‘Men, Masculinity, Travel and Tourism: Emerging Themes and Future Directions'

While the implicit masculine position of the tourist gaze has been identified and problematised, understandings of specific male tourists has often failed to engage with the gendered notions of independence, adventure, embodiment and ‘risk’ which underpin much tourism experience and practice. Drawing on the author’s own ethnographic study of British stag party tourism in a Polish city, the paper will draw out key themes emerging from in recent debates about the positioning of masculinity in the complex social interactions fostered by tourist mobility and the creation of new and developing tourist spaces. Through observing how tourist enactments of masculinity interact and potentially conflict with the gender performances of others, the stag tour weekend offers an insight into wider notions of how masculinities are negotiated through embodied, relational, performances within tourist spaces and through tourist practice. In particular, the notion of masculinities being increasingly fragmented and pluralised must be reconciled with the apparently straightforward and taken for granted ‘hyper-masculinity’ commonly enacted during the stag tour weekend. The paper suggests that the emergence of such male bonding rituals which are frequently based around excessive inebriation, transgressive behaviour and disinhibition illustrate the convergence of numerous emergent strands in men’s lives. As such, sociological knowledge of the stag tourism phenomenon is a pertinent catalyst to wider discussions of themes relevant to the critical study of men and masculinity. In conclusion, the paper will suggest various future directions for the study of tourism and masculinities.