Tourist Studies

This article seeks to advance the understanding of the role of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness as an important, if under-researched, element of tourism. In so doing, we work at the intersection of three bodies of writing focused on mundane mobilities; performativities of tourism and geographies of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. Drawing on empirical research undertaken in Australia, we highlight how alcohol, drinking and drunkenness are key to backpacking holidays: first, to help soften a number of (un)comfortable embodied and emotional materialities associated with budget travel; second, as an aid to spatial and temporal imperatives of ‘passing the time’ and ‘being able to do nothing’ and finally, to heighten senses of belonging with fellow travellers and ‘locals’. Crucial is participation in specific experiential practices and performativities that are fundamental to practices of ‘doing place’. Alcohol, drinking and drunkenness are key to unpacking backpacking and offer potentially fruitful research avenues for broader theoretical and empirical debates in tourist studies.

This article aims to interrogate the framing of New York’s Ground Zero as a ‘dark tourist’ destination, with particular reference to the entanglement of notions of kitsch in academic discussions of the events of 11 September 2001. What makes Ground Zero contentious, even scandalous, for many scholars is the presence of a conspicuous commodity culture around the site in the form of tourist souvenirs, leading to accusations of kitschification of memory and the constitution of visitors as ‘tourists of history’. Drawing upon theoretical ideas of Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour and W. J. T. Mitchell around image politics, the alignment of kitsch with the figure of the tourist will be questioned, along with the conviction that the so-called teddy-bearification of 9/11 threatens the formation of dangerous political subjectivities. In attempting to rid the debates of their default settings, and reliance on essentialist notions of kitsch, it is hoped that that the way will be cleared for the sociological, ethnographic and empirical work necessary to consider the cultural and political significance of the Ground Zero souvenir economy.

Unlike destination-based tourism, safari, by definition, implies perpetual mobility. This historically layered process of continuous movement across and through specific landscapes defines the safari as a unique travel experience. Taking travel as performative and processual, this study investigates the role of various technologies of travel in the emplacement, erasure, traversal, and categorization of place on safari; the creation of a topology of safari places and natures by and for visitors; and local Maasai challenges to much of this place- and nature-making. This results in an “imbrication” of place, of the local and the official, of the deep and the superficial, such that the placing of safari spaces comes to be seen as a deeply dialectical, multisensory process involving multiple actors.

The ability to experience distinctive adventure appears limited today in comparison to the accounts of past exploring heroes. Even with these perceived limitations, there is continued growth in remote adventure tours. Guided by a Bourdieusian lens, this article examines the negotiation of authenticity, distinction and identity in the websites and blogs of companies and tourists during the 2010 spring Mt Everest climbing season. The interpretation suggests company blogs offer tourists an experience framed in mountaineering myth. The mountaineering guides’ capital derived from skill, experience and decision making ability make this experience possible. The tourists’ blogs offer authentically, recognisable environments, practices, and emotions disguising their limited mountaineering abilities. Tourist’s existential stories seek to transcend and appropriate mountaineering capital. For the females in this study, tour experience has supported careers based on mountaineering adventurer social identities. The companies’ tourism products facilitate the professional adventure tourist’s role model claims to ‘authentic’ adventurer identities.

This article attempts to engage and advance tourism’s epistemological and methodological discussions. It explores how the transformative paradigm offers an opportunity to feminist tourism researchers to broaden their methods base and obtain nuanced understandings of systematic and localised oppression without compromising research principles, such as positionality and reflexivity. To illustrate the value of this approach, we combine a qualitative study of midlife (35–55 years) single women’s holiday experiences with a follow-up quantitative study of young (18–30 years) single women’s experiences. We argue that merging these studies creates new understandings of intersecting power relations related to gender, age and singlehood and that in a broader sense working within the transformative paradigm has the potential to promote paradigm peace in feminist tourism research.

This article explores the performances and narratives of nature-based tourists, more specifically of trampers, on Stewart Island, a remote tourism destination located in the southern waters of Aotearoa/New Zealand. It does so by reflecting on the concepts of commodification and of spectacle and how these may influence the experiences of tourists on the wild landscapes of Stewart Island. The study used an interpretive and embedded methodology, where the author was able to engage with the experiences of Others while tramping for extended periods of time on the island. This article concludes that the trampers’ experience of nature on Stewart Island is modulated by a media-constructed and media-sold tourism concept that fits well in a cultural and physical landscape that is able to provide an experience associated with a produced ‘nature’. Nature is therefore constructed to allow for an experience that is designed prior to the actual performance.

‘Have Magic, Will Travel’: Tourism and Harry Potter’s United (Magical) Kingdom by Christina Lee, Tourist Studies Volume: 12 Issue: 1 - April 2012: 52–69, doi: 10.1177/1468797612438438