Undoing Shame: Tourism and Women's Work in Turkey

Abstract

This paper discusses processes of tourism and socio-cultural change in a Turkish village context by exploring how gender identities and gendered spaces are being reconstituted through tourism-related work. As tourism has developed in the region surrounding the World Heritage Site of Göreme in central Turkey, men have become tourism entrepreneurs and gained tourism employment whilst women have remained largely excluded from tourism work. This is because in Göreme society tourism work is considered a man's activity as it is inappropriate for women to work in the ‘public’ sphere. During the past five years, however, there has been a marked increase both in women's paid employment in local tourism small businesses and in women's micro-scale entrepreneurial activity associated with tourism. Based on long term anthropological fieldwork, this paper considers the processes through which this example of tourism and social change has taken place. It considers some of the broader influential aspects of social change, and it also looks at how the spatial and moral boundaries have shifted in order to allow women to work in the tourism domain.