Disempowered Hosts? A Literature Review of Muslim Women and Tourism

The scholarly study of tourism can often be divided into research involving either hosts or guest, which has created a simplistic binary that for many is simply untrue as we find ourselves as both hosts and guests at distinct times, but also even simultaneously. Tourism research that focusses on gender has to some extent followed similar patterns, analyzing one or the other, but when this research is geographically categories as a whole, colonial patterns emerge in conceptualizations. As such, women from the global South are almost always immobilized hosts. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the representations of Muslim women in tourism research, it does so by reviewing the tourism literature concerned with Muslim women participants since 2010. The chapter finds that Muslim women are often researched as a homogenous host category, and contributes to the extant literature by highlighting the trend to conceptualise Muslim women not only as immobile hosts, but also disempowered hosts. In order to overcome this tendency and fully portray the nuances of gender and tourism, future research should include an understanding of intersectionality in their analyses.