Fernanda Gonçalves de Castro
Maria Manuel Baptista
Travel blogs are a multifaceted tool that crosses and influences different dimensions of subjects, whether personal, professional or even economic. This article proposes to explore and understand the power discourses of women, in travel blogs, who traveled to Madeira, Portugal. When placed and questioned under the light of Cultural Studies, blogs show a clear and obvious theoretical link with the categories of gender and exoticism. This brief study proposes the exploration and analysis of posts, between 2007 and 2020, about the trip to Madeira of 66 women, in 65 blogs. Through the qualitative analysis of these discourses, it was possible to identify discourses of power, naturalization phenomena and multiple colonization processes, based on different hierarchies of power, regarding self and heterorepresentations (Other-woman ↔ Other-Madeira) present in the speeches of traveling women.
Keywords: Travel; Blogs; Gender; Madeira; Exoticism; Intersectionality