Embodying plurality: Becoming more‐than‐homeless

Abstract

Arising from seven months of auto/ethnographic research in an English city, this paper attends to the mundane practices through which we – “the homeless” – renegotiate ourselves to become more‐than‐homeless. The “we” through which these auto/biographies are writ denotes an inflection on the spectral presence of my own experiences of homelessness, spectral because they reflect a historic occurrence brought back in the doing of this research. Affording a unique position of betweenness, this paper thus seeks to add depth and nuance to the homeless literature by emphasising the embodied performances through which we become more‐than‐homeless. To this end, this paper contributes to recent approaches in homelessness research drawing on performativity and embodiment to show how we are neither ontologically nor existentially reducible to our homelessness. Exploring the webs of relational engagements between human and non‐human others, space and subjectivity, the ongoing (re)negotiations expressed in acts of remembering, forgetting, suppressing, misremembering, and imagining, distance the moment of homelessness so that we are able to become someone other than “homeless.” This distancing is not to shade the ways in which we are different. Rather, it is to reveal a dimension of possibilities, both spatial and temporal, through which we resist a subsumption into the singular mass of “the homeless,” becoming instead someone more‐than‐homeless.