“Standing Up for Canadian Oil & Gas Families”: Tracing Gender, Family, and Work In the Alberta Petro-economy

Drawing on the social media content of four pro-oil Facebook groups, we argue that these ‘subsidized publics’ play an increasingly critical role in facilitating oil and gas companies’ continued accumulation of fossil capital. We adopt O’Shaughnessy and Krogman’s (2011) analytical framework to reveal material-discursive contradictions obscured from view in the pages of these online groups. Through deploying gendered and familial discourses, these subsidized publics celebrate traditional gender roles, present oil as a ubiquitous and benevolent force, and blur the divide between oil and gas workers on the one hand, and absentee transnational employers on the other. In an era of advanced neoliberal petro-capitalism, these quasi-public entities are masking the inherently unequal power relationship that exists between the two. Moreover, in projecting a working-class ethos, we argue that these familial and gendered discourses create a homogenizing narrative, advancing the false notion of a “classless and horizontally beneficial” industry (Gaventa, 1982, p. 58). Our analysis disrupts neoliberal representations of de-gendered extraction and highlights the extent to which gender remains a key axis within resource communities.