Abstract
In the traditional Newfoundland maritime division of labor, men worked at sea on boats and women worked on the land in their households. Patterns of gender identity, work, and gender relations were characterized by an ethos of complementarity. Present declines in the fishery make it impossible to earn a living at sea and men have become landbound. The resulting infringement by unemployed men into the spaces and prerogatives traditionally allotted to women has come to generate a gender antagonism that permeates, if not dominates, contemporary gender relations in a southwest coast Newfoundland fishing community. Ethnographic analysis incorporates data collected during two periods of anthropological fieldwork: 1977–1978 and 1989–1990. Comparative assessment of economic, psychological, and cultural constructionist theories of gender relations inform the qualitative analysis of ethnographic data.
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The original period (1977–1978) of anthropological fieldwork was funded by a grant from the United States National Institute of Child and Maternal Health, which was administered through the Population Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The second period (1989–1990) of fieldwork was funded by grants from Memorial University of Newfoundland's Institute of Social and Economic Research, the Canadian Embassy's Canadian Studies Program, and the University of South Dakota's General Research Fund.
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Davis, D.L. When men become “women”: Gender antagonism and the changing sexual geography of work in Newfoundland. Sex Roles 29, 457–475 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00289321
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00289321