THE DISORIENTED TOURIST

What originally caught our attention was the increased use of the figure of the tourist in contemporary writings on the modern/post-modern condition. The tourist seemed to appear everywhere, in every keynote paper at social scientific conferences, as a symbol of our allegedly post-modern era. But what was also surprising was that, in this context, little reference was ever made to the body of tourism studies, which are rich in depth and breadth (see the various chapters in this book).

The Makings of Mother in Diary Narratives

This article ponders the special character of “confessional” texts, especially the diary-form text both for its keeper and for its researcher. Diaries written by ordinary people certainly give us knowledge about psychic, cultural, and social realities, but what kind of knowledge, and how could it be interpreted? This article uses a toolbox of narrative discourse analysis critically applied to diary texts written by three mothers during the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s. Theoretically, feminist ideas of the desire to mother and Foucauldian thought of the arts of existence are made use of in the article.

Towards a Hostessing Society? Mobile Arrangements of Gender and Labour

This article theorizes the forms and interrelations of mobilized work and arrangements of gender in the context of “new work”: an ideology of the flexible labour market of the new economy from the perspective of the workers. The notion of new work is further complicated by the thesis of the feminization of work, whereby, on the one hand, temporary employment is increasingly common also among men and, on the other, attributes and conditions formerly connected to women and understood as feminine virtues or domestic skills are now required from both women and men. Meanwhile, women migrate and are trafficked from poor countries to wealthy ones to perform a range of “old work” for women. Here, t…

The Body in Tourism