Queering Tourism: Paradoxical Performances of Gay Pride Parades

Gay Pride parades are often fantastic spectacles of corporeality with drag queens, buff boys, dykes on bikes, leather bears taking part, increasingly these parades are forming the basis of a growing international queer tourism market. From Sydney to Rome Queering Tourism analyses the paradoxes of gay pride parades as tourist events. The book explores how the public display of queer bodies--how they look, what they do, who watches, and under what regulations--is profoundly important constructing sexualized subjectivities of bodies and cities. Gay pride parades are annual arenas of queer public culture where embodied notions of subjectivity are sold, enacted, transgressed and debated. Drawing on extensive collections of interviews, visuals and written media accounts, photographs, advertisements and her own participation in these parades, Lynda Johnston gives a vibrant account of "queer tourism" in New Zealand, Australia, Scotland and Italy. In each place, Queering Tourism looks at how the relationshipbetween the viewer and the viewed produces paradoxical concepts of bodily difference, and considers how the queered spaces of gay pride parades may prompt new understandings of power and tourism knowledges.