Women, Tourism, and the Visual Narrative of Interwar Tourism in the American Southwest

Abstract

A highly visible and visual apprehension of the cultural heritage of the Southwest, viewed through the distorting and dislocating lenses of multiple popular visual narratives, established a largely feminized visual imaginary of Southwestern cultural heritage that has functioned largely intact and relatively unquestioned, even by the region’s tri-cultural residents for almost a century. Visual imaginaries carry a profound visual capital and can frame desire, expectation, and value. Images have the power to construct and sustain visual discourses, regimes, and culturally constructed visualities, two of which competed to describe the cultural heritage of the Southwest between World War I and World War II: that of the masculinized traveler and that of the feminized tourist. The feminized visuality of the tourist not only emerged as dominant but as the popularly constructed visual narrative of the “enchanted Southwest’. The monocular direct gaze of the largely male Anglo newcomers was, however, refracted in a multi-ocular, multi-perspectival sideways glance by Anglo women active in popular visual spaces, who collectively and cumulatively posited a complex, imbricated, and tri-culturally interlaced visual narrative. Their domesticated and feminized touristic visual imaginary shaped an understanding and perception of the Southwest as “enchanted,” a construct that not only remains relatively unchallenged today, but still functions as the region’s prevalent popular narrative of cultural heritage.