Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
For as Mellinger (1994: 756) points out, marketing communications enables subjects to be
positioned in tourism discourse in different ways, creating negative representations of some
subjects and empowered ones by others: 'Analysis of these photographic images reveals that
specifi c iconographic strategies were employed by postcard photographers to culturally inscribe
black bodies with “Otherness.” . . . These images positioned black subjects in a racist regime of
representation that constructed subjectivities for those depicted and identities for their viewers'
(Mellinger 1994: 756).
A similar observation is offered by Schroeder and Borgerson (2002: 578), who identify the role
of marketing communications in constructing 'the other' within 'typifi ed representations, especially
those that are racist or sexist'. In later work they trace the historical construction of sexist categories
in the marketing of Hawaii
to North American tourists. Relations of power were organized
within a 'paradisal' discourse used consistently in marketing communications about Hawaii.
Images invariably depicted young, beautiful, semi-naked indigenous females lying pensively (and
always unaccompanied) on a beach. In many, but not all cases, the empowered subject is implied
as the (viewing) young white American male, looking for romantic relationships with their
submissive indigenous female subjects. Other images were more explicit, placing the intended
viewer in the 'paradisal' images, perhaps holding a surf board or a local woman's hand. Whilst
marketing communications have the capacity to represent subjects and relations in a particular
way within a (e.g. 'paradisal') discourse, they can also hide subjects and relations (especially those
incongruous with the ideal image). Schroeder and Borgerson (2005) underline the importance of
'absent subjects' in this 'paradisal' discourse, such as the lack of children, elderly, families, local
communities and crucially, Hawaiian males. They conclude that these absent subjects reinforced
the tourist's interpretation of the sexual availability of indigenous women and the economic and
cultural disempowerment of (invisible) Hawaiian men as well as others (families etc.).
Much research into power in tourism-other relations tends to take wealth disparity and
cultural distance as a proxy for power asymmetry, such that studies often favour investigations of
rich 'Western tourist's' and foreign 'third world' others. Power, though, is everywhere being
shaped in a wide range of marketing communications, and often in the least obvious places.
Returning to Caruana and Crane's (2011) study of tourism freedom, one of their case studies
explores relations of power where 'the other' can equally be thought of as a tourist or even a
working tour representative (i.e. not a classically 'vulnerable' indigenous population). Their case
study of hedonistic tourism discourse (marketed in a brochure) observes the construction of a
highly liberated self who, freed from the 'slave-like' incarceration of work, is able to engage in
unencumbered sexual relationships with other 'like-minded' hedonists (other tourists). On one
relational axis, the care-free, sexually-charged ethos promulgated in the brochure potentially
disobliges tourists from moral responsibilities towards sexual partners, rendering other tourists
vulnerable (e.g. to abuse, violence and/or sexual disease). The relations through which freedom
is portrayed elevates one tourist's sexual licence (
freedom to
have sex) over another's liberty
(
freedom from
sexual harm). On another relational axis, the ardent anti-work ethos that anchors
the 'hedonic myth' co-opts tour reps into the sexualized relations being celebrated. The postures,
expressions, clothing and activities of this (working) subject group are almost indistinguishable
from the tourist subject, thus the interpretation 'we're all hedonists!'. Why, you might well ask, is
this a problem? Despite being on low pay, short-term contracts and deployed in highly-charged
emotional labour and tasked into humiliating 'performances' (e.g. 'striptease'), tour reps, argue
Caruana and Crane (2011), are the subject of a double-incarceration, required to act as 'sexually
available hedonists' whilst also carrying the implicit tag of 'enslaved worker' so derided by the
hedonist ethos. How though do these tensions and contradictions in tourist-other relations not
destabilise the tourist's interpretation?
