Sex has been a part of tourism for a very long time, but according to
Veijola and Jokinen's (1994) playful paper that sets up a ®ctional theoretical
discussion between themselves and Urry and Rojek ± on a beach ±
`the body has been absent from the corpus of the sociological studies on
tourism' and `the analyst himself has likewise lacked a body' (Veijola and
Jokinen, 1994: 149). As part of this discussion, the two authors (who want
to argue an embodied, phenomenological position against the visualism of
Urry and Rojek) engage in topless sun bathing and at one point are rudely
interrupted by a naked man `or to be more precise, his sex' whose
volleyball has landed between them. Rojek and Urry meanwhile, are
imagined to be sitting away from this embodied (and passionate) beach
scene, under sunshades, on deckchairs deconstructing what seaside
postcards mean with Ovar LoÈfgren (see LoÈfgren, 1999). Their point in
writing this very witty paper is that the tourist gaze is impossibly abstracted
from `tourist events and encounters, in the duration of time and [the]
sexed body' (Veijola and Jokinen, 1994: 149). As we saw in Chapter 6 the
naked body and the ritual conventions of the beach interpellate a