Re-Centering Women in Tourism addresses tourism as simultaneously empowering women and reproducing colonial hierarchies. By centering women’s multivalent lived experiences in tourism projects, this collection reframes the very presuppositions on which tourism initiatives are based and helps imagine sustainable and regenerative alternatives.

Re-Centering Women in Tourism: Anti-Colonial Feminist Studies addresses tourism as simultaneously empowering women and reproducing colonial hierarchies. This volume contributes to conversations on the engagement of women in tourism by centering women’s multivalent lived experiences—as hosts, liaisons, vendors, performers, producers, and consumers—in tourism projects. Examining eco-tourism, craft production, and food tourism initiatives, the contributors embrace the building of new knowledge and advocate for change. By centering women and their experiences through epistemological lenses that encompass colonial histories and economics, this collection reframes the very presuppositions on which tourism initiatives are based and helps imagine sustainable and regenerative alternatives.

Section I: Touristing

Chapter 1 Who Invited the Women?: The Double Bind of a Culturally Respectful Female (or Feminist?) Traveler

Chapter 2 (Re)Shaping the Volunteer Tourist Bubble: The Intersectional Experiences of Two Women Volunteers in Guatemala

Chapter 3 ’Skanky stories’: Breaking Boundaries of Sexual Taboo in Women’s Narratives

Section II: Hosting

Chapter 4 Women’s Work and Tourism in Negril, the Capital of Casual

Chapter 5 Pedagogical Tourism: The Gendered Coloniality of Spanish Lessons in Guatemala

Chapter 6 Linger: Burned Bambu: Aftermath Nostalgia

Chapter 7 "The Baskets Cannot Send the Children to School”: Women, Handicrafts, and Tourism in Botswana’s Okavango Delta

Section III: Equitable Alternatives

Chapter 8 “My Mother’s Recipe, My Nation’s Narrative”: Intersections of Food, Militarism, and Masculinity in Maisa’s Kitchen

Chapter 9 Entrepreneurial Domesticity: Women on the Forefront of Touristic Endeavors in Costa Rica