Expatriate Ethnoscapes: Transnational Masculinity and Sexual Transgressions

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the role of the imagination in the construction of meaningful places out of the transnational corporate spaces of the late-20th century global economy. As others have made clear, there is a politics to the social imagination that achieves its most onerous effect in the ethnic/racial/gendered/national stratification of the global workforce.¹ In this regard, I wish to consider how the colonial imagination operates within an urban terrain occupied by a diverse population united (however tangentially) through the exigencies of the global economy. I take the colonial imagination as a key component of a broader transnational socio-spatial imagination through which Indonesian and Western-born members of the transnational capitalist class make sense of a complicated social geography to which neither is, strictly speaking, indigenous.

Citation

Leggett, W.H. (2006), "Expatriate Ethnoscapes: Transnational Masculinity and Sexual Transgressions", Hutchison, R. and Krase, J. (Ed.) Ethnic Landscapes in an Urban World (Research in Urban Sociology, Vol. 8), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 223-246. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1047-0042(06)08010-X