Expanding Understanding: Using the ‘Choraster’ to Provide a Voice for the Female Traveler

This chapter takes as its starting point the proposition that an understanding of tourist experiences and interactions requires a shift in our thinking of the tourist as a gazing flâneur to imagining the tourist as an interacting choraster (Wearing & Wearing, 1996). While much of the thinking within tourism studies has moved on considerably since Wearing and Wearing’s paper was published, the central arguments, nevertheless, provide a touchstone for many of the ideas we present here in exploring the experiences of women travelers (Wearing & Wearing, 1996).