Willeen Keough

Willeen Keough, “Newfoundland Landsmen Sealing: Interrogating the Limits of Ecomasculinity in the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries,” Acadiensis 50, 2 (Autumn 2021): 155-183.

Since the 1960s, debates concerning Newfoundland’s seal hunt have marginalized settler sealers’ experiences, expertise, and emotions. In this article, Willeen Keough offers a fresh perspective on the hunt and on the Newfoundlanders, who engaged in it. Using oral history interviews to inform her analysis, Keough explains landsmen’s thoughts and feelings about their work, economic contribution, environmental impact, and masculinity. Her work challenges “practitioners and theorists of ecomasculinity” to enter into “inclusive conversations with less-privileged rural harvesters.”  In so doing, her work has substantial theoretical and political implications, and contributes to wider understandings of environmentalism, economy, and gender in Canadian history.