Touristic security is the neoliberal practice of securing tourists to sustain tourism. In the aim of making tourists feel safe and keeping them from actual harm, a plethora of touristic security strategies are employed which represent, govern, restructure, and discipline place and people as ‘safe’ for tourists. This practice and its strategies are highly informed by and informing of inequalities, especially geopolitical inequalities between the Global North and Global South and embodied inequalities between different groups of people. Drawing upon ethnographic research in the small city of La Antigua Guatemala, this paper pays particular attention to the role of gender in touristic security. While gendered bodies, discourses, and practices inform who is deemed touristically threatened and threatening, and, thus, who comes to sit at the soft centre or sharp ends of touristic security strategies, they are also strategically mobilized in the aim of making Guatemala safe for, especially, Western female tourists. More than making Western female tourists feel safe and keeping them from actual harm, gendered touristic security is (re)producing inequalities, producing new threats/risks for Guatemalans, and creating different worlds of (in)security.
