“I hope you can help me”: Impacts of cisheteropatriarchal housing systems on tenant careworkers’ access to local state care infrastructure in Vancouver, Canada

Housing and care relations are deeply gendered. Analyzing these relationships through consideration of cisheteropatriarchal structures facilitates a deeper understanding of systemic contexts shaping tenants' experiences of care in housing crises and the protection of property ownership through normative hierarchies of gender and sexualities. Yet, understandings of how tenants' care work is situated within cisheteropatriarchal relations remains limited. To address this gap, I engage archival materials to analyze interactions between tenants and Vancouver, Canada's Rental Accommodation Grievance Board, a state-led mediator between landlords and tenants that operated from 1969-1975. I theorize the multifaceted approaches through which tenants demanded care from local state infrastructure in housing crises, as shaped by cisheteropatriarchal structures. Tenants provided care work to themselves, landlords, and the state and this labour was shaped by cisheteropatriarchal contexts. Tenants' demands for local state care through landlord-tenant laws often resulted in gender-based landlord violence and harassment towards tenants. Tenants resisted cisheteropatriarchal care norms that categorized their care needs as secondary to the protection of profit and property. I situate these care contexts within a cisheteropatriarchal housing system to argue that the reliance on tenants as careworkers in housing crises exacerbates gendered inequities and harms for those already vulnerable to housing precarity.