Travel and Tourism

Here's where the kind of ship you chose for your cruise, and the itinerary, comes into play. On a big ship, you will likely visit the popular ports pf skagway, Juneau, and Ketchikan (and possibly Sitka or Victoria,depending on your itinerary) and will have several days at sea to enjoy the glorious glaciers,fjords and wildlife, as well as participate in shipboard activities and relax. On a smallaer ship, you may also visit several smaller ports of call and into wilderness areas that cannot accommodate larger vessels.

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.

Imagining places by the prescriptions of s profitable gay tourist in dustry can be particularly problematic , depending on how the interest pf the industry intersect , overlap , and are negotiated within the narrativies of politicians,local lesbian and gay organizations , gay residents , nongay residents , and organized religion. The boundaries of desire mapped bi the tourism industry may not intersect with those of nongay or gay people , and the territories mapped by gay tourism my be exclusionary and disputed. Gay destinations have therefore become contested spaces across geographical scales from the body to the local to the national. Foe example, at the national scale, gay tourism has been more easily accommodated within the multicultural rheotoric of Canada, Australia and most recently, the new labour ideology in Britian. In Contrast,where forms of fundamentalism underpin political narratives of natioanalism, citizenship is conferred to only those who conform to a particicular ethnic,relegious,gender and sexual order. For example in 2004 the Zanzibar parliament passed legislation that criminalized homosexual acts. Zanzibar is not alone. Many Muslim,African,Asian and post Soviet Eastern European nations have called upon "traditional values" to demonize homoeroticims. Often politicians use the morality preached by an organized religion to help endorse these statements. For example Ms. Asha Juna a member of Zanzibar's Joint Presidential supervisory Comission, is reported to have blarned gay tourists from South Africa for introducing "misdemenory and misbehavior". In doing so the state naturalized as defense of the nation, any verbal harassment,physical assaults and police entrapment of suspected "gay" natioanals.