The Way Out West: Development and the Rhetoric of Mobility in Postmodern Feminist Theory

Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings

“…Rights to travel, for example, are highly uneven and skewed even between a pair of countries (Timothy, 2001;Gogia, 2006). Many feminist theorists have argued that nomadic theory rests on a 'romantic reading of mobility', and that 'certain ways of seeing [arise] as a result of this privileging of cosmopolitan mobility' (Kaplan, 2006; see also Pritchard, 2000;Tsing, 2002). Ahmed, for example, critiques mobile forms of subjectivity and argues that the 'idealisation of movement, or transformation of movement into a fetish, depends upon the exclusion of others who are already positioned as not free in the same way' (Ahmed, 2004, p.152).…”

Selling cruises: Gender and mobility in promotional brochures

“…From a theoretical point of view, the analysis is grounded in debates on gendered mobilities and tourism, and it aims at questioning the dichotomy between mobility/empowerment and stasis/disempowerment that has been discussed in various contributions in the field of gendered mobilities (cf. Cresswell and Uteng, 2008; Johnston, 2001; Pritchard, 2000; Rose, 1993). The thesis supported here is that, despite the abundant display of mobile and dynamic women in the promotional images of the cruise industry, it is possible to observe the persistence of various forms of a ‘masculine gaze’ (Mulvey, 1975; in the field of tourist studies, see Pritchard and Morgan, 2000).…”