Working as a local tour guide in a southern European city
a perspective from feminist geographies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46661/rec.11747Keywords:
labor geography, social reproduction, intersectionality, production of touristic space, platform capitalismAbstract
This article deals with the socio-spatial organization of labor today, taking employment as a local guide, that is, the interpretation of a city's heritage for its visitors, as a case study. The analytical perspective is twofold: both nourished by feminist thought and the theory of the production of space. The empirical dimension is based on 14 in-depth interviews carried out in Seville with the aim of finding out about the working conditions of the people who are employed as local guides in the city, as well as the relationship they develop with the urban space in which they carry it out. The results point in the same direction as the literature considered in the theoretical framework: women experience relations of inequality working as local guides, specifically regarding the tasks of social reproduction and the embodied work in the streets of the city. All this takes place in a touristified urban space, consciously built in the last decades, which is sustained by precarious work exercised to a greater extent by women, many of them racialized. It is, therefore, a structural precarity that is experienced in an interscalar way: from the most intimate of the corporal scale to the insertion of Andalusia in the spatial division of labor on a European scale.
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