Empowered at work, barely changed at home: spatial asymmetry in gendered tourism

Tourism is widely credited with empowering women, yet workplace advances rarely translate into changes in the gendered division of labour at home. This article reads that disjuncture spatially. Drawing on feminist geographies of space as socially constituted, it argues that work and home operate as distinct but mutually constituted spaces of gendered power, between which women move daily, performing gender before different normative audiences. The argument is conceptual, illustrated with extracts from fifty semi-structured interviews conducted in 2020–2021 with women in three labour positions in the tourism economy of San Gil, Colombia. Mobilising five feminist notions of power (power over, power to, power with, power within, and power through) analysed together rather than in isolation, and drawing on gender deviance neutralisation as an interpretive lens, the article explains why empowerment gained in the space of work is rarely carried into the space of home. The five notions are distributed differently across spaces rather than exclusively located in them; empowerment at work does not translate into gender equality; and that some discourses of empowerment obscure, and may even reinforce, the structural inequality sustained by women’s unpaid social reproduction. The article advances feminist tourism geographies by foregrounding the spatial constitution of gendered power.