Enacting Worldmaking Agency: Navigating and Negotiating Precarious Tourism Work and Lifestyle Mobilities in Lunenburg

Abstract

Worldmaking for and through tourism often produces a reality that is advantageous to some populations and suppressive to others. Indeed, the production of precarious and feminized tourism labor is evidence of the tourism industry’s simultaneous reliance upon and re-creation of the system of global capitalism. However, tourism is fundamentally relational, meaning it is constituted by, and relies upon, the very peoples and places it (re)produces. Herein lies the multiplicity and simultaneity of situated tourism life-worlds, as well as the potential for progressive detachment from dominant representations. Ethical worldmaking is presented as a threefold system involving the conception of tourism beyond or outside of global capitalism; the appropriation of our inescapable role in the production of tourism worlds; and the recognition that a multiplicity of tourism community stakeholders simultaneously interprets and shapes tourism worlds according to such intersecting differences as gender, race, class, age, nationality, sexuality, and so forth. Applying this framework to an empirical study, the lived experiences of regionally mobile woman working in tourism provide insight into the tension and contradiction underpinning cultural tourism production in Lunenburg, Canada. Thus, a series of coping strategies are enacted in order to navigate and negotiate their complex positionality, blurring the boundaries between leisure and labor, travel and migration, subjugation and empowerment.