Gendered tourism imaginaries in European screen travel

Streaming television shapes tourism imaginaries by circulating destinations before audiences travel. This article examines how Emily in Paris constructs gendered tourism imaginaries of Paris, Rome, and Venice. Through qualitative thematic and semiotic analysis of scenes selected from thirty episodes across five seasons, it brings feminist tourism theory into dialogue with mobility studies. Findings show that cities are framed as stylish, legible, safe, and frictionless spaces where female mobility signifies professional confidence, romantic freedom, consumption, and self-fashioning. Yet this postfeminist fantasy obscures the classed, racialised, and infrastructural privileges enabling such movement, alongside the invisible service labour sustaining tourism. It conceptualises audiovisual storytelling as communicative mobility: the transnational circulation of images, affects, routes, and expectations that renders destinations desirable before travel. © 2026 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.