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IBG/RGS Annual Conference Women and Geography Study Group Half Day Session Friday 7th January 2000 14.30 - 18.00 Gendered Leisure and Tourism Spaces Outline of session: Leisure and tourism spaces, places and destinations have increasingly become recognised by social and cultural geographers as important sites in the performance and regulation of gender and sexual identities. For example, museums and heritage sites frequently represent particular forms of masculinist, militarist or nationalist landscapes which leave little space to contest gender roles. Sporting spaces have been critiqued in a similar way as arenas of masculine hegemony. Even in tourism, brochures and ethnographic postcards continue to (re)construct both people and places out of context conveying impressions of exotic, unspoilt, natural, virginal and desirable spaces. These tourism landscapes, including corporeal landscapes, are frequently represented as the canvas upon which the explorer or the tourist can make their mark and demonstrate continuing constraints for women travellers.In contrast, new urban leisure sites provide locations for various forms of popular culture and consumption where gender and sexuality are performed and played out. This session attempts to examine the relationships between gender and the production, representation and consumption of leisure and tourism by examining a range of leisure and tourism sites including museums and heritage attractions, popular urban culture, sporting spaces, overseas and domestic tourism, and tourist brochures and marketing media. Papers are drawn from social and cultural geography and the related subject fields of leisure studies, tourism studies and gender studies. By engaging with poststructural, post-colonial, feminist and queer theory, the presentations evaluate leisure and tourism as both sites and processes of gender and sexual regulation, negotiation and transgression. Papers and Presenters: Herstory in the Landscape: Gender and the Heritage Industry Professor Briaval Holcomb, Rutgers University, USA Living history: gendered space in the modern museum Dr Jacky Tivers, University of Surrey and S. Mills, Keele University Whose space is it anyway? the experiences of solo women travellers Fiona Jordan, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education and Dr Heather Gibson, University of Florida, USA Tropical Paradise: constructing and consuming colonial Others Dr Cara Aitchison, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education When two become one? geographies of lesbian relationships. Kath Browne, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education Sport and its Gendered (or Ambiguous?) Spaces Professor John Bale, Keele University More information: Dr Cara Aitchison Reader in Leisure Policy and Cultural Theory Leisure and Sport Research Unit Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education Swindon Road Cheltenham GL50 4AZ [log in to unmask] 01242 532789 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%