The concept of the tourist gaze (Urry, 1990; Urry & Larsen, 2011) has long been a foundational theoretical lens in tourism studies, foregrounding how tourists construct meaning through visual consumption of people, places, and performances. However, increasing scholarly attention has been paid to fragmented concepts in gaze (Samarathunga & Cheng, 2021), along with gendered, experience based, racialised, and class-based dimensions of tourism encounters. This Research Topic invites critical engagement with the multiplicity of gazes that construct host-guest relationships, especially within the context of social impacts, power asymmetries, and embodied interactions.

By foregrounding who gazes, who is gazed at, and how gazing is negotiated, this Research Topic seeks to unpack the dynamics of mutual and asymmetrical gazes, including the local gaze, diverse male and female gazes, queer gazes, Eastern gazes, and the colonial and postcolonial gaze. It aims to critically discuss how these gazes are produced, co-created, resisted, internalised, or contested across different tourism spaces—from beach resorts to rural homestays, adventure travel, and heritage tourism. Particular attention is paid to the socio-cultural and emotional impacts of being seen or unseen, exoticised or normalised, across intersecting axes of identity and difference.

Aims and Scope

This special topic aims to:

• Re-examine the concept of the gaze from non-Western, feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives.

• Explore how locals perceive, manage, or subvert the tourist gaze, and how they, in turn, construct their own gazes toward visitors.

• Analyse how gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and (dis)ability mediate gaze dynamics in tourism spaces.

• Examine the emotional labour, self-surveillance, and performativity associated with being the object of the gaze.

• Investigate the counter-gaze, ethnographic gaze, and digital gaze in the era of social media tourism.

• Offer grounded empirical insights from diverse geographic and socio-cultural contexts, particularly from the Global South.

• Forecasting the mediation of artificial intelligence (AI) in re-evaluating the concept of the gaze.

Indicative Themes and Questions

Submissions may address (but are not limited to) the following themes:

• How do host communities interpret and respond to the tourist gaze?

• In what ways do men and women experience the gaze differently in tourism contexts?

• How are gazes refracted through sexuality, queerness, or non-normative embodiments?

• What are the emotional and psychological impacts of sustained visibility or hypervisibility in tourism zones?

• How do locals gaze back—resisting, appropriating, or reconfiguring the gaze?

• What role do photography, social media, and visual culture play in shaping contemporary gaze politics?

• How do race and colonial history inform the enduring power of exoticising gazes?

• Does artificial intelligence (AI) shape the notion of the gaze — and if so, how?

References

Samarathunga, W. H. M. S., & Cheng, L. (2021). Tourist gaze and beyond: State of the art. Tourism Review, 76(2), 344–357.

Urry, J. (1990). The tourist gaze: Leisure and travel in contemporary societies. Sage.

Urry, J. & Larsen, J. (2011). The Tourist Gaze 3.0. Sage.

Are you interested in contributing a manuscript to this Research Topic?

Reciprocal Gaze: Host-Guest Encounters, Gendered Perspectives, and the Politics of Seeing in Tourism