Travel and Tourism

The work of feminists has shown that social relations, including, importantly, gender relations and sexual identities, are partly constructed spatially and are embedded in the spatial organization of places (see longhurst,2001). Both bodies and space are bound into power/knowladge relationships. Rose(1995:335) noted how "particular imagined spatialities are constitutive of spesific subjectivities. Identities are in part constituted by the kind of space through which they imagine themselve."place is implicated in the articulation of the body's particular ethnicity, age, class, gender, and sexuality. For example, an anonymaous lesbian respondent quoted by Pritchard et al(2000) illustrates the importance of place in making gay tourists: "Naken man around a swimming pool. When i think of homosexuals on holiday i think of sea and sex. But it's probably a combination of sea, sex and culture. and it depends on your age".This quatation ilustrates ho, through imagining gay tourism destinations, place serve as contexts in relationship to a priori assumptions about how sexualities,gender, class snd age are inscribed on to the body. Critically for tourism studies, sexual, identities are not only conseptualized ase multiple but also as having a contextual quality. Drawing on these ideas, tht identity of the gay tourist is in part socially constructed through a resiprocal relationship with the spatial discourse of the distination through it's regimes, itineraries, routes an sights sites of pleasure travel. The bodily expression of identity,such as sexuality,is therefore not natural but naturalized. The gay tourist is envisaged to come into being in part through the particular needs experiences,activities and desire as contructed by the new "expert" knowledges about the destination provided by the gay tourism industry. It is possible, then, to imagine a person holding an alternative or contrasting bodylie expresstion of identity while being located in the leisure spaces of gay tourism destination. for example, same sex kissing on a professional soccer field has a very different meaning from same sex kissing on a "gay cruise ship". Equally firm fit bodies clad in a millitary uniform at a pride parade or dance party make a very different point about gender and sexuality that at a national remembrance day service.