Cosmopolitan sexual citizenship and the project of queer world-making at the Sydney 2002 Gay Games

Abstract

Using the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney 2002 Gay Games as a case study, in this article I analyse sexual citizenship through the lens of global cosmopolitanism. I begin by arguing that at these Games an idealised sexual citizen was produced through neoliberal discourses of freedom, rights, choice and cosmopolitanism. At events of this kind, these individualising practices function as new and important forms of ‘political’ action. I then argue that the idealised cosmopolitan sexual citizen is presumed to be a white, western citizen-subject who has access to ‘difference’ through urban living, global travel and through personal investments in the project of global queer world-making. Finally, I illustrate how becoming a cosmopolitan sexual citizen involves a set of consumptive practices that fetishise and Other non-white bodies and lives. At large global gay and lesbian events like the Gay Games, local histories and bodies are mediated as sites of consumption that affirm sexual citizens’ status as global cosmopolitan citizens and define the parameters of an imagined queer world.