Homeless women self-advocates: The quest from liminal to full citizenship

ABSTRACT

This essay explores how homeless women produce advocacy to gain full and substantive citizenship. Homeless women's attempts to gain recognition as full members of the society require them to transform lived experiences of trauma, exclusion, and loss into public arguments. Facing the intersection of civic exclusion by class and gender, homeless women are commonly viewed as welfare-dependent, irrational, and present-oriented, and are, therefore, considered the opposite of “good citizens.” Despite their legal citizenship, homeless women are essentially liminal citizens—their citizenship is lacking substantial political power and is thus barren. This essay explores how liminal citizens attempt to secure full citizenship by looking behind-the-scenes at their self-advocacy production process. Employing rhetorical field methods, the essay offers an interpretive reading of in-depth interviews with homeless women self-advocates and illuminates three aspects of the advocacy production process: recognizing the worth of the story; deciding to tell traumatic stories; and crafting the story. By unpacking the self-advocacy production process this essay animates the discussion about the mechanisms required to foster a deep and inclusive democracy from a rhetorical perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Homelessness
• liminal citizenship
• advocacy
• marginality
• public deliberation

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2020 conference “Citizenship at the Intersections: 100 years since the 19th Amendment,” Organizing for Research on Women and Communication. The author wishes to thank Karrin Vasby Anderson, Johana Hartelius, Tamar Katriel, Shiv Ganesh, Rodrick P. Hart, Jeffery Treem, Patrick Sheehan, Clayton Terry-Gonsalves, Justin Pehoski, and Eldad Levy for their helpful suggestions and comments, as well as Roni Chelban and the participants of Gathering Ground Theater for their help, time, and knowledge. In memory of James Mosely, a founding member of Gathering Ground Theater and a passionate activist, who passed away on March 14, 2020.

Notes on contributor

Inbal Leibovits is a Ph.D. student at the Communication Studies department at The University of Texas at Austin. She studies liminal citizenship and focuses on advocacy efforts of individuals experiencing homelessness.

Notes

1 Kathleen R. Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity: The Uncanniness of Late Modernity, SUNY Series in National Identities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004); Fred Evans, “Citizenship, Art, and the Voices of the City: Wodiczko's The Homeless Projection,” in Acts of Citizenship, ed. Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2008), 227–46; Engin F. Isin, “Theorizing Acts of Citizenship,” in Acts of Citizenship, ed. Greg M. Nielsen and Engin F. Isin (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2013), 15–43; Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development: Essays (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977); Aihwa Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States,” Current Anthropology 37, no. 5 (1996): 737–62, https://doi.org/10.1086/204560; Michael K. Middleton, “‘SafeGround Sacramento’ and Rhetorics of Substantive Citizenship,” Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 2 (2014): 119–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2013.835064; Melanie Loehwing, Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018).

2 Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity; Evans, “Citizenship, Art, and the Voices of the City”; Engin F. Isin, “Theorizing Acts of Citizenship,” in Acts of Citizenship, ed. Greg M. Nielsen and Engin F. Isin (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2013), 15–43 Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development; Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making”; Middleton, “‘SafeGround Sacramento’ and Rhetorics of Substantive Citizenship.”

3 The term “liminal citizenship” adds another dimension to the way we think about citizenship, since it highlights the duality of being simultaneously a citizen and a non-citizen—thus pointing at the constant negotiation citizenship demands. Grounded in a spatial metaphor, the term emphasizes the in-between space—between being and not being a citizen—inhabited by severely excluded citizens. It therefore adds to other terms used to think about citizenship: such as Marshall's degrees of citizenship—full/partial/passive citizenship (Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development), and Evans’ different types of citizenship—the distinction between legal and substantive citizenship which focuses on the type of citizenship (Evans, “Citizenship, Art, and the Voices of the City: Wodiczko's the Homeless Projection”).

4 The term “non-conventional advocacy” builds on Loehwing, Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home, where Loehwing differentiates between conventional and non-conventional advocacy efforts.

5 Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 2 (2004): 189–211, https://doi.org/10.1080/0033563042000227436; Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making.”

6 Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making,” 737.

7 Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” 191.

8 Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making”; Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.”

9 Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity; Loehwing, Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home.

10 Loehwing, Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home; Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity.

11 Joy Moses, “Demographic Data Project: Race, Ethnicity and Homelessness,” (Homeless Research Institute: National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2018), https://endhomelessness.org/demographic-data-project-race/.

12 Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity; Barbara Hobson and Ruth Lister, “Citizenship,” in Contested Concepts in Gender and Social Politics, ed. Barbara Hobson, Jane Lewis, and Birte Siim (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2002), 23–54; T. H. Marshall and T. B. Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto Press, 1992); Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59, no. 1 (1973): 74–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335637309383155.

13 Arabella Lyon, Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 68, 79–88.

14 Lyon, Deliberative Acts.

15 Whitney Gent, “When Homelessness Becomes a ‘Luxury’: Neutrality as an Obstacle to Counterpublic Rights Claims,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017): 230–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2017.1321133.

16 Jean Calterone Williams, “A Roof Over My Head”: Homeless Women and the Shelter Industry (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003).

17 Williams, “A Roof Over My Head.”

18 “Gathering Ground Theatre,” accessed April 26, 2020, https://www.gatheringgroundtheatre.org/. To this day, the group produced three performances: “Am I invisible” (2014), “No Sit / No Lie” (2017), and “Tales of Sleepless Nights” (2019). These performances were accompanied by a direct call to join ongoing efforts to repeal three local ordinances, which were judged by the city Auditor as contributing to the criminalization of homelessness. See City of Austin Office of the City Auditor, “Homelessness Assistance Audit Series: City Policies Related to Homelessness,” November 2017, http://www.austinmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/homeless-audit.pdf.

19 Rhetorical field methods (as discussed by Gent in “When Homelessness Becomes a ‘Luxury’” and Middleton in “‘SafeGround Sacramento’ and Rhetorics of Substantive Citizenship”) employ observations, interviews, focus groups, and so on, to access vernacular discourse which is not publicly available. In introducing rhetorical field methods, Gent and Middleton argue it is particularly useful when analysing marginalized groups and counter-publics, whose texts are often less accessible to rhetorical scholars. Such methods are therefore essential in studying the production of homeless self-advocacy.

20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 180–3. See also Lyon's insightful discussion on Arendt's notion of inter-est and in-between: Lyon, Deliberative Acts, 54–9.

21 Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation,” 78.

22 Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (May 1, 1996): 142–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639609384147.