Tourism as a space of self expression: Festival, body and place

Festivals are rituals that have been bringing people together since ancient times under the influence of various social, cultural, religious and economic motivations. Festivals have played an important role in social life ever since, although they have acquired different meanings in the historical process. More recently, in modern and postmodern thinking, they have been transformed into a tourism attraction and assumed new meanings and roles. Today, there are many festivals which are very different from one another in terms of scale and scope, and they have a significant share in international tourism mobility. Festivals offer a very deep research field, which is undergoing new transformations with the conduct of event studies and critical tourism studies. The fact that knowledge production in festivals is as dynamic and fluid as event practices, creates new inquiry areas under poststructuralist effects. One of these areas is the pride-themed festivals that have attracted worldwide attention for the last two decades. In this research the questioning of masculine and disembodied tourism knowledge production is regarded as a valuable starting point and it examines the subjectivity of the participants in pride festivals with a particular focus on the areas of expression provided by the Amsterdam Pride Festival to its participants. The study aims to contribute to the national and international tourism literature in this framework. The purpose of the research is to learn the bodily and spatial interactions that arise in the pride festivals, an important tourism practice, as well as to expose the experiences of the participants by examining their bodily expression areas and related evaluations. As the aim is to understand and interpret participant experiences, a qualitative research method is adopted in the research. In-depth interviews held at the Amsterdam Pride Festival and participant observer notes obtained by attending one of the most important events of the festival, were subjected to qualitative content analysis. Findings of the research show that participants create expression areas far from heteronormativity in their spatial and bodily interactions, yet the interaction patterns established both in space and in their encounter with heterosexual tourists during the festival influences the experiences and limits the divergences from the heteronormative order. At the same time, the findings reveal that the festival is undergoing a structural change as a tourism practice, and the pride festivals are transformed into a political entertainment activity with the intrusion of tourism sector. Keywords: Festival, body, space, pride.