Afterword: Men’s Touristic Practices: How Men Think They’re Men and Know Their Place

Abstract

This book is a welcome contribution to the study of tourism, particularly in the way in which it brings together and foregrounds in one place issues relating travel and tourism to men, ideas of masculinity and male sexuality. At the same time, thinking through tourism (Scott and Selwyn, 2010) to examine these concepts and constructs provides a fruitful seam to mine in terms of illuminating the issues themselves. It is not a particularly profound point to observe that tourism requires people — although perspectives in the study of tourism that are driven by management/business concerns would at times do well to remember that — and that in this study of people the actions, dispositions and impacts of and on men will necessarily be considered. For example, Ulla Wagner (1977) explored how young, single Gambian men formed casual relationships with visiting Scandinavians, and that, on occasions, the ‘romance’ blossomed and led to the men migrating to the tourists’ home country, where the relationships were subject to stresses and strains that threatened their viability. Phylis Passariello (1983) noted the hegemonic masculinity displayed in the form of loud, drunken behaviour by Mexican men when visiting the beach on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas at the weekends. More recently, Linda Malam (2004) examined the performance of masculinity on the beaches of Thailand.