Her own way: Gender, tourism and transnationality in Brazil

This paper presents an investigation on the presence of foreign women traveling in Brazil, especially alone or without male counterparts, in a context of leisure and beach tourism, at the village of Trancoso-BA. I will present my ethnographic work turning to the changes of international tourism in Trancoso-BA and its landscapes, to the biographies and experiences of these female tourists as well as present local perceptions about them. Examining the expressions and representations in terms of femininity, masculinity, embodiment, "ethnicity" and nationality that permeate and surround the tours of these women in Brazil, I shall present a broader discussion about, on the one hand, ideas that circulate globally on the spread of women in international tourism (confluent with debates and cultural changes in Western world on "gender mainstreaming") and, on the other, the differences and social & political-economic inequalities between states / nations / cultures of "North" and "South", which stand out in the context of tourism from the analytical perspective of the interaction between gender and other categories of differentiation.