Down-and-out in Paris: being LGBTQ and homeless, a compulsory performance of gender and sexuality

Abstract

This paper is grounded in the context of a severe housing, shelter shortage, and of an increasing number of homeless people in France. It will focus on LGBTQ homelessness in Paris as revealing moments of conflation, overlap and distinction in terms of gender and sexuality. In light of the binary gender framework underpinning the shelter space, there is very little consideration for non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations in the social support shelters provide. This paper will analyse issues of hypervisibility and invisibility amongst homeless LGBTQ people within a French universalist framework. Using interview material from fieldwork focused on the narratives of homeless LGBTQ respondents and drawing from the professional experience of the authors, this paper will highlight how precarious LGBTQ identities and subjectivities are produced by compulsory cisheteronormativity, as well as its consequences on LGBTQ bodies and survival strategies. As LGBTQ homelessness has not been explored much in the French context, these insights will call for the importance of assessing social difference in order to find adequate solutions to ending homelessness.