Touring and obscuring: how sensual, embodied and haptic gay touristic practices construct the geopolitics of pinkwashing

Gay tourism is commonly studied through pride events in cities. Rethinking the role gay men’s bodies and politics play in the context of tourism to Israeli heritage sites, this paper contributes to debates on geopolitics and geographies of sexualities and the embodied approach to tourism. Analyzing daytrips through the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I argue that sensual, embodied and haptic practices, which are immanent to gay men’s travel cultures, play into a pinkwashing geopolitics in this specific circumstance. Thus, this paper conceptualizes pinkwashing mechanisms operation through heritage tourist sites just as much as they are produced via the presentation of Tel Aviv as a modern space of acceptance of LGBT sexualities, albeit obviously in different ways. Moreover, tourists’ notions of place and non-place construct how (urban) space is produced as meaningful while other (heritage) space is marginalized. Methodologically, I present a reflexive embodied ethnography, which relies on my researcher’s reflexivity to produce an analysis through a story.