When homelessness becomes a “luxury”: Neutrality as an obstacle to counterpublic rights claims

ABSTRACT

Rhetorical scholars have consistently demonstrated the value of engaging with difference in processes of public deliberation, yet publics still regularly make arguments on the basis of neutrality. Using a case study of advocacy for homeless bills of rights, I employ rhetorical field methods to assess vernacular responses to counterpublic rights claims. By attending to neutrality’s rhetorical force in practice, I examine how it enables publics to deny counterpublic assertions of inequality and obstruct counterpublic rights claims. I argue that neutrality allows publics to deny counterpublics’ needs, define counterpublics’ identities, and disguise their own self-interest. The theory of neutrality I offer here pushes rhetoricians beyond questions of its (un)desirability and (im)possibility to an understanding of how it operates.

KEYWORDS:

• Neutrality
• counterpublics
• rights
• vernacular rhetoric
• field methods

Acknowledgements

Earlier portions of this essay were presented at the 2015 NCA/AFA Summer Conference on Argumentation and the 2016 National Communication Association Convention. The author wishes to thank Robert Asen, Liz Barr, Kenneth Lythgoe, Mary Stuckey, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions throughout the development of this manuscript.

ORCID

Whitney Gent http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6534-307X

Notes

1. Stephen E. Lankenau, “Panhandling repertoires and routines for overcoming the nonperson treatment,” Deviant Behavior 20, no. 2 (1999): 183–206.

2. Susan T. Fiske, “Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Comparison Divides Us,” American Psychologist 65, no. 8 (2010): 698–706.

3. Examples of such laws include: antipanhandling laws, laws banning sitting or lying on public sidewalks, laws prohibiting the sharing of food with homeless people in public, and public urination/defecation citations when no public restroom facilities are available. See National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, “Housing Not Handcuffs: Ending the Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities,” November 2016, https://www.nlchp.org/documents/Housing-Not-Handcuffs.

4. Rhode Island was the first state to enact these protections, in June 2012, after local advocates from the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project, Rhode Island ACLU, and Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless drafted and backed the bill. Each of the other bills has undergone similar advocacy processes, and the seven rights guaranteed by the bills are the same (though sometimes worded slightly differently) from state to state. See State of Connecticut, “Homeless Person's Bill of Rights,” SB-896 (2013), http://www.cga.ct.gov/2013/ACT/PA/2013PA-00251-R00SB-00896-PA.htm; State of Illinois, “Bill of Rights for the Homeless Act,” SB-1210 (2013), http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/publicacts/fulltext.asp?Name=098-0516; State of Rhode Island, “Homeless Bill of Rights,” S-2052 (2012), http://votesmart.org/static/billtext/40414.pdf.

5. Thomas Ammiano, Assembly Bill 5, California Legislature,” April 30, 2013, http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140AB5

6. Robert Asen, “Critical Engagement Through Public Sphere Scholarship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 132–44.

7. This approach builds on the recent efforts of scholars to expand the analytical tools available to rhetoricians. See Robin Patric Clair, “Reflexivity and Rhetorical Ethnography: From Family Farm to Orphanage and Back Again,” Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies 11, no. 2 (2011): 117–28; Dwight Conquergood, “Ethnography, Rhetoric, and Performance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78, no. 1 (1992): 80–123; Art Herbig and Aaron Hess, “Convergent Critical Rhetoric at the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’: Exploring the Intersection of Rhetoric, Ethnography, and Documentary Production,” Communication Studies 63, no. 3 (2012): 269–89; Aaron Hess, “Critical Rhetorical Ethnography: Rethinking the Place and Process of Rhetoric,” Communication Studies 62, no. 2 (2011): 127–52; Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, Robert Glenn Howard, Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2016); Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and Tensions,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 386–406; Michael Middleton, Aaron Hess, Danielle Endres, and Samantha Senda-Cook, Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric In Situ (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015); Phaedra Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetorics of Counterpublics and their cultural performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 345–65; Phaedra Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).

8. These critiques were largely rooted in feminist theory. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992); Rita Felski, “The Feminist Counterpublic Sphere,” in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 164–74; Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–42; Cindy L. Griffin, “The Essentialist Roots of the Public Sphere: A Feminist Critique,” Western Journal of Communication 60 (1996): 21–39.

9. McKerrow described this as a “critique of domination.” Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91–111. See also, for example, Aaron Hess, “Critical Rhetorical Ethnography”; Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “Out-law Discourse: The Critical Politics of Material Judgment,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 30, no. 1 (1997): 50–69; Erin J. Rand, “Queer Critical Rhetoric Bites Back,” Western Journal of Communication 77, no. 5 (2013): 533–37; Raka Shome, “The Obligation of Critical (Rhetorical) Studies to Build Theory,” Western Journal of Communication 77, no. 5 (2013): 514–17.

10. Even Michael Leff, who famously viewed critical rhetoric and textual criticism as fundamentally opposed, noted that close readers would do well to remember that power always enters into their texts. See Michael Leff, “Things Made by Words: Reflections on Textual Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78, no. 2 (1992): 223–31.

11. I use the words “actually existing” to invoke the work of Nancy Fraser in Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere.”

12. Benhabib, Situating the Self, 94.

13. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 314.

14. Arabella Lyon and Lester C. Olson, “Special Issue on Human Rights Rhetoric: Traditions of Testifying and Witnessing,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2011): 203–12. For more on the role of the law/legality in rights claims see, for example, Sarah K. Burgess, “Exposing the Ruins of Law: The Rhetorical Contours of Recognition's Demand,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 48, no. 4 (2015): 516–35; Wendy S. Hesford, “Human Rights Rhetoric of Recognition,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2011): 282–89.

15. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2009).

16. Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State, eds. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 17–34.

17. Ibid, 25.

18. Ibid, 25.

19. See Bruce A. Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980); Bruce A. Ackerman, “What is Neutral About Neutrality?” Ethics 93, no. 2 (1983): 372–90; Bruce A. Ackerman, “Why Dialogue?” Journal of Political Philosophy 86, no.1 (1989): 16.

20. Ackerman, “What is Neutral About Neutrality?” 375.

21. Similarly, John Rawls holds that people should restrict their public arguments to only those which draw upon a common, mutually agreed upon, range of reasons. Any arguments falling outside that range are illegitimate because they are not shared—they are not neutral. See John Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7, no. 1 (1987): 1–25; John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” University of Chicago Law Review 64, no. 3 (1997): 765–807; John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).

22. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

23. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; Robert Asen, “Seeking the ‘Counter’ in Counterpublics,” Communication Theory 10 (2000): 424–26; Daniel C. Brouwer, “Communication as Counterpublic,” in Communication as … : Perspectives on Theory, eds. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 195–208; Thomas R. Dunn, “Remembering Matthew Shepard: Violence, Identity, and Queer Counterpublic Memories,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13, no. 4 (2010): 611–52; Gerard A. Hauser, “Civic Conversation and the Reticulate Public Sphere,” Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 57–81; Kendall R. Phillips, “The Spaces of Public Dissension: Reconsidering the Public Sphere,” Communication Monographs 63 (1996): 231–48; Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’.”

24. Robert Asen, “Critical Engagement Through Public Sphere Scholarship,” 139.

25. Erik Doxtader, “In the Name of Reconciliation: The Faith and Works of Counterpublicity,” in Counterpublics and the State, eds. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 76.

26. See, for example, Robert Asen, “Ideology, Materiality, and Counterpublicity: William E. Simon and the Rise of a Conservative Counterintelligentsia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 3 (2009): 263–88; Daniel C. Brouwer, “Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 5 (2005): 351–71; Dunn, “Remembering Matthew Shepard.”

27. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 123. See also, for example, Karma Chávez, “Counter-Public Enclaves and Understanding the Function of Rhetoric in Social Movement Coalition-Building,” Communication Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2011): 1–18; Dunn, “Remembering Matthew Shepard”; “Hoda Elsadda, “Arab Women Bloggers: The Emergence of Literary Counterpublics,” Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication 3, no. 3 (November 2010): 312–32; Belinda A. Stillion Southard, “A Rhetoric of Inclusion and the Expansion of Movement Constituencies: Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Classed Politics of Woman Suffrage,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2014), 129–47.

28. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005).

29. Catherine Squires, “The Black Press and the State: Attracting Unwanted (?) Attention,” in Counterpublics and the State, eds. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 131.

30. See, for example, Hesford, “Human Rights Rhetoric of Recognition”; Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics; Harri Englund, “Towards a Critique of Rights Talk in New Democracies: The Case of Legal Aid in Malawi,” Discourse & Society 15, no. 5 (2004): 527–51.

31. Gerard A. Hauser, “The Moral Vernacular of Human Rights Discourse,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 41, no. 4 (2008): 440–66.

32. Lyon and Olson, “Special Issue on Human Rights Rhetoric,” 205.

33. Ibid.

34. For more on the bills of rights see, for example, Mary O’Hara, “U.S. Domestic and Home Care Workers Show How to Make Social Change Happen,” The Guardian, December 16, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/16/us-national-domestic-workers-alliance-social-change; Tracie McMillan, “Activists Demand A Bill of Rights for California Farm Workers,” NPR, January 29, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/01/29/464758284/activists-demand-a-bill-of-rights-for-california-farm-workers; Retail Workers Bill of Rights, accessed February 14, 2016, http://retailworkerrights.com/

35. See Asen, “Seeking the ‘Counter’ in Counterpublics.”

36. Kathleen Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity: The Uncanniness of Late Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), 87.

37. Leonard Feldman, Citizens Without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 92–94.

38. Randall Amster, Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2008), 7.

39. Middleton has shown how letters to the editor, radio interviews, and more were used as a mode of dissent that allowed homeless people in Sacramento to assert themselves as substantive citizens in local deliberative processes. See Michael K. Middleton, “'SafeGround Sacramento’ and Rhetorics of Substantive Citizenship,” Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 2 (2014): 119–33.

40. Melanie Loehwing, “Homelessness as the Unforgiving Minute of the Present: The Rhetorical Tenses of Democratic Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 4 (November 2010): 385–86; Rachel Best, “Situation or Social Problem: The Influence of Events on Media Coverage of Homelessness,” Social Problems 51, no. 1 (February 2010): 74–91; Todd G. Shields, “Network News Construction of Homelessness, 1980–1993,” The Communication Review 4, no. 2 (2001): 193–218; Insung Whang and Eungjun Min, “Blaming the Homeless: The Populist Aspect of Network TV News,” in Reading the Homeless: The Media's Image of Homeless Culture, ed. Eungjun Min (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).

41. Loehwing, “Homelessness as the Unforgiving Minute,” 383.

42. Gerard Hauser argues that human rights documents, in fact, are rhetorical frames for “moral vernaculars.” See Hauser, “The Moral Vernacular.”

43. In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas describes opinion-formation and will-formation as taking place in this “general public sphere,” even as decision-makers reside in “the institutionalized public spheres of parliamentary bodies.” See especially pp. 307–308.

44. Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods,” 386

45. See endnote 7.

46. See Elizabeth A. Suter, “Focus Groups in Ethnography of Communication: Expanding Topics of Inquiry Beyond Participant Observation,” The Qualitative Report 5, no. 1/2 (2000), online at http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR5-1/suter.html. Still, focus groups remain uncommon in rhetorical methods. One notable exception is Eric King Watts and Mark Orbe, “The Spectacular Consumption of ‘True’ African American Culture: ‘Whassup’ With the Budweiser Guys?” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 1 (March 2002): 1–20.

47. See, for example, Chávez, “Counter-Public Enclaves”; Hess, “Critical-Rhetorical Ethnography”; Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’”; Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism. See also endnote 7.

48. While not all conceptions of the vernacular position it as the opposite of institutional discourse, they do all conceive of the institutional and vernacular as in relationship. For example, Hauser sees vernacular rhetoric as unauthorized, everyday, noninstitutional; Ono and Sloop conceive of it as marginalized rhetoric which is, as such, noninstitutional; and Robert Glenn Howard argues that vernacular and institutional rhetoric operate in a dialectic. See Hauser, “Attending the Vernacular: A Plea for an Ethnographical Rhetoric,” in The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture eds. Christian Meyer and Felix Girke (2011): 157–72; Hauser, Vernacular Voices; Ono and Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse”; Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002); Robert Glenn Howard, “The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 5 (2008): 490–513; Robert Glenn Howard, “The Vernacular Mode: Locating the Non-institutional in the Practice of Citizenship,” in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Media, Culture, and the Shape of Public Life, eds. Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010)

49. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. By referring to these groups as “publics,” I do not mean to imply a total unity of opinion or discourse. The multiplicity of publics in any given public sphere make the boundaries between “public” and “counterpublic” quite slippery. In these groups, there were a small number of participants who either pushed back against dominant views in the group or expressed discomfort with those views. Hence, it may be possible to view some of the participants as counterpublic via their opposition to discourse within the focus groups. However, the groups generally resisted homeless bills of rights and consistently invoked neutrality-based arguments to do so. Here, I am interested in these dominant responses to homeless advocates’ counterpublic claims.

50. It was apparent that two pairs of friends had signed up to participate together, but generally speaking, participants did not know one another.

51. I asked participants to complete a short survey to collect this information prior to the beginning of the focus group discussion. Participants were permitted to use pseudonyms if desired, to encourage honest responses to sensitive questions. Among the 38 participants, all but five grew up in the United States (in eight different states) and all but six were female. Thirty one of the participants identified as white/Caucasian, with seven identifying as Asian and one as black/white. Most were aged 18–23. When asked, “On a scale of 1 (not very informed) to 10 (extremely informed), how informed do you feel you are about issues related to homelessness?,” participant responses averaged 4.67. In an effort to assess socioeconomic class, I also asked students for the highest level of education attained by their parents/guardians. There was some variety here across participants, from one participant with two parents who had only completed high school degrees to one whose parents had completed both law school and medical school. Thus, even as the group shared some demographic characteristics, there was some diversity of experiences and backgrounds in each of the conversations. This research was approved by the University of Wisconsin—Madison's Institutional Review Board.

52. David Peters, “How About a Bill of Rights for the Homeless,” Wisconsin State Journal, July 6, 2012, accessed July 8, 2013, http://host.madison.com/news/opinion/mailbag/david-peters-how-about-a-bill-of-rights-for-the/article_f4301edf-40ba-5d5a-9595-255d11c8acb3.html

53. Peters’ letter is unusual by virtue of his authorship. Homeless people's voices are rarely represented in media coverage of homelessness, and when they are, they are permitted generally to tell only stories of suffering, while “experts” speak on policy responses to homelessness. See Neil deMause and Steve Rendall, “The Poor Will Always Be With Us—Just Not on the TV News,” Extra!, September/October 2007, accessed November 18, 2012, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3172; Barbara Schneider, “Sourcing Homelessness: How Journalists Use Sources to Frame Homelessness,” Journalism 13, no. 1 (2011): 71–86.

54. Laura Liera, “Sleeping, Panhandling in Public? Homeless Rights Bill Becomes Contentious Debate,” The Bakersfield Californian, April 28, 2013.

55. This article is consistent with traditional media frames of homelessness insofar as it relies on “expert” opinions, rather than asking homeless people what they think of the proposed policy. It skewed toward arguments against Homeless Bills of Rights, in terms of lines of text and number of people represented as making those arguments. See deMause and Rendall, “The Poor Will Always Be With Us,” in Reading the Homeless: The Media’'s Image of Homeless Culture, ed. Eungjun Min (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999); Schneider, “Sourcing Homelessness.”

56. I opted to use this article, rather than one published in the students’ community, because no bill text had actually been assembled and released to the public at the time these focus groups were conducted, so there was not yet a public response. Coverage of the California controversy was representative of the kinds of responses that arose in other communities where these bills were under consideration; it allowed me to expose the focus groups to common arguments made regarding the kind of legislation that was being considered in their city. The National Coalition for the Homeless and Western Regional Advocacy Project are two key organizations leading the national campaign for homeless bills of rights. See “Homeless Bill of Rights,” National Coalition for the Homeless, accessed May 14, 2016, http://nationalhomeless.org/campaigns/bill-of-right/; “Homeless Bill of Rights,” Western Regional Advocacy Project, accessed May 14, 2016, http://wraphome.org/what/civil-rights-campaign/.

57. Respectively, see “Democracy,” Merriam-Webster, accessed August 31, 2016, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy; “Democracy,” Dictionary.com, accessed August 31, 2016, http://www.dictionary.com/browse/democracy.

58. “The Charters of Freedom: The Declaration of Independence,” U.S. National Archives, accessed August 31, 2016, http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html

59. Peters, “How About a Bill of Rights for the Homeless.”

60. David Zarefsky, Carol Miller-Tutzauer, and Frank E. Tutzauer, “Reagan's Safety Net for the Truly Needy: The Rhetorical Uses of Definition,” Central States Speech Journal 35 (1984): 113–19.

61. This is often described as the notion of the “undeserving poor,” There is extensive literature on this idea. See, for example, Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989). See also Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” Signs 19, no. 2 (1994): 309–36; and Robert Asen, Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2001).

62. David Peters, “How About a Bill of Rights for the Homeless.”

63. Sara L. McKinnon, “Essentialism, Intersectionality, and Recognition: A Feminist Rhetorical Approach to the Audience,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist voices, Feminist practices in Communication Studies, eds. Karma R. Chávez and Cindy L. Griffin (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 192.

64. Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 34.

65. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 29.

66. A number of scholars have attempted to diagnose a declining sense of obligation to others in U.S. democracy. Robert Putnam describes civic disengagement as a result of distrust of government, while Allen views it as a distrust of one's fellow citizens. Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsburg argue that the replacement of citizenship with consumerism has extinguished the perceived need for common interests. Lauren Berlant holds that there is “no context of communication and debate that makes ordinary citizens feel that they have a common public culture.” See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Allen, Talking to Strangers; Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsburg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 3.

67. This text, specifically, comes from Liera's description of the California bill in “Sleeping, Panhandling in Public?”

68. See Asen, “Critical Engagement Through Public Sphere Scholarship,” 139.