Rude Tourists? Contemporary Tourism as a Space of Incivility

Abstract

Contemporary discourses concerning tourism often criticize its negative impact on the environment and on the lives of local communities. In this paper we aim at analysing some of the discursive strategies that connote mass tourism as inherently impolite and disrespectful practice. To do so, we are going to focus on three main recurrent areas of criticism. Firstly, we are going to examine the question of the (in)authenticity of tourist experience, then we will analyze the dynamics of the "tourist gaze" (Urry 2011) and its consequences. In the last section we will finally deal with anti-touristic perspectives that consider mass tourism as a degenerating force capable of negatively affecting the identity and integrity of cities. Drawing on some insights derived from semiotic theory and the sociology of tourism, we intend to show how the connotation of tourism as a disrespectful and ill-mannered practice has important consequences on recent transformations of tourism itself.