A Geopolitics of Pleasure. The Articulations of Tourism in Central America

Keywords: geopolitics, feminism, tourism, value, pleasure
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 29

Abstract

This presentation draws from my doctoral research proposal, a relational comparison of the geopolitical trajectories of tourism development in Central America (Costa Rica and Guatemala). In it I propose to explore how the forces of two major geopolitical projects, neoliberalism and pacification, shape the spatial transformation of communities that came to be articulated to the global economy through alternative tourism. Bringing together the Marxist theory of value, the feminist and Marxist critiques to geopolitics, and queer postcolonial theory, I define that what is at work in the region is a geopolitics of pleasure that seeks to govern desire and pleasure by the production of places of difference and subordination that reproduce the vitality of some bodies while exhausting others. This geopolitics of pleasure recasts the orientation of historical imperial formations and racial and sexual regimes of representation through discourses of heritage and ecotourism that invoke peace and economic development.