Gazes and Performances

Abstract: Recent literature has critiqued this notion of the 'tourist gaze' for reducing tourism to visual experiences 'sightseeing' and neglecting other senses and bodily experiences of doing tourism. A so-called 'performance turn' within tourist studies highlights how tourists experience places in more multi-sensuous ways, touching, tasting, smelling, hearing and so on, as well as the materiality of objects and not just objects as signs. With inspiration from Goffman's dramaturgical sociology and Nigel Thrift's non-representational theory, the performance turn employs performative metaphors to onceptualise the corporeality of tourist bodies and the embodied actions of and interactions between tourist workers, tourists and 'locals' on various stages. It has been suggested that it is necessary to choose between gazing and performing as the tourism paradigm (Perkin and Thorns 2001). Rather than defending the tourist gaze against this new performance turn, I rethink the concept of the tourist gaze as a performative and embodied practice and interaction by highlighting how each gaze depends on practices, interactions and material relations, as much as on discourses and signs. Through various ethnographic studies I spell out the embodied, hybridised, mobile and performative nature of tourist gazing especially with regard to tourist photography. The talk draws on my recent book Tourism, Performance and the Everyday: Consuming the Orient (Routledge, 2009, With M. Haldrup) and the substantially revised and expanded Tourist Gaze 3.0 that I am writing with John Urry at the moment.