Reproducing-Resisting Race and Gender Difference: Examining India’s Online Tourism Campaign from a Transnational Feminist Perspective

Abstract

In this article, I examine the Indian state’s contemporary online tourism promotion campaign from a transnational feminist perspective by discursively considering twenty-four tourism promotion videos posted by the state on YouTube. While transnational feminists seek to examine how racialized, gendered selves are produced within processes of globalization, this work has largely neglected international tourism, which I argue is a key contemporary site of such production. While critical tourism scholarship has explored such issues, this work has nevertheless focused on how powerful Western and neocolonial actors reproduce colonial-era notions of racial and gender difference for other Western tourists, thereby neglecting a number of dimensions, including the critical role of the state. I argue that the state addresses audiences in addition to Western tourists in the global North, including the elite Indian diaspora in the global North and elite domestic Indians. For each audience, the state constructs racial and gender difference in a particular way, perpetuating colonial-era images for some audiences, disrupting them for others, and introducing new images of racial and gender difference for still others. Ultimately, I argue that the postcolonial neoliberal state engages in a complex process of self-racialization and self-sexualization—to both Westerners and domestic Indians—that points to state-sponsored international tourism as a key site of the reproduction of and resistance to racial and gender difference in contemporary globalization.