Tourism, ageing bodies and Chinese femininity

Abstract

Despite increased social science engagement with the body, its sensuousness and everyday performativity, the tourism-ageing-embodiment nexus remains under-served, with the older female Asian body particularly neglected. Adopting a feminist participatory approach and employing audio-video diaries and in-depth semi-structured interviews, our study examines the embodied travel experiences of 24 older Chinese women. Our findings reveal how their travel experiences are constrained within an evolving Chinese ideology on gender, age and femininity and shaped by their life trajectories and experiences and social and family roles. At the same time, however, we reveal how tourism provides an empowering space, where they negotiate and subvert constraining conceptualizations of femininity. The study advances understandings of ageing, embodiment and tourism and challenges their Western dominance.