Gender, sexuality and lifestyle migration: Exploring the impact of cosmopolitan place-marketing discourses on the post-migratory experiences of British women in Spain

Abstract

This article responds to a recent call to problematise the theoretical underpinnings of lifestyle migration and in particular, to critically examine the construction of lifestyle migrants as an ideal-type of individualised subject, freed from the constraints of normative social structures. Recent research has begun to do so, by demonstrating how class, race and gender can intersect to delimit the post-migratory experiences of lifestyle migrants, as they negotiate multiple social hierarchies. This article adds a new dimension to these studies by showing how class, gender and sexuality interconnect through the prism of ‘cosmopolitanism’ to structure the lives of British women in the affluent Catalan town of Sitges. Although British lesbians have more social autonomy than other British female lifestyle migrants in the town, they are simultaneously rendered subordinate in relation to Sitges’ cosmopolitan discourse, which privileges a stereotypical male homosexuality instead.