VW Campervan Subcultures- Tourism Mobilities and Experiences

This thesis is an enquiry into the nature of the motilities and mobility’s of VW Campervan subcultures as they vacate cities and suburbs to commune for recreational purposes. As a tourism study it looks at ways in which ownership of a distinctive form of transport has led to the flow of corporeal travel in the ‘slow lane’. By interrogating the multiple behaviors, discourses and interdependencies associated with the collective movement of mobile home owners, ‘kinships’ between the vehicle as a material object and driver, as its biological other are understood as an embodied practice. From initial observational fieldwork, the VW campervan is anthropomorphized by the majority of participants, as though imbued with human attributes. It is often adopted as a family member, identified by name and communicated about as though ‘alive’ in a pseudo biological sense. Sheller (2004) also suggests that there is a libidinal economy which has developed around the automobile, in which personalities are deeply invested in them as objects, thus the suggestion is that our “love affair” with a particular vehicle finds its psychic analogue through human desires, therefore they cannot simply be conceptualized as a piece of neutral, non divisive transport and leisure apparatus.