After reading the title and abstract of this article in Social and Cultural Geography, you have no more idea of what it is about than before:
Touring and obscuring: how sensual, embodied and haptic gay touristic practices construct the geopolitics of pinkwashing
Gay tourism is commonly studied through pride events in cities. Rethinking the role gay men’s bodies and politics play in the context of tourism to Israeli heritage sites, this paper contributes to debates on geopolitics and geographies of sexualities and the embodied approach to tourism. Analyzing daytrips through the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I argue that sensual, embodied and haptic practices, which are immanent to gay men’s travel cultures, play into a pinkwashing geopolitics in this specific circumstance. Thus, this paper conceptualizes pinkwashing mechanisms operation through heritage tourist sites just as much as they are produced via the presentation of Tel Aviv as a modern space of acceptance of LGBT sexualities, albeit obviously in different ways. Moreover, tourists’ notions of place and non-place construct how (urban) space is produced as meaningful while other (heritage) space is marginalized. Methodologically, I present a reflexive embodied ethnography, which relies on my researcher’s reflexivity to produce an analysis through a story.
In this article, I have shown that looking closely at the negotiation of Israel/Palestinian politics in juxtaposition with gay men tourist bodies outside Tel Aviv’s urban space reveals the centrality of the body in gay tourist culture. Gay tourism literature has tended to limit the centrality of sensations and bodies to urban settings or to gay tourist sites. Obviously, bodies play a major role in gay tourism, within which identities and subjectivities are produced (Waitt & Markwell, 2006). The present analysis, however, questions the sharp distinction between ‘gay’ and ‘non-gay’ tourism spaces and shows that gay tourist bodies play a major role even outside commonly discussed gay urban spaces such as pride parades and parties (Johnston, 2005; Waitt & Markwell, 2006). The day tour described above reveals an epistemology of gay tourism that is beyond the destination itself, produced by the tour organizers and most importantly by the participants as a tool for igniting sensations, for enriching haptic experiences.
This paper conceptualizes pinkwashing mechanisms operation through heritage tourist sites just as much as they are produced via the presentation of Tel Aviv as a modern space of acceptance of LGBT sexualities, albeit obviously in different ways. This is formed through the well-proven practices of promoting Israel as a liberal and modern state – a gay dream come true – combined with the envisioning (but not actual experiencing) of Palestine as a homophobic nightmare way beyond the wall. Another twist is added with less expected practices such as visualizing Jewish settlements and the occupation as a rational practice available even to a non-heteronormative logic.
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