Monumentally male 1

This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 34, Winter 1996/97.

The global tourism industry involves many women, both as workers and as consumers.  Feminists have given considerable attention to the way women are exploited by the industry, most obviously through sex tourism; but we’ve had less to say about the sexism of what’s on offer closer to home.

In Britain, tourism has long been an important economic activity, and its importance is increasing since it is often seen as a solution to the economic problems that arise when more traditional industries disappear from a local area. Contemporary strategies for promoting tourism in Britain are most frequently organised around the notion of ‘heritage’: visitors are invited to experience a carefully constructed representation of history and of place.  But whose heritage is this, and what is it saying to/about women? Cara Aitchison takes us on a guided tour of Stirling, one of Scotland’s premier tourist destinations, and suggests that for feminists it has rather few attractions…

Whilst the combined sectors of leisure and tourism are frequently cited as ‘the world’s fastest growing industry’ or ‘the world’s largest industry’ they are less frequently identified as the world’s most sex-segregated industry or the world’s most sex-role stereotyped industry. The leisure industry demonstrates gendered patterns of employment in virtually all areas of work, in addition to sex-role stereotyping with men greatly outnumbering women in the positions of power related to policy-making, planning, finance and senior management. In the UK only seven out of 146, or less than five per cent, of local authority leisure services departments are headed by a woman (Local Government Management Board 1996). In tourism women are concentrated in low-skilled, poorly paid and part-time areas of employment. This can be likened to a form of ‘commercialised domes­ticity’ for women where their domestic roles of cleaning, cooking and home-making are replicated in the workplace.

There is a growing body of research which analyses the gendered nature of tourism provision and employment, but there is very little feminist research on tourism participation, the experience of women tourists or the role of gender in constructing and representing tourist attractions and destinations. Through an examination of heritage tourism in one location I will argue that the representation of ‘heritage’ serves to render women invisible in our past whilst maintaining masculinist identities centred around militarism and nationalism. The location I have chosen is the Scottish town of Stirling where I lived for ten years.

Heritage tourism

Feminist analysis needs to consider tourism not just as a type of business or management but as a powerful cultural form and process which both shapes and is shaped by patriarchal society. One very evident example of tourism as a cultural form and process is the construction of ‘heri­tage’, which now forms an increasingly impor­tant element of the tourism industry, particularly within the UK. Just as landscapes are often ‘man-made’ constructions of the environment, heritage is a ‘man-made’ construction of the past. Many of our heritage attractions are constructed, represented and marketed by men. In addition to being ‘man-made’ these tourist attractions are patriarchally controlled, mascu­linised, and structured in such a way as to exclude women.

Stirling

The heritage landscape of Stirling is a case in point. It is a product of the town’s masculinised, militarised and nationalistic history which is, in part, linked to its geographical location. Stirling is located at the narrowest point between east and west in the whole of the British Isles and also overlooks the Carse of Forth which forms the divide between the Highlands of Scotland to the north and the Lowlands to the south. The town itself grew down the side of one of three volcanic outcrops in the area which rose above the marshland of the carse, a deep impenetrable moss which was not drained until the eighteenth century.

Stirling’s economic and industrial history is a mix of market and garrison town supported by the primary industries of coal and agriculture. With the demise of coal mining and other related secondary industries in the 1980s, the town focussed upon financial and retail services, its university, and tourism as its major sources of income. There is a sense in which Stirling has sought to replace the masculinity of the col­lapsed male dominated industries with the masculinity of nationalist and militarist history; William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, Rob Roy McGregor and the Stuart Kings feature heavily in product development, place promotion and marketing literature.

While Stirling’s tourism industry has undoubtedly received huge economic benefits from the recent films of Braveheart and Rob Roy along with the less widely known film of The Bruce starring Oliver Reed, this type of place promotion may further serve to entrench the marketing of Stirling as a tourist destination within a framework of masculinist, militarist, and nationalist fervour. Such gendered market­ing and place and product promotion serves to stimulate the male ‘tourist gaze’ and constructs women as ‘the Other’ by focussing on the iconography of a heritage landscape which emphasises masculine visibility and superiority through landmarks and monuments, buildings and statues, signs, symbols and banners, postcards and promotional literature.

Feminist analysis of heritage landscapes

Through an examination of the representational media just mentioned, it is possible to construct a framework for future feminist analyses of heritage landscapes. This analytical framework could be used in critiques of existing heritage tourism sites and strategies, or more positively, could contribute to the creation of new develop­ment plans. Such a framework has to include an analysis of the representation or non-represen­tation of women which includes the following six elements: constructions of ‘the Other’ in heritage tourism; the male ‘tourist gaze’; the iconography of gendered tourism; nationalism and gendered heritage; militarism and gendered heritage; and masculinist myth making in heritage tourism.

Constructions of ‘the Other’

The creation of a unique place or tourist destination frequently depends on the social construction of ‘the Other’. This has been commented upon at some length in the literature of tourism anthropology and tourism sociology and there is widespread agreement that tourists often engage in the search for ‘the Other’. The attempt to create and market an identity based on a unique heritage must coexist, however, with the need to facilitate the tourist’s identifi­cation with that identity. Thus a balance must be sought between presenting something which is different and presenting something sufficiently familiar for the tourist to identify with. This can be achieved by using vehicles such as nation­alism and militarism, combined with ancestral heritage, to provide the connections between the past and the present or between the familiar and ‘the Other’.

But these connections are provided by men, for men and are about men. The heritage of Scottish women is not represented in Stirling and their absence makes them ‘the Other’. Women tourists are also constructed as ‘the Other’ because they are expected to identify with a male construction of heritage which has rendered women invisible and perceives men, both past and present, as ‘the norm’.

Most writers in the area of the tourism anthropology and tourism sociology cite Edward Said as the originator of the concept of ‘the Other’ in reference to the western social construction of ‘orientalism’. The male-dominated discourse of tourism studies ignores the wealth of feminist writing on ‘the Other’ underpinned by the much earlier references to woman as ‘the Other’ by Simone de Beauvoir. Similarly, discussions of gender within tourism anthropology have tended to focus on sex tourism and the creation of the ‘exotic Other’ rather than recognising the all-pervasive patriarchal power of defining all women as ‘the Other’.

The male ‘tourist gaze’

References to ‘the tourist gaze’ entered tourism studies following the publication of John Urry’s book of that title whereas previously the concept of ‘the gaze’ was more commonly associated with poststructuralists like Michael Foucault. The concept of the gaze is about the power of looking, and how the right to look in particular ways contributes to the power of some social groups (those who look) at the expense of others (those who get looked at). For instance, men look at women; first world anthropologists look at third world peoples; doctors look at patients. The looker/looked positions are rarely reversed. Central to the concept of the ‘gaze’ is the theory that knowledge is both socially constructed and socially constructing. The power of the gaze is unequally distributed and the object of the gaze is constructed according to the locus of power and control.

We are familiar with notions of the male gaze and the sexual objectification of women but we are less familiar with notions of the male gaze directed at particular forms of masculinity rather than femininity in order to maintain male supremacy. Perhaps the most common example of this is seen in sports such as football where the male player is revered by the male spectator and reverence seems to increase with increasing displays of aggression by the player. Similarly, in heritage attractions, the male gaze is directed towards masculinist icons of a brutal and bloody past where representations of ‘the gaze’ and male constructions of ‘the Other’ are inter­twined to maintain patriarchal constructions of mascu­linity and femininity.

The iconography of gendered heritage

In addition to analysing written material, the heritage landscape, including artistic heritage, buildings, monuments, statues, symbols, signs and images can also be analysed and interpreted critically. In a piece called ‘The Masculinisation of Stirling’s Heritage’, Tim Edensor and Uma Kothari argue that heritage production and consumption is gendered through a series of processes which, ‘articulate masculinised notions of place and identity, and male domi­nated versions of the past which privilege white, male, heterosexual experience and activity’. They go on to identify the three sites of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Museum at Stirling Castle, the Bannockburn Monument and the Wallace Monument as forming the ‘Stirling Triangle’ each point of which reflects ‘particular and partial histories and myths, male-defined landscapes and gendered national identities’. However, they do not expand their analysis to incorporate a critique of the all-pervasive nature of this masculinist landscape.

Whilst the three sites are undoubtedly influential in constructing Stirling’s gendered heritage they are also part of a wider landscape which both emphasises additional gendered landmarks and monuments and simultaneously reasserts the power of the ‘Stirling Triangle’. Thus, in addition to the towering landmarks of the castle, situated at the highest point of the old town, and the two monuments of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce located on escarpments to the north-east and south-west respectively, these icons are replicated through­out the town and their masculine imagery is augmented by the addition of other male icons and visual imagery.

The representation of Wallace and Bruce takes a number of forms in addition to the monuments which overlook the town from the two surrounding hillsides. Each male icon has a street and a number of public houses named after him; there are large statues of William Wallace at two of the most focal points within the town: the first is on the frontage of a public building called the Athenaeum which is sited at the top of King Street in the centre of the town and overlooking the main shopping area and the other is in front of the castle overlooking the castle esplanade. More recent representation takes the form of banners and logos with Robert the Bruce representing the area of Bannockburn in a series of banners, again in King Street, each identifying a different local area. The logo of ‘Futureworld’, a local tourist development and promotion project from the 1980s, consisted of Robert the Bruce on horseback surrounded by a rainbow. The current logo has swapped the rainbow for a banner which envelops Bruce with the words ‘Royal Stirling’ above a shield displaying a picture of the castle and the words ‘Key to the Kingdom’. This slogan could be seen as reference to Stirling as the historic capital of Scotland, as the entrance to the Highlands, and as the locus of the history of the making of Scotland as a nation. In addition, postcards feature numerous images of the two icons from both near and far, conveying the heroic guardianship of the town.

Stirling’s male dominated and male-defined history is evident in the names of buildings and their previous uses. Many of the buildings of the old town are now used as tourist attractions or as restaurants and coffee shops, primarily for tourists. In 1994 the Stirling Heritage Trail opened, featuring many of the buildings of the old town but without any critique of the gendered nature of the town’s heritage or of the representation of that heritage. Old town buildings named after their original male residents include John Cowane’s House, Glenngarry Ludging, Spittal’s House, Darnley’s House, Norrie’s House, Auchenbowie’s House, Mar’s Wark, the Argyll’s Ludging, and the Erskine Church.

In addition to residential buildings and churches, Stirling’s new heritage trail, which starts with ‘a soldier’s view’ from the castle esplanade, includes many other buildings with male histories: the Old Military Prison, the Old Grammar School for boys, the Old High School, the Tolbooth and Prison, the Mercat Cross, and the Boy’s Club.

Fatal attractions: ‘Torture, death and damnation’

The Old Military Prison opened in April 1996 as a combination of tourist attraction and office space for local businesses. The redevelopment took over three years and cost £2.6 million of public money with funding coming from Forth Valley Enterprise, Stirling District Council (which no longer exists following local govern­ment restructuring in April 1996), and the European Regional Development Fund. The attraction is modelled, to a large extent, on Inverary Jail whose promotional literature states that the attraction has won a number of awards and recommendations for its display of ‘torture, death and damnation: the story of Scottish crime and punishment 1500—1700’ which features ‘an introductory exhibition with blood curdling details of mediaeval punishments’. Neither attraction acknowledges the gendered nature of the history they seek to represent or the gen­dered nature of the textual representations.

In spite of protests at the ‘Jack the Ripper Experience’ at the London Dungeon by groups such as the Campaign Against Pornography, the heritage industry continues to portray uncritical representations of abuse, mutilation and murder of women as appropriate tourist attractions. Promotional literature for the London Dungeon invites tourists to ‘Come with us down the dark, dank streets of London a century ago and maybe you too will feel the spirit of the Ripper as he stalks his next victim’. There are now a number of London tour companies offering ‘Jack the Ripper’ tours and one such company, run by four men and calling itself ‘Ripping Yarns’, distributes publicity containing the following:

For a completely different night out why not walk the very streets that were terrorised by a man who became known as JACK THE RIPPER. We take you where he committed the murders, we tell you how he mutilated his victims and, because a picture tells a thousand words, as we walk around we show you actual photographs — the only tour that does this.

The same obsession with violence and death is promoted by Stirling’s new tourist attractions which feature the old Court Room and Prison in Jail Wynd off Broad Street. Prisoners con­demned to death were taken from the prison to the Mercat Cross in Broad Street where hangings and beheadings were considered public entertainment. The Old High School has now been refurbished, extended and converted into a large hotel with the old headmasters’ study being transformed into the bar. Hanging on the walls of the ‘bar’ are portraits of all the previous headmasters: women cannot even have a drink during their leisure time without suffering the male gaze from the past as well as the present.

Nationalism

The symbiotic relationship between mascu­linism and nationalism has been well docu­mented. Less frequently discussed, however, is the role that nationalism plays within tourism promotion. A variety of forms of media have combined to reassert Scottish nationalism in recent years and films such as Braveheart, The Bruce and Rob Roy have acted as catalysts for a tourism industry desperately in search of the familiar ‘Other’.

The Wallace Monument epitomises the interrelationships between masculinity, milita­rism and nationalism in heritage production. The monument was refurbished to incorporate a variety of new visual displays in time to benefit from the additional tourists generated by the film Braveheart. The 220 foot high tower overlooks Stirling and the River Forth and was completed in 1869 as a monument to William Wallace who had led the defeat of Edward I of England at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297.

Heritage production within the monument uses a powerful combination of written text and pictures, statues, audio-visual displays, high-tech drama, costume, and music to recreate the past. Visitors entering the monument are overlooked by a huge bronze statue of Wallace with his sword drawn. The two-handed broad­sword is then displayed on the first floor of the monu­ment alongside a picture board display which presents a historical account of Wallace’s life under titles like ‘The Struggle Continues’ and ‘Capture and Execution’. In the centre of the same floor is a reconstruction of an English battle tent guarded by one of Edward’s knights. Visitors are invited into the tent to witness ‘a dramatised reconstruction and a talking head of William Wallace’ who has been captured by the English following years of hiding after the Scottish defeat at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298.

Whilst the technology may be commendable, the text and discourse of Wallace’s talking head requires more critical analysis. Although in shackles, Wallace’s posture and voice still command attention from his pulpit-like position as he gives his version of history, complete with anachronisms. Wallace introduces his account by stating, ‘Men must have their power. They seek to influence, to strengthen their position, to be seen as something in other men’s eyes’.

On the second floor of the monument is the ‘Hall of Heroes’. The publicity literature informs the visitor that,

In this vaulted chamber you’ll meet other great Scots, sculpted in marble. Writers, explorers, inventors and statesmen are here, including King Robert the Bruce, Sir Walter Scott, David Livingston, Robert Burns and James Watt, among others.

A large plaque within the Hall of Heroes tells visitors that ‘In 1885, sixteen years after the completion of the Monument; the Custodiers who were then responsible for its operation, launched an appeal for sponsors for a “hall of heroes of marble statues of very notable Scotsmen”’.

Militarism

The iconography of heritage tourism in Stirling is closely intertwined with militarism from different eras which reinforce notions of Scottish nationalism and masculinity. Wallace and Bruce are seen as national heroes because of their military victories. Stirling Castle and its regimental museum is a tourist attraction largely because of its militaristic heritage. Comple­menting the statue of William Wallace over­looking the castle esplanade is another statue of an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander with bayonet drawn during the Boer War. There is a further sword-bearing statue in the form of Rob Roy MacGregor positioned in another focal point on the edge of the old town and The Old Military Prison reinforces the militaristic theme and further entangles the web of masculinism, militarism and nationalism. There are no statues of women anywhere within the town and no monuments to women’s history.

Masculinist myth making

In addition to the gendering of heritage tourism outlined in the sections above, local tourist promotion has also embraced masculinised myth making in the name of tourism. Thus Rob Roy MacGregor, whose life history is not recorded accurately, has had a heroic past constructed for him through postcards, statues and a visitor centre. Rob Roy is known to have been a cattle thief and to have used extreme violence against both English and Scottish people. At the Rob Roy visitor centre tourists are encouraged to make up their own minds as to whether Rob Roy was a ‘Hero or Villain?’ but the language and imagery used to describe his life and character provide few challenges to the mascu­linism, violence and nationalism which are recon­structed through a romanticised heritage. Rather than seeing Rob Roy as a murderer, visitors are invited to view him as a ‘rogue’ and a ‘ruffian’ — words which fail to convey the full horror of the violence prevalent at the time and which also serve to strengthen the imagery of men’s use of violence masquerading as emanci­patory nationalism.

Tourism development in Stirling has also focussed upon Ghost Walks which are evening guided tours on foot led by a number of cos­tumed male characters. These tours provide an even clearer example of the way in which tourists are invited to empathise with male violence. The Ghost Walk starts and finishes with speeches by Allan Mair, the last person to be hanged publicly in Stirling. Mair was hanged in 1843 for battering his wife to death and his ghost is said to haunt the Tolbooth which is now a restaurant. Although much of the information presented during the actor’s performance is accurate historically, the performance has been constructed as a pantomime-like scene where Allan Mair protests his innocence to the audience, again in a ‘roguish’ manner, and the audience are encouraged to empathise with the murderer and are then invited to shout their opinions as to his culpability for the crime. This reconstruction of the past results in a majority verdict of ‘not guilty’ for the murderer.

Challenging ‘heritage’

A heritage trail has recently been constructed in Edinburgh to represent fifteen notable women from the city’s past. Whilst this demonstrates that feminist resistance to a male dominated and male-defined heritage industry is possible, it also highlights the difficulty of working towards a redefinition of ‘heritage’. The Edinburgh example can be seen as reflecting ‘women’s heritage’ rather than ‘feminist heritage’, as it replicates existing models of heritage provision by simply replacing the ‘great men’ with ‘great women’ rather than challenging our current models of provision and our constructions of heritage.

In addition to increasing women’s visibility within representations of heritage we must also continue to resist and protest against existing and planned heritage sites which glorify men’s use of violence, particularly against women. Such sites range from the London Dungeon and Jack the Ripper walks to many local tourist attractions in our home towns. Tourism and the heritage industry form the foundation of numerous local economic regeneration initia­tives and require large numbers of visitors to sustain such regeneration. Adverse publicity, or even the threat of adverse publicity, may be sufficient to promote change within many public sector bodies such as local authorities and regional tourist boards. However, smaller commercial sector heritage tourism companies may require more persuasion to change their practices; direct action along the lines of the London Dungeon campaign organised by the Campaign Against Pornography may be more appropriate in some cases.

References

Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex (Penguin, 1972).

Tim Edensor and Uma Kothari ‘The masculinisation of Stirling’s heritage’ in Vivian Kinnaird and Derek Hall (eds) Tourism: A Gender Analysis (Wiley, 1994).

Edward Said Orientalism (Routledge, 1978).

John Urry The Tourist Gaze (Sage, 1990).