Theorizing gender in homestay settings: Mobilities and/as power relations

Abstract

A contribution to critical work in hospitality, this article theorizes gendered power relations in various homestay settings. As such, it is an endorsement of – and response to – Shelagh Mooney’s call for critical problematization of ‘gender’, not least as a lens to better understanding the hospitality experiences of – and research approaches to – marginalized people, including women but also LGBTIQA+-identifying people. Discussed are the following ideas: intersectional identities and positionalities as these relate to gendered power relations; the role of mobilities in host/guest conflicts and resolutions; and the contested axiologies, epistemologies and ontologies that may undergird host–guest conflicts. We draw on our empirical research among homestay guests and hosts, including qualitative interviews with au pair, Workaway and WWOOFing hosts and guests and ethnographic research undertaken among Spanish-language learners in Guatemala and Nicaragua. Across all contexts, we focus on women’s and LGBTIQA+ people’s experiences in homestays – as part of wider mobilities – as prisms through which to understand the ways in which gendered identity work is undertaken and gender roles may be performed, negotiated, constructed and – above all – contested in hospitality settings more broadly as well as the associated mobilities, affordances and constraints. As such, this article contributes to the critical hospitality literature by queering gender in this context, understanding it as something one does/performs rather than is.