{"title":"Beyond self-Orientalism: Asian masculine landscapes in Chinese and Thai martial arts tourism","authors":"Jiange Deng","doi":"10.1177/14687976221143243","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Martial arts tourism is a burgeoning form of tourism typified by Western ‘martial arts pilgrims’ travelling to Asian ‘martial arts cradles’ for leisure-based learning, training and spectatorship. Despite its growing economic and cultural significance, research on martial arts tourism as a sociocultural practice is scant. This study argues that the intrinsic relationship of martial arts to masculinities and Asian-ness offers the opportunity to study the self-representation of ‘Asian masculine landscapes’ (AMLs) in tourism. By comparing eight destination websites in Thailand and China, this study conceives AMLs as the creative appropriation, transmogrification and hybridisation of divergent images of masculinities circulated at different scales. This conceptualisation speaks to a cultural complexity framework that moves beyond the deterministic and unidirectional paradigm of self-Orientalism by highlighting the productive role of Asian destination ‘image-makers’ as both cultural remediators and improvisers occupying the intermediary position between the homogenising and heterogenising discourses of transnational masculinities.","PeriodicalId":47199,"journal":{"name":"Tourist Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Tourist Studies","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687976221143243","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"HOSPITALITY, LEISURE, SPORT & TOURISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
Martial arts tourism is a burgeoning form of tourism typified by Western ‘martial arts pilgrims’ travelling to Asian ‘martial arts cradles’ for leisure-based learning, training and spectatorship. Despite its growing economic and cultural significance, research on martial arts tourism as a sociocultural practice is scant. This study argues that the intrinsic relationship of martial arts to masculinities and Asian-ness offers the opportunity to study the self-representation of ‘Asian masculine landscapes’ (AMLs) in tourism. By comparing eight destination websites in Thailand and China, this study conceives AMLs as the creative appropriation, transmogrification and hybridisation of divergent images of masculinities circulated at different scales. This conceptualisation speaks to a cultural complexity framework that moves beyond the deterministic and unidirectional paradigm of self-Orientalism by highlighting the productive role of Asian destination ‘image-makers’ as both cultural remediators and improvisers occupying the intermediary position between the homogenising and heterogenising discourses of transnational masculinities.
期刊介绍:
Tourist Studies is a multi-disciplinary journal providing a platform for the development of critical perspectives on the nature of tourism as a social phenomenon through a qualitative lens. Theoretical and multi-disciplinary. Tourist Studies provides a critical social science approach to the study of the tourist and the structures which influence tourist behaviour and the production and reproduction of tourism. The journal examines the relationship between tourism and related fields of social inquiry. Tourism and tourist styles consumption are not only emblematic of many features of contemporary social change, such as mobility, restlessness, the search for authenticity and escape, but they are increasingly central to economic restructuring, globalization, the sociology of consumption and the aestheticization of everyday life. Tourist Studies analyzes these features of tourism from a multi-disciplinary perspective and seeks to evaluate, compare and integrate approaches to tourism from sociology, socio-psychology, leisure studies, cultural studies, geography and anthropology. Global Perspective. Tourist Studies takes a global perspective of tourism, widening and challenging the established views of tourism presented in current periodical literature. Tourist Studies includes: Theoretical analysis with a firm grounding in contemporary problems and issues in tourism studies, qualitative analyses of tourism and the tourist experience, reviews linking theory and policy, interviews with scholars at the forefront of their fields, review essays on particular fields or issues in the study of tourism, review of key texts, publications and visual media relating to tourism studies, and notes on conferences and other events of topical interest to the field of tourism studies.