By Gillian Der 謝美華
On July 1st, 2024, I attended the Canada Day Parade in the town of Gold Bridge, nestled in the remote Bridge River Valley area of British Columbia (pop. 305). It was the first community celebration after the 2023 Downton Lake Wildfire. The fire resulted in damage on over 50 properties, the majority of which incurred total structure loss. Local volunteer fire groups stayed behind with provincial Wildfire fighters to assist in the fire fight. Although the parade was not designated as a moment of reflection, gratitude, or celebration of the firefighting effort it seemed to star mostly underdressed firefighting trucks and heavy equipment. I was curious why a celebration of Canadian nationalism had collided so conspicuously with celebrating firefighting. How has the figure of the firefighter historically been put to work to assert Canadian Nationalism? And what happens to that figure as increasingly severe and frequent interface fire events lead to larger losses?
Wildfire is reshaping masculine heroics (Pacholok, 2013) and in doing so demonstrating how these masculinities require a kind of social bail out scheme. I argue that older forms of masculinity that are foundational to Canadian settler nationalism and colonialism attend to this social bail out. By tracing the aesthetics and performance of firefighting and its implicit masculine physicality, I analyse how firefighting aligns with and leans against colonial masculinities to produce what I call, Fire Truck Nationalism. Fire Truck Nationalism rests less on a celebration of successful fire suppression and more on a theatre where performances of masculinity, heroics, and colonial myth protect one another from upheaval caused by fire loss.
Firefighting Cowboys and the Heros of the Wild West
Firefighting has an undeniably gendered aesthetic: one that is large, muscular, stubbornly masculine and fundamentally heroic (Totty, 2019; Tyler et al., 2019). In the Greek pantheon, a hero (nearly always male) is made through physical challenges: killing monsters, subduing beasts, winning glory in battle and rescuing (usually) women. Firefighters become heroes when they figuratively “kill” the fire-cast-as-monster, or literally by rescuing those trapped by flames. Like heroes, fire fighters are expected to conduct themselves within a system that mimics military command structure. The firefighter’s muscular physique is intrinsically linked to their ability to complete heroic tasks.
The image of the burly, athletic firefighter was already cemented in Canadian small-town life. In fact, the two categories were historically one in the same. Take, for example, the “Kaslo Fire Department Athletic Team”(BC Archives, 1898). A photo of the team shows a group of young men crossing their arms in an attempt to emphasize the size of their biceps. They wear shirts emblazoned with their fire crew name, and white shorts that look easy to move in. Their shoes are state of the art sprinting cleats with spikes necessary for traction when pulling hose by hand.
Idealized masculine athleticism finds an outlet in firefighting where hard bodies can be wielded toward the heroic and celebrated publicly. In Moyie British Columbia images from their 1907 Dominion Day celebrations include a fire hose race (British Columbia Archives, 1907). This event would have showcased the athletic speed and technical skill of the fire fighters emphasizing their capacity for heroism. Physicality is wielded toward the heroic to produce that initial figure of the firefighter. Rather than a dialectic however, the date of this event introduces a third myth into mix. The performance of the heroic firefighter is set during a simultaneous performance of the successful settler colony.
Like the puffed-up biceps of the past, contemporary fire crews often conduct fundraising campaigns by selling sexy firefighter calendars to direct funds toward charitable efforts in their communities. For the photoshoot participants, their heroism is doubled. Not only are these bodies capable of saving the day by serving on a crew, but they also save through their ability to raise funds by displaying the strength of their capable, athletic, and heroic bodies. Intriguingly, the Vancouver Firefighter’s Charity Calendar this year is themed “Wild West”. The invocation of the wild west once again aligns Canadian settler nationalism with firefighting through another heroic figure: the cowboy. Each hero-form builds on the other to reinforce the individual figure’s value to the categories of nationalism, masculinism, and heroism making it almost impossible to tease apart any distinct mythic lineage. Although Dominion Day hose races are no longer a staple of firefighting performances, firefighter physicality continues to link the body to heroic masculinity and settler nationalist power.
Bailing Out Heroic Masculinities by Performing Settler Nationalism
As temperatures rise, droughts stretch on, and fuel load continues to pile up, succeeding as a firefighting hero is becoming more fraught. Shelly Pacholok’s (2013) analysis of the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park fire makes important interventions into how a hero comes be. Unlike the heroes of myth, these firefighters are rarely anointed at birth as demi-gods or chosen ones. She notes that instead, the heroic is granted through credibility. One cannot simply deem themselves a hero, community must confer this status. Masculinity similarly demands an audience in order to assess appropriate gender performance. For Pacholok, successful fire fighting performances build and maintain credibility, but when fire losses occur, credibility is imperilled. In turn, Pacholok finds these losses to result in a renegotiation of the gendered expectations of firefighters and their crews.
What I observed in my community, however, adds another layer to how gender performance survives discreditation. Heroic masculinity as performed and perceived in fire crews is built within a western hetero-patriarchal structure. Having linked firefighting and settler nationalism, I posit that firefighters’ imperilled credibility in the face of fire loss is salvaged by its connection to colonial masculinity and nationalist myths. Rather than accept structure loss or uncontained fire perimeters as a failure, the simultaneous performance of these myths reduces failure to a setback enabling both the heroic firefighter and national pride to stand. The heroic firefighter does not face a credibility freefall instead he simply enters a temporarily embarrassed state.
What I witnessed on Canada Day in 2024 was the deployment of this social bailout. The figure of the heroic firefighter and his implicit masculinity is too big to fail, because it is propped up by foundational nationalist myths. This is why the “wild west” aesthetic maps so well onto the sexy firefighter calendar. It is why athleticism and hose races were centred in that 1907 Dominion Day celebration. These are the small stage performances that prime us to accept the conflation of firefighting, masculinity and nationalism. When that devastating fire finally comes, this theatre is reproduced on a grand stage for an audience who can accept Fire Truck Nationalism regardless of if the fire outcome is in fact disaster.
Works Cited
Pacholok, S. (2013). Into the Fire: Disaster and remaking of gender. University of Toronto Press.
Totty, M. (2019, October 9). “Why Aren’t There More Women Firefighters?” UCLA Anderson Review.
Tyler, M., Carson, L., & Reynolds, B. (2019). “Are fire services ‘extremely gendered’ organizations? Examining the Country Fire Authority (CFA) in Australia.” Gender, Work & Organization, 26(9), 1304–1323.
Gillian Der 謝美華