Refocussing the tourist experience: the flaneur and the choraster

Abstract

In current sociological analyses of tourist experience, class, race, ethnicity, age and gender are being incorporated into frameworks which initially assumed that male views of the phenomenon are universal. In this paper we seek to incorporate gender into the fundamental conceptualization of the tourist and the tourist destination. Drawing on concepts from interactionist and poststructural feminist theories we critique the male bias in the conceptualization of the tourist as ‘flaneur’ and the tourist desination as ‘image’ for the tourist gaze. A concept of the tourist destination as ‘chora’, or interactive space is offered. The tourist then becomes a creative, interacting ‘choraster’ who takes home an experience which impacts on the self in some way. We suggest that such a feminized conceptualization adds a second dimension to the one dimensional perspective which predominates in current sociological analyses of the tourist phenomenon.