Gender, power & sex in the world city network

Conventionally, the literature on world cities describes them as the global hubs that organise ever-more complex flows of information, money and people. Within this literature, it is advanced producer services that are considered to be of crucial importance in articulating this space of flows, often to the neglect of other cultural and social practices that give world cities their distinctive character. This paper redresses this balance by focusing on sex as one of the drivers of the global economy, arguing that world cities are not merely major markets for sexual consumption, pornography, and prostitution but are the hubs of a global network of sexual commerce around which images, bodies and desires circulate voraciously. As such, this paper brings the body into discussions of globalization not merely as a vector of disease transmission, an agent of cultural diffusion or a repository of tacit business knowledge, but as a sexualised and desiring body whose intimate geographies are integral to the reproduction of global economic systems which thrive on the commodification of desire.