ABSTRACT
The Gold Coast considers itself Australia's premier tourist destination'. Boasting expansive beaches, several theme parks, showpiece shopping centres and a lively nightlife, the city's growth is driven by leisure consumption. This chapter examines the performances of hegemonic masculinity as expressed through presentations of self, mating rituals and homosocial bonding activities. Accordingly, the city provides the kind of nightlife that it assumes tourists seek local nightclubs capture the codes of the city's tourism narratives, aiming to produce excessive, escapist, hedonistic experiences, specialising in an internationally familiar kind of glitz and glamour along with an internationally consumed menu of popular music and style. Ambience, aesthetics, spatial arrangements and marketing are significant factors in the social spatialisation of nightclubs. On Queensland's Gold Coast which can be seen as a major node for clubbing in Australia mainstream nightclubs are constructed and occupied as male-dominated spaces.
