Sticky Landscapes and Smooth Experiences: The Biopower of Tourism Mobilities in the Öresund Region

Abstract

As landscapes become ordered according to certain sets of economic, political, ecological or social practices and discourses, other possible orderings become limited in their potential. This article illustrates this with an example taken from the field of tourism and place marketing. The empirical focus is golf experiences in Scania, Sweden, bookable by individual consumers over the Internet. The ordering of what is termed the ‘golfscape’ is unfolded with the help of an assemblage of arguments taken from writings on mobility, biopower and subjectification, post‐foundational views of the materiality of the social and recent conceptualisations of the socio‐cultural and spatial impact of tourism. The booking sequence, i.e. the interaction between consumer and booking software, is analyzed as a series of negotiations, techniques and technologies of control and enactments of power. It is concluded that mobility studies can benefit from a Foucauldian power perspective when explaining practices of mobility and spatial fixation.

Keywords:

• tourism mobilities
• landscape ordering
• servicescape
• Foucault
• biopower
• actor network ontology
• golf

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge valuable comments from two anonymous referees. This work has received financial support from Sparbanksstiftelsen Skåne.