Festive traditions and tourism in Mallorca: Ludic transgressions and the disruption of otherness

Invented traditions are worldmaking devices that mobilise places for tourism consumption. They are regularly used to project a tourist sense of otherness. However, they can also be sites of resistance and transgression in tourism. This article explores the transgressive potential of invented traditions as a locus of cultural change that challenges processes of othering in tourism. It reflects on the disruption of alterity with a case study of La Mucada, an invented rural tradition in Mallorca, which problematises the romantic categories through which the island is consumed by tourists. Invented traditions are reconsidered in relational terms as progressive spaces that can generate more partial, fluid or unfixed identifications. A performative understanding of transgression is proposed, emphasising the banal tourist ways in which epistemologies of difference are disrupted. Ludic transgressions also target other dichotomies, including stable notions of sexuality and gender.