We Bring Home the Roots

Abstract

This chapter examines the gendered dimensions of travel in order to explain why women make up the majority of roots tourists in Brazil. It builds on the literature that seeks to deconstruct the implicitly masculinist abstract tourist subject. Analyzing why and how women travel is important in the project of challenging the supposed neutrality of “the tourist.” At the same time, although focusing on women travelers, the chapter does not confirm men as the norm that goes on unexamined. The chapter thus maps out the differences between women and men without further othering women. Even though the analysis looks more closely at women, it does so in order to examine gender more broadly, including the power relations between women and men, travel and tourism as fundamentally embodied and gendered practices, and the gendering of the diaspora though the gendering of space, place, and time.