Engendering food meaning and identity for Southern Sudanese refugee women in Brooks, Alberta

• Author / Creator

  Oleschuk, Merin

• This thesis explores the food practices of Southern Sudanese refugee women in Brooks, Alberta, illustrating how foodways (Long, 2004) impact and reflect women’s conceptions of themselves as gendered, multinational citizens. These women’s relationship to food is an ambivalent one; simultaneous food maintenance and re-creation represents women’s understandings about themselves within intersecting cosmopolitan and local identities. Women use food to connect them to their Southern Sudanese, Canadian, and cosmopolitan identities, and therefore embody ‘actually existing’ cosmopolitanism (Robbins, 1998). Women demonstrate agency in their foodways as they utilize cosmopolitan praxis to gain status, address quotidian challenges, and question established gender norms. Ultimately, transnational foodways represent freedom for Southern Sudanese women as they indicate their willingness and ability to move through the boundaries of identification as needed. The result of this movement is not without tension and as women appropriate transnational foodways they negotiate the power encompassed in ethnic and national gendered identities.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Identity
  • Southern Sudanese
  • Cosmopolitanism
  • Gender
  • Refugees
  • Food

• Graduation date

  Fall 2011

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R35059

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.