Tinder and tourist intimacy: women’s digital encounters with tourists in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

This paper examines how women residing in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, are using the popular dating app Tinder to reconfigure their encounters with visiting tourists. By drawing on text-based interview data and an analysis of Tinder we demonstrate the way the women leverage Tinder to overcome temporal, language and cultural barriers to cultivate tourist intimacy. We show how Tinder-facilitated tourist intimacy enables access to new opportunities for conviviality, and supports the women to explore practices and identities considered culturally controversial. We highlight how the women’s leveraging of Tinder’s affordances enables them to remain both unseeable (to their social circles) and seen (to tourists) in ways that allow them to navigate Tinder-facilitated tourist intimacy alongside complex gender and cultural expectations. Moreover, we emphasise the new challenges that Tinder-facilitated tourist intimacy introduces for the women, particularly related to postcolonial dynamics and personal safety, and explore the way women navigate these new challenges within the constraints of the cultural context. This research advances knowledge of how digital technologies are enabling new opportunities for intimacy while subsequently exacerbating inequalities in tourist destinations in postcolonial Global South contexts.