Producing Extreme Metal festivals: An analysis from Lacan's gaze

Abstract

By employing Lacan's theoretical framework of gaze, this study provides a narrative analysis to examine the managerial experiences of the producers for Extreme Metal festivals. Specifically, it explores meanings and struggles of tourism festival making that connects individual subjectivities and politics of culture production. As such, it offers a broad conceptual framework merging the Lacanian gaze into tourism research and MacCannell's theory. The findings reveal that festival producers are constantly dealing with various contested roles and voices, revealing in-depth psychological complexities situated within managerial experiences. Meanwhile, the process of festival management must be seen as significantly influenced by the mechanism of cultural offering that the producers attempt to assert and define through the festival space. Finally, implications related to the greater realms of psychoanalytic insights and their potential connections with tourism management are discussed.