Immigrants on Grindr

‘Immigrants on Grindr expands our understanding of digital culture, offering new insights into the ways LGBTQ people use dating and hook-up apps. Shield’s research also gives a voice to gay and queer migrants and the racism they face in their daily lives as the craft new lives in foreign lands.’

—Sharif Mowlabocus, Fordham University, USA

‘With theoretical elegance and ethnographic empathy, Shield explores a range of arousing, wounding, and life-affirming connections against exclusionary forces of digital dating classifications and sexual racism.’


—Jonathan Corpus Ong, Associate Professor of Global Digital Media, University of Massachusetts Amherst


‘Shield draws on rich empirical material to make significant contributions to debates about homonationalism, sexual racism, and the role of hook-up apps in shaping contemporary socio-sexual relations. He provides valuable insights into the ways these apps can facilitate those who are 'new in town' to settle into their surroundings.’

—Gavin Brown, Professor of Political Geography and Sexualities, University of Leicester

This book examines the role of hook-up apps in the lives of gay, bi, trans, and queer immigrants and refugees, and how the online culture of these platforms promotes belonging or exclusion. Within the context of the so-called European refugee crisis, this research focuses on the experiences of immigrants from especially Muslim-majority countries to the greater Copenhagen area, a region known for both its progressive ideologies and its anti-immigrant practices. Grindr and similar platforms connect newcomers with not only dates and sex, but also friends, roommates and other logistical contacts. But these socio-sexual platforms also become spaces of racialization and othering. Weaving together analyses of real Grindr profile texts, immigrant narratives, political rhetoric, and popular media, Immigrants on Grindr provides an in-depth look at the complex interplay between online and offline cultures, and between technology and society.