After Eat, Pray, Love: Tourism, Orientalism, and cartographies of salvation

Abstract

This article examines certain kinds of travel and tourism as extensions of colonial and examples of neocolonial forms of Orientalist engagement between the global North and global South. Focusing on areas that border the Indian Ocean, and the South Asian context in particular, I interrogate the gendered, racial, and geopolitical attachments that have historically drawn and continue to draw travelers to the region for tourism. I refer to these attachments as cartographies of salvation. In connecting the history and representations of travel to the area to the forms of leisure and spiritual tourism popularized by the 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, I argue that the Indian Ocean region remains for many a paternalistic endeavor or an exotic playground, where one can project a sense of purpose or indulge in an escapist fantasy. This article combines critical tourism studies, feminist ethnography and theory, and critical race studies.

Queer and Trans Yoga: Practices of Utopia in Hostile Times

“…Under these terms, feminism becomes an individualist position about white women's empowerment, rather than an intersectional and structural critique of racial capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy (Gill 2016). Within this postfeminist context, yoga is presented as a root to empowerment for the modern (white) woman, such that liberation is encoded as individualist self-care instead of community care and collective liberation (Putcha 2020). Practicing and teaching yoga in the United States is also connected to the geopolitics of a growing global far Right, connected, for example, to India's conservative Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who also sought to capitalize on Western fascination with yoga and further mobilize it and export it to the West as part of a broader technique of Indian Hindu nationalism (Lakshmi 2020).…”

Trajectories of embodiment in Tourist Studies

“…Traditionally, and perhaps influenced by anthropological approaches to examining culture, tourist research has focused on cultural representation of tourist bodies, giving priority to the image over the actions of the body. Indeed, Tourist Studies is packed with contributions exploring the extent to which elaborations and representations of the body in tourism are rooted in colonial (Kothari, 2015) and heteropatriarchal discourses (Pritchard and Morgan, 2005), reflecting on the close intimacy of tourism with colonialism (Hall and Tucker, 2004; Putcha, 2020). However, the body does not merely feature as a thing or a concept, a surface of inscription, a container of meaning or a plastic matter for sculpting.…”

“…The embodied turn has also led to the consideration of a wider range of bodies in tourism research beyond its traditional focus on male, white and middle-class figurations. In Tourist Studies , we find gendered female bodies (Aitchison, 2005; Brown et al, 2020; Osman et al, 2020), racialised bodies (Saldanha, 2002; Putcha, 2020), drunk euphoric bodies (Jayne et al, 2012; Tutenges, 2015), young bodies (Garcia, 2016; Kimber et al, 2019; Tucker, 2005), old bodies (Holloway et al, 2011; O’Reilly, 2003; Tucker, 2005), bodies at work (Harris, 2009; Veijola 2009), LGBTQI+ bodies (Binnie and Klesse, 2011; Vorobjovas-Pinta and Robards, 2017), medicalised bodies (Bell et al, 2011; Cook, 2010), bodies having sex (Collins, 2007; Frohlick, 2008) and all sorts of active and thrilled bodies. Such a diverse range of bodies within Tourist Studies , and of course, within the wider research field of critical tourism studies, show the extent tourism provides ‘a unique space to explore the role of such expressive, sensual and illusory faculties of the body’ (Obrador, 2003: 56).…”

“Eat-Pray-Love Tourism” as a New Transformative Tourism Trend: A Theoretical Model Proposal

“…Alanyazında bu konunun son yıllarda artan sayıda araştırmaya ev sahipliği yaptığı görülmektedir. Konu başlıklarına bakıldığında Ye-Dua Et-Sev kavramının kadın ve vatandaşlık (Larasati ve Diyah, 2010), yiyeceğin verdiği haz ve spiritüellik (Oliver, 2012), cinsiyet ve cinsellik (Dave, 2013), neoliberal manevi özne (Williams, 2014), uyum ve küresel turizm (Goggin, 2016), turizm imgesi (Badone, 2016), dil, yemek ve kimlik (Hughes, 2019), turizm ve doğubilimcilik (Putcha, 2020), gurbetçi ve turistler (Bell, 2016) ve film turizmi (Kim, Suri ve Park, 2018;Park, 2018) temaları altında ele alındığı görülmektedir. Bu yayınlar arasında turizm ve gastronomi ile alakalı sadece dört yayın (Oliver, 2012;Badone, 2016;Kim, Suri ve Park, 2018;Park, 2018) mevcuttur.…”