Tourism Commons^™

Community-Based Tourism Development As Gendered Political Space: A Feminist Geographical Perspective, Neha Nimble

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

Drawing from a doctoral thesis on the construction of gender in livelihoods, this paper analyzes women’s experiences of participation in a local decentralized governance body (Village Tourism Development Committee) within a State implemented community based rural tourism development program that aims at political empowerment of women and the marginalised. Building a theoretical framework located in Feminist Political Geography, this paper adds to the knowledge on the gendered nature of space by examining the unexplored role of local decentralized governance and development agencies as political space in which culturally and historically embedded gender and caste roles intersect to impact the outcome …