The moral gaze in commercialized dark tourism

ABSTRACT

The moral issues related to dark tourism, which commercializes death and disaster, have aroused heated academic debate. This paper adopts an analytical framework that explores the moral gaze of tourists in the context of commercialized dark tourism in the time and space dimensions. The findings show that different orientations to the past or present (in the time dimension) and different understandings of dark sites and dark places (in the space dimension) bring about various moral conflicts for tourists. Four types of moral gaze are identified: the critical gaze, tolerant gaze, supportive gaze, and sympathetic gaze. This paper makes a theoretical contribution to the study of the morality of dark tourism and promotes the understanding of the relationships between dark tourism and post-disaster reconstruction. Managerial implications are discussed with regard to how to reconcile moral conflicts for the sustainability of dark tourism.

KEYWORDS:

• Dark tourism
• moral conflict
• moral gaze
• commercialization
• Yingxiu

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the Humanity and Social Science Youth foundation of Ministry of Education of China (19XJC630001).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Youth Fund Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (No.19XJC630001) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42001150).