Towards a feminist epistemology of Tourism

Abstract

Although the majority of the tourism workforce is female, the academic production of this discipline, which has been addressed in universities since the 1970s, is mainly represented by cisgender male authors. From the initial studies on leisure time to the current reflections on the development and territorial management of tourism, the identification of sources with a gender perspective, or elaborated by women, is strikingly absent. Problems such as the sticky floor or the glass ceiling in organizations providing tourism services, the gender dimensions - double working day, precariousness, sexual harassment, sexualization of the activity - in tourism work, the social representations of solo female travelers, the design of non-inclusive equipment and facilities, tourist cities and their layout for male enjoyment, among others, are scarcely investigated by this field of knowledge. From the hegemonic narratives, the existence of "Sex Tourism" is naturalized as a typology linked to the motivations of the demand. Thus, the vulnerability of women, children, youth and dissidents is increased and at the same time made invisible in the face of the cisheteropatriarchal view of this phenomenon, considered as neutral and free of social tensions, ignoring its criminal genesis. Other disturbing aspects of contemporary analyses reveal severe conflicts between poverty, marginality and enjoyment of leisure, between very asymmetrical social groups, in practices such as "Slum Tourism" or Tourism of Poverty.

From this point of view, this paper attempts to question these realities in the generation of scientific knowledge, and focuses on the ways of classroom intervention and the challenges that teachers of Tourism at the higher level should face in order to develop their pedagogical experience from a feminist tourism epistemology.