ABSTRACT
This chapter draws attention to marketing strategies and civilizational discourses that are converging in the instrumentalization of sexual minorities in urban governance, especially in the global North. The instrumentalization of sexual diversity in a civilizational frame of cosmopolitanism and tolerance runs the risk of reproducing the problem it purports to address by re-appropriating the conceptual binaries and imaginations of Western modernity. Social justice requires freedom of movement for sexual minorities, as opposed to spatial containment and displacement, the discussion of instrumentalization of urban sexual diversity draws critical attention to the racialized, Eurocentric underpinnings of individual autonomy and mobility. A tension between mobility and containment, underscores their constitutive interconnection rather than assuming a contradiction between displacement on the one hand and cosmopolitanism associated with the city's civic character on the other. Thus, the growing displacement of certain categories of people - whose discreteness is defined in practices of governance - is part and parcel of cosmopolitanism rather than supplanting cosmopolitanism.
