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Composing 'the bubonic tourist' : an everyday creative and resistive tourist practice

University of British Columbia

I argue that the bubonic tourist is a resistive and reflexive everyday character. I hypothesize that the bubonic tourist can generate spatial and temporal transgressions that sanction increased social agency and thereby transform our sense of subjectivity. By appropriating, cannibalizing, and carnivalizing social codes and modes of operation, I considered how communities are created through performance. I argue that by departing and arriving from the centre to the margins of a peer, social, and cultural genus—what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus—marginalized individuals can both destabilize and inform demarcated and delimited categories. By performing and feeding back to social codes and norms experiences of the margins, the bubonic tourist creates fissures that engender self-reflexivity and meaning. I argue that, the bubonic tourist as a critical and creative practitioner can emancipate and empower the self and others. I considered how the bubonic tourist as an ethical individual is a member of a community that is created through performance. Finally, I considered how creative interventions might engender someone to transmogrify into the bubonic tourist and how as a methodology the bubonic tourist could have practical application. This study, seeks to outline the grounds in which instability can generate agency and a sense of self.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2008-11-20

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/2798

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/