Maliva, Nelly2023-04-192023-04-192023Maliva, N. (2016). Women’s participation in tourism in Zanzibar: An enactment perspective. Published PhD Thesis, Wageningen University.978-9976-60-611-9http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11810/6046N/AAlthough tourism is regarded as a potential ground from which women can obtain their empowerment, their engagements are always constrained by their gender roles. This chapter, therefore, aims at exploring the ways in which women negotiate with their gender roles in order to work and benefit from tourism. The interpretive approaches, including qualitative and in-depth interviews were used to capture the way women view and review the environment that they encounter in the society as they work in tourism. Both structuralism and post-structuralism standpoints were used to identify factors that women see as their enablers and /or constraints, observing the agency of women when they interact with tourism. By working in tourism, they have been able to create their self-knowledge of the strategies to use in tourism through three factors, namely religion, family and marriage as well as education. Their agency was seen by their willingness to accept, challenge or reject the limits set by their gender roles. By doing so, women have shown the ability of being the authors of their own decisions and actions. Therefore, empowerment is about being able to freely act according to own voices; that means, creating a balance between their gender roles and the extent to which they want to achieve by working in the industry. This way, women have been able to construct the gender roles that enable them to balance between their household responsibilities and working in tourism.enwomen empowerment, tourism, gender roles, agency, TanzaniaBook chapter