‘It got very debauched, very Dubai!’ Heterosexual intimacy amongst single British expatriates

Abstract

This article explores performances of heterosexuality amongst single, straight British expatriates resident in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I draw on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, involving participant-observation and interviewing. Specifically, I focus on performances of transient heterosexuality, by which I mean performances of heterosexuality that are characterised by frequent sexual encounters with successive partners and which are enacted in relation to discourses of transience. Firstly, I explore how Dubai is understood as a particular ‘landscape of desire’ (Bell and Valentine 1995 Bell, D. and Valentine, G., eds. 1995. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]), arguing that performances of transient heterosexuality are privileged in its bar/club spaces. I suggest that the changing nature of British transnationalism, transformations in Dubai's night-time economy and, in particular, expatriate discourses about the transnational city as a holiday-like space, influence such performances. Secondly, I consider the ambivalence amongst single British expatriates towards performances of transient heterosexuality. I argue that such performativity is celebrated as an escape from domesticated forms of couple intimacy yet, at the same time, constructed as a negative result of transnationalism. Finally, I explore how single British expatriates' performances of heterosexuality are refracted through more widespread, and powerfully gendered, international discourses about couple intimacy.