The Rhetorical Resistance of Tiny Homes: Downsizing Neoliberal Capitalism

Abstract

Asking how post-crisis countercultural formations compose new means of resisting an unjust economic order, this essay centers the tiny homes movement, which takes the financialization and commodification of housing as a warrant for radically downsized dwellings. As I argue, the campaign to displace (from) big homes and emplace tiny homes relies on coordinating rhetorical modalities: the parrhēsiastic case against dominant but flawed materializations of “good living” and the eudaimonic envisioning of an alternative “good living” less beholden to capital. I conclude by reviewing both problematics and possibilities that emerge from this inventive play for social and economic change.

Keywords:

• eudaimonia
• neoliberalism
• parrhēsia
• social resistance
• tiny homes

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Susan C. Jarratt for her generosity and guidance throughout the revision process as well as two anonymous reviewers for their extraordinarily helpful feedback.

Notes

¹ The size of the average new home hit an all-time high in 2015, representing a 62% increase in just over forty years (see Christie).

² Tortorello is discussing Quixote Village in Olympia, Washington, a former floating tent city converted to a tiny housing community. See Heben for a more complete list of sanctioned communities. San Jose is among the municipalities to consider tiny housing solutions (Licardo and Herrera).

³ Spokeswoman Elena Stern’s public comments were reported by multiple news outlets.

⁴ Summers was reportedly able to remove some houses to private land; see Lazare.

⁵ Benjamin never offers a precise formulation of left melancholy, Brown writes, but the concept emerges in several works, including the 1931 essay “Left-Wing Melancholy.”