TOURISM PRACTICES OF EXPATRIATE WOMEN IN LUXEMBOURG A HETERONORMATIVE PLAY LEADING TO SOCIAL EMANCIPATION THROUGH EXOTICIZATION OF EUROPE

Résumé En

This paper draws on the results of my PhD dissertation in political and cultural geography that aims at unveiling the subjective experiences of globalization of expatriate women from an ethnographical case study located in Luxembourg. By focusing on the everyday place-making process during this international mobility experience, placing the body as primary space of analysis through a large range of socio-spatial practices, my doctoral work seeks to reveal expatriation as a distinctive mobility practice, weaving from gender coercion to emancipation, which contributes to the reproduction and the spread of heteronormativity in the context of growing globalization. By shedding light on how these women use their experience and situation of international mobility for local or regional touristic purposes, this paper aims at the blurring of the categories of transnational mobility and tourism mobility from a queer and postcolonial perspective. Within this framework, I plan, firstly, to describe how they extend their heteronormative practices of everyday space in their consumption of distinctive touristic places, which are implicitly white, bourgeois and heteronormative. Secondly, I will focus on the social role these touristic practices play for these women under gender constraints. I will thus show how they gain social privileges as well as cultural capital within a sort of patriarchal negotiation. I will finally reveal the forms of exoticism of Europe at stake during this this experience of transnational mobility, more specifically from non-European women, and how these geographical imaginaries orient their tourism practices ad contribute to provincializing the European continent.