‘Don’t wake papa bear!’ Understanding media representations of landlord-tenant relations

Danielle Kerrigan

City, 2022, vol. 26, issue 4, 587-609

Abstract: Landlord–tenant relations are one of the core social relations of daily life yet are surprisingly under-theorized by housing scholars and geographers. This article begins to address this gap by applying for feminist scholarship on hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity to the case of the expansion and subsequent retrenchment of rent-control policy in Ontario, Canada in 2017–2018. Through a discourse analysis of government policy documents and news media coverage, I demonstrate that portrayals of landlords and tenants broadly conformed to characteristics of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, respectively, with landlords most commonly portrayed as ‘rational’ and tenants most commonly portrayed as ‘vulnerable’. Landlords benefit from traits associated with hegemonic masculinity even if they themselves do not embody them. Similarly, landlords benefit from the portrayal of tenants as passive victims, in need of paternalistic government protection, as opposed to potentially powerful collective actors.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2022.2067719 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:26:y:2022:i:4:p:587-609

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CCIT20

DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2022.2067719

Access Statistics for this article

City is currently edited by Bob Catterall

More articles in City from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().