Gender, emotions and fly‐in fly‐out work

Abstract

This paper explores the emotional life of fly-in fly-out (FIFO) workers and their families, through an analysis of more than 500 postings made on an online chat forum for mining families. Building on literature on fly-in fly-out workers and understandings of emotions as socially constructed, analysis shows how posters to the forum, typically women whose male partners are FIFO workers, construct gendered emotional identities for their partners (sometimes referred to as 'Mr Miner'), and for themselves, as 'mining women', 'mining widows' or the 'mining missus'. Inherent in the creation of gendered emotional subject positions is the process of women undertaking emotion work on and behalf of themselves, their male partners and their children. The findings demonstrate the overarching normative dimensions of women's emotional self-transformations in the service of their mining partners' careers and the attendant reproduction of everyday patriarchal relations in the private lives of mining families.

Disoriented geographies: Undoing relations, encountering limits

“…A space opens up between us and others. This insight offers a rejoinder to research that has emphasised the techniques that purport to reduce the felt space between us and others in the context of various forms of mobility, such as the role of communication devices (Elliott & Urry, ; Pini & Mayes, ) or the spaces of community that aim to reduce loneliness for mobile worker partners (Sibbel, ). Certainly, Kate's description of the continuity of playing videogames with her partner while he works away echoes these insights.…”

Re-Inscribing Gender Relations through Employment-Related Geographical Mobility: The Case of Newfoundland Youth in Resource Extraction

“…Research shows that women's underrepresentation in skilled trades is linked to the tension between the gendered double standard related to child and domestic work, and the expectation of long hours (Wright 2017) and long commutes (Barber, 2016). Further, men's mobility in resource extraction is enabled by the unpaid care work women do back home (Pini & Mayes, 2012). Unlike the rural to urban flow described in much of the rural youth literature, the young men's and women's mobilities we focus on are largely to and from rural and/ or remote regions both intra-and inter-provincially.…”

“…By this we mean the way in which the gendered world of paid work is supported by and reinforces gendered care work and dependency. On the one hand, child care and family responsibilities have different implications for women's and men's employment and mobility options, with women's care and domestic work freeing men for mobile employment (Hayfield, 2018;Pini & Mayes, 2012). John, an apprentice introduced earlier, told us that while he prefers not to travel outside the province for work because he has a young family, he wouldn't mind long-distance commuting for work on the island: For John, family responsibilities do not close mobility options, even if he personally desires to work closer to home.…”

The Embodied Countryside: Methodological Reflections in Place

“…Research with a focus on place and embodiment by rural feminist sociologists has involved a range of methods including focus groups (Madriz 1998), autoethnographic memory work (Bryant and Livholts 2013), textual analysis (Little and Panelli 2003), interviews (Brandth 2016) and online ethnographies (Pini and Mayes 2012). However, to date, little use has been made of the visual ethnography.…”