The tourist pose: aesthetic labour, social media, and new gendered tourism geographies

Abstract

The concept of the ‘tourist pose’ is developed to examine the feminised aesthetic labour involved in ‘post-selfie’ tourist self-portraiture for social media consumption, and its role in vernacular geographies of tourist visitation. We elaborate on what constitutes the tourist pose, its linkage to distinctive cultural groups and practices, and altered tourism geographies. Young female Chinese tourist-influencers visiting Sydney, Australia, combine photography, fashion, colour, text, and compositional skills, to curate high-end social media posts within a culturally-inflected community of practice. Their aesthetic labour also creates new distinctive geographies of ‘marked’ (daka) places. Democratisation of photography through smartphones and social media platforms, notably Xiaohongshu, has encouraged tourists to discover and recommend distinctive sites, beyond the mainstream, selected for their colour and curatorial possibilities. The tourist pose and accompanying aesthetic labour, fuel creativity and performances of femininity, extending the tourist gaze while diffusing tourism geographies. Visitation patterns associated with the tourist pose are dispersed and small-scale, and eschew managerial interventions. The point is not to ‘develop’ chosen sites for commercial gain, but to acknowledge tourists’ vernacular social practices and accompanying gendered performances. The tourist pose reveals how visitors find meaning, refine aesthetic skills, perform gendered identities and explore vernacular creativity, in distinctive places.