Publication of John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze in 1990 made an enormous impact on tourism studies. Since then, demonstrating the way in which the tourist gaze is socially constructed has been one of the major fields of sociological study on tourism. While Urry’s work has been received favorably in the academic world in general, there have been several critical reviews of his argument. For example, a prominent tourism scholar, Dean MacCannell, made the criticism that Urry’s model proffered by Michael Foucault was too deterministic, and assumed tourists to be too passive without agency (MacCannell 2001). Instead, MacCannell advocated the second gaze, shedding light on tourists’ agency to question the tourist gaze installed by the institutions and practices of the commercialized tourism industry, and to gain awareness that something is being concealed from the institutionalized and stereotyped gaze.
Urry has responded to such criticism in The Tourist Gaze 3.0, co-written with Jonas Larsen, in 2011. His response to various critical comments on the previous edition and his suggestion for a revised model of the tourist gaze are some of the features of this recent edition. In his work, he also agrees that tourists have agency and they do not accept the tourist gaze produced by the mass media and tourist industry, but interpret, negotiate, and question the institutionalized tourist gaze. Therefore, he acknowledges the importance of examining the way in which the tourist gaze can be transformed through performance and accidental experience of actual tourism practices.
This paper intends to apply his argument on the interface between the gaze and performance, and examines a case study of slum tourism in Kamagasaki, Osaka. Kamagasaki is known to have the largest concentration of day laborers in Japan, and is in a slum-like condition. Therefore, the mass media such as newspapers and popular magazines have frequently described Kamagasaki and its dwellers as dangerous, criminal, and dirt, (re)producing negative stereotyped images of them. Against these false images of a slum, the Kamagasaki Community Regeneration forum, a network organization of academics, activists, and local people supporting this area’s anti-poverty movement, has been conducting study tours there since 2004. Some local residents with extensive experience as day laborers have also been involved in this tour program as local guides.
In this paper, I examine how these tour experiences enable tourists to transform and deconstruct the essentialized and negative images of this area. Furthermore, it will be argued that these transformative processes enable tourists to view the slum residents as less ‘Othered’, but more ‘Same-d’.
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