engleski

Sun, fun and COVID time: gendered experiences of pandemic summer vacation

The sociology of leisure and the concept of summer vacation can be understood as "the academic study of touring traveling for pleasure and recreational purposes" (Ritter 2017). The concept of summer vacations is a kind of planned seasonal departure from everyday routines, which is not planned, performed or tested outside of class, gender and socio-cultural conditions. Holidays as a form of seasonal holidays are simultaneously "rational and irrational", "earned" and "reward", "treats and sacrifices" (Hall & Holdsworth 2014). In the context of sociological theory, vacations are an important part of the sphere of leisure, which was traditionally understood as the sphere opposite to the sphere of work, daily activities and obligations (Lefebvre 1991). The ideal of vacation inextricably intertwines tourism with consumerist fantasies about hedonistic experiences, freedom, and personal happiness (Lipovetsky 2008 ; Sharpley, Hall & Henderson 2012). For an in-depth understanding of holidays, the gender dimension should be taken into account – holiday experiences, travel patterns, tourist consumer choices, destination choices, motivations, etc. are gendered (Vespestad & Mehmetoglu 2015). The idea of a perfect vacation is not fixed but changeable, dynamic and ambivalent and as such is open to multiple negotiations (Hall & Holdsworth 2014). Disasters and crises such as the current crisis caused by the COVID-19 virus have affected tourism, the tourist offer and decisions to go to the desired tourist destination (Pappas 2021 ; Isaac & Keijzer 2021). The paper is based on the analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted in the context of the project "Body, health, prevention: mediaconstructed discourses and lived cultures in the age of new ˈbio-realitiesˈ" (project funded by the Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar).

holidays, tourism, gender, COVID-19, semi-structured interviews

Rad je pripremljen i prezentiran u koautorskom sastavu: Zdenko Zeman, Brigita Miloš i Marija Geiger Zeman