Gendered meeting grounds: the tourist dates

The conference is mainly directed at researchers active in Portugal whose work deals with issues of tourism and gender, and aims to generate an initial dialogue on these matters, exploring further possibilities for exchange and collaboration. It will be structured in short 15 minutes presentations (in Portuguese or English) followed by debate.

Send a short abstract (approximately 500 characters) by the 10th of November.

Presentation

In the worlds of travel and tourism, a wide range of relationships take place, which bring into contact people from across the world. Commerce, hospitality, friendship, love, sex, and charity are among the relational idioms that inform the encounters between those who travel and the people they meet during their journey. Each of these relational idioms has its own grammar of expectations and dispositions as to how the people who engage in them should behave. A key dimension of these expectations and dispositions relates to the gender of the people involved, and brings into play different assumptions on how gendered beings ought to engage with one another. Addressing this issue from another angle, we may also argue that once gender is conceived as relationally enacted, different relational idioms may inform its concrete manifestation.

Building on these premises, and blinking an eye to MacCannels’ Empty Meeting Grounds, this conference wishes to focus on the multiple articulations between gender and the relational idioms of travel and tourism. Rather than restricting the focus to one type of relationship, the conferences aims to bring together contributions on a range of relational idioms, acknowledging that the boundaries between them remain often ambiguous and contested. The connections between these different idioms, and the role gender plays in the possible transitions from one to the other, informing the mechanisms of their divergence/convergence, overlapping/separation, is another issue that deserves closer investigation.

Abstracts

Among the possible questions of interest, participants may want to consider the following ones:

How are gender and relational idioms articulated through travel and tourism?

When and how are these articulations made explicit (or not) and what are the implications of these processes of explicitation/invisibilization?

How does gender matter in the various types of relationships that people establish in travel and tourism? In which types of relationships does gender matter most/less? What is the interest, if any, of considering and comparing the articulations of gender across different relational idioms?

What kind of expectations, dispositions, and normative assumptions do the articulations of gender and relational idioms bring about, and how are they renegotiated through travel and tourism encounters?

How do institutionalized discourses and imaginaries shape articulations of gender and relational idioms in concrete moments of interaction, and how are they transformed by them?

How do the articulations of gender and relational idioms in travel and tourism differ, I ever, from those that take shape in other realms of people’s lives? How can we say, for instance, that travel and tourism reproduce / amplify / subvert these other articulations?

The conference welcomes papers that address these and other related questions through ethnographic cases, and that contribute more widely to anthropological debates on the matter.

Please send (500 characters; language: Portuguese and or English) abstracts to conference convenors Valerio Simoni  vals_sim@yahoo.com and Maria Cardeira da Silva m.cardeira@fcsh.unl until the 10th november.