Living on display: reciprocal gazes, everyday encounters, and the politics of visibility in the Sunshine Coast tourism community

This community case study analyses the production, negotiation, and contestation of reciprocal gazes within everyday settings, particularly focusing on contemporary lifestyle tourism destinations, and the examination of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Based on 48 in-depth interviews with tourists and locals, this case study looks at the politics of visibility that are part of host-guest relations in everyday encounters at the beach, cafe, marketplace, and online-mediated market. Intersecting with critical tourism studies, and tourism studies on the traveler, host, and reciprocal gaze, this study focuses on residents' experiences of being observed, judged, and photographed and the impacts of their experiences on emotional, social, and community wellbeing. The results show an unprecedented visibility asymmetry, in which tourists actively seek a curated portrayal of a lifestyle they deem effortless and authentic, while residents are subjected to what this study calls asymmetric authenticity—a situation where all the daily work, housing stress and social tension remains masked and invisible, provided that it does not deviate from an ideal narrative of the place. Residents bear the emotional burden of managing their self-presentation in shared public places as it shifts emotional labor from the tourism industry and integrates it into everyday life. The analysis of host agency captures forms of spatial avoidance, time-shifting, and repetitive cycles of seasonal belonging and absence, referred to as temporal resistance. This study captures how digital activity, particularly tourists' repetitive documentation of the same scene, creates digital gaze fatigue in residents, diminishes their control over community representation, and alters the local landscape through the avoidance of restricted areas. Focusing on resident narratives at a Global North lifestyle destination, the paper develops gaze theory in relation to reciprocal visibility, asymmetric authenticity, and digital gaze fatigue, while contributing to sustainable tourism scholarship by exposing the emotional and ethical tourism impacts that are typically ignored. Residents' narratives illuminate the necessity of tourism planning and destination governance that fosters, recognizes, and protects everyday hosting and representational rights. More ethically sustainable host and guest interactions are needed.