Embodying liminality : exploring the 'affects' of sexual encounters in backpacker and volunteer tourism

This chapter brings together findings from two ethnographic studies on youth tourists/travellers to examine the sexual interactions that can emerge in volunteer tourism and backpacker tourism. By drawing on two studies, we make connections between volunteers and backpackers as, in both cases, the tourists at the centre of the research were young (on average between the ages of 18 and 30), travelling for longer periods of time than ‘mass tourists’, and on trips that might typically be positioned as being ‘transformative’ (see, for example, Wearing et al., 2010). Further, despite growing academic interest in volunteer tourism and backpacker tourism and the connections frequently made between youth identities and these tourism forms, few studies have examined the sexual activities and encounters of these youth travellers (an exception being Berdychevsky et al., 2010). This is despite the plethora of youth studies outside of the tourism literature examining sexual identity and behaviours. In this chapter we make a contribution to this gap in tourism research and, by drawing comparisons from two separate projects on youth tourism experiences, we obtain a more detailed picture of the complex and contradictory sexual dynamics that can emerge corporeally, affectively and discursively between tourists and tourists, and tourists and locals.