Identity: Becoming a Homeless Youth

Abstract

This is the first of four chapters exploring the lived subjectivities assembled within the symbolic economy of youth homelessness. This chapter, and the next, focuses on identity, or the relationship to self articulated in autobiographical narratives about the experience of homelessness and the process of leaving homelessness to make a home. Here, analysis focuses on the consequences of being positioned as ‘homeless,’ and of coming to experience the self as that of a ‘homeless youth.’ This chapter is about the subject positions that emerge when young people describe the idea of homelessness, the process of becoming and being homeless, and the way in which young people relate to and negotiate the consequences of this for their sense of self. Exploring homelessness as a biographical event, this chapter maps the subjectivities possible outside of the normative boundaries defining ethical selfhood in late modernity. The chapter demonstrates the power of moralised personal responsibility as the ethic through which homelessness is experienced and describes the unique form of suffering produced within abject social spaces. Young people are positioned in this abject space when they come to define their experiences as homelessness, as well as in experiences of public denigration that reinforce this definition. Overall, the chapter establishes the nature of youth homelessness as a form of structurally produced social abjection.