Placing identities: family, class and gender in Surrey, British Columbia
Creators: name: Dowling, Robyn Margaret
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2009

description: 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.