Looking at You Looking at Me: An Autoethnographic Account of a Tattooed Female and (Re)appropriation of the Tourist Gaze
Abstract
As noted through Ury’s (2002) work, the tourist gaze serves as a literal and metaphorical construct describing the process involved in viewing the interculturally different Other. However, traditional understandings of the tourist gaze do not account for the reciprocity involved in the gazing process. Through the use of autoethnography enhanced with visual ethnographic artifacts, this essay dissects the presumed linear nature of the gaze, asserting that certain subjects may become objects of a (re)appropriated gaze in travel encounters. As evidenced through descriptions of travel in Mexican and Central American cultures, the tattooed female tourist serves as such a subject. Illustrating the (re)appropriated and (re)allocated tourist gaze, she is postured as an exotic Other, becoming one vehicle through which a Central American native or local may assess both U.S. American and/or tattoo culture as a whole.
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Copyright (c) 2011 Sonja Modesti
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