Homeless Bodies, Homeless Minds: Myth and the American Metropolis Open Access
Webb, Philip (2008)
Published
Abstract
In Homeless Bodies, Homeless Minds: Myth and the American
Metropolis, I
outline how the American discourse on homelessness arose from
Victorian social and
political anxieties about the impacts of immigration and
urbanization on the middle class,
Protestant family. This project focuses on how these anxieties were
negotiated by social
ministries, activists, and service providers, as well as those
commenting on their work--
journalists, sociologists, and finally policymakers. I look at the
stories told by these
religious activists and ministries--those ways in which they
described and diagnosed
social problems before they developed institutions to redress these
problems--to
understand how their modes of portraying urban life shaped
subsequent social science
and policy. I analyze how religious language and images codified
ways to represent these
urban problems, and through this process I explore how contemporary
American social
science, social work, and policy emerge from Victorian cultural and
religious attitudes
about the family, the city, and social life.
In this project, I examine several intersecting
literatures--social ministry,
journalism, sociology, and policy--to trace three distinct
configurations of the homeless
subject. Initially, before isolated individuals were constituted as
homeless subjects, the
fin-de-siècle city teeming with immigrant populations was
described as embodying the
homelessness that was juxtaposed to the family ideal of the
Christian home. Then, the
New Deal era `disaffiliated man' became the other of the nuclear
family. And, finally, the
fracturing of a racial and gender consensus about the disaffiliated
man led to the Reagan
era effort to establish the homeless subject as a person without a
fixed shelter failed in an
attempt to decouple family ideology from the homeless subject. By
emphasizing the
continuing role of myth in shaping the homeless subject, I explain
the inability of
empirical and policy changes--like the 1980s rise of the homeless
family--to fully
reconcile with the discourse.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Introduction 1
Chapter Two: Metropolitan Displacements 20
Chapter Three: The Rise of the Homeless Man 122
Chapter Four: Homelessness and Family Values 207
Chapter Five: Conclusion 285
Bibliography 296
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