MEN AT THE MARGIN - MASCULINITY AND SPACE IN DOWNTOWN VANCOUVER, 1950-1986

This article examines ways in which images and ideas about masculinity have been implicated in the social construction of Vancouver's Downto wn Eastside. In the 1950s and 1960s, this was the city's skid-road dis trict, a location where damaged masculinity, represented by the figure of the derelict, was linked causally to the deterioration of the cent ral-city landscape. The derelict was constituted as a figure of abject ion that marked the outside boundary of respectable masculinity, and h is presence provided a rationale for urban renewal. During the 1970s a nd the 1980s, community groups contested the representation of skid ro ad. They attempted to reconstruct the area as the Downtown Eastside, a working-class neighborhood and community that was symbolized by anoth er male figure: the aging, retired resource industry worker. This imag e was derived from the memory and experience of the people who lived t here. But because it rested on the appropriation and reworking of the same association between masculinity and space on which skid road was based, it excluded significant groups of people from the community it defined.