Tourism Representations, Imaginaries, and Encounters on the Maltese Islands

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dc.contributor.advisorCohen, Rina
dc.contributor.authorSpiteri, Suzanne
dc.date.accessioned2021-11-15T15:55:43Z
dc.date.available2021-11-15T15:55:43Z
dc.date.copyright2021-08
dc.date.issued2021-11-15
dc.date.updated2021-11-15T15:55:43Z
dc.degree.disciplineSociology
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis research explores the ethnosexual tourism of women to the Maltese islands by considering the politics of tourism representations and tourism imaginaries about the Maltese islands, and their effects on touristic experiences and encounters in Malta. It examines the link between the historical and contemporary discourses surrounding the Maltese islands and their role in shaping how the space and its inhabitants are engaged with, physically and socially, tourist women from Northern Europe. This dissertation aims to highlight the role and influences of tourist geographical imaginaries on spaces, places, touristic practices. Utilizing a postcolonial perspective that explores Orientalism and Exoticism in tourism representations, this dissertation contributes to tourism scholarship by examining the interconnected nature of history, discourse, and the politics of representation, and their impact on contemporary travel and touristic practices. In arguing that the ethnosexual encounters that occur amongst tourist women and Maltese men must be understood as firmly situated within the historical, political and postcolonial contexts from which they arise, this research uses ethnographic and interview data to reveal that the language and imageries used to promote and describe the Maltese islands, depends on an Orientalist and exoticized discourse, which is strongly reminiscent of the representations of the Maltese islands that permeated colonial era discourse about the region. The women who participated in this study, imagined, and experienced the Maltese islands using two distinct categories, the changed and the unchanged, the modern and the ancient, and the advancing and the decaying. The narratives of the tourist women involved in this study demonstrated a desire by tourists to experience a spatiotemporal displacement. Driven by (colonial) nostalgia, and the liminoid desires to shed the constraints of modernity, these women desired a space outside of modernity, and participation in heterosexual relationships with men who embodied their sense of the unchanged satisfied that desire.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/38794
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectSociology
dc.subject.keywordsTourism studies
dc.subject.keywordsethnosexual tourism
dc.subject.keywordspostcolonialism
dc.titleTourism Representations, Imaginaries, and Encounters on the Maltese Islands
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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