Living Paradoxically: Understanding the Discourse of Authentic Freedom as it Emerges in the Travel Space

Abstract

In contemporary society, youth travel is understood and represented by travelers and media alike as a contemporary rite of passage or significant, transitional moment. It is argued that the rapid accumulation of experience, an inherent component of travel, influences processes of identity construction and reconstruction. Central to these conceptualizations are concerns with authenticity and freedom, discourses that ultimately serve to structure the travel space and influence interactions between travelers and the travel media and industries. Based on semistructured in-depth interviews with young Australian travelers and discourse, image, and content analysis of key travel publications and advertisements, this article will examine the interplay between discourses of authenticity and freedom in traveler narratives and travel media. It will examine how travel media (and the travel industries) imagine backpackers and the backpacking community and how backpackers' own self and travel-narratives correspond with or contest such representations. Central to this examination is the centrality of discourses of authenticity and freedom, and the tensions that emerge between the two as they arise in traveler narratives and media and industry representations of travel. Ultimately, following Wang (2000), I will argue that travelers reconcile some of these tensions with reference to existential authenticity and that this intersubjective awareness, along with heightened reflexivity, gives rise to a concern with "authentic freedom."