Theorising gender and tourism in island locations

Islands have always fascinated the imagination (Gillis, 2007). An important aspect of this fascination has to do with the idea that ‘islands suggest themselves as tabulae rasae: potential laboratories for any conceivable human project, in thought or in action. There is something about the insular that beckons specificity, greater malleability, less inhibition’ (Baldacchino, 2006, p.5-6). For similar reasons, islands also seem to fascinate the tourist imagination. Thompson (2006) describes how already from the 1890s, the emerging British tourism industry engaged in a conscious effort to transform and visually promote the islands of the Caribbean ‘into spaces of touristic desire for British and North American traveling publics’ (Thompson, 2006, p.4).