Tourism and Gender Research in Brazil and Mexico

Abstract

Tourism and gender research emerged during the 1990s in the Anglophone academies. Despite the sociocultural improvement in gender studies, tourism and gender research remains a marginal and disarticulated subfield of studies three decades later, with limited impact on the broader tourism scholarship and on practical transformations at the destination level. In Latin America, tourism gender research was introduced towards the beginning of the 21st century and, apart from the limitations identified in the Anglophone academies, the lack of engagement with gender and feminist debates has contributed to marginalize this subfield of research. The gender dimensions of tourism have been examined mainly through social science frameworks. Even though tourism has been considered an interdisciplinary field of study, gender mainstreaming has been neglected as a relevant approach to research. Despite its limitations, tourism gender research in Latin America has made power relations visible in a wide array of tourism practices. The introduction of gender perspectives has facilitated the analysis of other hierarchical categories such as race, ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation. Drawing insights from a recent bibliometric analysis of the tourism and gender scholarship in Latin America for the period 2001–2015, this article continues a previous work and focuses on the production of the two leading countries in the region: Brazil and Mexico. Content analysis was conducted on a selection of 107 articles (64 from Brazil and 43 from Mexico). The purpose of the analysis was twofold: first, to identify the main research topics, and second, to examine the links with feminist or gender frameworks. Findings show these links are weak, and opportunities were detected to strengthen the association of tourism research with the social sciences through analysis that incorporate cultural and gender dimensions at the macro- or microlevels. Finally, we discuss areas for interdisciplinary collaboration with feminist traditions, such as intersectionality and transnationalism that may contribute to advance tourism gender research in the region.