Rural tourism microentrepreneurs’ self-representation through photography: a counter-hegemonic approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT American rural social geography has been subjected to simplified and standardised projections and stereotyping by hegemonic tourism media. Urban-centred advertising of rural tourism destinations is a powerful medium in creating hegemony and hierarchy between urban and rural communities. The act of representing rural social geographies through tourism creates discourse which dialectically creates and reinforces the modified social status quo of rural societies. Hence, aiming for social change and to magnify the rural subaltern voice, this article adopted auto-photography as an ethnographic participatory method. Fourteen rural tourism microentrepreneurs from the Piedmont region of North Carolina, United States, participated in self-representational photography of the aspects of life they wished to share with urbanites. Interviews were conducted using participants’ favourite photos as prompts. Critical discourse analysis was employed to identify rural tourism microentrepreneurs’ self-representations that counter urban-normativity. Findings show microentrepreneurs resisted and complied with an urban-normative tourism-based ideological hegemony.