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The Metropolitan Gaze:Travellers, Bodies and Spaces

1. A newspaper advertisement for Garuda Airlines presents the scopophilic pleasures of aholiday in Indonesia as a parody of the Balinese paintings sold in tourist resorts. Theillustration presents every possible variation on the tourist gaze. The naked eye issupplemented by spectacles, binoculars, telescopes, cameras, video cameras, and scubadiving goggles focused on natural and cultivated landscapes, wild and domesticatedanimals, exotic temples, and local people working, performing rituals or even dancingnaked. Tourists scale mountains or survey the whole scene from a helicopter (See Figure1).[1]

2. A magazine advertisement for Lauda Air displays a naked woman, lying back on exoticsilk drapery, eyes closed. Her dark, glossy skin merges with the drapery, suggesting anaffinity between the woman's body and the silken commodity (Figure 2). The caption, 'Flyyour dreams', is a more explicit version of the suggestiveness of the old 'Singapore Girl'advertisements.[2]
3. Another advertising image gives verbal and visual expression to the equation of travelwith sexuality: 'travel=desire' proclaims a postcard advertising a Lonely Planet TravelGuide, the words leading our eyes to the image of a reclining muscular male torsooverlaid with the texture of the scenery of a tourist destination.[3]

4. The producers of tourist industry advertising are thus conscious of the intimateconnections between travel, scopophilia and sexual desire, but how would theories oftourism and sexuality look if we combined the advertising copywriter's knowledge ofscopophilic desire with the social theorist's interest in the construction of class, gender,sexuality, 'race' and ethnicity?[4] Theorists of tourism have, until recently, been muchmore coy than the copywriters about these matters. Here, for example is Urry's earlyformulation of the tourist gaze:

5. Urry's tokenistic use of the phrase 'he or she' reveals that at this stage he had not fullytheorised the possessor of the tourist gaze. More recent discussions of tourism have triedto tease out the sexed, gendered, classed and ethnicised dimensions of this gaze, and toexpose the often implicitly masculine possessor of this gaze. A better understanding ofthe relationship between the tourist gaze and the masculine gaze is formulated by Urryand Rojek in a later work, when they state that:
While this formulation captures the gendered dimensions of the tourist gaze, it leaves theproduction of ethnicised and racialised identities through the tourist gaze untheorised.#p#分頁標題#e#
 

6. Others have tried to bring the body itself into discussions of tourism and travel.[7] Indeed,Eeva Jokinen and Soile Veijola invert conventional theorisations of the disembodied,disengaged, displaced traveller by placing the 'sextourist', the 'prostitute' and the'babysitter' at the centre of their analysis, rather than the voyeuristic figure of the flaneur,so beloved of recent social theorists.[8] By placing these figures at the centre of theiranalysis, Jokinen and Veijola help us theorise two aspects of the travel experience: thatthe focus on the tourist gaze has obscured the discussion of the embodied politics oftravel and sexuality; http://www.ttc-switch.com/Assignment_Writing/ and that spatial displacement may be an integral part of theproduction of desire. I would like to take their analysis in a specific direction, by focusingmore closely on the production of touristic desires in the Asia-Pacific region, focusing onthe gendered, classed, racialised and ethnicised dimensions of the tourist gaze in theAsia-Pacific region, and by considering the embodied spatial practices of tourism.

7. It has been argued that tourist destinations, particularly in Southeast Asia, areconstructed as 'illicit spaces'[9] quite analogous to the nineteenth century projections ofthe 'Orient'. At the tourist destination, in other words, illicit desires may be enacted, at asafe distance from everyday life. Such spatial displacement is a convention of a range ofcultural products, including novels, films, advertisements, and journalistic representationsof places like Manila and Bangkok. Articles about 'sex' and 'sin' are conventionallyaccompanied by photographs which reproduce the tropes of harem paintings: a profusionof undifferentiated female bodies, which exceed the frame of the photograph. Othertourist representations invite the viewer to enact the desire to cross a threshold, to open adoor, or to look beyond the veil (Figures 3a & 3b).[10]

8. What of the relationships between tourists and their hosts? Relationships are neversimply encounters between two individuals. Each individual brings a history shaped bythe dimensions of gender, class, 'race', ethnicity and sexuality in a field of political andeconomic inequalities. In tourist encounters, travellers may expect a range ofpersonalised, and often embodied, services: cooking, cleaning, serving of food anddrinks, childcare, driving, entertainment, provision of information about the local area.Some tourists also travel in the expectation of sexual encounters - in the form of casualrelationships, or in the form of payment for sexual services.

9. Sexuality, as expressed through romanticised encounters or through the use of theservices of prostitutes in tourist destinations, is not simply a matter of transactionsbetween individuals. Rather, the link between sexuality and travel analysis sensitive to the dynamics of classed, gendered and racialised relations, in thecontext of economic inequality between rich and poor countries. Even when the travellerdoes not literally exchange cash for sexual services, their ability to enjoy romanticrelationships in the tourist site is determined by their relatively privileged position as atraveller from a richer country and the relatively disadvantaged situation of the localpartner.necessitates an#p#分頁標題#e#