Affirmative alternatives to the biopolitics of air travel: Actions by the Taoyuan flight attendant union during the COVID-19 pandemic

The field of tourism offers a key to understanding past, present, and future biopolitical action implicated in the resistance against forms of biopower. Yet, the potential for tourism geographies to engage with and inform debates on biopolitics remains to be realized. To reflect that potential, this chapter examines a situated perspective surrounding tourism labour, namely the response of the Taoyuan Flight Attendant Union (TFAU) to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on workers in the aviation and hospitality sectors in Taiwan. I analyse the three dimensions of the union's campaigns at the exceptional time of the pandemic as "affirmative alternatives" to the biopolitical production of, and control over, air travel, health, and labour. The analytics proposed in the chapter open a space for understanding the "nitty-gritty" of workers' struggles to live well , to be governed better , and to establish a qualitatively different living-with vis-à-vis the general public. My discussion of TFAU's experiences indicates clear potential and an imperative for tourism and hospitality to nurture a sociality beyond consumerism and sexism-as an integral part of broader biopolitical and democratic struggles against governmental control and corporate capitalism.