judith “jack” halberstam on drag, gender and fashionable stupidity ...

WHEN PEOPLE AND PLACES ARE TRENDS
By Mitra Ebadolahi
I
nternational tourism is one of the
world’s largest industries. Tourism
presently accounts for an estimated 11
percent of total global gross domestic
product, according to the International
Institute for Environment and Development.
The scale, pace and intensity of international
tourism development over the last 60 years
have been unparalleled — and have wreaked
havoc on many tourism destinations,
particularly those in developing countries.
While the World Tourism Organization
acknowledges that a mere 3.5 percent of the
planet’s population has the financial means
and free time necessary to travel abroad,
today’s tourists are no longer confined to
megaplex resorts on gentrified enclave
beaches. International tourism is increasingly
susceptible to fluctuating trends, as new
tourism types and destinations become
fashionable among the globe-trotting elite.
International tourism boomed in the
post-World War II era, when commercial
airplanes extended the “pleasure periphery”
into new, uncharted destinations. The
Second World War had militarized the entire
world, scattering a plethora of bases and
airfields throughout relatively remote
locations — particularly small island states.
As tourism scholars Louis Turner and John
Ash explain, tourists could suddenly visit a
wide range of destinations that had been
previously inaccessible. Post-war affluence in
industrialized nations also meant that larger
numbers of travelers could take a holiday
each year.
In the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. tourists
began to venture beyond Mexico and the
Caribbean to Western European and
Mediterranean destinations, while Europeans
began to visit the Bahamas and the United
States, including Hawaii. Australian and
Japanese travelers fanned out across
Southeast Asia, India and the Middle East.
The sudden expansion of international
tourism not only reflected political and
socio-economic changes in touristgenerating
countries, but also caused a great
deal of change in destination nations. The
rhetoric of “development” and “modernization”
spread to developing countries around the
world, which suddenly faced the daunting
task of rapidly industrializing through
tourism and other enterprises to “catch up”
with the developed nations of the so-called
First World.
In those early decades, mass tourism —
characterized by large-scale resort complexes
centered on “sun, sand, sea and sex” — was
the most common form of international
travel. But by the early 1970s, choosy
travelers began to seek more “authentic”
travel experiences, away from the hordes of
their photo-snapping peers. Writing in 1976,
sociologist Dean MacCannell explained that
residents of “modern” (industrialized)
LOUDmouth 25
societies suffered from acute alienation and
traveled to “pre-modern” places in search of
the meaningful, real-life experiences they
had been denied in their home societies.
Consequently, while various types of mass
tourism persisted (including package tours
and cruises), new forms of tourism also
emerged or gained popularity, such as
rainforest-based “cannibal tours” and desert
safaris.
In the 1980s, new trends in
globalization and a shift away from massproduced
and -consumed products heralded
an era of “new tourisms.” Massive political
changes swept the globe, reconfiguring the
list of tourism “hot spots.” China welcomed
foreign visitors for the first time in the
1980s, while the collapse of the Berlin Wall
and the end of the Cold War opened up
Berlin, Prague, Moscow, Havana and Ho Chi
Minh City to international travelers in the
early 1990s.
Meanwhile, as Martin Mowforth and
Ian Munt point out, the end of the Cold War
made way for a new cause célèbre for the
international community: the global
environment and “sustainable development”
initiatives. In response to new environmental
discourses, trend-conscious tourists
scrambled to experience “ecotourism” from
the late 1980s on. Unlike mass, resort-based
tourism, ecotourism ostensibly encouraged a
respect for the environment and deeper
consciousness about how tourism affected
destination locales. However, sudden influxes
of large numbers of trekkers and other
ecotourists led to erosion and pollution in
some of the world’s most fragile
environments, from Patagonia to Tibet to the
Antarctic.
Since the mid-1980s, trendy “new
tourisms” have also provided middle-class
Western consumers with an opportunity to
increase their social and cultural capital.
Unlike “old tourists,” new tourists represent
themselves as more adventurous, open-minded
and culturally sensitive than their arrogant,
resort-based, sun-oriented predecessors. Yet
new tourists, like old tourists, seek new
places and cultures to consume, search for
“authentic” experiences and retain a level of
wealth matched by few people on the planet.
Now more than ever, international tourism is
viewed as an opportunity to amass social
capital and exemplify marketable personal
qualities like adaptability and
resourcefulness.
Forms of travel that emphasize
individualism and “worldliness” have become
increasingly popular in recent years. Claiming
to be travelers rather than tourists, “new
tourists” visit “dangerous” developing
countries and regions ravaged by political
violence and poverty in order to establish
certain reputations and distance themselves
from other tourists. These trends have led to
on international tourism
a surge in popularity for certain destinations,
including El Salvador, South Africa and India.
S. McClarence illuminates the attitude of one
such “new tourist,” a 28-year-old New York
businessman who traveled to Calcutta to find
real, “swollen-bellied poverty” in the city’s
slums. Snapping photos of the destitute is,
for some travelers, a very fashionable thing
to do.
Even when international tourists do
not explicitly “zooify” local residents, they
often objectify and commodify them. More
often than not, the victims of such tourist
commodification are local women, particularly
women who live in popular sex-tourism
destinations. Sex tourism remains a major
sub-sector of the international tourism
industry and has recently become entrenched
in countries like Cuba, Thailand and Russia.
As cash-crop economies have crumbled due
to international price wars, driving agricultural
producers to bankruptcy, poor rural women in
developing countries have come to
constitute the majority of the workforce in
the free-trade zones legalized by political
globalization. Those women who do not have
access to low-paid maquiladora-style jobs are
typically forced to eke out a meager
existence on the fringes of society, surviving
on sporadic informal sector work, including
sex work. Sex tourism is not always
denounced by international tourism
companies. Than Dam Truong explains: “For
the international tourism conglomerates, the
availability of sexual services as an exotic
commodity functions as a source of tourist
attraction and helps to fill airplane seats and
hotel rooms.”
As a result of the gendered division
of labor, the tourism industry has provided
women in developing countries with otherwise
scarce jobs. Yet the international tourism
industry’s susceptibility to travel trends has
led to boom-and-bust cycles of tourist
activity, which have dire consequences for
developing economies and impoverished
tourism employees, particularly women.
International tourism embodies an
uneven distribution of wealth and power,
which is often overlooked in pop-culture
representations of this important and
complex industry. Travel trends continue to
fluctuate constantly; in the last five years,
international tourism has been shaped by
health scares about SARS and HIV/AIDS and
new outbreaks of political violence and war
in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. What
this means for residents in tourist destinations
remains to be seen.
In 2002, Mitra conducted field research on tourism
in Havana, Cuba. Last year she completed an M.Sc.
in Politics of the World Economy on a Fulbright
Scholarship at the London School of Economics.
Please send comments and requests for related
reading lists to mightymousemitra@yahoo.com.