Desiring the dark: ‘a taste for the unusual’ in North Korean tourism?

Abstract

Desire is a continuous force, fundamentally eccentric and insatiable, yet insufficiently explored in tourism studies. To examine desire in tourism to ‘unusual’ places of darkness and danger we propose four interpretations of this psychoanalytic concept: desire as recognition, ‘object’ cause of desire, desire for novelty, and desire for fantasy. Initial empirical evidence drawn from analysing online mass-media accounts of tourists in North Korea suggests that tourists access desire when travelling to such a country portrayed as one of the most reclusive, dangerous and feared in the world.

Keywords:

• desire
• North Korea
• psychoanalysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Paul Kingsbury, Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Kenneth Miller, the anonymous reviewers, the editors and editorial assistant for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the paper.