Exploring the Female Tourists' Identity in Contemporary Chinese Theme Parks Tourism

With the impact of globalisation on China, many world-renowned branded theme parks have entered China and gained high popularity. Among these, female tourists have become the primary consumer group, initiating a new tourist experience consumption trend. The new characteristics of female identity developed in this process reflect an important development of contemporary China. Thus, this study takes Shanghai Disneyland, the most representative theme park, as an example to explore this phenomenon. This paper using content analysis, 170 short videos on Douyin which is the most popular social media in China are collected, Through coding the categories of female tourist experiences in video content and captions, the characteristics of female tourists' experiences at Shanghai Disneyland and the identity traits they wish to showcase are clearly demonstrated. Furthermore, through the tourist gaze to analysis how the construction of female identity with contemporary Chinese development. The study primary finds that in contemporary Chinese theme park, the tourist gaze constructs the identity characteristics of contemporary female tourists, utilizing thematic symbols to construct individual female identities?and this construction is passive. These related tourist experiences indicate that while female identity is rising in consumer culture, it remains in a state of being gazed at and constructed in the eyes of contemporary Chinese tourists. In the future, this research could be further extended, primarily to study consumer culture in theme parks, to help large multinational cultural companies understand how to enter the Chinese market and the impact of local female consumer habits on marketing strategies for foreign enterprises.