Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
QUEER PERSPECTIVES ON
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES
Gordon Waitt
This chapter explores queer perspectives on tourism geographies. It complements other
reviews locating the intersections between geographies of sexuality and tourism (for example
such as Johnston, 2005; Johnston and Longhurst, 2010; Waitt and Markwell, 2006; Waitt
et al.
, 2008). I am interested in the ways that queer perspectives provide theoretical tools to
think spatially about the relationships between tourism and sexuality. The aims of a queer
perspective are twofold: to disrupt the categorical stability of heterosexuality as 'normal' in
everyday spaces; and to reveal the fl exibility of sexuality. As Browne
et al.
(2007: 8) argue,
queer geographies explicitly 'question the . . . stable relationship between sex, gender, sexual
desire and sexual practice'. The chapter sketches the ways that tourism geographies have made
a range of conceptual and empirical advances in geographical work on tourism that interro-
gates the relationship between sexuality and space. First, I examine how queer perspectives
have questioned the spatial imaginaries of tourism research. Here I outline how queer
perspectives have challenged understandings of gay tourism that draw upon the spatial imagi-
nary of closet space or the 'gay ghetto'. I argue that when tourism research is framed through
the spatial lens of the closet, this denies the potential for change of sexual categories of the self
and the patterning of social interactions in forging sexuality. To argue that (hetero)sexuality
is not a pre-existing entity, but is the outcome of a socio-spatial process, we outline how
geographers have advocated for the application of feminist critical social theory on embodi-
ment (see also Tivers,
Chapter 11
in this volume). Second, we turn to the context of recent
marketing campaigns of the Western 'gay tourism industry' sponsored by states that once
imprisoned homosexuals and the emergence of the stereotyped tourist fi gure of the affl uent
gay white male. Queer perspectives on tourism geographies have been grappling with the
gradual normalisation of particular forms of homosexuality within the neoliberal market
place, and the implications for more radical imperatives of queer politics to blur and reveal the
inconsistencies of sexual and gender categories.
'We're here! We're queer! We're on vacation, too!'
In the pages of geography and tourism journals, geographers and non-geographers began to
explore the intersections between travel for pleasure and lesbian and gay sexualities during the
1990s. Recognising the market response in the United States to the increased number of
