Volunteer tourism and gender: A feminist research agenda

Abstract

The popularity of volunteer tourism has increased since the 1990s, as have empirical studies and academic debates on the topic. Despite the broad topics covered – such as volunteers’ motivations, impacts on the local community, and the role of the sending organisations – approaches based on gender differences and feminism are still uncommon among critical tourism studies. Through a semi-systematic literature review, a variety of topics emerged, such as the gendered reproduction of colonial dynamics in voluntourism; volunteer tourists’ motivations, preferences and differences according to gender; and the expectations around traditional gender roles faced by volunteers, the local community and the sending organisations. This paper proposes a feminist research agenda where knowledge gaps and future lines of investigation are illustrated. Finally, feminist standpoint theory and its implications are discussed to offer a more in-depth exploration of the transformation of gender relationships in voluntourism experiences.