Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
wide range of different elements and situations and its impacts may vary from the enhance-
ment of personal identity and increased status by some sex workers, at one end of the scale, to
the traffi cking of children and their exploitation as prostitutes, at the other (Ryan and Hall,
2001; see also Waitt,
Chapter 10
of this volume, on sexuality and tourism).
Tourist experiences/behaviour/embodiment
Few researchers have questioned the ways in which tourism experiences or motivations are
gendered (Harris and Wilson, 2007), although the writers of the studies edited by Swain and
Momsen (2002) are an exception; in particular, the paper by Anastassova on the gendered
tourism motivations of Bulgarian tourists seeks to question standard (gender-neutral) motiva-
tion models. As with recent research on tourism employment, much work on tourists' experi-
ences has focused on sexuality and sex tourism, but in this case from a consumer perspective.
Research has tended to concentrate mainly on the experiences of
male
sex tourists and the
impacts of their activities, but in recent years some studies have emerged of
female
sex tourists
or of casual sex as part of women's holiday experiences. Thomas (2005) notes that women
tourists tend to abandon their accustomed norms of behaviour temporarily on holiday, while
Andrews (2009) discusses the pressures on women tourists to conform to the expected prac-
tices of package tourism, involving the sexual objectifi cation of their bodies. Sanchez-Taylor
(2006) argues that the 'victims' of sex tourism may be portrayed too simplistically by studies
investigating issues of gender alone and that attention should be paid to the racialised power
relations evident in sexual exchanges (both commercial and non-commercial) between
female sex tourists and local men, while Freidus and Romero-Daza (2009) remind us that the
impact of such activity on local women leads to a complex gendered situation of antagonism
between different groups of women.
It has also been suggested that much female sex tourism falls more correctly under the
heading of 'romantic' tourism (for non-commercial sex), as opposed to the commercial sex
tourism undertaken by male tourists ( Jacobs, 2009; Freidus and Romero-Daza, 2009). Along
these lines, Jacobs (2009) notes a lack of attention paid to the imaginative and emotional
geographies created by such tourism relationships.
The gendered experiences of 'travellers' have also received some considerable attention in
the literature, with historical studies of women travellers in evidence at least since the 1980s
(Hall and Kinnaird, 1994) and continuing as a focus of interest for researchers. Maddrell's
(2009) book on women's geographical work in the UK, for example, includes an analysis of
the writings of eight women travellers in the Victorian and early twentieth-century periods
and underlines the variation in experiences, attitudes and perspectives on colonialism evident
in such writings. Garcia-Ramon and Albet i Mas (2002) remind us that most studies (including
those in tourism geography) have been written in English about British travellers within a
British colonial setting. They therefore set out specifi cally to study two women travelling in
(non-British colonial) North Africa in the early twentieth century; one from Spain, writing
in Catalan, and one from Geneva, writing in French. However, the conclusions they draw are
that these women's travel experiences were complex in meaning, involving both complicity
in a European colonial project, on the one hand, and an escape from Western patriarchal and
repressive gender relations on the other, which accords well with conclusions about British
travellers (see Blunt and Rose, 1994).
Recent interest in women's experiences of travelling has not been confi ned to historical
studies. McNamara and Prideaux (2010), for example, have researched different understand-
ings of risk and safety by solo female travellers, while Heimtun (2010) focuses on women's
