Black is not as beautiful: Gender, sexuality and tourism in Panama
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Abstract
In spite of its centrality, the ‘body’ has remained surprisingly
sparse from the corpus of tourism studies in the social
sciences. Recent work has focused on the tourist gaze as
gendered, sexualized and ethnicized, exposing the often
implicit masculine possessor of this gaze. This article studies
the host’s gaze as produced partly as a result of returning the
tourist gaze. I argue that Afro-Antillean men and women in
the Archipelago of Bocas del Toro (Panama) produce
embodied gazes that result from historical constructs as well as
from returning the gazes of those of the recent constant wave
of tourists landing on their shores.
I discuss how male and female bodies are conceptualized in the
Archipelago as repositories of moral values; how gender, race,
and class intersect in the production of these
conceptualizations; and how these interpretations connect in
harmonious and conflicting ways with tourism development in
the region.
Keywords
Gender, sexuality, tourism, Afro-Antillean/West Indian, PanamaDownloads
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