Gender and tourism sustainability

Abstract

It is long overdue for tourism research to move beyond the basic question of whether gender matters, because there is no humanity (or human phenomenon) without gender dimensions. Instead this article asks how does it matter? It does so by challenging tourism sustainability knowledges from the perspective of feminist epistemologies. It presents a broad and necessary conceptualization of gender which includes the spectrums of sex, sexuality, gender expression, and gender identity. Drawing on the philosophical conception of ideology by Elisabeth Anderson, this article invites to reimagine dominant models of the world in gender, culture and nature ideologies. It introduces the contributions and learnings of the special issue on “Gender and Tourism Sustainability”. Finally, it states that a future agenda for gender and tourism sustainability research must highlight that being and knowing includes the non-human and a multiplicity of ecologies and cosmologies, that knowledges are multitude, and that they can be found beyond the written word and/or sanctioned instutionalized knowledge.