Gender matters: Rethinking violence in tourism

Claudia Eger

doi:10.1016/j.annals.2021.103143

Abstract

The intersection of violence and gender matters in tourism, with violence being both a cause and consequence of gender inequality. This article establishes a conversation with the works of Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek to rethink theories of violence and to develop a theoretical framework that captures the nuances and complexities of gender-based violence. Violence does not happen “elsewhere”, rather the potential for violence forms part of human relations. However, the violence inherent in tourism relations is seldom named. This article develops an original proposal of how to rethink conceptualizations of gender-based violence challenging the divide between subjective and objective violence to move the often obscured and ignored silences of gendered vulnerability centre stage to discussions of violence in tourism.

Highlights

Violence against women and girls has been called the shadow pandemic of the current times (UN Women, 2020)
While there has been an increasing attention on gender-based violence (GBV) globally in the wake of the #MeToo movement, we still lack a consistent theoretical framework to capture the multiplicity of GBV and its complex embedding in different social, economic and cultural tourism contexts
The aim of this paper is to explore the interrelationship between gender and different forms of violence in tourism

Summary

Introduction

Violence against women and girls has been called the shadow pandemic of the current times (UN Women, 2020). While there has been an increasing attention on gender-based violence (GBV) globally in the wake of the #MeToo movement, we still lack a consistent theoretical framework to capture the multiplicity of GBV and its complex embedding in different social, economic and cultural tourism contexts. This might be partly due to the elusive character of violence, which emphasizes the need to adopt multi-level frameworks to study GBV. Responding to recent calls for an “explicit gender-based analysis of violence” (Devine & Ojeda, 2017), the purpose of this article is to step back to analyse how violence, in specific GBV, comes into being both in tourism production and consumption

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion