This paper examines the performance of gender and racial stereotypes in Carry On Abroad (1972), with a particular emphasis on how the mode of stereotypical
representation unfolds via the socio-cultural frame of the British package holiday (Barton 2005). Working with Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial understanding of the stereotype as ‘a complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation, as anxious as it is assertive’ (1994: 100), I argue that the film’s stereotyping reveals the cultural dynamics at play in the package holiday industry that rose to prominence in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. Peter Butterworth’s character Pepe and the ‘liquera por l’amoura’ serve as specific examples, where the relationship between surface appearances and a supposed underlying reality is unsettled via the form of the film.

Just as the call for papers for this conference advocates a move beyond ‘the celebratory or the outright disdainful’ when discussing Carry On films, Bhabha’s theory of stereotyping proposes a shift ‘from the identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the process of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse.’ (1994: 95) Through a close reading of Carry On Abroad, this paper argues that the performance of problematic gender and racial stereotypes in the film renders the visible the ambivalence on which these representations are dependent.