Young Homeless Subjectivities: A Symbolic Economy

Abstract

The subjectivities of young people experiencing homelessness are politically contested terrain. Young people’s values, moral orientations, personal aspirations, and relationship to social expectations are all stakes in the social construction and explanation of homelessness and in the public representation of ‘the homeless.’ In the discourses deployed to govern young people, youth subjectivities are made to reflect anxieties about social order and disorder, making representations of young homeless identities a means by which normative boundaries can be constructed and structural inequalities legitimised. In late modernity , personal self-governance is a central condition for ethical subjectivity, and underpins symbolic hierarchies of moral worth that contribute to the cultural meaning of poverty and privilege in late modernity. In all instances, young homeless subjectivities are constructed and reconstructed as part of claims about the nature of inequality and the characteristics of those who experience it.