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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.
A PARADIGM SHIFT IN PROGRESSIVE POLITICS the world social forum By Sarah H. Cross and Alice do Valle W e are standing on the corner of Rua Fernando Machado and Avenida Borges. Two hundred thousand people are passing by. In the building across from us, we notice an older man in a third-floor window striking a saucepan with a wooden spoon, adding his own beat to the bright samba sounds from groups of musicians and enthusiastic chants from the crowd. A group of drummers stops in front of his window; they start playing and calling up to him, raising their hands in the air and laughing. It is a parade. It is a march of the most tremendous diversity and loud excitement we have ever seen. A group of indigenous men chant and shake rattles. Japanese youngsters wear Palestinian headscarves. A young woman walks by. Her Tshirt reads, “My bush would make a better president.” Avenida Borges is a main street in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It leads from the downtown center to a collection of warehouses along Guaiba Bay, where this incredible mass of people from all over the globe — 155,000 official registrants — have convened for the fifth annual World Social Forum. People are here from India, Uganda and Uzbekistan, Thailand, New Zealand, Brazil and Belgium — almost every country in the world. They are people who believe “Another World is Possible” and want to find solutions to our most pressing problems — poverty, hunger, violence, environmental destruction, sexism, homophobia, racism, corporate exploitation. For six days, thinkers and doers come together to connect and strategize. Their ideas and practices are communicated through workshops and panels, theater and installations, films, speeches and concerts. If you are a progressive or a radical, this is the place to be. The Forum symbolizes a global trend, indeed, a paradigm shift in progressive politics. All over the world, people are engaged in similar struggles. Water privatization is eliminating millions of people’s access to water, whether in India or Bolivia. At an afternoon panel, activists from Africa, Europe and Latin America emphasized the necessity of immediate debt relief. Countries everywhere in the Global South are obligated to pay their debt to international financial institutions and are thus, for example, unable to provide education or healthcare. The Forum is a new and important space to connect these struggles: Activists meet, educate each other and share resources and strategies. At the Forum, as we deepen our understanding of the new habits of global capital and its effects at the local level, we develop cutting-edge responses to fight those effects. We gain strength by witnessing the parallel struggles of others. Meeting other strong and dedicated women and men addressing injustice is an incredible lift and motivation. Perhaps most importantly, the alliances we create here are critical in order to transform the world we live in. We cannot do this in isolation. Despite people’s passion for building a more just world, the Forum still exists in the world we live in and contains all its contradictions. In and of itself, the Forum illustrates and reproduces the system and dynamics it is trying to change. At a panel titled “Feminism and the Anti-Globalization Movement,” there was agreement that oppressive international practices impact women disproportionately. There was also agreement that there are significant obstacles to women’s leadership and participation both within the anti-globalization movement itself and its most public spaces such as the World Social Forum and regional forums that take place each year. Panelists raised vital questions that apply to the Forum and other international organizing spaces: How can women make alliances with other sectors and movements without diluting the most subversive components of feminism? Even here, especially here, they warned, we must maintain a constant vigilance and continuous struggle against sexism. Their discussion about sexism reminds us to maintain a similar vigilance against interlocking forms of oppression. Still, despite the challenges, we must continue to make those alliances. The Forum provides a crucial space, the first of its kind in size and scope, for activists from intersecting movements to create shared values by consent, to strengthen the conversation about global interdependence and to articulate an agenda for global justice that responds to the unjust power structure with the urgency our current situation demands. We must now be global activists, both fueled by and adding to international solidarity. At its worst moments, the mood among progressives in the United States — after the election, after Iraq, after something in this morning’s headlines — can be somber and bewildered, and many of us can succumb to political disillusionment and apolitical irony. We are isolated and uncertain about how to respond to our domestic and global crises. This global trend is an alternative. It presents an opportunity to connect with the excitement and hopefulness fiercely manifested at the Forum. Here, passion and commitment are welcomed and reinforced. Here there are other leaders, creatives and visionaries who risk imagining a better world. The feminists at the panel reminded us that the fashion now, the trend to broaden, is not elaborating a utopian vision for the future — though we always imagine what attributes a just society might have — but practicing it passionately in the present. Sarah H. Cross is a U.S.-born writer and producer who documents the strategies and visions of activists and artists. Alice do Valle, a Brazilian living in California, directs the campaign work for Justice Now, a human-rights organization that works with women in prison. They both attended and presented at the 2005 World Social Forum. Find out more about the Forum and learn about how to attend future WSFs at www.forumsocialmundial.org.br. T-shirts spotted at the Forum: “Stop the War” “Jews for Peace” (Ubiquitous) Che Guevara images “Associación de las Madres de Plazo de Mayo” “Não ao capitalismo” (photo: young boy with slingshot) (front) “Pacifistas sin Fronteras” (back) “Déjeme en Paz, Não Ma Perturbe” [Pacifists Without Borders: Leave Me in Peace, Don’t Bother Me] “Lugar de Mulher é na Política” [A Woman’s Place Is in Politics] “Dalits will Make Another World Possible” “Emancipación Ya!” [Emancipation Now!] LOUDmouth 26
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Page 5 and 6: DRESS TO KILL FIGHT TO WINBy Dean S
Page 7 and 8: Joanna E. Gaspar, M.S., M.P.H. Ques
Page 9 and 10: Dear Gwen, Congratulations on your
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Page 15 and 16: ¿QUIEN LLEVA LOS PANTALONES T he d
Page 17 and 18: DRAG, GENDER & FASHIONABLE STUPIDIT
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Page 21 and 22: By Stephanie Abraham I. Oppression
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Page 31 and 32: DOMESTICV DOMESTIC IOLENCESE XUALAS

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