Naked and dirty: rethinking (not) attending festivals – Kath Browne (2009)

Author(s): Kath Browne
Publisher:  Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 7:2, pp. 115-132
Date: 2009

This article draws together critical tourism studies and events tourism literature offering insights into the diverse motivations for, and barriers to, attending the predominantly lesbian and separatist feminist festival, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Augmenting the literature on lesbian tourism, the article deploys a conceptualisation of festivals, such as gay pride, that seeks to contest dominant codes and norms as parties with politics. Using the data gathered from 222 qualitative questions, 10 interviews and 1 focus group, it explores the intertwining of music, feminist politics and temporality in understanding womyn’s motivations in attending a separatist festival. Distinctively, it demonstrates how barriers to, and motivations for, attending festivals can be paradoxically mutually formative. In this way, it becomes possible both to question tick-box motivational frameworks and to explore festival times and spaces as (re)making tourist encounters. Thus, the article opens up considerations and theorisations of festival attendee’ motivations looking to the complexities of experiences, motivations and time–space interactions.

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