JSalter PhD Final Thesis Submission.pdf - University of Guelph

imaginings of home and community and one’s sense of belonging to the nation vary
immensely within Canada. My dissertation engages with novels that provide exemplary
sites for noting how authors utilize fiction as a staging ground for new configurations of
identity and social understanding in Canada. In terms of transnational migration,
citizenship, and notions of belonging, the roles and opportunities for women and men are
often regulated according to vastly different social expectations. In many cultures,
women have long been positioned as the conduits of traditional rules and values, the
keepers of the hearth, and their relation to the nation depends upon the patriarchal
ideologies governing their social positions and rights to autonomy. When women are
symbolically constructed “as the custodians of tradition” (Boehmer 349), this social role
ironically excludes them from participating equally with men in society. Elleke Boehmer
explains this ‘double bind’ position as a consequence of when women “seek[ing] to
distance themselves from cultural revivalism, of which they are nevertheless the
designated exponents, […] are accused of selling out to so-called Western values of self-
determination and feminist claims for equal rights” (349). Particularly within new socio-
political environments, women must continually negotiate contradiction as new
ideologies impose different cultural gender norms that contest or, inadvertently, reinforce
traditional familial or cultural expectations. In the diaspora, as Floya Anthias suggests,
“[w]omen may be empowered by retaining home traditions but they may also be quick to
abandon them when they are no longer strategies of survival” (571). At times, new
systems of power can afford emancipatory experiences for women, such as economic
independence, and yet, “gendered relations are constitutive of the positionalities of the
groups themselves” to which immigrant women may belong (Anthias 572). Labour
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