"Rereading the Subjugating Tourist" in Neoliberalism: Postcolonial Otherness and the Tourist Experience

In this review article, Wearing and Wearing attempt to develop an interactionist, constructionist, and postcolonial framework for conceptualizing tourist experiences of space. They argue that the tourist place provides social spaces for individual experiences related, among other things, to leisure expectations, guest–host relationships, and interactions with community members. To Wearing and Wearing, operations of power between the culture of the tourist and that of the host enable hegemonic constructions of the host's culture. These sorts of constructions position the "otherness" of hosts as inferior to the tourist's original culture, which is usually "White" and "infused with Western knowledge." The authors maintain thereby that the tourist destination then generally becomes a place for the voyeuristic gaze of the tourist, which, at best, reduces the destination culture to an inferior exoticism.