Academic literature on the topic 'The Romantic Tourist Gaze'

This article discusses the historical development of nature-based tourism in Iceland, in the light of the concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ and the romantic wilderness ideology, which has put a deep mark on modern views on nature and created a widespread demand for coming into touch with wild nature up to such an extent that a thriving sector of today’s tourist industry is built on it. Questions explored are what views on nature have shaped this story and what image of Icelandic nature has been highlighted in its marketing as a tourist attraction. Finally, the harsh conflict that has occurred between the different values of nature preservation and energy production is addressed and how nature-based tourism does, in the light of its values and interests, support the battle for the protection of natural landscape and wild ecosystems.

This article illustrates the self-presentations young people foreground when they visually communicate international volunteer experiences to social media audiences. Through a “categorical-content” analysis of repeated semi-structured interviews and photographic content posted to Facebook, and with theoretical support from Urry’s “tourist gaze” and Goffman’s “presentation of self,” I describe three impressions “given” and “given off” within participants’ profiles. The findings reveal some familiar touristic scenes (necessitating tribute to the well-established “family” and “romantic” gazes) and also inspire a new gazing form (incorporating “gutsy” bodily experiences). However, these holiday-like portrayals were selectively disclosed and complicated by the sentiments participants expressed during face-to-face interviews. As different self-presentations were idealized in different settings, this article helps to elucidate the situational role of the audience and offers unique analytical insights that may not have emerged had I utilized one method in isolation. Its contribution is located within its intersections: blending gazing and performing frameworks, employing verbal and visual approaches, leading to etic and emic understandings.

Railways have contributed to the complex mosaic of Cornish identity in three ways. First, as a holiday destination promoted from late Victorian times until the Second World War by companies such as the Great Western Railway, London and South Western Railway and Southern. Initially marketing its mild climate and health benefits as an alternative to holidaying abroad evolved, from the 1920s, into an enduring tourist gaze of romantic landscapes, myth and legend. Second, structural changes in the Cornish economy in association with a decline in metal mining precipitated large-scale emigration which continued until the start of the First World War. Railways represented the initial phase of the emigrant journey and the volume of migration was such that their role has become part of a cultural text signifying both loss and opportunity. Lastly, their physical presence and contribution to the landscape adds a further layer of social and cultural significance to Cornish identity.

This article explores the Orientalist dynamics of North/South sexual tourism in Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud/Heading South (2005). The narrative of the film is structured around the self-interested motivations of three white middle-aged bourgeois Western women who travel from North America to Haiti in the late 1970s in order to explore their sexuality in what they perceive as an island paradise, effectively exiling themselves from the codified social behavior expected of them in their homeland. The women avail themselves of the pleasures offered by young black Haitian men, often in exchange for money or goods, and fuel one-sided fantasies of romantic love with their local hosts, seemingly oblivious to the Orientalist nature of such an imbalance of social and economic power. The article explores the historical context of the political repression and violence of late-1970s Haiti under the Duvalier regime, as well as the manifestations of spatial politics represented in the film. In its Haitian setting, Vers le sud sheds light on a relatively unfamiliar cultural and social milieu for the Western/Northern audience, with the director keenly aware of the exoticism of the subject matter and the impossibility of the film to maintain its neutrality in a problematic engagement with the Orient/South. The article argues that the privileged position of the film’s protagonists is matched not only by Cantet’s directorial gaze, but also by the intellectual detachment of postcolonial scholars such as the article’s authors, who acknowledge that their engagement with the subject matter risks re-enacting the Orientalist dynamics they seek to expose.