Walking and Tourism Mobilities Through a Gendered Lens

By exploring recent advancements in Tourism, Mobilities, and Gender Studies, this chapter considers walking tourism in order to advance knowledge of the differentials that inform mobility patterns. Walking tourism is built around long-distance walks to explore spaces, places, and landscapes, and has been significantly commoditised in the Global North in the last decade. While perspectives on walking tourism have been varied, the majority tend to present the nexus between walking and tourism as convivial, easily embodied, and socially inclusive. We contend that a more nuanced account of walking tourism is needed. To this end, we present findings from an exploratory mixed methods study conducted over the summer of 2021 in Italy, with the aim of investigating the practices and choices made regarding walking trips as experienced by those in different gender categories. Our results show that those who identify as women are more sensitive to how their gender may have constrained their walking holiday, resulting in a series of embodied and spatial safeguarding strategies. In conclusion, we suggest the importance of expanding qualitative research on walking tourism to explore femininities, masculinities, and queer identities, while also adopting intersectional and critical disability perspectives.