My PhD dissertation examines the relation between the ideas of ‘underground’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ in Shanghai’s cultural worlds of clubbing, drag, and indie. These spaces of production and consumption of global cultural styles are exclusive to a select group of affluent, educated, and well-travelled local Chinese and (mostly Euro-American) international participants, who construe their cultural practices as ‘underground’. It attempts to answer the question, “How do participants in Shanghai’s clubbing, drag and indie cultures relate to Shanghai and the world through their understandings and constructions of ‘underground’?”

The dissertation adopts an ethnographic methodology, which includes participant observation in Shanghai in 2023 and 2024 and interviews with a variety of clubbing, drag, and indie participants. Taking inspiration from discourse analysis and grounded theory, this thesis theorises ‘underground’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ as two intersecting social ‘imaginaries’ through which venue owners, event organisers, performers, and patrons envision their cultural identity and place in the world. The analytic focus is on ‘cultural worlds’: assemblages of cultural production and consumption often centred around projects like venues, events and collectives, where social borders are negotiated through conventions, values, and norms.

The cultural worlds of clubbing, drag, and indie provide spaces where participants feel free to express themselves culturally and sexually within China’s socio-political context, but are simultaneously exclusive to those with the right social, cultural, and economic capital. This thesis explores the challenges clubbing, drag, and indie organisations face in China’s creative industries; articulations and social hierarchies in cultural worlds; the role of visual advertisements and digital technologies in making cultural worlds; and translocal connections of cultural projects. It analyses how cosmopolitan and underground imaginaries are employed in a variety of ways and for different purposes and argues that they are shaped by western normativity.