Trajectories of embodiment in Tourist Studies

From the tourist gaze to the multisensorial body

As Franklin and Crang acknowledge in the Introductory issue of Tourist Studies, John Urry’s (1990) concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ (as one of the most influential concepts in tourism research) set the stage for discussions on the body in tourism. The advent of the tourist gaze has substantially enriched our understanding of the constitution of the tourist subject, advancing tourist debates beyond a traditional focus on visual representations and the framing of destinations in the creation of tourist desire. However, the sort of research that Urry inspired often reproduced a mind/body dualism which portrayed tourists as detached, disembodied and passive observers, effectively reducing them to a disembodied pair of eyes. As Veijola and Jokinen (1994) pointed out, the focus on the gaze ironically tended to negate the whole of the tourist body and the multisensorial dimensions of the embodied tourist.

These critiques of the tourist gaze were emerging around the time of the first editorial of Tourist Studies (Franklin and Crang, 2001). A growing number of scholars highlighted the limitations of the tourist gaze: for how it epitomised a masculine subject position (Jokinen and Veijola, 1994; Pritchard and Morgan, 2000); for being western-based (Agapito et al., 2013; Chaney, 2008), for not paying sufficient attention to the practices of seeing (Crang, 1997), for disregarding the multiple sensual configurations of tourism (Edensor, 2001, 2006), for narrowly defining the subject/object of the gaze, and for ignoring the complex social relations involved in viewing and gazing (Gillespie, 2006; Maoz, 2006). There is therefore a significant body of work within Tourist Studies that has furthered this trajectory of complicating and situating the tourist gaze, repositioning the dematerialised visualities of tourism within an embodied and sensual space. One of the most prominent contributions is Haldrup and Larsen’s (2003) work on the family gaze, which highlights the extent to which tourist photography engages significant others and is part of what we might call the family theatre that enables people to enact and produce a sense of intimacy and togetherness. Relationality, performativity and power are further explored through work on tourists gazing at each other (Holloway et al., 2011), locals gazing at tourists (Chan, 2006), migrant workers gazing at migrant tourists (Moufakkir, 2019) and the enactment of the gaze in non-western contexts (Zara, 2015). This trajectory of work not only engages with the embodied and multi-sensuous nature of gazing, but also the complex social relations and fluid power geometries constituting these numerous performances of gazing.

Tourist Studies has thus been the leading journal in challenging the occulocentrism of tourism research and its tendency to collude ‘in writing the body out of tourism’ (Franklin and Crang, 2001: 14). The influence of the embodied turn in tourism research is felt the most in the sensory and performative explorations of the tourist experience (Cohen and Cohen, 2019), opening up novel trajectories in tourism research away from its traditional focus on vision. These sensory and performative explorations have occupied a central space in Tourist Studies, which, from its outset, sought ‘to show that tourists are seeking to be doing something in the places they visit rather than being endlessly spectatorially passive’ (Franklin and Crang, 2001: 13).

There is a plethora of sensory studies in the journal that explore the visceral articulations of practice and sensuality in tourism. Many of these contributions highlight a specific touristscape based on a particular sense. Soundscapes have been articulated through the work of Garcia (2016) on techno tourism in Berlin, where electronic music is a thing to be toured itself, and Saldanha’s (2002) work on the psychedelic rave scene in Goa, which explores the ability of music to organise ‘factions’ of bodies. There is also a special issue on music and tourism (Lashua et al., 2014) looking at the many dimensions of travelling in order to hear. Taste is a sensescape that has also received specific attention in Tourist Studies, with many articles focussing on the role of food and drink play in articulating the tourist experience. For example, Bezzola and Lugosi (2018) look at how tourists negotiate a sense of home and away through the consumption of food and drink, while Everett (2009) uses food to draw a more heterogenous sensory landscape where tourists are immersed in waves of taste, smell, sound and touch. Andrews (2005) explores the embodied nature of smell and hearing and constructions of national and gendered identities in tourism practices. Likewise, the alterations of tourist bodies with psychoactive substances is manifested in the work of Jayne et al. (2012) on alcohol, drinking and drunkenness within the context of backpacking. While these kinds of sensory experiences in tourism may seem ‘trivial’, Tarulevicz and Ooi (2019) have pointed to the ways that the embodied sense of taste is in fact raced and hierarchical. Drawing on the role of food tourism in Singapore, they describe how ‘food safety’ regulations shed light on the tensions between high and low food culture. The connection between the senses and broader constructions of class, culture and ethnicity is something we hope to see explored more within this journal in coming years.

Despite such advances in the critical reflection and understanding of tourism as underpinned by multisensory active doings and performances, the sense of touch remains relatively elusive. The most relevant contribution to this area in Tourist Studies is Merchant’s (2011) work on scuba diving which examines the re-arrangement of the sensorium underwater. Larsen and Svabo (2014) have brought touch into play within the context of museums. In addition to the sensations of pressure and contact, the haptic senses include kinaesthesia (the sense of movement), proprioception (sense of bodily position) and the sense of balance. These other haptic sensations feature in touristic discussions on speed, slow and thrill. Thus, for example, haptic sensations of kinaesthesia underpin the popularity of German Autobahns as tourist destination in what Gross (2020) calls Speed Tourism. The importance of haptic sensualities in tourism has been successfully addressed elsewhere, in particular in discussions relating to visually impaired people. The works of Hetherington (2003) and Macpherson’s (2009) on the tactile experiences of visually impaired people in museums and the countryside are particularly interesting. A more thorough engagement with the complexities of touch would substantially enrich this journal.

Traditionally, and perhaps influenced by anthropological approaches to examining culture, tourist research has focused on cultural representation of tourist bodies, giving priority to the image over the actions of the body. Indeed, Tourist Studies is packed with contributions exploring the extent to which elaborations and representations of the body in tourism are rooted in colonial (Kothari, 2015) and heteropatriarchal discourses (Pritchard and Morgan, 2005), reflecting on the close intimacy of tourism with colonialism (Hall and Tucker, 2004; Putcha, 2020). However, the body does not merely feature as a thing or a concept, a surface of inscription, a container of meaning or a plastic matter for sculpting. Rather, in Tourist Studies the body is also an active, expressive and sensual force, a body-subject with the ability to configure the tourist experience; a body that is simultaneously situated and situational, object and subject. In this broader framework, there are many forms of tourism that do not prioritise the sense of sight. One clear example of the significance of the body in tourist experiences is that of the beach, with its capacity to reconfigure tourist bodies through a series of embodied pleasures, like swimming, sunbathing and building sandcastle (Diken and Laustsen 2004; Franklin, 2014; Obrador, 2007, 2009, 2012), a focus that has been systematically ignored in much tourism research. As Arun Saldanha notes in one of the first issues in Tourist Studies: ‘[d]on’t tourists swim, climb, stroll, ski, relax, become bored perhaps, or ill; don’t they go to other places to taste, smell, listen, dance, get drunk, have sex?’ (2002: 43). In this quote, Saldanha reminds us that tourism is not so much a cognitive intellectual experience but a matter of doing, a practical, sensual and embodied engagement with the world. In the next section we consider how materialities are also embodied within tourism spaces.

From the bounded body to relational ontology/materiality

An exploration of the beach in tourist studies also opens up an exploration of the importance of materiality to touristic experiences as well as relationality and the capacity for the tourist body to be affected and disrupted by other agencies, human and non-human. A prominent example is Franklin’s (2014) article on the bucket and spade as a foundational element in the relational materialism of the beach. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Haraway (1998), Ingold (2008) and Latour (2010), Franklin’s discussion was pivotal in its post-humanist understanding of tourism as ‘a gathering together of a heterogeneous community of agencies and objects with whom humans must, as they do everywhere, negotiate relationships’ (p. 263). Franklin thus points out that while the embodiment turn has been crucial in tourism/tourist studies, it runs ‘the risk of over-emphasising the human body at the expense of other non-human agencies in the environment’ (2014: 267). Human action ‘should never of course be privileged over the action of the world it connects to’ (2014: 268).

Expanding the scope of the senses and embodiment, a relational materiality perspective was brought to the fore in Tourist Studies in Walsh and Tucker’s (2009) consideration as to how the material object of the backpack is implicated in the social world of backpackers. Walsh and Tucker argued there is a need to recognise that material objects do important things: ‘Beyond the realm of representation, the backpack is critical in backpackers’ lived experience’ (2009: 235). By highlighting ‘the affective relation between self and “thing”’ (2009: 225), Walsh and Tucker contend that their analysis ‘thus collapses any real distinction between sociality and materiality’ (2009: 235). Hence, Tourist Studies’ adoption of the embodied turn has not only led to the expansion of our understandings of the role of the body in tourism, but to an ontological recognition of the essential materiality of the world and, in this, the important role of non-human actors in tourism.

The ontologies and methodologies of relational materialism have thus become prominent in Tourist Studies not only in terms of the extension and elaboration they offer to ideas of embodiment, but also in their decentring of the human in tourist studies. This is highlighted in Benali and Ren’s (2019) discussion of head-lice in a volunteer tourism context in Nepal. Like Franklin, Benali and Ren (2019: 239) highlight the need to move beyond binary subject–object positions and to recognise the ‘ongoing ontological choreography also involving human and non-human actors, bodies and affects’. Showing lice to be useful ‘analytical entry points to describe the disruptive power of bodies and affect’, Benali and Ren (2019: 253) developed a clear understanding of how lice were an active element in shaping the emotions and experiences of the volunteer tourists.

Indeed, the ability for the tourist body both to affect and to be affected was recognised in Tourist Studies as early as Volume 1, in Fullagar’s (2001) analysis of Alphonso Lingis’ travel writing. Fullagar (2001: 178) read Lingis as being troubled by the mediating effects of western discourses and images that work to codify his experience, instead wanting ‘his flesh to be porous, open to the movements of the other’s body’. In this sense, travel, conceptualised as ‘an ethical encounter requires an openness to the affect of the other, at the risk of decentring the self’ (Fullagar, 2001: 174). However, focusing on affect is an area of tourism research which has been consistently underplayed, including in Tourist Studies. Indeed, since Fullagar’s (2001) article, there has been remarkably little in the journal on what Waitt et al. (2007: 252) vividly described as the potential for tourist encounters ‘to be disrupted by the fleshiness of the body’. This dearth of attention on affect in the journal is even more surprising when considering Duff’s (2010: 881) argument, pertaining to the ‘affective turn’ in geography, that ‘to experience place is to be affected by place’. Hence, a relational materialist view which understands tourism ‘as an ontological choreography which blurs and recasts conventional understandings of subjectivities and power relations’ (Benali and Ren, 2019: 240), as well as understanding the tourist body as a relational and situated site of affects, is an ontological position which we hope will feature more prominently in Tourist Studies’ third decade. Likewise, the acceptance of the porosity of the body and its vulnerability to the disruptive power of affect is itself an ethical position which signals the need for future work that is more clearly engaged with tourism and ethics. While we call for more work to be done on the affective dimensions of tourism we acknowledge below some of the work that has begun to pave forward an affective trajectory in tourism studies.

From non-representational thinking to affective emergences

In 2003, Obrador introduced non-representational theories into tourist studies to further centre the importance of the dynamic processes of meaning making that occur within encounters in tourism. This approach, Obrador argued, is key when seeking to move beyond the ‘essentialised and decontextualised meta-narratives of being in modernist and postmodernist theories that leave lived and situated subjects underscrutinised’, thus moving analysis away from ‘Cartesian divisions between subjects and objects, material and spiritual, facts and fetish’ (2003: 48). Drawing on Thrift, Obrador (2003: 55) situates embodiment not just as ‘a body’, but as a ‘body-subject’ engaging in ‘joint body practices of becoming’. This framing opens up new opportunities for conceptualising the tourist subject as embedded within relationalities and practices. Non-representational style of thinking, later renamed as more-than-representational by Lorimer (2005), allows an analysis of the body-subjects’ experiences which are expressive, sensual and perhaps most importantly, elusory. Crucially, a non-representational analysis pays attention to the tourism experiences that cannot be codified into the discursive realms, unsettling the presupposition of ‘a stable and ordered subject’ (Obrador, 2003: 56). It is within these more-than-representational realms of experiences that allow for analyses ‘to make new connections and assemblages’, to understand the capacities of embodiment to create ‘meaning in such a way that refuses the objectifying gaze and the control of the discourse’ (2003: 56).

These expansive notions of embodiment have provided tourism research with valuable opportunities to draw in more-than-rational notions of what constitutes tourism experiences. The notion of pleasure, for example, is something that cannot be made sense of merely through discursive analysis, instead it requires an attunement to embodied practices, feelings and dispositions. Indeed, the pleasures of tourism are rarely an intellectual or semiotic game, rather they are creative exercises of engaging with material and changing environments. There are many echoes of more-than-representational thinking in Tourist Studies. One of the most prominent examples is the work of Prince (2018) on bodily movements and mundane practices of the craft-artists in Bornholm, Denmark, which draws on Lorimer’s (2005) ‘more-than-representational’ analysis of the everyday ‘taskscape’. Prince’s work shows the extent that the tourist landscape is the product of embodied skills and techniques rather than simply arising out of the spectacular eye. However, and following Lorimer (2005: 89), Prince looks at the ‘fleshiness and pliability of bodies’ as a way to unsettle and extend the scope of the tourist subject rather than as something completely opposed to representation. Tourist Studies has helped forward an agenda of more-than-representational theory that (re)configures life as ‘a series of infinite “ands” which add to the world rather than extract stable representations from it’ (Cadman, 2009: 456). Nevertheless, there remains the challenge as to how the unconscious and non-discursive can contribute to ‘a dominant disciplinary paradigm of power exercised for political resistance and progressive emancipation’ (Lorimer, 2005: 90). While ‘more-than-representational’ analysis should continue to unsettle discursive realms that fix notions of power, these analyses also need to recognise the discursive domains that shape affective experiences.

There is therefore a danger that exists when developing insights into sensual and affective bodies of losing a political dimension of tourism. As Cohen and Cohen (2019) explain, the study of sensory experiences of tourists is dominated by psychological approaches, particularly in marketing and branding and rarely examine the link between embodiment and capitalism within the context of tourism. Exceptions to this within Tourist Studies includes Minca’s (2009) reflection on the relationships between work, bodies and space in bio-political terms and the life, emotional and performative encounters between host and guest. Modlin et al. (2011) use affect to politicise the storytelling narratives at plantation house museums in the USA, where slavery is misrepresented or even ignored while planter-class families are foregrounded and represented with emotionally evocative accounts by tour guides. This is a process they refer to as affective inequality. More broadly within tourism research, the work of Mostafanezhad (2013, 2014) and Crossley (2012) has paved the way for developing connections between affect and broader structures of power in volunteer tourism in theorising the links between the moral economies of neoliberalism and geographies of compassion and empathy. This work reminds us that tourism mobilities are deeply unequal, with tourism embedded within broader practices of colonial development and neoliberalising forces. Debates around the affective realms of tourism spaces must acknowledge the broader politics these encounters are embedded within. A 2015 special issue in Tourist Studies on volunteer tourism brings some of these issues and tensions between broader structural power dynamics, and the micro world of embodied encounters to the fore. In the introduction to the special issue, Sin et al. (2015: 124) ask ‘[h]ow do we critique development or neoliberalism while not being dismissive of meaningful or affective experience? How do we link the personal and the social?’ Griffiths (2015: 206) brings some important insights to these issues by arguing that affective experiences do not always ‘defer to forms of power but may actually emerge from the “dynamism” of the body and its capacity to affect and be affected’. Even when volunteer tourists lack critical perspectives on development, neo-colonialism and neoliberalism, the intensities that are experienced on the ground, within encounters cannot ‘so readily ascribe to constellations of power’ (2015: 216). Indeed, the capacity to affect and be affected can work to reinforce as well as disrupt some of formations of power in volunteer tourism. However, attention to affect can give researchers insights into possibilities for decolonising these encounters (Everingham and Motta, 2020), broadening the scope of what is deemed ‘political’. In exploring the connections between the structural and discursive relationships to affect, theorists should take seriously the ambivalences that arise from bodily disruptions and consider both the affective closures (that are shaped by broader structures of power) and affective openings (which contain possibilities to exceed and/ or be autonomous from them) (Everingham and Motta, 2020). Work by Everingham and Motta (2020: 3) utilises decolonial theorisations to pave a way forward in thinking about affect in in ways that are ‘more ambivalent than any singular, monological (ethnocentric) logic can capture’. We hope to see these debates continue between tourism scholars, and within this journal Tourist Studies over the coming decade.

The more-than-representational realms of affect, then, can draw attention to transformative possibilities for subverting broader structural power dynamics within tourism encounters. An article by Bawaka Country et al. (2017) brings the affective dimensions of human and more-than-human agencies to the fore, describing the inter-relationalities between Bawaka Country and humans in an Indigenous led tourism venture in North East Arnhem land Australia. Here, opportunities exist for tourists to experience a different way of being in the context of a colonial settler state; to ‘co-become with country’ becoming ‘part of its ongoing co-constitution’. Emotions and sensory experiences therefore ‘actively shape and enable transformative learning for tourists’ (2017: 446). Here, the more-than-representational includes agencies of more-than-humans and Indigenous ontologies. In terms of using this lens to understand how tourism can enable transformative experiences, this analysis captures how more-than-human agencies can ‘unsettle pre-conceived understandings of other people and other places, producing potentially transformative feelings of uneasiness, awe and wonder and/or opening moral and ethical dilemmas’ (2017: 445).

Also taking a non-western lens to embodiment, Zhang et al. (2019: 63) explore how collective memory and emotion ‘play an important role in the maintenance of modern life’, particularly when negotiating ‘strangeness and otherness’. Their study focuses on Chinese tourists in Japan to ‘investigate how the collective memory of Japan has shaped the Chinese Cohort 60’s emotions and views of Japan, which subsequently influenced their travel decision-making in regard to Japan’ (2019: 81). Focusing on the personal and the embodied, important insights are gained between how theorists understand ‘memory, emotion and time’ and the ways in which the Chinese negotiate with the ‘outside word’ (including ideological friends and opponents, trade partners and competitors and former war enemies). Exploring the subjectivities of Chinese outbound tourists offers tourism studies a non-Eurocentric lens to explore ‘everyday geopolitical encounters between hosts and guests’ (Mostafanezhad, 2018: 343), considerations of national and ethnic identities (Ooi, 2005) and contested urban landscapes related to insider/outsider identities (Chang, 2000). Attention to the mediated historical geographies of race and geo-economic relations brings much needed insights into the political geographies of tourism (Mostefanezhad et al., 2020). We hope to see more of these insights in Tourist Studies over the coming decades. Attention to embodiment in tourism in a time of broader geo-political shifting will be crucial, particularly in relation to ensuring equity and inclusion of various bodies.

Moving forward

20 years on from the inaugural issue of Tourist Studies, we have sought here to remind readers of what theorising embodiment can bring to understanding encounters in tourism spaces, and specifically how attention to embodiment moves analysis away from fixed and static notions of culture and power, towards dynamic interplays between bodies and more-than-human modalities. Tourist Studies has thus been key both in framing embodiment as multisensorial, and in expanding notions of embodiment towards the inter-relationalities of embodiment between human and non-human. These theoretical insights have helped expand analysis beyond ‘bounded’ notions of embodiment, as well as incorporating the non-human into affective entanglements. Moreover, Tourist Studies has not only incorporated the relationalities of how sights, smells and sensations are central to the ‘tourism experience’, but the journal has shown how non-representational theories and the realms of the more-than-representational can be utilised to address gaps in human experiences that cannot solely be explained through discursive representation. In other words, being attentive to these affective realms creates the possibilities for transformative tourism encounters and experiences that disrupt discursive understandings of power and agency.

About 20 years on from the inaugural issue of Tourist Studies, the situation of tourism is very different, with growing restrictions to international mobility and leisure, from Brexit to climate change. Indeed, the disruption to the normal functioning of tourism brought by the Covid-19 pandemic has been unprecedented. Consequently, Franklin and Crang’s view of tourism as ‘a significant modality through which transnational modern life is organised’ (2001: 6–7) is increasingly open to question. There is a danger that bodies are marginalised in the conceptual departures of the next 20 years as we pay increasing attention to the structural problems and limitations of tourism. Future research in tourism should address the changing nature of tourism without losing sight of an expanded, affectual, multi-sensual body. However, the conceptual trajectories of embodiment of the next 20 years will have to draw on different, probably more biopolitical, articulations of embodiment that recognises the materiality of the world as tourism encounters will take place in a fast changing and increasingly precarious environment, in the context of shifting geo-politics and global hegemons. While some bodies are already confined and contained by borders within the unequal geographies of tourism mobilities, we may see further curtailment and more limited sensual logics. The relational and multi-sensorial analyses of embodiment that has been published in Tourist Studies so far, provides an inspiring base to explore the interplay of tourist bodies with such a fast-changing world.