TubeCrush as Connected Intimacies: A Qualitative Analysis of Gender, Workplace and Contemporary Urban Space

Mobile technologies have radically altered subjectivity. Such technologies have changed ideas of love and romance; blurred distinctions between public and private in the workplace; and created contradictory experiences of interconnection and alienation in urban spaces. But we know little of how people make sense of these new subjectivities. Addressing this gap, we explore the gendering of metropolitan space on the daily commute using an innovative mobile research design that includes immersive interviews with users of TubeCrush, a website where people share unsolicited images of ‘guy candy’ on the London Underground. Drawing on our discussion of TubeCrush as visually representing postfeminist masculinity (Evans & Riley, forthcoming) and our analysis of gazes that are alternative to the 'male gaze' (Riley, Evans & Mackiewicz 2016) we will apply our own cutting-edge method of analysis to the data (Evans & Riley 2014) to offer new understandings of mobile desires, new gender relations and connected workplace intimacies.