ABSTRACT
It has been argued for some time by critical commentators (see, for example, Foucault 1980; Women and Geography Study Group 1997) that dominant ideologies1 in the construction of knowledge have tended to convey a single truth. This production of knowledge and development of theory was in the past largely based upon Eurocentric research and the ideas of mainly white middle-class men (Haraway 1991). Even today, in the field of tourism there are charges of lack of attention to post-modern thinking (Aitchison 2002). There appears to be reluctance in the field to engage with current debates ongoing in emancipatory and cultural theories (Deem 1999). As Aitchison (2002: 21) argues, ‘postmodernism and feminism present a challenge to the codification of power and knowledge, the power of knowledge and the challenge of power within the subject field’. Tourism research, then, has largely failed to acknowledge issues raised through standpoint epistemology, which dialectically, through the synthesis of often opposing ideas, informed the thinking of developing postmodern thinking and emancipatory frameworks. Consequently, it has tended to neglect the perspectives and experiences of marginalised groups. These groups include women, black people, people with disability, and so forth.
