POLITICIZING AESTHETICS IN VOLUNTEER TOURISM
Within volunteer tourism, the relationship between givers and receivers
are naturalized. This binary implies a priori uneven power relationship
on which the experience is based. Yet, this relationship is
‘‘naturalized’’ within the ‘‘helping discourse’’ (Dove, 1994) that is
widely perpetuated throughout the industry. This process leads to
the depoliticization of volunteer tourism. As Zizek describes Ranciere’s
theoretical perspective, ‘‘the basic aim of antidemocratic politics always—
and by definition—is and was depoliticization, i.e. the unconditional
demand that ‘things should return to normal’, with each
individual doing his or her particular job’’ (Zizek, 2004, p. 71).This
depolitcization tendency within contemporary Western society is materialized
within Ranciere’s postmodern post-politics or the depoliticization
of the political.
Yet, Ranciere notes that within the aesthetic structure there is the potential
for politics to emerge through the rupturing of a shared sensibility.
This possibility is relevant to the analysis of volunteer tourism
where visible forms of poverty are aestheticized as authentic and
cultural. Ranciere states that ‘‘an aesthetic politics always defines itself
by a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration
of the given perceptual forms’’ (Ranciere, 2004, p. 63). In this way,
Ranciere’s notion