Tourism Gender Studies

Abstract

From a historical perspective, tourism has a masculine origin. When the term, 'tourist' began to emerge and gained popularity in the mid-eighteenth century, it referred to a person, normally male, who explored the exotk foreign lands, ancl in some instances foreign women, for pleasure and excitememt (Enloe, 1989; Graburn and Jafari, 1991). The notion of 'tourist' has now become more inclusive as women account for half of the general travel market and even more in some niche markets (Harris and Wilson, 2007). The contemporary tourism space, however, is stiII highly gendered and sexualised (Pritchard and Morgan, 2000). This is manifested in the sex tourism industry as well as through tourism promotiona l materials where objectified and sexualised female bodies are commonly found (Pritchard and Morgan, 2000; Small, 2016). Comparable to many other social science discipliines, gender studies in tourism emerged in the late 1970s in the wake or the second wave of the Western feminist movement. Since then, this subfield has grown gradually and reached a milestone on 1995 when Anna;s of Tourism Research published a special issue on gender-studies edited by Margaret Byrne Swain. Following this, a number of edited books (Apostolopoulos et al., 2001; Swain and Momsen, 2002; Pritchard et al., 2007; Khoo-Lattimore and Mura, 2016; Khoo-Lattimore and Wilson, 2016) and journal special issues (Bowen, 2005, 2008) have been dedicated to gender studies in tourism. Despite these achievements, gender research remains a marginalised subfie]d in Tourism.