Las dimensiones de género en la investigación sobre turismo: Temas globales, perspectivas locales

Abstract

Gender research in Tourism Studies has evolved from an «add women and stir» approach to nuanced studies that draw on feminist theory written into a rich international literature. I’ll begin this paper with an overview, looking at contested meanings of gender as a concept that continue to inspire theorizing about women’s and men’s relationships, identities and activities. We study how intersections of gender with other ways of categorizing people’s differences such as ethnicity, age, class, sexuality, and nationality play out in complex patterns of cultural ideas and social relations. In our field, scholars are investigating gendered tourism environments, and the construction of gendered power relations in tourism systems. We are grappling with questions about ethics in sex tourism, inequalities in tourism production, marketing, and consumption, and gendered enjoyment shaped by ideas of masculinity and femininity. Our urgent inquiries about gender equity are located in the contexts of global issues such as capital accumulation, population movement, natural environmental resources, information technology, popular culture, and security. Local gender perceptions provide bases for fine-grain analysis in case studies and comparative analyses. One useful approach has grown out of ideas on embodiment, an often used but often obscured term. Bodies are as local as one can get. Here global and local tensions are encoded, acted out in individual sites. I’ll end this paper with a discussion of what theory about the body may mean for the production of knowledge in tourism studies, by us the embodied researchers