Profaning the Past to Salvage the Present: The Symbolically Reconstructed Pasts of Homeless Shelter Residents

Abstract

Homelessness presents challenges for maintaining a positive self-concept, and those seeking help from homeless shelters face a particular irony: establishing service-worthiness requires them to present themselves as homeless, not self-sufficient, and genuinely in need of help, yet also morally worthy of that help. How do shelter residents manage this tension and salvage the self within the institutional context of the shelter? A theoretical framework linking Mead, Goffman, and narrative helps clarify strategies of self-presentation and salvaging the self within the homeless shelter context. Drawing on interviews with 44 shelter residents, this paper demonstrates that residents construct narratives that symbolically reconstruct the past from the standpoint of the present, and draw on the stages of the shelter's moral career to present a temporally-divided self, allowing residents to strategically profane the past self while keeping the present self separate and sacred. Implications for research on other institutional selves are also discussed.

Time as a source of struggle and resilience in homeless families

“…Meanwell’s (2013) findings supported her hypothesis. Except for their past work histories—which residents viewed positively—they emphasized histories of emotional immaturity, financial irresponsibility, and substance abuse as reasons for being homeless.…”

“…But it is a better future that frequently recedes (or, proceeds) further away in time. Meanwell's (2013) finding that homeless persons tend to "profane" their pasts strategically in order to fit with the shelter's institutional narrative and assessment procedures about who needs services, while preserving and safeguarding their present identities as positive and willing to participate in the shelter's programs for change, was only indirectly and partially supported, although the present study did not set out to replicate her findings. In the present study, participants did portray themselves as doing their best to cope with their present circumstances and time challenges-and so, could be viewed as holding a positive identity-but they did not spontaneously suggest that one of the reasons they had become homeless was because of difficulty with time management, punctuality, or other temporally oriented behavior.…”

“…The level of noise and large number of distractions (for instance, unsupervised, unruly young children) negatively affected the quality of family connectedness. Meanwell (2013) conducted an interesting qualitative study of the experience of past, present, and future time in homeless adults, half of whom were in a family shelter and half of whom were in a single persons' shelter. She drew upon Flaherty's (2003) notion of "time work," defined as "one's efforts to promote or suppress a particular temporal experience" (p. 19); Mead's (1929) theory that the past is always reconstructed to suit the exigencies of the present, and to support projections about the future; Goffman's (1961) notion of the "moral career," developed from his study of psychiatric patients and institutions; and Ezzy's (1998) theory that life narratives represent person's constructed identities.…”

“…Based on integration of these perspectives, Meanwell examined whether homeless persons' need to establish their "service-worthiness" (p. 439) when requesting entry into a shelter leads to denigrating or "profaning" their pasts, while preserving a more positive sense of their present identities as willing to receive guidance, to change, and to demonstrate compliance with shelter rules and expectations. Just as psychiatric patients are required to acknowledge the illness that led to their need for hospitalization and treatment (Goffman, 1961), Meanwell (2013) proposes that homeless shelters require adults to acknowledge the past failings that led them to require temporary shelter and to improve their life management skills so as to create a stable life in the future.…”

Agency and clientship in public encounters: co‐constructing ‘neediness’ and ‘worthiness’ in shelter placement meetings

“…In these studies, the agency of homeless people has to do with ‘their capacity to make sense of their socially conditioned circumstances and identities’ (Parsell and Clarke : 2); for example, whether the homeless individuals are openly critical toward staff or display ‘honest, open and willing talk’ (Carr : 149). These studies have shown how homeless persons establish service‐worthiness by presenting themselves to staff as genuinely in need and morally worthy of the help offered (Carr ; Marvasti ; Meanwell ). Such Goffman‐inspired work on the hows of interaction are equally important as structural research that sheds light on the reasons for homelessness.…”