname, dress, accent, or English-speaking ability. Because caste operates as the operative calculus of desirability in South Asia and its diasporas, Grindr’s policy seems to have been explicit in the disappearing of those marked outside its bounds.[24] Fatphobia and femmephobia work in similar ways on the app: the phrase “no fats, no femmes” has come to be an omnipresent declaration of preference and desirability on the app, with there now even being physical merchandise that one can don to realize these filters in-person.[25] The filtering mechanism of the app tangibly contributes to these erasures, in the fact that self-description labels for fat users only include vague and misfitting language such as “stocky” and “large,” while “femme” is missing as a community label altogether. In the words of scholar Matthew Conte, Grindr’s desirability-centric filtering “forces fat and/or femme queers to present online versions of themselves that do not match their real life queer subjectivities.” As recently as 2020, Grindr even used to flaunt an “ethnicity” filter that has since been removed due to user backlash, although it took many weeks for this decision to actually come into effect.[26] Still, the mechanisms of filtering that remain are less plain, yet just as insidious for the ways in which they reproduce violent norms of desirability.
In Puar’s manuscript, homonationalism emerges not as a standalone politic of gay rights, but rather a deeply enmeshed manifestation of Foucauldian biopolitics, control, and surveillance. A core part of homonationalism is the (now high-tech) eugenic capture of perverse, queered, and racialized threat.[27] Profiling queer monstrosity – always mapped onto the terrorist figure of the Muslim, the turbaned – and earmarking it for elimination is thus a central exercise within a homonationalist world order. In that sense, there is something uniquely orgiastic about homonationalism, a simultaneous fascination and disgust with “sexual-racial perversity.”[28] Such perversity is often suspended in a dialectic against the liberal, respectable, and rights-bearing homonormative queer subject. Within the context of Zionism in particular, purity is a key pole in the equation. In his famous treatise “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine,” anti-colonial thinker Fayez Sayegh writes that racial purity, exclusiveness, and self-segregation are not “an accidental, passing feature of the Israeli scene,” but rather “congenial, essential and permanent…inherent in the very ideology of Zionism.”[29] For Sayegh, what differentiates Zionist colonialism and other forms of European supremacy is the political commitment to totally “isolate” and “evict” indigenous Palestinians, rather than to create hierarchical structures of co-existence: “[i]f racial discrimination against the ‘inferior natives’ was the motto of race-supremacist European settler-regimes in Asia and Africa, the motto of the race-supremacist Zionist settler-regime in Palestine was racial elimination.”[30]
Simultaneous to this practice of Foucauldian biopolitics is a rapturous Zionist necropolitics. The contradictory space in between the liberal joy that queerness purports to afford within regimes of life, and the fear-mongering violence always bound up with representations of Palestinian bodies in orders of death. As theorists Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Possoco put it: because the “queer Palestinian” stands as “a figure ambivalently positioned at the intersection of bio-and necro -powers,” simultaneously a “victim” and “threat” – queer Israeli life and subjecthood is conditional on queer Palestinian death and alienation.[31] By this logic, queer Palestinians both deserve saving from a pathologized Palestinian homophobia (see the March 2024 Tel Aviv Court judgement that LGBTQ+ Palestinians can now petition for Israeli asylum)[32]; and, they require containment given that they too may be “terrorists,” akin to how all Palestinians feature in the Israeli imaginary.
In a 2016 interview, Simkhai himself stated the following regarding the trend of desirability-based filtering i.e. “no femmes,” “no fatties,” “no Asians,” “no Blacks” – “There have always been racists. I don’t like it, but it’s not my job to police such things. I’m not a sixth-grade teacher.”[33] Beyond just a reluctant tolerance of structural racism, desirability-based filtering on Grindr privileges stringent and particular forms of homonormative masculinity by algorithmically spotlighting and eliminating the polluted perversity of caste-oppressed, fat, or femme bodies. Akin to Sayegh’s emphasis, this is a distinctly eugenic logic reflecting a uniquely Zionist-homonationalist investment in racial-sexual purity: bifurcating homosexuality into the normative and the monstrous is not generalizable to broader Western colonial race supremacy, to mere coincidence, or to the inevitability there having “always been racists.” Rather, given Grindr’s contemporaneous emergence amidst concerted campaigns of Israeli pinkwashing, it is an unmistakable sign of uniquely Zionist-homonationalist investments in racial-sexual purity.
Borrowing from Michael Dieter’s analytic, critical diagnostics offers a mode of interface critique which serves up the interface as a surface to be close-read for asymmetries between digital elements and entities in and of itself – similar to Mel Stanfill’s mode of “discursive interface analysis” on the web.[34] On Grindr, these interplays are more than apparent. On the landing page of the app, the top row is dotted with an array of filter buttons right above an endless grid of nearby profiles – some faces, some torsos, some totally blank squares. The topmost lefthand button opens up an entirely new filtering popup page where users can customize their choices in a sexual partner before reloading their grid, suspending the filter page and the grid page in a causal, asymmetric feedback loop. For users who are spending hours on-end on the app, shuffling and then reshuffling filters is the only way to manifest new experiences and jiggle the assortment of nearby profiles, creating an incentive to constantly toggle filter settings in an acrobatics of desirability.[35] The particular range of filters is incredibly revealing. One can not only filter by “Relationship Status” and “Tribe,” but also by “Height,” “Weight,” and “Body Type.”
In a real-life instantiation of the aforedescribed homonormative eugenics, users can quite literally custom-order the ideal partner of their choosing, with height, weight, and body specifications tailored to their purity preference. Such filter mechanisms also introduce inherent power asymmetries between every single user (who holds the agency of choice) and all the queried profiles served up to them, thus fostering the aforementioned supremacist dichotomy of battle-hero vs. war-spoil. These asymmetries are part of what has given Grindr its sell: almost no other app has filtering options so crudely physical and results so instantly updated in response.
***
The Homosexual Settler Self
In the American nationalist milieu, video game interfaces have emerged as mainstay sites for the dissemination and gamification of war culture[36] – allowing young boys to join the ranks from the comfort and safety of their homes as what Puar calls the “simulated soldier.”[37] While the video game industry has always shared a close ideological collusion with the military-industrial complex, as theorists Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter note, after 9/11, an uptick in “funds poured into co-designed military-civilian simulations for the War on Terror,” allowing “console-warriors” and “military trainers” both to emerge as “material partners in military technoculture” and profit from the “‘MIMENET’--the ‘Military Industrial Media Entertainment Network.’”[38] Importantly, the argument is not as simple as “‘games make you kill,’” but instead, a larger observation on how “digital games are systemically incorporated in the war-fighting apparatus of Empire…mak[ing] virtual play integral to ‘banal war.’”
What might be opened up by situating Grindr (and its Zionist-homonationalist affiliations) within these larger chronologies of “banal war”? Particularly given that the Israeli military arsenal has already been known to deploy gamified tactics of murder – an appalling ‘real-life' version of ‘Squid Games’ to massacre Palestinians seeking food at checkpoints.[39] Of course, Grindr is gamified, with all its slot machine noises, rating features, and endorphin release, but it is crucially militaristic in its form. Particularly with the addition of modes such as Right Now, a gay man, like the figure described above seeking a one-hour release in the dark corner of his bedroom, can now log on to Grindr. He can switch into an unabashed “console-warrior” mode for one hour a day, diffusing the logics of the Israeli occupation industry. Sex and conquest are dually intertwined aims, and scouring for a quick hookup against the clock is the ultimate orgiastic simulation of the battlefield. The perfect embodiment of what Puar explicates as a cultural premium on “motility, speed, and performance…as primary erotic and addictive charges of modernity.”[40] The instantaneity of a nude image that can experience virtual “dissemination” as the “ultimate form of territorial coverage and conquest;” or the timebound guarantee of Right’s Now’s sexual promise.
Further, Grindr embodies an incognito aesthetic that conjures up an affect of the guilty pleasure – an all dark interface, black squares ad nauseam, with the option to change the logo of the app on your home screen in purported protection of queer safety and privacy. For the millions of cis men users (many of whom may be closeted, bicurious, or “DL” [down-low]), it is safe to assume that shame may fundamentally constitute Grindr’s UX vis-a-vis potentiality of unthinkable sexual encounters with many kinds of geographically proximate Others (the sex-worker trans woman whom one would repulsively avoid eye contact with at all costs in daily life; the working-class taxi driver who would have never figured in the normative register of desirability beyond the desire for his labor; the 17-year old effeminate boy whose underage status would have rendered him sexually unthinkable in any other part of normal life). In this strange virtual land, lawlessness is law – an ultimate instantiation of Agamben’s “states of exception”[41]: The constitution of the fragmented I here hinges on, and is co-constituted by, the never-ending desire for the Other in a Lacanian manner (as has been well-theorized before in the context of Israel's fantasmatic national narratives of lack and belonging).[42] In this way, Grindr’s mode allows the normative Self to inhabit a temporary avatar where all normal rules, time, order, and conduct can be rightfully suspended, allowing a permissible zone for the expression of long-held historical fetishes and fantasies at the borderland between shame and shamelessness. The entire fun is that no rules apply because unrestricted sex/conquest is one’s Birthright – a logic not so dissimilar to the Israeli consensus on international law. Is it coincidental that Grindr’s Block feature never fully works, allowing users who were previously reported for bad behavior to simply redownload the app and continue participating in the wargame? That any semblance of accountability on the app is nothing but a semblance, with reports of the Block feature even being partially disabled last year?[43]
The fact that Grindr in London might situate one “within 100 meters of some guy living in his own penthouse apartment and someone else living in one of the most run-down houses of multiple occupancy in the borough” is precisely why urban scholar Huw Lemmey describes its interface as “a strange, transitory sense of geography to encounter handing out blowjobs.”[44] Because mere spatial “contact” does not imply fraternity,[45] these class, caste, racialized, and gendered proximities are just transgressive enough to be exciting, but not enough to be illicit – yoking disconnected populations, bodies, and sexualities into a liminal borderzone (what Achille Mbembe might call a "topography of cruelty”[46]) that would only ever be permissible in this liminal, anarchic realm. Here, shame is productive, not dangerous or foreclosed: its one-hour time limit lubricates the illicit fun of an interaction that is as violent as it is necessary to prop up and constitute the normative Self all other 23 hours of the day. In this sense, Grindr is both complementary and integral towards reconstituting the (homo)sexual settler self, as proud gay citizen/soldier. The militarized grid is a spatial modality to find whatever creatures, animals, or ‘savages’ you might in the wild, and trap them before they run loose. In an unsettling reiteration of Zionist warfare ethos, these bodies are laboring even when dead, sexualized even when defeated – a microcosm of the same inhuman perversity that allows IDF soldiers to pose with the bras and underwear of Palestinians they have just massacred.[48] What we might call a “Manichaean” kind of spatiality, where eugenics have always been erotic.[49] In Puar’s words, “the raw materials of the Orient—in this case, the ‘raw novelty’ of sexual perversion—are imported to sustain the prolific consumption habits, fertility, and reproduction of the Occident." By squeezing out “sexual excesses” vis-a-vis the “secret pleasures of the illicit,” when no other value can be squeezed, the now-digitalized sexual economies of warfare allow for a new lease on life to be put on the inimical Other in virile, fertile, reproductive ways, such that “perverse and primitive collide.”[50] Grindr’s recent introduction of Generative AI features to draft chats on one’s behalf during Right Now mode make this entire mission more optimal– a game boost of sorts, that promises to do the busywork of chatting with the human, so you access its corporeal plunder faster.[51]
And, undergirding this entire Zionist-homonationalist libidinal economy is the calculus of anti-Blackness – a subjectivity which has always been the rehearsed foundation for anti-Muslim War On Terror politics.[52] The simultaneous lascivious fetish and violent negation of Blackness is the precondition for many forms of homo (and even trans-)normativity and nationalism.[53] Indeed, when discussing Grindr’s laissez-faire politics of sexual interaction, it is no surprise that “‘I’m only into black guys’—is that a bad thing? I think we should allow you to say that, because that’s your preference”[54] was the most common-sensical, naturalized, and go-to rhetorical example Simkhai could reach for – invoking the homicidal gay fetishes of Jeffrey Dahmer, or the misogynoiristic trope of the Jezebel as a mythological temptress (who was in fact the wife of the king of Israel). Simultaneously, in Simkhai’s own words, Grindr’s infamous logo was designed to “[bring] people back to a primal tribe almost — like an African mask.”[55] Translated: Grindr allows for a tapping into that most ‘primordially’ dark, sexual part of the masculine psyche, where domination, survival, warfare and lawlessness reign, and perversity is reabsorbed into virile life. For Simkhai, this is the “mask” of African societies logo, structured as crudely animalistic, tribalistic, and masculinist in a calling back of Joseph Conrad’s “dark continent”[56] – a thrilling, but safe, almost-VR like experience of play-acting Indigenous Blackness as the most fun, primal game of all. Thus, the app’s Zionist-homonationalist UI is defined in self-reference to, and against, Blackness in what scholars Luis Andrade and Deven Cooper term the “‘psychic life of anti-Blackness on Grindr’”[57] – contiguous with the larger superstructure wherein homonormative liberal discourses find their basis in the enduring racial politics of the transatlantic slave trade.
***
Telling as these examples are, however, it is important to bear in mind that Grindr’s Zionist-homonationalism is not only confined to its Israeliness or Israeli origins. Rather than being a standalone analytic, homonationalism is a transnational circuit, a condition of modernity – wherein the right to sovereignty of a nation has bizarrely come to be measured by its progress on gay rights.[58] And more recently, by its regulations (or lack thereof) permitting Grindr’s usage. In a recent press statement regarding Grindr’s enhanced privacy features for athletes in the Olympics, the company’s Chief Product Officer wrote that the “Village needs different rules,” for “simply appearing on Grindr tells the world something about a person's identity that, in more than 60 countries, remains a criminal offense.”[59] Along with the 2024 launch of the “Global Gayborhood” where “the gay community all over the world, including in many countries where it is illegal to be gay”[60] might find each other via the international Rome mode, such statements contribute to a larger colonial equivalence where Grindr comes to be the digital arbiter of a nation’s “gay-friendly” status – always an assumed liberating force for its users, and its absence or curtailing as by default oppressive.
In part 2, I map the larger political economy that has created the conditions for apps like Grindr to exist and proliferate. By unpacking its relentless profit motives, PR strategy, and infrastructure of geolocative surveillance, I aim to continue tracing the trajectory of Grindr as an app produced by, and productive of, Zionist-homonationalism.
***
Biography: Mallika Dharmaraj is based out of New Delhi, India. As a creative, writer, researcher and trans woman technology organizer, she is interested in situating “AI” surveillance technologies within historical structures of power, violence, and personal/collective complicity. She holds an MPhil in the Ethics of AI, Data & Algorithms at the University of Cambridge and an A.B. from Harvard College in Computer Science and South Asian Studies.
Acknowledgements: I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Tomasz Hollanek for his advising of the initial stages of this project, the research for which was carried out during my MPhil at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge (2023-2024); my dear collaborator Astha Bamba for her generous editing and conceptual input; conversations with my friend Alexis Queen that helped shape my thinking; and Dr. Eric Stanley for reviewing this piece and providing invaluable feedback.
[1] “Looking? Grindr’s ‘Right Now’ Feature Expands into 15 New Cities.” Grindr, https://investors.grindr.com/news/news-details/2025/Looking-Grindrs-Right-Now-Feature-Expands-into-15-New-Cities/default.aspx
[2] Matthew Thomas Conte. "More Fats, More Femmes: A Critical Examination of Fatphobia and Femmephobia on Grindr." feral feminisms: Queer Feminine Affinities, no. 7, Spring 2018; Moses Tulasi. "Caste, Queerness, Migration and the Erotics of Activism." Interview by Kareem Khubchandani. Sedition, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Identity in South Asia, vol. 20, 2019.
[3] Patrick Wolfe. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006.
[4] Adi Kuntsman. “The soldier and the terrorist: Sexy nationalism, queer violence.” Queer Violence. Sexualities, vol. 11, no. 1-2, 2008.
[5] Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Possoco. Queer Necropolitics. Abingdon, Routledge, 2014.
[6] Anna M. Agathangelou, M. Daniel Bassichis, and Tamara L. Spira. Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire. Radical History Review, no. 100, 2008.
[7] Andrew LaVallee. "App Watch: Grindr Says It's More Than a Hook-Up Service." The Wall Street Journal, 17 Aug. 2009, www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-5716.
[8] "Investor Relations." Grindr, investors.grindr.com/overview/default.aspx#:~:text=Grindr%20is%20the%20number %201,since%20its%20launch%20in%202009.
[9] Matt Kapp. "Grindr: Welcome to the World's Biggest, Scariest Gay Bar." Vanity Fair, May 2011, www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/grindr-201105.
[10] Conte 2018.
[11] Tulasi 2019.
[12] Jasbir Puar. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, Duke UP, 2018.
[13] Theodore Herzl. A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question. New York Federation of American Zionists, 1917.
[14] Jasbir Puar. “Rethinking Homonationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, no. 45, 2013.
[15] Ibid., 16.
[16] Joshie Tikka. "What i see when my eyes fall out": anticipations, intensifications, immediacies, and transitions of identity construction, affect design, and movement building in digital spaces. 2020. DePaul University, PhD dissertation.
[17] George Abraham. "The Im/possibility of Being a Queer Palestinian in America." them, 1 Oct. 2021.
[18] “Grindr hosting its first White House Correspondents’ Dinner party.” USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/04/21/grindr-set-to-host-inaugural-white-house-correspondents-dinner-party/89719638007/.
[19] Antony Loewenstein. The Palestine Laboratory : How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World. E-book ed., Brunswick, Scribe Publications, 2023.
[20] Langdon Winner. "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" Daedalus, vol. 109, no. 1, winter 1980.
[21] I note both Indian and Israeli here given the well-documented linkages of Israeli and Indian militarized states and their dual settler-colonial occupations in Kashmir and Palestine. In particular, it remains imperative for those of us who are dominant-caste and Indian to attend to our own participation within the Indian settler-colonial project in Kashmir with as much tenor as we oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestine, as Shaista Patel reminds us.
[22] Michael Dieter. "Interface Critique At Large." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 30, no. 1, 30 Nov. 2022.
[23] Dhiren Borisa. "Hopeful Rantings of a Dalit-Queer Person." Jindal Humanities Law Review, vol. 91, 2020.
[24] Christina Dhanaraj. "Swipe Me Left, I'm Dalit." Medium, 6 May 2018, christinadhanaraj.medium.com/swipe-me-left-im-dalit-8bd2e3499b97.
[25] Conte 2018.
[26] Ben Hunte. "Grindr Removes 'Ethnicity Filter' after Complaints." BBC News, 1 June 2020, www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52886167#:~:text=Dating%20and%20hook%2Dup %20app,%2C%20height%2C%20weight%20and%20ethnicity; Samantha Cole. “Grindr Won’t Let Users Say 'No Zionists.’” 404, 24 July 2025.
[27] Ibid., 196.
[28] Ibid., 169.
[29] Fayez Sayegh. "Zionist Colonialism in Palestine." Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 1965, 214.
[30] Ibid., 217.
[31] Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Possoco. Queer Necropolitics. Abingdon, Routledge, 2014.
[32] Theia Chatelle. “A Gay Palestinian Fled to Israel’s ‘Safe Haven.’ Israel Tried to Exploit Him for Intelligence.” The Intercept, 2026.
[33] Halutz 2016.
[34] Dieter 2011; Mel Stanfill. The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design. New Media & Society, vol. 17, no. 7, 1059-1074. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814520873 (Original work published 2015)
[35] Turban 2018.
[36] Marc Ouellette and Jason C. Thompson. The Post-9/11 Video Game: A Critical Examination. Jefferson, McFarland, 2017
[37] Puar 2007, 156.
[38] Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism. CTheory, 2013.
[39] TRT World. “Real version of ’Squid Game’”: An Israeli-imposed reality for Palestinians in Gaza. Youtube, July 2025.
[40] Puar 2007, 108.
[41] Giorgio Agamben. State of Exception, translated by Kevin Attell. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005.
[42] Moran M. Mandelbaum. “‘I’m a proud Israeli’: Homonationalism, belonging and the insecurity of the Jewish-Israeli body national.” Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society 23, 2018.
[43] Henry Giardina. “The gays are sounding off about this controversial Grindr decision.” Into, Jan 7, 2025.
[44] McKenzie Wark. Huw Lemmey on the Gay City, Gentrification, Class, Mystical Queer Ancestors and Chemsex. Extra Extra Magazine, no. 19.
[45] Samuel Delaney. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York, New York University Press, 1999.
[46] Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Possoco. Queer Necropolitics. Abingdon, Routledge, 2014.
[47] Sima Shakhsari. “Killing Me Softly With Your Rights: Queer Death and the Politics of Rightful Killing.” In: Jin Haritaworn et. al. Queer Necropolitics. Abingdon, Routledge, 2014.
[48] Belén Fernandez. “Weaponising underwear: Genocide with a semi-pornographic twist.” Al-Jazeera, Apr 12, 2024.
[49] Sima Shakhsari. “Killing Me Softly With Your Rights: Queer Death and the Politics of Rightful Killing.” In: Jin Haritaworn et. al. Queer Necropolitics. Abingdon, Routledge, 2014.
[50] Puar, 75.
[51] Charles Pulliam-Moore. “Grindr’s new Right Now feature brings a spicy live feed to the hookup app.” The Verge, May 31, 2025.
[52] Puar 2007.
[53] C. Riley Snorton. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
[54] Graham Gremore. “CEO Joel Simkhai officially out at Grindr… Will the sexual racism he promotes go with him?” Queerty, Jan 8, 2018.
[55] Shikhrani Raghvendra. “Interview: Joel Simkhai, Founder and CEO, Grindr.” Gaysi, Sep. 9, 2015.
[56] Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness. Blackwood’s Magazine, 1899.
[57] Luis M. Andrade and Devin Cooper. Defending Whiteness: The Psychic Life of Anti-Blackness on Grindr. Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, vol. 38, 2023.
[58] Puar 2013.
[59] AJ Balance. “Grindr Disables Location Features in Olympic Village for Milano Cortina 2026 to Protect Athlete Safety and Privacy.” Grindr, Feb 2, 2026.
[60] George Arison. “Bringing the Global Gayborhood to Your Pocket, Starting with Travel.” Grindr, Apr 16, 2024.