Paper short abstract:

This paper explores gay Filipino call-center workers collaborative survival strategies through Manila’s uneven sociotechnical infrastructures. Tracking practices of gay dating app users in Manila, this empirical study demonstrates how digital technology mediates queer world-making.

Paper long abstract:

In February 2015, a Los Angeles Times headline read "The Philippines has become the call center capital of the world." This industry brings greater insecurity in Manila, a city already with severe economic and social inequalities. This paper explores sociotechnical infrastructures that scaffold Filipino call center workers on gay geolocative apps. Sociotechnical infrastructures refer to the entanglements between hardware, bodies, and affect used in the meaning making and translation of im/materialities within its shared ecologies. I argue that these users are making their own worlds that are messy, open-ended, and, in some ways, in collaborative survival as they try to establish connections and intimacies on gay dating apps. Sherry Turkle (2012) suggests that people are alone together in their everyday interactions among their technologically mediated networks, but this frictive (Tsing 2005) relationship is intertwined among a relational system fraught with unequal exchanges within sociotechnical infrastructures. This project looks at the self-fashioning and communicative practices of gay dating app users in the greater metropolitan Manila region. Reflecting on preliminary ethnographic research conducted over the summer of 2015, this presentation provides a sketch of complex and overlapping new media ecologies highlighting gay Manila's hopes, desires, and aspirations for homosocial bonds. New media technologies are portals of exchange between the Philippines and the world that shrink time and space as it simultaneously creates new distances among previously linked imaginaries. This work adds another empirical study to feminist postcolonial technoscience