Running Away or Running Toward? Pilgrimage as a Source of Women’s Leisure

The term ‘women’s leisure’ is an oxymoron, as interpretations of leisure for ethnic, diasporic women are usually bound in family or visiting friends and relatives (VFR) holidays and activities. This chapter, using autoethnography for data collection and contextualized to pilgrimage tropes, is viewed through the lens of Jafari’s Tourist Model. The six stages of the model are applied to my travels as a Zoroastrian woman: the terrors and joys of ‘solo’ but in a group, motivations for undertaking pilgrimage, and feelings while on pilgrimage through journeying to Iran. Diasporic identity with natal ‘homelands’, self-identity, and associations with important markers as a Zoroastrian woman are probed, along with the ideas inherent in pilgrimages of the ‘mind’, liberating one from the need to travel physically. Cementing shibboleths of economic independence, decision making, choice, and agency challenge perceptions of travel and generalizations about ethnic women’s leisure. The lasting impact of ‘pilgrimage’ and the confidence it instilled to travel ‘solo’ and shape future leisure experiences around self-identity and religiosity act as a clarion call for assimilation, but not subsummation.