New heights in climbing and tourism: Jordan's Wadi Rum

Abstract

Climbing tourists, seeking out evermore exciting locations in which to practise their sporting and touristic 'envelope-pushing', provide an excellent example for analysis of how foreign places and peoples are enmeshed in individual narratives of othering and 'selfing' predicated in no small part on individualised and marketised (mis)conceptions of embodied risk, heavily gendered forms of 'extremeness' and ethnic difference. Based on observer-as-participant fieldwork carried out in Wadi Rum, and analyses of marketing publications aimed specifically at rock-climbing tourists, this article explores how this particular landscape is masculinised to appeal to the 'hard' [Robinson, V. (2008). Everyday masculinities and extreme sport: Male identity and rock climbing. Oxford: Berg] Western climber, who is invited to experience Rum as hard or extreme play; as a performance of leisure that is unpredictable and unusually dangerous and risky for several reasons. Wadi Rum's 'soaring sandstone towers', inhospitable desert environment and Bedouin inhabitants feature heavily in holiday advertisements; the Bedouin people are valorised for both their 'inherent primitiveness' and capacity to adapt to, and ultimately conquer, their land's inhospitable summits. It is under these terms that adventure tourist 'spaces' become racialised, gendered and often classed and sexualised through various intersecting discourses.

A systematic literature review of risk and gender research in tourism

“…In particular, female tourists perceived greater physical risks, including violence, personal safety, and sexual harassment or assault. In the area of adventure tourism, a few studies described how risk taking is a gendered undertaking with a masculine origin (Bott, 2013;Elsrud, 2001). Many studies underlined that gender was not the only factor determining tourist risk perception; other factors such as travel group composition, tourist role, cultural background, and past experience ought to be taken into account (Carr, 2001;Chiu & Lin, 2011;Lepp & Gibson, 2003).…”

‘You can never cross the same river twice’: Climbers’ embodied quests for ‘original adventure’ in southern Thailand

“…The principal and overarching draw of Ton Sai for the participants in this study is the perceived potential for adventure that it presents. The links between adventure and rock climbing might seem obvious, but, as I have argued elsewhere, modernity and the rationalisation and popularisation of the sport and its locations can pose threats to individual climbers’ notions of adventure (Bott, 2013). Lewis (2000) discusses the affirmation of human embodied agency brought about by climbing, distinguishing the climbing body from the metropolitan body and arguing that the former reaches a state of freedom through, in part, its flirtations with death and danger.…”

“…Indeed, the notion of ‘adventure’ is of increasing prominence on tourists’ agendas, as the frontiers of tourism are being pushed back and growing numbers of tourists seek new ways to differentiate their experiences and therefore themselves from the ‘masses’. Furthermore, the ways in which ‘adventurous’ landscapes are being commodified and promoted in tourism contexts to feed a range of adventure tourism markets are being explored (Beedie, 2003; Bott, 2013; Varley, 2006).…”