Queering Tourism ─ Paradoxical Performances at Gay Pride Parades

Gay Pride parades are annual arenas of queer public culture, where embodied notions of subjectivity are sold, enacted, transgressed and debated.

From Sydney to Rome, Queering Tourism analyzes the paradoxes of gay pride parades as tourist events, exploring how the public display of queer bodies – the way they look, what they do, who watches them, and under what regulations – is profoundly important in constructing sexualized subjectivities of bodies and cities.

Drawing on extensive collections of interviews, visual and written media accounts, photographs, advertisements, and her own participation in these parades, Lynda Johnston gives a vibrant account of ‘queer tourism’ in New Zealand, Australia, Scotland and Italy. For each place, she looks at how the relationship between the viewer and the viewed produces paradoxical concepts of bodily difference, and considers how the queered spaces of gay pride parades may prompt new understandings of power and tourism.

Examining the intersection of sexuality, space and tourism, and using empirical data gathered at Gay Pride parades such as the Sydney Mardi Gras, New Zealand HERO Parade and World Pride Roma 2000, this important work produces a deconstructive account of tourism and presents new ways of thinking through the powerful processes of subjectivity formation.

Lynda Johnston is a senior lecturer in the Department of Geography, Tourism and Environmental Planning at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research focuses on social/cultural and feminist geography, critical social theory and tourism.