Publication: ‘The white woman's burden’–the racialized, gendered politics of volunteer tourism
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Issued Date
2017-08-08
Resource Type
ISSN
14701340
14616688
14616688
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2-s2.0-85015223460
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Mahidol University
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SCOPUS
Bibliographic Citation
Tourism Geographies. Vol.19, No.4 (2017), 644-657
Suggested Citation
Ranjan Bandyopadhyay, Vrushali Patil ‘The white woman's burden’–the racialized, gendered politics of volunteer tourism. Tourism Geographies. Vol.19, No.4 (2017), 644-657. doi:10.1080/14616688.2017.1298150 Retrieved from: https://repository.li.mahidol.ac.th/handle/123456789/42113
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Title
‘The white woman's burden’–the racialized, gendered politics of volunteer tourism
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Abstract
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the racialized and gendered politics of volunteer tourism from the perspective of the ‘white savior complex,’ we seek to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. We employ a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer tourism. The meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism development are informed by the racialized, gendered logics of colonial thought. If older colonial logics were predominantly masculinist, it considers the largely (white) women participants in contemporary volunteer tourism as a window onto current transformations in historic racialized and gendered logics. Colonial logics and discourses have shifted over time, from the erstwhile ‘civilizing mission’ to the subsequent mandate for development to contemporary depoliticized social causes such as ‘saving the environment.’ Volunteer tourism is an exemplar of this third discourse, as global North volunteer tourists, through their depoliticized logic of ‘saving’ and ‘helping’ the less fortunate others in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them further. Given the predominance of young white women in contemporary volunteer tourism, beyond these continuities, we also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the masculinism of historic colonial processes. We also highlight the religious dimension, how Christian ideologies which were so central to formal colonial processes continue to play an important role in volunteer tourism today. Future studies on volunteer tourism need to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and ongoing power relations having to do with race and racialized gender, which will enable a critical conversation on volunteer tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of contemporary neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.