Hospitality & Society - Understanding Gender and Sexual Politics in Hospitality as Hospo-Gender, Sept 2023

Previous research attests that the chef profession is gender-segregated; men dominate the industry and occupy the prime culinary positions. Understandings of the experiences of women executive chefs in the professional kitchen environment remain scant. This study adopted a qualitative life history method to reveal 23 women executive chefs’ professional trajectories and narratives about their experiences in the professional kitchen. The intersections of gender and the chef profession were revealed, and sexism was an experience shared amongst the participants. The findings showed that participants engaged in both ‘doing gender’ and ‘undoing gender’ during their professional trajectories through adapting how they behaved in the kitchen, as a coping strategy and to fulfil the perceived expectations of their role. In confirming the gendered environment of the chef profession, the study contributes new insights to the burgeoning critical hospitality research that seeks to prioritize and shed light on otherwise marginalized perspectives.

The hospitality industry in Qatar is rapidly expanding and heavily reliant on migrant labour to staff its hotels and restaurants, with women migrants forming an increasingly important part of the workforce. Global perceptions of Qatar as a location for female migrant workers are ambiguous: it is a patriarchal and traditional country, which limits women’s career opportunities, yet at the same time offers relatively high wages, low taxes and multiple job options for women in the hospitality industry. This study draws on an ethnographic study of migrant women workers in a five-star hotel in Doha to examine various ways in which they navigate this ambiguity and their perceptions and motivations for working and living in Qatar. Findings illustrate that the women in the study had positive perceptions of Qatar as a safe environment where they could earn money to send to support families back home. For many women from the Global South, Qatar offers a hospitable environment and the hospitality industry provides opportunities to capitalize on the benefits of migrating to work in Qatar, for both the individual worker and her wider family.

A contribution to critical work in hospitality, this article theorizes gendered power relations in various homestay settings. As such, it is an endorsement of – and response to – Shelagh Mooney’s call for critical problematization of ‘gender’, not least as a lens to better understanding the hospitality experiences of – and research approaches to – marginalized people, including women but also LGBTIQA+-identifying people. Discussed are the following ideas: intersectional identities and positionalities as these relate to gendered power relations; the role of mobilities in host/guest conflicts and resolutions; and the contested axiologies, epistemologies and ontologies that may undergird host–guest conflicts. We draw on our empirical research among homestay guests and hosts, including qualitative interviews with au pair, Workaway and WWOOFing hosts and guests and ethnographic research undertaken among Spanish-language learners in Guatemala and Nicaragua. Across all contexts, we focus on women’s and LGBTIQA+ people’s experiences in homestays – as part of wider mobilities – as prisms through which to understand the ways in which gendered identity work is undertaken and gender roles may be performed, negotiated, constructed and – above all – contested in hospitality settings more broadly as well as the associated mobilities, affordances and constraints. As such, this article contributes to the critical hospitality literature by queering gender in this context, understanding it as something one does/performs rather than is.