Alternative Cartographies of Homelessness: Rendering visible British women's experiences of ‘visible’ homelessness

Abstract

This article focuses on a group largely ignored by both geographers and feminist scholars of homelessness alike—the growing number of ‘visibly homeless’ women in Britain. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 19 ‘visibly homeless’ women, we delineate between four ‘alternative cartographies’ of homelessness, each articulating quite different gendered homeless identities. The article suggests that whilst it is important to recognise that women too suffer the exclusions of visible homelessness, it is also clear that the experience of visible homelessness differs for different women. Any attempt to respond to the (immediate) needs of such women necessitates a recognition rather than denial of these differences.

Éste artículo enfoca en un grupo que se ignora en buena parte los geógrafos y feministas que estudian el problema de la falta de vivienda—el aumento en el número de mujeres ‘visiblemente’ sin techo en Inglaterra. Haciendo uso de entrevistas profundas con 19 de éstas mujeres, distinguimos cuatro ‘cartografías alternativas’ de la falta de vivienda, cada una articulando una identidad diferente generizada de estar sin techo. Éste artículo sugiere que mientras es importante reconocer que las mujeres también sufren las exclusiones de la falta de vivienda visible, también es claro que para cada mujer la experiencia de vivir sin techo es diferente. Un intento de responder a las necesidades (urgentes) de tales mujeres no exige una denegación de éstas diferencias sino que exija un reconocimiento.

Keywords:

• Street homeless
• Women
• Identity
• Prostitution
• Britain

Keywords:

• la falta de vivienda
• vivir en la calle
• mujer
• identidad
• prostitución
• Inglaterra/Britana

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the homeless women and men and project staff whose experiences we have tried to give voice to here, and the referees of our final research report whose perceptive and supportive comments encouraged us to try and think through the dynamic of women's homelessness in more detail. The research on which this article is based was funded by the ESRC (Award R000238996).

Notes

1. In Britain, distinctions are commonly drawn between the ‘statutory’ and ‘non-statutory’ homeless, a division first made in relation to the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act and upheld in all subsequent revisions to the Act. The former group includes all those to whom the local state has a statutory duty to provide accommodation and applies to people with dependants, those found otherwise in ‘priority need’ (by virtue of age or ill-health, for example) and those deemed not to have made themselves ‘intentionally homeless’. In contrast, the non-statutory homeless have no such rights to accommodation and are mainly dependent upon voluntary organisations for emergency services. Because the majority (though by no means all) of the non-statutory homeless are single, it has become commonplace in policy and practitioner discourse to refer to this group as ‘single’ homeless people. The single homeless can subsequently be divided into two further groups: those suffering ‘visible’ homelessness (living in night shelters, hostels or on the streets) and those experiencing some kind of ‘hidden homelessness’ (staying unwillingly with friends or relatives, in bed and breakfast hotels or in squats).

2. In a little more detail, field work was conducted in seven towns and cities across England, selected so as to capture the dynamics of service provision and use in places of both (relatively) ‘high’ and ‘low’ provision, in: Banbury, Bristol, Bodmin, Doncaster, Dorchester, Scarborough and Worcester. Service users were contacted through both agencies (night shelters, hostels, day centres and soup runs) and through word of mouth on the street and were paid a fee of £10 for their time. Respondents were selected so as to capture experiences of both ‘visible’ and ‘hidden’ homelessness. Each person was interviewed once, with interviews lasting anything from 20 minutes to an hour and a half, depending upon the material and the desires of the interviewee. Interviews were conducted in a range of settings, from night shelters and drop-in services to the streets. Participant observation was overt, with both service users and staff aware of the observer's presence and the purposes of the research. The observer introduced themselves as a university researcher undertaking research into people's experiences of homelessness and of homeless services. Participant observation enabled sustained observation of the complex dynamics shaping different service settings and proved invaluable in cementing arrangements for interview and developing relationships of trust with service users who often lead a relatively chaotic lifestyle and who can be wary of talking with ‘outsiders’. Field work was conducted over a 12 month period, from January 2002 to January 2003. For further details of the methodologies deployed in this project see Cloke et al. (2004).