Homeless bodies, homeless minds: Myth and the American metropolis

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.