ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on analyses of the global culture industry of tourism, through event-ethnographic analysis of the 33rd International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association (IGLTA) convention, held in Cape Town in April 2016. I combine fieldwork data and participant observation with multimodal critical discourse analyses of the digital communication and publicity preceding, during and following the event. This chapter illustrates how pink tourism reflects homonormative ideologies, whereby LGBTQ people – and especially gay men – are assimilated into contemporary market globalist society. This chapter demonstrates how the production of pink tourism discourse shows LGBTQ people standing apart from the fray of mass tourism and the still-insecure or unstable realities of queer life. Contradictorily, the IGLTA convention presents pink tourism as both an escape from prejudice, and as a force for change, particularly in parts of the world that are not safe for LGBTQ people (including South Africa). The IGLTA convention is alive with affect; its camp, carnivalesque atmosphere characterizes the globe as a playground for some LGBTQ people. The convention, and by extension the social world of pink tourism writ large, is therefore a heterotopia, juxtaposing several sites which are themselves incompatible (Foucault 1986) – it ‘enacts utopia’, imagining and enacting the future of LGBTQ identity, while firmly aligning with, and in many ways enforcing, the barriers to a better life for the world’s underprivileged.
