Fashioning selves and identities, contested narratives, disputed subjects

grantor: University of TorontoIn this thesis, I examine narratives by working class women and men employed at Job Brothers fish plant, in St. John's, Newfoundland, between 1930 and 1967. The workers produce stories of their experiences in, and competing discourses about, work and their domestic lives. A rich and complex picture is drawn of the material and social organization of women lives, in the plant and in the communities around them. Multiple physical geographies--of the plant, work, and St. John's--operate as social markers and organizing features in narrators' stories. Work on fish and blueberry processing is detailed, as are stories of harmony, negotiation, and resistance on the plant floor. I suggest that processing lines and jobs are sites of historically contingent constitutions of workers' identities. Contested stories of the formation of the Ladies' Cold Storage Workers Union in 1948 are explored, and I show how public history of Job's, work and unionization is partial and incomplete. Who was/is authorized to speak, and about what subjects, remain disputed questions. I demonstrate how the narrators actively fashion their identities through the stories they tell. Through nuanced readings I suggest that while the narrators seek to produce themselves as 'whole' and 'complete' subjects, their accounts display an ongoing production of contested, negotiated, and shifting subject positionings cut by axes of difference--gender, race, class, age, marital status, geographic location. Fragmentary discourses of femininity, masculinity, and class are emergent in narrators' stories, while relations of race are more muted, and embedded and naturalized through what I call a "discourse of niceness." I develop the notion of "narrative constellation" to explore dimensions of the constitution of identities, memories and forgetting, and speculate that these are embodied and social acts. I argue that the narrators' stories subvert the possibility of a single interpretation of women's paid work, domestic lives, and unionization. My work builds on, draws from, and contributes to existing studies of women's paid labour and fish plant work in Newfoundland and Labrador. I contribute new insights about the material and social organization of women's work, production and management techniques. Importantly, through my layered readings of the narratives, history is seen as a fragmentary, dynamic construction, by and of subjects, identities, events and memories, rather than as a coherent, unitary "Truth."Ph.D