Gender Strategies at Work: Informal Female Tour Guides in Yangshuo West Street

ABSTRACT

Many studies on the lives of female workers have shown the roles and statuses of women are influenced by their workplaces, which can be relatively gendered, such that female workers are confronted with various job challenges and have to come up with their own gender strategies to survive. However, these studies mainly focus on formal workplaces where female workers have social and economic power to some extent, which is significantly different from the situation in the tourism industry for front-line female workers who do not have any power. Through a spatial lens, this article focuses on female employees’ working characteristics and gender strategies in the tourism industry. Yangshuo West Street is selected to be the study site, as informal female tour guides in public spaces are very common there. By using qualitative methods including interviews and observations, this research indicates that female workers take advantage of various gender strategies to survive. These strategies include wearing close-fitting clothes to make prominent their feminine characteristics, developing supportive social networks with surrounding entrepreneurs, abiding by silence rules among peers and mediating with city inspectors. They endow a gendered nature with public spaces, where they struggle for survival and employment benefits by using gendered strategies.

摘要

关于女性工作者的很多研究表明女性的角色和地位会受到她们工作场所的影响。工作场所是相对性别化的，女性在其中面临各种工作挑战并不得不利用她们的性别策略进行应对。然而，这些研究主要关注正式的工作场所，女性就业者在某种程度上具有社会和经济权⼒。这种状况与旅游行业中没有任何权⼒的一线女性就业者明显不同。通过空间角度，本文关注旅游业中女性就业者的工作特征和性别策略。本文以阳朔西街为案例，在那里非正规导游在公共空间中非常普遍。通过使用包含访谈法和观察法在内的质性研究方法，本研究表明女性就业者利用不同的性别策略去应对。这些策略包括穿着紧身衣以凸显她们的女性特征，与周边企业主建立支持性的社会网络，遵守同行之家默认的“规矩，以及与城管进行漠视和斡旋。她们利用性别策略主动争取生存空间和就业利益，并赋予公共空间强烈的性别色彩。

KEYWORDS:

• Gender strategies
• public space
• working features
• informal tour guides
• Yangshuo West Street

关键词:

• 性别策略
• 公共空间
• 工作特征
• 非正规导游
• 阳朔西街

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. [41371156].

Notes on contributors

Hui Wang

Hui Wang is a PhD Candidate at the School of Tourism Management, Sun Yat-sen University. Her research interests include small tourism firms, feminist geography [email protected].

Honggang Xu

Honggang Xu is a professor at the School of Tourism Management, Sun Yat-sen University. Her research interests include regional tourism development, tourism planning, and system dynamics [email protected].