Cara Aitchison

The Role of Food Tourism in Sustaining Regional Identity: A Case Study of Cornwall, South West England

This exploratory paper examines the role of food tourism in developing and sustaining regional identities within the context of rural regeneration, agricultural diversification and the creation of closer relationships between production and consumption in the countryside. It focuses on Cornwall, South West England, an area with rural development issues, increasing tourism impacts and contested issues of regional identity. A literature and policy analysis, and in-depth interviews with 12 restaurateurs, were undertaken in four popular tourist locations. Correlation was found between increased levels of food tourism interest and the retention and development of regional identity, the enhancement of environmental awareness and sustainability, an increase in social and cultural benefits celebrating the production of local food and the conservation of traditional heritage, skills and ways of life. The paper draws attention to three issues: the role of food tourism in increasing tourist spending, the potential role of food tourism in extending the tourist season, and the re-examination of food tourist typologies within a sustainability framework.

New cultural geographies: the spatiality of leisure, gender and sexuality

The contribution of geography to leisure research is well established. The relationships between spatiality, gender and sexuality are, however, less clearly articulated within previous leisure geographies. Whilst the concepts of spatialized feminism and gendered space have been well documented in geography, this is less true in relation to leisure studies. Only recently have leisure and tourism scholars begun to acknowledge that the synergy between gender relations and spatial relations is a major contributor to leisure relations (Aitchison, C. and Jordon, F. (1998) Gender, Space and Identity: Leisure, Culture and Commerce , Leisure Studies Association, Eastbourne; Watson, B. and Scraton, S. (1998) Leisure Studies 17 (2), 123–37). This recent shift can be attributed, in part, to the new cultural geography and its inclusion of leisure, culture and tourism within its spatial analysis. This paper reviews the development of the new cultural geography and its impact upon leisure studies. The review is construc...

Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies

1. Introduction A place for leisure and tourism? From geography to geographies Theorising the social-cultural nexus Social and cultural geographies of leisure and tourism landscapes 2. Locating Landscapes: Geographies of Lesiure and Tourism Introduction Colonial geographies: mapping regional territories Systematic geographies: modelling land use and tourism Landscape evaluations: mapping scenic amenity in leisure and tourism Tourism geographies: topologies of land use Structuralist interpretations of leisure and tourism landscapes Post-colonial geographies of leisure and tourism Geographys cultural turn: the spatiality of leisure and tourism Leisure geographies of the street Tourism geographies of the spectacle and monument Geographies of social and cultural exclusion Overview 3. Moving Landscpaes: Leisure and Tourism in Time and Space Introduction The Journey, travel and discovery Prospects of pleasure, landscapes of feeling Annihilating time and distance Landscape, leisure and mobility Road to nowhere? Overview 4. Valuing the Countryside: Leisure, Tourism and the Rural Landscape Introduction Nature was His book Access and exclusion Landscape fit for heroes A peoples charter for the open air A countryside for all? Overview 5. Introduction A landscape aesthetic? The socio-cultural context Landscape and imaginative reconstuction The Highlands of Scotland Ossianic tourism The Highlander in the picture The Highlands of Walter Scott Travelling in the Highlands Royal Patrons A Literary way of seeing The real Highlands Overview 6. Heritage Landscapes: Merging Past and Present Introduction The evolution of heritage Heritage in the landscape Stonehenge: multi-vocal landscape Avebury: evolving landscape Tintagel: mythical landscape Overview 7. Gendered Landscapes: Constructing and Consuming Leisure and Tourism Inroduction Spatialised feminism Feminism and leisure landscapes Gendered space Deconstructing dualisms The gendered other Gender and landscapes of tourism Gender and landscapes of heritage Overview 8. Retrophilia and the Urban Landscape Introduction Antiquity, restoration and fake Reverence, worldliness and action Modernism, collective memory and amnesia Urban conservation and civic pride Commercialism, decadence and tourism The historic quarters of Londons City Fringe Overview 9. Landscapes of Desire: Reappropriating the City Introduction Queer space: material and symbolic landscapes Gay destinations: the landscape of the city Sexuality and spectacle: the landscape of the street Sexuality and hospitality: the landscape of the hotel Overview 10. Leisure, Tourism and Culture: Relocating Landscapes

Theorizing Other discourses of tourism, gender and culture Can the subaltern speak (in tourism)?

At its broadest level, this article is concerned with identifying, reviewing and developing synergies between three subject fields that have experienced rapid growth over the last two decades: tourism studies, gender studies and wider cultural theory. At a more specific level, the article seeks to review the interface between structural and cultural power in the construction of gender relations and gendered Others in tourism. The article adopts and adapts poststructural and postcolonial feminist critiques that have placed emphasis on the symbolic, textual, discursive and performative construction of the Other. Seeing the Other person or people as merely subaltern in tourism is problematized when we listen to these poststructural and postcolonial feminist voices. These voices articulate discourses that speak of the complexity of tourism and gender relations. In doing so, however, these academic voices create yet further possibilities of representing Others and raise additional questions about authors, authority and the subaltern’s speech. Thus, tourism, through its association with the exotic and erotic, is critiqued as a complex media, medium and mediator of symbolic and material power in the Othering of gender and culture as part of the fluid process of tourism and global consumption where issues of power and representation are continually tested and contested.

From leisure and disability to disability leisure: developing data, definitions and discourses

Although both disability studies and leisure studies have grown to become influential subject fields in their own right, there has been little discursive exchange between the two fields. This article seeks to address these equally significant gaps in disability research within leisure studies and leisure research within disability studies. Empirical data examining the role of leisure in the lives of a group of young people with cerebral palsy are introduced to contextualise definitions and discourses of leisure and disability. The article demonstrates that, for many young disabled people, the role of leisure in tackling social exclusion remains within the realms of policy rhetoric, rather than everyday reality. The dissonance between these agendas and actualities is reviewed in relation to definitions and discourses of disability and leisure evident in wider social policies, and in relation to definitions, discourses and models of disability that remain dominant within leisure provision.

Feminist and gender perspectives in tourism studies The social-cultural nexus of critical and cultural theories

This article calls for a pause for reflection on the theoretical trajectory of feminist and gender research in tourism studies. It offers a critical appraisal of the origins, development and contemporary application of the three epistemological approaches of feminist empiricism, standpoint feminism and poststructural feminism. Although each of these broad perspectives has served to shape our multiple understandings of the relationships between gender and tourism they may also, simultaneously and inadvertently, have served to fracture the coherence of gender and tourism as a sub-discipline within tourism studies. The article suggests that to disembody that which is not yet fully formed runs the risk of aborting rather than nurturing the embryonic project of advancing feminist and gender tourism studies. Thus, while acknowledging the positive influence of the ‘cultural turn’ within feminist and gender studies of tourism, the article cautions against the wholesale adoption of poststructural approaches to the neglect of previous material analyses. Thus, the case is made for developing synergy between these two seemingly oppositional perspectives and the social-cultural nexus is introduced as a conceptual framework within which to explore the mutually informing nature of the social and the cultural in shaping both materialities and relations of gender and tourism.

The critical and the cultural : Explaining the divergent paths of leisure studies and tourism studies

In this brief paper I explore, and offer explanations for, the divergent experiences of leisure studies and tourism studies in their engagements with ‘the cultural turn’. The social sciences of the 1960s and 1970s, so instrumental in informing the discourse of early articles published in Leisure Studies, have come to be associated with critical theory, materialist and structuralist approaches. In contrast, the last two decades of the 20th century are likely to be remembered as the period when a number of social science disciplines developed their engagements with poststructural theory and experienced what has come to be known as ‘the cultural turn’. Reflective of the different periods at which leisure studies and tourism studies experienced their most significant growth, as evidenced by the number of higher education enrolments, new journal titles and the publication of books, it is argued here that critical theory remains a more dominant influence within leisure studies whereas the turn to culture, evidenced by engagement with poststructural theory and the linking of the cultural and the critical, has become a more apparent hallmark of contemporary tourism studies. This linking of the critical and the cultural has a longer history in the humanities than in the social sciences. As tourism studies, with its social and cultural underpinning, has emerged as a distinct field from tourism management, with its primarily economic underpinning, so greater engagement between tourism studies and humanities discourses has evolved. As Evans (2003: p. 69) has pointed out, ‘the “cultural turn” in sociology has persuaded many people that social life is now organised and regulated through culture’ and this has served to disrupt the rather dualistic late 20th century discourse between the social sciences, with their primary

A decade of compulsory competitive tendering in UK sport and leisure services: some feminist reflections.

The last decade has witnessed the transformation of public policy in the UK following an extensive programme of privatization across a range of public services. When compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) in sport and leisure services was first proposed in 1987 there was widespread opposition from feminists and also from the Labour party who had been out of government for eight years. This period out of office was to continue for a further ten years until New Labour was elected to government on 1st May 1997 with a landslide majority and a manifesto which embraced, rather than rejected, many of the policies of the four previous Conservative administrations. Instead of the widespread failure and subsequent abandonment of CCT predicted a decade ago by feminists, national labour politicians and local labour authorities, CCT is now widely accepted as here to stay. Following ten years of private sector involvement in local authority sport and leisure provision, and the apparent likelihood that such provision is...

Women in leisure services: managing the social-cultural nexus of gender equity

Poststructural analyses have recently transformed gender theory and methodology within many social science disciplines and subject fields including management studies. Leisure management, however, has retained a focus on structural analyses of power. As a result, cultural representations of gender-power relations have remained largely untheorized within the leisure management literature. This paper draws on poststructural feminist theory to supplement and complement previous structural analyses of gendered power in leisure management. The paper cites empirical evidence from research into Gender Equity in Leisure Management, commissioned by the Institute of Leisure and Amenity Management and undertaken by the author. Analysis of the results concurs with similar research undertaken in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, demonstrating that gender-power relations are frequently produced, legitimated and reproduced at the intersection of social and cultural forces in organizations.