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Do not cite, quote, or reprint without permission. Instead, cite: Gieseking, Jen Jack. 2018. Messing with the Attractiveness Algorithm: a Response to Queering Code/Space. Gender, Place and Culture. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2017.1379955. Messing with the Attractiveness Algorithm: a Response to Queering Code/Space Jen Jack Gieseking American Studies, Trinity College ABSTRACT Responding to the collection of articles, “Queering Code/Space,” this article discusses how algorithms affect the production of online lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) spaces, namely online dating sites. The set of papers is well timed: lesbian bars have closed en masse across the US and many gay male bars have followed suit so that online spaces fill—or perhaps make—a gap in the social production of LGBTQ spaces. I draw on Cindi Katz’s idea of “messy” qualities of social reproduction and the necessity of “messing” with dominant narratives in order to think about the labor, experience, and project of queering code/space. KEYWORDS Queer, code, space, social media, social reproduction If I had not been dating on and off since the rise of internet dating, and if I didn’t study the lesbian and queer production of digital and material spaces (which often overlap), I would not have made sense of the years of frustration and anxiety I have heard among lesbian, queer, and trans (LQT) folks. At parties and bars, femme and feminine-presenting LQT people would say upon meeting me (a six foot, white, sizeable butch/trans dyke): “Why haven’t we met? Oh, because there are no butches and/or transmen (et al) on OkCupid.” In homes and on the street, butches, transmen, and masculine-presenting LQT people told me: “I can’t meet a girl. There are no femmes on OkCupid.” Surely butches and femmes do not only date one another but those that do are stymied. Why? Sitting next to a white, svelte, symmetrical, feminine, bisexual friend in a café in New York City, I noticed her possible matches: all bisexual and feminine-presenting women, almost all white—a group that OkCupid says are their most “attractive” users. I opened mine and revealed a multi-raced amalgam of butches and transmen, feminine ciswomen and transwomen, many of whom were less svelte, less symmetrical, etc. We made eye contact as I realized the anecdotal 1 Do not cite, quote, or reprint without permission. Instead, cite: Gieseking, Jen Jack. 2018. Messing with the Attractiveness Algorithm: a Response to Queering Code/Space. Gender, Place and Culture. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2017.1379955. tales we told making sense of our lives were actually designed by algorithms to be keep us apart. The bias in the algorithm shaping online dating is defined by expectations and norms around beauty. OkCupid, like many other dating websites, boasts about its “attractiveness algorithm.” With enough clicks on your profile soon after you join the site, OkCupid marks you as “attractive” so that you only see and are seen by other “attractive” people. The company would send “attractive users an email notification that ended with the utterly tactless statement: “And, no, we didn’t just send this email to everyone on OkCupid. Go ask an ugly friend and see” (Lothlorien 2012). Cruel and unapologetic, the email is no longer sent to users marked “attractive” but its sorting and categorizing persists in the background. What would it mean to mess with the algorithm on behalf of queers and queering? And what would it mean to queer not only sites like OkCupid but code itself? I begin (and conclude) with this anecdote to situate my thoughts on queer digital-material life since much of the way code produces life is purposefully veiled, purportedly mysterious, and heavily proprietary. I take the notion of “messing with” from Cindi Katz’s reflection on David Harvey’s writings on urban political economy, which she contends is “a refusal of certain kinds of mess: the mess of difference, the mess of scale and the mess of indeterminacy” (2006, 241). Elsewhere, the “mess” Katz refers to relates to social reproduction, which she describes as the “fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life. It is also a set of structured practices that unfold in dialectical relation with production, with which it is mutually constitutive and in tension” (2001, 711). What else is 2 Do not cite, quote, or reprint without permission. Instead, cite: Gieseking, Jen Jack. 2018. Messing with the Attractiveness Algorithm: a Response to Queering Code/Space. Gender, Place and Culture. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2017.1379955. queering then but an engagement with mess—both visible (often read as: production) and invisible (almost always: social reproduction)—“attractive” in all possible forms? Work in geographies of sexualities has increasingly expanded the public’s limited geographical imagination of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) spaces through studies of ruralities, suburbs, WNBA games, and, increasingly over recent years, online spaces (cf. Brown and Browne 2016). By extending Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s (2011) concept of code/space, this collection of articles takes the queer digital to new level. Kitchin and Dodge contend that code/space surrounds us in the mutual constitution of software and the spatiality of everyday life. The effort to queer code/space helps us rethink the co-production of code and space through the lens of everyday trans and gay and non- heterosexual male lives and a rigorous application of queer theory. The only absence I noticed across these articles is a failure to take up a political economic critique that runs through all discussions of data, algorithms, software, and systems today; I include my own thoughts on OkCupid to help to fill that gap. As code, data, algorithms, and software already shape our everyday lives, it is necessary to queer assumptions that products are “free” when we give our data and labor away to them, data and labor that is often worth much more to corporations than most could imagine. LGBTQ studies has long been a part of geography but queer theory’s entrance is more recent. Natalie Oswin’s 2008 article was a significant effort to place queer theory and geography in conversation. Her concept of queer space highlighted a specifically queer approach to the discipline and politics. Oswin writes, “The equation of queerness with visibility has been severely questioned and the insistence upon a trajectory from 3 Do not cite, quote, or reprint without permission. Instead, cite: Gieseking, Jen Jack. 2018. Messing with the Attractiveness Algorithm: a Response to Queering Code/Space. Gender, Place and Culture. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2017.1379955. unliberated, prepolitical homosexual practice to liberated, out, politicized, gay subjectivity has been abandoned” (2008, 780). A decade later, invigorated by “what a focus on queer experiences and bodies might bring to contemporary digital technology,” Cockayne and Richardson write in their introduction that queer theory might contribute to an ambivalent theorization of the relationship between the human and technology that would emphasize both a spatio-temporal contingency to the assertion of ‘the human’ as an ordering device, and an instability that potentially troubles the logic of that order. Such a sentiment reiterates Oswin’s vision of questioning the politics of visibility as the route to liberation, but also undergirds the primacy of human typologies foremost as the road toward freedom. Instead, the messy project of queerness requires upending assumptions, norms, and even order. To be queer is to be messy. To be queer is to live a life full or at least always in part outside of state-sanctioned patterns of social reproduction. What other way is there to conceive of queer radicality but as a mess, a failure, a fissure in the neoliberal order that relies on productivity, normality, and visibility to determine which lives are deemed worthy? In an invigorating collection, the three central articles offer empirical studies of queer life interfacing, shaping, and being shaped by code across interfaces, places, and ages while the fourth returns more explicitly to theoretical concerns. The set of papers is well timed: lesbian bars have closed en masse across the US and many gay male bars have followed suit so that online spaces fill—or perhaps make—a gap in the social production of LGBTQ spaces. Two of the empirical papers focus primarily on the hookup app Grindr, and the third on Tumblr and YouTube. Sam Miles’ research into non-heterosexual men’s experiences in London, UK using Grindr as they “navigate online spaces in pursuit of embodied meaning,” 4 Do not cite, quote, or reprint without permission. Instead, cite: Gieseking, Jen Jack. 2018. Messing with the Attractiveness Algorithm: a Response to Queering Code/Space. Gender, Place and Culture. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2017.1379955. i.e. to find a digital connection that makes way for material intimacy. He expands upon recent discussions of the hybridization of digital-material life through “unrealized” community: “the potential for online sociality if qualified by its co-option as a tool to pursue sexual encounter.” Relatedly, one of Miles’ participants, Malcolm, shared that “for a lot of people, it’s just the fantasy of speaking to someone.” This idea and quote illustrate that the seemingly easy navigations of sexual contact among gay, queer, and bisexual men and MSM are perhaps made more complicated—but perhaps not the fun sort of sexual messy—when fed through the likes of Grindr. My reading of these arguments recalls queer theorist Samuel Delany’s arguments between the affordances of contact versus networking in the closing of working class gay men’s and MSM cruising space at the turn of the century (Delany 2001). It is possible that the social reproduction of queer men’s worlds becomes all the more fragile when in-depth, in-person contact is replaced with superficial digital networking—but the long- term effects are far from visible.

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