Queering Hospitality: Roses Are Red. Gender Is Performative. Why Is Tourism so Heteronormative?

With this abstract we’re a team of researchers all affiliated with the Diversity and Difference Business in Society Platform at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) who’d like to propose a 1.5hr long workshop dedicated to exploring the hopeful possibilities of queering hospitality. We are, in that regard, less concerned with criticising what is in terms of excluding ‘welcoming’ practices that already exist; rather, what we want to do is to nurture and care for what could be by means of imagining what queered hospitality would look like, feel like, perhaps even smell, taste and sound like. To invoke this imaginary of a future desired place to be we take inspiration from recent movements in other fields of study (e.g. the project ‘Queering Accounting’) and norm-critical methods (e.g., Christensen 2018). Queering, in this regard, is not limited to the task of rendering queer or LGBT+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) lives visible to for example hospitality or event managers. This is but one aspect of queer matters, which are all about being at odds with dominant norms that render certain (groups of) people, their needs, dreams and wishes for the future invisible to management. How can we break with the idea, the norm of welcoming practices being universally hospitable to all? And how can we re-imagine, even envisioning tourism and hospitality through queer perspectives? These and other emerging questions are to be addressed during the workshop, whose intended outcome is a collectively co-created manifesto. Our aim is to get the manifesto published in a relevant journal as a call to action for research and practice avenues that can lead if not all then some of the way to a hopeful and queered hospitality future.