The Racialized Tourist Gaze: a transnational perspective on travel choices and access in Brazil-United States

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table Five: Racial Experiences and Perspectives of Black People and African Americans

Abstract

This study offers a comparative sociological examination of forty years of Brazilian and U.S. academic production on travel choices and spatial access to argue that the terminology of a "racialized tourist gaze" helps to understand contemporary dynamics of racial inequalities in travel as a mode of mobility.Drawing on John Urry’s canonical framework of the "tourist gaze," which identifies that socially organized practices informs travel, I utilize Omi and Winant’s focus on racialization processes to argue that race functions as a foundational axis that informs both the process of constructing an imaginary and the experience of being read by an external social gaze. By adopting a transnational perspective, this research reveals distinct analytical pathways that have historically operated in different directions. In the U.S., scholarship is anchored in a regime of institutionalized segregation, symbolized by the Green Book, where travel is a site of agency and strategies of self-protection against racial discrimination. Conversely, I argue that Brazilian studies reflect a different logic of access to travel, where mechanisms of racialization structure leisure consumption and subjective barriers. In this setting, agency is exercised to negotiate the legitimacy of occupying spaces of prestige within a "colorblind" framework that neglects racialized boundaries beyond material factors. A key finding is that the Black American tourist became a central subject in early Brazilian literature, shaping debates on how the experience is racialized. By synthesizing these trajectories, the "racialized tourist gaze" is formulated through its bidirectionality: first, as a lens through which the traveler anticipates and chooses destinations based on a racialized repertoire; and second, as a filter through which the tourist’s body is identified and categorized, directly impacting their access to the space.

Author

• Thaina Souza Santos, University of Sao Paulo