ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the dearth of research on leisure and play in global cities, and by vividly depicting Shanghai’s nightclubs as “ethno-sexual transzones,” they argue that global cities are nodal points where sexuality is performed and sexual subjectivity is negotiated. Few researchers focus on leisure in the definition of global cities, though arguably urban leisure cultures have fueled urban development throughout human history. By the late 1980s, Shanghai boasted hundreds of commercial dance establishments catering to Shanghai’s broad working classes. Shanghai nightscapes from the 1920s onward were also sites for the exploration of “urban exoticism” in the form of racialized sexual spectacles. The transzone of Shanghai nightlife was indeed a space of transnational flows, but one with racialized “pools” and gendered “eddies” in which some felt included while others floated on by or were marginalized in the still waters of social interaction.
