EXPLICIT COMPLICITY: A GRINDR NARRATIVE

Abstract

In 2009, a full three years before Tinder would popularize the "swipe," Grindr debuted as the world's first geosocial dating app for men. Since then, mobile dating has become immensely popular, particularly for so-called "thin markets" such as the LGBTIQ population. A novel like Alberto Fuguet's Sudor (2016), with its frequent WhatsApp conversations, emails, and Grindr exchanges, invites critical reflection on how these new communications technologies might change the stories we tell about modern intimacy, and how a novel itself can be a technology of connection. The gay characters who populate Sudor take their cues from the narrator's cell phone, by far the most frequently caressed entity in this 600-page novel about mediated connections and the decadence of the publishing industry in the Internet age.1 While it may be true that, as the narrator asserts, "Grindr no es para seducir con conversaciones eternas y complicidades literarias," this article sets out to argue that Grindr provides the necessary means for Sudor to create complicit readers (224). That is, this Grindr narrative precipitates readers who are both attendant to and participative in heretofore unmentionable intimacy.

Throughout this article, I analyze how Alberto Fuguet's Sudor serves as a useful case study for considering how a novel in 2017 might function as a technology of posthuman intimacy. We can think of posthuman as a way of understanding the irreversibly connected relationship that our species has with a natural world rapidly being reshaped by technical interventions. Under this new rubric, the concept of the human stops signifying a discrete, material entity. Instead, the posthuman accounts for the shared subjectivity between the human and the non-human, an assemblage (in the words of Deleuze and Guattari). Following the ground-breaking work of Donna Haraway in cyborg studies and the more recent contributions of new materialists like Rosi Braidotti and Bruno Latour, we can productively study so-called human phenomena by paying more attention to the non-human entities -organic or inorganic-around us. For our purposes, we find that human intimacy becomes morethan-human as we consider the many ways intimacy has been catalyzed and mediated vis-å-vis online dating. Within this posthuman configuration, a literary analysis of intimacy enables us to study how characters exercise sexual desire and achieve sexual satisfaction in a way that accounts for the many mediations of this human-non-human assemblage. It also allows us to consider where the novel and reader fit into this very same assemblage.