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1In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) granted pandemic status to the SARS-CoV 2 virus responsible for the disease that was to be named COVID-19. This status resulted in the launch one of the greatest biopolitical experiments of our time, if not of modern history. A state of exception was announced, this was broken down into a set of health measures aimed at limiting the progression of the virus. These health measures have put society, and the bodies of the humans who constitute society, under tension. A process of immunization was imposed (Esposito, 2011) which aimed to protect society from the virus by relying on limitations on sociability through social distancing and isolation. Thus the importance of life, Bios in the strict sense, appeared in all its importance for all social, political and economic processes. These exceptional measures have also revealed great differences between one society and another in this combination of life and politics, from strict confinements to voluntary measures, from compulsory vaccination to the complete closure of borders, the pandemic has acted as an index of biopower by showing that though the so-called biological processes are general, their political understandings differ from one society to another.

2These links between life, politics and power are at the heart of the questioning of contemporary social sciences, among other things through the emergence of the notion of biopolitics. This importance of the biopolitical analyzes is such that some authors even speak of a biopolitical turn in the social sciences (Campbell and Sitze, 2013; Lemke, 2011; Mills, 2017). By biopolitics we mean: the political production of life marked by a desire to manage the lives of populations and the very conceptualization of the life and death of individuals (Foucault, 1997; Minca, 2010; Tzanelli, 2016) to produce new forms of subjectivity (Foucault, 2004; Mills, 2017) through language, values ​​and affect (Hardnt and Negri, 2000; Lapointe, Sarrasin, and Benjamin, 2018). The notion of biopolitics comes from a desire, mainly following the work of Michel Foucault, to be interested in the combination of life and politics; between life in its many variations, the actual mechanisms of life, bodies and organisms, but also at the scale of population management (Foucault, 1994). How does power and its mechanisms in societies protect, regulate or abandon life? As part of this special issue of Via Tourism Review, we focus more specifically on the place of tourism in this intersection between life and politics, between bios and power. But first, a small detour to examine exactly what biopower and biopolitics are.

3Many attribute the birth of the concept to Michel Foucault in his The Will to Know (Foucault, 1994). Indeed at the end of this book, which is the first volume of the history of sexuality, Michel Foucault (1994) entitles a chapter Right of death and power over life. In this chapter, he analyzes the transformation of the relationship to life and death in the exercise of power in the West. He presents the transition from a disciplinary society to a society of control, a control he calls biopower. Indeed, Foucault is primarily interested in the institutions by which societies and states discipline life and bodies. Whether it is the prison, the hospital or the army, Foucault describes devices able to control the reproduction of society and to prioritize its members. Power is no longer centralized, it is repurposed through its mechanisms and aims to control populations. The other important element of Foucault's thought (2004) is based on the internalization of the rules of control by the members of society. Among other things, he focuses on the emergence of the market as a biopolitical device through neoliberal governmentality (Brown, 2015). Thus, subjectivity and affects contribute to the reproduction of society and internalize the rules of competition and the market. In the Western democracies of the 1980s, the resulting policies stem both from the empowerment of the individual, among other things through the withdrawal of the state, but also from the actions of the state at the level of the populational with policies that aim to keep the social and political body productive. This internalization is expressed, among other things, in the generalization of managerial language to present everyday expressions (Deneault, 2013). Whether through phrases such as investing in your career, finding added value in one trip rather than another, or even having a life coach.

4If for Foucault biopolitics is the product of modern (and post-modern) society, for Giorgio Agamben (1998) the birth of biopolitics is actually located among the Greeks. It is in the distinction that Aristotle makes between bios and zoe, between the raw life and the good life, the one that deserves to be lived, the one that is organized to offer a good life, that politics begins to grasp life as bios. The population dimension is all the more marked in Agamben with the naked body and the state of exception as a biopolitical modus operandi at the heart of his thought. Thus, faced with a state of constant threats, internal threats, via the body carrying threats, external threats to be circumscribed via the figure of the camp. The camp, a central figure in Agamben, consists of the permanent establishment of a state of exception in a circumscribed space where life is laid bare in a political and legal order outside of society, and which encompasses total control over life (Agamben, 1998, 2005; Genel, 2004).

5This thematic issue of Via Tourism Review is an effort to highlight tourism as a biopolitical institution capable of creating exceptional spaces and able to generate its own rules of control. A device that connects place, technology and affects to manage mobility from the inside by internalizing tourist mobility as a technology of the self (Boukhris and Chapuis, 2016; Lapointe and Coulter, 2020).

6Indeed, tourism is no exception to this theoretical shift. The biopolitical manifestations of tourism are not recent, as evidenced by the health motivation of seaside resorts and thermal baths which made it possible to take the waters and escape tuberculosis, or even the national organization of leisure activities in the fascist regimes with the avowed aim of shaping the working body (Dietschy, 2008). In a systematic literature review, Lapointe and Coulter (2020) underline the emergence of research work combining tourism and biopolitics in a context where Tourism is increasingly pervasive in contemporary social and political systems (Brouder, 2019; Lapointe and O’Neil Coulter, 2019; Lapointe et al., 2018; Stock, 2020). Tourism produces, transforms and reproduces subjectivities relating to places, history and populations (Salazar and Graburn, 2014; Dann, 1996), it goes far beyond its commercial dimension and acts directly on the (re)production of society and on daily life in the host settings (Ek and Hultman, 2008). This production of subjectivity is part of the biopolitical dimension of society, where individuals self-negotiate a way of being in the world and of understanding it (Mills, 2016). So, as clearly mentioned by Roeloefsen and Minca (2018, p. 172), despite the importance of the staging and management of bodies (Veijola and Valtonen, 2007) produced by the tourism industry as well as by local and national authorities on tourists and tourism workers, but also on places and history, the question of the control and management of mobile bodies still remains unexplored. This is how Sheller (2015) emphasizes that a biopolitical approach begins with the analysis of the modes of production of the mobility of the tourist, that of the tourist worker and finally of the very production of the destination through processes of subjectification and political and cultural desubjectification. This brings us back to tourism as a device based on a discursive and material production capable of dictating behaviors that fall under social control (Boukhris and Chapuis, 2016).

7The biopolitical dimension of tourism is divided into four dimensions: 1) technology, 2) placemaking, 3) labor and 4) mobility (Lapointe and Coulter, 2020). These four dimensions intertwine in a series of threads of meaning in knots of complex meanings in their autonomy and their intersections. The technological aspect concerns the technological intermediation of tourist behavior. Ek and Hultman (2008) in their analysis of online reservation software in the golf industry, identify a process that corresponds to a series of negotiations that superimposes a power over the subjectivity of tourists, what they can do, where, when and how. Technology allows this control, among other things, through the possibility of commenting on and evaluating the service, the delivery and the tourist experience. The example of the AirBnB platform and its Superhosts is a good example where a discourse of diversity, community and locality is based on a normative process that is able to create categories that qualify and disqualify ways of living and subjectivities in relation to inhabiting, bringing habitat into the market and into a technological, social and commercial negotiation of inhabiting it via technology (Roelofsen, 2022; Roelofsen and Minca, 2018). This reveals a form of politicization of accommodation and tourist services, as Da Silva's contribution to this issue points out.

8Next, the main dimension of biopolitics addressed by research in tourism is placemaking or how tourism transforms places and comes to dictate the parameters, activities and type of experience (and therefore of subjectivity) to be deployed there, at various scales, in order to meet the imperatives of economic growth, but also of notoriety. This biopolitical production of the tourist space is not neutral and is contingent on material conditions and put in place, mainly to respond to the gaze of the tourist and thus reproduce inequalities (Asibong, 2018). This situation is also embodied in tourism development policies around conservation, as Mokhele points out in his contribution, transforming the asymmetrical evaluation of human and non-human life (Bluwstein, 2018) while building a brand image of places that will be attractive for visitors (Ek and Hultman, 2008) and by evacuating other imaginaries. Thus tourism seeks to attract, but also to keep visitors in a place, as Renaud points out in his contribution, and therefore to make tourist mobility controllable by harmonizing the brand image of places and the subjectivities of visitors such as "hunter" of experiences (Ek and Hultman, 2008). For his part, Simpson (2015), approaches this aspect via the concept of "post-world cities" - touristic enclaves centered on their biopolitical significance recognizes the "marketable status of the image of the city" as well as the important role of " non-state actors" 'in the development of tourist towns where there is a disappearance of the boundaries between economy and politics, between production and reproduction, the emphasis being placed on the production of subjectivity and the transformation of human relations. The case of Sfax, presented by Fguira and Maurette in this thematic issue, is not without similarity to the processes described by Simpson. The fabrication of such tourist images gives meaning to the promulgation of differentiated rights for different categories of people for different purposes in the same space; in short, exercises a form of sovereignty over the lives (Connoy & Ilcan, 2013) and the subjectivity of tourists, residents and workers.

9While previous works have focused more on the production dimension of tourist subjectivities, the response to the latter also involves controlling and transforming those of the workforce working in this industry. Thus, tourism workers would be important not only in what they do, but also in what they represent, in the way they perform (Minca, 2010). The product they embody is not so much in the services rendered, but in the marketing of feelings and desires (Pagliarin, 2016), and even of intimacy. This affective labor is both a source of domination/normalization of subjectivity by the market (Pagliarin, 2016), the process of commodification would require the regulation of human activity, or even quality control, producing biopolitical interventions in order to regulate marketed forms (Scher, 2011), but could also be a place of emancipation (Pagliarin, 2016). However, this last aspect is barely clarified in current research. Finally, tourism, as a biopolitical phenomenon, would be a form of mobility control through the three previous aspects where tourist mobility, and the subsequent geographies, are contingent on the policies of travel and occupation of space (Alderman, 2018) through the control of mobility, but also of immobility at different scales (Ek and Hultman, 2008). If all of this research comprehensively represents the complex nexus of contemporary tourism, this research, with the exception of Ek and Hultman (2008), does not relate these four aspects, their interdependencies, their inter-supplies and it has difficulty in articulating the micro and macro scales, the relationship between the structures and agency of the actors in the process of subjectification/desubjectification.

10Presentation of the contributions

11It is through a discursive production of the Arctic as a tourist heterotopia that Aapo Lunden approaches the biopolitics of tourism. The Arctic both as a space strongly affected by climate change, but also as an attraction for tourism and a place to perform sustainability through tourism.

12“In the heart of using sustainability for promotional purposes lie trust in consumerism as the de facto producer of common ecological will that emphasises tourist ability for responsible choices, sustainable leisure, and sustainable self. Therefore, tourism as the possibility to deviate and escape from the everyday is enabled increasingly by a logic of environmental compensation and care manifested in heterotopic destination development and marketing of the Arctic.”

13Thus, through a form of essentialization and simplification of what the Artic can be, a tourist space appears for a global clientele where environmental issues find solutions and answers in a deterritorialized consumer ethic while the very practice of this tourism bears the seeds of its downfall.

14For his part, Da Silva brings to light the entanglement of social and political relations implied by the technological mediation of the sharing of accommodation for women. Rooted in an intersectional feminist perspective, her ethnography details the intertwining of the platform economy in our lives, but above all its ability to mediate elements ranging from the banal purchase of goods, to the most intimate of shared experience or even finding a partner. It is therefore from the idea that we live in a platform society that she looks at the politicization of travel and the way in which these platforms prioritize the bodies of women. Faced with this hierarchy, affinity groups form and allow resistance and the creation of new possibilities for their members.

15“The movement even provokes redesigns in the forms of tourist consumption and subjectivities. Because, certain women who previously could not enjoy travel or who enjoyed very little of this practice, with network mobilization, have their opportunities increased and, consequently, this market becomes even more heterogeneous.”

16The contribution opens up on the potential of those groups who mobilize themselves via and despite, platform technologies, to regain control over their bodies and move from biopolitics to biocapacity.

17While Da Silva presents us with mobilizing platforms to counter the hierarchy of bodies, Luc Renaud, in his analysis of the micro-geographies of cruise tourism presents a spatial translation of the control over the mobility of the bodies of cruise tourists, between heterotopia and the internalization of controlling rules, local communities and multinationals compete for tourist rent through numerous strategies. From the internalization of fear, fear of the other, fear of the scam, fear of missing the boat, to the establishment of enclaves operating according to their own rules, the body of cruise passengers is at the heart of this quest for profits that these floating "camps" hold out to local communities.

18« Néanmoins, l’enjeu soulevé ici concerne la portée spatiale des relations de pouvoir dans une perspective de contrôle de l’espace hors des limites de la zone enclavée à l’intérieur desquelles l’industrie exerce une forme de souveraineté. Il s’agit de comprendre comment l’industrie arrive à déployer son pouvoir biopolitique, qui repose sur le principe d’extraterritorialité de ses activés, hors des limites du « camp » en s’alliant au pouvoir des États hôtes afin de reproduire le biopouvoir lié à l’état d’exception au sein même des espaces de vie. »

19This biopower deployed beyond the exclusive enclave under the direct control of the cruise industry raises the question of local control as an alternative model for welcoming cruise passengers, but Renaud warns us against the idealization of local control as a virtuous model. Indeed, these works point rather towards a reproduction of biopolitical control over the mobility of cruise passengers, but based on the interplay of actors and local motivations, thus creating new hierarchies of places and bodies.

20Itumeleng Mokhele exposes the biopolitical issues surrounding the conservation and management of a protected area in Lesotho. In this case, the biopolitics extends to the control of access to other forms of life, which includes biological communities other than humans. Thus, the establishment of the Bokong Nature Reserve transforms not only the understanding and representation of life in protected ecosystems, but also the very capacity for reproduction of life and local societies. The uses of these places are transformed to produce a tourist activity with capitalistic tendencies, while the populations who using these lands find themselves marginalized and deprived of their means of subsistence. Here, even if Mokhele does not explicitly use the term, the biopolitics is combined with the necropolitics of Mbembe (2006), where certain bodies are considered acceptable for being sacrificed in a judgement of who can live or not, and who can have access to means of subsistence or not.

21“While disempowerment of the local communities through the grabbing of their land is auspicious, impoverishment of the local community is the major effect that is known. Members who participated in the study indicate that their livestock which got confiscated in the unfenced tourism site are released at heavy fines while in some instances even get killed.”

22We are faced with the establishment of another enclave, this time around biotic communities of environmental interest, but which transforms the hierarchy of places and bodies, in the name of economic development associated with tourism which is concentrated in the park enclave.

23This strong spatial dimension is also present in the last text, by Maurette and Ben Fguira on the transformation of the urban fabric of Sfax, in Tunisia, by medical tourism. Here, there is a double biopolitical entry, through medical tourism that responds to public and private health service policies, where for some, travel to such destination care is the response to inaccessible or non-existent public care. Thus, medical tourism prioritizes bodies in its communications and practices, through a triple articulation around class, gender and racialization. In addition, these movements of medically motivated visitors transform the places where they take place.

24« La transition d’une société disciplinaire, incarnée notamment par le secteur public décrit en amont, vers une société de contrôle incarnée par l’initiative privée, trouve donc sa pertinence à travers l'émergence du tourisme médical. Celui-ci ne doit pas être compris comme un phénomène en soi, mais comme l’expression d’une transition de paradigme urbain. La forme néolibérale conduite par ce modèle économique et ses effets sur la ville font sens dans un cadre biopolitique où les corps sont les principaux convoyeurs des pratiques et représentations qui guident, in fine, les structures sociospatiales. »

25The individualization of politics through the body, its care and its performance, is expressed in the very fabric of the neoliberal city where private actors compete with each other for land, its use and sale, but also for the services to provide individual well-being.

26The dossier concludes with a brief theoretical essay by Rodanthi Tzanelli, which situates the question of the biopolitics of tourism vis-à-vis the various contemporary currents of critical research in tourism studies. She concludes by formulating a perspective where, inspired by Hannah Arendt, she suggests an inclusive post-human diversity that takes into account not only biodiversity but also the superdiversity of humanity. A form of a return to curiosity about travel, of being in the world linked by this superdiversity in a recognition of the other in tourism rather than tourism as a strategy for accumulating experience in an economy of status and privilege.

27By way of opening, we can only underline the need to explore tourism as a biopolitical phenomenon more exhaustively and in depth. The importance of this activity on our planet, its impact on living environments and on the daily lives of billions of individuals can only make it a political subject, and above all, biopolitics in its imprint on life, bodies, affects, heterotopias and living environments. The mobile entanglement of bodies, places and technologies that constitute tourism deserves not only to be considered as a web of devices for controlling bodies, places and societies (Boukhris and Chapuis, 2016), but also as being itself a tourist body (Lapointe, Sarrasin, and Lagueux, 2020), echoing the body politic or the social body. This tourist body, this generative metaphor, opens the door to a disciplinary advance for the understanding and conceptualization of the tourist phenomenon in its pluralities and multiplicities, while establishing a common thread. The flows of visitors crossing it like flows of blood, the different forms of control and production of these flows becoming organs capable of maintaining the flow and reproducing it. Places acting as bone reinforcements and cultures of muscular, adipose and nervous tissues able to support the processes of life. As for the technologies, they remain what they are in this metaphor, appendages, complements, which are not without echoing Haraway's Cyborg (1991), capable of magnifying the scope of the tourist body, but also of compelling or even dominating this « body ». This incomplete and inconclusive metaphor is an invitation to consider tourism as a locus of power, in its complex inscription with life, with the self and with the set of biotic and abiotic communities with which we share life.

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Dominic Lapointe, « Apparatus for control, state of exception and tourist bodies: tourism as a biopolitical phenomenon », Via [En ligne], 21 | 2022, mis en ligne le 22 août 2022, consulté le 20 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/8070 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/viatourism.8070

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Auteur

Dominic Lapointe

Professor, Department of Urban and Tourism Studies, University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM)

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Nelson Graburn

University of California, Berkeley

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