Elite Imaginations: The Visual Spatialization of Luxury and Privilege in Mediatized Tourism Discourse.

This paper exemplifies the kind of contribution visual communication scholarship can make to the rapidly growing field of critical tourism studies. From the combined perspectives of social semiotics and critical discourse analysis, we start by recognizing how mediatized texts and the social practices of which they are a part can be tremendously powerful in reconstituting substantial areas of social life. On this basis, we examine the visual representation and production of space/place in a corpus of over 100 tourist advertizing images. Our analysis shows how the visual texturing of space is a key resource in tourism marketing and which establishes a powerful regime of (un)truth about luxury, exclusivity and privilege. This is established through a combination of key semiotic resources (e.g., the frequent depicition of unnamed, feminized, neocolonial places) and other design strategies (e.g., the exaggeration of exclusion through the absence of people and through perceptual effects of "emptiness" and order). Our concern is that this particular visual-spatialization of tourism discourse also works to (re)produce an elitist ideology of class distinction and social inequality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]