Based on ethnographic observations in Chinese discos, this article describes how urban Chinese youth participate in the cosmopolitan sexual culture of the discotheque, using the hybrid cultural space of the discotheque for their own forms of sexual display and interaction. The discotheque is perceived by youth as a cosmopolitan space allowing for appropriation and consumption of ‘foreign’ sexual styles. Especially for young women, the disco provides a space for sexual expression which would be unacceptable in other social spaces, and offers Chinese youth of both sexes a space for participation in a global consumer culture. Sub-cultural theories of youth culture are found to be inadequate to describe participation in this shifting and anonymous marketplace of sexual images and self-display. Chinese participation in the discotheque is less a ‘localization’ or subversion of global practices than an active consumption of and participation in a kind of sexual cosmopolitanism, more of a construction of a ‘super-culture’ rather than of a ‘sub-culture’. Rather than creating local group solidarities, participation in this ‘super-culture’ emphasizes, above all, sexual display and the exposure of the commodified sexual self to the gaze of anonymous and ‘foreign’ others.
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