How can we bring together the two concepts of 'globalisation' and the 'body', and why is it important to do so? At first glance, it seems that these two concepts are so different in scale that it would be difficult to bring them together. However, if we accept that the individual experience of embodiment is situated in particular social and cultural contexts, then it seems necessary to place the contemporary experience of embodiment in the context of current processes of globalisation. The processes of globalisation are implicated in the circulation of finance, capital, commodities, knowledge, information, and cultural representations. There are also complex circuits for the movement of people, as knowledge workers, labourers, asylum seekers, soldiers and peacekeepers, diplomats and NGO workers, carers, spouses, surrogate parents, adoptive parents and adoptive children, sex workers, domestic workers, medical practitioners and their patients, and tourists. While finance, capital, information and commodities move freely, the movement of people is highly regulated, and opportunities for mobility are unequally distributed. These processes provide challenges to existing theorisations of embodiment, and challenges for artistic practice. In this special issue we consider how globalisation is reflected in cultural representation and artistic practice. Possible themes include the production of new sexed and gendered identities, the mediatised production of discourses of sexuality and romance, the place of the body in performance, questions of history, memory and performance, and the body as a site of self-fashioning.