A Feminist Political Economy of Tourism ‘Homestays’ in Guatemala

This paper engages with recent debates on social reproduction in feminist political economy which have analysed issues such as migration and the global household, as well as attempts to conceptualise and account for the contribution of social reproduction to the global economy. It explores the conceptual foundations of social reproduction – namely, economic difference; alternative economies; and the centring of the household and social provisioning – and contemporary attempts to account for social reproduction in international institutions. The paper highlights a gap in the feminist political economy literature and argues that the ILO’s category of ‘contributing family workers’ offers a useful lens for exploring gendered social reproductive labour in the global economy. In order to explore this further, the paper takes the case of tourism ‘homestays’ in Antigua, Guatemala. These ‘ways to stay’ form part of the informal tourism economy, in which tourists are provided with a ‘host-family’ – in particular a ‘host-mum’ - during their stay in Guatemala. Homestays are therefore co-produced through embodied enactments of ‘real family’. Through immersing oneself in a Guatemalan family, students are promised to not only increase their language skills and cultural capital, but also to have a Guatemalan familial experience which is presented as being both ‘authentic’ and ‘unique’. In this paper, we interrogate the gendered social reproductive labour that is involved in homestays. Using the category of contributing family workers and a lens of economic difference, we consider what this specific kind of economic activity can tell us about social reproduction in global political economy.