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Tourism Review
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Tourisme et biopolitique

Biopolitics in critical tourism theory: a radical

critique of critique
Rodanthi Tzanelli

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URL: https://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/8242
DOI: 10.4000/viatourism.8242
ISSN: 2259-924X

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La biopolitique dans la théorie critique du tourisme : une critique radicale de la critique - URL : https://
journals.openedition.org/viatourism/8252 [fr]

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 Biopolitics in critical tourism theory: a radical critique of critique 1

Biopolitics in critical tourism

theory: a radical critique of critique
Rodanthi Tzanelli

Introduction
1 In tourism analysis, “biopolitics” is a knife with a double-edged blade cutting at both
ends (theory and practice) sharper than it should. Originally envisaged and theorised as
part of the philosophical portfolio of well-being by European nation states, tourism was
subsequently also theorised by scholars as a pathway to performative pedagogy and
liberation from cultural and institutional insularity (Dann and Liebmann Parinello,
2009). The institutional portfolio (of welfare as well-being) continues to inform the
study of biopolitics in tourism. However, it helps to remind scholars that biopolitics in
organisational studies advocates a grim, structured view of the social world as a
system, which can lead to the human subject’s passivity towards injustice and the
strangulation of leisurely freedom and free play at the same time. The “good life” is not
achieved just by tackling social injustices, but also by attending to the vicissitudes of
access to leisure time, which ensures personal self-growth and the maintenance of
emotional health. As I proceed to explain in latter parts of this article, social justice and
leisure/pleasure could inform the design of tourism futures in more balanced ways if
the very concept of “biopolitics” is revised.
2 In section I, I provide a short explication of the conceptual origins of biopolitics,
followed by some key thematic applications in tourism theory and practice. In section
II, I call for a more refined use of it in terms of practice, subject orientation (to whom/
what it can be applied) and theoretical development. I conclude in section III with some
observations on the concept’s inherent limitations, which should be taken seriously in
the development of a social and cultural theory of tourism, travel, and leisure.

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 Biopolitics in critical tourism theory: a radical critique of critique 2

I. The origins of biopolitics and applications in tourism

analysis
3 The social science literature on biopolitics is vast and impossible to acknowledge in this
short essay. Mostly associated with Michel Foucault’s (2003) work on the management
of human populations through the institutional vessels/vehicles of power (the state,
the police, the clinic, the prison and so forth), and Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) thesis on
power’s hold over the human right to live or die (biopolitics after Hannah Arendt’s
work on bíos or biographical life vs. zōé or biological life), the concept entered the
analytical lexicon of tourism theory in the last few decades. To establish a more
panoramic view, in Fuller’s (2011, 2012) programme for a comprehensive philosophy of
social science, biopolitics occupies one of the three key domains of human interests -
the other two being the ecological (or the organisation of environmental domains,
spanning those of sociality and nature) and the cybernetic (the governance of
cyberspace). At first this “programme” appears to conveniently reflect the current
concerns of critical tourism studies scholars with labour justice (biopolitics – Lapointe
and Coulter, 2020), climate change (ecologies - Higgins-Desbiolles et al., 2019) and the
mobilisation of digital tools in sustainable development (cybernetics – Germann Molz,
2014). However, the application of this neat division of critical analysis into three
interest-based domains in real contexts of tourism mobilities is not failproof. In real
contexts of tourism mobility biopolitics crosses and interacts with ecological and
cybernetic processes all the time. This real-life blending of human interests is better
addressed in some scholarship, such as that associated with the “new mobilities
paradigm” [e.g., see Sheller’s (2016) transition to systems theory].
4 The most established uses of biopolitics in tourism analysis focus on the
instrumentalization of labour in tourism (Coulter and Lapointe, 2020) via what I shall
term technologies of ‘family resemblance’. This ‘resemblance’ is fictional in the sense
that it is constructed by an institutional authority, whether this is the family, the state,
or the market. To apply and explain further, we may consider how lumping together
individuals as labour (taxonomizing them) is presented by markets as a ‘natural drive’,
an impulse to grow business through the maximisation of efficiency. “Technologies of
family semblance” enable institutions and independent business alike to discipline
bodies and minds so as to maximise obedience to power. This strategy or ‘signature of
power’ (Dean, 2013, p. 4) ensures that the human subject is individualised as a species
(the labourer) rather than an aggregate of bodies via processes of sociation (a group of
creative workers). However, making human bodies obedient and productive does not
optimise the state of life (i.e. ensure wellness) but mainly that of (capitalist)
production.
5 Notably, the biopolitical sorting of labour (that is, the process of disciplining workers’
bodies and minds) depends on mechanisms of “normalisation” - what begins from the
moment humans are born/inculcated into a community. In this respect, biopolitics is
always about the maintenance of abstract laws of progress and obedience: the making
of heritage based on history and genealogy that transforms things and humans into
families. With over a decade between them, Ek and Hultman (2008) and Lapointe and
Coulter (2020) attempt to build a critique of old managerialist approaches to the
tourism industry so as to unmask interplays of power with the symbolic order of the
social world of labour. Biopolitical sorting in networks of tourism has also been

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 Biopolitics in critical tourism theory: a radical critique of critique 3

discussed in regard to both “sticky” non-human categories, such as landscape and land
in tourism destinations (Minca, 2010; Lapointe, 2021) and hypermobile human
categories, such as professional/business travel and professional migration networks
connected to film tourism, event-staging, travel dark/heritage tourism and
voluntourism (Tzanelli, 2015, 2016, 2017).
6 Such macro-socio-political approaches have been complemented with considerations of
the meso-level of human socialites and cultural interactions, which support the
symbolic orders of gender, class, disability, and race/ethnicity. For example, the most
basic unit of sociation, the family was examined as a mediator between the
effectiveness of disciplinary mechanisms and the uncertainty connected to biopolitical
diversity in tourism and hospitality labour (Tzanelli, 2011). It is not coincidental that
such research focuses on the social variables of gender and sexuality, as well as race
and ethnicity: they all participate (become complicit) in the classification and
hierarchisation of human worth. Thus, Veijola and Jokinen’s (1994) discussion of the
body in tourism acknowledges the importance of massification (versus
individualisation) in the tourist’s release from biopolitical sorting in leisure contexts.
Tzanelli’s (2011) analysis of the ways women are exploited within family-based tourism
enterprise supporting nationalist values, shows how key institutions (the state and the
family) adopt the logic of the market to taxonomise labour in tourism (i.e., men are
business leaders and women are unpaid labour).
7 In short, institutions do communicate with systems of exploitation: for example, sex
work, especially in developing countries that experienced colonisation (system) has
been a clear biopolitical vehicle researched by tourism studies scholars for decades
without an explicit reference to Foucault (Ryan and Hall, 2001).
8 If one wishes to trace the origins of such debates in “grand tourism theory”, the
influential theses of “the tourist gaze” (Urry, 1990) and “worldmaking” (Hollinshead,
1999, 2009a) serve as appropriate starting points. Admittedly, Urry’s reflections on the
ways tourism professionals systematise the ways both post-industrial advertising and
tourists apprehend tourist destinations and Hollinshead’s (2009a) argument about the
authorial (but collaborative with tourist industries) role of the nation state in the
production of marketable/touristified identity in tourist destinations do not explicitly
draw on biopolitics but the adjacent disciplinary couple of power/knowledge. However,
it is worth bearing in mind that biopolitics is embedded:
a. In the individualisation of human subjects, which is achieved by the twin processes of
professionalisation and citizenship. These are prerequisites for a better understanding of
who is involved in the production of the tourist gaze (as per Urry 1990 and Urry and Larsen,
2011) and how/where from they draw legitimacy for their involvement in it (Guerrón
Montero, 2020).
b. In what Foucault (1979, p. 135) has termed the “symbolics of blood”, which grant the father/
ruler of a household or dominion with the right to “dispose” of members not conforming to
its fundamental values. This idea guides the spatialisation of heritage and its concomitant
marketisation in global markets that Hollinshead (2009b discussed as a worldmaking
mechanism, which “advance [s], manufacture[s], or correct[s] held designations or
expressions about culture, heritage, [or] nature” (Hollinshead and Suleman, 2018, p. 204).

10 These orientations communicate with the current use of the term, which concentrates
on the ways structured power circulates in the dominant economic system of mobility:

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 Biopolitics in critical tourism theory: a radical critique of critique 4

capitalism. Behind these structured mobilities of money and human bodies (travellers
and labour), hides the selective dissolution of national borders for the convenience of
big enterprises. Otherwise put, according to this argument, national institutions have
either lost their rigor or were rendered obsolete in the organisation (rather than
“institutionalisation”) of norms, values and thus discourses driving development in the
tourist sector.

II. Theoretical, contextual and practice adjustments

11 I suggest that critical tourism analysis may manage to design hopeful futures beyond
unrealisable utopias if it pushes for the implementation of a revisionist pragmatic
approach to agency. Agamben’s (1996) orientation towards political theory before the
post-structuralist turn, and Steve Luke’s (1974) “radical view” of power suggest
pragmatic revisions to Foucault’s view on biopolitics without discarding the
importance of norms in the civil organisation of human development. Pragmatism is
already part of the critical tourism analysis on ecological considerations focusing on
the environment (Caton, 2012; Grimwood and Caton, 2018), but such approaches are too
focused on particular post-humanist philosophies in which ecological ethics assert the
primacy of the natural world. At the other end of the spectrum, the organisational and
business-orientated origins of tourism favour Foucault’s view over continuities
between discipline and biopolitics. In the late 1980s tourism studies scholarship the
polemical response to “business as usual” drew on systems theory (Krippendorf, 1986)
to address the presence of a “neo-colonial” model of exploitation of countries/cultures
serving as tourist destinations (formed colonised parts of the world or peripheries) and
satellites of Western tourist business (subordinates to the “world centre”). Such
approaches persist in philosophies of degrowth applied to tourism to date for good
reasons: the former colonised countries remain tourist hotspots exploited by capitalist
networks. It is just that this approach is not enough when we deal with multiple crises
that do not affect just the poor and the disenfranchised of the Global South but all of us.
12 The shift to post-structuralist biopolitics in the late 20 th and the 21 st century tourism
studies endorsed an even more insidious vision of power than that introduced by
Frankfurt School scholars (Ateljevic at al., 2013). As true descendants of Althusser’s
(2014 [1970]) thesis on interpellation that is free flowing in society and thus impossible
to locate and address institutionally, Foucaultians argue that power subjects the human
not just unconsciously but also willingly to the rules of the market. Ironically, such
total visions are ameliorated in political theory through examinations of what actually
constitutes agency in the first place. In sociology, thinkers such as Margaret Archer
(2003) advocate deliberative thinking and reflexivity, but do not address agency qua
power in their work (they speak of structures instead, thus not considering systems of
inequality. Contrariwise, Lukes (1974) proposed the ideal of a “community” of morally
autonomous subjects, who knowingly and consciously give consent to the exercise of
power, which nevertheless acts in their best interests in transparent and just ways.
Similar ideas are hinted in Agamben’s (1998) approach to human freedom, which are
more orientated towards questions of power legitimisation qua human rights. The
concept of “bio” is transformed into a vehicle of autobiography, enlarging
understandings of belonging through ongoing engagements with others in

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 Biopolitics in critical tourism theory: a radical critique of critique 5

communities of ascent, shared interest and thus processes of “becoming” a planetary

citizen in small ways (Tzanelli, 2022, forthcoming).
13 It is worth stressing that although not belonging to the same epistemological and
ontological traditions, the political programmes of Lukes, Agamben and Foucault are all
part of European cultural and political thought. Unlike them, theorists of degrowth and
post-colonial/decolonial critics of biopolitics are critical of both European political
legacies (colonialism) and epistemologies (anthropocentrism, ocularcentrism). Such
perspectival differences persist in tourism analysis. The problem with such either-or
approaches is that they strand practice between a totalitarian vision of
anthropocentrism that maintains evil governance (while also reifying the passive
victimisation of subjected human populations for self-valorisation), and a new post-
humanist agenda in which nature’s rights should take precedence over the extended
use of technological infrastructures that make the world move in non-natural ways
(e.g., digital tourism). But here is a reality check: as a species, we have spent some
thousand years producing technological civilisations, which are now identified as “part
of the current problem” – and this comes under the names of the death of nature or
“ecocide” (Hall, 2022). Clearly, this post-biopolitical claim is anti-cybernetic and anti-
ecological, where “ecology” stands for the needs of human life. The absurdity of some
extreme environmentalist activism leads to unworkable questions: whose agency and
rights can be promoted, if human interest is muted, given that the animate natural
world will never speak a language that a legislator can understand? Should we not
propose instead a more radical view on power over earthly forms life, in which we do
not target particular systems of exploitation or inequality, but the systemic roots of
ecological neglect (see also Córdoba Azcárate, 2020)? I call this a fight against ecological
speciesism in tourism. I define this as a commitment to de-metaphorizing (“de-
fetishizing” or de-tokenising) human difference in projects of degrowth and
development alike, to better situate human and non-human difference in non-
utilitarian terms (on colonial responsibility and metaphor see Stinson et.al., 2021). A
post-humanism attacking biopolitical classification can be as damaging to planetary
diversity as the call to put an end to “ecocide” in tourism (Hall, 2022).
14 To translate my proposition to a workable social, cultural, and political programme,
tourism scholars may need to take a number of ethico-epistemological steps: first, they
should not analytically conflate tourism as an activity and an industry, allowing for
free-moving transitions between the agency of tourist subjects and tourism labour and
the organisational and normative structures of tourist business. This would allow for an
exploration of the pragmatic aspects of human agency over power and corporate
violence, discarding the idea of complete human automation/subjection (the Foucault
“plague” of over-structuring). Second, they should both investigate actual examples
and advocate pragmatic models of agency that can drive social change in tourism and
hospitality contexts. Pragmatic action is rarely “revolutionary”, but is, or can be
counter-biopolitical, in that it can revise biased classifications of populations by
business and the nation-state. Third, and concomitantly, they should discard practice
seemingly driven by commitment to justice, which in fact marginalises the “objects” of
care, such as exploited labour, indigenous populations and natural ecosystems acting as
tourist destinations. The latter is an obscene aspect of biopolitical sorting camouflaged
under an optics of care for the vulnerable. Fourth, a more careful approach needs to be
adopted to biopolitical context. Especially in the age of species extinction and extreme
urbanisation, considering the “bio” of political agendas demands that we step out of

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 Biopolitics in critical tourism theory: a radical critique of critique 6

our comfortable conceptions of biopower based on distinctions between species

individualisation and massification. The post-humanist paradigm propagates a new
world in which humans are not just dethroned from planetary biopower but
consciously step down in favour of preserving and improving a collective multispecies
future. However, even this proposition comes with epistemological (for tourism
scholars) and ontological (for the studied subject) challenges.

III. Eurocentrism, totalitarianism = post-humanism,

post-agentism, environmental fascism
15 Let me shift perspective to critique the critique now: because biopolitics entered
tourism analysis from political-philosophical debates, it ended up challenging tourism
as an activity in leisure theory vis-à-vis the cultural-industrial organisation of tourism-
related labour. The development of “critical perspectives” in tourism theory slowly
remove the subject areas’ distinctiveness, turning it into a “case study” of ethics,
political philosophy, social theory, or organisational studies. This may be fine for a
political theorist or a sociologist, but anyone self-identifying as a “tourism studies
scholar” risks becoming an “endangered species” (with apologies for the pun). So far,
the outcome of this move toward grand theory (biopolitics) has been a thematic study
of blended tourism-and-labour, which is better explored in the new mobilities
paradigm as part of the politics and cultural poetics of purposive or directed (towards
an end) movement (Hannam et al., 2006; Urry, 2007). But this is not just about tourism
analysis.
16 Also, regarding the new post-humanist movement in tourism analysis, we must never
forget that the devil is in the detail and often speaks the language of environmental
fascism: tourism theory aspiring to eliminate biopolitics may unwitting adopt the so-
called “Rapoport’s Rule”, which suggests that if a species such as the human lives or
travels in biodiverse environments in temperate climate zones (read: the new Global
South), they are de facto Anthropocenic neo-colonisers, putting at risk local ecosystems
by crowding and eliminating other local species (Fuller, 2006, pp. 184-135). This is an
unfortunate reading of natural economy as a disturbed equilibrium between species
and individuals (in Foucault’s terms), which turns post-human collaborations into guilt
games targeting particular groups, usually from the middle social strata. As much as
such groups may engage in pollution or inhospitable behaviour, they are also the only
ones with clout who act in tourism networks as supporters of various local causes,
promoting variations of tourism amenable to development. In addition, some strands of
post-humanism may end up forgetting that there is no ideal/universal human subject
to identify as the enemy of the environment tor natural ecosystems. If we think smaller
for a while, human populations display such “superdiversity”, that saving nature may
result in a new Holocaust for some social groups (for example, the old and the disabled,
who may be producing more carbon footprint out of necessity), or even the whole parts
of the developing world, which relies on tourism revenues and thus does not
necessarily want to degrow. There is such a thing as a mindless moralisation of
“problems”, which traps those in real need in a world of rules without practical
solutions.
17 In conclusion then, tourist scholars may have to steer clear of moral universalisms to
consider how both different species and different human categories develop

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 Biopolitics in critical tourism theory: a radical critique of critique 7

capabilities rather than “resiliencies” in different ecological contexts. To dispel any

confusions, I suggest that we must learn to think of different ways of “homing” human
and non-human alterities, without turning their homes into exiles. Because
understanding and recognising difference calls for dialogue with it, the post-human
programme cannot function without the plurality of human voices – hence, their
biographical signatures. This is not the signature of power advocated in Foucault’s view
of the world, but an implementation of Arendt’s vision of a polis/power on a mission to
gather hospitality labour, tourism professionals and tourists in appropriate cultural
spaces of tolerance for another and each other in small, workable ways.

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 Biopolitics in critical tourism theory: a radical critique of critique 9

ABSTRACTS
The article reviews the uses of the concept of biopolitics in critical tourism studies. After a brief
genealogical account of the concept in political philosophy, it follows its transposition and its
thematic applications in tourism theory and practice. It is argued that biopolitics is only one of
the three key domains of ‘human interests’, which must be subjected to a radical critique in
tourism studies and practice. Such critique should be entwined with questions of (a) institutional
and discursive power in the making of tourism worlds and destinations (‘worldmaking’ –
Hollinshead, 2009a), but also, crucially (b) the analogous counter-discourses instituted by critical
tourism studies scholars, who seek to legitimise their own epistemic community and thus
produce a majoritarian voice endorsing an apparent (but not interest or motivation free) support
of morally just causes for a better human and planetary futures.

AUTHOR
RODANTHI TZANELLI
She is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Mobilities Area in the Bauman
Institute, University of Leeds, UK. She is a social and cultural theorist with particular reference to
hybrid mobilities (tourism, travel, migration, social movements, and new technologies) as well as
the representational contexts of contemporary crises such as climate change. Her work on
cinematic tourism is widely regarded in studies of popular and public culture. She is the author
of numerous critical interventions, research articles, chapters, and 15 monographs, including
Space, mobility, and crisis in mega-event organisation: Tokyo Olympics 2020's atmospheric irradiations,
with Routledge (2022).

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