Where are the Women When the Tourists Arrive?: Bodies, Space, and Islamic Femininity in Rural Zanzibar

Since the 1980s, tourism has risen to become the most important source of foreign income for the islands of Zanzibar. This case study of a previously subsistence village that now hosts transnational tourists reveals how intersecting ideas about gender and ethnicity influence work choices made by individual women. Labor choices are a balance between production and identity, and most women’s work choices maintain spatial boundaries between local people and tourists. Women’s work thus serves as a site of resistance against cultural imperialism by mainland Tanzanian elites and the West. Women’s bodies are sites of contestation between local and outsider identities. The discursive role of women’s bodies in response to potential cultural domination results in significant limits on women’s economic participation in tourism.