For more than one evening, I saw a group of men dressing in funny female clothes, running on Victoria Street, Hamilton. Therefore, I believed they run on a regular basis. They really caught my attention, as a Geographer whose interests include space, gender and tourism, I decided to wait for them and hoped to talk to them. What motivates them to dress like women? Or do they consider they are performing a small scale of parade as some kind of tourism activity? Have they been in any trouble for acting this way? Unfortunately, I never see them running again.
The question that I came across was in fact evoked by my research and others tourism and geography researchers. Today, many geography scholars including me believe we live in a hegemonic world that heterosexual ideas and performances are naturalized in daily lives (Johnston, 2006). Therefore it is abnormal for being homosexual. In 2007, I published a research article, mobilizing pride/shame: lesbians, tourism and parades, which explores how pride, shame, performativity, gender, sexuality and politics of resistance in the tourism event of Pride Scotland (Johnston, 2007). I made a few findings. First, performing in a queer parade enables an articulation of both queer celebration and protest against normative and oppressive forms of sexuality. Second, the pride parades may exaggerate the processes by which bodies and places become gendered and sexualized (Johnston, 2007 p.34) for performers intend to dress up to show they are a group of gays while audiences expect to see bodies that defy normative assumptions of gendered and sexualized bodies (Johnston, 2007, p.35). Third, participants in the Pride parade are not just gays and lesbians but also heterosexual people trying to look/act camp (Johnston, 2007). And their camp performance are somehow acting against heterosexual being natural and gay being odd
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