Legitimizing discourses within favela tourism

Abstract

Urban slums, especially in the Global South, have become popular attractions for tourists interested in sites off the beaten track and more authentic encounters with local culture. This practice has drawn attention from the media and extensive academic research, pointing out its controversial character due to the uneven power relations between hosts and guests and the commodification of poverty to turn it into a tourist attraction. Though acknowledging this pitfall, this work takes a different approach. We argue that tourism has agency in co-producing meanings and values in the process of making and consuming slums as tourist places. Within this process, the cultural capital of slums may find new avenues of legitimization. We critically analyze how discursive practices may valorize and legitimize slums as spaces for cultural production and consumption and the role of tourism in ordering, valuing, and visualizing vernacular cultural landscapes. The paper examines the case of favelas in Rio de Janeiro open to tourist visitation. Using as sources 79 articles from virtual media outlets (a mainstream, hegemonic newspaper, and a popular grassroots publication), official social media accounts, and tourism policies, we leverage Foucauldian discourse analysis and scrutinized the data, drawing insights on three categories of legitimization: authorization, rationalization, and moral evaluation. Our main findings show that tourism is often portrayed as a justification for securitization policies, as well as for fiscalization and formalization processes. Tourists were perceived to have authority in evaluating and valorizing slums’ cacophonic landscape beyond the evaluations of hegemonic social and political elites, which makes for a potential avenue of legitimization. However, in employing a more critical scope, two questions resonate: (1) who benefits from the valorization of slums’ cultural capital and, (2) who decides on the social validity of emergent cultural elements?