Women, Leisure and Tourism: gender, experience and empowerment
A trip may be a service purchase, but it may also be time someone can choose for herself. Women, Leisure and Tourism (2022) invites a broader view than treating women as a customer segment. Experience, the work of producing it and opportunities for self-expression become connected concerns.
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Women, Leisure and Tourism
Self-actualization and Empowerment through the Production and Consumption of Experience
CABI · 2022 · EnglishISBN 9781789247985Original book cover; the language and edition are identified alongside it.
Specific settings, different positions
Edited by Linda J. Ingram, Klára Tarkó and Susan L. Slocum, the collection includes settings such as later-life sport, festival vending, crafts and commerce, consent in event tourism and non-formal learning among refugee women. These contexts resist the assumption of one universal female experience.
The production/consumption distinction is particularly useful. Organizers, vendors and participants may share a setting while possessing different resources and choices. This makes empowerment a question to investigate rather than a label to apply automatically.
Find a more focused topic
Readers developing a tourism thesis might look beyond a familiar satisfaction–revisit model toward participation, constraints, safety or personal meaning. These are reading prompts, not a ready-made causal model from the book. Appropriate theory and original studies must still support any proposed relationships.
Choose one chapter close to your context and another quite different from it. Compare who participates, their life circumstances and what participation means. A conclusion does not transfer simply because both groups are women.
A suggested research exercise
Illustration created by Lê Minh: in preparing interviews with women working at a destination, distinguish tourism income from decision-making agency. Participants may describe them differently. Leave room for both opportunities and constraints rather than assuming tourism necessarily empowers everyone.
Who may benefit
Tourism, gender, community and experience researchers can use the collection to refine whose perspective their project represents. Practitioners may read it to move beyond demographic customer profiles. Academic readers should cite individual chapters appropriately. A valuable result is a more attentive research question, grounded in varied lives rather than a single average comparison between gender categories.
Choose a companion reading
Continue with: Qualitative Data Analysis with NVivo (Second edition · 2013 · English).
Source and edition
Ingram, L. J., Tarkó, K., & Slocum, S. L. (Eds.). (2022). Women, leisure and tourism: Self-actualization and empowerment through the production and consumption of experience. CABI.