| This dissertation is a semiotic-informed content analysis of advertisements in Travel + Leisure magazine from 1969 to 1999. This study was undertaken to answer questions about how females and males have been portrayed as tourists and hosts in tourism magazine advertising, how these images have changed, and how they correspond with global tourism and general advertising trends. This work is guided by Kinnaird & Hall's gender analysis framework for understanding tourism processes, the means-end-chain theory of advertising, and the media and communications claim that advertisements are ubiquitous cultural artifacts, which reify and perpetuate dominant ideology and cultural hegemony.; This study revealed that American gender stereotypes of work-a-day life are replicated and subverted, resisted and reinforced in tourism magazine advertising. Heterosexual couples predominated. Female tourists were more likely to have been on beaches in bathing suits than involved in outdoor recreation or sporting activities; and male tourists were more likely to have been involved in outdoor recreation/sporting activities than sunbathing on the beach, for example. At the same time, the status quo is challenged. Male hosts were more likely to have appeared in a service role than were female hosts. This stands in opposition to what tourists generally experience at home, where American women still carry the majority of responsibility for domestic tasks, and contradicts what is actually occurring in most tourist destinations, where females tend to dominate tourism employment. These advertisements were designed to connect with tourists' values through familiarity and appeal to escape and relaxation, named by tourists as top motivating factors in vacation decisions.; On one hand, this collection of tourism marketing advertising images reveal a Grand Narrative in which the hetero-patriarchal neo-colonial system of tourism is normalized through reproduction. This picture of tourism becomes an ordinary, commonsense scenario. On another hand, these images can become a site of resistance, in which female tourists can read themselves into an advertisement and turn an available, passive object into an active, vacationing/escaping subject.; We must remain aware of the images we create and circulate, as well as how many ways we do or not interpret the ones we find. |
