There’s No Place Like Home: The Discursive Creation of Homelessness

Abstract

In this article, the author examines the cultural production of homelessness in the United States, with particular concern for the intimate connection between discursive practices and material conditions. Drawing from poststructural discourse analysis, the author traces the discursive development of homelessness and homeless people between 1982 and 1996 in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. The author explores changes in discursive practices and demonstrates how these changes produce, transform, and stabilize public knowledge about people who cannot afford housing. In conjunction, the author deconstructs current discursive practices in newspapers and examines the relationship of these practices to local political responses to homelessness. The author then discusses how discursive practices regarding poverty create particular problems, deliberations, and interventions while precluding others. Finally, the author considers the implications of the findings for class politics and social change.

Homelessness and identity: a critical review of the literature and theory

“…Parsell found that many people experiencing homelessness rejected the notion of being a 'homeless other', describing themselves with reference to their families. Later studies (Parsell, 2008;Pascale, 2005; have since asked what purpose is served by this 'othering' of homeless people. Parsell (2008) argues that uncritical construction of people with a 'homeless identity' runs the risk of considering their homelessness as an all-encompassing characteristic.…”

“…Such constructions are largely negative and place 'too much concentration on the disease aspects of the homeless, overlooking their assets' (Boydell et al, 2000: 28). This serves to reify the homeless person as 'other', emphasising problematic differences and results in producing the conditions of alienation such studies attempt to describe (Pascale, 2005). The model leaves questions unanswered: what factors influence how roles are constructed?…”

“…Many now agree that homeless people's identities are constructed for them to such an extent that they become 'objects of discourse' (Pascale, 2005: 261) rather than subjects of their own experience. Seal (2007: i) notes that homeless people's identities are 'foisted on them'; Pascale (2005) insists that most knowledge about homelessness and homeless people comes from the news media; and Boydell et al (2000) argue that western society presents a particular set of messages about the value of homeless people. Butchinsky (2007) argues how these images typically connote a lack of shelter, privacy, retreat and warmth; images of criminality and anti-social behaviour; vulnerability and victimhood.…”

“…In such a practice, a 'homeless identity' becomes the defining feature of a person's character, overshadowing all other axes of identity. By subsuming all people experiencing homelessness into a marked category -usually that of 'the dishevelled man in a duffel coat on the street' (Burman in Breeze and Dean, 2012: 134) -without reference to differentiations, the subject status called forth is that of the white man as the universal (Pascale, 2005); poverty is thought of neither as racialised nor gendered. Much past research has ignored the vast range of experiences of the growing number of homeless women in Great Britain (May et al, 2007).…”

Governing Homelessness: The Discursive and Institutional Construction of Homelessness in Australia

“…There is a small literature that considers the discursive construction of homelessness, drawing on Foucault's early work (Fopp 1996(Fopp , 2002Horsell 2006;Min 1999;Pascale 2005;Sykes and Treleaven 2005). Despite the strong interest in governmentality among housing researchers, there has been a lesser emphasis in the area of homelessness (Schindeler 2007).…”