Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

Abstract

The Great Recession of 2008 underscored the precarity of housing for many people living in the United States, as well as the unequal conditions that structure housing policy and practices. Victimized by predatory lending practices, many families lost their homes as a speculative housing bubble burst. Facing tremendous uncertainty, these families joined tens of thousands of others across the country who struggle with housing for a variety of reasons—leaving an abusive partner, struggling with medical and other unforeseen expenses, coping with addiction and/or mental illness, and more. Indeed, as Melanie Loehwing explains in her important new book, “housed” and “unhoused” represent not fixed categories or stable life trajectories but moments and dynamics that reveal the struggles of negotiating an unequal, exclusive, and often uncaring society that views the deprivation of some as justifying the privilege of many and, moreover, as a harsh reminder to compete in the marketplace lest the term “unhoused” characterize one's own social and material standing.Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home is a book about public policy and democratic theory. Offering this overview, I do not wish to suggest that Loehwing has written a book about two different topics. To the contrary, Loehwing argues compellingly that public policy (particularly policies geared toward eliminating homelessness) and democratic theory are two parts of a mutually informative relationship. Housed citizens tolerate homelessness because the sight of someone ostensibly living on the street comports with their idea of the polity, in which individuals' social standing and resources reflect their ability and effort to provide for themselves. Working together through the state, citizens do not demand more ambitious efforts to redress homelessness because of these ascriptions of deservingness and undeservingness to others. Reciprocally, popularly held perspectives of democracy justify inequality and deprivation by imagining ideals of the competent citizen whose lead should be followed by all. While homelessness illuminates material disadvantage and suffering, it also outlines the limits of a collective imagining of how people should act as citizens. Far from separating the public sphere from the private sphere, homelessness expresses their interrelationship for housed and unhoused citizens alike. On this basis, Loehwing critiques narrow, instrumental approaches that view homelessness strictly as a lack of housing. Instead, Loehwing argues that we should “understand announcements of an end to homelessness as a rhetorical act, one that contributes to the constitution of the civic body by strategically defining homelessness as a marker of flawed disposition that disqualifies individuals from inclusion in the political community” (4). To end homelessness, citizens and officials must do more than provide housing to people who lack it at a particular moment. Rather, redressing homelessness requires reimagining democracy and building a more inclusive civic home.Employing a democratic lens, Loehwing contrasts conventional and unconventional modes of advocacy to address homelessness. Conducted by organizations like the National Coalition for Homelessness and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, conventional advocacy engages in important policy-related efforts directed toward institutional actors to increase the saliency of and generate resources for programs to eliminate homelessness. While these and other organizations dedicate considerable energy to a comparatively undervalued issue, Loehwing explains that their advocacy seeks attention and influence at the cost of reinforcing some potentially disabling conventions about people experiencing homelessness. First, these organizations draw on a trope of visibility that assumes that housed citizens and policy makers are insufficiently informed about people experiencing homelessness and that bringing homelessness into clearer view will engender positive change. Second, mainstream organizations engaged in conventional advocacy often present themselves as tending to the broken bodies of people experiencing homelessness. By foregrounding physiological and psychological suffering, conventional advocacy reinforces the image of homelessness as a brutish existence that degrades the human body. Third, conventional advocacy aligns homelessness with a present-centered outlook that seeks the satisfaction of immediate needs at the expense of past memories and future plans. According to this convention, those experiencing homelessness can afford to think only in the moment, without any consideration of what they experienced previously or may experience in the future.Reflecting the connection between policy and visions of democracy, these three conventions not only characterize the people experiencing homelessness that mainstream organizations wish to help but also disqualify the homeless as citizens. Conventional advocacy may induce pity (or fear) of people without permanent shelter, but this advocacy does not treat people experiencing homelessness as potentially engaging housed publics on equal ground. Instead, relations of marginalization and subordination prevail. Together, the three conventions that Loehwing highlights—visuality, corporeality, and temporality—“illuminate the implicit models of ideal democratic citizenship that underwrite the exclusion of the homeless from contemporary society” (64). People experiencing homelessness, then, are not only people without homes; they are noncitizens, perhaps anti-citizens, and remain so until they obtain housing and simultaneously refashion themselves. Moreover, the persistence of homelessness, even if individuals, families, and groups may move among homeless and housed, reinforces the ideal notions of democratic citizenship.In chapters 2 through 4 of Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home, Loehwing explores in each chapter a detailed case of unconventional advocacy that challenges the conventions of visibility, corporeality, and temporality. Chapter 2 considers the practices of meal-sharing initiatives, particularly the work of the Food Not Bombs group of Orlando, Florida, to share meals with people experiencing homelessness in their city. In chapter 3, Loehwing considers efforts of activists across a transnational network to organize a Homeless World Cup—an international soccer tournament composed of players experiencing homelessness in their “home” nations. Turning to the convention of time, chapter 4 explores the practice in cities across the United States of Homeless Persons' Memorial Days, in which participants remember homeless people in their communities who died in the past year.As Loehwing argues, meal sharing reconfigures the visibility politics of homelessness and citizenship. In their imagining of the ideal, theories of citizenship retain a skepticism toward the visual as potentially weakening critical judgment in the presence of spectacle. A citizen must exhibit reason, while spectacle threatens to overwhelm reason. Conventional advocacy abides by this visibility politics insofar as it maintains the spectacle of homelessness as distinct from a housed public that may be affected by visibility. Sharing meals in Orlando's city center, the Food Not Bombs group works with people on equal terms, creating a community of homeless and housed members. As Loehwing observes, “FNB creates the sights of community anew, countering invisibility with constitutive visions of what the community could look like if different values and norms of civic relationships were enacted through the form of radically inclusive shared meals” (88–89).If ideal citizens should act rationally, they also must control their bodies. Stereotypical images of people experiencing homelessness, such as images of people performing actions that housed publics perform in private, serve as sharp reminders of the connections between policy and democratic theory—anyone who engages in “debasing” actions before others cannot be trusted as a citizen. Reversing conventional hierarchies of bodily control, the Homeless World Cup provides a venue for homeless people from across the globe to demonstrate acute physical prowess. Started by British homeless advocate Mel Young, the Homeless World Cup began as a way to bring together people experiencing homelessness from different nations. As a well-attended event, the Homeless World Cup reconfigures the bodies of participants and spectators. In addition to illuminating the unique abilities of the players, Loehwing explains, the tournament “positions a housed public as an interested and supportive spectator … [and] the HWC re-presents the individuals experiencing homelessness as representatives of the nation, rather than those rejected from the civic body” (112).From antiquity forward, ideal citizens have needed to negotiate different temporal horizons. Indeed, Aristotle's three species of rhetoric (judicial, epideictic, deliberative) each asked audiences to make a distinct time-oriented (past, present, future) judgment. Living in the now does not permit judgments of past events or future planning, which democracy asks of every citizen. As the name suggests, Homeless Persons' Memorial Days explicitly challenge the association of present centeredness and homelessness. Loehwing explains that “these events reconstruct lost lives, enact moments of identification between homeless and housed, and deliberate about the shared future of a community constituted around mourning the loss of homeless neighbors” (130). Like the other instances of unconventional advocacy that Loehwing analyzes, Homeless Persons' Memorial Days bring together, rather than separate, homeless and housed publics. These events regard people experiencing homelessness not as anonymous elements of a dystopic contemporary scene but as people with names, lives, histories, aspirations. They too made contributions to the communities in which members of housed and homeless publics lived; their lives held value.Loehwing is clear to explain that the differences between conventional and unconventional advocacy do not compel readers to choose between these modes. Indeed, Loehwing holds that the two modes “go a long way toward reconciling each other's limitations and drawbacks” (162). Focused more on institutions, conventional advocacy may garner more “recognition, resources, and social services” for people (162). Unconventional advocacy promises “a different kind of remedy—one that extends civic recognition as its core contribution, because it acknowledges that working for more resources within the existing system may not do enough to challenge the conditions that led to homeless marginalization in the first place” (163). Systemic change requires that we focus on the constitutive connection of theories and practices of policy and democracy.Loehwing envisions the convergence of policy and democracy in the concept of the “civic home.” As a home, a civic home recalls the material inequities of persistent homelessness, which compels some publics to move among housed and homeless standing as they negotiate the ups and downs of an unequal society while others go about their daily lives largely insulated from these traumatic experiences. Yet, as a civic home, Loehwing's concept underscores that resources, while irreplaceable, may not be enough if privileged publics imagine the polity in ways that perpetually exclude others. Without systemic change, housed publics will continue to tolerate homelessness as an unfortunate (or, perhaps, best unseen) byproduct of a wider society that produces benefits for those who subscribe to the vision of ideal citizenship.A civic home underscores the ameliorative role of unconventional advocacy in potentially “realign[ing] the assumptions, prejudices, and exclusions found in competing rhetorics of homelessness” (163). Loehwing locates the materials for the construction of a civic home in “rhetorical circulation.” If the civic home is a “symbolic space,” then its building requires the reshaping of political culture so that publics may appreciate connections to one another. For Loehwing, the civic home would serve as a “place of mutual recognition and inclusion” (166). Our present approach to homelessness divides publics, drawing civic ideals by denying material and discursive resources to others, and reifies the terms “housed” and “homeless,” obscuring the complicated lives and struggles of many citizens. A rebuilt civic home would disavow this zero-sum game, recognizing and appreciating the diverse contributions of intersecting and overlapping publics. In the construction process, unconventional advocacy performs both “circulatory” and “consummatory” functions. In circulation, this advocacy invites wider publics to reconsider the meanings of homeless and housed and people's relationships to one another. Yet this advocacy also consummates the agency and identity of the homeless/housed advocates, affirming their place in the civic home. While advocacy—both conventional and unconventional—constitutes one type of building material, Loehwing also includes deliberation and protest in a full civic rhetoric.Addressing issues of visibility, corporeality, and temporality, and articulating a civic rhetoric of advocacy, deliberation, and protest, Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home offers lessons for scholars and students considering a range of topics. Assumptions about who belongs within a political community and on what terms—who may gain entry to our civic home as currently constructed—pervade politics and policy. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine social policy without assumptions about diverse publics. Melanie Loehwing importantly invites readers to consider these issues explicitly. Loehwing encourages us to understand how these assumptions operate and to evaluate them, reconstructing our notions of community as necessary. In doing so, we may build a new civic home on a firmer foundation of justice, equality, and mutual respect.