Gender as Work in the Tourism Industry

Abstract

Recent theorizing on the changing patterns of gender and labour in contemporary capitalist production provides a fertile starting point for investigating tourism as work and labour — instead of the more common themes of leisure, management and social or environmental impact. Current working life in post-Fordist societies, for its part, is increasingly based on producing experiences, images and affects, all familiar aspects of tourist scenes. This article argues that when investigating tourism work as experienced and enunciated by workers themselves, we can not only gain a better grasp of the production process of the tourist experience but also of the constitution of contemporary subjectivity in late capitalist societies. Narrative analysis is performed on the autobiographical narratives of two tourism workers from Finnish Lapland to investigate and demonstrate the argument by focusing particularly on the interplay between skill and gender in the context of ‘new work’.