| This thesis discusses representations of American homelessness as they are currently being deployed in mass popular culture. Common discourses of urban poverty tend to reduce diverse unsheltered populations to either masculine, white, lazy deviants, or seek to portray destitute individuals as specifically racialised and gendered survivors of the urban environment who are either homeless by choice, or resourceful enough to improve their situation by themselves. Generic images work hard to patholigise the wider issue of inequality for a dominant culture and homeless populations become effectively "othered" regardless of their distinct racial, regional, age and gender, identities.;Tracing popular constructions of unsheltered Americans since the end of the Civil War, I argue that the homeless have at various times been cast as "apolitical others" on which many social prejudices can be projected, or as nostalgic heroes whose subversive upward mobility is lauded as the embodiment of national mythologies. Popular culture has gradually evolved to project a minimal individualism, and an almost measured diversity, onto what remain largely homogenous constructions of urban outcasts. By openly highlighting established diagnostic traits of homelessness---mental illness, dirtiness, whiteness, failed masculinity, and antisocial behaviour---new media representations of homelessness stake their territory quietly, with no explicit reference to inequality, and yet leave little ambiguity as to the cultural pathologies they invoke. |
