The "Modern Fisherman": Masculinity in Crisis or Resilient Masculinity?

A major shift is occurring in Canadian fisheries management. The state is in the process of dismantling its extensive fisheries regulatory regime including its scientific infrastructure and transferring the responsibilities for management onto participants in the industry. This shift is premised on two key assumptions. First, there are too many fishers chasing too few fish; and second, economic restructuring, informed by a neoliberal agenda, is the solutio-n to such overcapacity and associated problems, including stock collapses and dependency on social programs. These assumptions underlie adjustment initiatives that accompanied state-imposed moratoria on groundfish in Atlantic Canada starting in the early 1990s and subsequent fisheries-related policy, the objectives of which are to reduce capacity, rationalize access, and ultimately create self-reliant and selfmanaging individual entrepreneurs (DFO 1996,2001). These assumptions and initiatives reflect and enable what Barbara Neis and Susan Williams call a "global ecological revolution" which is "based on the transformation of nature, our productive relations to nature, the reproduction of fisheries households and communities and the dominant legal, political and ideological frameworks that govern fisheries" (56). The effects on the lives offisheriesdependent peoples of this "global ecological revolution" are mediated by gendered and hierarchical divisions oflabour in local fishery economies, in communities, and within households, and by gendered ideologies that provide spaces in which to create meaning and that guide national and local policyand decisionmaking about access to fisheries-related wealth, resources, and jobs. In her case study of a Newfoundland fishing village, Dona Lee Davis argued that one effect has been a feminization of local men. T o put it another way, there has been a "crisis of masculinity." This conclusion seems logical given the well-documented historical importance of the fishery as a site in which Newfoundland men earn a living, live a distinctly masculine way of life, and create meaning. In this paper I offer a different response to the question, "Has this global ecological revolution triggered a crisis of masculinity in the Newfoundland fishery?" I do so by critically examining the impacts of and responses to the changing criteria concerning access to fisheries resources-as part of an overall development process-on men's work, practices, identities and ways of making meaning and on the implications for women's dependency and visibility in the fishery. I draw on interviews conducted between 1995 and 1998 with 97 women and men from the Bonavista-Trinity Bay region of the island portion of Newfoundland and Labrador.'