Abstract
Focusing on Eat Pray Love (dir. Ryan Murphy, US, 2010) and Ticket to Paradise (dir. Ol Parker, UK/Japan/US, 2022), this article telescopes over a decade of the tourist romance genre. It examines the ideological impact of the tourist romance's happy resolutions and argues that the genre simultaneously offers a critique of neoliberalism and rehabilitates the same principles elsewhere. A comparative analysis of these films not only sheds light on the evolution of the tourist romance genre but also maps the shifting politics of love in the time of neoliberalism. In so doing, the article demonstrates how the penetration of the logic of neoliberalism into former welfare states in the non‐West has reshaped the relationship between the global metropole and the periphery, and between the tourist and the local.
