Body hair and booty calls: Conceptualising 'empowered-ness' in travel and tourism for solo female vanlifers

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Khoo, Catheryn
Thakur, Prachi
Yang, Mona Ji Hyun
Pung, Jessica Mei
Ting, Amanda
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2025
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The present study focuses on advancing the current discourse from women empowerment to ‘empowered-ness’ by conceptualising solo female vanlifers' bodies from travel reflections as a medium to redefine boundaries for socio-cultural norms. This study adopted a multi-faceted approach integrating social-networking-platform and ethnographic data to examine empowered-ness for women in prolonged mobility, and the role of empowered women's bodies in travel. 421 statements from 285 solo female vanlifers were collected through social-networking-platforms, and supplemented with synchronous longitudinal ethnographic data journalling solo female vanlife. The findings demonstrate that female empowered-ness through vanlife mobility manifests through independence from men, unconventional relationships, and risk-taking behaviour. This conceptual shift from empowerment to an ‘empowered’ framework is a contribution to solo female travel literature.

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Annals of Tourism Research

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111

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© 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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Khoo, C; Thakur, P; Yang, MJH; Pung, JM; Ting, A, Body hair and booty calls: Conceptualising 'empowered-ness' in travel and tourism for solo female vanlifers, Annals of Tourism Research, 2025, 111, pp. 103905

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