Men, Masculinities, Travel and Tourism

T. Thurnell-Read, M. Casey, T. Thurnell-Read, M. Casey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349465118, 9781137341457
• eBook ISBN: 9781137341464
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Social Sciences

Men, Masculinities, Travel and Tourism draws together established and emerging academics that have a key interest in men, masculinity, travel and tourism. Through the chapters collected in this volume the reader will be exposed to cutting edge research and writing that offer global and local perspectives within these fields.

1

Introduction

Mark Casey and Thomas Thurnell-Read

With its roots in the Grand Tours of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Withey, 1997; Inglis, 2000; Littlewood, 2001) and its development entwined with the expansion of European colonialism (MacKenzie, 2005), modern tourism – particularly the international tourism industry – is an inescapably gendered phenomenon (Swain, 1995), arising from profoundly gendered societies and from the global interconnections among them (Enloe, 1989). Just as, in the most general sense, ‘tourism has become a metaphor for the way we lead our everyday lives in a consumer society’ (Franklin, 2003: 5), so, too, has it emerged as an important context in which contemporary relationships based on both entrenched and emergent positioning of gender, ethnicity and class can be studied. As noted by Cara Aitchison (1999: 61), ‘tourism needs to be considered not just as a type of business or management but as a powerful cultural form and process which both shapes and is shaped by gendered constructions of space, place, nation and culture’.

Although there is some existing work that has focused upon gender and tourism (Sinclair, 1997; Aitchison, 1999; Swain and Momsen 2002; Pritchard et al., 2007) the focus upon men, masculinities and tourism has been rather limited (e.g., Knox and Hannam, 2007; Noy, 2007). While the implicit masculine position of the tourist gaze has been questioned, understandings of specific male tourists have often failed to engage with the gendered notions of independence, adventure, embodiment and risk that underpin much tourism experience and practice. Indeed, considerable overlap can be identified between the markers of successful travel and notions of toughness, independence and resilience in the face of risk or adversity foregrounded in hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). Further, many of the freedoms and benefits of travel and tourism are only open to men or, at least, only available to women via a more complex negotiation of problematic assumptions about the nature of danger, risk and (in)dependence when travelling. This book aims to provide the first comprehensive exploration of the interdependencies of masculinities and tourism by bringing together a diverse range of empirical studies.

Both tourism studies and the critical study of men and masculinities only developed as coherent fields relatively recently. While early seminal texts (MacCannell, 1976; Urry, 1990; Hearn, 1992; Connell, 1995) outlined important theoretical and conceptual foundations, in both fields it was not until the later years of the 1990s that studies of sufficient diversity allowed earlier paradigmatic developments to be applied and observed in a range of empirical investigations. At the same time, important developments in the conceptualisation of tourism from sociology (Urry, 1990), anthropology (Selwyn, 1996) and geography (Crouch, 1999) in particular, developed new ways of looking at tourist phenomena and gave rise to what has become a genuinely interdisciplinary field of study. It is to the work of recent years in both fields that we look for important and progressive conceptualisations of tourism. Thus, tourism is experienced through embodiment (Crouch and Desforges, 2003), tourism practices are often spatially antagonistic (Edensor, 1998; Mordue, 2005), and tourism spaces and activities are often characterised by their liminality (Shields, 1991; Selänniemi, 2003; Andrews and Roberts, 2012). Similarly, the critical study of men and masculinities has sought to highlight the ways in which the social construction of masculinity gives rise to an increased understanding of masculinity as plural (Aboim, 2010), as embodied (Kehily, 2001a, b), and as open to renewed formations based around new articulations of masculinity specific to changes in the socioeconomic context of late modernity (Nayak, 2003; Anderson, 2011).

In light of this, the book sits at the intersection of two different but complementary fields of study. It is therefore offered both as a useful introduction to scholars of gender and sexuality who have little familiarity with developments in the sociological study of tourism and as a chance for academics and researchers of tourism to return focus to the notion that masculinity is central to much tourist practice and experience.

The centrality of highly gendered notions of hospitality and sociability (Hochschild, 1983) to the tourism industry frequently gives rise to social situations configured around the service of men by women. The expectation is that women in such settings will readily and willingly engage in a range of support roles, all based on gendered, classed and frequently racialised notions of hospitality. Many, but not all, tourist encounters (Crouch et al., 2001) are mediated by monetary exchanges, although tourism industries and workers work hard to conceal this from clients. The economic underpinnings of many highly gendered social interactions taking place as part of tourism cannot therefore be underestimated. This appeal to patriarchal benevolence appears in work on male sex tourists (Sanchez Taylor, 2000) who worryingly justify, condone and, indeed, even valorise their acts of paying for sex in terms of the economic assistance offered to a gendered, classed and racialised ‘Other’.

Sex is central to tourism (Littlewood, 2001; Bauer and McKercher, 2003); just as its study readily reveals great gender inequalities, it also exposes complex social constructions of sex, sexuality and desire (Frohlick, 2010). The fantasies of tourist escapism have long been built upon deeply entrenched inequalities between individuals and between countries. Erik Cohen identified this, in his influential essay on sex tourism in Thailand, as the myth of ‘instantly available women’ that pervades the tourist imagination (Cohen, 1982: 407).

The disinhibition associated with many tourism destinations may encourage traits associated with hegemonic masculinity to be pursued with greater vigour, and with a different array of associated senses, feelings and emotions, than they would at other times. Guilt, shame or embarrassment may be mitigated by the temporary entry into a social milieu that endorses the pursuit of hedonism, excess and indulgence. Notable, then, are the male tourists who appear to seek out experiences and encounters that specifically simplify, compartmentalise and de-problematise a version of hegemonic masculinity and its relationship with masculine and feminine ‘others’. While we do not wish to reinstate the home-away binary of early tourism studies, which has been shown to be far more porous and hazy than first envisaged, we do suggest that the contributions to this book demonstrate that the ways in which masculinity is enacted whilst ‘away’ can readily increase our understanding of how gender subjectivities shift whilst at ‘home’. Thus, changes to the dominant form of masculinity might result in reconfigurations of how tourists and travellers experience and enact gender whilst ‘away’. Whether or not and to what extent these changes in the constitution of gender roles and identities are carried over into tourism practice is the subject of chapters by Costa (Chapter 9) and Gilli and Ruspini (Chapter 14).

Studies that have highlighted the problematic masculinities of many young men in a deindustrialised late modernity (Winlow, 2001; Blackshaw, 2003; Nayak, 2006) also indicate that the leisure sphere can provide a space for the assertion of a masculinity clinging to the values of ‘traditional’ hegemonic masculinity. While individual men may enact a masculinity no longer available to them at ‘home’, their performances are part of a wider and deeply entrenched structuring of the tourist industry along heavily gendered lines.

Written through many of the studies in this book is, if not the actual and complete transformation of masculinities for the individuals involved, then the continued allure and the sense of possibility for tourism to offer a retreat from or an escape to certain experiences of masculinity. The sometimes fantastical and visceral – and at other times mundane and quotidian – imagining of potential masculinity as fantasy pervades the tourist imagination. For all this fantasy, the experiences of male tourists and travellers also remain rooted in the pragmatics of negotiating risky spaces and attendant dangers (Katsulis, Chapter 11) as is travel and tourism for many women, for whom adventurous and risky travel is only problematically achieved whilst remaining stubbornly associated with the masculine (Lozanski, Chapter 3). Through a familiar narrative of risk, adventure and activity, the gendered nature of tourist experience becomes apparent in many of the studies in this book.

Since Connell’s influential Masculinities (1995), the critical study of men and masculinities has developed a greater appreciation of the variety of masculinities that are pluralised (Aboim, 2010) and commonly vary across the life course (Spector-Mersel, 2006). This plurality is evident throughout this book, as the chapters illustrate the diverse experiences of men who, through their engagement with tourism and travel, engage with some elements of gender, class and ethnic positioning whilst disowning others. While the mobility that tourism offers may allow men to reassert, and to some extent recreate, masculinity, they also carry with them sometimes-burdensome markers of class locality (Ward, Chapter 7) and ethnicity (Waitt and Markwell, Chapter 8).

The concepts of reinvention associated with tourism and travel are readily mapped onto this more flexible, plural conception of masculinities. The empirical works collected in this book speak to this diversity; gender performance is relational and contingent. A recurring theme is that men in various empirical studies enact and construct their masculinity in relation to the gender of others. The supposed masculinity of some Polish men, perceived by ‘stag tour’ participants as overly aggressive and threatening, is used to frame the male stag tourist’s own gender subjectivity as playful and spontaneous (Thurnell-Read, Chapter 4). Likewise, in Treadwell’s contribution, a perceived ‘other’ of respectable middle class values hangs in the air as a foil to which the working class men can contrast their excesses.

We are therefore, to deploy Tim Edensor’s (1998) dramaturgical analogy, interested in the diversity of actors/tourists who frequent, traverse and often contest these tourist stages/spaces. Tourism spaces are constructed and experienced relationally. Across the hotel swimming pool (Casey, Chapter 6) or the nightclub dance floor (Thurnell-Read, Chapter 4; Waitt and Markwell, Chapter 8), tourists gaze upon (Urry, 1990) and encounter (Crouch et al., 2001) each other in ways that are at times mundane and at others spectacular. These spaces are never solely tourist spaces. Both Lin (Chapter 10) and Waitt and Markwell (Chapter 8) demonstrate the coming together of various actors within the tourist setting where tourists, non-tourists and staff present us rich imbrications of biographies and subjectivities of gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity. It is through such intersections that tourism spaces are potential sites for dominant gender codes to be challenged and reconfigured and, from a methodological point of view, for sociological insights to be drawn, which often have a bearing far beyond the tourist setting.

The contributions fall broadly into four key areas of theoretical engagement that reflect the themes in this book. While the chapters that form section one ground the book in key debates about the nature and form of hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinity, the remaining three sections relate identity, sexuality and embodiment respectively. While our intention is not to detract the reader’s attention from the considerable overlaps among these themes and the work of the contributing authors, the division of the book into these sections, we hope, will guide the reader through both general and specific connections between masculinity and tourism. In particular, the sections reflect the advances made in the fields of tourism studies and of men and masculinities detailed above and highlight the need to envisage gendered hierarchies and structures of unequal power whilst not losing sight of the embodied and subjective experiences of individual tourists and travellers.

Forming the first section, the initial four chapters theorise hegemonic masculinity and its performance within, and relationship to, travel and touristic experiences. In doing this, the chapters offer the reader insight into theoretical debates around how men ‘do’ hegemonic masculinity whilst travelling, and the emergence of recent challenges to its dominance. Helen Goodman’s chapter reflects the longstanding association between masculinity and travel and reflects on the ease of men’s global mobility, empowered through their claims to hegemonic masculinity. Providing a useful historical and cultural context for the following chapters, Goodman draws from both diaries and fiction to examine the relationship between masculinity and newly emerging travel during the Victorian era. By engaging with the dominance of hegemonic masculinity then, her chapter reflects the primacy given to the middle and upper class white male body within such travel accounts. Following this, Kristin Lozanski explores meanings and experiences of risk for both male and female travellers in India. In her chapter, Lozanski examines how narratives of risk frame women’s holiday experiences and meanings in negotiation with hegemonic masculinity in Rajasthan, Goa, and Kerala in India. Male tourists’ negotiation of risk (and females’ perceived vulnerability to it) represents the privilege attributed to the male body and masculinity as men move through different cultural and geographic regions. Similarly, through his focus on the European stag weekend phenomenon, Thomas Thurnell-Read explores one of the key markers of successful heterosexual hegemonic masculinity. His chapter presents the centrality of heterosexual masculinity to the touristic experiences desired and explored during the stag weekend. In so doing, he examines more nuanced accounts of how masculinities are increasingly fragmented and pluralised, with a need to reconcile this with the hyper-hegemonic masculinity as presented and performed through the increasingly commodified stag weekend. Nigel Jarvis’ chapter draws on the Gay Games and the event’s potential to challenge the assumed relationship between hegemonic heterosexual masculinity, the sporting body and global mobility. The advent of the Gay Games, for Jarvis, exposes residents and tourists to multiple gay male identities and diverse ways of doing masculinity that may challenge hegemonic masculinity and its cultural and spatial domination. Taken together, the chapters of this first section ground debates relating to hegemonic and subordinate masculinity in empirical examples of tourism practices and illustrate how the social construction of masculinity is revealed to be central to many of the principle discourses of travel and tourism.

In the next section, again comprising four chapters, the book moves the reader into discussions surrounding masculinities, tourism and men’s identities. Mark Casey’s chapter theorises about the way working class masculiniti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• Part I  Hegemonic Masculinity, Travel and Tourism
• Part II  Masculinities, Tourism and Identity
• Part III  Sex, Sexuality, Tourism and Masculinity
• Part IV  Embodying Masculine Travel
• Index