Neoliberal Tourism: Solo Women’s Travel as Spiritual Self-Investment

• In Event: Rationalizing Tourism: Neoliberalism, Neocolonialism, and Self-Care Culture

Abstract

In the 21st century, women traveling alone have become increasingly visible. Narratives of solitary women’s travel have worked their way into the public imaginary through best-selling books-turned-movies such as Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love (2006) and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), while solo women’s travel blogs and online communities have proliferated. The largest Facebook group devoted to the activity, The Solo Female Travel Network, has gained over 560,000 members since launching in 2016. This paper analyzes social media representations of solo women’s travel alongside the solo women’s travel movement urtext, Eat Pray Love, a memoir that follows Gilbert on a “spiritual journey” through Italy, India, and Indonesia following a divorce. I also draw on over 20 ethnographic interviews that I conducted with solo women travelers. Through this analysis, I show the neoliberal logic underlying this travel movement, with tourists drawing on the language of self-help culture to frame their trips as economically rational investments in self-betterment.

I begin by highlighting crucial differences between women’s journeys based on factors including race, age, nationality, disability, and sexual orientation. These differences reveal variations around the resources women have to “invest” in travel and their desired “payoff.” Next, I look to Eat Pray Love to highlight key themes of solo women’s travel, especially the notions that solitary travel fosters introspection and can function as a way to “refresh” and reorient one’s life. Contextualizing this memoir within solo women’s travel online communities and my interviews with travelers, I outline the various rationalizations for solo trips and testimonies of personal transformation.

Overall, I demonstrate how problematic neoliberal logics have leached into the solo women’s travel movement. Workers under late-stage capitalism tend not to think of themselves as exchanging labor for capital, but instead as enterprises or entrepreneurs, working and spending money to bring about a future payoff. Speaking to this trend, Foucault states, “The man of consumption, insofar as he consumes, is a producer. What does he produce? Well quite simply he produces his own satisfaction” (226). Foucault was certainly not picturing solo women travelers with this description, yet their quests for self-betterment are frequently framed in similar terms of economic rationality. Women such as Elizabeth Gilbert invest in travel — financially, temporally, and emotionally — with the goal of self-betterment. They consume to produce their own fulfillment. Ultimately, I show how popular narratives of solo travel such as Eat Pray Love do not promote women’s aimless idling as modern flâneuses or celebrate pursuits of pleasure and leisure without any end goal (Elkin). Instead, they imply that women’s mobility is only laudable when tied to self-improvement. Yet, I suggest, solo women’s trips can be admirable, feminist quests for joy amidst oppressive conditions when undertaken ethically and disentangled from neoliberal logics.

Works Cited:
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, New York, Macmillan, 2016.

Author

• Leah Butterfield, University of The Bahamas