In a transnational tourist town in black Caribbean Costa Rica situated both on the margins of “white” Costa Rican society and squarely in global tourism, the mobility of European and North American women tourists in and out constitute a significant tourist flow. Central to the town's social sexual history and modes of sociability are economically ambiguous sexual and often intimate relations between female tourists and local predominantly black Caribbean men. I use the concept of “fluid exchanges” to comprehend the fluidity and corporeality of these relationships in which, I argue, intimacy plays a significant role. Local men, who are situated outside of hegemonic masculinity, use sexual knowledge and masculine privilege to “give” intimacy freely as well as to bargain for payment and acquire cosmopolitan identities, and to regulate the unfettered mobility of First World women tourists within a disparate global sex market and era where new erotic subjectivities and transnational intimate relations are being forged in hybrid and fluid places like Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica.
It is a taken-for-granted assumption by the authors included in this special issue of Tourist Studies that ethnographic research with tourists, while initially seeming tricky, is imperative if we want to meaningfully expand our understanding of the tourist experience. But how can such an amorphous group be studied ethnographically? Tourists number in the millions; never all gather in one place; generally do not stay anywhere for extended periods; have varied national identities, socioeconomic class positions, ages, genders, sexualities, racial and ethnic identifications, professions and work lives. Additionally each has a unique personal history, and a life outside of the time they spend as a tourist. No matter how they define themselves, or understand their own motivations for travel, or how they might be categorized by others-traveler, tourist, wanderer, cottager, adventurer, eco-or cultural, romance/sex tourist, student or even 'not-atourist'; or how their travels might be described-long haul, cruise, independent, guided, episodic, seasonal, frivolous, rest and relaxation, they are a complex, dispersed and highly mobile population. How does one do ethnographic research with a group that lacks any 'habitus of collectivity' (Amit, 2000: 14)? The authors included here demonstrate that it can very successfully be done, and in that process offer a productive opportunity for critical reflection on the theoretical, ethical and pragmatic underpinnings of how we do ethnography. Gaining access One of the key problems facing those choosing to pursue ethnographic research with tourists is how to access them. Put another way, the problem is how to situate ourselves strategically and unobtrusively in a 'contact zone' where meaningful tourist studies
En anthropologie du tourisme, les termes « touriste » et « local » sont souvent utilisés pour conceptualiser les relations sociales du tourisme international, où les sujets mobiles des « pays industrialisés » rendent visite aux « autres » du « tiers monde », non mobiles. La mondialisation, à la fois comme discours et comme condition, est en train de changer les contours et les conceptualisations des espaces touristiques. Dans cet article, l'auteure montre comment différents sujets négocient le « mondial » et comment les alpinistes récréationnels du Népal négocient leurs identités en tant que « locaux » aussi bien que sujets mondiaux, mobiles et voyageurs dans le cadre du « paysage récréationnel mondial » de l'himalayisme. Elle suggère que la question de savoir qui peut être un touriste dans un monde en voie de mondialisation devrait être examinée de très près.
This article draws upon ethnographic fieldwork carried out at mountain film festivals in three Canadian cities to show how women viewers reacted to and talked about the predominantly masculine narratives and active male subjects that they were bombarded with in the mediated hype of the festival. The women viewers’ interpretations of the films complicated the ‘alleged neutrality’ of men's bodies by drawing attention to nuanced constructions of the unmarked male adventure subject, such as world explorer, elite athlete and extreme adventurer. At the same time, the women's narratives demonstrate that ‘playful, white masculinity’ is repeatedly represented in these media spaces, which effectively displaces women and non-white men to the periphery of the adventure imaginary. Positioned as consuming subjects, female viewers do not blithely accept these images but as white, educated, middle-class western women both distance themselves from and place themselves within these imaginaries, and engage with ambivalent re-articulations of adventure.
This special issue brings reproduction into a critical mobilities framework. We extend scholarship in cross-border reproductive care and medical mobilities into new theoretical and empirical directions. Reproductive mobilities articulates the mutual constitution of reproduction and mobilities. Human (and nonhuman) movement not only shapes reproduction but produces reproductive imaginaries, desires, futures, trajectories, as well as the subjectivities and 'becoming-ness' of diverse reproductive subjects. Through the lens of reproduction, we examine how contemporary mobilities-and immobilities-intersect with gendered, racialized, sexually expressive, nation-inscribed, fertile, infertile, young, aging, pregnant, surrogate, and/or otherwise non/reproductive bodies and persons. Can human reproduction be analyzed without noticing all things mobile and immobile that converge to construct reproductive (and non-reproductive) desires and practices? Can mobility and immobility be considered without thought to how worlds and worlding comes about? Mobility facilitates reproduction, and new possibilities for reproduction; reproduction is mobile at scales from the molecular to the transnational. This effort to bring the fields of reproduction and mobilities into dialogue does not introduce a new subfield but rather creates the opening for a trajectory of empirical work and theoretical ideas that invigorates mobilities with newfound attention on the matter and becoming-ness of reproduction.
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