Gaze, tourism
The term “gaze” refers to the discourses and practices of seeing in tourism contexts as well as to ways of knowing what is being looked at. Originally framed by Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, the prison and the medical gaze, it is now concentrated on tourist systems, institutions, and visitor economy. Subsequently, “gazing” came to encompass the ideas of interpretivism, thereby prompting theorists to also examine host and guest behaviors.
Urry (1990) was the first to maintain that there were systematic ways of “seeing” destinations, which had roots in Western ocularcentric practices, essential to debates that enveloped modernity. His division of the gaze into romantic, individual and solitary, and mass or budget further refined the focus of rituals and processes of modernization. The acknowledgement of the role of visual culture in the construction of tourist experience and tourism as an organized system of leisure was also examined by Seaton (1998). He saw in the picturesque...
References
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