ABSTRACT
In our early writings, just as in many other scholars discussing tourism in the field of social theory, we have focused on the tourist experience as one that materializes the generalised subjectivity of our time. What we often found lacking in these discussions, however, was the body, and thereby also the gender, of the agency of the mobile social figure. Later, having already concluded that there is perhaps not so much to add to the topic of the body in tourism (e.g. Swain 1995; Johnston 2001; Macnaghten and Urry 2001; Ateljevic et al. 2007), we ended up, through different routes, at the same crossroads again, but this time it was the alleged opposite of tourism: the working life. It did not take much effort to see how the work performances called for in Western societies are constituted by corporealities, affectivity and emotions, and how fittingly the – formerly strikingly invisible – figure of the tourism worker epitomizes the processes and agencies involved in the production of the tourist experience (Veijola and Jokinen 2008; Valkonen and Veijola 2008; Haanpää et al. 2005).
