This thesis is an investigation of the gendered, classed and racialized
identities associated with living a traditional family life in a suburb of
Vancouver, British Columbia in the 1 990s. It has two entry points. The first
is a focus on gendered identities that are the result of “old” ideals in a “new”
cultural and geographical context: what identities result when traditional
ideals of motherhood, fatherhood and homeownership are played out in a
context where the ideals are being questioned, the ability to live these ideals
limited and the surrounding landscape does not seem to reflect these
notions? I use the heuristics of “new traditionalism” and “declining fortunes”
to understand this interpretation and reinscription of the “old” within the
“new”. The second entry point is a concern with place: how, in the 1990s,
are white, middle-class familial identities gendered and experienced in and
through place, and specifically suburban environments? Building upon
Doreen Massey’s rethinking of the notion of place, I define place as a
constellation of social and cultural relations in a particular site and examine
some of the ways that places and identities are articulated.
The thesis is based on archival work and in-depth interviews with
residents in two neighbourhoods in the Municipality of Surrey, an outer
suburb of Vancouver, British Columiba. Through an analysis of the planning
of Surrey I show how the construction of Surrey as suburban set the limits of
possibility and impossibility for identity there, deeming some identities
“natural” and others peripheral. An examination of residential location
decisions demonstrates that spatially demarcated neighbourhoods were
desired and reconstructed and that the meanings of places within Surrey
(what I term symbolic geographies) and distancing from a familial and racial other were important in the process. By exploring the multiple linkages
between gender, class and home I show how images of place, and especially
the house and the neighbourhood, are part of situating the self. Through a
focus on the tensions between new traditionalist ideals and practices, I
suggest that cultural meanings circulating within specific places influence the
experience of gendered subject positions and both exacerbate and smooth
over tensions within new traditionalism. In an investigation of the links
between religion, gender difference, new traditionalist convictions, and place,
I highlight how religious networks involve a different relation to place
compared to other residents.
I conclude that traditional models of family and gender (new
traditionalism) remain pervasive signposts, and underlain by a relation to
feminism, but are modified in response to the pressures of homeownership
and different economic positionings (understood in terms of the discourse of
declining fortunes). This modification is also class and place specific; the
ability to live an idealized new traditionalist life is dependent upon the
“possibility” of a male breadwinner wage and the meanings circulating within
the residential neighbourhood.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/7281 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Dowling, Robyn Margaret |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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