Feminist travel discourse: Exploring emotions, choices and life

The article provides some insights into gendered experiences of leisure outside the Western world. Using a netnographic approach and narrative analysis, the article analyses 255 posts on 17 blogs written entirely by Romanian women. Five major themes were identified, namely novelty and learning, self-discovery and transformation, empowering others, hedonic experiences and safety. While the bloggers often portray their travel experiences as transformative, ‘empowering’ them to redefine their personal and professional lives, the analysis shows that such forms of empowerment are only partial, contingent and accessible mainly to women with a particular socio-economic, educational background and cultural privileges. Some journeys, especially those off the beaten track or in destinations perceived as less safe, become a metaphorical labyrinth they must navigate. Through these trials, women traveller bloggers position themselves as stronger, more independent individuals, yet their narratives also reveal the persistence of neoliberal ideas. We argue that by sharing their journeys, emotions, transformations and discoveries with the Romanian readers, these female bloggers do contribute to a sense of community and encourage the audience to be more open-minded and travel to discover the world, but they simultaneously reproduce selective imaginaries of who can afford and inhabit such empowered subjectivities.