Tourism Mobilities and the Travel Glance: Experiences of Being on the Move

ISSN： 1502-2269

Source： Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, Vol.1, Iss.2, 2001-12, pp. : 80-98

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Abstract

This article seeks to bring a cultural analysis of experiences of motorized - train and car - mobility into tourism studies. The tourist body senses landscapes as it is moved through them. First, it discusses how, in their early years, the train and the car were perceived as shocking speed machines that radically changed people's experiences of distance, movement, time and landscape and became discursively associated with various bodily pleasures and pains among different "movements" of tourists. It is argued that a contemporary pleasure of leisurely automobility is related to the car's flexibility and the imagined freedom and seduction of the road that together set in motion motorized flânerie. It focuses particularly upon the visual experience of mobility and asks what the implications of a mobility perspective are on how we can "think" touristic vision and landscape. It is argued that one effect of such mobility technologies is to change the nature of vision; they should be seen as simultaneous vision machines which facilitate and impose a specific viewing position, and, hence, way of seeing. Urry's notion of the "tourist gaze" (1990) has become paradigmatic in explaining touristic vision, but trains and cars provide a radically different viewing position and visual experience than the static photographic gaze: the travel glance. The mobile travel glance provides a visual "cinematic" experience of moving landscape images to the travelling yet corporally immobile "armchair" spectator. Thus, the travel glance will be captured through the metaphor of cinema.