Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home 9780271083087

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HOMELESS ADVOCACY AND THE RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE CIVIC HOME

D RD RHETORICANDDEMOCRATICDELIBERATION VOLUME 13 19

edited by cheryl glenn and stephen browne the pennsylvania state university

Co-­­­founding Editor: J. Michael Hogan Editorial Board: Robert Asen (University of Wisconsin–Madison) Debra Hawhee (The Pennsylvania State University) J. Michael Hogan (The Pennsylvania State University) Peter Levine (Tufts University) Steven J. Mailloux (University of California, Irvine) Krista Ratcliffe (Marquette University) Karen Tracy (University of Colorado, Boulder) Kirt Wilson (The Pennsylvania State University) David Zarefsky (Northwestern University)

Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation focuses on the interplay of public discourse, politics, and democratic action. Engaging with diverse theoretical, cultural, and critical perspectives, books published in this series offer fresh perspectives on rhetoric as it relates to education, social movements, and governments throughout the world. A complete list of books in this series is located at the back of this volume.

HOMELESS ADVOCACY AND THE RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE CIVIC HOME

melanie loehwing

The Pennsylvania State University Press | University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-­­in-­­Publication Data Names: Loehwing, Melanie, 1981– author. Title: Homeless advocacy and the rhetorical construction of the civic home / Melanie Loehwing. Other titles: Rhetoric and democratic deliberation. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2018] | Series: Rhetoric and democratic deliberation | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A rhetorical analysis of conventional and unconventional models of homeless advocacy that positions each in relation to perennial anxieties about citizens’ abilities to fulfill democratic obligations”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2018031182 | ISBN 9780271082158 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780271082141 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Homelessness—United States. | Rhetoric—Political Aspects—United States. Classification: LCC HV4505 .L697 2018 | DDC 362.5/920973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031182 Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-­­free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

For my parents, with love

Contents



Acknowledgments  |  ix



List of Abbreviations  |  xiii



Introduction: Dwelling Within Democracy  |  1

1 The Rhetorical Conventions of Contemporary Homeless Advocacy  |  30 2 The Democratic Vision of Homeless Meal-­Sharing Initiatives  |  68 3 The Democratic Bodies of the Homeless World Cup  |  96 4 The Democratic Temporalities of the Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day  |  126

Conclusion: Rhetorical Constructions of the Civic Home  |  156



Notes  |  175



Bibliography  |  191



Index  |  209

Acknowledgments

What a ride this has been—the process of writing this book has been equal parts joyful, exhilarating, intimidating, and challenging. And I am sure that I have only made it through because I have a remarkable support network of family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who have been far more generous with me than I can ever hope to reciprocate. I’m grateful for the opportunity to recognize their extraordinary support and thank them here. It feels as though a lifetime has passed since I wrote a modest little dissertation on homeless documentary photography. My subsequent research on homeless advocacy has resulted in this new project, one that has benefited from the generous influence of my academic mentors, whose values and commitments continue to inform my approach to scholarship. Jeffrey Isaac, Robert Ivie, and Robert Terrill have given me invaluable guidance over the years of my graduate education, and I hope I can someday be half as good a professor to my students as these three have been to me. John Lucaites has been more supportive and generous with his time than I ever imagined a mentor could be. Years ago in graduate school, after I asked for advice about how to juggle the various competing demands of academic life without continuously falling behind, he told me to “pay myself first.” I’m sure I’m not the first or last of his advisees to hear that particular motivational speech, but it probably took me the longest to internalize its lesson. For too many years, I didn’t heed his excellent advice; when I finally did, I finished this book. Thanks, John. I had the tremendous good fortune to study with a remarkable group of faculty and graduate students in the Department of Communication and Culture (CMCL) at Indiana University. To this day, I am inspired by their enthusiasm for rhetorical and communication scholarship and their commitment to creating a vibrant, diverse academic community. Though the program has unfortunately been disbanded, the CMCL spirit of socially just academic inquiry lives on in those of us shaped by our time there, and I hope that spirit is represented well in this book. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Communication at Mississippi State University for supporting my work over the last several

x   acknowledgments

years. Their support comes in myriad forms—intellectual, social, and of course financial—and I am thankful every day for each kind word, our compelling conversation, and the investment in my professional development. Pete Smith has been particularly generous with his time and expertise in helping me navigate the process of book publishing. Skye Cooley has borne my sometimes productive, but mostly annoying neuroses over a series of collaborations with good humor and patience. His enthusiasm and ambition keep me motivated to work for the next big project that can enrich our students’ education, our campuses’ cultures, and our local communities. Donna Blair, Emily Cain, John Forde, and Myra Keasler hold our whole operation together, and I appreciate how their knowledge, support, and patience make it possible for me to do my work effectively. It is colleagues like these that make coming to work a pleasure, and I thank them for making my time in McComas Hall a high point of each weekday. My friends and colleagues across campus have provided me the strong academic community in which this kind of research becomes possible, and I am grateful to work alongside so many smart and interesting people. I especially appreciate the opportunities to discuss and present various portions of this project to many audiences across campus, including in the Africa Research Interest Group, the College of Arts & Sciences, the Language Research Group, the Shackouls Honors College, and the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University. Patty Ann Bogue, Asya Cooley, Melody Fisher, Katherine Flowers, Heather Hanna, Wendy Herd, Leslie Hossfeld, Gina Rico Mendez, Elizabeth Miller, John Nicholson, Kathleen Ragsdale, Holli Seitz, Cade Smith, Becky Smith, and Andrea Spain have been so generous with their support and collaboration on a range of projects that helped me work through my broader ideas about democracy, deliberation, citizenship, and activism. Across a variety of academic homes, I have had so many good people rooting me on and sharing their lives with me even though I am often lousy at keeping in touch with them once separated geographically. Many thanks to Jeff Bennett, Byron Craig, E. Cram, Mark Duncan, Megan Foley, Whitney Gent, Jeff Motter, Jeremiah Murphy, Marylou Naumoff, Steve Rahko, Kate Schroeder, Bethany Stich, Isaac West, and Staci Zavattaro. My writing group has slogged through early drafts of this manuscript, and our group chats have been some of the most influential for helping me to refine my arguments and thinking about the homeless advocacy analyzed in this book. I am grateful to Christopher Thomas and Myriam Mompoint in particular for braving multiple chapters, in various stages of completion, and out of order.

acknowledgments   xi

Ultimately, this book is far more polished and coherent than I could have managed on my own, thanks to the thoughtful comments of the anonymous reviewers and the wonderful guidance of Kendra Boileau, Patty Mitchell, Alex Vose, and the amazing staff of Penn State University Press. Thank you, to all, for giving so much of your time and insight to this project. Each time I get discouraged by the persistence of antihomeless sentiment, I remember the quiet dedication of good people like my family who devote their time and resources to helping those in need. I write a great deal about the potential for citizens to collectively generate communities of care, inclusion, and reciprocity as a remedy for exclusion and marginalization. I believe in such remedies because I have seen firsthand their transformative power in the ways that my grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and extended family have built a legacy of relationships defined by the highest standards of loving care and acceptance. I find a profound sense of hope each time I observe the generosity and support my siblings, Jackie and Andrew, show to others, and the outstanding example my parents, Marge and Jim, have always set for us. This book is lovingly dedicated to them, and to Brian Shoup, who is my home.

Abbreviations

CCNV CoC FNB HCH HPMD HWC INSP NAEH NCH NHCHC NLCHP PIT SBE SRO USICH

Community for Creative Non-­Violence Continuum of Care Food Not Bombs Health Care for the Homeless Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day Homeless World Cup International Network of Street Papers National Alliance to End Homelessness National Coalition for the Homeless National Health Care for the Homeless Council National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty Point-­in-­Time Service-­Based Enumeration Single Room Occupancy United States Interagency Council on Homelessness

introduction: dwelling within democracy

In November of 1978, an affordable-­housing crisis and freezing temperatures combined to imperil a growing population of people experiencing homelessness in the nation’s capital. Concerned and finding limited success through traditional advocacy channels, homeless activists Mitch Snyder and Ann Splaine devised a dramatic approach to publicizing homeless suffering: voluntarily living on the streets. By electing to take up residence on the same sidewalks and park benches as those they aimed to assist, Snyder and Splaine sought both a firsthand understanding of the experience of homelessness and a newsworthy act of defiance. They resisted the urge to return indoors despite the bitter cold, and instead spent the freezing nights roaming the city, talking to the people living there, and hunting for street grates as the sole source of heat available to them. Their approach to advocating for the homeless, though unconventional, afforded them the opportunity to discuss the experiences of homelessness with those who live it every day and articulate the varieties of resistance and injustice that stymied their work. As Snyder explained to the Washington Post, “There’s an insanity, an absurdity,” inherent in the public’s indifference or disgust toward homelessness. “These people out here are hungry, sick, broke, degraded, intimidated, the most miserable segment of society. Yet they are ignored. . . . Our social and economic systems drive people apart, instead of bringing them together. That is why I feel the need for radical change.”1 For Snyder and his peers in the Community for Creative Non-­Violence, helping transform public attitudes toward homelessness—finding inventive ways to bring people together across the divisions of housing status—remained as essential a goal as administering to the needs of individuals suffering from life on the streets. Despite the intervening years, public attitudes toward homelessness still largely reflect the lack of compassion that struck Snyder as insane and absurd. As a result, advocates for people experiencing homelessness face a rhetorical situation that seems to be characterized more by constraints

2   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

than opportunities. In advancing public arguments on behalf of a marginalized homeless population, these advocates must still work tirelessly across a number of different fronts. They must appeal for material resources for those in need, petition for expanded shelter and affordable housing options, challenge antihomeless legislation and sentiment, and cultivate supportive communities despite the public’s increasing compassion fatigue. Supporters of homeless populations must often work with too few resources and too little social capital as funding for vital programs gets cut. Gentrification efforts decimate the availability of affordable housing. Economic downturns jeopardize the already precarious financial standing of the working poor, and housed publics, often made weary by their own economic struggles, turn their backs on their homeless neighbors in indifference or disgust. Business owners increasingly demand protection against the disruptions of commerce that they attribute to the public presence of homeless bodies. Given the substantial financial, legal, and political constraints within which homeless advocacy must operate, the goal of ending homelessness seems like some kind of utopian dream—an ideal accomplishment, to be sure, but perhaps too unrealistic an objective. Yet in December 2013, the city of Phoenix, Arizona, was able to publicize the remarkable accomplishment of ending chronic veteran homelessness, announcing that its successful initiative could serve as a blueprint for other cities working to get people experiencing homelessness off the streets and into stable housing.2 Not only had the city managed to house the 222 veterans living without regular shelter, but it also was the first to achieve the goal set by the Obama Administration to end homelessness among veterans by 2015.3 Just weeks later, the mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, proclaimed its second-­place finish in their “wonderful friendly competition” with Phoenix to eradicate chronic homelessness in their cities’ veteran populations.4 Like Phoenix, Salt Lake City had identified the homeless veterans living in their community and dedicated resources to housing them. Their success, according to the mayor, came by virtue of cooperation among public and private stakeholders working at the national, state, and local levels in the fight against homelessness. Phoenix and Salt Lake City represent early success stories in the federal effort to eliminate veteran homelessness by 2015 as an initial step to ending homelessness across all subgroups. While veteran homelessness in particular and homelessness in general has persisted beyond the original 2015 benchmark, city and state communities across the country have joined Phoenix and Salt Lake City in asserting substantial progress toward these

introduction   3

shared goals. In New Orleans, officials declared the end of veteran homelessness when the last of its 227 known homeless veterans received housing at the start of 2015.5 Similar pronouncements of the resolution of chronic veteran homelessness emerged over the course of 2015, including those from the states of Virginia and Connecticut, and the cities of Las Cruces, New Mexico; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and New York City.6 As the deputy director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH), Laura Zeilinger, told the New York Times, “We do think we can get to the point where we can say there are no more homeless veterans in the country. . . . And if we do this for veterans, it’s something that as a nation, if we set our mind to, we can achieve for other populations as well.”7 Zeilinger’s objective inspires in both its optimism and ambition. Given the persistence of homelessness as a multifaceted social problem lacking straightforward solutions, the idea of completely eradicating it is undeniably appealing even as the obstacles appear insurmountable in their complexity. But what could it mean for a community to declare it has “ended homelessness”? At first glance, it would appear to mean that within such communities, at the moment of declaration, every single citizen has housing of some kind. Yet such an admirable state hardly qualifies as an end to homelessness overall, since housing status changes regularly—particularly for those of marginal socioeconomic status, for whom the possibility of homelessness is especially tangible. In the context of the vagaries and fluctuations of housing status, rhetorical declarations of the end of homelessness seem to ask us to freeze the present moment in time to stand in for all future measures of housing, which is an unrealistic stance, to be sure. And once we move past the celebratory headlines that announce an end to homelessness, we see that the details of the accomplishment qualify it based on USICH’s criteria: that in the cases of the communities discussed above, all homeless veterans have been identified, have been provided shelter if desired, are moved quickly into permanent housing, and are able to be supported in the event that they are at risk of homelessness in the future.8 Communities meeting these criteria can submit documentation to the federal government for review and official certification that they have “achieved the goal of ending veteran homelessness.”9 Given these qualifying criteria, the triumphant announcement of an end to homelessness (or identification of such as a concrete goal) is more of a political or symbolic victory than a literal one. Declaring that a city has secured an end to homelessness may seem like a relatively straightforward

4   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

bureaucratic matter, a measurement of policy outcomes that might only interest social workers or elected officials invested in tracking the success rates of city initiatives to improve the quality of life for those who reside in their communities. In contrast, I suggest we understand announcements of an end to homelessness as a rhetorical act, one that contributes to the constitution of the civic body by strategically defining homelessness as a marker of flawed disposition that disqualifies individuals from inclusion in the political community.10 The ideal of ending homelessness conjures up images of communities where none lack basic resources or struggle to make ends meet, but in reality the federal program establishes rapid provision of housing to people experiencing homelessness as a satisfactory outcome. Undoubtedly, we should celebrate any community that can meet the objective of having sufficient available housing to serve the needs of the newly homeless. But in recognizing that some residents will remain at risk of future homelessness, and that resources must be maintained to provide for them, cities that aim to declare an end to homelessness seem to contradict themselves as they plan for its inevitable persistence. Assessed purely in terms of policy outcomes, declarations of an end to homelessness may seem incoherent at best, duplicitous at worst. Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home makes sense of this apparent contradiction by asking not what it means to declare an end to homelessness but instead what communities gain through this rhetorical act. As I will show in the following pages, there are powerful political incentives for declaring an end to homelessness; most seek an opportunity to assuage housed publics’ fears that homelessness will disrupt their daily social and commercial transactions. And while communities that declare an end to homelessness may be motivated at least in part by charitable attitudes toward people experiencing homelessness, public efforts to eradicate homelessness simultaneously respond to the concerns of private citizens and business owners who feel threatened by the material realities of other people’s misfortune. In this context, declaring an end to homelessness may provide a powerful form of reassurance to a housed citizenry that feels the community is diminished by the persistence of homelessness. This book takes as its starting point the insight that resolving homelessness cannot be reduced to ending houselessness—that providing shelter is but one undeniably important yet, on its own, insufficient remedy to a condition that has been produced, refigured, and reinforced through decades of marginalizing discourses and discriminatory policies. In short, the condition of homelessness is one constituted by the public rhetoric that documents it, condemns it, attempts to resolve it, and proclaims its potential end. As we

introduction   5

will see in the following discussion, these discourses have activated forms of social and political exclusion that require more than shelter alone to remedy the harms they have perpetrated against people experiencing homelessness and the communities that have been constituted around their displacement from the civic body.

The Rhetorical Production of Homeless Exclusion When policymakers and publics define homelessness simplistically, in terms of a lack of housing alone, explanations and solutions to the problem seem correspondingly simple and manageable. A prime example of this sort of reductivist rhetoric appears in USICH’s 2010 report, Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, which it presented to the Office of the President and Congress. This document outlines a series of ambitious goals, including to “prevent and end homelessness among Veterans in 2015,” to “finish the job of ending chronic homelessness in 2017,” to “prevent and end homelessness for families, youth, and children in 2020,” and to “set a path to ending all types of homelessness.”11 President Obama, in his prefatory letter to the Opening Doors report, suggests what an end to homelessness might look like by defining “home” exclusively in terms of housing. He writes, “Since the founding of our country, ‘home’ has been the center of the American dream. Stable housing is the foundation upon which everything else in a family’s or individual’s life is built—without a stable, affordable place to live, it is much tougher to maintain good health, get a good education or reach your full potential.”12 And indeed, this reduction of homelessness to houselessness continues throughout the document; it is particularly evident in the section establishing an “Operational Definition of an End to Homelessness”: “An end to homelessness does not mean that no one will ever experience a housing crisis again. Changing economic realities, the unpredictability of life, and unsafe or unwelcoming family environments may create situations where individuals, families, or youth could experience, re-­experience, or be at risk of homelessness. An end to homelessness means that every community will have a systematic response in place that ensures homelessness is prevented whenever possible or is otherwise a rare, brief, and non-­recurring experience.”13 The brevity of potential future homelessness is ensured, according to Opening Doors, by equipping all communities to detect any increased risk of homelessness among their residents and make immediate interventions to either eliminate that risk or provide access to housing of some kind to

6   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

resolve a temporary lack of shelter before it devolves into a more permanent situation. The vision of this admirable and ambitious federal plan rests firmly on the notion of homelessness as a lack of housing—homelessness as houselessness. Yet the concept of “homelessness” is not so singular and self-­evident as the policies anticipating its end might imagine. Defining homelessness and approximating the number of people experiencing it is a notoriously difficult task, one as fraught with conceptual ambiguities as it is tied up in exercises of power and domination.14 Most important for our purposes, identifying particular lifestyles or circumstances as “homeless” represents a rhetorical act with a variety of significant implications for the constitution of political community and the empowerment of the citizens it comprises. Christopher Jencks describes the periodic rhetorical recharacterizations of homelessness that have emerged in political and academic discourse in terms of competing notions of the conception of “home.”15 When “home” means the place where you live with others, such as in a familial unit, then individuals who are sheltered but live alone are considered homeless. When “home” means any sort of physical shelter to which you have access, then only those who must sleep in public or on the streets are considered homeless. At stake in making such distinctions is a sense of the magnitude of the problem of homelessness, in terms of both its scope and the type of solutions it demands. At one end of the spectrum, where homelessness is defined expansively in terms of social marginalization in addition to a lack of physical housing, we encounter homelessness as a complex range of experiences affecting a much broader swath of the population and requiring a variety of remedies that address homelessness’s different dimensions. At the other end, by comparison homelessness looks relatively small and manageable, given enough available housing to move individuals residing in public into nonpublic structures. Hence definitions of homelessness operate rhetorically to shape audiences’ perception of the issue and invite them to adopt particular attitudes toward it.16 As such, they present the public with what David Zarefsky calls “persuasive definitions,” or those that accommodate a variety of meanings, aid in vivid visualization, and accommodate analogous comparisons.17 Persuasive definitions exercise their rhetorical power by combining descriptive and emotive meanings, according to Douglas A. Walton. These dual dimensions, particularly the “lingering of this emotive meaning,” result when “the respondent is covertly persuaded to accept (or reject) the new definition, based on persuasive positive or negative connotations in the existing usage of the word.”18

introduction   7

A secondary simplification occurs in public discourses, policy deliberations, and advocacy rhetoric that strip experiences of homelessness of their particularity, especially in terms of intersecting racial, ethnic, and gender identities. Kimberle Crenshaw introduced the concept of intersectionality to remedy a persistent oversight in feminist and antiracist discourse that sought social justice through identity politics but failed to account for the ways in which forms of discrimination overlap.19 Because “race and gender intersect in shaping structural, political, and representational aspects of violence against women of color,” Crenshaw explains, neither race nor gender alone serves as an adequate lens to fully understand the experiences of women of color.20 An intentionally intersectionalist critical approach would thus resist simplifying frameworks that isolate a single identity and focus on it to the exclusion of all others, opting instead for “invit[ing] critics to take into account the multiple possibilities and constraints that exist in a host of historical and contemporary situations, where both individuals and groups face shifting alliances and the possible appropriations of their own rhetorics.”21 An intersectionalist approach to rhetorical studies makes an additional contribution, as Darrel Wanzer-­Serrano argues: “If bound by categories such as ‘race,’ ‘gender,’ or ‘class,’ we see racism or sexism or classism; but we do not see racist-­sexism, sexist-­racism, racist-­sexist-­classism, etc. Similarly, when bound by ‘textual’ categories, we have difficulty making sense of the ways in which word and body combine to create something qualitatively distinct from words or bodies considered separately. As conceived here, ‘intersectional rhetoric’ is both a label for a kind of discourse and a marker for a critical attitude necessary to examine such rhetorics.”22 Thus an intersectional orientation first helps us discern how forms of discrimination influence and compound each other’s effects in individuals’ lives, and it also encourages us to approach the rhetorical production of such forms of discrimination in equally expansive terms. Through my analysis of a variety of textual artifacts, rhetorical practices, and performative acts in the context of homeless advocacy, I adopt Wanzer-­Serrano’s approach to intersectional rhetoric that interrogates “a kind of rhetoric wherein one form of discourse is not privileged over another; rather, diverse forms intersect organically to create something challenging to rhetorical norms,” through the intersection of words, images, and bodies.23 However, as we will see in the following chapters, public discussions of homelessness in media representations, policy deliberations, advocacy campaigns, and scholarly inquiry often fail to consider how experiences of homelessness are shaped by marginalization based on a variety of other identities. Experiences of homelessness by a teenager

8   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

running away from domestic abuse in their family of origin, for example, undoubtedly differ in profound ways from those of an adult whose race may subject them to heightened surveillance by police and the public while living on the streets. I want to be clear here that I am not claiming the mapping of these types of intersecting harms as the primary objective of this book, though I hope that future studies will have the opportunity to take up this important line of inquiry in earnest. In this project, I focus on examining the broad contours of public discussions of homelessness to discern their shared rhetorical conventions and the possibilities for innovative advocacy challenges to those trends. Those broad contours are frequently disappointing precisely because they do not take intersecting forms of discrimination into account and because the public rhetoric addressing homelessness seems to default, more often than not, to discussing the experience as if these other forms of discrimination are a separate and largely unrelated concern. This blindness to intersectionality in the context of homeless experience has important consequences for the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion and the limitations of advocacy that aims to challenge such exclusion, and I will return to these implications in the concluding chapter. Whether the reductivist view of homelessness characterizes the condition in terms of simple houselessness or a vague, monolithic threat stripped of diverse subjectivities and experiences, it fundamentally shapes the subsequent public discussions in ways that constrain the civic imaginary. And the civic imaginary matters tremendously, particularly in contemporary democratic cultures, for emancipatory politics seeking to overcome unjust exclusions. The way we envision our communities can provide the grounds for fostering identification among citizens who understand themselves as similar even as they remain strangers to one another; it can also make divisions appear natural and inevitable in the organizing vision of democratic community embraced in a particular time and place.24 Even though definitions of homelessness in advocate and policy rhetorics are presented as self-­evident, they may actually function to influence publics’ understanding and judgment of homelessness and, consequently, the people experiencing it. This is an important consideration communities potentially lose sight of as they work to meet the federal operational definition of an end to homelessness without assessing the rhetorical impact this particular definition may have. Instead, the important work of designing community responses to homelessness merits careful attention to the ways persuasive definitions of homelessness emerge and vie for dominance in the civic imaginary. Investigating

introduction   9

the multiple sites of what I am calling “the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion” helps us understand both the process and implications of these persuasive definitions. Moreover, as Ken Kyle argues, if we are invested in countering discriminatory representations and inviting more empowering alternatives, we must rigorously examine “the way that rhetorical portrayals and social constructions of the homeless affect the self-­perceptions of homeless persons and the views of non-­homeless persons.”25 Public attitudes about homelessness have been shaped by definitions emerging across a variety of discursive sites, including homeless legislation, restrictions on public space, media representations of homelessness, and general public discourse. In the remainder of this section, I look to each of these sites to trace the common themes emerging in the broader discursive landscape in which homeless exclusion is generated and validated. While the previous studies of homelessness discussed here have largely focused on a single discursive site, I argue that we need a more comprehensive map of the rhetorical situations in which homeless advocates operate to adequately evaluate the conditions constraining their work and the degree to which their efforts invent new alternatives. Homeless Legislation The first discursive site that contributes to the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion encompasses the legislative arenas—federal, state, and local— that generate the legal framework for assisting and disciplining people who are experiencing homelessness. Homeless legislation can be divided into two general categories: legislation that assists the homeless and legislation that criminalizes homelessness. In both contexts, we find the seeds of homeless exclusion codified into law. The McKinney-­Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which is the most significant and far-­reaching federal legislation addressing homelessness, exemplifies legislation assisting the homeless. Originally named the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, it was signed into law in 1987 by President Reagan and has been reauthorized and amended periodically in the years since.26 The act established USICH, a collaboration among cabinet secretaries and agencies “charged with coordinating the federal response to homelessness and creating a national partnership at every level of government and with the private sector to reduce and end homelessness in the nation while maximizing the effectiveness of the federal government in contributing to the end of homelessness.”27 Programs authorized by the McKinney-­Vento Act provide various forms of aid through emergency

10   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

food and shelter, transitional housing, health care, housing assistance, substance abuse treatment, education for both adults and youth experiencing homelessness, food assistance, and veteran job training. In addition to allocating resources for these programs, the McKinney-­Vento Act decrees a definition of homelessness that establishes distinct subpopulations and policies designed to serve the unique needs of each. While a legislative undertaking as massive as the McKinney-­Vento Act certainly requires a nuanced and well-­developed understanding of the complexities of homelessness, the rhetorical effects of its definitions may harm the very people it aims to serve. Kyle contrasts the legislation’s characterization of homelessness with the broader trends emerging in public discourse: “There is great disparity in the way the homeless as a target population are portrayed. Discussion of the homeless is cast in terms ranging from greatly deserving to completely undeserving. . . . Those who view the homeless as deserving present them as a dependent target population while those who view them as undeserving portray them as a deviant target population. However, all of the homeless subpopulations are presented by the McKinney Act and other federal homeless measures as if the homeless are irresponsible or incapable.”28 While many advocates set out to accommodate much broader variety in conceptions of homelessness, the legislative language modeled in the McKinney-­Vento Act appeals to narrow understandings of homelessness that only validate limited forms of governmental aid. To understand these restrictions, Kyle suggests that we contrast the rhetorical characterizations of aid recipients implicit in two types of housing assistance: those who lack shelter because of natural disasters and public emergencies, and those who lack shelter because of more run-­of-­the-­mill personal crises. The former, who typically receive aid from programs like those administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, are entrusted with direct cash payments as a remedy for their emergency shelter needs. In contrast, the latter are granted access to professionals who are employed through funds secured by the McKinney-­Vento Act but who do not receive direct payments of aid because they are presumed to lack the ability to use such funds prudently.29 Thus the target population of homeless assistance legislation like the McKinney-­Vento Act is rhetorically excluded from the image of a civic body comprising independent, capable, autonomous citizens.30 In order to secure assistance for people experiencing homelessness, advocates may be willing to accept the potentially negative rhetorical effects of the policy language used by legislators, reckoning that any support for a population in dire need is worth the tradeoff of a less than generous public

introduction   11

image. However, legislation that assists in mitigating the effects of homelessness is not the only source of the negative stereotypes of people who experience the condition. Antihomeless legislation—policies and laws that target and criminalize the behaviors associated with homelessness—reinforce and extend the negative connotations implied in the political distinctions between deserving and undeserving, capable and dependent recipients of aid. Antihomeless legislation takes various forms: it may involve seemingly innocuous restrictions on sitting or sleeping on benches, sidewalks, and grassy areas; it may prohibit panhandling or soliciting aid from passersby in public spaces; it may limit establishing shelters, such as tents, or storing possessions in public; it may authorize police sweeps of homeless encampments to remove inhabitants, their belongings, and the structures they have erected.31 A common theme across these diverse approaches to criminalizing the experience of homelessness is a justification, implicitly or explicitly asserted, that is built on “a vision of the homeless as ‘profane outlaws,’ disorderly and unconstrained subjects who require the discipline of the laws.”32 Michael K. Middleton urges us to understand this sort of exclusionary vision in terms of varied frames of misrecognition: as his analyses of the rhetorical strategies of SafeGround Sacramento’s fight against homeless exclusion have shown, popular discourses of homelessness underwrite political exclusion by advancing “two basic assumptions: First, that homeless persons are subordinate and/or marginal in comparison to housed citizens . . . second, homeless persons are not agents with the capacity to control their own political or economic status.”33 These forms of misrecognition perpetuate general public prejudices against people experiencing homelessness by marking them as a deviant other in comparison to their housed counterparts. The characterization of people experiencing homelessness as outside of, and unsuited for, the life of the civic body provides grounds for both a discriminatory attitude toward citizens in need and legal exclusions that frequently violate some of our most basic and dearly held rights. Although the Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unlawful searches and seizures, and arrests based on the suspicion of future criminality, antihomeless legislation often authorizes indiscriminate confiscations of homeless possessions and arrests based on the likelihood of continued homelessness.34 Prohibitions against sleeping or camping in public penalize those with nowhere else to go, creating a cruel and unusual punishment for behavior rooted in need rather than choice.35 Restrictions on panhandling limit the free speech of those who petition their fellow citizens for assistance.36 Policies that criminalize homelessness exclusively—such as homeless arrest campaigns—have

12   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

been challenged for violating the Equal Protection Clause, because they “may be construed as official hostility toward homeless people.”37 And while housed citizens can typically assume a right to freedom of movement in public places, people experiencing homelessness are frequently disciplined for their presence in public—despite the fact that they often have nowhere else to go. Restrictions on Public Space The attempts to legislate homeless bodies out of their public existence leads us to a second site of the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion: restrictions on public space. Leonard C. Feldman attributes the increasing criminalization of homeless presence to evolving conceptions of the function of public space. His genealogy of “publicness” identifies a key transformation that motivates antihomeless ordinances as the organizing principle of public spaces shifts from the promotion of production to the accommodation of consumption. The prevailing conception of public space today as an arena for commerce alone legitimizes the disciplining and expulsion of people experiencing homelessness, who rarely participate in commercial trans­ actions in the same way and with the same frequency as their housed peers. Moreover, the life-­sustaining actions people experiencing homelessness must, by necessity, carry out in public interfere with the activities of housed consumers: “Public space assumes a ‘natural’ function, so self-­evident as to be manifest in the very term ‘sidewalk.’ But of course, this ‘natural’ and ‘obvious’ meaning of public space is politically produced by a judicial decision that is thoroughly enmeshed in a conflict over space. In this discourse of motion, commerce, and consumption the homeless street-­dweller becomes the constitutive outside of the consumptive public sphere, a blockage—both physical and ideological—to the free movement of goods and consumers but a blockage that simultaneously constitutes the boundaries of public space.”38 Hence broader popular and legal discourses about acceptable uses of public space produce, as one significant byproduct, the grounds on which homeless exclusion may be justified by an unsympathetic public. And as such exclusions emerge, people experiencing homelessness are doubly victimized: first by failures of the economic and social systems through whose cracks they slip, and second by the policies that criminalize their misfortune and exact punishments for their use of public space to secure their private existence.39 Communities have grown accustomed to interpreting homeless bodies as signaling “decay, the degenerate body, a body that is constantly rejected

introduction   13

by the public as ‘sick,’ ‘scary,’ ‘dirty and smelly,’ and a host of other pejoratives used to create social distance between housed and unhoused persons.”40 This social distance creates a symbolic positioning of people who experience homelessness as simultaneously present and displaced—present in the sense of being subjected to heightened surveillance and discipline, and displaced in that their presence is rendered illegitimate by antihomeless policies. Such policies are not just damaging to individuals who are victimized by them; they further erode the democratic character of public space as an arena for political action and justice. Building on Henri Lefebvre’s account, Don Mitchell distinguishes between three conceptions of public space: as representational space, representations of space, and spaces for representation. Representational space is characterized by its everyday use and appropriation for daily life; representations of space accommodate the orderly plans that design space for optimal institutional control. To these two conceptions from Lefebvre, Mitchell adds a notion of spaces for representation, which identify the function of public space to provide “a place within which political movements can stake out the territory that allows them to be seen (and heard).  .  .  . By claiming space in public, by creating public spaces, social groups themselves become public.”41 In their capacity as private persons, people experiencing homelessness need public space to carry out the biological requirements of daily life; as citizens, they need public space to appeal to the larger community for recognition. Antihomeless legislation, because it is designed to criminalize the former and undermine the latter, threatens the degree to which public spaces may facilitate their core democratic function. Media Representations A third site of the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion emerges in the trends and tropes of media representations of homelessness. Prohibited from public spaces, people experiencing homelessness and their allies may turn to mediated public discourses to recuperate their political voice. While advocates may be tempted to assume that any media attention for the homeless aids in the quest to generate public concern and support, scholars investigating patterns and effects of media coverage throw the old adage of any publicity being good publicity into doubt. Rachel Best finds that increased media coverage of homelessness does not necessarily indicate increased public attention or concern, particularly when journalists present homelessness as a matter of individual choice or failing, rather than as a social issue with which the community must grapple.42 Media narratives relating

14   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

to homelessness frequently distinguish between the so-­called deserving and undeserving poor and, as Richard Campbell and Jimmie L. Reeves contend, “the major socioeconomic problem of homelessness which requires collective participation for resolution often plays out in the news as isolated personal problems demanding individual correction.”43 Campbell and Reeves examine the media narratives shaping coverage of Joyce Brown, whose case garnered national attention in 1987 as Brown, a woman experiencing both homelessness and mental illness, fought against her involuntary commitment to psychiatric facilities. As Campbell and Reeves conclude, her story resonated with a public audience during the height of the 1980s homelessness crisis because media coverage framed the narrative in terms of “a common sense position which makes her plight less threatening and which ultimately extols heartland individualism.”44 Thus such news stories validate the expulsion of the homeless from the community of the housed, not only because of their different shelter status but because of a perceived essential difference in temperament and ability. Network newscast coverage writ large functions as a prime factor in the development of this sense of division between people experiencing homelessness and housed viewers of the programs. As Todd G. Shields has shown, these newscasts frame homelessness as a personal deviance of those “choosing to live a brutish life out of their own ignorance.”45 Reinforcing this sense of exclusion of the homeless from the community of the housed, media coverage rarely features the voices of people experiencing homelessness in stories documenting their struggles. Barbara Schneider examined major newspaper coverage of homelessness in Canada to ascertain the degree to which journalists incorporated quotations from homeless interviewees. She discovered that “[a]lthough homeless people are by no means excluded as sources in newspaper coverage, they are permitted a very limited voice in the news. They are quoted speaking primarily about their own experience, typically in ways that promote their continued marginalization and undermine their potential for social inclusion and citizenship.”46 Schneider further contends that these negative consequences do not simply result from nefarious intentions of homeless opponents; journalists who are supportive of and sympathize with people experiencing homelessness often inadvertently perpetuate conventions of media coverage that cause more harm than help.47 Schneider explains this reversal with reference to the journalistic imperatives to feature dramatic conflict and to incorporate individual perspectives as subjective expressions of personal experience. Both of these standard professional practices put the subjects of homeless news coverage at a distinct

introduction   15

disadvantage, because the stories typically portray the housed at odds with the homeless and discount homeless perspectives as personal opinions or idiosyncratic experiences. To make sense of the different images, narratives, and assessments of homelessness continuously circulating to public audiences, Maurice Penner and Susan Penner recommend that we distinguish between three different types of media representations of homelessness.48 At the most basic level, when media publicize homelessness, they present generally straightforward representations of the harms of living without shelter. For example, such representations may detail individuals sleeping in public or searching for food in trash receptacles. Second, when media politicize homelessness, a call to action is added to publicizing representations. That is, in addition to depicting the daily struggles of people experiencing homelessness, politicizing representations also call on specific representatives or the government in general to act to remedy the plight of the homeless. Finally, when media neutralize homelessness, we see representations much like those circulating in the Joyce Brown case. In neutralizing representations, homelessness is presented as the consequence of the victim’s poor choices, personal failings, or inability to engage in personal care. Such representations are neutral in the sense that they remain silent on the systemic causes of homelessness or the collective responsibilities to provide aid to those in need. Absent from neutralizing discourses is any consideration of larger social or political factors that lead to or exacerbate the problems experienced in homelessness. For this reason, neutralizing representations potentially do the most damage in terms of perpetuating the social exclusions warranted on an asserted dichotomy based on housing status. General Public Discourse Finally, we see the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion come full circle when examining the general character of public discussions of homelessness. Given the prevalence of media representations that invoke sharp distinctions between homeless and housed, and that characterize people experiencing homelessness as irreparably damaged and at fault for their circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that these views pervade general public discourse about homelessness as well.49 As Barbara Schneider and Chaseten Remillard find in their analysis of focus group conversations, even members of the general public who express great sympathy for those who experience homelessness still reinforce the dichotomous characterizations found in

16   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

news coverage.50 Troublingly, Schneider and Remillard’s research indicates that stigma may be produced by public discourse not only in critiques and condemnations of the homeless but also in “statements that might be taken to indicate positive attitudes toward homelessness and homeless people.”51 Their finding seems counterintuitive: surely those who generally support programs and efforts to help people experiencing homelessness would also oppose the negative stereotypes that characterize much of the individual-­blaming explanations present in news coverage and broader public discussions. Yet Schneider and Remillard discover that even focus-­group participants intent on expressing caring statements about the homeless nevertheless perpetuate the stigmas that typically lead to public rejection or disgust. In a particularly striking example, Schneider and Remillard describe how despite the consideration for homeless individuals expressed by participants, the desire to better homeless individuals’ circumstances, and the willingness to do so without warrant, these expressions were often coupled or entangled with statements describing the socially unacceptable manner in which homeless people asked for or received their attempts to help. People described themselves as feeling that their attempts to help did not really work out, not through any fault of their own, but because the need had been falsely communicated or the help was not received and used as they expected. These qualifying statements undercut the claims made by participants about social responsibility and reinforce a common perception of homeless people as agents of their own decrepitude.52 In short, the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion pervades even those discursive sites where we also encounter apparently inclusive messages about the public’s obligation to extend compassionate support to people experiencing homelessness. Schneider and Remillard explain this surprising conclusion in terms of the simultaneous discursive identity work that accompanies assertions of sympathy and care: while the participants in their focus groups seemed sincerely supportive of those experiencing homelessness in their communities, their general talk about the issue of homelessness also constructed a specific identity for themselves as a caring and socially responsible citizen. Because such identity work, in turn, “is inevitably linked to processes of social differentiation,” even a housed public’s expressions of concern may ultimately replicate the housed/homeless dichotomy that marginalizes the latter.53

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Well-­intentioned but nonetheless exclusionary rhetoric in general public discourse turns out to be the exception to the rule, however. When we look to the character of general public discussions about homelessness, we are much more likely to encounter negative attitudes toward homelessness and unsympathetic, even cruel, rejections of those unfortunate enough to end up on the streets. Kathleen R. Arnold attributes the rejection of people experiencing homelessness to a general public “fear of the unknown and uncanny Other” that manifests in public discourse privileging the housed over the homeless in a civic hierarchy.54 In this view, housed publics reassure themselves of their own legitimate claim to civic status and security through deployment of “the paradigm of the homeless as dirty, uncontrollable, disaffiliated, and unpredictable.”55 On the basis of this characterization, NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) discourses emerge that articulate a general public fear of contamination and the destruction of the social order by a homeless presence.56 All told, discriminatory public discourses shore up the exclusions articulated in policy, institutional, and mediated representations by simultaneously reflecting and reinforcing the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion. As these scholars have shown, homelessness appears at first glance to be rather simply defined and self-­evident, but that impression only demonstrates the success of the persuasive definitions of the concept that make its measurement, explanation, and resolution more manageable. A discriminatory media stereotype here, an uncompassionate local ordinance there— on their own, these examples of homeless exclusion may seem regrettable but less important than providing housing to solve the ongoing problem of homelessness. However, I argue that we need the fuller picture of the rhetorical situation in which homeless exclusion is generated across a variety of discursive sites in order to understand the challenges advocates face, as well as the broader implications of rhetorically constituting the civic community by physically and symbolically expelling the homeless from (the) public. I examine how these rhetorics of homelessness come to circulate and gain credibility in contemporary U.S. public culture—and how they are challenged by unconventional advocacy approaches that undermine the typical conventions of the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion as outlined in the preceding discussion. The analyses I present in the following chapters approach rhetorics of homelessness expansively by attending to the public conversations about homelessness as a key site of the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion and its potential resolution. Specifically, I argue that characterizations of homelessness themselves provide a solution to perennial

18   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

public anxieties in a democratic culture. That is, recurring anxieties about the visibility/visuality of civic action, the needs and agencies of citizen bodies, and the temporal orientation of collective life find a partial resolution in the displacement of qualities considered unsuitable for democratic participation onto people experiencing homelessness. In this way, rhetorics of home and homelessness serve to assure housed citizens and dominant publics that those undesirable qualities belong to a community not like them, one that is characterized solely by their housing status and thought to be destined to life outside the civic body because they lack fundamental capacities that other citizens are assumed to possess. This book thus aims to make two primary contributions to scholarship on democratic citizenship: it identifies the ways that an overlooked segment of the U.S. population (people experiencing homelessness) is excluded and restricted from the civic body, thereby constituting a significant violation of the presumably open and equal civic status enjoyed by those whose citizenship is not called into question or actively delegitimized. It also seeks to advance our understanding of how we imagine the ideal of democratic citizenship by showing the exclusions made on the grounds of not meeting that ideal. Although issue-­driven public deliberations rarely articulate or make explicit the abstract norms by which we measure people’s fittingness to carry out the acts and responsibilities of citizenship, we can see in this interrogation of homeless politics and advocacy how the general frameworks that we use to evaluate citizenship are implicit in our enacted exclusions. The specific contrast I draw between conventional and unconventional homeless advocacy brings three dimensions of the civic ideal into sharp focus: the ideal democratic citizen is one who can resist the enticing manipulation of visual spectacles, master mundane bodily needs and impulses, and participate in future-­oriented judgment that weighs the consequences of a decision for the long-­term fate of the community. To appreciate how these dimensions of the civic ideal emerge in democratic cultures, we have to start with the rhetorical foundations of democracy and citizenship.

Rhetorical Citizenship and Democratic Community For as long as the two have been practiced, rhetoric’s place within and effect on democracy has continuously been called into question, so much so that lamenting rhetoric’s corruption of democratic discourse has taken on an almost ritualistic function.57 From Plato’s early indictments through the

introduction   19

casual dismissal of “mere rhetoric” in contemporary commentary, participants in democratic cultures have distrusted rhetorical practice even as they rely on it to advance their critiques and engage in the discursive lifeworld that operates in tandem with democratic political systems.58 Robert L. Ivie cautions us to avoid “reducing the intersection of rhetoric and democracy to demagoguery, which undermines confidence in the judgment of the people and transforms the demos into a threatening Other.”59 And yet suspicions of rhetoric’s corrupting influence on democracy persist, presuming democracy’s existence prior to and apart from the rhetorical practices in the political arenas it creates. Within this vision, rhetoric appears as a means to an end, a strategic tool that citizens may use as they see fit in the best instances and are manipulated by in the worst.60 This vision motivates theorists of deliberative democracy to excise rhetoric from the deliberative procedures designed to protect participation in decision-­making from self-­interest, corruption, or fraud. As Scott Welsh contends, this perspective hopes “to refashion political speech as a mode of open-­ended, mutually respectful dialogue, free of the distorting influence of the pursuit of power,” and it ultimately finds rhetoric incompatible because of its reductive characterization of rhetoric as strategic speech alone.61 With an emphasis on orderly procedures and civil speech, deliberative democracy imagines rhetoric to be a realm of unruly excess and disorienting diversity, which results in the procedural model’s tacit exclusion of discursive styles deemed too unrestrained, emotional, or irrational.62 In order for democracy to work, this perspective suggests, we need to tightly control how citizens engage in political speech and collective decision-­making, or else citizens might give in to the tempting powers rhetoric offers those who would circumvent the difficult and time-­consuming work of public deliberation. Thus we find a core limitation of the deliberative democratic perspective on rhetoric in its blindness to the rich variety of constitutive effects rhetoric has on the citizens who practice it in real-­world settings. Critics of deliberative democracy and theorists of rhetorical democracy and citizenship have compiled an extensive account that can help us navigate the role rhetoric plays in shaping democracy and being shaped by it in turn. Four key insights that emerge from this body of scholarship inform my analysis: first, that citizenship is a rhetorical enactment; second, that democratic cultures are rhetorically constituted; third, that rhetorical citizenship entails participation beyond institutional settings alone; and fourth, that diverse forms of rhetorical practice (most notably advocacy, protest, and deliberation) fuel democracy.

20   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

First, citizenship is a rhetorical enactment in the sense that civic standing exceeds legal or political status alone. While inquiries into the complexities of institutional status are undoubtedly vital to ending unjust exclusions and the marginalization of those who find themselves outside the mainstream, accounts of citizenship that examine “processes of making citizens—social, political, cultural and symbolic” add an important dimension to our understanding of how the specific contours of formal citizenship emerge in the first place.63 Citizens are made, at least in part, by virtue of the larger public discourses that privilege some identities to the exclusion of others. As Troy A. Murphy puts it, “As a discursive construct representing democratic ideals, the idea of citizenship holds explanatory power, directing how Americans understand the meaning of democratic self-­governance, their role in the process, and the relative health of American democracy. American citizens understand the idea of democracy, and, thus, the idea of citizenship and their role in democratic life, by exposure to and identification with the most popular and public forms of citizenship enactment.”64 In this vein, Robert Asen suggests we adjust our inquiries to account for “the how of citizenship,” paying attention to the processes by which individuals assert and secure civic standing across a variety of settings and through diverse everyday acts.65 Second, democratic cultures are rhetorically constituted in that the nature of a community’s rhetorical practices shapes the norms that govern its composition and operation. This is one of the reasons why scholars concerned with exclusion and inequality have resisted the traditional Habermasian model of the bourgeois public sphere in the context of contemporary democracies; the suspicion remains that the rhetorical practices celebrated in the historical model will perpetuate the exclusions on which that model was built.66 In other words, how we communicate matters a great deal for the kind of political culture we live in, “making the quality of our public life a rhetorical achievement,” as Gerard A. Hauser puts it.67 Moreover, as Jason Edward Black has found from examining the co-­optation of Native voice and texts by Western rhetors, it is both the texts themselves as well as the rhetorical practices that produce, take up, and circulate particular discourse that “says much about a public that interprets it and the ideologies that underscore that particular public’s civic imaginary.”68 As such, to understand the rhetorical constitution of democratic culture, we must attend to both the substance and processes of civic rhetoric. Third, rhetorical citizenship entails participation beyond institutional settings alone, as citizens discover increasingly novel means and moments for

introduction   21

engaging their communities in civic exchanges. Performances of citizenship may occur in a variety of public arenas, appeal to multiple audiences, and utilize diverse modes of address. Josue David Cisneros explains this rhetorical variety in terms of the hybridity demonstrated by performances of citizenship, wherein “even those who lack citizenship in the political, legal, or cultural sense can perform citizenship on a daily basis through rhetorical acts.”69 These quotidian forms of democratic participation appear unrecognizable within a proceduralist vision of democratic politics, in which citizens act by addressing public audiences through official channels following institutionalized procedures. Rhetorical citizenship, on the other hand, unfolds as citizens navigate their everyday environments and contribute to the shared critique and judgment of the community. Such vernacular acts are not limited to traditional public address; indeed their advantage appears as they accommodate a host of verbal and visual rhetorical practices, allowing individuals and groups to generate civic relationships far beyond the confines of officially sanctioned institutional processes.70 Finally, diverse forms of rhetorical practice fuel democracy, and here I want to highlight three practices in particular: advocacy, protest, and deliberation. As we have seen from the discussion thus far, these three types of rhetorical practices are among the most common interrogated by scholars of rhetorical democracy. Their prominence suggests an implicit assumption that we can most readily recognize citizens as citizens when they are engaging in democratic discourse persuading in support of their position (advocacy), articulating a rejection to another’s position or power (protest), and participating in the discursive exchanges that bring diverse viewpoints and experiences to bear as communities seek to make tough choices about their priorities, policies, and collective decisions (deliberation). Previous rhetorical studies have explored advocacy, protest, and deliberation as core civic practices operating alongside one another. This important work has shown how citizens have a variety of rhetorical practices available to them as they participate in and constitute democratic culture. Additionally, I suggest there is utility in thinking through these three types of civic rhetorical practices not just as alternate modes of civic action but as the three fundamental dimensions of civic rhetoric. I ultimately argue that democracy has the greatest potential to empower citizens, enrich their shared culture, and embody its inclusive ideals when its participants excel at persuading audiences of the merits of their proposals, articulating their rejection of the status quo or proposals for change that they judge as harmful, and engaging diverse viewpoints in thoughtful dialogue. Imagining civic rhetoric as a set of

22   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

rhetorical capacities—advocacy, protest, and deliberation—that citizens may draw on as the context calls for has the advantage of resisting the restrictive ideals that often govern accounts and critiques of democratic practice. Citizens need not practice these modes of democratic rhetoric perfectly or uniformly in this account. And scholars do not need to settle, once and for all, whether rhetoric fundamentally enriches or contaminates democracy. Instead, a vision of civic rhetoric as a set of distinct, complementary rhetorical capacities establishes the potential for rhetorically savvy citizens to participate fully in collective governance and judgment—and in doing so, to secure their place within the civic home of the community.

Democratic Anxieties, Rhetorical Remedies If we think of rhetorical practice and democratic culture in these mutually constitutive terms, then a primary aim of scholarly inquiry into rhetorical democracy must be to elucidate the ways in which rhetoric makes democracy possible and vice versa. Rather than imagining rhetoric in purely instrumental terms, as a tool that citizens use to navigate pre-­existing democratic structures and institutions, we can instead seek out the moments where rhetorical practice calls into being newly democratic formations and where democracy incentivizes and accommodates particular rhetorical practices. The potential sites of such inquiry are varied, but in the context of the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion and the forms of homeless advocacy fighting against it, we find one specific dimension of the rhetoric–democracy relationship taking center stage. This dimension consists of the variety of anxieties relating to citizens’ capacities that compel democratic communities to engage in exclusionary civic rhetoric. To illustrate this relationship, let us turn to one of the most persistent types of contemporary antihomeless sentiment circulating presently: panhandling bans. Taking the form of restrictions or prohibitions passed by municipalities across the country, these local measures most often prohibit panhandling that occurs in particular public locations like subways, beaches, or ATM vestibules, or that is accompanied by specific “aggressive” behaviors like making physical contact, following the solicited person, or using intimidating body language.71 In Houston, Texas, the ordinance punishing panhandling that was passed in the spring of 2017 was proposed as a mutually beneficial solution to all affected, one that would protect the comfort and convenience of housed citizens and discourage self-­harming behaviors from those

introduction   23

experiencing homelessness.72 However, as two homeless residents of the city who rely on panhandling explained to the Houston Chronicle, the law does little to help those on the street: “The city needs to build homes and shelters instead of arresting homeless people for panhandling, instead of harassing us,” as Andrew Quintanilla explains. Although he suspects the housed residents of the city “want us to disappear,” he recognizes that with “nowhere to go,” most people experiencing homelessness will only suffer more intensely given the new restrictions on panhandling.73 For James Wright, such restrictions just signal a more difficult set of daily circumstances to navigate, because regardless of the new penalties, “we have to eat, we’ve got to survive. I really don’t know what the new law is going to do, people are still going to be out here [panhandling] regardless.”74 The debates surrounding the need for panhandling restrictions often attract both impassioned support and vociferous opposition, with those in favor insisting that appeals to passerby for money or support threaten the safety and stability of public spaces. In making such arguments, proponents of panhandling restrictions characterize people experiencing homelessness as an insidious presence in their communities. The City of Lowell, Massachusetts, offers a particularly alarming example of such dehumanizing rhetoric in defending its ban on panhandling, a form of solicitation it describes as having both “festive and sinister aspects.”75 Panhandling in this view forces the public into contact with a seedy cast of characters, “the occasionally or ambiguously homeless; those in and out of housing, rehab and jail; modern-­day court jesters or buffoons; trouble-­makers; those with apparent access to housing, employment and conventional social participation but who choose a more raffish modus operandi; alcoholics; and the drug-­ addicted.”76 The dangers of this “raucous alternative culture” of “parasitism” lie in how panhandling compromises a compositional and spatial purity of the public, which the City of Lowell conceives of as “those mainstream souls who lack the ‘need’—or perhaps the chutzpah—to importune strangers for money.”77 By my read, this overly dramatic description radically misidentifies the horrific dimensions of panhandling. Rather than focusing on the desperate economic and sociopolitical conditions that might make begging strangers for assistance the most plausible means for survival, the memo rhetorically recharacterizes people engaged in panhandling as an inevitable and existential threat. It warrants its characterization on a purported sense of vulnerability other citizens experience in the face of such requests, asserting that “members of the non-­panhandling public are not so much ‘bothered’

24   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

or ‘annoyed’ by panhandling as they are afraid.”78 The City of Lowell attributes this fear to the nature of the panhandling act, which it likens to “the time-­honored stick-­up.”79 In this respect, the memo is not unusual; its central anxieties are reflected and reinforced by the local discussions occurring across the country where fear of public encounters with people experiencing homelessness or engaging in panhandling is enough to convince a community to attempt to banish or silence those in need.80 The perplexing paradox in this type of antihomeless rhetoric is that those who are among the most vulnerable in our communities—those left without physical, social, legal, or political protection by virtue of their lack of housing—are simultaneously cast as the most dangerous element contaminating public space. A 2010 National Consumer Advisory Board survey found that “while 49% of homeless individuals report being victims of violence, only two percent of the general population does the same,” and yet panhandling bans depict the homeless as primary sources of violence and danger from which the rest of the public must be protected.81 What accounts for this inversion of precarity?82 I suggest that in our attitudes toward people experiencing homelessness, we see traces of broader anxieties about citizenship more generally. The very human tendencies that seem to compromise our performance as citizens—those shortcomings of temperament, knowledge, or virtue that might disrupt or distort the smooth functioning of democratic systems grounded on popular sovereignty and collective decision-­making—are those we project onto excluded others as both the explanation and justification for their displacement from the civic body. As the specific homeless advocacy cases featured in this book demonstrate, three basic anxieties underwrite the rhetorics of exclusion that situate homelessness outside of a community’s shared civic life: these are anxieties about how visuality, corporeality, and temporality potentially interfere with our abilities as citizens to produce sound political judgment and contribute fully and meaningfully to the democratic culture that relies on our participation. As I detail in subsequent chapters, discrimination against and rejection of homelessness is frequently legitimated by claims of civic deficiencies, as people experiencing homelessness are excluded from public space and from the polity because the sight of their presence is thought to diminish the value and functioning of public space, because they are thought to be inescapably controlled by their bodies, and because the persistence of their suffering is thought to result from an inadequate responsiveness to either lessons from past failures or the requirements of future-­oriented goals. Any of these characteristics might indeed account for the particular circumstances that led

introduction   25

specific individuals to homelessness, but they fail to address the much more salient systemic causes of homelessness—lack of affordable housing, access to health care, support and treatment resources for addiction, job opportunities that provide a living wage, and social safety nets that protect individuals from isolation and abusive domestic situations. As such, the centrality of these anxieties in justifying antihomeless sentiment and legislation tell a housed public much more about what characteristics it fears will lead citizens astray from their basic calling to participate in the collective effort to sustain democratic life and community. Hence, the stakes of these anxieties extend beyond a fuller understanding of antihomeless sentiment and the reasons why it might persist. Interrogating them helps us understand who we (believe we) are by elucidating the implicit civic ideal that provides the impetus and rationalization for expelling the homeless from the civic body in the first place. Collectively held anxieties like these move publics, often in ways that are troubling and unjust, making them an important subject of rhetorical analysis so that we might equip audiences with the critical tools to identify, assess, and rebut them.83 They also help us discern the collectively held aspirations a polity has about its identity and composition; these insights can provide the basis for transformative critique and argument not previously available to a public deliberating about its shared future. Democratic anxieties, in other words, demand rhetorical remedies. In order to offer them, we must determine how anxieties fuel political judgment and how rhetorical intervention potentially interrupts and redirects their driving force. Anxiety results from encounters with the unknown, unanticipated, or uncertain, according to George E. Marcus, who formulates an account of the political uses of emotion based both on the philosophical tradition and the findings of neuroscientific research.84 Anxiety produces an often-­unbearable discomfort that we experience when our expectations are subverted and we must make sense of circumstances that violate the norm we assumed as likely or inevitable. Marcus goes so far as to claim that “anxiety is the central emotion on which reason and democratic politics rest,” because anxiety prevents citizens from going through the habitual, unthinking motions of dealing with certainty and requires them to engage their rational capacities to process and respond to new encounters.85 Thus anxieties that provoke rhetorical action in response are instructive for illustrating what a community tends to find a threatening departure from an assumed norm. At a more basic level, as symbol-­users, we are accustomed and inclined to turning to rhetoric as a means of resolving anxiety. Bryan Crable explains this tendency

26   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

by extending Kenneth Burke’s formulation of rhetoric and the human condition to consider the roots of anxiety and the “invitation to rhetoric” that results from it: Taken together, the confrontation with the abyss and with one’s own finitude is quite a recipe for anxiety. I am born into an environment which threatens me at every turn. I have no preprogrammed instincts to organize it, and it contains threats to my existence. Further, as a symbol-­user, I am not timelessly immersed in its flow, but exist at a distance from it—yet my body is a continual reminder that, all my symbolic strivings to the contrary, death is my destiny. What is a body (that learns language) to do? In light of these reflections, I suggest not simply that the human situation is an “invitation” to rhetoric, but that we are called to rhetoric in an attempt to grapple with this situation. It is anxiety, not simply ambiguity, which characterizes the “‘universal’ rhetorical situation.”86 The key point here is that anxiety operates as both byproduct of and impetus for rhetorical acts. We experience anxiety by our nature as symbol-­users, and that anxiety prompts us to turn to symbolic action for solace. One example of such soothing symbolic action in a specifically democratic context appears in the example of democracies’ stories of foreign-­founders, which Bonnie Honig examines to show how such cultures manage anxieties over the fact of foreignness or the presence of foreigners.87 Such stories are told for political purposes: to facilitate the public’s acceptance of novel developments, encourage a break with a harmful status quo, or transcend partisan differences that deadlock a home community through public discourse about the object of anxiety. These stories represent rhetorical remedies because they help the community manage the deeper fears foreignness evokes for them. In the process of easing democratic anxieties, they also contribute to the civic habits that structure the affective bonds between members of a community in both productive and destructive ways, as Danielle S. Allen has shown.88 Examining the (re)production of interracial distrust in American politics, Allen suggests that interventions into these everyday habits are as important and powerful as legally mandated protections to vulnerable groups. The rhetorical remedies necessitated by democratic anxieties are those that disrupt destructive civic habits and promote the construction of affective civic bonds by refiguring civic subjectivity, communal identity, and collective action in newly emancipatory ways.

introduction   27

Thus, in this book, I aim to invert the prevailing questions that structure public and policy discussions of homelessness. Instead of searching for a definitive diagnosis of the problem of homelessness, I seek to understand the terministic motivation contained in public discourse for distinguishing between housed and homeless in stark terms of absolute inclusion and repulsion. Like Honig, I am interested in determining the uses to which narratives of homelessness are put, by asking how the diagnosis and description of homelessness eases a housed public’s anxieties about their own fittingness for democratic life. I join Allen in investigating how innovative rhetorical texts and practices may intervene in the status quo of civic habits, particularly those that block the grounds for identification between homeless and housed neighbors within a community. And following the insights of rhetorical democracy scholarship more broadly, I interrogate the powerful political incentives that motivate conventional advocates to engage in the definitional rhetorics distinguishing homeless and housed, as well as the potential transformations made possible by innovative unconventional advocacy challenging the predominant vision. Chapter 1, “The Rhetorical Conventions of Contemporary Homeless Advocacy,” traces the development of three key tropes that emerge as national organizations advocate on behalf of people experiencing homelessness. These tropes concern the invisible suffering of homelessness, the broken bodies of the homeless, and the present-­centered lives that both lead to and result from a lack of housing. In the advocate community, the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH), and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP) stand out as three of the most important loci of advocate activity and networking. The campaigns and initiatives of organizations such as the NAEH, NCH, and NLCHP represent traditional solutions-­focused social advocacy. Oriented by the values of scientific study and objective policymaking, these institutions imagine their task to be providing pragmatic answers for the question of how to solve the problem of homelessness. In the course of answering this question, each implicitly advances a particular characterization of homelessness that conceives of its causes, conditions, and solutions in ways that at times, I argue, work in opposition to their intended support of people experiencing homelessness. Chapter 2, “The Democratic Vision of Homeless Meal-­Sharing Initia­ tives,” challenges the typical assumption that increased visibility is the preferable solution to the often lamented invisibility of homelessness. Where conventional advocacy fights against the latter, asking a public audience to

28   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

refrain from looking away from the sights of suffering in the streets, homeless meal-­sharing initiatives ask us to see the community anew, as one that comprises homeless and housed and only comes into being through voluntary interaction across those distinctions. In this way, meal-­sharing initiatives challenge the political logic that justifies prohibitions against distributing food to people experiencing homelessness, and thereby assert the organic constitution of the community by citizens engaged in consensual civic interactions. Chapter 3, “The Democratic Bodies of the Homeless World Cup,” examines an advocacy model that resists the typical attribution of disability or disease to homeless bodies by creating an arena in which people experiencing homelessness appear as citizens representing their home nations. Where conventional advocacy fights against the breakdown of the homeless body, asking us to help secure material resources to fulfill its needs, the Homeless World Cup (HWC) prioritizes repositioning housed citizens as the appreciative spectators of homeless bodies in action. The HWC players, many of whom come from nations where their lack of housing is grounds for relocation or arrest, participate in the tournament as the embodiments of the nations that reject them at home. Thus the HWC emphasizes performances of citizenship over bureaucratic legibility, attempting to provide the arena in which people experiencing homelessness may enact their civic status instead of rehabilitating bodies for future institutional inclusion. Chapter 4, “The Democratic Temporalities of the Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day,” takes up the question of how temporal orientations attributed to different citizen-­subjectivities underwrite classifications of citizens into those who are capable of meeting democracy’s requirements and those who are unsuited to carrying out their civic duties. Where conventional advocacy fights discrimination against the homeless based on their present circumstances, the Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day (HPMD) restores the multitense existence of the homeless in their communities by celebrating their past, mourning their absence in the present, and cautioning against a communal future that repeats their unjust marginalization. The book closes with “Rhetorical Constructions of the Civic Home,” a reflection on the lessons we can draw from the preceding analyses to enrich our understanding of civic rhetoric and the role public discourses play in creating more socially just democratic cultures. Here, I consider how the three key anxieties interrogated over the course of the preceding chapters— anxieties about visibility, about bodies, and about temporalities—are not unique to the displacement of the homeless from public life. In fact, these

introduction   29

are perennial concerns that democracies have to grapple with when it comes to accommodating and empowering their citizens. Homeless advocacy represents one site among many where these anxieties crystalize, and attending to the nuances of advocacy rhetoric helps us better appreciate how the formal decisions and everyday actions of a given community assume an ideal citizen whose characteristics should not be tacitly accepted but instead should themselves become a subject of deliberation. The unconventional advocacy efforts analyzed in this book provide a preliminary model for citizens and activists who similarly challenge exclusions based on these anxieties, and they offer an opportunity to theorize the difficulties faced by such efforts as well as the opportunities afforded by them. Housing, in the sense of relatively stable access to safe and reliable physical shelter, provides a partial but vital remedy to homelessness, and thus represents an important and worthy pursuit of homeless advocates. But ultimately, my work aims to show how access to the civic home may offer a remedy more far-­reaching and politically advantageous than housing alone to the extent that advocates’ efforts aim to create conditions that accommodate civic dwelling, as opposed to the maintenance of bare life.89 Given the contemporary interpenetration of public and private realms, I argue citizens need a civic home—one that legitimizes the elements of their existence previously relegated to their private and domestic lives and that provides the bedrock for their participation in the collective politics of democratic life. Dwelling in public might implicate the ability to occupy and move through spaces in which the life of the polity takes place, but dwelling in the civic home more specifically implicates issues of voice, agency, and participation: not the unpunished presence of citizen bodies, but the right to engage others in the collective enterprise of democracy. The conversation on how to best equip citizens for democracy resists a singular and definitive answer, but homeless advocacy gives us one productive approach among many for extending civic recognition and dignity to our neighbors in need.

1

the rhetorical conventions of contemporary homeless advocacy

To understand the broader context in which homeless advocates make their appeals, we must begin by inquiring how the problem of homelessness has evolved over the course of American history, thereby disrupting the commonsense notion that homelessness simply refers to the absence of housing. Historians of the politics of homelessness, poverty, and the welfare state have provided detailed accounts of how these concepts morph throughout various periods in American history.1 Europeans began to colonize the “New World” based on images of limitless opportunity and abundant resources, myths of plenty that enticed populations that until then were struggling to coexist in overcrowded English cities characterized by inadequate employment opportunities, housing stock, and agricultural resources. But as Walter I. Trattner notes, the widespread availability of land, labor demand, and potential wealth did not guarantee that those settling the New World necessarily escaped the social ills that plagued the old: The picture of America portrayed by early promoters of settlement—a land abounding in wealth and good auspices, indeed a new Paradise, a veritable Garden of Eden—was hardly true. Those who came to the colonies (land proprietors, tax-­dodgers, and a handful of others excepted) were of moderate or poor means. The English practice, as authorized by Parliament and the transportation laws, of shipping to America thousands of rogues, convicts, political prisoners, beggars, vagrants, orphans, the unemployed, and other undesirables hardly helped. Then there was the trip across the Atlantic; not only a prolonged but also a debilitating experience for many. . . . Many did not survive the wretched conditions of the voyage; those who did frequently reached shore ill or infirm.2

contemporary homeless advocacy    31

As populations of colonists grew, communities needed to organize basic institutions for handling the increasing numbers of those unable to thrive on their own in the so-­called land of plenty. Not surprisingly, such poverty-­ relief measures mimicked the form of those prevalent in the Old World the colonists had left behind, namely, the English Poor Law of 1601.3 In the earliest moments of American history, homelessness (and poverty generally) is understood and explained much differently than in contemporary times. Rather than attributing homelessness to individual deficiency, “for seventeenth-­century Americans, need was in the order of things, a natural and inevitable part of the human condition. The poor, mere pawns in a divinely destined universe and hence not responsible for their condition, were always present—in America as elsewhere.”4 An offshoot of theological views that posited the coherence of humankind across apparent difference, this sentiment did not position the homeless as people whose deficiencies made them unable or unwilling to join in what was held up as normal, functioning society. The homeless “presence did not indicate a flaw in society, or in the needy, something to be feared and eliminated”; rather, people in need existed as “permanent and integral parts of the community, [who] were to be pitied and helped.”5 Early American colonists approached the establishment of public and private poverty-­relief institutions as the only sensible course of action in accordance with their understanding of both divine law and the nature of human collective life. The early American approach to homelessness changed significantly over time, perhaps partly because of different dimensions of the problem of poverty, but more likely because of evolving attitudes toward public and private responsibility to provide aid. In early American views, “social welfare was a partnership. Private philanthropy complemented public aid; both were part of the American response to poverty. While, from the outset, the public was responsible for providing aid to the needy who, in turn, had a right to such assistance, as soon as they could afford to do so, private citizens and a host of voluntary associations also gave generously to those in distress. . . . In view of the antagonism later thought to exist between public assistance and private charity, this cooperative approach to the problem is one of the more noteworthy aspects of American colonial history.”6 But after the American Revolution, as colonists embraced their newly acquired independence and started to pursue greater land and wealth opportunities through the settlement of the frontier, these attitudes upholding public and private responsibility for the needy underwent their first major revision.

32   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

As Americans moved to the West, the small, close-­knit colonial communities were largely abandoned for the freedom of open spaces, accompanied by shifts in cultural values that exchanged strong community ties for individual responsibility and achievement, self-­reliance and self-­help, and seemingly limitless possibilities for personal success. Greatly increased individual mobility for privileged segments of the American population and the vast reserves of material resources thought to be awaiting any who had the self-­motivation and discipline to pursue them undermined earlier visions of poverty as a necessary component of human community, an inevitable and inescapable fate of particular members of humankind.7 As the changes wrought by resettlement, industrialization, and vast increases to population and diversity eroded the basis for the colonial view of homelessness, Americans began searching for new perspectives that would provide more convincing explanations for the prevalence and persistence of widespread poverty. No longer could homelessness be understood as one of many potential human conditions; instead, attitudes toward homelessness began to focus on individuals who experienced homelessness as outliers to human experience. Here, we start to see people defined not by their common humanity but by their status within human society: the image of individuals experiencing homelessness gets refigured as homeless individuals. Thus categorized as a unique kind of human figure, the homeless begin to be approached by a wider housed society not as individuals both needing and deserving assistance but as a phenomenon to be studied, diagnosed, and cured, if possible, of whatever social deficiency prevents them from joining the functioning human society, of which they are no longer considered a part. The acceleration of industrialization and urbanization after the Civil War shored up developing characterizations of poverty and homelessness and the vision of assistance as the responsibility of scientific experts, public officials, and strong centralized institutions, rather than private individuals operating within their local communities. The rise of factory labor as a predominant form of employment, as well as the growing influence of Social Darwinism and capitalist systems, generated the attitude that “distress was an individual moral matter,” a conviction “not only revived but strengthened as the wounds of the Civil War were healed and the nation grew and prospered. The poor were held in contempt in an acquisitive society in which wealth became almost an end in itself.”8 No more radical change in attitude toward the homeless appears in American history than the final dissolution of the colonial era’s commitment to communal support for indigence and resistance to social exclusion of the needy. As Trattner contends, “although

contemporary homeless advocacy    33

these arguments—advanced to justify inequality and, in effect, to condone misery—never went completely unchallenged, the theory that poverty was caused by personal frailty was not easily supplanted; endowed with this new aura of authority, it retained a loyal following for a long time.”9 In the decades that followed, Americans saw very little resistance to the articulation of homelessness with personal failure; however, the figure of the homeless individual appeared in markedly different forms. At the start of the post–Civil War era, the image of the “tramp” appeared for the first time as a unique individual in the vast array of those experiencing poverty or hardship. What distinguished the tramp from the typically destitute was his “stunning mobility. . . . Constant shifting back and forth between and within metropolitan regions was not unusual.”10 The swift growth of the country’s railroad systems, along with shrinking opportunities for employment in urban areas, provided incentives for working men in particular to embrace a lifestyle apart from the geographically rooted norm of the ideal American home of the era. But while the migratory labor of the tramp contributed considerably to the economic growth and industrial development of the United States after the Civil War, the figure of the tramp was quickly condemned as a threat to public order and American values: “[P]undits . . . generated imaginative origin myths of tramping that symbolically captured the epoch’s intersecting crises of family, community, and nation. The image of a foraging, pillaging great army of tramps symbolically reversed the harmonious world of free labor and sentimental domesticity vouchsafed to the nation by a bloody Civil War.”11 The original tramps provoked a number of public fears, including the dangers of masculinity not tempered by domesticity and the rejection of communal tradition and stability threatened by radical mobility. The later figure of the hobo shifted the understanding of the public hazard posed by the homeless individual to reflect changing anxieties about sociopolitical life. The fear became that the itinerant tramps were not just endangering the virtuous domestic world of the American home, but that they were forming a countercultural network that could upset the norms and cultural institutions at the heart of American life. As such, Progressive reformers viewed hoboes as a willfully dangerous antagonist, one who claimed to be organizing in defense of working-­class men and their contributions to an ungrateful nation. To Progressives, the overwhelming hobo population “was indeed a vanguard, not of a multiracial and multinational working class, but of an encroaching modernity and economic rationalization that increasingly drew native-­born white Americans away from the traditional relationships

34   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

of home. Through their struggle with a population they deemed homeless, these activists redefined the very meanings of home for modern industrial society.”12 But the expansive frontier mindset that prompted American culture to embrace virtues of self-­determination, achievement, and responsibility while simultaneously undermining charitable attitudes toward poor relief met its limits in the Great Depression and the world wars. Vast economic changes stymied the seemingly unbounded industrial and financial expansion that enabled an army of homeless men to travel the country at their leisure in pursuit of employment opportunities and community among their peers, and “as the suburban ideal subdued the hotel spirit after World War I, changes on the wageworkers’ frontier, and in the political economy of industrial employment generally, dramatically reduced the pool of migratory hobo labor.”13 In a sense, then, the profitability of the hobo subculture in terms of both the economic and cultural benefits to its participants waned, and its popularity correspondingly decreased. From the 1950s forward, the image of homelessness predominant in American culture moved from an empowered worker challenging social and cultural norms to a debilitated figure struggling to keep up with the upward economic mobility of the population at large. Vast stretches of single room occupancy (SRO) hotels constructed originally to cash in on the popularity of the tramp and hobo lifestyles devolved into skid row, the last resort of the new homeless, men who were forced through economic decline to inhabit increasingly marginal positions in the postwar economic prosperity.14 From the country’s founding, homelessness as a concept has morphed, signally at various points a condition that provided evidence for a divine ordering of human life, a dangerous alternative lifestyle that threatened the sanctity of the American home, or the supreme misfortune that befell those unable or unwilling to participate in capitalist society. These ever-­changing definitions of homelessness emerged in evolving political, economic, and social contexts, so while they may help us appreciate the fluidity of categories like “homeless” and “at home,” they cannot substitute for an investigation of the current interpretations of homelessness, ones that respond specifically to and circulate within U.S. public culture at the present moment. As such, we must begin any analysis of the contemporary rhetorical construction of homelessness by asking how the concept conventionally appears to us today: What sort of problem is homelessness understood to represent? Whom do we believe it threatens? How are its causes, consequences, and solutions characterized?

contemporary homeless advocacy    35

I document this conventional view by analyzing the advocacy efforts of the three major national organizations addressing homelessness today: the National Coalition for the Homeless, the National Alliance to End Homelessness, and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. To be clear, these are certainly not the only noteworthy organizations advocating on behalf of people experiencing homelessness at present, whether on a national stage or in a more local context. However, I analyze the outreach of these three organizations to discern the rhetorical conventions of contemporary homeless advocacy because they act as both exemplars and facilitators of such initiatives. While they exist as separate institutional entities, all three coordinate their efforts with each other and local partners, acting as clearinghouses for the research and persuasive appeals that circulate most frequently in contemporary policy and legislative deliberations. These three groups explicitly aim to coordinate the efforts of homeless advocates throughout the country—not to micromanage their work, but to amplify it through fostering connections among otherwise isolated and fragmentary appeals to the public. Through their legislative efforts and awareness-­raising campaigns, these three organizations act most prominently on the public stage to advance the interests of people experiencing homelessness. By examining the common conventions of their advocacy, we can glean the shared conception of homelessness circulated by typical homeless advocates today.

Exemplars of National Homeless Advocacy The three prominent national advocacy organizations that work on behalf of people experiencing homelessness were all founded in the 1980s during the homelessness crisis of Reagan’s America. The timing was not coincidental: as Todd DePastino explains, “while not responsible for the recession that, in fact, helped seal his election, Reagan vigorously pursued a ‘supply-­side’ economic agenda that included a massive defunding of federal social welfare and housing programs at precisely the time when poverty rates were soaring. The issue of homelessness allowed activists to focus their opposition to ‘Reaganomics’ by challenging Reagan’s narrative of self-­reliant entrepreneurial success with one of declining middle-­ and working-­class fortunes.”15 Starting in the 1980s but continuing throughout the late twentieth century, the combination of periodic economic decline, structural transformations in employment, reductions in public assistance programs, diminishing sources of affordable housing, and rising health care costs

36   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

pushed far greater numbers of the American working class out of poverty and into destitution.16 In response to the increasing numbers of individuals forced to live on the streets, the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) formed in 1981 to “end homelessness” by creating a “national network of people who are currently experiencing or who have experienced homelessness, activists and advocates, community-­based and faith-­based service providers, and others.” The NCH describes itself in terms of its two-­pronged approach to homeless advocacy, which pursues both “systemic and attitudinal changes necessary to prevent and end homelessness” by “engag[ing] in public education, policy advocacy, and grassroots organizing.” Their advocacy work proceeds on four main fronts: “housing justice, economic justice, health care justice, and civil rights.”17 A primary concern for the NCH is including the beneficiaries of their efforts in the campaigns themselves, and so this community coalition organizes programs that involve people experiencing homelessness as part of their appeals. For example, in the Homeless Challenge project, housed citizens “dress down” and spend up to forty-­eight hours living on the street with their homeless neighbors; through the Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day campaign, residents of cities organize annual memorial services for their homeless neighbors who have passed away during the preceding year; and during National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, communities organize awareness-­raising events each year in late November to generate funds for homeless assistance providers.18 The National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), unlike the NCH, does not work so explicitly to include people experiencing homelessness in its ranks and projects. Instead, this organization advocates on behalf of the homeless by serving as a clearinghouse for the lobbying activities of experts on homelessness and housing policy. Boasting over ten thousand provider and public agency partners, the NAEH represents “the largest partnership dedicated to ending homelessness.” Describing itself as “a leading voice on the issue of homelessness,” the NAEH speaks primarily to the institutional component of aiding people experiencing homelessness. The organization “analyzes policy and develops pragmatic, cost-­effective policy solutions”; “works collaboratively with the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to build state and local capacity, leading to stronger programs and policies that help communities achieve their goal of ending homelessness”; and “provide[s] data and research to policymakers and elected officials in order to inform policy debates and educate the public and opinion leaders nationwide.” The NAEH justifies this focus on policy issues in its historical narrative:

contemporary homeless advocacy    37

originally called “the National Citizens Committee for Food and Shelter,” the NAEH reoriented its goals in 1987 when it realized the shortcomings of only addressing the emergency needs of the homeless population—in their terms, the “hot and a cot” model of social services.19 Moving away from a service provision format and embracing policymaking efforts, the NAEH coordinates the efforts of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to provide a managerial and information resource for those administering to the needs of the homeless.20 The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP),  the third of the major U.S. homeless advocacy organizations, follows the NAEH’s lead in focusing on the production of expert knowledge rather than participating in the day-­to-­day provision of resources to individuals experiencing homelessness. Founded in 1989 by Maria Foscarinis, a lawyer devoted to seeking justice through the courts for people experiencing homelessness, the NLCHP aims “to prevent and end homelessness by serving as the legal arm of the nationwide movement to end homelessness.”21 Like the NCH and the NAEH, the NLCHP pursues policy initiatives that seek greater allocation of funds and resources to homeless service providers, as well as public education campaigns aspiring to correct misconceptions about homelessness and publicize little-­known truths about its causes and consequences. NLCHP campaigns advocate on behalf of the homeless through legal channels largely by working to reclaim the rights stripped from those who lack private shelter: their programs include initiatives to increase federal resources, ensure homeless children’s access to public education, and protect the homeless of all ages from hate crimes, wrongful evictions, and civil-­rights violations.22 The three groups also provide resources and recommendations for assisting specific segments of the homeless population, which helps push back against the general trend in the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion to erase the influences of race, gender, sexuality, age, nationality, ability, and other factors on experiences of homelessness. To this end, the NCH maintains a wealth of resources specific to particular segments of the homeless population, including families, the elderly, the young, veterans, and LGBT individuals.23 In these targeted resource archives, the NCH documents how individual experiences of homeless may vary significantly based on other complicating situational factors. For example, in the “Family Homelessness” resource archive, the NCH explains how those who are victimized by their domestic partners face an array of additional obstacles to securing emergency housing: “Because of their unique and often urgent circumstances,

38   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

those coming from domestic violence situations are more likely to become homeless or have a problem finding housing. Families escaping domestic violence may have poor credit, rental, and/or employment histories. Additionally, some are unable to collect and/or enforce child support and alimony payments, because they must avoid their abuser for safety.”24 Likewise, in the “LGBT Homelessness” resource archive, the NCH explains how broader discriminations based on sexuality may both lead to homelessness and exacerbate its harmful effects, because “LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) individuals face a particular set of challenges, both in becoming homeless as well as when they are trying to avoid homelessness. LGBT persons face social stigma, discrimination, and often rejection by their families, which adds to the physical and mental strains/challenges that all homeless persons must struggle with.”25 Here the NCH is being diligent in encouraging a broader public audience to reject the overly simplified view of homelessness as houselessness. As they make clear, for some people experiencing homelessness, housing alone provides neither a sufficient nor attainable solution. In the case of those discriminated against for their sexuality, this is a particularly important distinction to keep in mind: “Frequently, homeless LGBT persons have great difficulty finding shelters that accept and respect them. LGBT individuals experiencing homelessness are often at a heightened risk of violence, abuse, and exploitation compared with their heterosexual peers. Transgender people are particularly at physical risk due to a lack of acceptance and are often turned away from shelters; in some cases signs have been posted barring their entrance.”26 Marking this difference in experiences of homelessness is an important point of resistance to the simplifying and reductivist rhetoric examined in the previous chapter. To join in that effort, service providers, advocates, and public audiences may explore the NAEH’s range of toolkits developed and designed to administer to the unique needs and circumstances of specific subgroups within the U.S. homeless population. For example, in the NAEH toolkits tailored to youth, domestic violence survivors, and Medicaid recipients, they provide the latest research on the population at hand and orient the data on homeless life and solutions to homeless suffering to speak to the situations that most commonly arise for these subgroups.27 And finally, the NLCHP advocates for legal changes and challenges unconstitutional legislation that unfairly targets specific subgroups within the homeless population. Because of their focus on the legislative dimension of homeless assistance, their advocacy frequently takes the form of helping those who need to navigate various legal

contemporary homeless advocacy    39

and bureaucratic labyrinths in order to access specialized forms of assistance. In their “Youth & Education” resource center, for example, they make available a number of fact sheets, reports, manuals, and publicity materials that address the obstacles preventing homeless children from attaining an education. These materials summarize the provisions in the McKinney-­ Vento Homeless Assistance Act that provide children with access to education while they are experiencing homelessness, and address the issue with nuance and sensitivity to diverse situations within this subcategory, for example, by distinguishing between the needs of unaccompanied homeless youth and those whose families are experiencing homelessness.28 This brief overview only scratches the surface of the efforts of the NCH, NAEH, and NLCHP in addressing the diverse dimensions of homeless experience, but I offer it here to demonstrate how such resources mitigate the effects of the common impulse to lump all experiences of homelessness into the same category and imagine that singular explanations and solutions apply indiscriminately to all. My analysis largely engages the common trends within the rhetorical appeals created and circulated by these most prominent national advocates, but these variations from the broad conventions are equally valuable to the populations they serve. In order to ascertain the advocacy commonplaces that characterize the work of these homeless organizations at the national level, I examine the many rhetorical products created and disseminated by the NAEH, the NCH, and the NLCHP. Taken as a representative group, these three organizations prioritize the circulation of a variety of materials to public audiences that aim to provide more reliable information about homelessness, to challenge restrictive and discriminatory public attitudes about the people experiencing homelessness, and to appeal to political representatives at local, state, and national levels to enact legislative and policy changes that might better support the homeless population and reverse the troubling trend of homeless criminalization. All three organizations produce a diverse set of rhetorical messages for public audiences, from individual fact sheets, infographics, datasets, and research reports to broad-­reaching persuasive appeals, advocacy manuals, community events, and legislative campaigns. This chapter explains and illustrates three of the dominant conventions that emerge when this body of advocacy rhetoric is examined: typical homeless advocacy as represented by the NAEH, the NCH, and the NLCHP (1) challenges the invisibility of homeless suffering, (2) administers to the needs of broken bodies, and (3) pursues protections against the vulnerabilities of present-­centered lives.

40   Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

Invisible Suffering The conventional view of homelessness stresses the truth-­revealing potential of vision to document and evidence a previously unknown, or underappreciated, exigency. Proceeding from the assumption that people experiencing homelessness continue to suffer because the extent and severity of their plight remains largely invisible to a wider public, conventional advocacy seeks the means to make visible a hidden reality of contemporary American society: an alarming number of American citizens are forced to live outside reliable private shelter, and the majority of the housed population remains unaware of and indifferent to their struggle. This objective is aptly summarized in a short advocacy film called Make Them Visible, described by its creators as a message that “will change how you see the homeless. This video was originally produced as a social experiment, geared at revealing how we, as a society, see our homeless neighbors.”29 This video-­as-­social-­experiment is guided by the question posed at the start of the film: “Have the homeless become so invisible we wouldn’t notice our own family members living on the street?” Over the course of only a few minutes, viewers of Make Them Visible watch as the filmmakers test their suspicion that indifference to people experiencing homelessness has grown to such a level that their suffering no longer registers at all for most passersby. In the film, unsuspecting subjects in the social experiment describe a particularly strong relationship that is important to them—an enduring bond with a spouse, a parent, a sibling, and so on. But in between these heartfelt descriptions of abiding personal connection, we see an unidentified crew constructing elaborate homeless disguises for the relatives being described. Each individual’s appearance is transformed—with clothing, hair, and makeup adjusted to resemble a caricature of homelessness— and then the newly “homeless” person is positioned sitting on the sidewalk to appear to be panhandling or sleeping. The film documents how to a person, the interviewees all walk past their beloved relatives without pause, intimating that the tendency to look away from the sights of homelessness is so strong that the homeless remain invisible even to the most important people in their lives. As the film progresses, the interviewees are shown the footage of themselves indifferently walking past those individuals whom they have just identified as the most important people in their lives simply because their appearance suggests they are homeless. By the end of the film, the answer to the opening question is clear: the homeless have become so invisible that we barely take notice of their suffering. The

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film’s name suggests the necessary remedy to this callous disregard: Make Them Visible. Likewise, visibility has long represented a shared concern of modern homeless advocates. Since the 1970s, organizations such as the Community for Creative Non-­Violence (CCNV) have structured their activism around the creation of striking, spectacular revelations of the scope and urgency of homeless suffering.30 Their strategies of hunger strikes, public protests, occupations of federal buildings, and dramatic demonstrations develop out of the common conviction that the public is insufficiently aware of the realities of homelessness, perhaps because they lack information or, more troublingly, because the evidence of homelessness is intentionally swept out of sight by communities unwilling to support those in need. As Mitch Snyder, the CCNV’s leader and perhaps best-­known homeless activist, put it, “We had to capture the attention of people because we were dealing with complete ignorance and absolute invisibility. So you do that in a very dramatic, high visibility way and in a way that guarantees that people respond viscerally, emotionally, because it’s only when emotions are aroused that people begin to think.”31 Thus advocates prioritize a making visible of the reality of homelessness, an orientation to activism that takes many forms. The easiest to recognize are those that explicitly utilize images to address the problematic invisibility that people experiencing homelessness suffer. Take, for example, a campaign created by the NCH called “The Faces of Homelessness.”32 The Faces of Homelessness initiative combines a nationwide speaking tour with an online photograph archive that seeks to reveal the unknown truths of homeless experience. The NCH sets up public events around the country to introduce housed residents of communities to their homeless neighbors, offering people who were previously homeless or are currently experiencing homelessness “a significant platform for those whom homelessness affects directly to talk personally about their experiences.” The necessity for the program, as articulated by the NCH, stems from a lack of interaction between different groups of our society, combined with impersonal or inaccurate descriptions of homelessness posed by the media and public officials, [which] contributes to a distancing of those who have housing from those who do not. As a result, homelessness is perceived as an abstract social problem. Those who experience homelessness are seen as the sources of their own misfortunes, and the socio-­economic policies and practices that give rise to homelessness are then too easily ignored. This abstraction, in turn, lessens the

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degree of urgency and commitment needed to work strategically and consistently toward solutions to end homelessness that are long-­term, outcome-­based, and not simply responses to crises. The NCH seeks to concretize the abstraction of homelessness by presenting audiences with images of the individuals experiencing homelessness. Speakers at the events relate their own personal tales of life on the streets and its attendant struggles. The online photograph gallery features images that preserve the moments in which individuals experiencing homelessness become newly visible to a housed audience.33 By offering these images to online visitors to the website, the NCH extends the moment when homeless speakers stand up and are recognized in public, thereby assuring their ongoing visibility in the face of an overwhelming aversion to homeless presence in the spaces of the city. At this point, I want to mark two key features of the NCH’s Faces of Homelessness project that, we will come to see in later discussions, represent important conventions in typical homeless advocacy. First, visibility functions in this context as a means for personal expression and revelation. Against legislative trends and cultural norms that seek to make homelessness invisible, the Faces of Homelessness project attempts to reverse the relationship between housed and homeless. Rather than removing a homeless presence in public, the project intentionally highlights a homeless presence on the assumption that people experiencing homelessness can be legitimized through visibility. Second, practices that make people experiencing homelessness visible to a housed audience are touted as a means to secure greater institutional recognition of those forced to live outside shelter. The legitimacy that visibility presumably grants does not take as its aim the transformation of everyday civic attitudes. Instead, it pursues an attitudinal shift—a willingness to look at homelessness, to know it and understand it—as evidence for the need for state authorities to step up their assistance for people experiencing homelessness. As the NCH explains, the end goal for the Faces of Homelessness project, like all their campaigns, is institutional implementation of legal and policy reform, increased resource provision, and the ultimate commitment of local and federal governments to end homelessness altogether.34 As such, it is not just through visual texts that advocates seek to remedy the invisibility of people experiencing homelessness. I argue that conventional advocacy campaigns, which take the form of legislative initiatives, legal battles, and awareness-­raising efforts, implicitly rely on the optic most

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easily recognized in texts like the NCH’s Faces of Homelessness project. That is, the NCH positions the truth-­revealing visibility of homelessness as directed toward a public authority best equipped to supply the material provisions and security needed to overcome the perils of homelessness. Citizens on the street may be the ones who look away from the troubling sights of homelessness when they encounter them in public, but conventional advocacy campaigns find simply persuading everyday citizens to change their visual habits to be an inadequate final outcome. It is the reconstruction of homelessness as a problem recognizable in institutional contexts that conventional advocacy efforts pursue. Thus, conventional advocacy for people experiencing homelessness cultivates what I call a state optic, one that imagines just democratic politics as those made legible from the transcendent perspective of institutional authority. I return to this concept of the state optic in chapter 2; in the meantime, I continue our exploration of advocacy aiming to remedy the invisibility of homelessness in the contemporary United States. An additional commonplace of conventional homeless advocacy concerned with invisibility appears in the execution—and criticism—of ritualized measurements of homelessness. In initiatives that seek to institute a homeless census and bolster existing point-­in-­time (PIT) counts, communities aim to reveal the hidden extent of homelessness as experienced among their populations but excluded from traditional demographic measurements. Advocates rely on the data produced by these initiatives for their persuasive appeals at the same time that they frequently interrogate the methodologies used to define homelessness and estimate the scope of its effects. And in fact it is a related methodological deficiency that makes the undertaking of a homeless census necessary: the decennial U.S. Census, a constitutionally mandated enumeration of the American population, utilizes count procedures that systematically exclude people experiencing homelessness.35 Because the U.S. Census is conducted largely through at-­home visits and surveys mailed to residential addresses, the execution of the mandate to gather information about the makeup and distribution of the national population operationally neglects those lacking a private residence at the time of the count. This neglect is hardly intentional, and in fact, the Census Bureau has made some efforts to reach out to those typically overlooked by standard count procedures. But, as Brendan Kearns argues, there is ample room for improvement in the initiatives to supplement the standard approach of the census with operations that might better account for the population of people

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experiencing homelessness. For Kearns, the stakes of improving such measures extend beyond the accuracy of the census: In addition to the immediate, concrete political and financial effects of inaccurate census data on the homeless, there are also more intangible costs: the Census Bureau’s minimal efforts to count the homeless population conveys to these individuals, many of who already feel estranged from society, that they do not count. The government must remain sensitive to the symbolic power of census measures. After all, this is a country whose founding document once stated that another uniquely marginalized and vulnerable population—slaves—should only count as three-­fifths of a person for the purposes of a national census. The government’s lackadaisical approach to measuring the homeless population provides a contemporary reminder of the institutional indifference that confronts the poor, vulnerable, and dispossessed within the United States.36 Hence, the consideration of how to include the homeless in official counts of the U.S. population matters not just for accuracy but for equality in political representation as well. Aiming to be responsive to such concerns, the Census Bureau has experimented with several different approaches to expanding the population count beyond those locatable by residential mailing address. These efforts include a variety of special counts conducted at places most likely to be populated by people experiencing homelessness: for example, the 1970 “Transient Night” and “Mission Night” events focused on short-­term shelter facilities like SROs, public spaces like bus terminals, and support providers like soup kitchens to find individuals who were likely missed by traditional counting measures. These early and rather haphazard attempts to find and make visible the subset of the American population experiencing homelessness were organized into more systematic counts conducted by individual communities and advocate groups in the 1980s, although the results varied dramatically from one count to another. For the 1990 census, local communities’ governmental and shelter staff were tasked with conducting counts for “S-­Night,” or the “Shelter and Street Night.” S-­Night took information gathered by local communities about the places where people experiencing homeless typically congregated or sought provisional shelter and dispatched census workers to seek out and document those occupying such spaces during an evening in March. The 2000 census saw a revision of S-­Night into

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the “Service-­Based Enumeration” (SBE) count, wherein facilities distributing food, offering shelter, and providing health care or other services for the homeless were tasked with conducting the count over a three-­day period. This SBE model continued to dominate the approach to including people experiencing homelessness in the 2010 census, a sign of “procedural stagnation” that demonstrates how “the Bureau continues to conduct the census in a manner that needlessly neglects many homeless individuals.”37 In addition to the census count every ten years, communities are also charged with conducting biennial point-­in-­time (PIT) counts and reporting the results to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in order to contribute to the national measures of homelessness and to demonstrate their effectiveness in providing the services that aim to reduce and eliminate homelessness on a local level.38 Although PIT counts are only required by HUD every other year, many communities make them annual events in order to continuously and more accurately track the changes in homeless population and resource utilization. The NAEH offers a general overview of the PIT count model that emphasizes its function as a narrowly tailored “measure to evaluate progress in ending homelessness”: “On a given night in January, communities, organized into Continuums of Care (CoCs), count the number of people experiencing homelessness in emergency shelters, transitional housing, and sleeping outside and in other places not meant for human habitation. Electronic administrative records are used to enumerate people living in emergency shelters and transitional housing. An organized unsheltered count is conducted by outreach workers and volunteers who canvas CoCs to enumerate the people who appear to be living in places not meant for human habitation.”39 PIT counts are essential to the work homeless advocates do because there is no single national effort to measure and document the current homeless population; instead, information about the number and demographics of those experiencing homelessness is aggregated from the PIT results submitted by individual communities. HUD stresses that PIT counts have twofold significance, first because “HUD’s PIT count data has become increasingly important as a measure of our local and national progress related to preventing and ending homelessness,” and second because the validity and reliability of the information gathered by local communities “can influence CoC Program funding awards,” incentivizing providers’ participation in the initiative regardless of their potential reservations about and critiques of its methodology.40 Moreover, HUD justifies the requirement of PIT counts in terms of the necessity of revealing the true extent and urgency of homelessness; the guide for

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conducting such counts stresses that PIT counts enable a national community to better understand the scope and scale of assistance needed to alleviate the harmful consequences of homelessness, to refine policy approaches to best address these needs, and to “rais[e] public awareness of the challenges facing people who are homeless and bolster efforts to garner additional public and private support.”41 Implicit in HUD’s justification is a warning: that absent accurate and transparent counting, the needs and suffering of the homeless population will remain unseen and unappreciated, and as a consequence, both material and public support will wane. Presenting the PIT counts as a remedy establishes increasing the visibility of homelessness as a primary solution to its persistence. Advocates and academics alike have criticized the various approaches to counting and documenting the homeless population discussed above. In a special issue of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, a series of articles and commentary question both the approach utilized in the S-­Night count and the very impulse to perfect and standardize homeless population measurement approaches. Ellen Bassuk identifies a core problem with the S-­Night approach in “the magnitude of difference in counts [which] is not trivial; it varies by a factor of seven to ten.”42 James D. Wright and Joel A. Devine attribute these varying results to two primary factors: people experiencing homelessness whom they term “uncounted” and “uncountable.” Those who were uncounted on S-­Night were those that the S-­Night teams simply missed as they attempted to identify and interview all homeless people in shelters, on streets, and in abandoned buildings. Those who were uncountable were those sheltering in locations not visited by the S-­Night teams. For example, people experiencing homelessness who found temporary private shelter for the night by “doubling up” in someone else’s residence would have been missed by the S-­Night’s focus on public shelters and streets.43 Notably, Wright and Devine’s essential critique of these counting practices revolves around the identification and condemnation of their methodological blind spots: they contend that the S-­Night fails to effectively and accurately calculate the scope of the homeless population because it is methodologically blind to certain types of homelessness and very typical changes in housing status: “A cash windfall, an extended period of sobriety, or a sympathetic sister would all be sufficient, in at least some cases, to get a homeless person off the streets for a bit and thus out of the view of the S-­Night operation.”44 Moreover, the potential blinders created by the count methodologies have consequences that affect more than just the accuracy of the results produced.

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Described by Christine L. Jocoy as a “quantification ritual,” the approach to counting the homeless as used by the Census Bureau or mandated by HUD “feeds the culture of bureaucracy much more than it offers solutions to people living without permanent homes.”45 Jocoy justifies this critique in terms of the amount of time, attention, and resources that are afforded the count itself; she suggests that perhaps the quantification ritual is not actually helping to inform policy decisions but instead providing an ever more complex and time-­consuming distraction from reducing homelessness. The optics of homeless population counts, in other words, reassure communities that they are diligently working to address homelessness, even as the connection between the counts and subsequent resource provision and policy change remain unclear at best. Yet advocates and bureaucrats alike appreciate the implications of the count numbers for shaping public opinion about homelessness, which is why both argue emphatically for the reliability of their results over those of others. Cynthia J. Bogard points to one such conflict in the early 1980s between homeless activists like the CCNV, and governmental sources like HUD. While the CCNV argued that, based on their research, about 2.2 million people were experiencing homelessness in the United States, HUD studies circulated in response to the CCNV estimate set the homeless population at about 350,000.46 Both estimates were critiqued as being inaccurate because they were not sufficiently objective: “The CCNV was seen by some, especially government officials, as exaggerating the extent of the problem as a way to link homelessness to Reagan administration economic policies,” while “HUD estimators, in contrast, were accused of minimizing homelessness for political reasons, both by the CCNV and by other social scientists and advocates.”47 The methods for obtaining accurate enumerations of the homeless population remains a topic of fierce debate, but the important takeaway for our purposes here is to note how the numbers matter for community responses to homelessness: the urgency and credibility of advocates’ appeals for broad public support may depend on the publicity afforded by estimates that view homelessness expansively. Hence advocates invest both in the official numbers produced by governmental enumerations even as they critique the methods used by enumerators. Advocacy reports from the NLCHP, NAEH, and NCH echo the critiques made by the academic evaluators above. The NLCHP estimates that 2.5 to 3.5 million people per year experience literal homelessness in the United States (living outside private residences), with another 7.4 million avoiding literal homelessness by doubling up. They contextualize that estimate by

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noting that “data related to homelessness are far from exact,” due at least in part to the different operational definitions of homelessness that shape counting measures. Where governmental organizations tend to use very strict and narrow definitions of homeless in their counts, advocacy groups recognize that these definitions systematically exclude the variety of situations people experiencing homelessness find themselves in.48 The NCH suggests that the very question animating homeless counts is “misleading,” because “in most cases, homelessness is a temporary circumstance— not a permanent condition. A more appropriate measure of the magnitude of homelessness is the number of people who experience homelessness over time, not the number of ‘homeless people.’” By their account, then, initiatives like S-­Night and PIT counts set out looking for the wrong phenomenon, and consequently, their results fail to reflect the true extent of homelessness in the United States.49 The NAEH concurs; while they recognize the utility of the PIT counts mandated by HUD, conceding that although they “are not without limitations,” they remain “the only measure that enumerates people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in addition to those who are sheltered.” And even granting that “despite its flaws, the annual point-­in-­time counts result in the most reliable estimate of people experiencing homelessness in the United States from which progress can be measured,” the NAEH still maintains that “national trends and overall totals do not provide a complete picture of homelessness across the country.” Calling for “a clearer picture,” the NAEH echoes other academic and advocate critiques seeking to refine our vision and hence understanding of homelessness.50 As such, even as they critique the methodology of the counts mandated by HUD and the Census Bureau, advocates and academics leave the underlying assumption about the importance of the visibility of homeless suffering unchallenged. In other words, they contest the insufficiencies and inaccuracies of the existing approaches to counting the homeless on the grounds that their blind spots render them inadequate and call for more accurate methodologies. The emphasis on accuracy rests on an assumption of the significance of invisibility of suffering as a primary obstacle for those working on behalf of a homeless population to overcome. Conventional homeless advocacy thus takes on the challenge of identifying and critiquing such invisibility as it continues to occur in public life—whether as a consequence of public indifference or bureaucratic oversight—and implementing solutions that provide visibility-­achieving measures as primary remedies.

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Broken Bodies A second convention of typical homeless advocacy appears in the identification of and administration to broken bodies. Unsurprisingly, homeless life is dangerous and debilitating. Experiences of homelessness routinely entail a lack of protection from the elements and health complications that are caused or exacerbated by life on the streets. Lacking reliable shelter and regular access to basic, necessary resources like food, water, hygienic facilities, medical care, and adequate rest, people experiencing homelessness are largely unable to maintain a minimal level of physical well-­being. A fact sheet produced by the NCH articulates the dangers of homelessness most explicitly: “Homeless people are three to six times more likely to become ill than housed people. Homelessness precludes good nutrition, good personal hygiene, and basic first aid, adding to the complex health needs of homeless people. Additionally, conditions that require regular, uninterrupted treatment, such as tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, are extremely difficult to treat or control among those without adequate housing.”51 But as the NCH also makes clear, the difficulty of treating injuries and illnesses while homeless is not the only potentially negative consequence to be considered. The causal connection between homelessness and poor health runs both ways, as a lack of adequate health care, leading to unaffordable medical treatment and unmanageable health conditions, “itself is a cause for homelessness.”52 So if insufficient access to health care potentially leads to homelessness, and homelessness exacerbates existing physical and mental health conditions as well as instigating new medical problems, then people experiencing homelessness are doubly vulnerable, their broken bodies serving as both a cause of homelessness and a consequence of the struggle to survive on the streets. Hence advocates prioritize appeals that warrant the expansion of resource provision by invoking the wide range of severe threats homelessness poses to vulnerable bodies. The NCH’s Heath Care and Homelessness fact sheet details a startling inventory of potential health risks to homelessness, including “heart disease, cancer, liver disease, kidney disease, skin infections, HIV/AIDS, pneumonia, and tuberculosis,” as well as the dangers in the physical environment resulting in “frostbite, immersion foot, and hypothermia,” and a radically reduced life expectancy “estimated between 42 and 52 years, compared to 78 years in the general population.”53 In all, the NCH paints a grim picture; not only do people experiencing homelessness disproportionately suffer from medical problems as listed above but they also are impeded by obstacles not shared with the housed population. To be sure,

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for many housed citizens, cost also represents a significant barrier to accessing health care; homeless and housed alike suffer when they cannot afford the medical treatments they need. But the NCH also indicates that people experiencing homelessness face additional hurdles in getting appropriate medical treatment, obstacles that “include lack of knowledge about where to get treated, lack of access to transportation, and lack of identification.” These logistical difficulties are often accompanied by “psychological barriers . . . such as embarrassment, nervousness about filling out the forms and answering questions properly, and self-­consciousness about appearance and hygiene when living on the streets.”54 Thus the fact sheet opens with a fairly standard articulation of the harms associated with homelessness, focusing specifically on the dangers homelessness poses to individual bodies in need. The NCH does not conclude with its description of these harms, however. Instead, it uses them as the basis from which to recommend policy changes aimed at reducing both the threats to the well-­being of the homeless and the costs associated with providing medical care. The concluding “Policy Issues” section of the fact sheet begins by describing the sole existing program that is federally funded to administer to the health care needs of the homeless. This program, aptly named Health Care for the Homeless (HCH), is “required to provide primary health care, substance abuse services, emergency care, outreach, and assistance in qualifying for housing,” in addition to offering “dental care, mental health treatment, supportive housing, and other service” when possible.55 Noting that the HCH serves in excess of 740,000 people experiencing homeless each year, the Health Care and Homelessness fact sheet establishes the necessity of the program and at the same time recognizes that its reach does not yet fulfill existing need. Because the HCH’s programs and services are direly needed, and because many more people experience homelessness than those currently able to be served by the HCH, the NCH recommends expanding the availability of affordable housing paired with “universal access to affordable, high-­quality and comprehensive health care” as policies with the potential to mitigate the harms to the homeless. This argumentative structure is one that appears repeatedly in rhetorical messages created and circulated by national advocates like the NCH, the NAEH, and the NLCHP, marking the emphasis on broken bodies to justify greatly expanded resource provision and legislative change as an important common convention for homeless advocacy operating at the national level. We see this convention again as it makes its appearance in the NLCHP’s advocacy report on youth homelessness. Investigating the variety of causes, complications, and proposed solutions for the growing number of minors

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experiencing homelessness, the NLCHP focuses on the motivating factors that lead children and teens to flee their homes and opt for living outside traditional shelter arrangements. The report highlights the dangers presented by abusive households, suggesting, “Young people who run away from home often do so for their own survival. One study found that 21 percent of youth who had run away or had been kicked out of their homes had either experienced physical or sexual abuse or were afraid of being harmed if they went home. Furthermore, significant correlations have been found between children who had suffered verbal, physical, or sexual abuse and higher rates of running away. Severe dysfunction in the home is also common. For example, over two-­thirds of the youth reported that at least one parent abused drugs or alcohol.”56 We see an initial reversal to the conventional rhetorical form in this appeal, suggesting as it does that youth homelessness results from minors fleeing from, rather than to, an environment in which they are continually endangered. And yet, the initial reversal of the broken bodies convention does not bear out because the flight from danger typically leads to equally perilous circumstances as “tragically, they often find further victimization waiting for them on the streets,” since homeless youth are often the targets of crime like assault and robbery or are the victims of exploitation and trafficking.57 Because of the dangerous environments of both home and street for these youth, the NLCHP recommends that communities reclassify unsupervised minors to prevent the criminalization of their flights from unsafe homes. It also uses the broken-­bodies trope to justify the expansion of resources and services that directly provide relief to those unaccompanied minors who cannot return home because of a threat of abuse and require stable, safe shelter and the support of the state. The NLCHP calls on communities to “offer a full complement of services” that might prevent situations in which youth feel forced into homelessness as their best option; such services include “counseling, family mediation, and alternative placements,” in addition to “parenting training, family counseling, anger management, and addiction and mental health services.”58 These services and other programs like them have the dual benefit of providing relief for those whose well-­being has already been damaged from homelessness, and also of mitigating some of the factors initially causing youth homelessness. Perhaps the most prominent type of advocacy appeal that exemplifies the broken-­bodies convention consists of the increasingly frequent arguments on behalf of a “Housing First” approach to solving homelessness. The NAEH explains the approach and persuades on its behalf in a 2016 fact sheet that distinguishes the approach from previous efforts to end homelessness.

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Where earlier approaches stressed a multipronged treatment program aiming to resolve the spectrum of health, behavioral, vocational, and financial problems contributing to homelessness, Housing First “views housing as the foundation for life improvement and enables access to permanent housing without prerequisites or conditions beyond those of a typical renter.”59 Housing First thus reverses the usual reasoning used to make sense of homeless experience: rather than attempting to fix the smaller, discrete problems that may have contributed to the loss of housing, this program operates from the assumption that people experiencing homelessness are best served if their housing situation is resolved before any other problems are addressed. In the NAEH’s terms, Housing First constitutes a reprioritization of the needs of the homeless, reflecting “a belief that people need basic necessities like food and a place to live before attending to anything less critical, such as getting a job, budgeting properly, or attending to substance use issues.”60 Notice how the Housing First model positions administering to the needs of a broken body as its primary concern before branching out to an individual’s social and financial needs. In this way, Housing First reflects the conventional advocacy view that the pressing bodily and material needs of people experiencing homelessness warrant the most urgent responses and must be resolved first and foremost. Just as advocates invoke the bodily harms that result from living on the streets as validation for calls to increase resource provision for the homeless, so too do discussions of Housing First establish the exigency of broken bodies as the justification for greatly expanding available housing. As the NAEH’s fact sheet explains, Housing First programs typically provide two different types of housing to people experiencing homelessness: permanent supportive housing and rapid re-­housing. The first, permanent supportive housing, pairs housing assistance with other services tailored to the needs of individual residents. By providing housing that “is targeted to individuals and families with chronic illnesses, disabilities, mental health issues, or substance use disorders who have experienced long-­term or repeated homelessness,” permanent supportive housing carves out a previously unavailable space of stability and safety in which the broken bodies of the chronically homeless may heal, strengthen, and potentially thrive.61 The second type of housing, rapid rehousing, involves the provision of short-­term assistance that comes in a variety of forms, such as “housing identification, rent and move-­in assistance, and case management and services,” depending on the needs and circumstances of the individuals who access it. The objective for rapid rehousing is to provide a quick and effective crutch to those whose

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temporary housing need, if left unaddressed, could potentially develop into much more long-­term experiences of homelessness.62 Housing First has gained quite a bit of attention in the context of the Great Recession and housing market crisis of the late 2000s. Though the model made its first appearance in the early 1990s, introduced in New York City by the nonprofit group Pathways to Housing, its embrace by USICH and service providers as a uniquely effective solution for ongoing homelessness has intensified its popularity in recent years.63 Ronni Michelle Greenwood, Ana Stefancic, and Sam Tsemberis describe the Housing First model as a kind of “disruptive innovation,” embracing the evaluative terminology of the business world to explain the model’s departure from traditional housing provision and homeless assistance: “Five aspects of this model made it radical. First, it revolutionized the order in which housing and services are delivered to homeless adults with co-­occurring diagnoses in the United States. Second, it relocated choice in housing and services from the service providing ‘experts’ to consumers themselves. Third, it provided housing as a matter of right, not something to be earned by completing treatment or attaining sobriety. Fourth, it incorporated a harm reduction approach to psychiatric and substance abuse treatment. Fifth, from its very inception, research and evidence-­based practice were integrated into each dimension of service delivery.”64 Advocates of Housing First celebrate the program for its ability to more effectively and efficiently serve people experiencing homelessness whose substance abuse, medical conditions, or behavioral problems typically precluded them from effectively adhering to the treatment paths mandated by alternate housing-­assistance models. In these earlier approaches, people experiencing homelessness were routinely required to “demonstrate that they are psychiatrically stable, abstinent from substances, and otherwise ‘housing ready’ before they are able to live independently, even with supports.”65 Housing First, on the other hand, proceeds on the assumption that—as its name implies—providing access to housing before any other resource and without any prerequisites or qualifying criteria offers people experiencing homelessness their best chance at recovering from the problems characterizing the broken homeless body such as addiction and disease. Housing First proponents celebrate the program because it promises to achieve more effective solutions to homelessness as its model takes into account Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, recognizing that “the fundamental tenets of human need for food, water, clothing, and shelter” must be prioritized so that people experiencing homelessness may then progress to secure higher-­order needs related to individual development and socialization.66

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Whereas the older housing-­assistance models made treatment a prerequisite for achieving the privilege of shelter access, Housing First contends that it is housing itself that best equips people experiencing homelessness for successful completion of treatment programs. Hence it invokes the broken-­ bodies convention even as is seems to displace typical attention to broken bodies: the Housing First model still justifies the expansion of social services provisions to people experiencing homelessness on the urgent needs of suffering bodies, but it innovates a slight deviation from the typical broken-­bodies argument by suggesting that the best remedies for the physical and psychological harms of homelessness begin with providing housing. USICH’s Opening Doors report celebrates Housing First as a best practice in responses to homelessness, noting that “many people experience improvements in quality of life, in the areas of health, mental health, substance abuse, and employment, as a result of achieving housing.”67 USICH makes a particularly emphatic case in terms of the model’s efficacy in solving long-­ term homelessness: “For people experiencing chronic homelessness, the research is overwhelmingly clear that permanent supportive housing using a Housing First approach is the solution.”68 The report arrives at this recommendation for Housing First after enumerating the ways in which people experiencing chronic homeless are at constant physical and psychological risk from “mental illness and/or substance use disorders”; “severe symptoms of substance use, schizophrenia, and other mental health disorders”; “increasingly high rates of chronic, disabling, and/or life-­threatening health conditions (hypertension, asthma, HIV/AIDS, liver disease)”; and “high rates of abuse, violence, and separation from families.”69 Given these vulnerabilities of homeless bodies, the report suggests, communities must protect people experiencing homelessness from further harm by funding and implementing a Housing First approach to homeless assistance. For readers sympathetic to the plight of the homeless, the broken-­bodies convention may appear so self-­evidently useful for homeless advocacy as to be unremarkable. Yet we have to contextualize this convention in terms of the broader public discourses characterizing homelessness and modeling responses to it in the contemporary United States. If we recall the discussion of the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion from the previous chapter, we can note that in most typical contemporary conversations about homelessness, communities usually legitimize the policy solutions suggested in terms of the well-­being of housed citizens, not those experiencing homelessness, and aim to achieve the rehabilitation of public spaces, not the treatment of the broken bodies of the homeless. Too often, discussions of

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homelessness ignore the suffering and consequences to homeless bodies as they rally behind securing the comfort and accommodation of the housed community. In this context, circulating stark descriptions of the suffering homelessness entails and invoking the deteriorating state of broken homeless bodies as a justification for policy change represents quite a dramatic split with the typical public sentiments that underwrite the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion.

Present-­Centered Lives The final convention of national homeless advocacy to which we will turn our attention in this chapter is the common theme of characterizing the essential harms of homelessness as consequences of a present-­centered condition, and therefore challenging the discrimination and displacement of the homeless that is based on their present circumstances. As I have previously argued, the characterization of homelessness as the inability to escape a present-­centered mindset in mediated representations of homelessness has constructed a largely unexamined barrier to civic inclusion of people experiencing homelessness.70 In media narratives like the representative documentary Reversal of Fortune, homelessness is presented to housed viewers as a condition afflicting those who are compelled by physical disabilities or mental diseases to attend only to their fleeting needs in the present moment. Reversal of Fortune illustrates this present-­centered depiction of homelessness by narrating of the experiences of Ted, a man experiencing homelessness, who has been set up in this self-­described social-­experiment film to receive $100,000 in cash in order to see how the unexpected windfall will affect his life. Ultimately, the film documents the various ways that the money diminishes Ted’s quality of life over the course of several weeks, and his poor decisions and missteps are attributed to his inability to think outside the whims and demands of the present moment. Like media representations that construct a view of homelessness as a condition inexorably constrained by the attempt to survive moment to moment, advocacy that renders homelessness in the present tense may unwittingly reinforce civic exclusions based on the inability to participate in the future-­oriented judgment and collective action of the democratic community. Chapter 4 explores the implications of temporality for the rehabilitation of the civic standing of the homeless more fully; at present, we are concerned with establishing the present-­oriented convention of national homeless advocacy. The predominant manifestation

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of the present-­centered lives convention appears as advocates seek protections against the criminalization of homeless presence and actions in public places, and as they challenge the exclusion of the homeless from civil rights protections and institutional status. All three national organizations take the rejection of homeless criminalization as one primary goal of their advocacy. The steady increase of laws making the unavoidable material realities of homeless life a kind of illegal activity or status punishable by fines, removal from public space, or incarceration creates a sense of urgency for advocacy appeals that aim to challenge the unjust criminalization of homelessness. As discussed in the preceding chapter, antihomeless ordinances typically take the forms of prohibitions against homeless presence and activity in public—for example, laws that forbid people experiencing homelessness from sitting, sleeping, loitering, bathing, sharing food, storing possessions, camping, or congregating in public.71 As Amanda Aykanian and Wonhyung Lee argue, such antihomeless laws are typically not enacted for the sake of the homeless population: instead, they are “primarily intended to reduce the presence of homeless people in specific locations or in an entire community, in an effort to maintain or improve public safety, economic stability, and aesthetic appeal.”72 Judy Aulette and Albert Aulette speculate that the criminalization of homelessness persists because of a variety of powerful political incentives: “First, creating the image that homeless people are criminals serves to blame the victims, and to take the heat off the system responsible for a collapsing economy. Second, identifying homeless people as criminals allows the repression of a potentially revolutionary section of our society. That is, when the police arrest and harass homeless people, they really are protecting society from change. . . . Homeless people have been thrust into the front lines of those who must demand change in order to live.”73 Aulette and Aulette echo charges made by advocates that people experiencing homelessness are unfairly targeted by antihomeless policies and must be defended against the erosion of their civil rights and their exclusion from the civic body. Tanene Allison explains the persistent, unjust criminalization of homelessness as a way that housed communities may reconcile the cognitive dissonance produced when the suffering of the homeless challenges a housed public’s belief in the American Dream.74 Allison contends that in order to maintain the fantasy that hard work is rewarded and success is possible, Americans subscribe to what she terms the “Myth of Choice” that affords an explanation for the existence of homelessness: when a community believes that people experiencing homelessness do so because of their bad choices, then they can simultaneously accept both the tenets of

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the American Dream and the evidence of its failures. The Myth of Choice provides explanatory power for a housed community seeking justification for punishing, rather than supporting, their homeless neighbors. In light of the contemporary urban landscape, an environment where the consequences and necessities of homeless survival are punished by laws designed to drive homelessness out of the city by removing or harassing its casualties, Gregg Barak and Robert M. Bohm offer an innovative proposal. They call on communities to distinguish more carefully between the “crimes of the homeless” and the “crime of homelessness,” suggesting that instead of criminalizing behaviors and activities related to homeless survival, they can flip the script in order to see people experiencing homelessness as victims of a crime, not its perpetrators.75 In other words, from Barak and Bohm’s perspective, people experiencing homelessness should be supported precisely because they are victims of the crime of homelessness; the remedy for their public life-­sustaining activities should come in the form of increased resource provision, not legal penalties. For Barak and Bohm, citizens concerned about the plight of the homeless and invested in mitigating its most harmful consequences must begin by interrogating the terminology used to designate and evaluate behaviors deemed criminal. While national advocates have yet to take up the specific terminological revision they suggest, efforts to protect and promote the civil rights of people experiencing homelessness take aim at both the public discourses and legal policies that contribute to homeless criminalization. Given the current state of homeless criminalization, the day-­to-­day lives of people experiencing homelessness often largely consist of a never-­ending struggle to seek limited resources, dodge detection, and avoid persecution. Homes Not Handcuffs, a joint report issued by the NCH and NLCHP, details these experiences in their “Narratives of the Meanest Cities.”76 The report criticizes city officials in Los Angeles, for example, for designating more money for the policing of Skid Row than the amount allotted for homeless services. Because of this push for increased policing instead of supportive resources, the needs of the homeless population and police brutality against them increased, even as many people experiencing homelessness have fled Skid Row for relatively safer areas of the city. The report outlines a cycle that condemns people experiencing homelessness to unending struggle: “Many homeless advocates feel that Los Angeles’ most vulnerable population is being pointlessly targeted. When homeless individuals are cited for crimes, even for the most innocent violations such as jaywalking or loitering, they are rarely able to pay their fines. As a result, many are jailed and end up with

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a criminal record. Once a person has a criminal record, it is more difficult for them to get access to housing and other services.”77 Likewise, in San Francisco, attempts by those experiencing homelessness to create their own shelter are stymied by the city’s “toughened stance on homeless encampment,” which entails arresting anyone who modifies “the landscape in any way in order to create a shelter or accumulate household furniture or appliances or construction debris in any park.”78 For people living in a community with skyrocketing housing costs and a tremendous deficit in supportive housing, the prohibitions against trying to improvise some substitute for permanent shelter returns them, each day, back to the debilitating base experience of homelessness. As advocates address the costs of antihomeless legislation—those incurred by the people targeted by such measures, as well as the larger costs to the community to support a criminal justice system that punishes, rather than resolves, the effects of economic misfortune—they emphasize the importance of affirming the rights of the homeless in the moment of confrontation with cities that would deal with homelessness by legislating the experience of it out of existence. In its coverage of the series of violent, fatal attacks on men sleeping outdoors in San Diego in July 2016, the NCH directly attributes the daily insecurity faced by the homeless to the attempts by communities to criminalize homelessness: The National Coalition for the Homeless is deeply saddened by the recent senseless attacks on men sleeping outdoors in San Diego that have left three dead and one more critically injured. But we are not surprised. Over the last several months, San Diego has been sweeping homeless encampments, constantly displacing residents who have nowhere else to go and disposing of items of personal and survival value. Quietly, the city laid down boulders beneath an overpass, on a sidewalk often used by houseless folks to rest.79 Notice how the NCH does not reduce crime against the homeless to a consequence of individual acts, but instead contextualizes it in terms of larger community efforts to erase the presence of people experiencing homelessness from their public spaces. In these opening sentences of their response to this series of attacks on homeless men, the NCH connects the crimes to systematic failures of the community rather than the idiosyncratic bad acts of the perpetrator. In this sense, the harms of homelessness are characterized

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as resulting from the criminalization measures that prevent people experiencing homelessness from alleviating the demands of unfulfilled needs and escaping the cycle of living moment to moment. Hence advocacy narratives detailing crimes against the homeless may characterize the victims as being unfairly prevented from pursuing structures of physical or social support that might help break the pattern of present-­centered survival. They continue, “It is easy to see a correlation between the appearance of laws criminalizing homelessness, and the increase of hate crimes or violent acts against homeless people. . . . One possible explanation for this is the message that criminalizing homelessness sends to the general public: ‘Homeless people do not matter and are not worthy of living in our city.’ This message is blatant in the attitudes many cities have toward homeless people and can be used as an internal justification for attacking someone.”80 So the harms associated with homeless criminalization do not just affect those experiencing homelessness, although the effects to this population should be recognized more broadly. Here the NCH articulates the erosion of civic trust, affiliation, and affection as a direct consequence of antihomeless legislation. Since democratic communities rely on civic engagement and collective action that builds on longstanding bonds and seeks to extend and expand them into the future, laws that criminalize the homeless deny people both their individual rights and their inclusion in that future-­oriented civic imaginary. In response, homeless advocates prioritize the critique of antihomeless legislation as an important remedy for improving both the standing of individuals and the health of the community. One promising avenue advocates have explored to challenge the current criminalization of homelessness is to pursue awareness and support for a homeless bill of rights. In their report equipping advocates to make research-­based arguments in favor of a homeless bill of rights, the NLCHP summarizes a wide range of benefits, “from helping to combat the stigmatization of homelessness to helping protect homeless people from common rights violations,” that such legislation makes possible for citizens experiencing homelessness.81 Although specific state-­passed iterations of homeless bills of rights vary in their particulars, the NLCHP identifies a core list of common provisions that typically form the backbone of the bills. Their list includes the rights to • Move freely in public spaces • Equal treatment by state and municipal authorities • Freedom from discrimination while seeking or maintaining employment

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• Emergency medical care • Vote, register to vote, and receive documentation necessary for voter registration • Protection from disclosure of information or records conveyed to a temporary residence • Reasonable expectation of privacy in personal property82 From Wrongs to Rights, a legal advocacy report, justifies the necessity of homeless bill-­of-­rights legislation based on three arguments: first, that such bills of rights help prevent people experiencing homelessness from being denied their existing rights, as is increasingly common given the targeted and prejudicial treatment of this community by police and legislators; second, that such bills help facilitate the expansion of existing rights to include a fundamental right to housing for all citizens, a measure advocates believe is important not just to help the currently homeless but also to prevent future homelessness. And finally, the bills are legitimized because of the legal credibility they lend to efforts by advocates who would challenge the ongoing social exclusion of people experiencing homelessness based on the stigma attributed to the condition. In the NLCHP’s terms, “These laws, and the process of enacting them, help to draw attention to the plight of our nation’s homeless population. They confront the foundation of prejudice upon which discrimination against homeless people is based. And, they underscore the importance of protecting the civil and human rights of every American.”83 What we see in this advocacy initiative is a two-­pronged critique of homeless criminalization: the NLCHP opposes antihomeless legislation on the grounds that it violates fundamental rights that should protect all citizens but that are routinely denied to the homeless. But in addition to rights-­based advocacy, the NLCHP makes a pragmatic argument as well, contending that antihomeless legislation simply does not work in practice. In fact, the report argues, criminalizing homelessness costs a great deal and exacerbates, rather than reduces, the condition of homelessness for most people who are targeted by antihomeless measures. As they explain, “Criminalization measures do not address the root causes of homelessness nor do they reduce the problem. To the contrary, laws that cycle homeless people through the criminal justice system have the effect of increasing and prolonging homelessness. A criminal conviction on a person’s record can cause that person to be passed over for employment or housing. Moreover, homeless people who are jailed often suffer the loss of their personal possessions, including photo identification, Social Security cards, or other documentation needed to access employment,

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housing, and social services.”84 The NLCHP turns to the potential remedy of a homeless bill of rights as a way of disrupting what they represent as a continuous cycle that people experiencing homelessness are otherwise prevented from escaping. Noting how antihomeless legislation establishes obstacles to obtaining the financial, legal, and civic resources needed to make personal progress out of homelessness, the report celebrates a homeless bill of rights for breaking the otherwise inevitable present-­centered condition. The NLCHP has remained at the forefront of the fight for homeless rights, describing its approach in terms of a dual focus on “ending the criminalization of homelessness and reducing the burden of ID barriers on homeless people.”85 Their appeal for supporting homeless civil rights identifies the costs to both the individuals suffering under antihomeless legislation and the communities that bear the financial burden of additional strain on the criminal justice system and service providers. Because antihomeless ordinances “cost more than providing permanent supportive housing,” the NLCHP opposes “policies that criminalize homelessness [because they] take a toll on entire communities.”86 But the costs associated with these policies do not end with the effects to the community as a whole and its available resources; antihomeless policies diminish the potential for communities to live up to their commitments to protecting human rights and facilitating human flourishing. Here the NLCHP enacts its “human rights approach to criminalization,” taking aim at policies that “violate homeless persons’ constitutional rights” by allowing communities to “punish homeless persons who are forced to perform life-­sustaining actions in public spaces.”87 Approaching homeless advocacy from a human-­rights perspective drives the NLCHP’s emphasis on contesting unjust legislation and petitioning for new initiatives to recognize and protect the civil rights of those experiencing homelessness. In pursuit of these dual goals, the NLCHP compiles publicly available research reports that document the changing landscape of homeless criminalization in the United States. One such report, titled No Safe Place, provides detailed information on the emergence of antihomeless legislation in communities across the country.88 An update on their earlier Criminalizing Crisis report,89 No Safe Place examines the “marked increase in laws criminalizing homelessness” in addition to the ways in which the criminalization trend “appears to be changing for the worse.”90 The NLCHP reports that whereas antihomeless ordinances originated in restrictions on activities in specific locations—such as business districts or tourist spots—communities have increasingly enacted city-­wide bans that “leav[e] no place for homeless

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people to do what they must do to survive,” and as a result, “under constant threat of arrest for performing actions necessary for survival, homeless people are forced out of entire communities.”91 The NLCHP’s research on criminalization policies is buttressed by testimonials in the report from people experiencing homelessness who explain the disproportionately severe effects they suffer, and it is in the inclusion of these testimonials that we see an especially striking characterization of homelessness as a present-­centered condition. Jacob, for example, is quoted in the report as he describes the endless endeavor to avoid arrest: “The cops give us no rest. I mean, we can’t even sleep at the park anymore because it’s against the [law] to camp. Even if we sleep [on the streets] we get ticketed. There was one night I couldn’t even get a full eight hours of sleep because I was getting woken up by cops and told to go from place to place. And I would just go lay down and get woken up an hour later. Go lay down another place, and get woken up. I got five tickets that night. [Last night] I [slept] in a park right over there, where I’m at risk of getting a ticket every night. I can sleep on the sidewalk and get a ticket. I can sleep [across the street] and get a ticket. No matter where I go I get a ticket.”92 Jacob’s vivid description of the ongoing struggle to avoid detection and detention details the essential repetition of his actions: homelessness literally uproots him, continuously, forcing him to carry out an exhausting cycle of locating and being driven from spaces to rest. Diane Jones gives voice to the paralyzing anxiety that accompanies the constant struggle to just make it moment to moment: “Me and my son live in a car and we’re not bad people. I’m so afraid what will happen if we lose that.”93 The holding pattern that characterizes a present-­centered life—one that looks more like treading water than making progress toward any type of goal—stymies the ability of those who experience homelessness to make future-­oriented decisions or bank their resources, time, or energy toward long-­term objectives. In short, advocates present homelessness as a condition that overwhelms human life, trapping its victims in a mindset that precludes the kind of forward-­looking planning and judgment that is required to find a path out of homelessness. One key indicator of the present-­centered characteristic of homeless life is the inability to retain basic personal possessions or to build and maintain long-­term domestic spaces. Quoting John Harrison, a man described as a “formerly homeless person,” the No Safe Place report depicts police seizures of personal possessions as an additional injustice suffered by people experiencing homelessness. As Harrison attests, “A number of us [homeless] would leave our possessions in these hedges that were in a median along New York Avenue so that we didn’t have to carry everything we had with us.

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There was a metropolitan police officer who took it upon himself to take what amount to, basically, our worldly possessions. He one time came with his police car with a garbage truck following him, rooting through the bushes, to get our stuff and throw it away . . . Our belongings were so obviously those of someone just barely scraping by. And it went further. The city also re-­ landscaped that whole stretch of New York Avenue to entirely eliminate the hedges in which we could conceal our things. And now if you walk by there, the plants are about 8 inches tall.”94 For most housed citizens, “worldly possessions” simply comprise the backdrop against which their daily lives take place; they need only worry about loss or destruction of their belongings in exceptional circumstances. And when their possessions are taken away from them or destroyed, their claims to unfair loss are legitimized by standard financial or legal assistance. What the NLCHP emphasizes here is an often-­ unrecognized indignity of homelessness, which is the present-­centered existence that means people experiencing homelessness cannot assume the security of their lives and belongings beyond the present moment. Alphonso Williams testifies to similar experiences: “The officer told us we were too late. They took my wife’s wheelchair, her medicines, and our wedding pictures.”95 Sandra Thomas echoes the devastation, listing the losses she has suffered: “I lost my ID, my grandmother’s diamond wedding ring, Social Security paperwork, clothes, and blankets. I had no place to sleep, no blankets, and I caught pneumonia.”96 What these testimonials exemplify is the degree to which people experiencing homelessness are constantly under surveillance and subject to discipline; their possessions are only theirs to the extent that they can hold on to them in the present. The fact of their past ownership or their future plans are rendered irrelevant by the present-­centered existence they must suffer as people experiencing homelessness. Additionally, advocates characterize the past experiences of people experiencing homelessness as factors that often only serve to prolong their suffering in the present. As Kathryn explains in the No Safe Place report, “One time I was one check away from getting off the streets in Las Vegas and somebody stole all my money. I was staying in a winter shelter at night and they stole my purse with all my money in it. I raised ‘Cain’ about it. . . . So I went to jail for 45 days. I lost that job.”97 Criminal records—even those that result from arrests under antihomeless laws—frequently impede people’s attempts to pull themselves out of homelessness. Donald’s situation illustrates the typical obstacles faced by those attempting to secure their own housing: “Well I’ve been homeless since I been out of prison two years now . . . and now my past is catching up with me. I can’t get into an apartment. I’m on social

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security, but everywhere I go my criminal record comes up and I’m denied housing.”98 For Kathryn, Donald, and others in similar situations, homelessness renders their future an unending repetition of their present suffering. In featuring their stories, the NLCHP suggests that lacking some kind of extraordinary intervention, people experiencing homelessness are doomed to continue their Sisyphean struggle, never quite escaping the survival-­ oriented demands of their immediate needs.

Unpacking the Conventions My intention in documenting the persistence of these three conventions— invisible suffering, broken bodies, and present-­centered lives—is not to suggest that these are the only ways that homeless advocates typically characterize the condition they are trying to solve. Indeed, an additional rhetorical convention that has emerged over the past decade and appears with at least as much frequency as the others is a reconfiguration of homeless advocacy in business terminology and metrics of corporate value-­assessment. As we saw briefly in the discussion of Housing First approaches earlier in this chapter, contemporary homeless advocacy seems to be increasingly incorporating the language of “clients” in describing the people experiencing homelessness that they serve, as well as legitimizing homeless-­assistance models almost exclusively in terms of cost-­benefit analysis. This business-­oriented rhetorical convention may also undermine the civic imperative of advocacy aiming to reconstruct the affective and social bonds between homeless and housed. But I have focused in this chapter on the rhetorical conventions concerning visuality, corporeality, and temporality because they illuminate the implicit models of ideal democratic citizenship that underwrite the exclusion of the homeless from contemporary society. Let’s begin with visuality. From the earliest critiques of democracy found in Plato’s emphatic rejection of both democracy and the rhetoric that sustains it, up through contemporary theories that seek the normatively superior iteration of democratic governance, institutions, and procedures, visuality has been treated with suspicion or condemned outright as a potentially corrupting influence.99 The suspicion driving such critiques assumes that visuality corrupts because citizens are taken in by the enticing appearances of visual displays and spectacles, which bear little resemblance to the truth but nonetheless exercise considerable power by swaying public opinion and judgment. In more contemporary iterations of Plato’s rejection of

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the image, we encounter critiques of the visual in democratic life because the management of appearances drives modern statecraft intent on misleading the public or manufacturing its consent.100 Whether democracies fret over the potential for the visual to lead citizens astray by having them abandon their search for the truth or to enable the state to distort the reality of current affairs, their anxieties about how visuality potentially disrupts democracy contain the first hint as to how we should understand the ideal citizen: namely, the citizen best equipped to participate in democratic life is one that can resist the appeal of the visual and remain committed to rational inquiry and decision-­making. Conventional advocacy on behalf of people experiencing homelessness soothes this anxiety about visuality in at least three ways. As we have seen in the discussion above, the advocacy rhetoric of the three national organizations examined in the chapter fundamentally asserts a truth-­revealing relationship between sight and the accurate and proper understanding of homeless suffering. In other words, conventional homeless advocacy critiques the invisibility of suffering because it is invisibility, not visibility, that distorts the truth of homelessness; in this way, conventional advocacy messages reassure a democratic public that the sights of homelessness are not manipulative spectacles but instead felicitous contributions to prudent deliberation and decision-­making regarding the issue of homelessness. Second, conventional advocacy cultivates the sights of homelessness in line with a state optic to make homelessness more legible to bureaucratic entities, thereby harnessing the visual mode of modern statecraft in a way that benefits, rather than harms, citizens in need. In doing so, they also sacrifice the potential to develop a public optic that resists the management of appearances from the elevated viewpoint of the state, but their advocacy soothes the anxiety about the ways in which modern statecraft relies on misleading images. Finally, conventional advocacy works to make homelessness visible as a justification for moving people experiencing homelessness out of public and into private domestic spaces, thereby reassuring communities concerned with the visible evidence of poverty—like the “broken windows” so often invoked in policy discussions—contributing to the decline of public space and its orderly functioning.101 As we will see in chapter 2, unconventional advocacy takes a different approach than the conventional messages utilizing the invisibility of suffering trope. As I explore in my analysis of homeless meal-­sharing initiatives, unconventional advocacy explores the rhetorical, rather than manipulative, potential of spectacle and spectatorship, locating a site for the production

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of democratic community in the visual displays of meals bringing together homeless and housed. These efforts develop a public optic rather than seeking to recast homelessness from the vantage point of bureaucratic state management, thereby resisting the resolution of an anxiety about the messiness and complexity of political vision. Finally, meal-­sharing events reconceive of public space as the place where bonds between homeless and housed are forged, enacted, and strengthened, making homeless presence—rather than its absence—a visual sign of community health. Thus unconventional advocacy articulates a rhetorical alternative to the conventional soothing of the democratic anxiety over visuality. A second core democratic anxiety comes in the form of distrusting corporeality, or the ways that citizens’ bodies betray their better intentions to participate in democratic politics and decision-­making as rational actors largely divorced from their individual desires and needs. In this perspective on democracy, what matters for citizenship is mind over body, or reason over emotion; democratic political systems are thought to fail to the extent that citizens cannot exercise control over their corporeal needs and desires. In this vision, the ideal citizen must be capable and willing to set those needs and desires aside, a quality the homeless are thought to lack because they are overcome by the frailties and compulsions of their bodies. Conventional advocacy on behalf of people experiencing homelessness again seeks to soothe this anxiety about corporeality by implicitly agreeing that homelessness prevents individuals from functioning well in their current bodily state. As we saw in the examples of the broken-­bodies trope, conventional advocacy focuses on securing resources and rehabilitating damaged and suffering bodies precisely because of the presumption that no degree of progress is possible until the harms to the homeless body are mitigated and resolved. As we will see in chapter 3, however, unconventional advocates challenge the broken-­bodies trope by staging events like the Homeless World Cup (HWC), events that blur the boundaries between homeless and housed, ability and disability, citizen and outcast. As an advocacy campaign, the HWC intervenes in the debilitating representations of homelessness circulating, particularly in the United States, by allowing people experiencing homelessness to embody the nation as imperfect, yet still internationally recognized, representatives. In doing so, the event challenges the legal and political inclinations to reject and hide atypical or non-­normative bodies. Where conventional advocacy assents to the image of broken bodies as a barrier to citizenship, using this anxiety to warrant increased resource provision to rehabilitate the damaged bodies of the homeless, unconventional advocacy

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proceeds instead to push back against the corporeal ideal at the heart of democratic citizenship. The final anxiety made apparent in the contrast between conventional and unconventional homeless advocacy relates to temporality, or the traditional insistence on a civic subjectivity that is attentive to the past, reflective in the present, and responsive to the future concerns shaping a community’s shared destiny. Here, democracies have traditionally insisted that to make good decisions and participate most productively in collective governance, citizens must master the multitense enterprise of civic action, particularly the future-­oriented mindset that allows them to engage in collective judgment. For this reason, housed publics have generally not been bothered by the political and social exclusion of the homeless because their compulsions and daily routines and realities are thought to leave them almost unceasingly oriented toward the demands of the present. Conventional homeless advocacy, as we have seen in this chapter, asserts homeless rights and opposes homeless criminalization as the key obstacles to overcoming the present-­ focused cycle of homelessness—a general stereotype that remains relatively unchallenged in their account. Chapter 4 examines an unconventional advocacy campaign that resists the attribution of a constraining focus on the present to experiences of homelessness. The Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day (HPMD) campaign celebrates the multitense existence of homeless individuals and communities despite a lack of housing and ongoing marginalization by mainstream communities. Like the previous two unconventional forms of homeless advocacy, the HPMD is remarkable for imagining civic as well as material remedies for the harms of homelessness and the destruction of democratic community that advocates attribute to the persistent exclusion of the homeless. Unconventional homeless advocates thus inventively upend the conventions that characterize traditional homeless advocacy and its attempts to resolve the core democratic anxieties concerning visuality, corporeality, and temporality. In doing so, these unconventional visions offer a promising rhetorical model for soliciting expanded material support for people experiencing homelessness, as well as articulating the contours of political community anew.

2

the democratic vision of homeless meal-­sharing initiatives

Short, attention-­grabbing films that illustrate the relative invisibility of homelessness have become a popular form of informal online advocacy. In one such film, shot on a crowded street in Düsseldorf, a street-­paper vendor who has been homeless for fifteen years stands on the sidewalk, holding out the newspapers he sells as a source of income. But unlike typical street-­paper vendors who are routinely ignored by passersby, this particular man, named Lutz, is the centerpiece of a technological setup that aims to make literal the invisibility many people experiencing homeless feel in public spaces. A film crew has placed a video camera behind him, which captures the street scene and connects to a projector set up in front of him. The images from the camera are projected onto Lutz’s body, so that those approaching him from the front seem to see through him, thus transforming him into the title of the experimental film: The Invisible Man.1 Interspliced among the images of shoppers looking into windows, the camera and projector being set up, and crowds gathering once the projection is up and running are intertitles that caption and contextualize the various scenes strung together in the film. The filmmakers explain the premise of the experiment in an intertitle that notes, “There are many homeless people in Düsseldorf. And many people who don’t notice them.”2 Presumably, the filmmakers find the indifference of the city’s residents troubling, because they aim with this experiment to “sensitise the public and incite them to buy the homeless magazine fiftyfifty.”3 This self-­described “spectacular promotion” aims to draw attention to the feeling that people experiencing homelessness have of housed individuals “look[ing] right through them” in an effort to call into question both the visual habits of a housed population and the corresponding lack of charity and generosity toward the homeless street vendors.4 The film declares its experiment a success, noting two positive

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results that followed: Lutz received extensive media coverage, and the issue of fiftyfifty he offered during filming sold out.5 The Invisible Man is an interesting project not only for its creativity but also for the paradoxes it illuminates. The film aims to highlight the visual habits of citizens by which the homeless seem to be made invisible, but it does so by literalizing the very habits it critiques. As such, Lutz only achieves public visibility by exaggerating the invisibility forced on him, ironically turning invisibility into a spectacular public display. Overemphasizing his invisibility—and that of people experiencing homelessness on a broad level—is, according to the film, the optimal path to recuperate his visibility in public. The experiment thus implicitly asks the following: if the invisible homeless man was not spectacularly invisible, and if the truth about homelessness was known and not misunderstood or ignored by a wider housed public, would the homeless get extensive media coverage documenting their plight, widespread outrage at the injustices and indignities that they suffer, and increased monetary and civic support from a housed public that used to walk past without taking notice of them? The Invisible Man seems to assume so, echoing conventional advocacy for the homeless that seeks greater visibility as a powerful remedy, operating under the assumption that knowledge of homelessness comes through this increased visibility (and therefore conceptual clarity) of the problem. The argument the short film advances prompts its audiences to examine their own tendencies to look away from homelessness, and to consider the sights of homelessness from a new perspective: in our public encounters with people experiencing homelessness, it asks, what do we see? Its answer—we see nothing—operates as a condemnation of visual habits that encourage housed citizens to look past the homeless instead of confronting the problem that places so many in perpetual physical vulnerability and social exclusion. Of course, not all advocates agree that this is the most salient question to ask, or the most productive way to draw attention to the problems visibility poses for people experiencing homelessness. Like the Make Them Visible film discussed in the preceding chapter, The Invisible Man takes a common approach to homeless advocacy and presents it to the public in a more entertaining form, hoping to generate more visibility for homelessness as a remedy to the crippling invisibility its victims typically face. But is simple visibility the only remedy needed? Advocates engaged in strategic meal-­sharing initiatives offer us a new critique and resolution of the invisibility that plagues homeless communities by reorienting the inquiry of

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conventional advocacy. Rather than asking what we see (or what we choose to ignore) when faced with evidence of homelessness, this unconventional approach to homeless advocacy considers a different, additional question: how do we see homelessness, and the people experiencing it? I argue in this chapter that the ways homeless advocates take up questions of visibility do not simply implicate discussions of community responses to homelessness, but instead reflect persistent anxieties about the susceptibility of civic judgment, the means of manipulation available to figures and institutions of authority, and the relationship between the visual order of public spaces and the social order of the communities that inhabit them. As we will see, democratic theorists have often warned against the ways in which visuality potentially imperils democracy. And as we saw in the preceding chapter, conventional homeless advocacy reassures those convinced by such threats that visibility’s dangerous potential can be mitigated by greater publicity— fighting the ignorance produced by invisibility with the enlightenment and knowledge afforded by expanded sight. Clarity and accuracy of vision, in other words, provide the remedy conventional homeless advocacy pursues for the invisibility of homeless suffering to the degree that such visibility justifies greater institutional support and resource provision. The unconventional approach to homeless advocacy examined in this chapter pursues an alternate remedy to homeless invisibility and, I argue, ultimately challenges the general democratic anxiety that visuality disrupts and distorts civic judgment. Enacted in the form of meal-­sharing initiatives, or public events that stage community meals as a combination of political theater, public argument, and resource provision, this unconventional approach embraces the spectacle of community for its potential to materialize newly equitable civic relationships between homeless and housed. I proceed in this chapter by reviewing accounts of the distrust of visuality in democratic theory, by surveying the general approach of meal-­sharing as a form of homeless advocacy, and by examining the public controversy over the meal-­sharing campaign of Food Not Bombs, a loosely affiliated international network of anarchist activists aiming to end hunger in their local communities by reclaiming and redistributing food to all those who need it. In short, what the meal-­sharing approach contributes to our understanding of homeless advocacy and its implications for democratic culture and citizenship is a conviction that increased visibility of social issues is a necessary but insufficient remedy to suffering swept out of sight. Meal-­sharing’s inventive approach for resolving the shortcomings of increased visibility emerges in the facilitation of transformative spectacles of civic bonds that can create

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community where none previously existed and warrant more just public policies on behalf of the newly sighted public.

Political Optics There is an uneasy relationship between visuality and civic participation in democratic theories. Jeffrey Edward Green traces this discomfort with what he describes as the “ocular model” of democracy to a nearly uniform commitment across a diverse tradition of democratic theories to conceive of the People, acts of political participation, and forms of popular sovereignty and democratic rule in terms of civic voice.6 This vocal model of civic action and influence conceptualizes civic participation in democratic governance in the form of decision-­making and discursive or deliberative capacities: we exercise our citizenship, in other words, to the extent that we express our preferences, engage others in discussions of issues, and participate in decision-­making processes that generate democratic rule. And yet, as Green points out, this model of democratic participation and civic action through popular voice hardly matches the world we live in today, which is characterized far more by visual texts and practices than it is by a model of direct democracy in which citizens exercise their influence by participating in verbal exchanges. Green poses the question in this way: “Given that spectatorship is endemic to the way mass democracy is experienced today, why has it been neglected? Why does our understanding of democracy continue to be guided by the central figure of the citizen-­governor when in fact most of us most of the time have political lives typified by spectatorship rather than action?”7 The answer, he asserts, lies in the traditional celebration of the voice of the People and the persistent distrust of the People’s vision. While recognizing the diversity contained within the democratic tradition, Green nonetheless traces a unifying prejudice for what he terms the “vocal model of popular power” over alternate models—in particular, the ocular model of popular power.8 This unifying prejudice also encompasses the preferential treatment textual artifacts receive over visual ones in public sphere theories, as Cara Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang have demonstrated.9 And as Green notes, the vocal model “assumes that popular empowerment must involve self-­legislation—a process from which the spectator, as such, is necessarily excluded.”10 The vocal model conceives of civic action in terms of expressive verbal acts that contribute to a collective enterprise of popular sovereignty. In the simplest sense, citizens speak their way into democratic

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culture, by contributing perspectives and arguments that cohere into a collective aggregate will that guides (or ought to guide, in ideal circumstances) democratic decision-­making. In this view, citizens participate by voicing their will, reflecting a “systematic tendency to imagine the People as if it were a parliament and popular power as a force that realizes itself ultimately in laws and policies.”11 Hence our ways of thinking about democracy and the nature of citizens’ participation in it have been unnecessarily constrained by an implicit bias toward the vocal over the visual, as “the fundamental assumption has been that the essence, or substance, of popular power is an expressive, intentional, willful, legislative voice.”12 As such, spectatorship, as the practice of viewing and judging, and presumably the opposite of speaking, is thought to discourage the active participation by citizens on which democratic governance depends for its political and ethical legitimacy. Visuality, then, is presumed to have little relevance to democracy except insofar as its displays divert from the real work of politics, which consist of the exclusively vocal practices of deliberation and decision-­making. If, as Green asserts, our sense of democracy and its appropriate functioning assumes that “the People is defined as an intentional voice that articulates a set of preferences about what kind of policies government ought to be legislating,” then the potential for spectatorship to contribute in meaningful and productive ways to democratic culture is virtually inconceivable.13 In contrast to this pervasive vocal model of democracy, Green suggests we rethink popular power in terms of visual practices. Though the vocal model imagines expression of the popular will as the quintessential civic contribution to democratic governance, Green’s ocular model of popular power notes the insufficiency of this explanation for the actually occurring practices of contemporary mass democracy. The vocal model fails to account for the functioning of a system characterized most prominently by moments “when the People’s voice is routinely ignored, when it often does not exist, when its existence is shaped by the very government it is supposed to control, when there is no established criterion for measuring the degree of this control, when the devices for its self-­expression are crude and thereby severely limit its articulacy, and when it is always more accurate to speak of the voice of some segment of the People that manages to be heard rather than the People itself.”14 In other words, the vocal model suffers from “the imperfect, limited, occasional power of vocal processes on the mass scale,” and an ocular model is needed to take stock of and move beyond these shortcomings.15 The key shift Green calls for is a reconceptualization of the citizen, not as a decision-­ maker whose voice shapes public opinion and contributes to the legislative

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process, but as a spectator who views and judges the sights of democratic rule and in so doing may hold elected representatives and figures of authority to the plebiscitary standard of candor. Meeting an expectation of candor involves political leaders relinquishing their ability to fully control the terms of their public appearances, to candidly and genuinely submit themselves to the evaluative judgment of a public composed of critical spectators. And the judgment of candor by citizens as spectators is necessary, as Green puts it, to account for the contemporary reality that “the everyday political experience of democratic citizens is characterized by silence rather than decision, spectatorship rather than activism, and hierarchy rather than equality.”16 As such, a democratic theory that conceives of popular power in terms of visuality, not vocality, more accurately reflects the real-­world conditions of contemporary democratic cultures. What makes Green’s defense of visuality and spectatorship as an important form of civic action so valuable is its resistance to the overwhelming and frequently unexamined distrust of the visual as a perversion or distortion of democratic politics and civic judgment. This suspicion of the visual in democratic cultures is hardly a new phenomenon. As Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites note, the distrust of vision and its potential influence over citizens’ capacities to apprehend and act on truths, rather than appearances, emerges in Plato’s allegory of the cave and carries through to contemporary accounts of the numbing and manipulative effects of a deluge of images in our increasingly visual culture.17 Anxieties about the visual and its relationship to politics date back at least to the fourth century bce, when Plato developed his infamous allegory of the cave in The Republic.18 Just as he painstakingly distinguished between the deceptive nature of rhetoric and the truth-­seeking pursuit of philosophy in the Gorgias,19 Plato offers Socrates’s allegory of the cave in order to position images and vision as fundamentally incompatible with philosophical inquiry and its orienting objectives of apprehending the right, the true, and the good: “My own view, for what it’s worth, is that in the realm of what can be known the thing seen last, and seen with great difficulty, is the form or character of the good. But when it is seen, the conclusion must be that it turns out to be the cause of all that is right and good for everything. In the realm of sight it produces light and light’s sovereign, the sun, while in the realm of thought it is itself sovereign, producing truth and reason unassisted. I further believe that anyone who is going to act wisely either in private life or in public life must have had a sight of this.”20 For Socrates, then, in everyday political life, images cannot help but lie and mislead. This is a critique that has continuously generated suspicion of the visual and of images that we

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fear for being dishonest and distorting. Hariman and Lucaites challenge this prevalent “hermeneutics of suspicion,” though their defense is an exception to the general critique of the visual. Although they recognize the negative or manipulative uses to which visual images have been put, for example when “photography has been adopted for every kind of human viciousness,” they simultaneously identify the ways in which images have been “a boon for human understanding and solidarity,” and photography itself has served as “a vital technology of democratic citizenship.”21 Hariman and Lucaites celebrate the abundance inherent in contemporary visual practices, most particularly within the event of photography and the multiple iterations of civic relationships and community the unfolding process of spectatorship makes possible.22 However, the skeptical view of the infiltration of the visual into realms of democratic life that have typically been governed by verbal practices remains at least—if not more—prevalent in present-­day assessments of democratic culture. Susan Sontag’s well-­known critique of the visual texts and practices innovated by the technology of photography condemns the visual disruption of our affective and epistemic relationships to the world, to others, and to the interventions we might otherwise be inclined to make as viewers of suffering, injustice, or violence. For Sontag, photography depersonalizes the world by possessing and objectifying it, making us narcissistic, alienated spectators engaging captivating images in place of truth and reality.23 And Lilie Chouliaraki extends Sontag’s suspicion of the perverse effects of spectatorship for political community in her account of the rise of the ironic spectator, called into being by contemporary humanitarian discourse that “signals the retreat of an other-­oriented morality, where doing good to others is about our common humanity and asks nothing back, and the emergence of a self-­oriented morality, where doing good to others is about ‘how I feel.’”24 Although certainly not unanimous, the typical suspicion of visuality is common enough to constitute a general democratic anxiety because it is thought to contain the potential to lead citizens astray, by distracting them, lying to them, or rendering them passive audiences to displays of power. This democratic anxiety over the visual finds a further articulation in the fear that in the modern era, the state actively manipulates ways of seeing in order to reproduce its own power and impose order on the otherwise messy, everyday affairs of citizens’ lived experiences. Adapting the work of James C. Scott, I suggest using the terms “state optic” and “public optic” to better understand the threat that managerial statecraft is assumed to pose for democracy and the potential for subversive ways of seeing to reassert a

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vibrant civic culture.25 Developing this distinction requires us to briefly summarize Scott’s account of what I am calling the state optic—the rejection of human perspective for a god’s-­eye view from which the many inconsistencies, contingencies, and complexities of everyday affairs can be ordered, disciplined, and ultimately reshaped. The state optic, embodied in this god’s-­ eye view, incentivizes simplicity and legibility from its transcendent perspective. A public optic, on the other hand, embraces complexity and diversity by reorienting us to approach the task of political judgment from the literal and figurative perspective of the citizen on the ground. Whereas the state optic prioritizes the orderly and efficient administration of standardized remedies to problems like homelessness, a public optic asks how the action of citizens encountering their peers might provide essential insight about and solutions to the suffering of people experiencing homelessness. A public optic resists the urge to take us out of the everyday life of the community and into the realm of bureaucratic ideals; instead, it seeks wisdom and agency in remaining rooted to partial perspectives on the ground, the value of which always exceeds the sum of its parts. In literal visual terms, we can imagine the difference between these two optics as represented by a blueprint versus a snapshot: the former tends to be an abstract representation of a structure from above, while the latter grants us momentary insight from the personal perspective of a situated viewer moving through that space.26 Note how the state optic and its nearly universal embrace by modern governing institutions replicates the distrust of an ocular model of democracy: we distrust the citizen’s vision because it is partial, manipulable, subjective, and easily swayed; similarly, we distrust the civic perspective on the ground because it lacks the ability to apprehend and organize the community as a whole. The public optic, characterized by its opposition to the god’s-­eye view, its insistence on maintaining the knowledge produced from the embodied perspective of the citizen on the ground, rejects the anxiety that drives the democratic distrust of citizens’ vision. The state optic, then, manifests in policy innovations and reforms that elevate the virtues of simplification and legibility to the detriment of practical knowledge, contingency, and local variety and diversity. Marking this distinction reorients theories of modern statecraft to the issue of vision. In many cases, such vision is quite literal: in the case of mapmaking, for example, one must assume a visual perspective that is physically impossible for humans to achieve unassisted by technology in order to apprehend the layout of a city. Where cities develop along the patterns of human use, the god’s-­eye view (the state optic) afforded by the map makes the city unintelligible, because

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the city’s disorderly form evolves—and hence only makes sense—from the embodied perspective of human beings living within it (a public optic). Alternately, the geometrically designed city envisioned by urban planners adheres to an organizational structure that is only “evident, not at street level, but rather from above and from outside. Like a marcher in a parade or like a single riveter in a long assembly line, a pedestrian in the middle of this grid cannot instantly perceive the larger design of the city.”27 Scott’s emphasis on perspective prompts us to note how the visual does not simply aid or impede social progress and political action; different optical positionings constitute different political realities with problems and solutions constrained by their unique nature. In the case of maps, the citizen’s perspective contrasts absolutely with that of the mapmaker’s: where for the citizen, public life is successfully ordered if it accommodates the needs and demands of everyday life, the mapmaker’s perspective transforms order into a concern with the legibility of an overall urban structure approached from outside, and without any special reference to, the lived experiences of citizens. Scott thus presents vision not as an aid to the scientific study and design of society, but as a constitutive act that “discovers new social truths as well as merely summarizing known facts.”28 In the case of seeing like a state, the choice to view a messy political configuration from an imaginary vantage point that positions us above and apart from lived human affairs destines policy choices made from such a perspective to pursue simplified, legible classificatory schemes that level the heterogeneity and diversity apparent on the ground. Scott does not resist such state simplification impulses because they mistake reality, and his objection to such visual practices does not assert the necessary falsity of simplification over the unique truthfulness of local complexity. Instead, Scott worries that the sophisticated deployment of legibility-­and simplicity-­generating practices and policies might come to replace all alternative modes of vision by shaping the public governed by the state in the image of such policies: “The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a ‘civilizing mission.’ The builders of the modern nation-­state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.”29 Here we might revise Scott’s specific formulation by combining his theory of modern statecraft with a rhetorical vocabulary. Specifically, I suggest a rearticulation of seeing like a state in terms of a visual second persona, by which I refer to Edwin Black’s foundational argument that rhetoric does not

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merely appeal to an audience to persuade it to act, but also shapes the audience in the image of the ideal auditor. Thus rhetorical effects do not simply culminate in accepted calls to action; beyond the particulars in a specific address, “the critic can see in the auditor implied by a discourse a model of what the rhetor would have his real auditor become.”30 Something similar, I argue, is happening in the practices Scott critiques. Designing policy and planning measures to be legible from the vantage point of a transcendent authority situated above and apart from human affairs, modern statecraft does not simply replicate the preferences of such vision by shaping the urban and political landscape, thereby also altering the lives of the human inhabitants; it also shapes citizens in the image of the state that sees from above, investing them in the project of contemporary politics that privileges distance from everyday affairs, blindness to local diversity, and transcendence of individual perspective and interest.31 It is this rhetorical function of vision, the shaping of the audience in the image of the ideal viewer, that simultaneously embodies the danger and emancipatory potential of the visual for democratic politics. Scott’s critique of the transcendent perspective central to the state optic illustrates how visuality potentially creates problems for democracy, insofar as it permits institutional authorities to subvert civic perspective. However, an appreciation of this visual second persona also orients us to discover how an alternate vision—namely, a public optic—might offer an important corrective to the antidemocratic tendencies of state sight. Scott’s account details the contours of the state optic, how modern statecraft logically pursues the incentives that come from imposing a specifically visual order on often incoherent and inconsistent practical affairs. In contrast to the state optic, the public optic (exemplified by unconventional advocacy initiatives like the meal-­sharing campaigns explored in this chapter) tends to view social problems and their solutions differently than a state optic invested in improving the human condition by imposing the transcendent perspective of institutional authority on problems like homelessness, designing solutions from that viewpoint, and then rigorously pursuing simplicity-­and legibility-­conferring measures as a means to control the outcomes. I argue that the public optic examines social problems like homelessness in terms of a breakdown of social relations, rather than insufficient administration of material resources at the institutional level, and it pursues solutions in the form of resituating public audiences as fellow citizens to those who are suffering, whose interaction with and recognition of a civic peer potentially supplies a powerful remedy to the social exclusions at the heart of the problem.

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As I explained in the preceding chapter, my argument is that conventional homeless advocacy works to calm a housed public afflicted with these typical anxieties about the problems that visuality creates for democracy. It does so by assuring them that advocates’ calls for greater visibility do not serve as emotional manipulations but instead ensure that the truth of homelessness is revealed, that the most effective solutions to end it may be designed and implemented, and that the visual order of public space may be restored and protected. Hence conventional advocacy appeals to the state optic’s viewpoint and its accompanying ideology as it emphasizes the problem of invisibility and rallies for increased visibility of homeless suffering so that the problem of homelessness may be better known, more accurately diagnosed, and more efficiently solved. The remainder of this chapter puts forth an account of an unconventional approach to homeless advocacy that strongly resists this organizing state optic in order to pursue the civic potential of homeless meal-­ sharing spectacles. The cultivation of a public optic through meal-­sharing results, I argue, from the advocates’ exploitation of the rhetorical, rather than manipulative, potential of spectacles and spectatorship; from resistance to the simplification and legibility imperatives of the state optic; and from the recharacterization of public space as a site/sight of community making through public appearance.

Meal-­Sharing as Homeless Advocacy For those who imagine that any source of compassion and support would be welcome in the fight against homelessness, it may come as some surprise that communities across the United States would police private, voluntary acts of charity in support of individuals in need. And yet, homeless advocates in recent years have faced precisely this obstacle in getting resources to those most vulnerable citizens whose suffering, exacerbated by the difficult conditions of homeless living, they would try to mitigate by providing basic everyday resources like clothing, toiletries, and food. Even as the Great Recession and housing-­market crises of the early 2000s radically increased the number of citizens experiencing disproportionate economic precarity, local communities throughout the country moved to enact legal measures designed to discourage informal public distribution of food and other supplies to those in need. As the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP) document in a joint report, local ordinances prohibiting the sharing of meals and other

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resources targeted the private charity homeless advocacy groups, church and civic organizations, and concerned individuals attempted to carry out in their home communities.32 While laws designed to punish and thereby discourage homeless activities and presence in public are nothing new, local communities have additionally turned to penalizing those who would provide charitable support as an added measure to eradicate any evidence of homelessness in shared spaces—particularly commercial spaces. At times couched in language that asserts a concern with public hygiene and safety, such legal measures in fact seem more plausibly tied to stereotypes and prejudices about homelessness. As the NCH and NLCHP explain, “Uncomfortable with visible homelessness in their communities and influenced by myths about homeless people’s food access, cities use food sharing restrictions to move homeless people out of sight, an action that often exacerbates the challenges people experiencing homelessness face each day just to survive.”33 There is considerable variety in terms of both the forms such meal-­sharing programs take and the efforts cities make to restrict them out of existence: “The goal of food programs that serve homeless people is to provide nutritious, filling and safe food to individuals who do not typically have consistent access to healthy food. In addition, many food sharing programs aim to build community or provide access to supportive services. Some food sharing groups are motivated by religious reasons, and may provide both food and the ability to join their congregation in a religious service. These are ways groups go above and beyond the key component of providing food, which all people have a human right to access.”34 In this sense, the food-­sharing these programs facilitate might more accurately be described as meal-­sharing: they aim not only to provide material assistance in the form of the food distributed but also, to greater and lesser degrees, pursue the social and spiritual support that volunteers extend to people who have been marginalized from their communities by virtue of their homelessness. Because meal-­sharing takes many forms, communities aiming to discourage or prevent this voluntary mode of social support must likewise design a variety of legal measures to prohibit it. One of the most common restrictions appears in local efforts to radically limit the legal use of public property, specifically public parks. Such measures make people experiencing homelessness particularly vulnerable, since public parks are one of a very few public spaces where individuals may linger without having to pay for admission (either in the form of direct access fees or commercial purchases that permit one to enter and remain in a place of business). Requiring permits to

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distribute food or stage large-­group meals is one direct way that local governments are able to prevent voluntary private outreach to the homeless population. More indirectly, anticamping ordinances help discourage shared meals by taking the public benches, pavilions, and lawns away as potential areas for rest and congregation. In Alaska, an anticamping ordinance implemented in 2017 endangers people experiencing homelessness like Lorraine Paul, a forty-­two-­year-­old woman who fears for her safety now that she is forced to move from Marine Park, which is located in an accessible, well-­developed downtown location, to Thane campground, an unlit, isolated location miles away. Paul fears making the move herself because the campground has a reputation for being unsafe for women: “You hear a lot of stories. For example, if I walked out there myself—I’m told there’s guys out that way that camp that would hurt you and rape you.”35 The ordinance allows the city to preserve the park for a limited range of activities that do not include sleeping or sheltering by people experiencing homelessness, but in doing so, it only exacerbates their suffering. Paul explains, “It’s really hard to find somewhere to sleep. I mean, I’m an alcoholic. Some of us try to stick together—how do I say it—pack off to ourselves.”36 Denied their right to use spaces designated for the public, Paul and others will face increased struggles to maintain their well-­being, their safety, and their already fragile social support network. Moreover, because public parks tend to be centrally located, intentionally linked up to public transportation, and designed to accommodate a variety of activities, these spaces are typically more accessible than alternate food distribution sites. It is unsurprising, then, that people experiencing homelessness come to rely on such locations in their daily struggle to secure their basic needs. When local measures limit who can enter a park, what they can bring with them, and how long they can stay, they are not simply securing the physical space of the park under regulation; they are also asserting a vision of who belongs in the community and who may be cast out. Trinidad DeLeon, a thirty-­eight-­year-­old homeless resident of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, gave voice to the dual harms—both physical and symbolic—resulting from the city’s decision in spring of 2017 to bulldoze a homeless encampment he and others had made their home. “I felt like they took our dignity away. . . . This was the only place we feel safe. Now we have just what we can carry. I managed to save a pair of socks and some hospital scrubs.”37 DeLeon has experienced firsthand the extraordinary measures cities like Fort Lauderdale take to discourage homeless occupation of public parks and public spaces; restrictions on meal-­sharing extend such measures by attempting to cut off the source of assistance that might bring people back to the parks once they

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are cleared. Communities enact restrictions on homeless meal-­sharing by limiting the number of people that can gather in a park at a given time, the number of meals that can be shared there, and the type of uses to which the public space may be put.38 Cities may also use zoning restrictions to disallow food preparation and distribution to groups of people experiencing homelessness. Here the restrictions have been justified in terms of meal-­sharing programs potentially violating the designated uses of particular spaces. For example, the CrossRoads United Methodist Church in Phoenix, Arizona, was prevented in late 2009 from continuing its morning breakfast and religious service program because its location in an area of the city zoned residential did not permit the creation of what the city called a “charity dining hall.”39 In a similar approach, cities may prohibit homeless meal-­sharing on the grounds that the food being prepared for such meals does not meet public health codes.40 And when individuals and groups persist in their attempts to provide meals for those in need despite these legal prohibitions, cities turn to pressure from police surveillance and harassment to end these voluntary acts of public charity.41 A great many organizations, of various sizes and orientations, have engaged in the local homeless advocacy of meal-­sharing. The NCH and NLCHP documented twenty-­three separate communities where the work of multiple meal-­sharing projects led to legislative restrictions being enacted in retaliation in order to prevent further food sharing with people experiencing homelessness.42 Across these communities, spanning every region of the United States, the groups that engage in meal-­sharing include religious organizations administering to their congregations and communities, soup kitchens taking their services to more easily accessible public spaces, and formal and informal coalitions of service providers, community organizations, and private individuals.43 The group whose meal-­sharing activities take center stage in this chapter is the loosely affiliated network of local chapters of Food Not Bombs (FNB), an antiwar and antihunger activist group that has been operating in communities across the United States for several decades. FNB chapters have been engaging in subversive meal-­sharing in many communities that have informally discouraged and formally prohibited such advocacy work, and the Orlando, Florida, chapter’s struggle with the local legal restrictions enacted in response to their outreach has garnered international attention for the meal-­sharing movement. I highlight this particular case for the remainder of the chapter because of the decades-­long continuity of FNB’s food advocacy, its successful legal challenges in the context of Orlando, and the publicity-­generating creativity of its approach to using

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meals as a way of intervening in unjust community exclusions. FNB’s food advocacy comprises a wide variety of rhetorical artifacts: the meal-­sharing events themselves; social media testimony, images, and videos; public statements made to journalists; formal statements distributed through their legal representation; and websites and print promotional materials created by the FNB network of community activists. In the analysis that follows, I show how FNB’s advocacy through meal-­sharing resists the traditional anxieties about visuality disrupting civic judgment.

Food Not Bombs FNB’s rhetorically innovative food advocacy and staging of transformative spectacle joins a broader tradition of social protest. Nik Heynen contextualizes the political activism of FNB in terms of a history of nonviolent civil disobedience.44 As a movement “ideologically based in anarchist principles of mutual aid,” FNB works through an informally connected network of approximately four hundred chapters across the globe.45 Each chapter is free to implement the general vision of FNB as it chooses. Most chapters generally operate along the same lines as the FNB Athens chapter that Heynen participated in, by gleaning food set to be destroyed or disposed of by businesses who could no longer sell it, preparing vegetarian or vegan meals from the reclaimed food, and distributing both the meals “and often political literature (advocating everything from the use of civil disobedience to the end of torture by the United States), to the central, most public, corner in downtown to share the food with any who wants some—rich, poor or in between.”46 The aim, as Heynen explains it, is at least twofold: to provide material assistance to those who need or desire it, as well as to generate solidarity among members of the community “that is formed through standing and sitting in public together against the domination and disciplining of urban political economic activities.”47 Hence FNB attempts not just to supplement existing efforts to support the urban poor and homeless, but to intervene in the political logics that would pit various groups against one another and conceive of their survival in zero-­sum terms. One such intervention FNB’s meal-­sharing events perform is to challenge the predominant acceptance of a capitalist food system that positions producers and consumers of food in relationships governed in the terms of narrowly rational commodity exchanges. In this way, FNB operates as a kind of autonomous food space, as Amanda DiVito Wilson describes it.48 Wilson

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contextualizes her reclassification of FNB as an autonomous food space in terms of the ongoing scholarly conversation distinguishing conventional food sites and practices from alternative food institutions, geographies, and networks.49 What sets FNB’s meal-­sharing apart from other types of food distribution is the various chapters’ “uses [of ] the production and consumption of food as a means to engage in a broader politics that challenges capitalism and unequal power relations.”50 Wilson emphasizes two key characteristics of FNB’s meal-­sharing: first, their efforts are more concerned with the process of sharing food than they are with the type or quality of the food itself. FNB values food reclamation—the rescuing and redistribution of food resources that would otherwise end up thrown out or destroyed by businesses and organizations—as a valuable end in and of itself, rather than asserting the value of particular kinds of food that is gleaned or donated. Second, FNB adopts an antihierarchical structure that enacts collective governance and decision-­making. Describing her experiences working with the Kingston FNB chapter, Wilson notes that this egalitarian setup was both freeing and, at times, constraining: “One of the things I first found daunting about participating in Food Not Bombs was being told I could ‘do whatever I wanted’ in response to my questions of how I could help in the kitchen. Everyone shared in the planning and preparation of food, regardless of skill or length of involvement in the group. It was a very relaxed and open environment; whoever showed up that Sunday morning would assess the available food and construct a menu. People who attended the meal were invited to participate in the clean-­up or preparation of meals, but there was no obligation.”51 This model of flexible and inclusive decision-­making eschews a central authority coordinating either the actions of the individual chapters or their relationship to the FNB network, and it is an intentional design that manifests the key political values guiding the public work the FNB chapters set out to do in their communities. Intentionally breaking down leadership hierarchies dovetails with the broader goal of resisting existing community dichotomies—between those in need and those providing resources, between homeless and housed, between producers and consumers of food. Rather than viewing food preparation and consumption as transactional, FNB characterizes “the preparation and consumption of food as part of an overall strategy of mutual aid,” making it vital for “those who prepared the food to partake in the meal themselves, and engage in spaces of shared consumption.”52 In this way, Wilson describes FNB’s meal-­sharing events as constitutive of a space for “relationships and interactions that are generally discouraged by mainstream society, providing free food not as a form of

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charity but as a means of building community and forging new identities.”53 Of course, Wilson recognizes that not all participants in the shared meal contribute in identical ways or share the implicit political orientation that rejects a capitalist ideology. Nevertheless, FNB generates a space for new forms of economic and political relationships to emerge and thrive, even if it cannot guarantee their successful realization and longevity.54 It is perhaps this radical potential to articulate new social relations and values that prompts the harsh retaliation against movements like FNB. For Joshua Sbicca and Robert Todd Perdue, FNB represents a fairly standard radical protest movement that challenges contemporary forms of domination and thus predictably invites disciplinary blowback from political authorities.55 After noting that “demonizing radical activists to marginalize their views or strategies is a common tactic used by the state to legitimate domination,” they turn to the legal obstacles and police harassment faced by the Orlando FNB chapter, who attracted the unwanted attention of the city. Defying accusations that their meal-­sharing was endangering the safety and prosperity of Lake Eola, a major tourist attraction in downtown Orlando, the FNB chapter’s persistence in serving meals despite an arrest campaign by the city manifests a kind of “spatial citizenship,” according to Sbicca and Perdue. This spatial citizenship entails “a mutually constitutive process by which these activists link struggles against neoliberalization to place-­based nonviolent direct action, consensus decision-­making and the provisioning of human essentials (i.e., food, water, shelter and community).”56 While Sbicca and Perdue explain the backlash against FNB in terms of their rejection of neoliberal notions of citizenship, Sean Parson contends that this is only part of the story.57 In addition to articulating a rejection of neoliberal models of charity, FNB chapters face harassment and arrest by city officials “only when the right confluence of neoliberal economic development, austerity, urban gentrification efforts, and public visibility come together.”58 In other words, while the FNB activists themselves may see their work as primarily situated in relation to prevailing models of charity provision, Parson contextualizes cities’ resistance to the FNB model in terms of the erosion of a welfare state and rise of political and social structures designed through a model of market relations. FNB’s rejection of mainstream or dominant neoliberal approaches to social service provision puts them at odds with many other charities that are seemingly operating with identical instrumental goals of serving those in need and mitigating the effects of poverty and hunger. As we have seen from this brief review, previous scholarship on FNB’s meal-­sharing initiatives has highlighted a number of defining characteristics

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that set FNB apart from other homeless advocates. First, rather than working through institutional channels and arguing for increasing provision of resources, FNB undermines neoliberal social service and charity models. Second, FNB redefines social and community relationships around food, rejecting a producer/consumer dichotomy in favor of an evolving web of relations that come into being through meal-­sharing. Moreover, FNB utilizes the publicity afforded by staging shared meals in public to reverse the trends of “neoliberal urbanization that forces all visible signs of poverty and ‘dis­ order’ out of public space under the guise of zero tolerance for quality-­of-­life violations.”59 I join this effort to make sense of the inventive political and social contributions of FNB’s strategic meal-­sharing by contextualizing their efforts in terms of their unconventional use of public vision—namely, by challenging the implicit and persistent anxieties about the potential for the ocular model of popular power to disrupt productive civic judgment and participation. By cultivating a public optic, I argue, FNB shared meals operate as a compelling instance of image events, what Kevin Michael DeLuca has described as protests staged dramatically for optimal publicity and media dissemination.60 Examining the “unorthodox rhetorical tactics” used by radical environmental justice groups, DeLuca identifies the ways that image events exceed reasoned discourse and traditional public argument to enact performances that “question the modern grand narrative of industrial progress, seek to rearticulate identities, work toward reinventing ‘nature,’ open new possibilities for humanity-­nature and human-­human relations, and break with conventional politics and rhetoric through the practice of a radical form of participatory democracy, thus enacting the political and rhetorical possibilities of a postmodern age.”61 In this account, public displays and spectacles are not distortions of reason to be minimized but productive and persuasive provocations to rethink the core values and relationships that characterize the community in which they occur. Image events thus operate as “a postmodern form of argument that employs acts of protest to deliver images as argumentative fragments that serve as inventional resources for public deliberation and which shift responsibility for argument construction to audiences.”62 Image events confront public audiences with sights that challenge their conventional ways of viewing the world and themselves, and in doing so, they urge citizens to reimagine themselves in relation to what they are seeing. As a rhetorical strategy of protest, image events generate discomfort that demands a resolution through “their ability to both construct and deconstruct identities and ideologies.”63 As we will see in the following section,

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the public controversy over FNB Orlando’s meal-­sharing in key downtown spaces illustrates how this unconventional homeless advocacy may harness a democratic vision to simultaneously resist both the prejudices against the homeless in their communities and the biases that privilege democratic citizens’ verbal participation over visual practices of seeing and being seen.

The Spectacular Politics of Meal-­Sharing FNB entered the protest scene in the early 1980s through a series of antiwar actions conducted in and around Boston.64 The loosely structured organization founded by Keith McHenry and his colleagues prioritizes efforts to redistribute existing food resources to feed the hungry, support the needy, and build a community around dual senses of inclusion and responsibility.65 Their organizing message of nonviolent social cooperation has led their hundreds of chapters, active in dozens of countries around the world, to seek out opportunities to reclaim resources to feed the hungry in their communities—whether that involves soliciting donations from businesses, providing supplies themselves, or coordinating collective gathering and sharing of food and other resources.66 While theirs is a message of nonviolent opposition to the legislation and community practices that promote war, exclusion, and suffering, their activity in communities is not universally accepted or tolerated as a benign presence. FNB’s history is marked by frequent police intervention, as participants in their protests and meal-­sharing events are often forced to leave the public spaces they are occupying or be arrested.67 FNB engages in “reclaiming the commons by laying claim to a public park to collectively meet the right to food,” creating a space where community forms around the practice of sharing meals and providing for all.68 The Orlando chapter of FNB found itself at the heart of a particularly visible public controversy in the summer of 2011, when the mayor and city council publicly identified them as a contamination of public space that needed to be forcibly removed.69 While the controversy came to a head in 2011, it began five years earlier with the passing of a city ordinance banning meal-­sharing in public. This ordinance, called the “Large Group Feeding Ordinance” by the city, prohibited any organization or individual from distributing free meals in public spaces to groups of more than twenty-­five without a permit.70 Organizations and individuals were restricted to two permits per year, which meant that FNB would have to reduce its outreach efforts from providing food to dozens of people multiple times a week to helping fifty people per year.

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Members of FNB Orlando knew that the demand for food assistance was far more than fifty meals per year because they had been distributing food to the needy in Orlando since 1996, and estimations of the homeless population at the time put the number of people experiencing homelessness in Orlando at approximately ten thousand.71 Over the years, they typically gathered in picnic areas of Lake Eola Park, a central location in the city that offered open spaces for their gatherings and was most easily accessible to the residents of the city who most needed the meals shared downtown and could not count on personal transportation to get to them. In theory, Lake Eola Park should have been open to all of the public, but the businesses that owned the restaurants, hotels, apartments, and attractions around its perimeter exerted significant influence over the city’s regulation of activity in the park. In 2006, after FNB Orlando’s meal-­sharing events had become a regular feature of park activity, the city passed its strict regulation of who may hand out and receive food at Lake Eola.72 One FNB Orlando activist, identified only as Sam in an online interview, explains the city’s intervention in terms of the lack of compassion of a more financially and socially privileged public that opposed their presence: A lot of the people that, you know, populate Lake Eola are kind of, more, you know, upper class—there’s a lot of nice condos over there— and to be honest, they just didn’t want to see a lot of homeless people in the park all the time. So they kind of forced the city into passing an ordinance, and we just kind of ignored it and kept doing it [sharing meals] anyway. And then they started enforcing the ordinance and that went on for a number of years until we reached a stalemate where we get to feed in front of City Hall and they’ll stop arresting us.73 The stalemate Sam describes came after several years of intense legal and political battles between the City of Orlando and the FNB chapter. FNB Orlando continued with their meal-­sharing events, which occurred more often and fed far more people than the ordinance passed to discourage their work allowed. In response, the police began regularly arresting the FNB participants. In October 2006, FNB filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the ordinance, and won. For several years, FNB continued with their work while the city of Orlando appealed the initial decision. In April 2011, the city found its victory as the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the earlier decision and upheld the constitutionality of the large-­ group feeding ban.74 Undeterred, FNB participants continued sharing meals

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without permits and beyond the legally permissible regularity and scope, and the city of Orlando recommitted to arresting as many of these “food terrorists”—in Mayor Buddy Dyer’s words—as it could, aiming to stamp out the practice once and for all.75 As Orlando continued to arrest organizers and volunteers of the FNB meal-­sharing events, the advocacy group took advantage of the increased publicity to stage, produce, and circulate photographs of the police interfering with their peaceful efforts to provide for the city’s most needy residents. Participants and passersby also captured the arrests on video and disseminated them on platforms like Facebook and YouTube.76 The images and videos follow the visual conventions of both previous FNB efforts and images of police/protestor interactions more generally: the generous and gentle actions of the FNB participants are depicted in sharp contrast to the heavy-­handed and disruptive interventions made by police. The photographs depict the essential argument advanced by FNB that the state aims to divide and disrupt the community and stability created around sharing meals. The work of the FNB activists is an effort in creating unity, inclusion, and balance; hence photographs of their work tend to feature volunteers and the public gathered around the tables on which their food is laid out, mingling as they share food and conversation.77 In contrast, the effect of the police intervention is to destroy those connections made peacefully around the table; hence photographs of the arrests often position police as a dividing line separating the community back into its subsections or blocking the public’s access to the food freely given by FNB. Visual texts and practices are clearly central to the efforts of FNB Orlando to challenge exclusionary social expectations and legal measures that limit who may inhabit public space and what actions they may carry out there. So at first glance, FNB Orlando’s work may appear to fit neatly within the first main advocacy trope discussed in chapter 1—that of critiquing the invisibility of homeless suffering and calling on the public to increase and perfect their visual apprehension of homelessness. On the one hand, FNB intentionally pursues what they describe as a politics of visibility; they see their work as carried out by countering the invisible forces that shape a community’s responses to or ignorance of food and hunger, provision of charity and social support, and policing of public spaces. On the other hand, their attempts to counter the invisibility of homelessness, hunger, and dissent does not proceed in the typical approach of raising awareness by making visible a previously obscured or hidden reality. Instead, FNB creates the sights of community anew, countering invisibility with constitutive visions of what

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the community could look like if different values and norms of civic relationships were enacted through the form of radically inclusive shared meals. In this way, their approach to homeless advocacy accomplishes very different rhetorical work than their conventional counterparts, whose awareness-­ raising efforts are oriented toward clarity and accuracy in the production of knowledge of homelessness, its causes, and its solutions. FNB skips the efforts to seek more complete and reliable information about homelessness by making it visible; instead of pursuing simplicity and legibility in the sights of homelessness, it creates images of the community through spectacular displays that generate the civic bonds that were previously lacking. I argue that we can understand how FNB accomplishes this unconventional challenge to the typical anxieties about visuality and the approaches conventional homeless advocacy usually takes by examining how they implicitly assert the rhetorical, rather than manipulative, function of spectacle and spectatorship; develop a public optic and reject the state optic; and reclaim public space as the generative realm where community may be created. First, FNB Orlando’s defiant meal-­sharing in the face of ongoing arrests relies on the potential for spectacular public displays to fulfill important rhetorical functions, rather than to distract or distort civic judgment. Far from inviting passive reception of the sights before them, the meal-­sharing events demand participation from a public audience in at least two forms: first, by participating in the meals themselves, and second, by making sense of the inversion of hierarchy put on display by the spectacle. As FNB Orlando activists intentionally broke the ordinance prohibiting their shared meals, they staged a public scene in which the roles of protectors and violators of public space were reversed. Despite the mayor calling them “food terrorists,” their shared meals prompted police to terrorize the participants gathered in peaceful communion. In an interview with Democracy Now!, Benjamin Markeson, one of the FNB Orlando activists repeatedly arrested by city police, explains this subversion of roles: “Well, I don’t know what the Mayor’s logic is. All I can say is that we think that it’s terrorism to arrest people for trying to share food with poor and hungry people in the community. . . . I don’t know how that qualifies as terrorism.”78 Thus the spectacles cultivated by FNB Orlando, which come in the form of strategically inviting police harassment and arrests, operate to advance political deliberation about the norms that govern their community. In the scenes unfolding before a public audience, wherein FNB Orlando activists are stopped from engaging in voluntary charity and punished for their public displays of generosity and solidarity with people experiencing homelessness, the group

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designs a spectacular enactment of the unjust roles the police and city officials have adopted. Some of the most striking, specific visual strategies that contribute to this constructive use of civic spectacle come in the form of videos and photographs that capture the arrests and publicize them beyond the moments when they unfold in public before a live audience. These visual representations typically contrast the disruptive actions of the police with the community-­building efforts and nonviolence of the activists.79 In nearly all imagery captured and distributed via social media, the protestors calmly proceed in carrying out their planned shared meals, setting up tables with buffets of free food and assisting those in line with making their plates and joining the group to eat. In the midst of these acts of kindness and generosity, police officers will interrupt the tranquil scene by ordering the activists to desist, by handcuffing them as they attempt to hand out more free food, and by dismantling the meal setup and taking portions of the food as evidence. As this standard script plays out, FNB Orlando activists and their supporters turn the scene into a moment of political dissent and protest, displaying signs that call for an end to the police harassment. Their signs make assertions like “Sharing is caring” and “We need more helping hands and less handcuffs”; the signs also pose critiques of the efforts to disband FNB Orlando’s shared meals, asking “Did Jesus need a permit?” and “To protect + serve?”80 Many spectators of the arrests join in chanting common slogans, such as “public parks for public needs,” all transforming the police’s actions into a compelling spectacle that demands opposition in the name of justice.81 Visuality, in this case, prompts civic participation rather than passivity, as spectators engage in the negotiation of an important issue that should be taken up by the community. FNB Orlando thus models a kind of ocular popular power—spectacle as visual referendum on unjust policing of public spaces—that equips housed and homeless alike to weigh in on the affairs of the community. Next, FNB Orlando cultivates what I am calling a public optic in opposition to the type of state optic that Scott links to the erosion of civic perspective in public affairs. Administration from the state optic involves pursuing simplicity and legibility as a means of organizing and controlling the messy progression of human life; the public optic, on the other hand, prioritizes sense-­making from the perspective of lived experience and civic relationships. One key way FNB Orlando activists cultivate this public optic is to reposition the police as members of the same community they are trying to serve with the shared meals, even as the police attempt to disrupt and put an end to their efforts. The video of FNB Orlando members Allison Estes

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and Doug Coleman being arrested aptly illustrates this rhetorical strategy.82 The short video opens with the shared meal already in progress; police officers have just arrived on the scene, ominously circling through the gathered crowd on their bicycles. One officer stops in front of the food line, points to Estes and Coleman, and says “You two? You know the drill.”83 In response, Coleman asks, “Well, do you guys want a plate?”84 Rather than acting out his role as a citizen responding to state authority, he offers the officers an opportunity to join the community constituted by the shared meal. As Estes is being cuffed, she asks, “Do you see how many families are here? How many children are here? Obviously there’s a need.” In short, Estes is asking the officers to pause in their official duties and view the gathered community from the perspective of a fellow citizen—one attuned to and empathetic with the suffering of others. The police intervene in the meal-­sharing scene as agents of the state, attempting to sort through the actions permitted by law and those that violate the city’s large group feeding prohibition. In that role, they are tasked with imposing the state’s view on the action unfolding in public spaces. Rather than working within that state optic—perhaps by reclassifying meal-­sharing as a recognizable and therefore legally protected action within the state’s administrative logic—FNB Orlando activists de-­elevate the transcendent perspective from which the police conduct their assessment to determine the correct course of action. Hence the FNB Orlando activists approach these officers of the law as civic peers, individuals who in public have the same opportunity and potential to experience solidarity with people in need and through whose participation in the meal new civic relationships might manifest. Finally, FNB Orlando pursues the making of community through appearances in public, recharacterizing the disputed spaces of the city not as channels for commerce and tourism but as sites for the manifestation of civic belonging and obligation. As Sam makes clear in his video interview, FNB Orlando aims to draw attention to the political stakes of accommodating or prohibiting meal-­sharing in public spaces of the city. When asked to speculate on the city’s intention behind the large group-­feeding ordinance, Sam bypasses the mayor’s explanation of logistical and hygienic concerns and highlights the political potential for community-­making public spaces: It’s the dehumanization of the homeless population, it’s the fact that most of our decisions are made by the people with the most money. And if you wanted to get like a little political science-­y about it, it’s about the fact that they’re pissed off that we take things out of market

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and bring it back into society, like, like bring it back to the community for no value.  .  .  . It kind of contradicts the idea of a market, period, in showing that the idea of actual scarcity, at least in this country, is caused more by market forces and not actually by a lack of food. We have enough food. It’s just a matter of how we choose to allocate it. And it’s how we choose to allocate resources.85 FNB Orlando activists thus recognize how the choice of particular public spaces and the nature of the actions carried out in them have consequences for how civic bonds and affiliations potential emerge—or are discouraged from doing so—by careful design. As the legal battle between the city and the FNB Orlando chapter was escalating, the city proposed a compromise whereby the meal-­sharing could continue to take place, but at a vacant lot far removed from downtown, one filled with “rocks and barbed wire” and virtually no infrastructure to support the preparation, serving, and sharing of meals.86 The distance and inaccessibility to people experiencing homelessness created practical obstacles for the shared meals and, as Markeson phrased it, participants in the meals “deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and this site is the antithesis of respect for poor and working people in our community.”87 In this important way, FNB Orlando recognized the negative consequences of the optics of moving the meals to an unused and unwanted space, one described as “in an industrial area” and “dangerous, unsanitary and [that] keeps the homeless problem hidden from view.”88 FNB Orlando’s food sharing work relies on public spectatorship—not just to realize that a problem with hunger and homelessness persists, but to make available a public audience that extends the empathetic connections of civic recognition to all those who take part in the shared meals. In these myriad ways, FNB Orlando models a provocative rehabilitation of democratic vision and civic spectatorship. By dramatically staging, recording, and recirculating their arrests and continued persecution by the Orlando police, the FNB activists constructed a “strategic juxtaposition” of the kind that Anne Teresa Demo contends “engenders social change by highlighting contradictions in the social order.”89 In the case of FNB meal-­sharing, the relevant contradictions are those that relate to safety (police as a source of danger and disruption), food security (the absurdity of people starving in a city with such wealth and resources), and public space (the park being governed by the private commercial interests of business owners rather than the public needs of the community). Orlando’s ordinance prohibiting meal-­ sharing was purported to be necessary for securing the safety of the city, but

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it results in harm to those who are most vulnerable. In response, FNB calls on the community to participate in the spectacular politics of meal-­sharing, thereby “enact[ing] alternative visions based on diversity and social justice.”90 The meal-­sharing image events of FNB confront public audiences with strategic juxtapositions tailored for uptake on social media and dissemination by news coverage of the controversy. I conclude this chapter by reflecting on the implications of this rehabilitation in terms of innovating new forms of homeless advocacy and envisioning new modes of civic judgment and democratic participation.

Challenging Anxieties About Visuality The meal-­sharing approach adopted by groups like FNB represents an undoubtedly risky strategy for homeless advocates. Although they aim to transform notions of community and norms of civic obligation through the creation of public spectacles, in doing so they attract unwanted disciplinary attention of a kind that typically does not threaten conventional homeless advocacy. Moreover, creating these public displays of community support and cohesion neglects the traditional advocate work of identifying and challenging the underlying conditions that lead to homelessness in the first place. The performance of shared meals may unite communities and offer welcome moments of inclusion, but homeless advocates also must reckon with the inadequacies in health care, job opportunities, available and affordable housing, and mental health treatment and support that additionally contribute to contemporary cycles and environments of homelessness. Given these risks and trade-­offs, it is worth reflecting on the reasons why advocates might nonetheless pursue the strategy of meal-­sharing as a way to intervene in homeless exclusion and marginalization. Above and beyond the typical accomplishments of conventional homeless advocacy, meal-­sharing authorizes a keen resistance to the state optic and its attendant anxieties about the role of the visual in democratic culture. Institutional judgments—about legal restrictions to place on public behavior, about levels of support to extend to at-­risk populations, about interventions to make into malfunctioning housing and job markets, for example—are powered by the normative content and commitments produced by the public’s rhetorical imaginary.91 Meal-­sharing may not efficiently or effectively intervene directly into those institutional and legislative judgments, but it does hold the potential to imagine new possibilities and forge new civic bonds that

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might ultimately alter the broader public commitments and norms underwriting future institutional decisions. In the case of meal-­sharing, these efforts ask the public to consider reimagining the place of our homeless neighbors in communities previously envisioned as exclusively composed of the housed—and, more ominously, imagined as communities that needed to be protected from homeless presence or interference. The objections to FNB’s efforts in Orlando exemplify this exclusionary vision, and the shared meals staged by the chapter directly contest the image of the community and of public space as one threatened by visible homeless presence. Meal-­sharing also invites its public spectators to challenge the colonization of public space by logics of efficiency and profitability, which work to categorically exclude community-­building efforts like homeless meal-­sharing. This, I would argue, is where we see the most promising democratic contribution of unconventional advocacy like meal-­sharing: namely, its role in undermining the logic that supports antihomeless legislation designed to move homeless bodies out of sight, and to prohibit interactions between homeless and housed. The more accustomed a public becomes to seeing community constituted across housing lines, the more equipped they will be to imagine the fate of the homeless as tied to their own. In this way, the public spectacle affords advocates the opportunity to transform community; it does not divert from civic judgment, but instead makes it possible. More generally, as the work of groups like FNB helps us see homelessness anew, it also provides one iteration of resistance to the state optic in favor of a public optic constructed by staging shared meals. I want to be clear that the state optic is, of course, quite useful to those who care about homelessness and want to work toward reducing the harms it poses for those who experience it. But its utility is also limited by the constraints of its vision. For homeless advocates, policymakers, and many academics, the perspective of the state optic produces increased knowledge of the truth of homelessness, better judgment about how to go about solving it, and more efficient institutional structures to respond to the needs of those suffering from living outside more traditional private shelter. In this view, discovering the truth about homelessness is the path toward more effective assistance and increased public compassion. Citizenship appears in this account as institutional and legal status, and the task of rehabilitating the homeless takes the form of reclaiming a lost identity that affords all citizens protection and access to legitimized institutional standing, public goods, and social services. In short, this view bears all the characteristics of the strong central-­planning initiatives from which Scott developed the theory of seeing like a state. But

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just as officials attempted—and ultimately failed—to bring the tumultuous and unpredictable daily life of the city into order through the production of legible subjects and the simplification of urban design, so too does the conventional advocacy view pursue—and fall short of—the legibility and simplification of homelessness as a means toward helping individuals too often left in need. FNB’s meal-­sharing helps illustrate the limitations of the state optic. In this case, the narrowing of vision presents the object of sight, the homeless, as an unspeaking, agentless entity who suffers tremendously from both inadequate physical sustenance and disenfranchisement from the political community, what Leonard C. Feldman identifies (following Giorgio Agamben) as the bare life of homelessness.92 In this view of homelessness, citizenship exists only in terms of status (either protected or threatened), thereby ignoring the more everyday dimensions of civic life that exceed institutional recognition and inclusion. In the process, the conventional view of homelessness, framed by the state optic, ignores the rhetorical engagement among peers that makes civic life possible. Moreover, homelessness as seen from the state optic reaffirms a markedly undemocratic vision of public space as designed space, its order conceived through the perspective of a transcendent authority that has no contact with the everyday needs of citizens. The imposition from above of such order cannot allow for political innovations and engagement on the ground. If democracy, in its broadest sense, is some form of empowerment of the People to determine the shape and course of their collective lives, then the state optic, which rewards the following of transcendent authority by identifying anything unable to be incorporated into its central planning as a problem, can hardly be called conducive to democratic life. Thus the state optic’s limitations demand a supplemental vision, and as we have seen in this discussion of meal-­sharing outreach embraced by unconventional homeless advocates, a public optic—one that situates housed and homeless individuals as civic peers whose inclusion in the political community depends on mutual recognition and regard—may provide an important critique and potential corrective.

3 the democratic bodies of the homeless world cup

When homeless bodies feature in news coverage, their representation is typically negative: they appear as victims or perpetrators of crime, vulnerable to addiction or neglect, afflicted with mental illness or physical disabilities, or casualties of larger economic forces that leave them unable to support themselves.1 So when media outlets discovered Ted Williams, the “homeless man with the golden voice,” in 2011, they seized on his story as one that would stand out from the usual gloomy narratives of homeless suffering. Spotted panhandling off an interstate ramp in Columbus, Ohio, Williams carried a sign that marked his abilities as distinct from those of the typical person experiencing homelessness: “I have a God given gift of voice. I am an ex-­radio announcer who has fallen on hard times. Please! Any help will be greatfully [sic] appreciated. Thank you and God bless you/Happy holidays.”2 Williams became an almost instantaneous “Internet sensation,” in the Columbus Dispatch’s estimation, because of a short video they captured and posted that publicized his remarkable vocal abilities. In the video, an unidentified narrator provides voiceover as a car approaches an intersection where members of the public have noticed a person panhandling with an unusual sign. The person filming this short clip pulls over alongside the median where Williams is displaying his sign, requesting assistance from other drivers passing by. Because he asks Williams to “work for your dollar,” we get to hear the golden voice in action as Williams recites a line from his broadcasting past: “When you’re listening to nothing but the best of oldies, you’re listening to Magic 98.9!”3 Viewers found the juxtaposition of Williams’s unkempt homeless appearance and vocal talent jarring, and their surprise over this homeless man’s ability to sound like a talented media professional perhaps explains why his video was watched and shared by millions of viewers.4 Their surprise may also result from prejudices based on class and race; people experiencing homelessness are often regarded as lazy, broken, or responsible for their own

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misfortune, and these forms of discrimination are compounded by prejudices against racial minorities like Williams. Doral Chenoweth III, the Columbus Dispatch videographer eventually identified as the individual who found Williams and created the video, clarified his motivation in publicizing Williams’s vocal abilities by distinguishing Williams’s approach to panhandling from those he typically sees: “We run into these guys at the exit ramps and we pretty much ignore them,” he explained, but Williams stood out as worthy of notice because “this guy was using his talent.”5 After the initial video was posted and circulated by a variety of social media users, Williams’s fame grew as a national public audience continued to express their surprise and delight at his remarkable vocal abilities. Immediately after the original release of the video, radio stations, media organizations, and other employers pursued Williams, enlisting the help of the newspaper that first found him to track him down again so that they might make their pitches for him to join their broadcasting teams. Among those offering employment were MTV, ESPN, the National Football League, and the Cleveland Cavaliers; through his newfound notoriety, Williams was also invited to appear in interviews on the Today show, The Early Show, and a variety of local media broadcasts.6 Since most panhandlers can expect to be ignored at best, and targeted for public contempt or police harassment at worst, the public awe over Williams’s talent and the concerted campaign to get him located, cleaned up, employed, and back on track represents an almost incomprehensible deviation from the typical treatment of people experiencing homelessness. Of course, the assistance offered to Williams was not as easy to marshal or effortlessly effective in improving his lot in life as the original media coverage might have implied. Although national media corporations and advertisers were tripping over themselves to offer him work, and although Williams received a $395,000 advance to write his memoir, his path from panhandling to gainful employment and steady, supportive housing was hardly smooth.7 Five years after their initial discovery of Williams’s talents, the Columbus Dispatch revisited him to document his progress, and the paper’s follow-­up report found him starring in a weekday program on WVKO-­AM but still working through the consequences and complications stemming from his decades-­old setbacks when “addictions to drugs and alcohol took the popular local personality from the studio to the streets.”8 Despite his relatively newfound sobriety and incredible career prospects in 2011, the paper noted that “the depths and damage of his longtime demons played out publicly—from Dr. Phil appearances and family altercations that made the tabloids to a tense

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reunion with his long-­estranged mother on national television.”9 Williams’s struggle to manage the incredible financial gains that fell so unexpectedly into his lap, along with his difficulty in navigating his history with addiction and conflicted personal and professional relationships, marks his progress today as hard-­won and all the more remarkable, given the extraordinary obstacles he faced. His persistence is recognized and publicly lauded, even as his setbacks complicate his narrative of self-­improvement and progress. Similar accommodation, support, and compassion are not extended to most people experiencing homelessness, however. Very unfortunately, the public is more inclined to attribute the state of homelessness or the suffering it causes to personal failures and weaknesses, rather than to approach the homeless with the kind of generous understanding extended to Williams. Although the sympathy and support afforded to Williams is cause for celebration—one small but needed victory in the effort to generate public care for people experiencing homelessness—a status quo nonetheless remains in which encouragement and sympathy on this scale rarely emerge for the vast majority of those who struggle to escape the myriad causes and consequences of homeless life. Paradoxically, it is conventional homeless advocacy that might best explain both the unexpected level of public support for Williams and the absence of similar concern for the majority of people experiencing homelessness. As I noted in chapter 1, a second major trope of conventional homeless advocacy consists of emphasizing the harms suffered by broken homeless bodies, as a means of publicizing the negative repercussions of homelessness and of generating urgency and warranting support of increased resource provision to those in need. I believe the media frenzy surrounding the “homeless man with the golden voice” demonstrates just how convincingly conventional homeless advocates have shaped the public’s image of homelessness in terms of hopelessly broken bodies. Williams stands out against this typical vision because his story emphasizes newly rediscovered abilities, rather than serving as evidence for typical harms that imperil his health and well-­being. In conventional advocacy terms, what most demands our attention is not the exceptional abilities or unique qualities of those experiencing homelessness but instead the routine and significant damage their bodies sustain as they are made to navigate life outside clean, hygienic, and safe physical structures. It is, of course, understandable that advocates would highlight the extreme harms perpetrated against homeless bodies to make the case that they merit immediate public attention and support. But in doing so, they also may inoculate public sympathies and utilize a mode of advocacy that has significant rhetorical drawbacks: reducing

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homeless subjectivity to suffering or abnormal bodies, and shoring up a general distrust of citizens’ bodies, which culminates in the recurring anxiety that bodies interfere with—rather than inform, shape, or underwrite—their contributions as democratic citizens. This chapter explores an unconventional advocacy that breaks with the broken-­bodies trope in order to illustrate those drawbacks and to articulate potential alternatives that might resolve them. In order to link the broken-­ bodies trope to the general distrust of citizens’ bodies, I explore a range of scholarship that identifies the problems bodies are thought to pose for democratic citizenship, as well as the accounts scholars have given of the rhetorical production of bodies and cultivation of disgust toward homeless bodies in particular. I then turn to the Homeless World Cup (HWC), an unconventional advocacy event that brings people experiencing homelessness in countries across the globe together each year for a street soccer tournament as a means of challenging homeless exclusion. As I show, the HWC uniquely reinvents homeless bodies, repositions housed audiences in relation to the homeless tournament participants, and recuperates the civic standing of those whose homelessness too often excludes them from formal legal inclusion and informal national belonging.

Disciplining (Homeless) Citizens’ Bodies Democracies worry about citizens’ bodies betraying their more enlightened, more noble, or more honorable inclinations. Rhetorical scholarship in particular contributes to our understanding of how bodies are discursively sorted into various categories and the implications such categories have for community, democracy, and citizenship. As such, a rhetorical perspective is essential for understanding how bodies work as arguments within a democratic culture that nonetheless prioritizes disembodied reason and discourse.10 Kevin Michael DeLuca’s account of the body rhetoric employed by protest groups explains how the public presentation of bodies may enact, rather than simply accompany, effective argumentation strategies.11 His analysis shows how bodies are rhetorical when they manifest new political and cultural hierarchies, subvert existing taboos and forms of discrimination, and reclaim public presence and legitimacy by resisting norms of marginalization and exclusion. Of course, the politics of such visibility is never straightforward or singular; rhetorical bodies may simultaneously challenge some dimensions of constraining norms and shore up others, as Erin  J.  Rand reminds us.12

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The task of using bodily presence and presentation in order to push back against injustices and inequalities depends on the rhetorical context in which they are situated, and as Paul Achter has shown in his examination of the strategic “domestication” of veterans’ bodies, “public controversies involving bodies prove that the body is a forceful rhetorical form that captures and expresses ideas in a way that words cannot.”13 So at the same time that “bodies that violate norms provoke discipline from the larger society,” we must also acknowledge “the role of the body as a locus of struggle for those whose voice is otherwise silenced.”14 In these accounts, bodies variously represent the source, site, agency, and product of argument. Rhetorics of the body thus authorize a variety of public judgments, sometimes emancipatory, but just as often disciplinary and exclusionary. The seeds of this latter corporeal discrimination can be found in the earliest accounts of democratic politics from ancient Greek thought. Aristotle, for example, distinguishes citizens from those outside the political community based on the degree to which the former is capable of exercising political judgment, reason, and speech, and the extent to which the latter is assumed to be ruled by emotions, bodily impulses, and petty desires.15 As Barbara Koziak argues, this dichotomy between those suited for political life and those ill-­equipped to carry out the work of the citizenry maps easily onto divisions between public and private arenas characterized by the types of bodies that inhabit them. “Reading the Politics,” she writes, “one can easily believe that the oikos, or household, the realm of women and slaves, is dominated by emotion, hierarchy, and the needs of the body, whereas the public is dominated by reason, equality, and the needs of the intellect. Apparently, male citizens and statesmen should diminish the sway of emotion as much as possible.”16 Carol Lee Bacchi and Chris Beasley further attribute the dismissal of bodily oriented dimensions of human existence from conceptions of citizenship to the tendency in the Western tradition to prioritize mental over physical faculties. Their concern in examining the multiple dichotomies exerting an explanatory power over citizens’ capacities and suitability for political life is to contribute to “identifying the political effects and the possible limits of existing accounts of political subjectivity.”17 There are multiple political implications for the way we talk about bodies in relation to democratic governance and citizenship, and Bacchi and Beasley enumerate some most directly related to policies that govern civic action, status, and belonging: “Policies often indicate what bodies can or cannot do (conscription, public exposure), what shape they are to take (citizenship rules for transgender subjects), what resources they can expect in order to survive (public health issues, welfare

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issues), and where they can appear or assemble (control of public spaces).”18 Each of these policy orientations emerges clearly in the regulation of homelessness in contemporary society and the ways in which homeless bodies are disciplined and governed by the communities in which they appear. Antihomeless legislation in particular limits the range of homeless behaviors that may be carried out in public, the state of bodies that are authorized to occupy public space, the access they are granted to public bathroom and protective facilities, and the places they may enter, linger, and move through alongside their fellow citizens. Bacchi and Beasley reframe the typical mind-­versus-­body split in terms of those who successfully exert “control over body” and those who remain “controlled by body”19; the former have traditionally been considered suited for citizenship because they are thought to possess a disposition inclined toward rationality, and the latter are governed as if undeserving of full citizenship because they are believed to be incapable of restraining their bodily impulses. Premises about bodies inform social policy. More specifically, political subjects who evince forms of control over their bodies are constituted as full citizens, which at times is equated with a degree of distance from government surveillance. Political subjects who are deemed not to exercise this control, who are considered to be controlled by or subject to their bodies, do not measure up on the citizenship scale; hence, their activities can be regulated in ways deemed inappropriate for full citizens. Conceptions about bodies act as a dividing line between full and lesser citizens, with citizenship itself understood in terms of “autonomy” from government.20 Homeless exclusion and marginalization is often legitimized in terms of characterizing those without shelter as hopelessly controlled by their bodies, leading to imprudent actions and poor choices that interfere with their ability to find and secure suitable housing and engage in basic self-­care. Williams, the so-­called homeless man with the golden voice, illustrates the conflict at the heart of this dichotomy. In the retelling of his story, the narrative journalists most frequently returned to simultaneously characterized him as having control of his body and being controlled by it: On the one hand, his astonishing control over his body (in the form of his vocal abilities) appeared to validate his rescue from homeless life and recruitment by major networks and corporations to do broadcasting work for them; on the other hand, his

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lack of control over his body (in the form of his addictions and inclinations toward interpersonal conflict) were thought to destine him to homeless life in the first place. If the traditional dichotomy between citizens’ minds and bodies imposes unnecessarily constraining conditions on political agency, so too does the rhetorical sorting of types of bodies into categories of ideal and inferior. Such distinctions have been made on the grounds of demographic identity categories like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation; they have also targeted hygiene, weight, ability, and appearance as explanatory criteria for distinguishing between those whose bodies merit full citizenship and those who have been found lacking. Particularly relevant to the disciplining of homeless bodies, hygienic practices operate as “an articulation of a specific social order,” and Jeanette Pols maps out how different attitudes toward washing implicate competing conceptions of citizenship.21 The different “repertoires of washing,” in her terms, signal different understandings of the relationship of bodies to citizenship, and of citizen bodies to each other. When washing is understood in terms of personal privacy, then its completion enacts the individual autonomy that stands as a prerequisite for autonomous citizenship. If characterized as a skill, washing becomes a tool the full citizen must master for inclusion in the civic body. Situating washing as a precondition for full citizenship gives hygiene a gatekeeping function, authorizing the inclusion of those who carry out its rituals and denying those who do not. And finally, when washing is positioned as an essential chance for connecting with others, then hygienic rituals afford their adherents an entry point into the collective social body by linking citizens to one another. In this way, hygienic practices enable both the exclusion of those who fail to meet their expectations and opportunities to reassert civic belonging. People experiencing homelessness very often have no access to washrooms or toiletries, making it nearly impossible to maintain standards of hygiene expected by housed citizens. But instead of seeing a decline in hygiene as evidence of need, housed audiences often interpret unkempt homeless bodily states as an indication of personal failure or deficiency, and Pols’s account helps explain why: when these “repertoires of washing” signal compliance with the civic order, those who cannot participate in them appear incompatible with the norm. Just as assessments of socially determined standards of hygiene have been used to legitimate inclusive and exclusive civic rhetorics, so too has body weight been presented as a standard for determining individuals’ fittingness for citizenship. Charlene D. Elliott contends that “obese individuals

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are implicitly and explicitly framed as ‘less equal’ citizens,” and as such, “the conspicuous body is read as, not merely the sign of moral failure, but the failure of personal responsibility as well.”22 At the heart of such discriminations is a tacit, and therefore frequently unexamined, yet powerfully formative civic ideal. As Susan Schweik frames it, “We know what the normal body of the citizen is by knowing what it is not.”23 In the case of homelessness, the ideal citizen body comes into clearer definition when contrasted with the characteristics of behavior, disposition, appearance, hygiene, self-­care, grooming, health, and presentation of self all attributed to homeless life and used to explain persistent exclusion from housing and the life of the community.24 When the public maintains a “dominant image of the homeless as victims or parasites outside the pale of society,” this image authorizes a variety of discriminations that not only victimize the bodies of the homeless but also reinforce the notion that their lesser status results from their own deficiencies and shortcomings. Such discriminations against the homeless body have devastating repercussions, as this basic establishment of homeless “otherness” validates policies and legislation that formalize the subordinate status of people experiencing homelessness. As communities move to protect both public space and housed citizens from the public presence of homeless bodies, they limit people experiencing homelessness from participating in the kinds of public behaviors, exchanges, and appearances in which housed citizens may freely engage. Meal-­sharing among individuals who are or pass as housed citizens, for example, rarely attracts the kind of unwanted scrutiny and retaliation that we saw in the cases examined in the previous chapter. Similarly, initiatives like the “Please Don’t Feed Our Bums” sticker campaign in Ocean Beach, California, explicitly link homeless bodies to contaminations of public space: in Ocean Beach, shopkeepers along a boardwalk that attracts increasing numbers of panhandlers printed and distributed decals modeled after the Mammoth Lakes signs that ask visitors to refrain from giving food to the wildlife.25 Ken Anderson, the creator of these “Please Don’t Feed Our Bums” stickers, explains the campaign’s appeal in terms of the impact the homeless have on the community as a whole: “People in Ocean Beach are getting frustrated. . . . The sticker is their way of saying, ‘Let’s stop these people from parasiting off the community.’”26 The worry for communities attempting to restrict panhandling or food sharing in public extends from a fear of the homeless as “wildlife” or “parasites,” individuals whose mere presence signals the deterioration of public space and the contamination of communal life. In San Francisco, a city with one of the highest homelessness rates in the country, “the San

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Francisco Hotel Council funded a $65,000 billboard campaign that linked panhandling to drug abuse and sexually transmitted diseases. One ad read, ‘Today we rode a cable car, visited Alcatraz and supported a drug habit.’”27 Cities’ attempts not only to prevent but to prohibit interactions between homeless and housed in public rely on a discourse of contamination that figures the homeless as a diseased entity, and those willing to reach out to the homeless as the naïve accomplices to the spread of the contagion. Housed citizens, of course, often occupy a much more empowered position than the homeless in that they are generally free to pursue either type of activity—private interests (typically in the form of commercial exchanges) or public interaction. To be clear, these privileges are not automatic or evenly distributed; discriminatory attitudes toward bodies perceived to be abnormal, even among the housed, function to differentiate between some citizens’ asserted legitimacy in occupying public space and the perceived unsuitability of others based on the ways that “gender, race, sexuality, religion, and national identity are inexorably intertwined with disability and class.”28 The homeless, however, lack such power to determine the uses to which shared areas of the city will be put paradoxically because they are forced to inhabit these areas nearly exclusively. Lacking a private retreat, their entire lives must be carried out in spaces that ostensibly belong to all, but which they can neither prevent others from occupying nor invoke a legitimate claim to inhabit. In this liminal state, the homeless become bodies out of place in public because such space must function as the scene for their private lives as well, producing “cultural anxieties about bodily boundaries.”29 Such boundaries do not simply relate to the characteristics of individual bodies, but to the types of activities, expressions, and interactions thought to be normal or acceptable in particular settings. Undoubtedly, in the case of the homeless, it is not as straightforward as simply distinguishing between those activities that anyone may carry out in public, and those that are unacceptable for all. For example, ordinances that prohibit loitering, sitting on sidewalks, sleeping in public, panhandling, or public urination may seem perfectly acceptable to a housed public seeking protection from encounters with the homeless, but such laws are rarely enforced when the infraction is committed by someone who does not need to perform such activities in the sight of others since few would confuse a distinctively nonhomeless adult asking for bus fare with a homeless panhandler begging on the street. If a housed citizen is waiting at a bus stop and must sit on the curb because the bench is full, she would hardly expect her actions to violate her fellow citizens’ sense of orderly public space. Yet police actively

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pursue and disperse homeless individuals caught sleeping on park benches or loitering in public areas, ostensibly because such activities can only be permitted if one does not need to carry them out in public. There is something more than simple duplicity at play here. As Christina Haas contends, distinctions between public and private are inextricably bound with rhetorics of space and bodies.30 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue that such “differentiation . . . is dependent upon disgust. The division of the social into high and low, the polite and the vulgar, simultaneously maps out divisions between the civilized and the grotesque body, between author and hack, between social purity and social hybridization.”31 When communities’ laws and policies label homeless bodies as contaminating public presences and enforce their restriction or exclusion from public, they are implicitly relying on a sense of homeless bodies as forms of “pollution” of public space that “confuse or contradict cherished classifications.”32 In blurring such classifications, homelessness produces disgust. Martha Nussbaum argues that disgust “is very different from anger, in that its thought-­content is typically unreasonable, embodying magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity, immortality, and nonanimality, that are just not in line with human life as we know it.”33 Yet even as disgust shapes our everyday behaviors, prompting us to seek out certain encounters and shield ourselves from others, it also forms an argumentative ground for punitive and exclusionary legal measures; in fact, “disgust has been used throughout history to exclude and marginalize groups or people who come to embody the dominant group’s fear and loathing of its own animality and mortality.”34 Such exclusions rest on the determination of a dominant group to require “avoidance of certain groups of people as physically disgusting, bearers of a contamination that the healthy element of society must keep at bay.”35 Nussbaum’s argument is not that all forms of disgust are suspect—she frequently notes that disgust in all likelihood played an important evolutionary role for human beings36—but she does assert the need for a liberal society to be wary of discourses of disgust, rooted as they are in social hierarchy and exclusion: “In the case of disgust, properties pertinent to the subject’s own fear of animality and mortality are projected onto a less powerful group, and that group then becomes a vehicle for the dominant group’s anxiety about itself. Because they and their bodies are found disgusting, members of the subordinated group typically experience various forms of discrimination.”37 Outside the potential ugliness of individualized feelings for one another, disgust affects political order and democratic systems to the degree that it stymies the basic expectation of a tolerance of difference and diversity.

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William Ian Miller conceives of the antidemocratic ramifications of disgust by contrasting it with a related but separate political emotion—contempt— that also influences the structuring of political life and civic relations. Contempt and disgust both express negative judgments of the individuals that inspire them, but while disgust calls for an all-­out rejection, contempt relates more to the feeling of perceived superiority: not a rejection per se, but perception of the other’s inferiority because of their difference in social rank. Miller suggests that contempt is “a mechanism of ranking people or of contesting relative rankings and as such has an intensely political significance,” and while disgust closely imitates many outward features of contempt, it deviates significantly from the latter’s relationship to political and social orders.38 Contempt challenges received placement within hierarchies, calling their legitimacy into question; disgust maintains those same hierarchies and elevates their exclusions into absolute terms: Contempt, far from being inimical to democracy, seemed in the end greatly to assist its project, as long as the possibilities for contempt were fairly equally distributed among groupings in the polity—as long, that is, as upward contempt in the dismissive style was available to the low. Disgust is a different matter entirely. It does not admit of equitable distribution, and it works against ideas of equality. It paints a picture of pure and impure. And the compromises it makes across those lines are by way of transgression as sin, lust, or perversion. Hierarchies maintained by disgust cannot be benign; because the low are polluting they constitute a danger; a policy of live and let live is not adequate.39 When a housed public experiences disgust in relation to their homeless neighbors, they are not simply influenced by individual perceptions or reactions; they are perpetuating the unjust ordering of society that casts people experiencing homelessness as impure and out of place. And as Jeffrey A. Bennett urges us to remember, rhetorics of disgust “are frightening not simply because of falsely perceived pollution, but because contamination always suggests purification.”40 Disgust positions a housed public to anticipate and embrace the inevitable removal of the contaminant (homelessness) from their midst. Moreover, disgust dehumanizes the objects of its repulsion and rejection. As J. David Cisneros argues, disgust produces discourses of contamination that metaphorically figure subordinate groups as nothing more than refuse,

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a process that all too often puts people experiencing homelessness at a disadvantage in their communities.41 Cisneros investigates the media representations of immigrants as pollutants, representations that trace a specific link between crises of immigration and environmental contamination. Using the news coverage of the late 1970s toxic chemical drum spill in the Love Canal in northern New York state, he identifies three main themes that govern the discourse of contamination: representations revolve around “images of the pollutant, images of the pollutant’s impact on the community, and images of the government’s attempts to clean up the problem.”42 By specifically featuring the scope and spread of the contamination, the disruption of the everyday lives of community members, and public authority’s containment and cleanup efforts, the representations of the Love Canal environmental crisis offer a broad template for appropriation wherein “environmental pollutant” can be replaced by any other perceived contamination—even individual bodies, like those of immigrants (or, in terms of this analysis, the homeless). Cisneros argues the adverse effects of contamination discourses are twofold: not only do they position immigrants “as threatening substances, denying them agency and reinforcing common stereotypes” but they also “inform society’s relationship to immigrants and they influence the direction of public policy on immigration.”43 When opponents of the public presence of homeless bodies gathered in meal-­sharing, for example, articulate their concerns in terms of the threat “that visible homelessness is hurting tourism and business in the town,” they work with a similar metaphorical construction: the homeless body as pollutant.44 Advocates seeking to counter such negative metaphorical representations might offer new visions of their own. This seems to be the primary motivation in seeking out new terms for homelessness (referring to “people experiencing homelessness” or homeless “neighbors” or “guests”—a valuable rhetorical inversion of the phrase “homeless people,” which seems to define individuals by their housing status alone). But the display of homeless bodies might also provide an avenue for challenging the characterization of homeless presence as dangerous contaminant to public space and healthy communities. Gerard Hauser has investigated this potentiality in his study of how prisoners of conscience “often find the body as their rhetorical means of last resort, but often also their most (perhaps only) effective rhetorical weapon to confront and best the state.”45 Marshaling bodies as a form of argument entails presenting a corporeal presence as “a particular case, a source of evidence and argument, an exemplification or what Aristotle would have called argument by paradigma or example.”46 In the specific case

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of prisoners’ hunger strikes, Hauser notes that the starving body functions to prompt a moral dilemma for authorities: “The fasting body cannot force the authority to cave in, but public display of helplessness before a superior power presents itself as paradigmatic for the society’s moral economy.”47 For Hauser, such cases demonstrate the profound rhetorical effects of bodies as argument, particularly when prisoners are cut off from any other means of public address.48 Building from rhetorical theorists’ assertion of the body’s rhetoricity or potentiality to function as a form of public argument, I examine the HWC as an important public performance that possibly contributes to the refiguration of the homeless body from pollutant to positive presence. The organizers certainly hold up their success stories—HWC competitors who have, thanks to the tournament, rehabilitated their lives to secure housing and jobs, or to overcome their addictions—as a direct challenge to the discourse of contamination.49 But more germane for our purposes here is an investigation of how the homeless body as presented in the HWC pursues an unconventional rhetorical remedy for homeless exclusion by prompting the revision of housed publics’ attitudes toward the homeless.

The Homeless World Cup Advocacy Model The unconventional advocacy under discussion in this chapter enters the public conversation at the point where homeless bodies are characterized as a contaminating presence in public space. Working against the institutional impulse to situate all citizens into their appropriate categories—homeless or housed, public or private, pollution or purification, abled or disabled—the HWC, an international street soccer tournament, seeks to upset the categories established as well as to stage the occasion for transforming public attitudes about homelessness, civic engagement, and individual ability. The first HWC took place in Graz, Austria, in 2003, and eighteen soccer teams solely comprising homeless citizens of countries around the world participated in the first of what would become an annual international soccer tournament. The HWC is not the first organized sport association for people experiencing homelessness; the tournament grew out of local street soccer leagues in urban areas across the globe that have been operating for years as an alternative assistance program for the homeless. Though it grew out of these unaffiliated street soccer leagues, it in turn “has triggered and supports grassroots football projects in over 70 nations working with over

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30,000 homeless and excluded people throughout the year.”50 Its methods may be unorthodox, but its aim is clear: “There are one billion homeless people living in our world today. The Homeless World Cup exists to end this, so we all have a home, a basic human need.”51 The HWC model takes on the dual challenges of improving both the lives of its participants and the communities that may be inhospitable to them because of their homelessness. As “an aspirational goal for players,” appearing in the HWC tournament represents an experience that proves “transformational for both participants and members of the audience” because it “challenges attitudes towards homelessness.”52 The organizers imagine the transformative potential of the HWC event in terms of how it situates the participants in relation to each other, the audience, and larger communities: “Players represent their country in front of a supportive audience when previously they were alienated from mainstream society. They are given the opportunity to travel as well as meet people who have faced similar challenges. The tournament is designed to be competitive, but its special structure and emphasis on fair play mean that everyone plays until the last day. There are several levels of competition and trophies to win, providing a sense of achievement for teams of all skill levels.”53 Initially, the HWC consisted of mixed-­gender teams competing for the different levels of trophies awarded.54 However, starting in 2008, the HWC began to award a separate Women’s Homeless World Cup, and mixed-­ gender teams continue to compete for the Homeless World Cup.55 Within the tournament, mixed-­gender groups compete for six levels of trophies, the highest of which is the Homeless World Cup; all-­female teams compete for an additional six levels of trophies, the highest of which is the Women’s Homeless World Cup.56 The HWC got its start as the brainchild of Mel Young, a British homeless advocate who spent years working for the homeless communities in Scotland by creating the first street paper there. Launched in 1993, The Big Issue in Scotland was published twice a month and sold by homeless vendors who were contracted to keep 60 percent of the cover price.57 Young had gotten the idea from street-­paper vendors he had seen selling The Big Issue in London, and The Big Issue in Scotland was his attempt “to illustrate that the homeless were not simply a statistic, but were individuals, and we wished to present them not as numbers but as people. There was a need to create an alternative to begging, and it was essential to alter the landscape in terms of attitude and interaction.”58 Even in his initial work as a street-­paper publisher, Young’s advocacy exhibited the beginnings of the rhetorical remedy that would come to characterize his major project, the HWC; namely, his emphasis on

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facilitating interaction on the streets between homeless and housed as fellow citizens is the point at which his resistance to the public order–generating impulse of much antihomeless legislation and informal exclusion begins. Where an institutional authority overseeing the city might aim to design its spaces to encourage better civic interaction and protect from disruptions of movement and commerce, Young places that potential in the hands of citizens themselves, creating the opportunity for transformative encounters, rather than the means to avoid such encounters (as the criminalization of homelessness functions). Young’s founding of The Big Issue in Scotland led him to participate in the International Network of Street Papers (INSP), a global organization of local publications produced under the model Young used: the publishers provide the street papers, and homeless vendors sell copies on the street, keeping a portion of the profit as income. The INSP is an ever-­growing network of homeless advocacy and employment; at present, its members include over one hundred street papers in approximately forty countries around the globe, and the INSP has employed over 250,000 individuals since it was founded in 1994.59 In his role as publisher of The Big Issue in Scotland and a member of the INSP, Young traveled around the world to visit other street-­paper operations and attend the annual meeting of INSP members, which allowed “representatives from each paper [to] come together for moral support, exchange of ideas and the formulation of new thinking. These gatherings would bring an extra dimension to our work and we would return to our respective papers fuelled with energy and inspiration.” But one fact troubled Young: the conference participants “were all editors, and board members. What about our vendors? If only there was a way they could experience something like this.”60 Though the INSP conferences did not offer an opportunity for the street-­ paper vendors to gather together, it was at the sixth annual INSP conference in 2001 that Young and Harald Schmied brainstormed the idea of bringing the street-­paper vendors from around the globe to meet each other once a year. They were immediately presented with a number of problems: “How could we get a Russian vendor across Europe if he or she wasn’t even recognized by their own authorities? Visa restrictions, employment laws and social security issues would cause additional headaches. And there was also the problem of communication.”61 Since street-­paper vendors would be coming from countries on every continent, they could hardly be expected to speak the same language, or any single common language through which they would be able to understand each other at all. Momentarily stumped, the men had

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difficulty imagining how these various bureaucratic and cultural obstacles might be overcome, but “it was then that football was mentioned. The game was an international language, someone said. People understood the simplicity of football and could play the game easily without needing to understand a word of the opposition side. This was the answer, we quickly concluded: organize matches between teams representing street newspapers.”62 Thus, the HWC was born. In its first year, the tournament was hosted in Graz and attracted just under twenty teams, but the organization’s mission statement asserted early on, “We aim to be the most reputable organization to use sports as a means for social inclusion, involving one million players by 2012.”63 As of 2016, they have achieved their goal, noting on their website that the tournament alone brings in five hundred players each year, and the HWC movement brings together seventy-­three national partners from over four hundred cities around the globe, “with 100,000 homeless people involved every year.”64 Growing in popularity every year, the HWC has undoubtedly benefited from greatly increased publicity following the wide release of a documentary film featuring the 2006 HWC in Cape Town, South Africa.65 The HWC’s increasing popularity is perhaps the most immediate reason for examining it in the context of a larger study of U.S. homeless advocacy: as it grows in scope and following, it represents one of the most successful publicity-­generating approaches to raising awareness of homeless suffering and getting public audiences involved in community responses to homelessness. The HWC functions as a compelling exemplar for U.S. activists invested in challenging discriminatory rhetorics of homeless exclusion and undermining associations that link homeless encounters with feelings of disgust. As such, I see the value in incorporating this particular case to lie more with its inventive and productive deviation from the rhetorical conventions of traditional homeless advocacy in the United States, particularly in its challenging of the broken-­bodies trope that establishes the urgent need for homeless assistance on the depiction of ongoing homeless suffering. I cannot and do not attempt to speak to the reception, evaluation, or usefulness of this advocacy model to activists working in other national contexts. In this chapter, I am more interested in how participation in and spectatorship of this international event by U.S. public audiences may intervene in the rhetorical constraints faced by U.S. homeless advocates. Thus my analysis of this case focuses on how the HWC model can be embraced by U.S. homeless advocates looking to challenge the anxieties about deficient citizen bodies that underwrite discrimination and exclusion of people experiencing homelessness in the United States by circulating alternative rhetorics in which

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HWC participants appear as the embodiment of their communities, rather than broken castoffs in need of aid. As I argue in the following analysis, the HWC’s rhetorical significance for contemporary U.S. homeless advocacy stems from the ways it upends the conventional anxiety about citizens’ bodies, and homeless bodies in particular, by making a number of important rhetorical interventions. First, the HWC rejects the conception of homeless bodies as pollution contaminating public spaces in favor of a characterization of homeless bodies as untapped resources of unique ability and insight. Second, it positions a housed public as an interested and supportive spectator invested in the success of functioning homeless publics. And finally, the HWC re-­presents individuals experiencing homelessness as representatives of the nation, rather than those rejected from the civic body. To illustrate these rhetorical interventions that, I will argue, mark the HWC as a productive alternative to the broken-­bodies trope of conventional homeless advocacy, I examine a variety of materials designed and disseminated by the event organizers to explain, document, publicize, and grow their event. These artifacts include major publications, such as the HWC founder’s memoir and the award-­winning documentary telling the story of the 2006 HWC held in Cape Town, South Africa. I also look to public interviews given by the organizers and participants, media coverage of the annual events, and the HWC website to discern how the HWC model reinvents the civic standing of participating players, justifies the efficacy of its approach to homeless advocacy, articulates its goals in circulating emancipatory visions of people experiencing homelessness, and aims to intervene in one of the most significant and enduring social justice challenges by persuading nations around the globe to work more diligently to end homelessness within their communities. Through these various outreach measures, the HWC presents a model of homeless advocacy that activists, working in their home communities, may consider as an alternative to the documentation and circulation of images of homeless suffering.

From Homeless Outcasts to Soccer Stars The first and most basic rhetorical intervention the HWC pursues relates to recharacterizing homeless bodies as untapped resources of unique ability and insight. In order to do so, they must create a tournament structure that inverts the standard criteria by which athletic bodies are selected and celebrated in typical competitions, thus working, in Christine Harold’s

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terms, to “deny viewers a rational framework through which to comfortably account for them,” and to “encourage viewers to find other ways to make sense of their appeal.”66 Like the non-­normative fashion photographs that Harold examines, the HWC events disrupt dominant discourses about the suitability of homeless bodies for public participation, inclusion, and athletic competition. To this end, the organizers design training programs and structure the competition of the tournament itself as a showcase for the unique abilities and experiences of homeless bodies. The rules of the HWC single out individuals experiencing homelessness as those exceptionally qualified to participate and succeed in this unconventional competition. Players on national teams must meet the following criteria: Mandatory criteria: • Be at least 16 years old (must have turned 16 before 01.07.2016) • Have not taken part in previous Homeless World Cup tournaments Players must meet at least one of the following criteria: • Have been homeless at some point after 01.07.2015, in accordance with the national definition of homelessness • Make their main living income as street-­paper vendor • Asylum seekers currently without positive asylum status or who were previously asylum seekers but obtained residency status after 01.07.2105 • Currently in drug or alcohol rehabilitation and also have been homeless at some point in the past two years (post 01.07.2014)67 The competition is thus designed with the constraints of life on the streets in mind, and the criteria for participation reverse usual expectations for selected athletes in that instead of requiring the most conventionally fit bodies possible, they reaffirm the ability of those generally thought to be too broken to participate meaningfully in public life (e.g., those struggling with addiction or lacking basic life-­sustaining resources). In constructing a vision of the ideal competitor as one who has suffered from homeless experiences, the HWC suggests that homeless life cannot simply be reduced to a handicap that prevents success; it is the struggles of the homeless that qualify HWC athletes as best positioned to succeed in this unconventional competition. The tournament itself is based on a fairly standard model of athletic competition, but the form of the games adapts conventional soccer to some of the

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idiosyncrasies of street life. The court is markedly smaller than full soccer fields (twenty-­two by sixteen meters) and the games are played on concrete courts that mimic streets instead of grass fields. These courts are surrounded by wooden half-­walls off of which the ball may be bounced in the course of passing between players.68 Games are short and extremely fast paced: each match consists of two seven-­minute halves with a one-­minute break in between.69 Beyond the competition, the entire HWC event is structured as a blend between tournament and conference: the players assemble in the host city as much for the purpose of socialization as for competition. Here, Young believes he has found an ideal match between soccer and homeless advocacy, because the HWC has “proved that sport could provide the basis for social integration.”70 And Young articulates the reason for the HWC’s social success in terms of its rejection of conventional advocacy approaches: The world these days demands information. Everything must be analyzed, dissected, and categorized. We live in an age of information overload. Sometimes, it feels like the public reference library has invaded our brains. “I can take no more,” I hear myself saying sometimes. . . . I’ve always been a bit anti when it comes to research and analysis concerning homelessness. The public sector, in particular, wants to justify its spending and to establish if its strategy is working. There is plenty of logic in all this but it is just overdone. There’s too much of it and it’s overanalyzed to such a point that it becomes irrelevant.71 Here, Young critiques the narrow-­sighted pursuit of scientific and technological progress as a means to solving problems that are, at their root, social. In contrast, the HWC views “homeless people and those living in poverty [as] human beings. They are not items which can be measured. Sure, we can observe and learn and make recommendations which hopefully lead to solutions. To me, the overall objective is to end homelessness altogether. We do that by working together and by creating inclusive societies where we respect each other.”72 The emphasis on inclusion—which necessitates transforming what typically manifests as public disgust into public acceptance and identification—marks the HWC as a rhetorical intervention aiming to challenge the uncritically accepted social hierarchies and political orders that situate people experiencing homelessness outside the civic body. The work of the HWC does not terminate in transforming homeless bodies into public athletes, however. The second of the HWC’s rhetorical interventions comes in the form of positioning the housed audience as

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interested spectators to the success of homeless actors, rather than indifferent passersby who may try to avoid, but cannot relate to, the contaminating presence of homeless bodies in public. As we saw earlier in this chapter, metaphors of pollution position public audiences as fundamentally separate from and incompatible with those rhetorically constituted as contamination; thus conditions for identification disappear as publics are divided and dispersed, rather than united across difference. In the HWC model, refiguring the broader public as spectators dependent on the performance of the participants, rather than citizens who are threatened by their potential action, is a central organizing commitment for achieving attitudinal and social change. On this count, the HWC seems to be enjoying more success than even they could have anticipated, and the organizers note their surprise and delight at the unexpected numbers of housed citizens who came to the inaugural HWC as excited spectators: And it wasn’t just the media who were being carried along by the excitement of it all. The crowds coming to watch the games had been growing steadily and their enjoyment was obvious. People who loved sport were relishing the excitement of the competition, especially having witnessed Austria being involved in a pulsating qualifying section. But it was not just a football tournament. The circumstances of the players added a special dimension that appeared to connect with the spectators. They cheered, no matter what country the player came from, and no matter how brilliant or poor at football they happened to be.73 As Young’s reflection on the initial enthusiasm from housed spectators watching the tournament shows, there is something of an inversion happening at the HWC wherein housed citizens no longer define the legitimacy of their public presence in contrast with the illegitimacy of a homeless occupation of public space. Instead, what the tournaments facilitate is an opportunity for housed and homeless bodies to cohabitate the same public event as peers whose attendance is not identical but in different ways necessary for the successful implementation of the HWC model. At the HWC tournaments, homeless presence does not violate the civic order; it makes civic community possible through the players’ participation and interaction with housed spectators. This transformation of the typical interaction between homeless and housed stands out to Young as one of the most powerful contributions the HWC ultimately makes in advocating for the homeless:

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There was an evening when Harald and I were standing by the main arena when we became aware of a commotion on the streets nearby. The Dutch squad were approaching and people who had been sitting at cafes had risen to their feet and had begun applauding. There were children running up to the players and demanding that they sign autographs, and the team was being followed by a band of supporters. It was a remarkable sight. Harald and I looked at each other. “So, that will be homeless people, then,” we said in unison.74 The housed audience transformed into fans of homeless publics exceeds such moments of impromptu support, as well. Over the course of successive HWC events, far-­reaching networks of fans have coordinated online on social media sites like Facebook to follow the progress of their favorite players. People travel around the world for the opportunity to join the audience of the HWC, and at the 2016 tournament in Glasgow, Scotland, approximately eighty thousand fans assembled to cheer on their favorite teams.75 But at the games, it is not just the housed that sit in the stands to cheer the HWC teams on. While other teams are playing, HWC competitors join the housed as members of the audience whose spectatorship contributes to the success of the overall event.76 The homeless move rather seamlessly from being the object of attention to the position of the audience, suggesting that the civic encounter constructed by the HWC moves beyond simply inverting a homeless-­housed hierarchy. Instead, the HWC demonstrates how the lines typically drawn between homeless outsiders and housed insiders result from particular rhetorical constructions—and thus may be reconstructed when communities cease to maintain the strict dichotomy of homeless and housed bodies, and instead affirm the potential for relationships between publics to function and evolve across many moments of identification and cooperation. The final rhetorical intervention the HWC makes that marks its work as distinct from conventional homeless advocacy emerges as the tournament provides the opportunity for the homeless players to occupy a public stage as celebrated representatives of their nations, rather than castoffs excluded from their communities back home. This intervention comes across most clearly in the internationally acclaimed documentary made about the 2006 HWC tournament, Kicking It, which was an official selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, and the 2008 Silverdocs Film Festival. A widely distributed and screened film that documented

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the 2006 HWC tournament in South Africa, Kicking It provides an invaluable text for discerning the specific strategies used by organizers to transform previously marginalized homeless individuals into figures representing their home countries. To resituate homeless players as representatives of the nation, Kicking It must first define the exigency of homelessness as the disconnect between homeless and housed members of the same national community. Through its profiles of a series of representative individual players, the film then proposes a shift from surveillance of homeless others to the international spectatorship of homeless players as the most important solution to combating the exigency of homelessness, which it earlier figured as the breakdown of social relationships. Kicking It opens with a stark statistic: appearing over an image of a waning moon in a black sky, the text reads, “There are an estimated one billion homeless people in the world.”77 The title sequence compiles a montage of images of homeless individuals scavenging through trash containers on a deserted street at night contrasted with clips of the HWC soccer players and teams.78 The juxtaposed images of a solitary man digging through a dumpster to find cardboard boxes for a makeshift shelter and images of homeless players practicing and competing in tournaments distinguishes the primary aim of the HWC: whereas before the tournament, players struggled alone in the dark, they emerge from the competition as reinstated members of the communities that once excluded them. The narration clarifies how this metamorphosis is possible: “A ball can change your life. You may not have any of those things that most people take for granted. You may not have a home. You may not have a job. A ball can give you something you never thought possible. A ball can teach you teamwork. A ball can teach you discipline. We are trying to make our lives better. And every person here has a chance to make their lives better. All because of a ball. You have the chance to come all the way to Cape Town because of a ball.”79 Of course, the soccer ball alone has no transformative potential in terms of addressing the problems of homelessness, because the HWC is not singularly invested in rehabilitating broken bodies. Rather, the ball represents a useful figure for the reparative civic work the HWC engages in. It is the interactions made possible by the ball, the chance to take public stage, to see and be seen as bodies welcomed into public arenas, that has transformative potential. Against the opening montage’s images of the isolated homeless figure struggling alone in the dark, Kicking It establishes the need for homeless advocacy that privileges the repairing of social relationships above and beyond the distribution of material resources.

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The film defines the exigency of homelessness by profiling six main players in the 2006 tournament. Each comes from a different country, has different circumstances leading to his homelessness, and seeks different benefits in participating on HWC teams. We should take note here that while the film highlights differences in national culture and community, age, ability, and ambition, it elides other forms of difference: namely, gender. The documentary exclusively follows male HWC participants, even though women have participated with increasing frequency since the first HWC in 2003.80 Although it does not attend to the gender-­related dimensions of homeless experience, exclusion, and rehabilitation, the documentary does succeed in presenting a variety of homeless bodies that challenge the normative views of belonging based on housing status. The first player profiled is Damien, a twenty-­three-­year-­old resident of Dublin. Damien’s story is introduced by a context-­establishing intertitle that reads, “A heroin epidemic in Dublin has left hundreds of young people homeless and on the street.”81 Damien appears on screen as one of those affected by the wave of drug abuse: explaining that he used to play soccer as a child, he notes that he abandoned the activity because his drug use disrupted the course of his life and his prior relationships that made participating in the sport possible. As a drug user, Damien was thrown out of his home by his mother, but he has since entered a rehabilitation program and, though he has not been allowed to move back home, his family and friends have begun to support him on his quest for sobriety. Alex is the next player profiled: a twenty-­nine-­year-­old player on the Kenyan team, he grew up with extreme poverty and a persistent lack of food and shelter. These conditions significantly constrained his general health and well-­being, education, and employment prospects. Alex asserts that his real life, one not characterized solely by material deprivation, began when he started playing soccer: Nairobi lacks much public infrastructure, including sports facilities, so Alex and his fellow homeless residents came together to construct a makeshift soccer pitch with whatever materials and resources they could scavenge. At the end of Alex’s narrative, text superimposed over the scenes of the street soccer players gathering to watch a British match on television notes, “The Kenyans were denied visas to the UK for last year’s competition. Authorities believed they had nothing to return home to.”82 But through Alex’s testimonial about his experiences with the sport, the film offers a powerful rebuttal: whereas the policies and procedures of institutional authority may not recognize the informal pitch as a meaningful use of public space, and hence a demonstration of the homeless players’ rootedness

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in their communities, Alex and his neighbors reorder their environment as a materialization of their communal bonds. Next up is Jesus, a sixty-­two-­year-­old competitor from Madrid. Jesus relates his life story as one marked by ill health, addiction, and crime, resulting in his long-­term estrangement from his family and friends. A gifted athlete in his youth, Jesus represents one of the oldest players in the HWC but one whom the coach describes as the “spirit, the soul of our team.”83 After his selection for the Madrid HWC team, Jesus declares, “I dedicate my first goal in South Africa to the wonderful people who work here at the shelter.”84 His recovery through soccer has not entirely rehabilitated his body, which is compromised by his poor health, but it has facilitated his reintegration into a community from which he is no longer excluded because of his homelessness. Jesus describes this social rehabilitation as his protection against becoming “a forgotten one,” a figure like the isolated individual depicted in the film’s opening montage.85 Craig represents the American competitors, and he is introduced as a nineteen-­year-­old who has been living in an improvised homeless campsite in the forest outside Charlotte, North Carolina. Craig’s troubled family life led him to finally leave his parents’ home to escape his father’s physical and emotional abuse. His flight from the physical security of his parents’ house enabled him to begin the process of recovering from the effects of his abuse, as well as offering him a makeshift family to adopt in place of the one he had to abandon. Though he despises his biological family, he has forged new ties with the other individuals living in the woodland tents rigged by stringing tarps over tree branches. There, he and his adopted family have created a replacement home for the one he was forced out of, but even these bonds cannot mitigate the exclusion he feels for being homeless: “You see how many police cars roll by? For nothing. That’s stupid. The police harass the homeless. If a homeless person don’t have nowhere to sleep, where they going to sleep at? If the shelter’s filled up, they can’t get in. Where they going to sleep at? You feel what I’m saying? So it’s like . . . it’s like you have prejudice, and stereotype, that combination.”86 Craig describes the increased police scrutiny as a force that alters his very identity: “I feel like a stray dog, you know. I am somebody; I am worth something. But at the same time, I’m nobody. But as long as you sit around and don’t do nothing, the negativity strikes the mind.”87 Craig has found a way to recuperate his sense of self-­ worth and belonging through participation on the HWC team. Najib, the next HWC competitor to be introduced, hails from Afghanistan and has experienced homelessness due to poverty as well as political

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displacement as a refugee. His introduction follows scenes of the opening parade of HWC teams at the start of the Cape Town tournament; in it, the Afghani team carries a large banner that reads, “Afghan people call for global peace and a world free of violence and poverty.”88 The film cuts to Najib’s profile as a twenty-­three-­year-­old survivor of Taliban violence in his home country. As a refugee in Pakistan, Najib lost most of his family; he returned to Afghanistan but still suffers exclusion stemming from extreme poverty and homelessness. He contrasts his experiences with the HWC and life at home, noting that public gatherings of all kinds, including sporting events, are prohibited by the Taliban. Arenas that used to accommodate soccer games were taken over as sites for public executions, a harrowing image that he intends to counter through his participation in the HWC: “To be an Afghan representative, we should show the world that we’re simple people, and we have no interest in fighting.”89 The final player featured in Kicking It is Slava, a twenty-­seven-­year-­old Russian man who grew up playing soccer in the small village where he was born. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, poverty spread throughout rural regions particularly quickly, and Slava sought better economic conditions and employment opportunities in urban areas. Yet he has found little success, because Russian citizens are required to produce official registration of residency before they can attain legal employment within the cities: “There are about five million homeless people living in Russia without registration. Homelessness is a taboo subject in Russia.”90 But lacking the institutional status to obtain employment, Slava lives a marginal existence. He explains, “I have no rights as a citizen, as a human being. The police can stop me any time for not having registration.”91 Together, the detailed profiles of representative players’ lives and experiences leading up to their participation in the HWC creates a specific vision of the exigency of homelessness that the tournament aims to alleviate. All the players profiled have, at best, improvised and temporary shelter, but it is not their lack of housing that unites these individuals. Rather, the common themes that emerge from these portraits are social disconnect, exclusion, and rejection from political community. As such, Kicking It characterizes the advocacy work of the HWC not as the provision of material resources alone, but as a campaign aiming to repair broken social relationships and stage the occasion for the establishment of new ones. The HWC pursues this program of social repair through a competitive tournament, but the competition itself hardly features in the film. Flashes from games and announcers’ commentary on individual matches appear

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sporadically throughout Kicking It, but the clear focus of the documentary is on the narratives that bring teams, players, and fans together across distinctions in nationality and housing status. The aforementioned team parade, held at the opening ceremony of the HWC, stands out as an exemplary scene in the film that foregrounds the issues of inclusion and acceptance: following a panoramic view of Cape Town in which individual figures, homeless or housed, are indistinguishable from each other, the camera returns viewers to a grounded perspective to capture the movement of the players parading through the crowd gathered to cheer them on. The teams march past cheering spectators wearing their national colors, waving their countries’ flags, and shouting their excitement to be representatives of their respective nations.92 Later in the film, at the end of the tournament, we encounter a similar scene as the trophies are awarded to the winners of the three divisions: Ireland wins the Edinburgh Cup (third division); Kenya wins the Premier’s Cup (second division); Russia wins the Homeless World Cup (first division). Mimicking the award ceremonies of mainstream international sporting events, each division-­winning team receives its trophy after the crowd stands for the team’s national anthem. This moment of rhetorical recognition—the audience rising and looking to the homeless competitors as the sights that signify and embody the nation—produces a powerful alternative to the disciplinary surveillance of criminalized homeless bodies. Craig from the U.S. team articulates it best to a crowd of HWC players gathered around him in the stands: In America, homelessness is a crime. So they’re going to arrest you for being homeless. A homeless person is really stereotyped. When they walk into a store, they get watched. They get watched, twenty-­four seven, and then they can’t even go—like, y’all can sleep outside. We can’t even sleep outside. We have to walk around like we’re zombies or something. . . . If you was to sleep in a park bench, they’ll wake you up and tell you to get up. And if you make a fuss, they send you to jail. And that’s my word. That’s my word. They do that. That’s what they do.93 But the HWC resists such disciplinary surveillance of homeless bodies as matter out of place, or pollutants contaminating public spaces. Instead, the event generates the occasion to re-­present homeless bodies in a synecdochic relationship with their home nations, as HWC players become the newly validated part that stands in for the whole of the national community on

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the public stage facilitated by the HWC. This re-­presentation of homeless players as the embodiment of their national communities creates an encounter between the homeless players and their public audiences that is hardly conceivable within the discourses that marginalize homeless bodies and reject them from civic communities based on reactions of disgust. By creating a space and occasion for this transformative encounter, the HWC model invites a reciprocal relationship between players and spectators through interaction grounded in identification and civic affiliation.

Challenging Anxieties About Corporeality In an interview shortly before the start of the 2016 HWC, founder Mel Young described the skeptical reactions his idea originally prompted, with some observers insisting that an advocacy program like the HWC was “utterly ludicrous” and hardly worth the enormous amount of time, coordination, and resources required.94 Young’s persistence in working past the skepticism to pull off this enormous undertaking is motivated, in part, by a concern for the players; because they benefit tremendously from participation in the tournament, he is committed to pursuing all possible avenues for expanding the HWC’s reach and success. Moreover, Young values the influence for a housed audience in attendance at the HWC: “For spectators coming down to this year’s tournament, my main hope is that they never look at a homeless person in the same way. I want the tournament to change the general public’s view on homelessness away from the stereotypical view of begging on the street. . . . Together, let’s change perceptions and drive impact and change for some of the most socially excluded individuals in the world.”95 One key anticipated benefit to the players, then, is to return to home communities whose recent prejudices against their presence might be transformed into support and acceptance. And indeed, a variety of sports scholars have documented the extent to which such a transformed relationship takes place. Emma Sherry examined the experiences of the “Street Socceroos,” the HWC team representing Australia at the 2006 tournament in Cape Town, to determine whether participation in the competition resulted in meaningful personal change for the players.96 What Sherry found through interviewing the Street Socceroo team members is that participation did in fact increase their “sense of community, and for some, a sense of family . . . [that] provided a source of both support and reflection.”97 This discovery of newly forged communal and familial bonds invested the players in reciprocal relationships

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of mutual concern and obligation that they carried beyond the training and participation in the tournament itself. Sherry’s optimism for the HWC’s potential to result in positive improvements in the lives of its participants is not universally shared, however. Conducting a similar set of interviews with a different squad, the United Kingdom team that traveled to the inaugural HWC in Graz, Jonathan Magee and Ruth Jeanes document the range of diverse outcomes that are possible for HWC participants.98 Through their interviews throughout training, during the competition, and after returning to the United Kingdom once the tournament had concluded, Magee and Jeanes discovered that for some HWC players, the tournament structure only exacerbated their sense of failure and exclusion: “Their interactions with the HWC as an alternative socially constituted support structure mirrored the interactions and experiences they have in their everyday lives. They could not ‘effectively compete’ and were ridiculed and degraded by both opposition and the crowd because of this. . . . The HWC effectively replicated the difficulties that our participants experienced when attempting to engage actively with key structures in their wider lives.”99 While acknowledging that many players may indeed benefit from participation in the HWC, Magee and Jeanes suggest that continued scrutiny of the model is warranted, particularly given that “competitive sport is by its nature exclusionary,” guaranteeing in advance that only some participants will excel in this structure, and creating an environment in which “success/ failure is a central component, publicly visible and judged.”100 Additionally, Magee has highlighted the hierarchies that emerge given the different background, preparation, and resources enjoyed by HWC teams: while his interviews establish that the 2003 Welsh HWC squad did benefit from increased motivation and self-­esteem from their participation, “there was a clear gulf between elite and non-­elite teams,” and the Welsh squad felt simultaneously celebrated in and excluded from the community of HWC participants.101 Of course, we do not and should not require a guaranteed positive outcome in order to support advocates’ attempts to reverse homeless marginalization. That the HWC has benefited some participants more than others does not invalidate its potential to envision and enact more just treatment of people experiencing homelessness. On what grounds, then, should we defend and pursue this advocacy model as a useful approach? I argue that the key features of the HWC that we should promote as innovative and promising developments in homeless advocacy are threefold: the HWC supplements traditional institutional approaches to resource provision, challenges prejudicial views of homeless bodies, and enriches the civic imaginary of the

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community as a whole. These accomplishments may provide a useful guide to activists of all stripes, not just those engaged in homeless advocacy. I conclude by reflecting on each of these benefits in turn. First, the HWC supplements a traditional “hot and a cot” model of resource provision that emphasizes administration to broken homeless bodies as the most pressing and urgent concern. This model takes homeless assistance out of public places, just as antihomeless legislation removes homeless bodies from public sight, and resituates the compassionate care for the homeless in the semiprivate arena of social service institutions. In other words, administering to the broken bodies of the homeless in this way does little to intervene in the logic that excludes a homeless presence in public and provokes reactions of disgust and rejection from a housed public. The HWC reimagines administering to the harms of homelessness in terms of both material and rhetorical remedies: not only does it open up new opportunities for people experiencing homelessness to receive the food, shelter, and medical care they need, but it also involves a housed audience of appreciative spectators as an essential component of healing homeless suffering. In doing so, the HWC helps us navigate some of the most longstanding anxieties about homeless bodies in particular and citizens’ bodies in general. Against discriminatory attitudes toward the appearance of the homeless in public, the HWC carves out spaces where homeless appearance is the main purpose for gathering in public and participating in community events. Where communities typically fear and discipline homeless bodies because of their perceived dangers, failures, or contagions, the HWC embraces the homeless body as an integral part of communities made whole by their interactions across differences in housing status. By turning the HWC participants into celebrities whose fans travel vast distances to support their performances, the tournament invents new forms of civic affiliation not previously available to people experiencing homelessness or their housed counterparts. As representatives of the nation, rather than its castoffs, HWC participants find a space to overcome the frequent rejections their home countries justify in terms of their bodily imperfections, addictions, and disabilities. Of course, the HWC’s reinvention of homeless participants is not without its potential drawbacks. The HWC aims to intervene in public attitudes toward homelessness as much as it offers assistance to those in need, an approach that necessarily entails both strengths and shortcomings. A clear strength appears in the HWC’s recognition that designing solutions to elevate people out of housing crises may leave intact the systemic forms of

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discrimination and inequality that imperil people experiencing homelessness. Thus the HWC excels in their intentional effort to respond both to the exclusionary logics that marginalize people experiencing homelessness and the individual needs that too frequently go unmet for the participants. However, in taking on such an extraordinary challenge, the HWC must often default to an approach and language that minimizes the important differences in the experience of homelessness for players based on their unique local circumstances. For example, homelessness is criminalized in different ways and to varying degrees in different countries; a tournament model that seeks to mark homeless alienation without rigorously considering how its effects depend on local context may imagine the problem and solution in terms that tend too much toward the general and abstract. Advocates seeking to overcome civic exclusions must work carefully to balance unifying and innovative abstract approaches with the specific demands of local contexts. This is a vitally important consideration that I will return to in the concluding chapter. Finally, the HWC benefits not just the participants themselves (to the extent that individuals competing in the tournament do in fact leave it with better prospects, renewed enthusiasm, more stable social support, and improved self-­esteem) but the community as a whole. The focus on apprehending the measurable improvements in the lives of the players makes sense, particularly if we are operating within the mindset of conventional homeless advocacy, which is oriented toward exposing and resolving broken homeless bodies as quickly, comprehensively, and efficiently as possible. However, an equally important but as yet neglected benefit of the HWC is the positive outcome for all citizens who may leave the tournament with the potential to inhabit communities where faith is restored in citizens’ bodies to be an important (not distracting or disqualifying) dimension of their citizenship. It is not just people forced to live on the streets who are harmed by homeless exclusion; the normative quality of a democratic community can be measured by the extent to which its members exist in relationships of mutual concern and care, across many iterations of social and political difference. By reintegrating housed and homeless as civic peers, the HWC provides an important general corrective to democratic cultures limited by the anxiety that citizens’ bodies disrupt their potential to carry out their civic obligations.

4 the democratic temporalities of the homeless persons’ memorial day

On December 21, 2016, Care for the Homeless and Urban Pathways conducted their fifth annual memorial service for individuals who died while homeless in New York City. This service honored 143 of the recently deceased, making the event a more complex undertaking than the typical memorial service for a single individual. The NYC event honored the lives of those who had died homeless in their community in 2016 by recognizing their passing in a number of ways: the deceased’s names were displayed on the walls around the room; each memorialized individual was recognized with a bell ringing after their name was announced; many were eulogized by the friends and neighbors who knew them best and were mourning their passing, giving poignant detail to their enduring legacies. This type of event stands out among typical forms of homeless advocacy because homeless existence, experience, survival, contribution, and passing were given center stage, and not simply in the form of the individuals honored in death—the organizers, “formerly homeless individuals who now serve as outreach workers and advocates,” featured as a major contributor to the event’s success.1 Many took to the speaker’s podium to relate touching personal details or endearing anecdotes about those who had died. Such testimonials challenge the typical power relationship between (housed) advocates, who are thought to have the resources and agency to act, and (homeless) recipients, who must often passively accept aid on someone else’s terms. The personal memories and reflections at the memorial service instead reestablished an equal footing between homeless and housed, marking their differing contributions as similarly valuable and, perhaps most importantly, showing how the boundary between the two categories is far more porous than the public typically imagines. For example, in a eulogy of Steven Browand, “a client who showed up to each appointment dapper in a suit and quickly secured a job as a hotel security guard,” his friend Andre West emphasized how

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“Browand influenced his own presentation and demeanor.” West explained, “He changed the way I dressed. Instead of wearing khakis and boat shoes to work, I began wearing suits and ties. . . . We called it the ‘Browand Way.’”2 West’s remarks invert the typical housed-­helping-­homeless narrative, not only because West himself has experienced homelessness but because he focused on the particular gifts Browand brought to their relationship, rather than the services he accessed as a recipient of homeless assistance. Featuring this personal insight into homeless experience represented an important theme of the evening, as the memorial service allowed those who have lived homeless to attest to the suffering that the deceased community members had faced in their lives: For writer Philip Malebranche, 58, the hardest part of being homeless was not cold weather, food insecurity, or wondering where he was going to sleep. It was the stigma he encountered, even from family members. “People have their prejudgements,” Malebranche said. “They have difficulties seeing homeless people as like everybody else, as being possibly anybody. There’s diversity among the homeless population that people don’t realize. People think it’s all substance abuse and domestic violence, but it’s a diverse population and we need people to see that anyone can experience homelessness.”3 Memorial services designed around honoring homeless contributions to the community and mourning the passing of homeless neighbors thus exceed a simple function of granting aid or relief to those experiencing homelessness; they additionally extend a call for civic recognition between homeless and housed, challenging the grounds on which homeless exclusion and marginalization have been legitimized in their communities. To this point, I have examined modes of conventional and unconventional advocacy that circulate strong arguments for serving the people currently experiencing homelessness in our communities—whether that be through the typical approaches of increasing visibility of homelessness or administering to broken bodies, or through the more novel methods of creating public meal-­sharing spectacles in local communities or organizing homeless street soccer competitions on a local, national, and international stage. This chapter rounds out the picture I have been developing of unconventional homeless advocacy by engaging an initiative that addresses a perhaps unanticipated question: rather than focusing on what we can do to

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improve the lives of the homeless, this campaign prompts us to consider how communities respond to or ignore the often-­untimely deaths of our homeless neighbors. In chapter 1, on the rhetorical conventions of traditional homeless advocacy, a key trope that emerges as advocates attempt to secure greater public support for people experiencing homelessness is the characterization of homeless life as hopelessly limited by a present-­centered mindset. What should concern us here is not some objective reality of homeless experience but instead how the characterization of homelessness as a fundamentally present-­centered existence limits the agency and standing of the homeless within the civic community. Eyal Chowers has developed an account of the political implications of such impositions of present-­centeredness on certain types of bodies that helps us understand how homelessness comes to be understood as a marker of civic deficiency: “The predicament of present-­ centeredness has two dimensions, one that concerns the relation of the self to the external world, the other the way the self pictures its inner life. Present-­centeredness emerges when the external world is conceived of as uncertain and baffling, too complex to be fathomed by ordinary human reason. No discernable rules are seen to apply to the future course of events; no human will or design is believed capable of shaping it significantly.”4 Let’s begin by unpacking this definition on its own before relating it to the specific case of homelessness. Chowers contends that the first dimension of present-­centeredness results from a perceived constitutive uncertainty and unpredictability of the environment we inhabit. When we understand the world we live in to be unstable and capricious, then our place within that world is as humans doing their best to navigate seemingly random and unknowable conditions. Our existence cannot be oriented meaningfully to past or future, because the past is not instructive for anticipating what comes next, and the future will unfold impervious to our attempted interventions. The second dimension of present-­centeredness relates to “a certain view of the self,” one characterized by “internal discontinuity, wherein each experience of the self is dissociated from what precedes or follows it.”5 Here, Chowers points our attention to the ways in which citizens’ bodies may be conceptualized in terms that deny them the ability to “form a future, not because of unforeseeable external circumstances, but because [they are] incapable of planning and engaging in any sustained effort.”6 When certain bodies are depicted as irrational, lacking internal coherence, continuity, or discipline, they are presented as hopelessly trapped in a present-­centered existence. The combination of the chaos of the external world with that of

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the internal mindset creates an image of civic disability that has been used to legitimize “a modern political tradition that viewed citizens with skepticism and called to disempower them politically” on the grounds that present-­ centeredness disqualifies them from political life.7 We can map Chowers’s general description of present-­centeredness onto antihomeless sentiment to help understand one of the bases on which people experiencing homelessness come to be excluded from the civic body. Doing so equips us to appreciate how the attribution of an overwhelming influence of the present on all actions and decisions made by people experiencing homelessness also has two main dimensions: on the one hand, homelessness is presented as a cause for present-­centeredness insofar as life on the streets forces individuals to navigate an unending cycle of minimally maintaining physical safety and sustenance. This is Chowers’s initial focus on environment, where present-­centeredness is an attitude that results from the uncertainty surrounding us. If we return to the testimonials from people experiencing homelessness that are marshaled as evidence in conventional advocacy reports for the urgency of the problem, we can recall descriptions that highlight the homeless life as one of basically treading water, never quite meeting the demands of the present, and remaining incapable of thinking or planning beyond the present moment. Thus the condition of homelessness is thought to prevent individuals experiencing it from attending to past or future concerns, as they can barely survive the hazards of the present. Additionally, homelessness is described in conventional advocacy as a consequence of present-­centered existence, as advocates highlight the emotional and physical difficulties that prevent people experiencing homelessness from moving beyond past mistakes and pursuing improved future prospects. Typical advocacy appeals understand the extraordinary challenges, obstacles, and setbacks that result from homeless life as factors that create the very “internal discontinuity” that Chowers identifies. Conceptualized as both a cause and consequence of present-­centeredness, homelessness appears in typical characterizations to create a vicious cycle that those trapped in its circumstances can rarely escape. Conventional advocates thus point to an inability to move beyond present-­centeredness in order to explain both entry into and inability to exit the cycle of homelessness. And in turn, this perceived homeless present-­centeredness serves as evidence warranting the increased financial support and social services that conventional advocates petition public officials to provide. An unconventional approach to the temporal dimensions of homeless advocacy comes in the form of community memorials for people who died

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having experienced homelessness. These memorials, like the 2016 service in New York discussed at the start of this chapter, are typically organized as part of the campaign originated by the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH)—which, as I will address in the conclusion of this chapter, also operates as one of the conventional advocacy organizations discussed earlier. Alongside its more traditional approaches to homeless advocacy, the NCH coordinates and supports the efforts of local communities across North America to engage in a kind of homeless advocacy that at first glance may appear to accomplish very little in the fight against homelessness.8 Within the world of conventional homeless advocacy, programs tend to be evaluated on purely economic grounds of efficiency and return on investment, and by such measures, the NCH’s Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day (HMPD) campaign falls short as a useful attempt to achieve measurable economic gains and quantifiable outcomes to support homeless assistance organizations. I argue, however, that the efficacy of the HPMD cannot be reduced to its return on investment or lack thereof. What marks the HPMD as a compelling artifact for a rhetorical analysis of unconventional homeless advocacy is its invitation to question and critique reigning temporal norms of democratic citizenship, particularly the articulation of homelessness with an exclusively present-­centered mindset. In this chapter I present a close reading of the HPMD event materials and performances, attending to the ways that homelessness is rhetorically constructed as an urgent social exigence with particular causes, consequences, and solutions. Understanding the nature of the problem as presented by the HPMD model is essential for appreciating how this program of public commemoration offers an important corrective to conventional homeless advocacy that conceptualizes homelessness as the perpetual suffering of present-­centered lives. I then examine three main trends that emerge across hundreds of HPMD programs conducted over the last two decades. My analysis of the civic rituals enacted by various communities’ HPMD events shows how this unconventional advocacy accommodates and synthesizes the three temporal orientations necessarily for democratic citizenship, in that these events reconstruct lost lives, enact moments of identification between homeless and housed, and deliberate about the shared future of a community constituted around mourning the loss of homeless neighbors. In this way, the HPMD model undermines the conventional image of the homeless as inept citizens perpetually trapped in the present and restores the multitense potential of a civic body composed both of homeless and housed.

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Multiple Temporalities of Democratic Citizenship What qualities make for a good citizen? As we have seen in earlier chapters, democratic cultures tend to establish the identity of the ideal citizen by implicit contrast with those thought to be ill-­equipped to carry out the obligations and responsibilities of democratic citizenship. As I discussed in chapter 2, the ideal citizen is conceived as one who can resist the manipulative appeal of the visual, and who participates in collective rule through rational speech and decision-­making, rather than spectatorship. In chapter 3, I surveyed the accounts of rhetorical constructions of civic bodies to show how the ideal democratic citizen is thought to be minimally influenced by their corporeal existence, if at all. Michael Schudson further articulates the transformations in the vision of ideal democratic citizen in his historical account of the shifts such thinking has undergone since the American colonization of the New World.9 Schudson identifies four main identities the ideal American citizen has been thought to take: the ideal citizen has variously been characterized as gentlemen engaged in elite rule of the disenfranchised masses, as members of parties whose rule was validated by holding numerical majorities, as individual voters whose preferences and decisions should be shaped by the knowledge produced by experts, and most recently as rights-­bearing individuals empowered by their protection from the whims of the majority. Schudson’s purpose in tracing this evolution of the ideal citizen is not to lament the changes he documents, nor to advance an overly nostalgic vision of our political past, but to examine how the civic ideal emerges in response to particular historical contexts and to show how our political procedures, practices, institutions, and discourses all converge to construct the civic ideal that reigns in a given moment. Schudson’s phases of the ideal citizen indicate shifts in norms of authority: competing notions of who should rule, and on what normative grounds their rule can be legitimized. My purpose in this chapter is not to draw directly on Schudson’s typology of the ideal citizen but to explore an additional constitutive dimension of the contemporary civic ideal. Put simply, while a particular relationship to forms of authority may characterize today’s ideal citizen as a rights-­bearing individual, this is not the only defining trait. A second expectation is that the ideal citizen is one who masters multiple temporal orientations and is able to move between them—being sufficiently reverent of a shared past and formed by its traditions, acting in the present to demonstrate efficiency and industrious use of available time and resources, and weighing future outcomes and repercussions with a judgment oriented toward assessing

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the long-­term value for the community as a whole.10 As we have seen in the case of people experiencing homelessness, when individuals or a class of people are characterized as being too caught up in a single temporal orientation, they are regarded as inferior citizens at best or assumed to be legitimately excluded from full citizenship at worst. In contrast, the ideal citizen is one who masters all three temporal orientations but is not governed exclusively by any of them; this ideal citizen is characterized by the ability to move, easily and appropriately, across these various civic times. A politics of temporality shapes the image of the ideal citizen, and that image in turn underwrites contemporary policies and political decisions that have real—often negative—effects on actual citizens. Thus exposing and analyzing the effects of this temporal civic ideal remains an essential task for any advocate invested in identifying and overturning forms of political exclusion. Chowers provides perhaps the most robust exploration of the temporal civic ideal in his account of how various schools of political thought have incorporated or excluded particular temporal orientations.11 Chowers examines discourses of physiology and politics to see how competing notions of humans’ physical capacities and their mastery over (or inability to control) time authorized varying degrees of civic empowerment and regulation. The main temporal orientation he investigates is a sense of present-­centeredness, or the degree to which citizens’ concerns, efforts, preferences, and judgments are caught up in whatever fleeting whims and desires they experience in the current moment. When citizens’ bodies are considered to be powerless to contend with an overwhelmingly present-­centered focus, “the distrust in the body is translated into and enhanced by the distrust in the political competence of the citizen,” hence legitimizing the disempowerment of individuals and the authoritative mandate of the state.12 Chowers’s account focuses on prejudices against present-­centeredness in major schools of political philosophy, and the ways such prejudices authorize narratives of civic deficiency on a broad scale. Rhetorical scholars have taken up the question of how temporalities shape the community and individual citizens’ place within it by casting the net wider, investigating not only theoretical accounts found in the philosophical tradition but also the symbolic and material practices, spaces, and acts that construct visions of the past, structure encounters in the present, and position us to pursue particular long-­term ends. Each of these areas of rhetorical inquiry helps us better understand the accomplishments of the HPMD campaign in undermining typical anxieties about citizens’ limited mastery of temporalities.

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In the first instance, public memory scholarship explores how historical narratives, public spaces and rituals, and monuments and memorials may commemorate shared histories and past victories, thus constituting a common collective identity that is established and maintained in the symbolic landscapes of the community.13 The rhetorical work of public memory and commemoration serves both civic and strategic ends: it advances organizing narratives, symbols, and histories around which the collective may rally and make sense of their present, at the same time that it aids partisan interests and ends. For this reason, Stephen H. Browne reminds us that despite the temptation “to think of public memorializing as the work of retrospection,” we must retain the awareness that “public memory does not just happen; however spontaneous the individual act of recollection, shared rituals of commemoration are always in some sense provided for, the strategic and stylized result of an event the interpretation of which already, at least momentarily, has been established.”14 Commemorative rhetoric constructs shared, though not necessarily unanimous, public memory through a variety of forms— textual, symbolic, visual, material—resulting in “multiple memories rather than a monolithic collective memory,” in Victoria J. Gallagher’s terms.15 Taking account of the rhetorical effects of public memory thus requires examining diverse material and rhetorical artifacts, practices, spaces, and events; the HPMD campaign is not reducible to just its promotional materials, organizing manuals, memorial services, visual displays, public performances, or occupations of public space.16 This chapter considers all of these “meaning-­ laden sites of memory” wherein the shared vision of homeless pasts are articulated, celebrated, and offered as evidence of the need to enact widespread community changes in the pursuit of social justice.17 Additionally, public spaces, norms, and rituals may facilitate the kinds of political and commercial encounters or transactions in the present that are necessary for the long-­term development and flourishing of the community. Rhetorical scholars are accustomed to thinking of this mode of civic engagement in terms of deliberation, the branch of rhetoric that Aristotle describes as consisting of persuasive appeals oriented toward the future and aiming to convince the audience of the prudence of a proposed course of action.18 But Arabella Lyon suggests that although “escape from his [Aristotle’s] legacy of persuading speaker is difficult even today,” we might productively challenge the constraining vision of deliberation as forward-­looking persuasion to appreciate how deliberation may also entail a performative act of recognition that exceeds persuasion and identification.19 Lyon grounds her notion of performative deliberation in the Arendtian concept of the in-­between, a

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space generated by public encounters where meaning is co-­created through our appearances within and relation to a common world. This theoretical foundation resituates deliberation as a simultaneously present-­ and future-­ oriented act: “In Thinking, the first volume of Life of the Mind, Arendt is explicit about the place of the in-­between in the present tense, occupying the ephemeral gap between past and future. This temporal aspect of spatial placement—or more actively, positioning—is important to rethinking deliberation not as a means to an end, but as a performance when and where new identities and political possibilities are formed.”20 This generative potential of deliberative acts—the public encounters that forge new relations, identities, and political potentials—sharply resists the traditional disciplining of a present-­centered mindset. That is, Chowers identifies the ways that a sense of present-­centeredness serves to disqualify citizens from participating fully in their governance; Lyon offers us a way to reclaim present-­centeredness as a potential source of civic agency in the form of deliberative acts. Lyon’s performative deliberation is not limited to the present tense exclusively, however. She notes that “deliberative utterances are performed in a moment, but the perlocution of a deliberative act exceeds its locutionary moment, constituting in-­betweens, identity, interests, agency, and the event itself.”21 Deliberative acts unfold in the present, but simultaneously work to refashion our understandings of the past and position us in anticipation of a particular future. As the HMPD memorial events bring citizens together across differences in housing status and, as we will see, create public performances that facilitate an experience of the in-­between, they forge a productive link between deliberative acts in the moment of mourning and a sense of a shared common destiny that demands taking responsibility for and being responsive to homeless suffering. Finally, we see a foundational celebration of future-­oriented judgment and action translated into individual terms in rhetorics upholding and reinforcing the myth of the American Dream—that organizing narrative that hails its subjects as savvy navigators of past failures, determined toilers in the present, and the future beneficiaries of the promise that hard work will lead to success.22 The myth of the American Dream presents a narrative vision of ordinary people acting out the progressive trajectory that leads to a more perfect future society. Their progress is ensured, within the vision of the American Dream, by an “abundance of opportunity [that] guarantees reward—upward mobility, financial security, comfort in later life—to those who demonstrate ambition and industry and virtue.”23 The American Dream can thus be distinguished from other organizing myths, in Robert Rowland

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and John. M. Jones’s terms, because it prioritizes narratives wherein “the focus is not on perfection found in the past, but on gradually achieving a more perfect future.”24 The pursuit of this more perfect future is routinely modeled by the central figure of the American Western myth, what Janice Hocker Rushing identifies as the cowboy who is driven simultaneously by competing values that orient his future actions. Part rugged individualist, part community savior, the cowboy figure is one who must navigate seemingly incompatible demands: “If he does not manifest rugged individualism in all of his crucial actions, he cannot be a hero. Yet if he does not respond to the needs of a community, typically to be saved from outside or inside evil forces, he cannot meet the ‘goodness’ requirements of a hero.”25 Like the broader American Dream myth to which it is related, the American Western myth instructs citizens about the ideal ways to resolve perennial dilemmas that arise in American political culture and thus encourages them to organize their lives to follow the trajectories illustrated by the myths. What emerges in these diverse types of rhetorical texts and practices is a continuous articulation between the idealized figure of the citizen and the mastery of multiple temporalities—reverence for the past, decorous adherence to shared norms in the present, and prudent anticipation of the future. Against this idealized citizen, characterizations of the homeless as inescapably and singularly governed by the present authorize discriminatory policies, laws, and sentiment. When communities pass laws that seek to move a homeless presence out of public spaces, they do so because they attribute disruptive present-­centered actions to people experiencing homelessness, entirely to the neglect of the alternate temporal orientations they can and do adopt in public. These communities seek to protect the integrity of public spaces because, in their terms, such spaces best serve actions oriented toward the past or future: constructing shared public memory or accommodating deliberation about collective action to pursue. What public spaces and forums are not designed to accommodate are citizens’ singularly present-­ centered needs and concerns, like sleeping, urinating, bathing, engaging in sexual activities, and passing time in the absence of private spaces to which they can retreat from public sight. Because people experiencing homelessness must carry out these activities to meet their present-­centered needs in very public ways, communities lacking compassion for their struggles often justify their removal by asserting that these present-­oriented behaviors are the only activity they engage in. Defined by these present-­centered needs alone, homeless presence is thought to violate the integrity of public spaces, and the removal of people experiencing homelessness is carried out despite

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its being an unjust constraint on their rights to appear with their fellow citizens in public. Like the physiological accounts that conceptualized citizens exclusively in terms of their present-­centeredness, antihomeless policies dovetail with “a modern political tradition that viewed citizens with skepticism and called to disempower them politically because of their bodies.”26 The enduring damage accruing from present-­centered conceptions of homelessness results from the denial of individuals’ ability to master multiple temporal orientations. To be fully embraced as a legitimate, validated, and valued democratic citizen, one must be welcomed into the variety of “temporal homes” comprising the civic ideal: “People populating one and the same age converse with the dead, contemplate the fates of distant humanity and their natural environments, and valorize the absolute and instantaneous present; at each passing moment, individuals are presented with different and even contradictory conceptions of belonging and home. Under these conditions, each person makes a different choice in respect to her temporal home, and some will insist on anchoring themselves to particular places after all.”27 As Chowers suggests here, there is power in resisting an external force determining our temporal orientations, and although some individuals will engage in self-­constraint with regards to their orientations toward time, we are better served as citizens of late modernity by “thinking of [ourselves] as a kind of flexible, temporal dancer: oscillating between diverse temporal anchors according to circumstances, mastering time with exemplary timing.”28 Opportunities for resistance, in other words, present themselves in the ways we talk about the subjects constituted by a particular “regime of temporality,” and in the ways our everyday practices can subvert, undermine, and challenge an unjust temporal logic.29 This type of resistance is the particular rhetorical phenomenon I investigate in this chapter, which interrogates the HPMD as a temporal revisioning of both homeless subjects and the identity-­producing practices of the communities that mourn their passing.

The Civic Ritual of the Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day The Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day campaign began in 1990, an initiative created by the NCH to coordinate annual community services held in cities across the United States.30 Along with its National Consumer Advisory Board and the National Health Care for the Homeless Council (NHCHC), the NCH promotes the HPMD model to communities aiming to increase

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awareness of homelessness, cultivate public support for people experiencing homelessness, and facilitate public recognition of the homeless individuals no longer with them. Each year, these memorial services publicize the deaths of individuals experiencing homelessness that have occurred in the preceding twelve months in the communities hosting the event. The NCH provides a general organizing manual to any group wishing to conduct one of these memorial services, and this manual serves as both a template for the events themselves, as well as growing documentation of the evolving rituals innovated by different communities each year.31 Typical HPMD events bring together advocates, service providers, community leaders, and housed and homeless citizens to mourn their homeless neighbors who are gone and to promote a more inclusive vision of their communities. The services are held on or near December 21, which is “[t]he first day of winter. The longest night of the year,” in the words of the campaign’s slogan.32 The NCH makes a common event poster available to all participants on their website and in the organizing manual, and many HMPD services make use of the general features of the NCH’s now iconic visual representation of the event. The sample event poster is the most direct and widely publicized synoptic representation of the campaign’s aims, and examining its variations over the last several years’ manuals gives useful insight into the formative civic orientation of the HPMD model. I approach these texts as examples of constitutive rhetoric, which function, much like the White Papers examined by Maurice Charland, to interpellate subjects through a tautological logic that functions to “require that its embodied subjects act freely in the social world to affirm their subject position.”33 Constitutive rhetorics create collective subjects to the degree that they present a vision of the world in which audiences recognize themselves, even if this recognition contradicts their earlier perceived place.34 As constitutive rhetoric, the HPMD campaign “inscribes real social actors within its textualized structure of motives, and then inserts them into the world of practice”—in effect, attendees at the HPMD are invited to understand themselves as part of a community that comprises homeless and housed and that is built on the extension of civic recognition and dignity which, if they recognize themselves in this vision, they are then obligated to carry out.35 I turn now to a close examination of the organizing manuals to detail the shape this constitutive vision takes in the context of the HPMD campaign. The 2006 organizing manual was the last to offer relatively sparse publicity materials that simply communicated pertinent information about the event logistics and sponsors.36 In the 2006 version of the sample flyer, the

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NCH presented a bare-­bones template, comprised mostly of the following basic text: National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day On December 21, the First Day of Winter, join us to remember those who have died homeless in our community during 2006. [Insert local details here] 37 The bottom of the flyer template indicated the (then two) national sponsors for the campaign by including the logos of the NCH and the NHCHC as the only images. While the official flyer template may have left something to be desired in terms of aesthetic appeal, individual communities created more visually interesting publicity materials for their planned HPMD services. These more original takes on the event poster include attention-­grabbing visual representations of homelessness, as seen on the Worcester, Massachusetts, poster, in which the top fourth of the page is taken up by a photograph of an unidentified individual curled up in a fetal position, sleeping among milk crates and cardboard boxes. Only the legs and feet of the sleeping person are visible as they stick out from in between the piles of items characteristic of the alleyways where many people experiencing homelessness find temporary shelter and an opportunity to rest. Also included in the 2006 organizing manual is a sample flyer from the 2002 HPMD service in Washington, D.C.; this flyer incorporates traditional winter holiday images and design, encircling the title of the event with a holly wreath and printing the short paragraphs explaining the HPMD model and rationale in a text box laid over a background illustration of a winter night, stars and snowflakes twinkling in the air around a tree that has dropped its leaves. These visual cues help the audience anticipate both what is at stake in the HPMD services and what is expected of them: the images of homelessness and winter scenes help clarify how the HPMD model draws attention to the dire consequences of living without regular shelter, particularly in the harsh winter weather. At the same time, the holiday designs so typical of yearly public rituals implicate the community as a whole as expected participants, rather than suggesting that the HPMD is interested only in targeting those who may already be active in homeless advocacy and outreach. In the 2006 manual, we already see the beginning traces of the visual style that will dominate HPMD publicity materials: these flyers, posters, and programs function rhetorically to

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constitute a public that is concerned with addressing the homeless deaths that have already occurred, resolving the exclusions that continue in the present, and preventing future injustices by altering the policies and approaches communities take to respond to homelessness. The cover of the 2007 organizing manual debuts the most common poster utilized over the last decade. Unlike the sparse text of the previous year’s poster template, this cover creates a striking visual contrast between the all-­black background and the single candle that appears against that background, centered at the bottom of the image, and whose flame reaches up through the middle of the design. Declaring the name of the event in bold, all-­capitalized letters across the top of the image, this poster goes beyond simply advertising the details of the event and the organizations that sponsor it. It additionally articulates a distinct characterization of the exigence of homelessness by specifying the type of problem it represents, the shared values that demand communities act to resolve and prevent homelessness, and a call to action. The spatial arrangement of the argument on the poster is as important for shaping its rhetorical effects as the specific content of each of its constituent parts, so my analysis here will address both elements of this rhetorical appeal. We begin with the content of the argument as presented on the NCH’s generic HPMD poster. The text starts by making claims about the most important consequences of the persistence of homelessness. In full sentences that hover over the candle flame and zig-­zag from the top right of the image to the bottom, appearing on alternating sides, the HPMD flyer establishes the basic foundation of its argument for the significant costs of homelessness: Homeless people die from illnesses that affect everyone, frequently without health care. Homeless people die from exposure, unprotected from the heat and cold. Homeless people die from violence, often in unprovoked hate crimes.38 In this initial public argument on behalf of the HPMD, the NCH identifies untimely, painful, and unjust death as the ultimate stakes of homelessness. In terms as stark as the visual design of the poster, the NCH makes an urgent plea for the public to understand that the costs of homelessness—in terms of the harms it causes to those who experience it—are too severe for

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a compassionate community to tolerate. Notice that the emphasis here is on the inevitable future that affects people experiencing homelessness in communities that do not intervene to end their suffering; this is not a characterization of homelessness as imprisonment in the present, but homelessness as being destined for an intolerable future. The presentation of these enumerated harms also mimics the essential problem the HPMD seeks to resolve: the repetitive and parallel structure of the initial statements reinforces the predictable repetition of homeless death. As surely as these statements follow a rhetorical pattern, the poster implies, so too will the homeless suffering they describe continue to lead to a final, irreversible outcome for those who lack the care of their communities. In this way, the series of statements that open the argument presented by the HPMD poster does not simply establish the harms of homelessness; it also implies its inevitability, depicting an exhausting and disheartening fatalism at first glance. This series also provides a causal explanation for each of the negative consequences it identifies. Because so many people experiencing homelessness lack necessities that others may take for granted—like health care, access to safe and reliable shelter to protect from the elements, and the social and legal protections of civic standing within the community—the repercussions they bear occur in the most extreme of terms, resulting in radically reduced mortality.39 As such, the poster stakes its claim in the debates about homelessness by presenting the causes of homelessness as unequal access to institutional, physical, and social resources, and by linking these causes to the most severe outcomes—namely, homeless deaths. The visual arrangement and presentation of the poster reinforces this argumentative progression, as these opening statements are rendered in fonts that move from dark orange hues to lighter ones as they work their way down the page and toward the candle’s flame. Since the poster begins by asserting the conditions that lead to death while experiencing homelessness, and by providing a brief explanation for why conditions of homelessness culminate in such harsh consequences, it must next find a way to construct an argument that moves the audience to action on the basis of this information. It does so by asserting three core values around which the community can rally: Health care is a human right. Housing is a human right. Physical safety is a human right.40

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Unlike the three opening statements, which oscillate from one side of the page to the other, and progressively lighten in color as they get closer to the central candle image, these three stated values appear in rigidly symmetrical order on the left side of the candle’s flame. They match the same bright color as the flame itself, and are spaced evenly, visually suggesting equal importance and a reorienting articulation of core beliefs. They resemble steps in a ladder in that they are approximately the same short width, are arranged in quick succession, and are separated by an equal dividing space that is large enough to distinguish them from each other, yet small enough to tie them together despite this distinction. And like rungs on a ladder, they lead the viewer predictably and unambiguously, giving the reassuring impression that these are small steps we can take to make our way out of the darkness and into the light.41 They also warrant the argumentative jump from the information about homeless mortality presented in the three statements at the top of the image to the call to action included at its conclusion. As we work our way further down the poster’s design, this call to action comes in a rather unexpected form: in light of the injustices identified and the shared values asserted, the viewer of the poster is encouraged to conclude that public action is needed. But the conclusion the poster leads its audiences to appears as a perplexing diversion from the expected claim, given the typical resource-­oriented demands made by conventional homeless advocates. Instead of insisting on policy measures that immediately secure housing, health care, and physical safety, as is typical of initiatives like the others undertaken by the NCH, the NHCHC, and groups like them, the campaign poster leaves viewers with the charge to “Remember our neighbors and friends who have died without homes. Remember why they died.”42 This act of remembering stands in for much more pragmatic, monetarily oriented appeals typically made by advocacy groups, favoring instead a pursuit of a more symbolic intervention: a policy program of commemoration. In presenting this unlikely and unexpected intervention as a key to resolving the discrepancies between the unjust suffering of the homeless and the core values shared by the community, the HPMD poster clarifies its fundamental and formative civic orientation. The visual and verbal dimensions of the poster present the campaign as an initiative that leads from injustice to justice, from darkness to light, from suffering to enlightenment, from disorder to restored balance, and the HPMD is able to accomplish this not by virtue of private medical, financial, or legal interventions into individual lives but because it reconstitutes a community through the enactment of norms of recognition and respect.

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This fundamental civic framing shapes the approach to all of the organizing resources that follow in the manual. The NCH is careful to qualify their intentions in providing these materials to those who wish to plan a local service as part of the national campaign. Their vision for the HPMD campaign events is not one where every community is compelled to replicate the same type of service as all the other locales in all the previous years; instead, they encourage planners to adapt the options available or to innovate their own approaches so that the HPMD service they facilitate will speak to the specific losses their community has suffered: “If this will be your first time participating in Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day, remember that it is a personal event for you and your community. You have total freedom to honor the lives of those who passed away while experiencing homelessness in the manner that you see is most appropriate. This guide is meant to give you ideas and provide resources, not dictate the design of your event.”43 Their openness to innovation and variation marks this advocacy campaign as simultaneously centralized and egalitarian. While coordinated through the NCH’s efforts, communities are encouraged to generate their own original contributions or improvisations on previous HPMD events. The online resources, including each year’s organizing manual, compile an evolving archive of examples of local communities doing precisely that: working within the HPMD framework to invent new ways of envisioning their communities as including homeless and housed, and symbolizing the loss of homeless life in newly compelling terms that might spark civic action to end homeless discrimination. The manuals present a series of steps organizers can follow to plan and implement HPMD services in their local communities. These steps begin with the task of working with service providers and local officials to try to determine how many people experiencing homelessness have died in the preceding year. And while this may seem like the easiest or most basic of all the work involved in organizing an HPMD event, the manuals are careful to note that this planning step may actually represent quite a difficult challenge, because “there is no official tracking of homeless deaths in most communities,” which means that planners need to create such a record themselves by pooling the knowledge of as many individuals in contact with the homeless community as possible.44 The NCH suggests “work[ing] with your local health department and/or health care clinic/program to identify the number of people who have died in your community without an address. Try also to obtain people’s names and ages.”45 In these specific recommendations for tracking down the most basic of identifying information for the recently

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deceased, we get a glimpse of just how far-­reaching are the consequences of the civic exclusion of the homeless from contemporary communities. The physical suffering of the homeless is frequently on display in public spaces, at least until unsympathetic antihomeless policies sweep it out of sight, but the symbolic indignities and institutional indifference or misrecognitions make even the act of mourning homeless deaths more difficult than we might otherwise expect. Having brought planners up to speed on the logistical challenges that HPMD organizers typically face, the manuals sketch out a basic structure for creating the HPMD events themselves. As the specific narratives of particular HPMD services will evidence, these events take a variety of forms and planners have a great degree of latitude in deciding which type of event will work best for their communities. The NCH suggests four basic, generic characteristics of HPMD events be adopted by all planners: they should work with a broad range of community partners, create an event plan that best suits the unique resources and needs of their home communities, collaborate with local government to pair the civic ritual with concrete political action, and cultivate positive media coverage of the event and the broader cause in order to extend the reach and influence of the HPMD service. First, HPMD events succeed best when they are not planned or facilitated in isolation. Thus the NCH encourages organizers to connect with as many community partners as they can identify as interested and invested in the HPMD model. They specifically suggest that “local and statewide coalitions for the homeless, health care for the homeless projects, shelters, housing programs, service providers and outreach programs” all provide potential collaborators for anyone planning an HPMD service.46 Second, the NCH offers a list of typical formats HPMD services have followed in the past, including

• • • • • •

Candlelight vigils Graveside services Plays and performances Silent marches Special religious services Public policy advocacy events47

Their aim in listing these options is not to narrow the potential forms the HPMD services can take but to present a range of options that can be considered by local advocates. “Make sure to tailor your local event to your own

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community,” the manual insists, which can be accomplished when advocates are able to “think creatively about ways to honor the memory of those who have died and ways to raise awareness about homelessness.”48 The listed recommendations are particularly useful in accommodating a variety of circumstances because, depending on the resources available in terms of money, space, and staff, local HPMD events can elaborate on these basic formats or scale them back as needed. Whatever form their HPMD events take, organizers are encouraged to ensure they incorporate “a name reading and identify the number of people who have died while homeless in the local area” because “a name reading not only honors those whose lives have been lost, but it can be a powerful component of your ceremony that connects the person to the tragedy of homelessness.”49 In making this recommendation, the NCH ensures that a collective act of civic recognition, aiming to honor and restore the communal standing of the deceased individuals who were marginalized because of homelessness during their lives, features prominently in HPMD events. Once organizers have determined what shape their HPMD services will take, they are tasked with a series of responsibilities as outlined in the manual. The NCH offers a basic checklist for organizers to work from when creating an HPMD program. Because “people who have experienced homelessness or who still have no homes should be incorporated into these events at every stage,” the manual encourages organizers to begin by making or expanding their connections with “local partners and people experiencing homelessness.”50 Planners are free to choose the date, time, and location that works best for them, although the manual does note that “events on or around December 21st are recommended” because the symbolic force of the longest night of the year sets a somber tone for the events and encourages the attendees to reflect on the isolation and obstacles that face those forced to live on the streets.51 As organizers begin to plan the agenda for the event, the NCH promotes the idea of incorporating speakers that include individuals who themselves have experienced (or are currently experiencing) homelessness because their personal testimony can create a vivid image for the audience. In preparation for identifying the specific individuals to be mourned, organizers must work with local officials and institutions to try to ascertain exactly how many people experiencing homelessness have died in the preceding year, and to collect as much basic personal information (name, age, brief biography) about each deceased individual as possible. Finally, the NCH concludes its basic checklist with the creation of a publicity campaign utilizing as many media and specific publicity outlets as possible.

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The third general characteristic of the HPMD model is to pair the memorial events with some sort of direct political action or collaboration. The manual suggests there are two potential benefits of doing so: not only can such partnerships lead to quantifiable social change in the forms of revised policies or laws, but they can also tap into the publicity networks already cultivated by government offices. They clarify, “In order to attract more attention to this year’s Memorial Day, work with your local city council, mayor, state legislature, or governor. Encourage them to pass a proclamation or resolution that recognizes December 21st as National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day and describe homelessness as a continuing and serious issue that must be resolved. A sample resolution has been included in this manual. You are encouraged to modify it to best meet the needs of your community.”52 Thus, the influence of the civic ritual of the HPMD events may serve a dual purpose: to provide a rhetorical remedy to the marginalization of the homeless by forging new communal bonds, and to motivate institutional measures that can intervene in the structural conditions that exacerbate homelessness. The organizing manual outlines a series of specific recommendations and policies to be prioritized when working through the form of HPMD events to reach out to local lawmakers.53 These priorities include recognizing housing as a basic and inalienable right that all citizens should have access to, thus necessitating local communities’ investment in affordable housing, equitable access to housing, and preventive measures to protect against the potential for housing loss. Second, the manual promotes declarations of states of emergency at the local and state level in order to immediately expand the resources available to people experiencing homelessness. Third, the NCH recommends measures that might increase access to affordable health care to prevent premature mortality due to treatable conditions. Fourth, communities should commit to providing substance abuse assistance to all who need it in order to disrupt the progression from addiction to homelessness. Fifth, laws protecting people experiencing homelessness from criminal and violent acts should be pursued in communities sponsoring HPMD events, and antihomeless legislation should be avoided or repealed. And finally, the manual encourages planners to request that public officials improve and expand their current record-­keeping processes to produce more accurate tracking of experiences of homelessness and deaths from homelessness. The final general characteristic of the HPMD model is a collaboration with the media in order to extend the reach and impact of HPMD services beyond the immediate audience and context. Here the organizing manual helps local communities tap into increased coverage of topics related to

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homelessness that are generally featured during the time frame when most HPMD events take place. Specifically, the manual recommends that HPMD organizers • Make and circulate a flyer that includes important information about your event including time and place (example on page 8). • Update your organizational and personal social media pages and website to promote the event. ° Use #homelessmemorial to connect with others honoring this day! • Write and submit a press release announcing your event to local media (example on page 11). • Write and submit an article or letter-­to-­the-­editor for your local newspaper (example on page 14). • Invite local media to your event, if the group feels comfortable doing so.54 As the frequent references to sample materials included in later sections of the manual suggest, the NCH is committed to providing a kind of rhetorical handbook to any event planners consulting their framework for the HPMD campaign. Leaving the particular construction of community identity and celebration of lost homelessness neighbors up to each group, the NCH nonetheless provides models and templates for creating coherent and integrated materials for this civic ritual. Individual communities thus join a broader national initiative by mimicking the rhetorical conventions of the larger campaign, and by linking their efforts through similar media coverage strategies and social-­media hashtags. The contours of homelessness might appear distinct in each individual community, but the concerted effort to publicize and mourn the loss of homeless neighbors promotes an organizing civic orientation to addressing the issue of homeless exclusion in every place it occurs.

Homeless Pasts, Civic Futures With the general rhetorical features of the HPMD model of homeless advocacy now in place, we can next consider how the specific iterations of HPMD services innovated by communities across the United States demonstrate the campaign’s multiple civic temporalities. As we saw in the earlier discussion of the politics of time, democratic citizens are empowered to the extent

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that they exercise multiple temporal orientations and can manage prudent movement across orientations to the present, past, and future in order to fulfill the demands of democratic participation, broadly conceived, and to exercise sound civic judgment. The HPMD campaign, as I argue in this section, facilitates the development and exercise of three distinct temporal orientations in order to subvert the fear that the real danger of homelessness is an exclusively present-­centered mindset, and to rearticulate the enactment of temporal orientations from individual citizens to civic communities. First, HPMD events facilitate an orientation to the past by honoring those who have died homeless in the preceding year and recalling memories of their contributions, however unorthodox, to their communities.55 Nearly all HPMD services incorporate the recommended reading of the names of each of the individuals who has died. Often, communities will mark each name with a symbol of mourning or an audience response like “We will remember.”56 For example, the 2006 HPMD service in Birmingham, Alabama, included a public reading of the list of the names of the deceased by clergy members whose presence signaled the solemn gathering of a funeral. In the same year, in Dayton, Ohio, the names of the deceased were read in front of the courthouse, and a bell tolled once after each name to symbolize the community’s grief over their passing. In Salt Lake City, Utah, the thirty-­seven individuals who died homeless in 2006 were recognized through the performance of a drum circle; in Seattle, Washington, an organization comprising homeless women performed their mourning by donning the traditional all-­black clothes characterizing funeral attire and worked to get obituaries published in the local newspaper.57 In addition to recognizing the individuals who have died and marking their passing with symbols of honor or grief, HPMD events help attendees revisit the past as mourners take the stage to share memories of their friends and acquaintances whose lives were lost in the preceding year. Several prime examples of this characteristic orientation occurred at the 2007 HPMD events in Helena, Montana, and Salt Lake City, Utah, during which attendees who were familiar with the deceased addressed the audience to narrate their fond memories and the circumstances that led to their loved ones’ untimely deaths. In Helena, Gerard Fortin “shared the story of a homeless friend who died of leukemia at the age of 44”; at the Salt Lake City service, the audience learned of the death of a sixteen-­year-­old homeless child, and through this story “were reminded of the intense vulnerability that faces each and every person who does not have a permanent, safe place to call home.”58 In 2009, HPMD advocates made an additional attempt to extend

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the power of these communal recollections and reflections on past interactions with people experiencing homelessness and make them more publicly accessible by utilizing an online platform called “Bloggers Unite” on blogspot.com. This platform provided a space “where bloggers who participate all write about a particular project on the same day,” creating a virtual site for the HPMD to publicize its efforts and circulate the commemorative narratives issuing from particular communities about those who had died.59 The Bloggers Unite online event made it possible for HPMD organizers and participants to connect with other members of the public interested in discussing homelessness, giving personal testimony about their experiences of homelessness or with the deceased individuals being honored, or participate in HPMD services even if none were planned for their own communities. HPMD organizers additionally use traditional and social media outlets to disseminate eulogies and remembrances of the community members whose passing they honor in the memorial services. The NCH includes Barbara Anderson’s “Saying Good-­Bye: A Story about Loss in a Shelter,” as a sample article that other HPMD planners can emulate in order to retell the personal stories and reconstruct a shared public memory of the deceased in their communities.60 As the director of Haven House Services in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and a member of the NCH Board, Anderson writes about both the specific individuals she and her community are mourning in 2012 as well as the general struggles faced by homeless advocates and supportive organizations. She eulogizes seven people experiencing homelessness that her community lost, and her descriptions of their personalities, relationships, accomplishments, and qualities models the kind of compassionate personal connection that is denied to many isolated homeless individuals in their lifetimes. She recalls the deceased using their nicknames—Charles “Cash” Brown, “Cincinnati” John Anderson, “Old Nick”—thereby intimating that they were beloved, regular members of the communities who mourn their passing.61 Her article features illustrative anecdotes and small personal details giving new life to the quirks that distinguished each individual: Charles “Cash” Brown was a musician in several bands, a veteran, and worked for the public schools.62 Jonelle Akers “played the piano beautifully, cussed like a sailor, and looked over the children as if they were her own, while her own [children] would not even claim her body.”63 Mike Kahafer had “brilliantly blue” eyes and an “infectious” smile, and Tommy Rawlings could always be spotted driving around town on his moped.64 “Cincinnati” John Anderson was a devoted husband and veteran with “dancing blue eyes and loved to spin a story.”65 Jean Ruel served the shelter as a VISTA volunteer

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before becoming homeless and returning to the shelter as a resident with a sense of humor that stood out and an enduring devotion to her daughter.66 “Old Nick” was an informal mentor and protector that the other homeless residents of Louisville called “Daddy” and looked to as a father figure.67 By highlighting enduring personal connections and legacies, Anderson’s article illustrates the ways that the HPMD model refigures homeless life as exceeding the present-­centered characterization advanced by conventional homeless advocacy. Recalling fond memories of the individuals being mourned and marking the effects their absence has on the community thus takes center stage, as the HPMD events serve to recuperate the past for people experiencing homelessness. In Anderson’s letter, she makes a point of linking these particular losses to the quality of the community marked by their absence: “When you bury someone in homelessness,” she writes, “you find yourself feeling the loneliness as well. We don’t believe anyone should die without someone knowing or caring; each of our folks received a celebration of life.”68 These homeless community members’ lives were not singularly determined by a cruel and repetitive present, a cycle of addiction, suffering, and punishment; rather, theirs was a past marked by enduring relationships, however rocky and unpredictable, and interests and experiences that far exceeded their lack of housing. In this way, the HPMD model performs its first temporal reorientation through commemorative rhetoric that re-­presents the past in communicating the stories of those who are now deceased. Second, HPMD events enable an orientation to the present by enacting moments of identification between the homeless and housed, allowing living community members to figuratively stand in for their deceased homeless peers and thus validating a sense of civic identity that accommodates a variety of housing statuses. We can see this orientation most clearly in the case of the innovative visual design of the HPMD display in 2010 in Baltimore, Maryland.69 There, the HPMD organizers planned a memorial service to take place in the Inner Harbor, one of the main tourist attractions of the city and an excellent location to catch the attention of the public and accommodate a large audience. The HPMD event revised the typical candlelight vigil by distributing candles to mourners as well as erecting a display that memorialized each of the eighty-­seven city residents who had passed away that year. The display that formed the stage for the service consisted of two sets of risers, similar to those that a choir might stand on during a performance, that were positioned on either side of the speaker’s podium. On these risers, the organizers arranged donated pairs of shoes, positioning

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them as they would likely appear if worn by individuals on stage. A tea light candle was placed inside each shoe, and small signs were attached to each pair that named one of the dead. By offering shoes to embody the deceased homeless neighbors being mourned, living citizens transfer the legitimacy granted to housed individuals onto homeless bodies whose public presence is either made invisible or criminalized. Mindful perhaps of the axiomatic command to “walk a mile in another’s shoes” before passing judgment, the HPMD display in Baltimore encourages a collective civic judgment oriented to the present, in which attendees are encouraged to develop a more compassionate and supportive relationship with people experiencing homelessness in their communities. A more jarring approach to enacting homeless/housed identification as a means of critiquing homeless exclusion and neglect appeared in a performance piece that preceded the 2014 HPMD vigil in Keene, New Hampshire. In the performance, members of Keene Unitarian Universalist Church’s Arts in Action committee staged what they called a “death drop”: Three groups of three people each will participate on both sides of Main Street and in Central Square. The performance will occur as follows, according to participant Carin L. Torp: After one member of each group rings a bell, a second member will drop to the ground. The bell ringer will then read a proclamation on the issue of homelessness before a third person draws a chalk outline around the second member’s body. Inside the outline the group will write the name of someone in New Hampshire who has died in the last year as a result of being homeless. The performance will continue until every person who has died in the past year in these circumstances has been represented.70 In Indianapolis, mourners even more literally stood in for the deceased in a memorial service that combined the reading of the names with active audience participation. At the start of the event, each mourner was given a program that included a bookmark with one of the names of the deceased printed on it. The HPMD service in Indianapolis incorporated a variety of different formats into one event; the evening included “a responsive reading led by a service provider, a message from Mayor Gregory A. Ballard, a poem reading dedicated to those whose lives were lost, music performed by the church’s girls’ choir, and success stories shared by two formerly

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homeless individuals.” And at the end of the service, attendees took part in the reading of the names, rather than passively witnessing it: as the list of the deceased homeless community members’ names were read out, mourners were instructed to rise when the name printed on the bookmark they received in their program was announced. By the end of the service, the entire audience of approximately three hundred people was standing.71 In substituting themselves for their missing homeless neighbors—in these cases, by letting their shoes, their actions, and their bodies stand in for the homeless bodies that have passed on—the participants at the HPMD events invoke a simultaneous presence and absence that inverts the relationship constructed by demeaning discourses of homeless criminalization. Laws enacted to rid public spaces of homeless bodies mark the public presence of homelessness as a contamination, one that can only be solved through the enforced absence of homeless bodies and their life-­sustaining activities from public space. In contrast, the HPMD services identify the current absence of homeless bodies as the problem plaguing the community, a problem they address by substituting mourners’ presence in place of the departed as the first step to fostering greater identification between homeless and housed. In this way, services organized in the loose structure of the HPMD model facilitate a second temporal orientation, one that constructs a new present by undermining the typical dichotomous opposition of homeless and housed as civic outsiders and insiders, respectively, and reconstituting the community as civic peers united in their determination to end homeless suffering and injustice. Finally, HPMD events support an orientation to the future by incorporating political argument, deliberation, and policy advocacy into the public performances included in the services. These appeals, designed to motivate future changes in legislation and action, aim to invest the community as a whole in caring about the problems associated with homelessness and working to end homeless exclusion and marginalization. Every year, the NCH updates the organizing manual to include a more diverse range of political measures undertaken by communities in response to HPMD advocacy. The 2010 HPMD manual, for example, includes multiple sample state and city proclamations declaring official recognition of December 21 as National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day.72 The manual also includes a generic template so that additional communities can appeal to their elected officials to make similar official designations at the local and state level.73 Such appeals are common to HPMD events generally, but the specific form pursued by communities hosting public forums on homelessness and

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related issues stands out as particularly compelling. In 2009, the HPMD events in Baltimore, Maryland, coordinated multiple evenings of reflection, discussion, and political action by members of the community and across a number of different organizations. Over the course of the month, they held events designed to encourage the complementary goals of educating the community about the conditions of homelessness, building enthusiasm and momentum for pursuing serious community and policy solutions, and fostering community engagement and organizing the public to carry through on the commitments cultivated at the HPMD events.74 This 2009 event series included a budget hearing held on December 3, a moderated discussion titled “Ending Homelessness through Art and Social Action” on December 10, a second moderated discussion titled “Homelessness and the Housing Question” on December 17, and the final HPMD service, returning again to one of the most visible and central locations in the city: the Inner Harbor.75 As the event schedule shows, the 2009 Baltimore HPMD took advantage of the flexibility of the HPMD model to supplement the general memorial service with community conversations that engaged a broader population interested in discussing how their city might best respond to the future appearance and persistence of homelessness. Organizing conversations around a range of topics—budgets, forms of social action, and housing policy—allowed this HPMD event series to provide opportunities for the community to think together, as a civic body, about how their future plans and actions could potentially secure a better environment for all citizens to thrive. The NHCHC’s HPMD webinar documents a series of public forums facilitated by previous HPMD organizers, any of which can be adopted and adapted by other communities; these include “Poor, Nasty, Brutish and Short: Homelessness, Health, and Life and Death on the Street,” “The Criminalization of Homelessness,” “The Changing Face of Homelessness: Child and Family Homelessness,” and “Bars Aren’t the Only Barriers: Reentry and Homelessness.”76 The range of topics engaged in these examples illustrates the variety of opportunities communities have in deliberating about the state of homelessness in their area and proposing, debating, and selecting future paths to pursue. Additionally, HPMD events operate to articulate and perform political arguments contesting unjust policies, a lack of resources, and neglect or persecution of the homeless community. As we have seen, HPMD services in Baltimore have typically taken place in a central public location (the Inner Harbor), but in 2015, the event was forced out of this central tourist area and relocated to an area close to an interstate on-­ramp that has been home to a

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series of improvised shelters and tents. Undeterred by this snub, the HPMD organizers used the location as a rhetorical opportunity to articulate their criticism of city officials, rather than a constraint on the event’s potential. As in previous years, they constructed a visual display that named each of the deceased homeless neighbors they gathered to mourn, and these signs were each paired with a candle illuminating the name written on them. But the placement of the signs was used to call attention to the unsympathetic treatment of people experiencing homelessness at the hands of the mayor and public officials. Hoping to make tent cities and homeless encampments unsustainable, the city had previously planted holly bushes in the places where people kept returning to sleep, and the HPMD organizers positioned the memorial signs “next to each of the prickly holly bushes the city has planted in that spot to discourage encampment activity.”77 Using the HPMD memorial displays to spark deliberation about and critique of the obstacles intentionally erected by the city demonstrates one instance of the productive future orientation of the HPMD model: as much as these memorial services reconstruct the past lives of the homeless who have died, and reconstitute the present around homeless/housed unity, they also function to prompt critical discussion and political action aimed at achieving a more just future for people experiencing homelessness and the civic community as a whole.

Challenging Anxieties About Temporality The HPMD’s success over nearly three decades comes through clearly when we examine the enthusiasm organizers and participants have after participating in the memorial services. They leave the HPMD events newly invested in assisting efforts to advocate on behalf of the homeless, and their encounter with these civic rituals of mourning connects them to people experiencing homelessness in ways they may not have anticipated or thought possible prior to their attendance. The HPMD model falls far short of solving all problems associated with homelessness, but it does provide us with a promising approach to subverting the characteristic regime of temporality constraining homeless subjectivity and authorizing ongoing forms of political and civic exclusion. The HPMD model also usefully illustrates how unconventional advocacy strategies can incubate and emerge even in the context of institutions traditionally invested in the same tropes of conventional homeless advocacy that impose limits on the civic rehabilitation of people experiencing

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homelessness. As we saw in chapter 1, the NCH works alongside the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP) as exemplars of the most visible and influential sources of homeless advocacy in the United States today. As such, the NCH seems an unlikely source for an unconventional model like the HPMD. But the fact of its simultaneous promotion of unconventional innovations that pursue civic remedies and advancement of conventional tropes that undermine its own civic efforts nevertheless should give us optimism for the future of homeless advocacy and for the utility of this type of rhetorical analysis that can tease out the civic implications of the usual forms taken when advocates advance public appeals on behalf of people experiencing homelessness. Namely, the NCH offers us a prime example of how envisioning newly emancipatory alternatives to the tropes of conventional homeless advocacy does not necessitate a radical break with earlier efforts; indeed, some of the best resources for imagining these alternatives and implementing them might be available within the very institutions their civic work aims to supplement. Thus we can respond to potential objections to the HPMD model that fault it for advancing advocacy that is too late—coming as it does after people experiencing homelessness have already died—or critiques that it conveniently cultivates public support for homeless bodies only after those bodies no longer inhabit the shared spaces of their communities. Because the HPMD is an unconventional alternative innovated by a conventional institutional source, it functions in a complementary relationship to traditional homeless advocacy; each helps provide the missing dimensions resulting from the limitations of its rhetorical counterpart. So where conventional advocacy may hone in on individual bodies and their suffering in the present, the HPMD attends to the civic dimensions of homeless exclusion by reconstituting temporal orientations to the past and future as well. And while this unconventional approach to homeless advocacy may de-­emphasize the provision of material resources to bodies in need, its partnership with conventional advocacy models ensures that equal gains are being pursued in institutional and legislative contexts. Finally, the HPMD offers us a promising avenue for identifying and resisting the anxieties about citizens’ temporal orientations—their abilities to sufficiently be formed and guided by the shared past, carry out appropriate actions and decisions in the present, and establish future objectives that are properly aligned with the best interests of the community—and the ways in which particular citizens fail to live up to the temporal flexibility at the heart

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of the democratic ideal. The HPMD events offer opportunities for individuals to inhabit those various temporal homes, to be sure. But even more productively, the event model encourages us to conceive of civic time not just in terms of individuals’ relationships to the past, present, and future, but also to the temporal orientations their collective efforts might establish for the community as a whole.

conclusion: rhetorical constructions of the civic home

In Columbus, Mississippi, a city of about twenty-­three thousand located a half-­hour’s drive from where I live, Glenda Buckhalter makes regular pleas for the community to lend their assistance in supporting those without homes.1 Buckhalter is director of the city-­sponsored Community Outreach Center, an organization that serves residents of Columbus who need help with securing basic life essentials like food, clothing, housing, and transportation.2 In 2016, her request for community support took an especially blunt tone: “I know this is the season of giving and I don’t like to put a limit on whatever people want to donate, we get a lot of clothes donated, we get a lot of food donated, we get hygiene bags, but right now, our number one need is money.”3 The center’s resources are largely dependent on the voluntary contributions of Columbus community organizations, donations by individuals, and some minimal funding from the city ($4,200 in 2016). Given the lack of a dependable and adequate budget, the center is quite limited in the types and level of assistance it can provide for the homeless population, which as of 2016 exceeded one thousand people.4 Buckhalter insists that the city needs a homeless shelter in order to address the ongoing problems with securing and sustaining housing, and that the current piecemeal system of offering motel rooms and whatever other sorts of assistance happen to be available at any given moment is a poor use of the already scant resources existing for those in need. A homeless shelter would utilize those resources more efficiently and productively, but it is still out of the city’s reach at a price of $800,000. “That’s a lot of money and one agency or one organization can’t do it,” Buckhalter explains. “It’s gonna take the community at large, businesses, churches, you know, organizations all coming together.”5 The enormity of such a fundraising goal is daunting all on its own, particularly when the organizations that are trying to generate the funds have to simultaneously manage the urgent needs of the population they serve on a

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daily basis. Advocates are presented with a series of disheartening trade-­offs: do they fully invest their energies in the sort of long-­term solicitation that might produce enough enthusiasm and commitment from the community and private sector to make major goals, like a homeless shelter, a reality in the future? What if the only way to adequately address these long-­term needs is to neglect, to some degree, the critical deficiencies in resources immediately available to those who are suffering? Do they instead prioritize the day-­ to-­day crises that members of their communities face when a lack of housing imperils their safety and well-­being? In other words, do they have the luxury to pursue the kinds of unconventional advocacy that seek rhetorical and civic remedies like the cases examined in this book? Buckhalter’s struggles are emblematic of those of many communities, large and small, that are trying to stretch radically diminished resources to cover the growing needs of the economically precarious among them. In this difficult context, how might we proceed? I suggest we chart a path forward by considering the implications of the analyses I have presented in this book in terms of the limitations of the unconventional models examined here, the form of the civic home they attempt to enact, and the rhetorical strategies we can extrapolate from both their successes and shortcomings.

Limitations of Unconventional Homeless Advocacy What I hope to have shown in the preceding analyses is that there is substantial transformative value in pursuing advocacy that challenges both the anxieties democracies tend to experience in relation to citizens’ judgment, and the assumptions about how visuality, corporeality, and temporality lead that judgment astray. Although these initiatives are not without their drawbacks, which I detail in this section, I find the unconventional advocacy campaigns examined here to be sources of considerable optimism about the potential for initially challenging, and potentially overcoming, these constraining anxieties. To contextualize their limitations, I begin by reviewing what made them such promising rhetorical innovations to begin with. I chose to highlight these advocacy campaigns in particular because they attempt to incorporate elements of both a traditional focus on social service provision even as they are oriented around an unconventional emphasis on civic rehabilitation. Homeless meal-­sharing, for example, is most remarkable for the ways in which it seeks to foster emancipatory spectacles of community—providing the occasion and participants for quite directly

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imagining the composition of the civic body anew and enacting that vision in public spaces. In the process, groups like Food Not Bombs (FNB) also make meaningful material changes to the ways that food resources are procured and distributed in their communities, and they provide meals to those who might otherwise have gone hungry. The Homeless World Cup (HWC) similarly functions to provide basic sustenance to the homeless players it serves, in terms of food, shelter, training for the event, and supportive services after the tournament has concluded; at the same time, it stands out among homeless advocacy models because it adds to those basic services a recuperation of the civic standing of the players on an international stage. In other words, the HWC model does not culminate in feeding, clothing, and sheltering street-­paper vendors in need but instead integrates those services into a larger effort of validating the abilities and inclusion of those typically cast out from their national communities. Likewise, the Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day (HPMD) combines civic rituals of mourning with resource distribution to the extent that many memorial services include segments addressing resource needs, such as those where volunteers hand out clothing, blankets, hygiene kits, and other materials to any attendees who need them. As a consequence, these memorial services begin to navigate the competing demands of administering to the needs of living homeless bodies and commemorating those who have died. Of course, these efforts are not without their disadvantages; the pursuit of enduring social change is never as simple as identifying the magic bullet solution and then setting about enacting it. There are a least four common limitations to these unconventional forms of advocacy that I have drawn together in this project, and while these are not fatal flaws, in the sense of wholly invalidating the approaches taken, we do need to acknowledge them in order to generalize potential insights from the unconventional homeless advocacy models they offer. Namely, homeless meal-­sharing, the HWC, and the HPMD all must make sacrifices, because the form of advocacy they choose forecloses opportunities to fully (1) attend to the variety of homeless experience, (2) center homeless voices in advocacy messages, (3) resist a potentially patronizing rescue myth of housed saviors, and (4) acknowledge the urgency of suffering that homeless advocacy typically addresses. First, these unconventional advocacy efforts never fully escape the rather vague and uniform characterizations of homelessness that I critiqued in the introduction’s discussion of the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion. Homelessness and the variety of needs that accompany it are not always fully articulated but rather are assumed to be a self-­evident problem that

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the public will already understand and recognize despite its complexity. When FNB shares meals in communities across the country, for example, they are attempting, in founder Keith McHenry’s terms, to “model a post-­ capitalist society by showing first that there is abundance—because there is an abundance of food, no one should go hungry.”6 The relative equivalence of conditions of hunger and need in all these diverse communities is taken for granted to get on with the work as FNB envisions it, and differences between the type of need or the influence of local context on experiences of hunger and homelessness are downplayed in favor of ensuring a uniformity of process: “As long as the group is nonviolent, doesn’t have a hierarchy, and uses consensus to make decisions, and the food is free to everyone without restriction, how the different chapters want to organize themselves is up to them.”7 McHenry celebrates this decentralization for its ability to grant groups maximum autonomy and ability to “mak[e] decisions related to the way that community is,” but their embrace of uniform chapter commitments to an anarchist, postcapitalist model presumes a solution that fits all iterations of homelessness without actually accounting for diversity on the ground.8 Likewise and almost out of necessity, the HWC must level the differences in national contexts in order to create an event where competitors who, for example, live in a refugee camp in Kenya and competitors who live on the streets of Ireland because of opioid addiction both represent a common existence labeled as “homelessness.” For some HWC participants, homelessness and displacement is a way of life resulting from broad-­scale ethnopolitical conflict; for others, it is a consequence of insufficient social safety nets in communities where a majority of the population nonetheless thrives; for still more, it results from prejudice (regarding race, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, age) enshrined into law in their home nations. In order to serve its mission—to publicize homeless suffering and to create conditions for identification between homeless and housed that might lead to more compassionate responses to homeless suffering—the HWC must paradoxically sacrifice sustained engagement with the nuances of homeless experience and the highly variable and complex structural conditions that lead to homelessness in each of the nations participating in the tournament. In other words, to make a global audience care about homelessness, the condition itself has to be rather unfortunately simplified and easily recognized. The HPMD, perhaps, is best of the three in avoiding this tendency, since the eulogies memorializing homeless individuals often give opportunities to consider how the specific contours of homeless lives and the struggles they endure are

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overdetermined by a variety of factors. Yet as the campaign moves into more traditional advocacy arenas—for example, when it promotes local and state ordinances recognizing December 21 with an official HPMD designation—it must let go of the opportunity to expound on these intersectionalities even as they are central to fully understanding the harms they seek to resolve. Second, and related to the seemingly inevitable return to a rather generic and abstract vision of “homelessness,” these unconventional advocacy campaigns may seek to empower those marginalized for their housing status even as they predominantly focus on the voices and experiences of the housed public and advocate community. Part of the problem may stem from prejudicial norms of contemporary journalism and public relations, where housed advocates and activists are uncritically considered to be more authoritative or credible interview subjects and thus receive more public attention and dissemination of their statements than do homeless participants. Although the FNB shared meals invite anyone who cares to participate to the community table, the media coverage of the city of Orlando’s interference with these acts of radical community re-­making tend to focus on the experiences of the FNB activists as they are targeted by police, prevented from distributing food, and arrested or incarcerated for their charitable work. Likewise, as the HWC grows in scope and popularity, it is typically the founders who are approached by international media to speak to their experiences with the event, their ambitions, the changes they have seen take place in homeless players’ lives, and the arguments they would offer to a public considering getting involved with the program. As we saw in the Kicking It documentary, the opening events of the tournament include a parade celebrating each nation participating in the tournament, and the players themselves certainly receive the majority of the spotlight during the competition. There is enormous potential in validating and indeed celebrating homeless presence in public, given the cruel and diverse forms of antihomeless sentiment that pervade the players’ home communities, particularly the United States. But we should also qualify that potential by noting that this celebration does not yet give meaningful, sustained attention to homeless voices so that they may share their experiences, articulate their perspectives, and fully participate in the transformative deliberations that challenge their exclusion. The HPMD model makes a point of encouraging organizers to incorporate members of the homeless community in the events and programs as consistently as possible, although it still presumes—perhaps out of necessity—that the organizers themselves will likely be housed advocates or service providers that have the access to

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needed resources to put together a memorial service. Thus these approaches are not ones that seek to organize within the homeless community to reclaim their voice and agency; they are approaches offered to broader (likely housed) publics looking to reckon with their past failings when it comes to extending compassionate support to their homeless neighbors. Even in the process of writing this book, which seeks to identify and explain the rhetorical dynamics of advocacy oriented to empowering and validating people experiencing homeless as equal members of civic communities, I have not been able to wholly escape the conventional hierarchical ordering of housed voices over homeless ones. I have attempted to feature advocacy documents and media coverage in which people experiencing homelessness give voice to their own lives as often as possible to begin to remedy the imbalance. But analyzing homeless advocacy typically means amplifying the voices of the housed more often than those of the homeless. I admire the progress all the advocates featured in this project have made to empower homeless voices; we can and should still push ourselves to do more. There are not enough opportunities to let people experiencing homelessness speak for themselves and be taken seriously in their knowledge, insight, and contributions to ending discrimination against homelessness. The advocacy models examined in this book are a promising start, but we still have a ways to go. Third, the sometimes-­inequitable balance between homeless and housed voices may help fuel a kind of “housed savior” rescue myth that downplays the agency of people experiencing homelessness by celebrating those who spearhead advocacy campaigns to offer new forms of assistance. America loves its tales of individuals who show determination in the face of overwhelming odds, dream up new approaches and solutions never before conceived, and persist in their noble fight until their inevitable success proves that they were right and worthy of emulation all along. We see such hero figures emerging in some of the advocacy examined here, most notably in the figures of Keith McHenry (founder of FNB), Mel Young (creator of the HWC), and, from the book’s opening anecdote, Mitch Snyder (leader of the CCNV). These men are celebrated for their determination to take on a problem no one has been able to solve before and to innovate solutions that no one has dared to try. In the process, the attention granted the founders of these efforts may reinforce a tacit suspicion that people experiencing homelessness cannot act to resolve their own dilemmas, and that housed saviors are ultimately needed for meaningful and far-­reaching interventions. Does this mean we should be suspicious of any attempt by housed advocates to ease the suffering of the

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homeless community? Of course not. But we should learn from this limitation how easy it is to fall in line with the disempowering narratives of homeless subjects reduced to being recipients of aid and nothing more. Although FNB protests, the HWC tournament, and the HPMD campaign have not yet escaped these disempowering narratives, they should inspire us to continue to pursue advocacy that intentionally calls out such narratives of the housed savior and critiques them. This is not a paralyzing limitation, but rather one that calls for improved advocacy that accommodates collective action uniting homeless and housed in their joint pursuit of justice. I began this chapter with a local anecdote that helps illustrate the final potential limitation of the unconventional advocacy highlighted in this book. Put simply, this sort of rhetorical intervention may appear to be too much of a luxury to pursue in the face of people’s urgent, often life-­or-­death needs resulting from homeless life. When there are already so few resources devoted to addressing hunger, health, shelter, clothing, and rehabilitation deficits, it may appear imprudent to devote those meager funds to events that aim for such amorphous, long-­term improvements in the hopes that changing people’s minds about homelessness will also change their willingness to support those suffering it. On these grounds, advocates might consider the purposeful arrests of the FNB activists as more of an interference with the ability to distribute food than an aid to expanding the reach of their assistance. The HWC may seem like a diversion of enormous amounts of time, funding, and donated resources from homeless bodies in need to event planning, promotional materials, and merchandizing. The HPMD may appear to direct advocates’ energies to inopportune moments, those after intervention into homeless lives may prevent their untimely deaths. Pursuing these civic remedies may challenge unjust exclusions, invite a reconstitution of the community across housing lines, and break open a constricting civic imaginary in order to build more inclusive democratic culture in the future—but these rhetorical interventions may also come at the price of meeting the immediate, dire needs of those who do not have the luxury of waiting for relief of their physical, emotional, social, and political suffering. Given these limitations, we must revisit the contrast drawn over the course of the analyses presented in this book between conventional and unconventional homeless advocacy in the United States. Conventional advocacy, as detailed in chapter 1, justifies its calls for increased institutional recognition, funding, resources, and social services as a remedy for a problem characterized by invisible suffering, broken bodies, and present-­centered lives that can only be improved through outside intervention. Unconventional advocacy, as

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examined in chapters 2, 3, and 4, turns to transformative spectacles, celebrations of homeless bodies, and reinstating multiple temporalities of homelessness as a different kind of remedy—one that extends civic recognition as its core contribution, because it acknowledges that working for more resources within the existing system may not do enough to challenge the conditions that led to homeless marginalization in the first place. As I hope is now clear, neither approach represents a perfect solution, and their contrasting orientations might invite advocates to get bogged down in debating which is normatively or pragmatically superior to the other. I suggest we need both, because together the two go a long way toward reconciling each other’s limitations and drawbacks. Since the conventional approach to homeless advocacy has been pursued more consistently than the unconventional models featured in this study, I offer my critical comparison of the two to help advocates and audiences alike begin to appreciate the potential contributions the unconventional model may make in supplementing traditional homeless advocacy.

Theorizing the Civic Home The limitations outlined in the preceding section should give us pause but not pessimism when it comes to the democratic potential of unconventional advocacy models in the context of the fight against homelessness and with regard to the wide range of social justice issues animating contemporary advocates. Although their consequences should guide our efforts to continually improve advocacy practices, we are fortunately not forced to decide between wholesale acceptance or rejection of either conventional or unconventional approaches. We can be mindful of their limitations even as we resist the urge of rejecting them in favor of some other, yet unrealized, ideal and complete form of (homeless) advocacy. What we can learn from the unconventional advocacy models of FNB, the HWC, and the HPMD is that there is transformative potential in tackling the problem of how to invent and circulate rhetorical remedies to problems of injustice, exclusion, and division. Examined in isolation, these advocacy efforts fall short; as part of a larger symbolic landscape—one that comprises conventional homeless advocacy, unconventional approaches, the diverse forms of the rhetorical production of homeless exclusion, and many other discursive sites beyond the scope of this project—these rhetorical remedies may find their greatest values in their charge to realign the assumptions, prejudices, and exclusions found in competing rhetorics of homelessness. We can conclude from these

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analyses that the civic home created by unconventional homeless advocacy comes into being by virtue of their reliance on rhetorical circulation and their combination of self-­and other-­directed performances for social change. Scholars have approached the problematic of rhetorical circulation from a number of angles, seeking to explain what circulates (the nature of text, its fragmentation, its authenticity, and the travels and travails of particular rhetoric artifacts that move through public space and time), the environment in which such texts circulate (changes wrought by evolving technologies, rhetorical conventions, public attitudes and literacies, and interaction with other texts/fragments), and the effects of circulation on a narrow and broad scale (the constitution of communities, the creation of social roles and institutions, the empowerment or appropriation of particular voices, and the gatekeeping function of circulation). Examining rhetorical circulation from all these theoretical vantage points gives us considerable insight into how the civic home may be constituted by the circulation of rhetorical remedies to democratic anxieties about civic abilities. First, rhetorical theorists have conceptualized the changing status of the text that circulates, many in response to Michael Calvin McGee’s fragmentation thesis,9 which suggests that the postmodern condition may be characterized by the breakup of discrete, whole texts into rhetorical fragments that circulate to public audiences who then assemble them into meaningful, meaning-­making creations. McGee takes exception to the discipline’s tendency to orient our study around the act of criticism, and therefore to proceed on the assumption that “what constitutes ‘the text’ is unproblematic—the discourse as it is delivered to its audience/readers is considered ‘finished,’ whole, clearly and obviously the object (target) of critical analysis.”10 Instead, McGee would have us think of texts as “simultaneously structures of fragments, finished texts, and fragments themselves to be accounted for in subsequent discourse, either (a) the audience/reader/critic’s explanation of their power and meaning, or (b) the audience/reader/critic’s rationalization for having taken their cue as an excuse of action.”11 Here, what matters is not the finality of a text but the uses to which it is put in subsequent engagements by audiences, rhetors, and critics, alongside the uses to which it puts fragments drawn from other texts and context. The circulation of fragments both signals and maintains the connection between text and context, insofar as “all of culture is implicated in every instance of discourse,” according to McGee.12 Such implications result from a fragmented culture characteristic of the postmodern condition, in which “the only way to ‘say it all’” involves an effort “to provide readers/audiences with dense, truncated fragments

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which cue them to produce a finished discourse in their minds.”13 In this state of fragmentation, it is not the singular text that matters so much as it is the continual movement, appearance, and uptake—in short, the circulation—of discursive fragments.14 As fragments and the textual formations they come to create circulate, the meaning of both the fragments themselves and their perceived authenticity is called into question. Lester Olson has theorized the former function in part as “rhetorical re-­circulation,” a process that assumes an original artifact and a series of subsequent (nearly) identical copies, which may be redistributed to audiences for a variety of “reasons ranging from solidarity to partisan opposition.”15 In this process, rhetors recirculating “any earlier composition” are able to “exercise a degree of rhetorical agency by reproducing, reframing, and redistributing it from other locations to attentive audiences under different circumstances, which were not necessarily anticipated by the original maker.”16 Hence rhetorical recirculation unsettles the original producer of a text or fragment as the rhetor in control of its meaning; instead, meaning emerges through future encounters with and repurposing of the original.17 This expansion of rhetorical agency may produce a variety of results, some empowering, some exploitative. Jason Edward Black examines the use of Native American texts by Western rhetors as an example of the exploitative potential of rhetorical recirculation. In the case of Ted Perry’s appropriation of Chief Seattle’s 1854 speech, Black argues that “Perry (a non-­Native) redacted Seattle’s speech to retrofit it into his film’s message of Judeo-­Christian guardianship of the earth,” an example of how, through circulation and co-­optation, “American Indian pasts, presents, and futures are symbolically controlled by Western interests that tend to overlook that importance of Native voice.”18 Black’s analysis reminds us that rhetorical repurposing and recirculation may grant continued life to a text, but it may do so at the expense of the voices it purports to represent. Just as the fragments, assemblages, and movements of discourses are varied, so too are the effects such circulation has on rhetors, audiences, and cultures. The notion of textual circulation constituting the audiences it addresses and encounters is a central feature of Michael Warner’s account of publics and the counterpublics that form in relation to them.19 For Warner, texts move through public to some degree separately from their creators and hail audiences through a generative function similar to Charland’s constitutive rhetoric, as I discussed in chapter 4.20 Rhetorical circulation is central to this constitutive process, because “without the idea of texts that can be picked up at different times and in different places by otherwise unrelated

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people, we would not imagine a public as an entity that embraces all the uses of that text, whoever they might be. Often the texts themselves are not even recognized as texts—as for example with visual advertising or the chattering of a DJ—but the publics they bring into being are still discursive in the same way.”21 Thus rhetorical circulation has the potential to create publics, and Warner is clear this is due more to the circulatory process than features of individual texts: “It is not texts themselves that create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time.”22 In constituting a constellation of specific publics, rhetorical circulation more broadly enables “cultures of circulation” in which social roles and institutions are produced, managed, and maintained, according to Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma.23 In the process, rhetorical circulation of texts, fragments, and images may contribute to a process of amplifying and empowering certain voices, or appropriating and disempowering them, depending on the uses to which the (re)circulated texts are put.24 As such, rhetorical circulation is a process with the potential for (but no inherent or inevitable inclination toward) social change.25 Circulated texts may challenge the status quo and doxa of the culture through which they move and that they help constitute, but they may also reinforce unjust characterizations or, through their absence, silence particular voices.26 To these previous accounts of rhetorical circulation, I would add the insights drawn from my analysis of unconventional homeless advocacy: namely, that circulation enables the rhetorical construction of the civic home as a place of mutual recognition and inclusion. This is not a literal space but a symbolic one, produced by the connections forged when homeless and housed are invited to encounter one another as civic peers. None of the advocacy models examined in this study consists of single texts disseminated directly to discrete audiences in a one-­off attempt at persuading decision makers. Instead, these campaigns—particularly the meal-­sharing of FNB, the HWC tournament, and the HPMD services—operate by circulating emancipatory images of civic community that transcend housing status. Circulation producing the civic home relies on a variety of rhetorical practices that support persistent repetition and repurposing of innovative challenges to constrictive or disempowering images of community characterized by the displacement of people experiencing homelessness from the civic body. Specifically, FNB’s shared meals challenge the typical sights of homeless bodies as contaminations of public space by staging new visions of community constituted through homeless and housed dining together. Such transformation might be realized to the degree that a broader public continually

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encounters and becomes accustomed to envisioning community in these emancipatory terms. For FNB, one single, jarringly transformative spectacle of meal-­sharing cannot suffice in this endeavor; instead, the group continuously stages these civic sights because it is the repetition, reuse, and uptake of such spectacles that strengthens the rhetorical remedies they offer to democratic displacement. Likewise, the HWC and HPMD rely on multiple fragments in the form of media coverage, firsthand accounts and anecdotes, images, testimonials, publicity materials, and public outreach, to incrementally influence longstanding cultural prejudices against homelessness and the threats it is assumed to represent for the ability of citizens to participate fully in democratic life. Rhetorical circulation carves out space for these innovative visions to challenge the old prejudices, and it does so by continuously activating the public’s judgment of the types of encounters being facilitated between homeless and housed. This rhetorical construction of the civic home through circulating emancipatory texts confirms Brandon Inabinet’s characterization of circulation as a process in which “patterns of flow and patterns of textual invention and judgment are thus interconnected.”27 As these rhetorical remedies get taken up and redistributed by publics, they help “generat[e] rhetorical sites to cope with new forms of instability”28—and, I would add, to offer rhetorical remedies for displacement. Along with circulating opportunities and provocations for public judgment, the rhetorical production of the civic home also entails enacting alternatives to the status quo and the current marginalized standing of the homeless within specific communities. Randall A. Lake describes this as a “consummatory function” of protest, as opposed to a purely instrumental orientation.29 Lakes’s assessment of Native American protest strategies, which had been previously dismissed by rhetorical critics examining the Red Power Movement as unpersuasive or ineffective, relies on an appreciation of the protestors “ritually enacting both Indian tradition in general and movement demands in particular”; in doing so, consummatory rhetorics are able to “achieve their purposes simply by being; they are, thus, ends in themselves for those who acknowledge the ritual dimensions of symbolic acts.”30 For homeless advocates invested in challenging unjust displacement of people experiencing homelessness from the civic body, the unconventional model of enacting liberating alternatives—staging meals, athletic competitions, and memorial services in which homeless and housed exist as civic peers responsible for and responsive to each other’s well-­being—demonstrates how the rhetorical construction of the civic home depends on a consummatory function in addition to its reliance on circulation.

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Prioritizing the enactment of more socially just communities means that unconventional homeless advocacy gives us a model of rhetorical action that resists easy categorization into instrumental categories of “self-­directed” or “other-­directed” rhetorics of social change. Richard B. Gregg theorizes this distinction by noting the ways in which protest rhetoric of the mid-­twentieth century seems perplexingly incoherent from traditional rhetorical frameworks, because it does not seem to foster identification or cooperation with authority figures in a position to make change, nor does it articulate plausible or reasonable proposal for future action.31 Instead of dismissing protestors as inept rhetors, Gregg suggests that “we can better understand what is happening if we realize that the stance taken by the more radical protestors in the latter part of the 1960s was one facing deliberately away from those persons, actions, and things grouped together and identified in the construct, ‘establishment.’ The rhetoric which comes from one holding such a stance directs itself to the ‘establishment’ only indirectly, if at all, and programmatic concerns become incidental to more personal functions.”32 Gregg envisions these “personal functions” as those relating to the ego, culminating in “rhetoric [that] is basically self-­directed, not other-­directed in the usual sense of that term,” meaning that protestors are essentially performing for themselves and in order to persuade themselves of their own selfhood and affirm their worth.33 As Charles J. Stewart has noted, this function holds true for a majority of self-­directed social movements whose efforts revolve around rehabilitating their standing or contesting their own suffering in their political and historical context; however, the ego function does not manifest in the same way for other-­direct movements, where advocates seek change on behalf of others who are vulnerable and oppressed.34 In other-­directed movements, protestors may still be performing an identity for themselves, but this has less to do with an effort “to raise consciousness, refurbish self-­image, or create feelings of self-­worth and self-­esteem but to take advantage of and celebrate the exalted egos of protestors.”35 Given this typology, how should we characterize the advocacy of groups like FNB, and events like the HWC and HPMD? Do these unconventional models represent the rhetorical work of self-­directed protest whose enactment affirms disenfranchised subjectivities? Or are these examples of other-­ directed movements whose already high self-­esteem is validated through their involvement with these groups and participation in the struggle for homeless recognition? I propose that the cases examined here embody self-­ and other-­directed advocacy for social change simultaneously, because they challenge the traditional vision of the singular protestor coordinating with

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others in both Gregg’s and Stewart’s accounts. Like the protestors fulfilling a self-­directed ego function in Gregg’s conceptualization, housed and homeless participants in unconventional homeless advocacy enact more inclusive communities because they see the civic body as under siege, threatened by unjust antihomeless legislation and discriminatory public attitudes. At the same time, they also resemble the other-­directed movements examined by Stewart because they are not advocating solely on behalf of their own identities, interests, or protections since participants do not ultimately share uniform identities, interests, or needs when homeless and housed act together. The rhetorical constructions of the civic home thus entail two key dimensions: circulation of rhetorical remedies to democratic displacements, and the performative enactment of a civic body characterized by norms of reciprocity and recognition rather than a singular identity or subgroup. Challenging the more common and continuous rhetorical production of homeless exclusion, the construction of the civic home presents a contrasting site for communities to reconstitute and heal divisions based on housing status. Against the more general repetition and reinforcement of democratic anxieties about citizens’ capacity for productive political judgment, the construction of the civic home enacts empowering alternatives that affirm the ways our appearance in public enhances the community, rather than diminishing it; our corporeality informs our participation in democratic deliberation, rather than distorting it; and our collective experiences, solidarity, and aspirations resist reduction to a single temporality. This model of the civic home entails accepting particular political norms, obligations, and expectations, most important of which is that as members of democratic cultures, we are all responsible for enacting the varied modes of rhetorical practice that constitute civic relationships among and between participants. The protections of democratic citizenship do not terminate in the rights granted to us as individuals by virtue of our recognition in formal and institutional classificatory schemes. Instead, we dwell within the civic home of democracy to the extent that we actively extend to others the same recognition and engagement through which we have been legitimated as members of the civic body. In this sense, the value of these unconventional approaches to advocacy exceeds their victories in the fight for expanding homeless inclusion. They additionally contribute beyond the issue of homelessness by modeling the types of rhetorical practices and facilitating the types of rhetorical opportunities that individuals need in order to fully participate in their communities, be recognized as part of the civic body, and extend reciprocal civic recognition to others. To the extent that the larger

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community—not just those already engaged in homeless advocacy—learn and adopt the civic lessons implicit in these models, we can also ease the pressure on homeless advocates themselves to do both the work of providing daily material resources and the equally necessary work of cultivating more robust bonds of civic affiliation. Discourses of homelessness are not the only site for such civic rhetoric to emerge and thrive, but the successes and failures of homeless advocates’ efforts remain instructive for understanding the value of pursuing a civic home for all.

The Future of the Civic Home If we are compelled by the possibilities of rhetorically constructing a civic home as a means for overcoming democratic displacement and exclusion, how might we best proceed outside the context of homeless advocacy? By way of conclusion, I offer some preliminary lessons to be drawn from this rhetorical analysis of homeless advocacy for broader endeavors to fight political and social exclusion, disempowerment, and disenfranchisement in a democratic culture. These include the recommendations to seek out opportunities to speak with instead of speaking for our civic peers, and to reconceptualize civic rhetoric as a set of interrelated facilities. First, rhetors committed to enacting more socially just civic communities in direct opposition to existing democratic displacements should prioritize speaking with their fellow citizens, even when pragmatic advocacy concerns incentivize speaking for those at greatest risk. As we have seen in the context of homeless advocacy, the voices of housed members of communities are too often elevated over those of the homeless, but it may not be entirely sufficient to simply reverse an existing hierarchy or exclusion in response. Committing to speaking with our civic peers involves the dual dimensions of granting others our attentiveness to amplify and validate all voices (speaking with in the sense of talking to one another), as well as articulating solidarity across difference (speaking with in the sense of talking together to a broader audience). Additionally, I propose we rethink civic rhetoric as the practices that facilitate mutual civic recognition rather than the rhetoric that originates from those who already enjoy civic standing. Our inclusion in a democratic civic body depends not just on formal participation in democratic institutions and economic exchanges, but on informal rhetorical practices that secure our place within the community through our affiliations with our civic peers.

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As we have seen, the ways we talk about homelessness have the potential not just to influence public attitudes toward those who experience the condition but also toward the self-­understanding of democratic communities in terms of their relationships and responsibilities to each other, their essential character in the moments they inhabit the role of citizen as opposed to the many other roles they move between throughout their day. The emancipatory potential of generating a civic home within which we may all dwell can emerge from actions both large and small, and in this sense civic rhetoric serves not just to rally support for a course of action but to teach us how we have failed to live up to our civic potential and how we might improve, for the sake of our communities and for each other’s well-­being, in the future. Those improvements come from the mastery of rhetorical capacities that transform individuals from private persons to democratic citizens. The rhetorical capacities I have in mind are advocacy, deliberation, and protest. These are not the only options in the citizen’s rhetorical repertoire, and future inquiries could productively map out what additional rhetorical competencies make enactments of citizenship effective and possible. But at this point, these three in particular illustrate the primary orientations to generating moments in which we appear to one another as citizens through our rhetorical practice. When we engage in advocacy, as the examples in this book have shown, we appeal to our fellow citizens for their voluntary assent in adopting our perspective on a particular issue. In order to garner support for the specific policy changes or collective action advocates propose, they must first prompt the civic judgment of the audiences they address; this audience judges the advocate’s case to either affirm or reject their view of the nature of the problem and the asserted preferability of their proposed solutions. As advocates, we participate in democracy not only by (in some cases) affecting institutional decision-­making and outcomes, but more fundamentally by enacting a rhetorical practice that empowers both advocate and audience. When I engage my fellow citizens in advocacy about issues I believe to be of common concern, I am manifesting our democratic commitment to collective over individual rule, insofar as I seek the voluntary assent of the audience I aim to convince. Hence advocacy operates as the first of the interrelated civic rhetorical capacities that represent an important dimension of inclusion in the civic home. Deliberation similarly functions to equip us to participate as citizens in a democratic culture whose nature and governing norms we create through our rhetorical practice. In deliberation, we perform a joint rhetorical enterprise that links citizens together in ways that exceed the effects of advocacy alone

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as a rhetorical process constitutive of the civic home. Arabella Lyon theorizes this process in terms of “performative deliberation,” which resists conceptualizations found in previous accounts that “emphasize an end of unified action.” Instead, Lyon encourages us to conceive of deliberation in terms of “the moments when the many meet, recognize each other, and share their acts and agency.”36 Where advocacy offers us practices and opportunities in which our values of collective rule and popular sovereignty may manifest, deliberation allows us to carry through on our commitment to widespread participation in the various arenas of democratic life. Robert Asen suggests that we turn to John Dewey’s vision of a “Great Community” in order to appreciate the significance of a culture of deliberation for both individual citizens and the community as a whole.37 Within a Great Community, ongoing public conversations and discussions engender norms of reciprocity on which both the coherence and quality of democratic culture rest. Deliberation in a Great Community realizes “a vision of democracy as a mode of associated living,” and as a result, “local participation cultivates subjectivities, empowers individuals and communities, offers important perspectives on policies, and contextualizes policymaking and implementation.”38 Deliberation is thus a vital rhetorical skill for facilitating the civic recognition and collaboration that are essential for democratic culture to prosper. The final basic rhetorical facility I identify as essential for constituting the civic home is protest, which empowers citizens whose interests, perspectives, or judgments have been overlooked or disregarded in ways they consider to be illegitimate. If advocacy facilitates affirmation from civic peers, and deliberation accommodates engagement between the same, protest supplies an important method of managing conflict without endangering the democratic nature of civic rhetoric. In protest, citizens simultaneously articulate a critique of the existing system or status quo, an important self-­corrective function to ensure that democratic cultures are continuously sustained by the civic enterprise of collective judgment and popular sovereignty. Without the opportunity to dissent, citizens’ acts of affirmation and participation are relatively meaningless. Dwelling within the civic home of democracy requires that we have the occasion to solicit each other’s support in advocacy, that we engage regularly in the collective enterprise of deliberative inquiry and decision-­making, and also that we are enabled to contest the views of the collective that we believe to be incorrect, imprudent, or unjust in some way. Although we may be accustomed to thinking of these three practices of advocacy, deliberation, and protest in relatively discrete terms, I suggest we view them as three mutually supporting and complementary dimensions

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of civic rhetoric that best equips citizens to participate in democratic life. Doing so enables us to articulate the ways that everyday rhetorical practices contribute—productively and counterproductively, as the case may be—to the production of democratic culture, to the accommodation of democratic dwelling, and to the contestation of democratic displacements.

Notes

Introduction 1. Valentine, “Christian Group Seeks.” 2. Chokshi, “Phoenix Says.” 3. LaPointe, “Phoenix Reduces”; Keyes, “Phoenix Becomes”; United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH), Opening Doors, 33. 4. Kugler, “Salt Lake City Joins”; Covert, “Second American City Ends.” 5. Swan, “In a US First.” 6. Coy, “Virginia Is”; “Gov. Malloy Announces”; Warren, “Las Cruces”; Loeb, “Veteran Homelessness Goes”; Carrillo, “Santa Fe Nears”; “Federal Government Announces.” 7. Santos, “Program to End.” 8. USICH, Achieving the Goal. 9. USICH, Assessing Whether. 10. Previous rhetorical scholarship has established that policy rhetorics are not simply instrumental communicative acts but constitutive ones that influence the collective judgment of and response to a variety of social issues. Robert Asen’s work has perhaps been most influential in this regard. See especially Asen, Democracy, Deliberation; Asen, Invoking the Invisible; Asen, “Reflections on the Role”; and Asen, Visions of Poverty. 11. USICH, Opening Doors, 9. 12. USICH, Opening Doors, 4. 13. USICH, Opening Doors, 10. 14. As Talmadge Wright argues, there are powerful incentives to lose sight of these distinctions: “Often divisions are created between those who take a stance in defense of homeless populations (advocates) and those who attempt to use ‘scientific detachment’ and the measures of ‘bias’ as a way to gain legitimate knowledge about the abject poor. I would maintain that the latter perspective, like that of British anthropology in the nineteenth century, is a discourse and method that masks the inherent colonizing feature of its gaze, treating the homeless as objects of power to be worked upon, fought over, discussed.” T. Wright, Out of Place, 17. 15. Jencks, Homeless, 3–7; Kyle, Contextualizing Homelessness, 40–50. 16. On the rhetorical functions of definition, see B. McGee, “Argument from Definition”; Broda-­Bahm, “Finding Protection”; Titsworth, “Ideological Basis”; Zarefsky, “Strategic Maneuvering”; and Bricker, “Feigning Environmentalism.” 17. Zarefsky, “Strategic Maneuvering,” 405–6. 18. Walton, “Persuasive Definitions,” 118. 19. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection.” 20. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1244. 21. Hasian Jr., “Critical Legal Theorizing,” 124. 22. Enck-­Wanzer, “Trashing the System,” 192; Wanzer-­Serrano, New York Young Lords. 23. Enck-­Wanzer, “Trashing the System,” 191. 24. This basic relationship is well established in the literatures on constitutive rhetoric, imagined communities, and the social imaginary. See especially M. C. McGee, “In

176    notes to pages 9–18 Search of”; Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric”; Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. 25. Kyle, Contextualizing Homelessness, 14. 26. Kyle, Contextualizing Homelessness, 33–61; Stoner, Civil Rights, 128–33; NCH, McKinney-­Vento Act. 27. USICH, “About USICH.” 28. Kyle, Contextualizing Homelessness, 50. 29. Kyle, Contextualizing Homelessness, 50–52. 30. Distinctions between the “deserving” population of housed citizens and the “undeserving” population of people experiencing homelessness emerge in legislators’ deliberations about policies, as well as pervading the language of the policies themselves, as Rebecca Anne Allahyari has shown in her analysis of congressional hearings. Allahyari, “Micro-­Politics of Worthy Homelessness.” 31. For an excellent overview of the current laws criminalizing homelessness, see National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP), Homes Not Handcuffs. 32. Feldman, Citizens Without Shelter, 27. 33. M. Middleton, “Housing Not Handcuffs,” 322; see also M. Middleton, “‘SafeGround Sacramento.’” 34. Stoner, Civil Rights, 167. 35. Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, 109. 36. Wright, Out of Place, 192. 37. Stoner, Civil Rights, 167. 38. Feldman, Citizens Without Shelter, 44. 39. Mitchell, Right to the City, 232. 40. Wright, Out of Place, 69. 41. Mitchell, Right to the City, 129. 42. Best, “Situation or Social Problem.” 43. Campbell and Reeves, “Covering the Homeless,” 23. 44. Campbell and Reeves, “Covering the Homeless,” 39. For an in-­depth examination of the Joyce Brown case and its implications for homeless policy in terms of civil status, see Failer, Who Qualifies for Rights? 45. Shields, “Network News,” 215. 46. Schneider, “Sourcing Homelessness,” 74. 47. Schneider, “Reporting Homelessness.” 48. Penner and Penner, “Publicizing, Politicizing.” 49. Nor is this relationship unique to the United States. For an analysis of the emergence of similar attitudes in a vernacular text in Brazil, see Resende, “‘It’s Not a Matter.’” 50. Schneider and Remillard, “Caring About Homelessness.” See also Schneider, “Homelessness.” 51. Schneider and Remillard, “Caring About Homelessness,” 96. 52. Schneider and Remillard, “Caring About Homelessness,” 103. 53. Schneider and Remillard, “Caring About Homelessness,” 109. 54. Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, 87. 55. Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, 127. 56. Harter et al., “ Structuring of Invisibility.” 57. As Bryan Garsten contends, despite rhetoric’s centrality in civic education for a majority of Western history, “today schools and universities rarely teach the art of persuasion. . . . While actual politicians have not abandoned persuasion (how could they?), they prefer not to acknowledge their art. They understand that when they hear an argument described as ‘rhetorical,’ it is being either decried as manipulative or dismissed as

notes to pages 19–24    177 superficial. In both theory and practice today, the reigning view of rhetorical speech is that it is a disruptive force in politics and a threat to democratic deliberation.” Garsten, Saving Persuasion, 3; see also Fontana, Nederman, and Remer, Talking Democracy. 58. The concept of democracy’s “lifeworld” comes from Jürgen Habermas, who has expressed some of the preceding suspicions of rhetoric. But as Jeff Motter and I have argued, despite Habermas’s rejection of a simple notion of rhetoric as plebiscitary speech, Habermas’s model of the democratic public sphere and lifeworld is in many ways compatible with the rich sense of discursive practice promoted by theorists of rhetorical democracy. Habermas, Structural Transformation; Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; Loehwing and Motter, “Publics, Counterpublics.” 59. Ivie, Democracy and America’s War. 60. One way democratic theorists have managed their distrust of rhetoric is to introduce distinctions between “good” and “bad” types of rhetoric. For example, Simone Chambers asks us to contrast deliberative rhetoric and plebiscitary rhetoric; for John S. Dryzek, we need to distinguish bridging from bonding rhetoric to see how the former generally offers a more positive contribution than the latter. Chambers, “Rhetoric and the Public”; Dryzek, “Rhetoric in Democracy.” 61. Welsh, Rhetorical Surface, 31. Note that unlike other theorists invested in recuperating rhetoric’s contribution to democracy, Welsh embraces and defends the characterization of rhetoric as strategic speech. 62. I. M. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 52–57; see also Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy. 63. Isin, “Theorizing Acts,” 17. 64. Murphy, “Romantic Democracy,” 193–94. 65. Asen, “Discourse Theory,” 191. 66. This is one of the primary critiques leveled by counterpublic theorists. See Fraser, Justice Interruptus; and Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. 67. Hauser, Vernacular Voices, 77. See also Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture. 68. J. E. Black, “Native Authenticity,” 636. 69. Cisneros, “(Re)Bordering the Civic,” 40. 70. Noteworthy studies of these everyday and vernacular rhetorics of citizenship include Hauser, Vernacular Voices; Bennett, Banning Queer Blood; Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption; Azoulay, Civil Contract; West, Transforming Citizenships. 71. For two excellent overviews of the generic features of antipanhandling measures, see Lee and Farrell, “Buddy, Can You?”; and Lauriello, “Panhandling Regulation.” 72. Rincon, “Panhandling Ban.” 73. Andrew Quintanilla, quoted in Rincon, “Panhandling Ban.” 74. James Wright, quoted in Rincon, “Panhandling Ban.” 75. The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts archived the legal documents from their challenge to the City of Lowell’s antipanhandling ordinance in order to publicize the antihomeless sentiment that fueled the legal restrictions and to encourage legal challenges of similar local measures. City of Lowell, “Memorandum of Law,” 1. 76. City of Lowell, “Memorandum of Law,” 1. 77. City of Lowell, “Memorandum of Law,” 2. 78. City of Lowell, “Memorandum of Law,” 4. 79. City of Lowell, “Memorandum of Law,” 4. 80. For accounts of specific local measures and the public sentiments that provide their impetus, see Ballew, “Panhandling and the First Amendment”; Childree, “How McCullen Affects”; and Mitchell, “S.U.V. Model.”

178    notes to pages 24–37 81. NCH, No Safe Street, 67. 82. I use “precarity” in Judith Butler’s sense of the term, which invokes both the vulnerability inherent in all human life and the “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.” Butler, “Performativity, Precarity,” ii; Butler, Precarious Life. 83. Approaching anxieties in this way highlights both their specificity to a particular historical/political context, and their social, rather than simply individual, nature and construction. These insights about contemporary anxieties are developed in Jackson, “Food Stories”; and T. Middleton, “Anxious Belongings.” 84. Marcus, Sentimental Citizen. 85. Marcus, Sentimental Citizen, 116. 86. Crable, “Rhetoric, Anxiety,” 8. 87. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner. 88. Allen, Talking to Strangers. 89. Giorgio Agamben offers the term “bare life” as a designation for those elements of biological existence that are at the same time excluded from and subject to the political realm. Agamben, Homo Sacer.

Chapter 1 1. DePastino, Citizen Hobo; Katz, Undeserving Poor; Katz, Poverty and Policy; Katz, Shadow of the Poorhouse; Katz, Price of Citizenship; Gans, War Agtainst the Poor; Asen, Visions of Poverty; Davis, Brutal Need; Trattner, From Poor Law. 2. Trattner, From Poor Law, 15. 3. Trattner, From Poor Law, 16; Feldman, Citizens Without Shelter, 30–34; Gans, War Against the Poor, 14–17; Katz, Undeserving Poor, 11–16. 4. Trattner, From Poor Law, 16. 5. Trattner, From Poor Law, 17 (emphasis added). 6. Trattner, From Poor Law, 35–36. 7. Trattner, From Poor Law, 42–43. 8. Trattner, From Poor Law, 88. 9. Trattner, From Poor Law, 89. 10. DePastino, Citizen Hobo, 8. 11. DePastino, Citizen Hobo, 27–28. 12. DePastino, Citizen Hobo, 126–27. 13. DePastino, Citizen Hobo, 167. 14. For a discussion of single room occupancy housing and its characterization as insufficiently “home-­like,” see Mifflin and Wilton, “No Place Like Home.” 15. DePastino, Citizen Hobo, 252. 16. DePastino, Citizen Hobo, 247–68; Kyle, Contextualizing Homelessness, 33–55; Jencks, Homeless, 8–20, 49–74; Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, 90–106. 17. NCH, “Who We Are.” 18. National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH), “Homeless Challenge”; NCH, “National Homeless Persons’”; NCH, “National Hunger.” 19. National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), “About Us.” 20. NAEH, “Our Work.” 21. NLCHP, “Lawyers Working.” 22. NLCHP, “NLCHP Programs.” 23. NCH, “Issues.”

notes to pages 38–54    179 24. NCH, “Family Homelessness.” 25. NCH, “LGBT Homelessness.” 26. NCH, “LGBT Homelessness.” 27. NAEH, “Rapid Re-­Housing”; NAEH, “Coordinated Assessment”; NAEH, “Using Medicaid.” 28. NLCHP, “Youth & Educational Resources.” 29. Make Them Visible Foundation, “Our Social Experiment.” 30. Rader, Signal Through the Flames. 31. Mitch Snyder, quoted in Rader, Signal Through the Flames, 4. 32. NCH, “Faces of Homelessness.” 33. NCH, “Faces of Homelessness: Photo Gallery.” 34. The NCH offers an overview of its policy agenda in a report outlining its 2010 public policy recommendations. The programs featured in this overview concern housing assistance, medical and material support for people experiencing homelessness, livable wage and labor protections, and civil rights. NCH, “Summary of 2010.” 35. Kearns, “Down for the Count.” 36. Kearns, “Down for the Count,” 158–59. 37. Kearns, “Down for the Count,” 173. 38. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Point-­in-­Time Count. 39. NAEH, State of Homelessness, 10. 40. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Point-­in-­Time Count, 3. 41. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Point-­in-­Time Count, 3. 42. Bassuk, “Dilemmas in Counting,” 318. 43. Wright and Devine, “Housing Dynamics.” 44. Wright and Devine, “Housing Dynamics,” 324 (emphasis added). 45. Jocoy, “Counting the Homeless,” 398. 46. Bogard, “Advocacy and Enumeration.” 47. Bogard, “Advocacy and Enumeration,” 106. 48. NLCHP, Homelessness in America. 49. NCH, How Many People? 50. NAEH, State of Homelessness, 10–11. 51. NCH, Health Care, 1–2. 52. NCH, Health Care, 1. 53. NCH, Health Care, 2. 54. NCH, Health Care, 2. 55. NCH, Health Care, 2. 56. NLCHP, Alone Without a Home, 65. 57. NLCHP, Alone Without a Home, 65. 58. NLCHP, Alone Without a Home, 66. 59. NAEH, Housing First, 1. 60. NAEH, Housing First, 1. 61. NAEH, Housing First, 1. 62. NAEH, Housing First, 2. 63. Greenwood, Stefancic, and Tsemberis, “Pathways Housing.” For additional evaluations of Housing First, see also Henwood et al., “Examining Provider Perspectives”; Austin et al., “VA’s Expansion”; and Stefancic et al., “Implementing Housing First.” 64. Greenwood, Stefancic, and Tsemberis, “Pathways Housing,” 645–46. 65. Greenwood, Stefancic, and Tsemberis, “Pathways Housing,” 647. 66. Schiff and Schiff, “Housing First,” 82. 67. USICH, Opening Doors, 14. 68. USICH, Opening Doors, 25.

180    notes to pages 54–68 69. USICH, Opening Doors, 24. 70. Loehwing, “Homelessness as the Unforgiving Minute.” 71. For a useful overview of the types of antihomeless legislation as well as available legal remedies, see Tars et al., “Can I Get?” 72. Aykanian and Lee, “Social Work’s Role,” 183. 73. Aulette and Aulette, “Police Harassment,” 246. 74. Allison, “Confronting the Myth.” 75. Barak and Bohm, “Crimes of the Homeless.” 76. NLCHP, Homes Not Handcuffs. 77. NLCHP, Homes Not Handcuffs, 35. 78. NLCHP, Homes Not Handcuffs, 42. 79. NCH, “No Safe Street.” 80. NCH, “No Safe Street.” 81. NLCHP, From Wrongs to Rights, 6. 82. NLCHP, From Wrongs to Rights, 7. 83. NLCHP, From Wrongs to Rights, 7. 84. NLCHP, From Wrongs to Rights, 8. 85. NLCHP, “Civil Rights.” 86. NLCHP, “Civil Rights.” 87. NLCHP, “Civil Rights.” 88. NLCHP, No Safe Place. 89. NLCHP, Criminalizing Crisis. 90. NLCHP, No Safe Place, 17. 91. NLCHP, No Safe Place, 17–18. 92. NLCHP, No Safe Place, 20 (bracketed editorial insertions in original). 93. NLCHP, No Safe Place, 24. 94. NLCHP, No Safe Place, 27. 95. NLCHP, No Safe Place, 26. 96. NLCHP, No Safe Place, 26. 97. NLCHP, No Safe Place, 33. 98. NLCHP, No Safe Place, 33. 99. Plato’s most sustained critique of the visual appears in his allegory of the cave, found in book VII of The Republic. E. Cram, John Louis Lucaites, and I review some of the most prominent critiques of the visual, particularly as they relate to theories of the public sphere and its place in a democratic system. Cram, Loehwing, and Lucaites, “Civic Sights.” See also Azoulay, Civil Contract; and Green, Eyes of the People. 100. Scott, Seeing Like a State. 101. Wilson and Kelling, “Broken Windows.”

Chapter 2 1. Invisible Man (video). 2. Invisible Man, 0:01. 3. Invisible Man, 0:07. The “magazine” referred to here is fiftyfifty, a street paper that is one of many publications sold by homeless people in cities around the globe. Individual publications structure their businesses in various ways but, in general, street papers are largely written by homeless people, or contain stories about the problems of homelessness in the cities where they are distributed. The publisher sells copies to individual homeless vendors at cost, and then these copies are sold by the individual vendors, who often have no other livelihood or financial resources beyond the profits they make selling

notes to pages 68–77    181 copies of street papers each day. Many cities’ local street-­paper publications, including fiftyfifty, operate as part of the International Network of Street Papers, a worldwide organization that coordinates the efforts of individual publishers who want to participate in publicizing issues of homelessness and extending employment opportunities to citizens on the economic and political margins of public life. For further information, see International Network of Street Papers, “International Network.” 4. Invisible Man, 0:21, 0:16. 5. Invisible Man, 1:11, 1:28. 6. Green, Eyes of the People. 7. Green, Eyes of the People, 64. 8. Green, Eyes of the People, 64–119. 9. Finnegan and Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public.” Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifier Peeples level a similar charge about the exclusion of the visual from theories of the public sphere, a structure they contend is better conceptualized as a public screen. DeLuca and Peeples, “From Public Sphere.” 10. Green, Eyes of the People, 65. 11. Green, Eyes of the People, 67. 12. Green, Eyes of the People, 67. 13. Green, Eyes of the People, 103. 14. Green, Eyes of the People, 103. 15. Green, Eyes of the People, 103. 16. Green, Eyes of the People, 199. 17. Hariman and Lucaites, Public Image, 1–28. See also Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption. 18. Plato, Republic, book 7. 19. Plato, Protagoras, Philebus, see especially 464–465. 20. Plato, Republic, 517b–c. 21. Hariman and Lucaites, Public Image, 2. 22. Ariella Azoulay theorizes the event of photography and civic spectatorship, and Danielle Allen offers an account of photography’s influence on civic habits and relationships. Azoulay, Civil Contract; Azoulay, Civil Imagination; Allen, Talking to Strangers. 23. Sontag, On Photography; Sontag, Regarding the Pain. 24. Chouliaraki, Ironic Spectator, 3. 25. Scott, Seeing Like a State. 26. To be clear, Scott is not opposing sight and voice in absolute terms, nor is he suggesting that the state optic is somehow all-­powerful and inescapable. His concept of the state optic is an invaluable lens for understanding the logic of antihomeless sentiment and conventional homeless advocacy. What it does not account for is the form of unconventional advocacy that FNB embraces, which neither aims for nor achieves the simplicity and legibility that are hallmarks of the state optic. I offer the notion of a public optic as a counterpart to his “seeing like a state” because his account of the pervasiveness of the state optic establishes both the need for and the powerful potential of sights and voices that push back in opposition. Scott has taken up forms of popular resistance in other works, engaging what Michel de Certeau theorizes as everyday practices that can exceed and resist the structural logics that attempt to determine and contain them. See especially Scott, Domination and the Arts; Scott, Art of Not Being Governed; and de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life. 27. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 57. 28. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 77. 29. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 82. 30. E. Black, “Second Persona,” 113.

182    notes to pages 77–86 31. Teresa Castro’s discussion of the influence mapmaking and cartographic vision has had on cinematography takes a similar position to the argument I make here. Castro traces cinemagraphic styles back to innovations consistent with the “scopic regime” that governs cartography, which suggests that the state function of mapmaking has trained citizens to reproduce the optic of the state in other areas (for example, filmmaking). Castro, “Cinema’s Mapping.” 32. NCH, Place at the Table. 33. NCH, Place at the Table, 2. 34. NCH, Place at the Table, 9. 35. Resneck, “Juneau’s Homeless.” 36. Resneck, “Juneau’s Homeless.” 37. Alanez and Wallman, “Fort Lauderdale.” 38. NCH, Place at the Table, 10. 39. NCH, Place at the Table, 14. 40. NCH, Place at the Table, 15. 41. NCH, Place at the Table, 15. 42. NCH, Place at the Table, 10. 43. NCH, Place at the Table, 5–17. 44. Heynen, “Cooking Up Non-­violent.” 45. Heynen, “Cooking Up Non-­violent,” 1227. 46. Heynen, “Cooking Up Non-­violent,” 1228. 47. Heynen, “Cooking Up Non-­violent,” 1228. 48. Wilson, “Beyond Alternative.” 49. Note that Wilson critiques the discourse of “alternatives,” arguing that while the conventional-­versus-­alternative dichotomy embraced by food scholars to this point has offered an entry point for conversations about “the potential for food to be a site and subject of social transformation . . . where conventional represents a capitalist corporate model of food production and alternative symbolizes attempts to reform or revolutionize this dominant food system,” the terminology often fails in moving beyond simply highlighting difference from the norm. She thus suggests we adopt a “deeper theoretical shift to move beyond the challenges inherent in a discourse of alternatives.” Wilson, “Beyond Alternative,” 719. 50. Wilson, “Beyond Alternative,” 732. 51. Wilson, “Beyond Alternative,” 732. 52. Wilson, “Beyond Alternative,” 733. 53. Wilson, “Beyond Alternative,” 733. 54. For an additional discussion of FNB’s meal sharing as productive of autonomous spaces, see Parson, “Parks, Permits.” 55. Sbicca and Perdue, “Protest Through Presence.” 56. Sbicca and Perdue, “Protest Through Presence,” 323. 57. Parson, “Breaking Bread.” 58. Parson, “Breaking Bread,” 35. 59. Spataro, “Against a De-­Politicized,” 10. 60. DeLuca, Image Politics. 61. DeLuca, Image Politics, 64. 62. Delicath and DeLuca, “Image Events,” 317. 63. Pace, “Image Events,” 36. 64. Kamph, “Food Not Bombs.” 65. Heynen, “Cooking Up Non-­violent.” 66. Food Not Bombs, “FAQ.” 67. Parson, “Breaking Bread.”

notes to pages 86–99    183 68. Wilson, “Beyond Alternative,” 732. 69. Sbicca and Perdue, “Protest Through Presence.” 70. “City’s Large Group Feeding Ordinance.” 71. Sbicca and Perdue, “Protest Through Presence,” 318. 72. Kamph, “Food Not Bombs.” 73. We Are Change Orlando, Illegal to Feed the Homeless (video), 1:55. 74. “Orlando”; Sbicca and Perdue, “Protest Through Presence,” 319. 75. Stangler, “Been Caught.” 76. Food Not Bombs, “Photos of Orlando”; Food Not Bombs, “Orlando Wall.” 77. An excellent collection of representative photographs can be found online in the archives hosted on the FNB website: Food Not Bombs, “Photos of Orlando.” 78. Benjamin Markeson, quoted in “Feeding Resistance.” 79. McCarthy, Food Not Bombs June (video); McCarthy, Food Not Bombs Arrested (video); Citizens Coalition for Police Accountability, 06/08/2011 (video). 80. “Pictures.” 81. McCarthy, Orlando Food (video), 1:10. 82. McCarthy, Orlando Food. 83. McCarthy, Orlando Food, 0:12. 84. McCarthy, Orlando Food, 0:17. 85. We Are Change Orlando, Illegal to Feed the Homeless, 3:44. 86. De La Rosa and Jenkins, “Food Not Bombs.” 87. Gore, “Food Not Bombs.” 88. Schlueb, “Judge.” 89. Demo, “Guerrilla Girls,’” 151. 90. Demo, “Guerrilla Girls,’” 152. 91. I have in mind here something akin to Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the lifeworld and its influence on institutional judgments rendered within political and legal institutions. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (see especially volume 2); Habermas, Between Facts and Norms. 92. Feldman, Citizens Without Shelter.

Chapter 3 1. Campbell and Reeves, “Covering the Homeless”; Penner and Penner, “Publicizing, Politicizing”; Schneider, “Homelessness”; Schneider, “Reporting Homelessness”; Schneider, “Sourcing Homelessness”; Shields, “Network News”; Sherry and Osborne, “Tale of Two Events”; Toft, “Contesting the Deviant Other.” 2. Joy, “Homeless Voice.” 3. Joy, “Homeless Voice.” The video of Williams can be found online here: Columbus Dispatch, “Ted Williams.” 4. Memmott, “Must-­See Video.” 5. Doral Chenoweth III, quoted in Joy, “Homeless Voice.” 6. Joy and Saunders, “Media Frenzy.” 7. “Once-­Homeless Man.” 8. Joy, “Five Years.” 9. Joy, “Five Years.” 10. And of course, it is not simply the political implications of rhetorics of the body that matter; Debra Hawhee’s work has reconstructed the important linkages between body and rhetoric in ancient Greek and Burkean rhetorical theory. Hawhee, Bodily Arts; Hawhee, Moving Bodies.

184    notes to pages 99–108 11. DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments”; see also Harold, “Tracking Heroin.” 12. Rand, “Appetite for Activism.” 13. Achter, “Unruly Bodies,” 49. 14. Hauser, “Incongruous Bodies,” 4; Vicaro, “Hunger for Voice,” 175. 15. For a brief genealogy of the ancient roots of a “corporeal aspect of citizenship,” see Burchell, “What to Do.” See also Verdi, “Symbolic Body”; and Dolmage, “Metis, Mêtis.” 16. Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion, 99–100. 17. Bacchi and Beasley, “Citizen Bodies,” 327. 18. Bacchi and Beasley, “Citizen Bodies,” 331. 19. Bacchi and Beasley, “Citizen Bodies,” 341. 20. Bacchi and Beasley, “Citizen Bodies,” 344. 21. Pols, “Washing the Citizen.” 22. Elliott, “Big Persons,” 135. 23. Schweik, “Disability and the Normal,” 418. See also Hohle, “Body and Citizenship”; and Krause, “Bodies in Action.” 24. Kawash, “Homeless Body”; Toft, “Contesting the Deviant Other.” 25. Cubbison, “OB Outrage.” 26. Quoted in Wilkens, “‘Please Don’t Feed.’” 27. Vega and Knight, “S.F. Parking.” 28. Schweik, Ugly Laws, 141. 29. Crowley, “Material of Rhetoric,” 361. 30. Haas, “Materializing Public.” 31. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 191. 32. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 37. 33. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, 14. 34. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, 14. 35. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, 72. 36. For example, Nussbaum explains that “disgust very likely played a valuable role in our evolutionary heritage, steering us away from real danger. Even if it does not track real danger perfectly, it does give an added emphasis to the sense of danger, and thus we might well want to rely on it in parts of our lives where ascertaining danger is likely to be difficult and uncertain. Thus it would very likely be a mistake to try to eat all foods, even those that initially disgust us. Disgust toward feces and corpses is probably a good thing to teach children, as a device to steer them away from genuine danger at an age when they cannot be expected to calculate the dangers.” Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, 121. 37. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, 336. 38. Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 207. 39. Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 251. 40. Bennett, Banning Queer Blood, 85. 41. Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities.” 42. Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities,” 576. 43. Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities,” 591. 44. NCH, Place at the Table, 13. 45. Hauser, “Rhetoric, the Body,” 250. 46. Hauser, “Rhetoric, the Body,” 250. 47. Hauser, “Rhetoric, the Body,” 251. 48. See also Jordan, “Rhetorical Limits”; Jordan, “Reshaping the ‘Pillow’”; Selzer and Crowley, Rhetorical Bodies. 49. In “Global Ambassadors,” the HWC highlights four of its competitors who have significantly improved their lives since they joined HWC teams, and who link their

notes to pages 109–119    185 success directly to their participation in the HWC event. Homeless World Cup (HWC), “Our Impact.” 50. HWC, “Ball Can Change.” 51. HWC, “Ball Can Change.” 52. HWC, “Frequently Asked Questions.” 53. HWC, “Frequently Asked Questions.” 54. M. Young, “Homelessness Affects.” 55. HWC, “About the Tournament.” 56. HWC, “Glasgow 2016.” 57. M. Young, Goal!, 4. 58. M. Young, Goal!, 4. Young’s aims are certainly admirable but not unique to him. For a discussion of similar endeavors carried about by other street-­paper publishers, see Swithinbank, Coming Up; and Howley, “Poverty of Voices.” 59. International Network of Street Papers, “Enterprising Solutions.” 60. M. Young, Goal!, 11. 61. M. Young, Goal!, 13. 62. M. Young, Goal!, 13. 63. HWC, “Mission.” 64. HWC, “Our Work.” 65. Kicking It (film). 66. Harold, “Tracking Heroin,” 69. 67. HWC, “Rules.” 68. M. Young, Goal!, 31. 69. HWC, “Rules.” 70. M. Young, Goal!, 49. 71. M. Young, Goal!, 121. 72. M. Young, Goal!, 121. 73. M. Young, Goal!, 39. 74. M. Young, Goal!, 39. 75. HWC, “Glasgow 2016.” 76. Kicking It. 77. Kicking It, 0:30. The image of nighttime representing the hopelessness of homeless experience is a common one. As we will see in chapter 4, the Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day campaign hosts events on December 21 each year, which is described in this way by the campaign’s slogan: “The First Day of Winter. The Longest Night of the Year.” The campaign poster distributed to local organizers of their annual memorial services for deceased homeless individuals in communities throughout the United States shows a lone candle struggling to illuminate a stark black background. NCH, “National Homeless Persons’.” 78. The montage of nighttime scenes of homeless life on the streets is also typical of documentary film depictions of homelessness. See Loehwing, “Homelessness as the Unforgiving Minute.” 79. Kicking It, 0:35–1:50. 80. M. Young, “Homelessness Affects.” 81. Kicking It, 3:17. 82. Kicking It, 11:20. 83. Kicking It, 15:45. 84. Kicking It, 16:06. 85. Kicking It, 12:18. 86. Kicking It, 18:33. 87. Kicking It, 19:55.

186    notes to pages 120 –134 88. Kicking It, 23:47. 89. Kicking It, 26:57. 90. Kicking It, 53:06. 91. Kicking It, 53:16. 92. Kicking It, 22:23. 93. Kicking It, 29:10. 94. M. Young, “Homeless World Cup.” 95. M. Young, “Homeless World Cup.” 96. Sherry, “(Re)engaging Marginalized Groups.” See also Sherry and O’May, “Exploring the Impact of Sport.” 97. Sherry, “(Re)engaging Marginalized Groups,” 65. 98. Magee and Jeanes, “Football’s Coming Home.” 99. Magee and Jeanes, “Football’s Coming Home,” 14. 100. Magee and Jeanes, “Football’s Coming Home,” 14. 101. Magee, “Disengagement, De-­motivation,” 170.

Chapter 4 1. Brand, “Remembering the Homeless.” 2. Brand, “Remembering the Homeless.” 3. Brand, “Remembering the Homeless.” 4. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 650. 5. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 650. 6. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 650. 7. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 651. 8. The main sites promoting and coordinating the HPMD are the following: NCH, “National Homeless Persons’”; and National Health Care for the Homeless Council, “Homeless Persons.’” 9. Schudson, Good Citizen. 10. The temporality of politics has implications both for how the institutions and systems of a political regime are designed, and for the nature of the expectations citizens’ dispositions and contributions are measured against. Scheuerman, “Busyness and Citizenship”; Abourahme, “Spatial Collisions”; Vaillant, “Politics of Temporality.” 11. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen”; see also Chowers, “Marriage of Time”; Chowers, “Gushing Time.” 12. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 651. 13. Dickinson, Blaire, and Ott, Places of Public Memory; Bruner, Strategies of Remembrance; Phillips, Framing Public Memory; Phillips, “Failure of Memory”; Sturken, Tangled Memories. 14. Browne, “Remembering Crispus,” 185; Peterson, “Epideictic and Public Memory.” 15. Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation,” 307. 16. For model rhetorical analyses of such diverse archives, see Maurantonio, “Material Rhetoric”; Paliewicz and Hasian, “Mourning Absences”; Poirot, “Gendered Geographies”; Tell, “Remembering Emmett.” 17. Maurantonio, “Material Rhetoric,” 84. 18. Asen, Democracy, Deliberation; Chambers, “Rhetoric and the Public”; Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture; Ivie, “Rhetorical Deliberation”; Yack, “Rhetoric and Public Reasoning.” 19. Lyon, Deliberative Acts, 30. 20. Lyon, Deliberative Acts, 55.

notes to pages 134–140    187 21. Lyon, Deliberative Acts, 180. 22. Bormann, Force of Fantasy; Beasley, You, the People; Stuckey, Defining Americans; Dionisopoulos et al., “Martin Luther”; Hoerl, “Cinematic Jujitsu”; Black and Harrison, “Southern Paternal Generationalism.” 23. Bineham, “How The Blind Side Blinds,” 231–32. 24. Rowland and Jones, “One Dream,” 131–32. 25. Rushing, “Rhetoric of the American,” 16. 26. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 651. 27. Chowers, “Gushing Time,” 246. 28. Chowers, “Gushing Time,” 246. 29. Hahner, “Working Girls,” 303. 30. NCH, “National Homeless Persons.’” 31. For the purposes of the analysis in this chapter, I examine the preceding ten years’ worth of organizing manuals for the HPMD. Many of the basic structures and some materials are repeated from year to year, but the revisions to the manuals are instructive for tracing how the NCH has refined the HPMD approach, and each year’s manual includes new information about specific event designs and structures adopted by specific communities in the preceding year. The organizing manuals examined in this chapter are from 2006 to 2015. Please note that because the main title stays the same each year, I am using the unique subtitles in the shortened citations appearing in the endnotes so that readers may more easily and correctly identify which manual is being cited. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 21, 2006; NCH, 2007 Organizing Manual; NCH, 2008 Organizing Manual; NCH, 2009 Organizing Manual; NCH, 2010 Organizing Manual; NCH, Organizer’s Manual 2011; NCH, Organizer’s Manual 2012; NCH, 2013 Organizing Manual; NCH, Organizing Manual, December 21, 2014; NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015. 32. This slogan began to be used most consistently in NCH, 2007 Organizing Manual. In 2006, the manual included variations on this basic slogan, such as the phrases “The Longest Night” and “The First Day of Winter” used on their own. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 21, 2006. 33. Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric,” 141. 34. Scholars have applied Charland’s notion of constitutive rhetoric to a variety of texts constructing a people in diverse contexts, drawing lessons from both the mechanics of successful rhetorical constitutions and the shortcomings of failed attempts. See Goehring and Dionisopoulos, “Identification by Antithesis”; Hill, “(Re)Articulating Difference”; Leff and Utley, “Instrumental and Constitutive Rhetoric”; Mills, “Pirate and the Sovereign”; Stein, “‘1984’ Macintosh Ad”; Tate, “Ideological Effects”; Zagacki, “Constitutive Rhetoric.” 35. Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric,” 142. 36. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 21, 2006, 10. 37. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 21, 2006, 10. 38. This poster is reproduced in nearly every organizing manual from 2007 forward, and iterations of it can be found from community events across the country. In that sense, there is no definitive “original” image to cite, but the cover of the 2007 Organizing Manual is the earliest I have found and most easily accessible reproduction. NCH, 2007 Organizing Manual, cover page. The poster is also available on the NHCHC collection of resources for HPMD planners. National Health Care for the Homeless Council (NHCHC), “Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day Poster.” 39. In the documentation accompanying their 2012 webinar for members of the public interested in organizing a HPMD event in their home communities, the NHCHC emphasizes that a prime objective of the HPMD is to “raise awareness of the disparities

188    notes to pages 140 –152 and injustices faced by the homeless,” and they cite a 2005 study that illustrates the most alarming disparity among many: “The average age of death [for people experiencing homelessness] in the studies reviewed is between 42 and 52 years, despite an average life expectancy of almost 80 years in this country. The potential years of life lost are incalculable.” NHCHC, Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day: How to Plan, 6, 4. 40. NCH, 2007 Organizing Manual, cover page. 41. One element of the design does contradict this reading, and that is the downward progression of each of the statements. Viewers might be more accustomed to thinking of the steps of a ladder leading upward, and we certainly tend to visualize progress or improvement by moving from lower parts of an image to higher ones. This inconsistency between the conceptual and visual design may be necessary in order to accommodate the patterns in which we are trained to read text (from the top of the page to the bottom), but it does muddy the coherence of the visual symbolism to some degree. 42. NCH, 2007 Organizing Manual, cover page. 43. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 2. 44. NCH, 2007 Organizing Manual, 4. 45. NCH, 2007 Organizing Manual, 5. 46. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 3. 47. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 3. 48. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 3. 49. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 3. 50. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 3. 51. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 3. 52. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 3. 53. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 5. 54. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 4. 55. The body of news coverage detailing HPMD services that incorporate recollections of deceased homeless neighbors is too extensive to include in its entirety, but representative articles include the following: de Guzman, “Vallejo Homeless Memorial”; Underhill and News, “Event Helps to Remember”; Moran, “Hundreds Turn Out”; Cresswell, “Vigil Held”; Haywood, “Groups Honor 32.” 56. NCH, 2009 Organizing Manual, 22. 57. NCH, 2007 Organizing Manual, 8–9. 58. NCH, 2008 Organizing Manual, 7–8. 59. NCH, 2009 Organizing Manual, 72. 60. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 13–14. 61. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 13–14. 62. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 13. 63. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 13. 64. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 13. 65. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 14. 66. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 14. 67. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 14. 68. NCH, Organizing Manual, December 2015, 14. 69. Moreno, “Homeless Persons Memorial.” 70. “‘Death Drop’ Scheduled.” 71. NCH, 2009 Organizing Manual, 28. 72. NCH, 2010 Organizing Manual, 14–17. 73. NCH, 2010 Organizing Manual, 18. 74. NHCHC, Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day: How to Plan, 15. 75. NHCHC, Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day: How to Plan, 15.

notes to pages 152–172    189 76. NHCHC, Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day: How to Plan, 16. 77. Shen, “Poignant—and Pointed.”

Conclusion 1. United States Census Bureau, “Quick Facts.” 2. Fowler, “Community Outreach.” 3. Glenda Buckhalter, quoted in Schaffer, “Growing Homelessness.” 4. Schaffer, “Growing Homelessness.” 5. Buckhalter, in Schaffer, “Growing Homelessness.” 6. Ross-­Brown, “Revolution Doesn’t Need.” 7. Ross-­Brown, “Revolution Doesn’t Need.” 8. Ross-­Brown, “Revolution Doesn’t Need.” 9. M. C. McGee, “Text, Context.” 10. M. C. McGee, “Text, Context,” 279. 11. M. C. McGee, “Text, Context,” 279. 12. M. C. McGee, “Text, Context,” 281. 13. M. C. McGee, “Text, Context,” 288. 14. Foley, “Sound Bites”; Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric”; Heidt, “Presidency as Pastiche.” 15. Olson, “Pictorial Representations,” 3. 16. Olson, “Pictorial Representations,” 3. 17. This general point about recirculation is made in Lehn, “Jackie Joins Twitter.” 18. J. E. Black, “Native Authenticity.” 19. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. 20. Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric.” 21. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 51. 22. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 62; see also Bloch, “Setting the Public.” 23. Lee and LiPuma, “Cultures of Circulation.” 24. J. E. Black, “Native Authenticity.” 25. Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric.” 26. O’Rourke, “Circulation and Noncirculation.” 27. Inabinet, “Democratic Circulation,” 660. 28. Inabinet, “Democratic Circulation,” 661. 29. Lake, “Enacting Red Power.” 30. Lake, “Enacting Red Power,” 140. I should note that while Lake conceives of this consummatory function in terms of a minority culture enacting an alternative worldview to the mainstream, the power dynamic is not so straightforward in the case of unconventional homeless advocacy. There, enactment of more inclusive community draws from both a homeless minority seeking recognition and a housed majority seeking to support the minority. This same participation across power differentials is unique to unconventional homeless advocacy cases, not part of Lake’s original account. 31. Gregg, “Ego-­Function.” 32. Gregg, “Ego-­Function,” 74. 33. Gregg, “Ego-­Function,” 74. 34. Stewart, “Championing the Rights.” 35. Stewart, “Championing the Rights,” 103. 36. Lyon, Deliberative Acts, 65. 37. Asen, Democracy, Deliberation, 180–94. 38. Asen, Democracy, Deliberation, 182.

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index

abuse. See violence Achter, Paul, 100 advocacy, 21–22, 35–48, 56–64, 171–73. See also homeless rhetoric conventional, 41–45, 51–64, 153; vs. unconventional, 27–29, 64–67, 114–15, 157, 162–63 unconventional, 27–29, 35, 123–25, 153–55; limitations of, 123–24, 156–63 advocates, 1–2, 125, 156­–57 Afghani HWC team, 119–20 Alex (HWC participant), 118–19 Allen, Danielle S., 26 Allison, Tanene, 56–57 American Dream (myth), 56–57, 134–35 American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 46 American Western myth, 135 Anderson, Barbara, 144, 148–49 Anderson, Ken, 103 anxiety, 16, 17, 104, 124 about own animality/mortality, 105, 139–40 democratic, 22–26, 28–29; challenging, 93–95, 122–25; soothing, 65, 70 Arendt, 133–34 Aristotle, 100, 107, 133 arrest campaigns, 11–12 artifacts, rhetorical, 7, 38–39, 82, 88, 112, 137–46, 164. See also images Asen, Robert, 20, 172 Aykanian, Amanda, 56 Bacchi, Carol Lee, 100–101 Baltimore, Maryland, 149–50, 152 bans. See criminalizing, homeless; restrictions Barak, Gregg, 57 Bassuk, Ellen, 46 Beasley, Chris, 100–101 Bennett, Jeffrey A., 106 Best, Rachel, 13 Big Issue in Scotland, The (paper), 109–10 bill of rights, homeless, 59–61 Birmingham, Alabama, memorial, 147

Black, Edwin, 76–77 Black, Jason Edward, 20, 165 Bloggers Unite, 148 bodies, homeless broken, 27, 39, 49–55, 98–108; challenge to trope of, 66­–67, 108–25 as degenerate, 12–13, 24, 28, 66–67 disciplining of, 99–108 (see also criminalizing, homeless; restrictions) health threats to, 49–55, 145 present and displaced, 13, 104, 167, 169 (see also present-centeredness) surveillance of, 62–64 See also corporeality; exclusion, homeless; homeless, perceptions of; homeless experiences; homelessness; homeless rhetoric body rhetoric, 99–108. See also bodies, homeless Bogard, Cynthia J., 47 Bohm, Robert M., 57 Browand, Steven, 126–27 Brown, Joyce, 14 Browne, Stephen H., 133 Buckhalter, Glenda, 156–57 Burke, Kenneth, 26 business-oriented rhetoric, 53, 64 campaigns. See advocacy; arrest campaigns; individual campaign names Campbell, Richard, 14 Census Bureau, 44–45 census, U.S., 43–44 children. See youth homelessness Chouliaraki, Lilie, 74 Chowers, Eyal, 128–29, 132–36 chronic homelessness, 52, 54 circulation, rhetorical, 163–67 Cisneros, Josue David, 21, 106–7 citizens, housed as civic peers with homeless, 66–67, 91, 115, 145, 149, 151, 166 helping-homeless narrative, 127­–28, 161 at odds with homeless, 14–15, 121–25

210   index citizens, housed (continued) as spectators of homeless, 112, 115–16, 124 (see also spectatorship) unifying with homeless, 70, 83–93, 162 citizenship, 20, 24, 72–73 ideals of, 18, 131–32, 135–36 as rhetorical act, 19–21 See also citizenship, rhetorical; spatial citizenship citizenship, rhetorical and democracy, 18–22, 171–73 reimagining of, 85–86, 89–96 reimagining of toward homelessness, 108, 109–25, 130, 158 See also citizenship; deliberation; protest; spectatorship civic home, 22, 29 rhetorical construction of, 160­–73 civic recognition, 127, 157–58 collective, 143–55, 170­–71 of self in others, 137, 151, 168–72 See also misrecognition under homeless experiences civic rhetoric. See citizenship, rhetorical; deliberation; rhetoric civil disobedience, 82–84. See also protest civil rights, homeless, 11, 56, 60–64. See also bill of rights, homeless Coleman, Doug, 91 colonial period, 30–32 Columbus, Mississippi, 156–57 Columbus Dispatch, 96–98 commemoration, 133–53 community. See citizenship; civic recognition; democracy Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV), 41, 47 constitutive rhetoric, 137 consumption, 12, 18, 85, 167 contaminants. See under homeless, perceptions of contempt, 106–7 Continuum of Care (CoC), 45 conventional advocacy. See under advocacy corporeality, 66–67, 100–108, 169. See also bodies, homeless counting. See measurements of homelessness cowboy figure, 135 Crable, Bryan, 25–26 Craig (HWC participant), 119, 121 Crenshaw, Kimberle, 7 criminalizing, homeless, 9, 11–12, 56–64, 121, 150

advocacy against, 56–64 (See also advocacy) See also legislation; policy; restrictions CrossRoads United Methodist Church, 81 Damien (HWC participant), 118 Dayton, Ohio memorial, 147 death, homeless, 139–40, 142–44 death drop, 150 decentralization, 159 DeLeon, Trinidad, 80 deliberation, 21–22, 133–34, 152, 169, 171 performative, 172 DeLuca, Kevin Michael, 85, 99 Demo, Anne Teresa, 92 democracy, 18–23, 64–67, 70–75, 99–100. See also under anxiety; citizenship, rhetorical DePastino, Todd, 35 Devine, Joel A., 46 discourse, public, 15–18 discrimination. See under exclusion, homeless disgust, 105–7, 111, 114 disruptive innovation, 53 Düsseldorf, Germany, 68–69 education, 39 Elliott, Charlene D., 102–3 emancipatory rhetoric, 166–67, 171 emotional appeal, 41 encounters, transformative, 110 Estes, Allison, 90–91 exclusion, homeless, 5–9, 14, 18, 105, 123 based on civic status, 103, 125–29 discrimination, 4–8, 11, 24–25 rhetorical production of, 54, 143, 168–73; challenging, 127, 138–39 See also bodies, homeless; homeless, perceptions of; homeless experiences; homelessness; homeless rhetoric; inclusion Faces of Homelessness initiative, 41–43 “Family Homelessness” resource archive, 37–38 fear. See anxiety Feldman, Leonard C., 12, 95 fiftyfifty (magazine), 68–69 Food Not Bombs (FNB), 70, 81–93 limitations of, 158–63 See also meal-sharing Fortin, Gerard, 147 Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 80 Foscarinis, Maria, 37

index   211 fragmentation, 165–67 From Wrongs to Rights (report), 60–61 future-oriented judgment, 128–53. See also present-centeredness Gallagher, Victoria J., 133 gender, 7, 38, 118 Great Community, 172 Green, Jeffrey Edward, 71–73 Greenwood, Ronni Michelle, 53 Gregg, Richard B., 168–69 Haas, Christina, 105 Habermasian model, 20 Hariman, Robert, 73–74 Harold, Christine, 112–13 Harrison, John, 62–63 Hauser, Gerard, 20, 107–8 health care, affordable, 5, 25, 49–50, 145. See also bodies, homeless Health Care and Homelessness (fact sheet), 49–50 Health Care for the Homeless (HCH) program, 50 health threats. See under bodies, homeless Helena, Montana memorial, 147 Heynen, Nik, 82 hierarchy, civic, 17, 105–6, 123, 131 anti- structures, 82–84, 89, 92, 116 hobo, 33–34 home, conceptions of, 5–6, 27. See also civic home homeless, perceptions of, 1–2, 8–9 as contaminants/pollutants, 103–107 as deficient, 11, 12, 15, 24–25, 31 as deserving/undeserving, 10–11, 56–57 evolving of, 31–35, 42, 115, 122–25 as individuals, 14, 41–43, 159­–60 as natural to human condition, 31–34 as outside civic body, 11, 17, 18, 56, 98–108 as Other, 8, 17, 103 as outlaws/threatening, 11, 14, 23–24, 32–35 (see also criminalizing, homeless) as resulting from failings, 98, 101, 103 See also bodies, homeless; exclusion, homeless; homeless experiences; homelessness; homeless rhetoric homeless experiences, 144 individual stories of, 62–64, 68–69, 96–98, 118–20, 148–49 invisible suffering, 27, 39–48 (see also visibility; visuality)

misrecognition, 11, 23, 143 political disempowerment, 128–29, 152 representing communities, 109, 112, 116, 121–22 unending struggle of, 49–50, 57–58, 60–63, 129 variations in, 6, 37–39, 158–60 See also bodies, homeless; exclusion, homeless; homeless, perceptions of; homelessness; homeless rhetoric; present-centeredness; voice; youth homelessness homelessness, 17–18, 31–35, 162 defining of, 5–6, 8, 32–35, 48; as houselessness, 27, 29, 38, 42, 117 ending of, 2–5 as multifaceted, 3, 51, 113 social constructions of, 1, 9, 33–34, 84 solutions to, 6, 36–39, 53, 124 See also bodies, homeless; exclusion, homeless; homeless, perceptions of; homeless experiences; homeless rhetoric; youth homelessness Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day (HPMD), 28, 67, 126­–30, 136–55, 167 artifacts of, 137–47 formats of, 143–53 limitations of, 158–63 homeless rhetoric, 3–4, 11–12, 32–33, 49–51 challenges to, 33–34, 37–40, 111 as dehumanizing, 23–24, 91–92, 106–7 harmful effects of, 10–12, 15–17 harms when intends to help, 11, 14, 98 symbolic effects of, 80, 132, 166 See also bodies, homeless; citizenship, rhetorical; homeless, perceptions of; homeless, experiences; homelessness; voice; see also under civic home; exclusion, homeless Homeless World Cup (HWC), 28, 66–67, 99, 108–25, 167 limitations of, 158–63 Homes Not Handcuffs (report), 57–58 Honig, Bonnie, 26 housed citizens. See citizens, housed houselessness. See under homelessness housing, 3, 18 affordable, 1–2, 5, 25, 35–36, 50, 145 lack of, 5–6, 10 See also individual housing types Housing and Urban Development, Department of (HUD), 45­–48 Housing First model, 51–54 Houston Chronicle, 23

212   index human rights, 61 hygienic practices, 102 images, 72–74, 85–93, 117, 138, 166 immigrants, 107 Inabinet, Brandon, 167 inclusion, 27, 93–95, 111, 114. See also exclusion, homeless Indianapolis memorial, 150–51 individualism, rugged, 14, 135 industrialization, 32–34 internal discontinuity, 128­–29 International Network of Street Papers (INSP), 110 intersectionality, 7–9, 37, 38 invisibility. See visibility; visuality; see also invisible suffering under homeless experience Invisible Man, The (film), 68–70 isolation, 144, 149 Ivie, Robert L., 19 Jeanes, Ruth, 123 Jencks, Christopher, 6 Jesus (HWC participant), 119 Jocoy, Christine L., 47 Jones, Diane, 62 Jones, John M., 134–35 Kearns, Brendan, 43–44 Keene, New Hampshire memorial, 150 Kicking It (film), 112, 116–22, 160 Koziak, Barbara, 100 Kyle, Ken, 9, 10 Lake, Randall A., 167 Lake Eola Park, Florida, 87–93 Lee, Wonhyung, 56 LeFebvre, Henri, 13 legibility-conferring measures, 75–77, 89–95 legislation, 9–12, 37–39, 58–61, 145–46 antihomeless, 9, 11–12, 56–64, 121, 150 See also meal-sharing; policy; restrictions LGBT, 38. See also gender “LGBT Homelessness” resource archive, 38 Los Angeles, California, 57–58 Love Canal discourse, 107 Lowell, Massachusetts, 23–24 Lucaites, John Louis, 73–74 Lyon, Arabella, 133–34, 172 Make Them Visible (film), 40–41, 69 Malebranche, Philip, 127

mapmaking, 75–76 Marcus, George E., 25 Markeson, Benjamin, 89, 92 McGhee, Michael Calvin, 164–65 McHenry, Keith, 86, 159, 161 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, 9–10, 39 meal-sharing, 27–28, 65–66, 69–71, 78–82, 166–67 limitations of, 157–58 rhetorical process of, 83–93 measurements of homelessness, 43–48, 64 media representations, 13–15, 41, 107, 112, 144–46 memory, public, 133–34, 141 Miller, William Ian, 106 Middleton, Michael K., 11 “Mission Night” event, 44 Mitchell, Don, 13 mobility, 33–35 Murphy, Troy A., 20 Myth of Choice, 56–67 Najib (HWC participant), 119–20 National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), 36–39, 48, 51–52, 154 National Coalition for Homeless (NCH), 36–39, 48, 58–59, 78–79 initiatives of, 41–43, 49–50, 126–55 National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP), 36–39, 51, 60–64, 78–79, 154 Native Americans, 166–67 New Orleans, Louisiana, 3 New York City homeless memorial, 126 NIMBY, 17 No Safe Place (report), 61–63 Nussbaum, Martha, 105 Obama, Barack, 5 Ocean Beach, California, 103 ocular model of popular power, 71–73, 90 Olson, Lester, 164 Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, 5–6, 54 Orlando, Florida, 81, 84–93 Orlando FNB chapter, 84–94 panhandling, 11–13, 22–24, 103–4 parks. See under public space Parson, Sean, 84 past, 131–36. See also memory, public; present-centeredness

index   213 Paul, Lorraine, 80 Perdue, Robert Todd, 84 permanent supportive housing, 52, 54 Perry, Ted, 165 persuasive definitions, 6–7 Phoenix, Arizona, 2–3 photographs, 74, 90. See also images Plato, 64–65, 73–74 point-in-time (PIT) counts, 43, 45–46, 48 policy, 36–39, 58–59 to reassure housed, 3–4, 18, 54, 56–57 See also criminalizing, homeless; legislation; restrictions; state optic pollutants. See under homeless, perceptions of Pols, Jeanette, 102 possessions, seizing of, 62–63 present-centeredness, 27, 55–64, 128–55. See also bodies, homeless; temporality private space. See under space protest, 15, 21–22, 152–53, 166–68, 171 radical, 84–93 publicness, genealogy of, 12 public optic, 74–78, 85, 89–93 public space, 13, 115, 133 homeless in, 24–25, 58–59, 103–7, 135–36 (see also present-centeredness) reclaiming for civic belonging, 89–93, 100–101, 117, 121–22, 149 rehabilitation of, 54–55 restrictions on, 12–13, 58–59 (see also restrictions); parks, 79–81, 104 See also memory, public purification, 105–7 quantification ritual, 47 Quintanilla, Andrew, 23 race, 7 Rand, Erin J., 99 rapid re-housing, 52–53 Reaganomics, 35–36 recirculation, rhetorical, 165–67 reductionist rhetoric, 38, 113 Reeves, Jimmie L., 14 relationships. See citizenship; social relationships Remillard, Chaseten, 15–16 rescue myth, 161–62 resources, allocation of, 9–10, 91–92 restrictions, 11–13, 58–64, 80, 103–5. See also criminalizing, homeless; legislation; see also under public space Reversal of Fortune (documentary), 55

rhetoric, 8–9, 17–22, 130 self-directed and other-directed, 169–72 See also artifacts, rhetorical; citizenship, rhetorical; homeless rhetoric; individual rhetoric types Rowland, Robert, 134–35 Safeground Sacramento, 11 safety, physical, 138–39 Salt Lake City, Utah, 2–3, 147 San Diego, California, 58–59 San Francisco, California, 103–4 “Saying Good-Bye: A Story about Loss in a Shelter,” 148–49 Sbicca, Joshua, 84 Schmied, Harald, 110 Schneider, Barbara, 14–16 Schudson, Michael, 131 Schweik, Susan, 103 Scott, James C., 74–77 Seattle, Washington memorial, 147 “Service-Based Enumeration” (SBE) count, 45 shelter. See housing Sherry, Emma, 122–25 Shields, Todd G., 14 simplicity-conferring measures, 75–77, 89–96 Slava (HWC participant), 120 S-Night (Shelter and Street Night), 44–45, 48 Snyder, Mitch, 1, 41, 161 social relationships, 148–49, 152–53 redefining of, 85–86, 89–93, 117, 119–25 See also inclusion Socrates, 73–74 Sontag, Susan, 74 space domestic, 62–63 in-between, 133–34 private, 105, 135 See also public space spatial citizenship, 84 spectatorship, 71–74, 89–92, 116 Splaine, Ann, 1 sport, 108–9, 123 Stallybrass, Peter, 105 statecraft, 74–78 state optic, 42–43, 65, 74–78, 89–96 status, civic, 95, 100–101, 103. See also under exclusion, homeless Stefancic, Ana, 53 Stewart, Charles J., 168–69 Street Socceroos, 122–23

214   index symbolic acts, 138–44, 147, 167. See also under homeless rhetoric

vocal model of popular power, 71–73 voice, 14–15, 61, 144, 148, 170–73

temporality, 55–59, 67, 131–36, 149, 153–55. See also present-centeredness terminological revision, 57 Thomas, Sandra, 63 Torp, Carin L., 150 tramp, 33–34 “Transient Night” event, 44 Trattner, Walter I., 30, 32–33 Tsemberis, Sam, 53

Walton, Douglas A., 6 Wanzer-Serrano, Darrel, 7 Warner, Michael, 165–66 washing, repertoires of, 102 weight, body, 102–3 Welsh, Scott, 19 Welsh UVC team, 123 West, Andre, 126–27 White, Allon, 105 Williams, Alphonso, 63 Williams, Ted, 96–98, 101 Wilson, Amanda DiVito, 82–84 Wright, James, 23, 46

unconventional advocacy. See under advocacy United Kingdom UWC team, 123 urbanization, 32–34 violence, 37–38, 51, 59 visibility, 40–48, 68–69, 150 as counter to invisibility, 88–89 See also visuality visuality, 64–66, 71–78, 90

Young, Mel, 109–110, 114–16, 122, 161 “Youth & Education” resource center, 39 youth homelessness, 39, 50–51 Zarefsky, David, 6 Zeilinger, Laura, 3

D RD RHETORICANDDEMOCRATICDELIBERATION Other books in the series: Karen Tracy, Challenges of Ordinary Democracy: A Case Study in Deliberation and Dissent / Volume 1 Samuel McCormick, Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals / Volume 2 Christian Kock and Lisa S. Villadsen, eds., Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation / Volume 3 Jay P. Childers, The Evolving Citizen: American Youth and the Changing Norms of Democratic Engagement / Volume 4 Dave Tell, Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-­­Century America / Volume 5 David Boromisza-­­Habashi, Speaking Hatefully: Culture, Public Communication, and Political Action in Hungary / Volume 6 Arabella Lyon, Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights / Volume 7 Lyn Carson, John Gastil, Janette Hartz-­­Karp, and Ron Lubensky, eds., The Australian Citizens’ Parliament and the Future of Deliberative Democracy / Volume 8 Christa J. Olson, Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador / Volume 9 Damien Smith Pfister, Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere / Volume 10 Katherine Elizabeth Mack, From Apartheid to Democracy: Deliberating Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa / Volume 11 Mary E. Stuckey, Voting Deliberatively: FDR and the 1936 Presidential Campaign / Volume 12 Robert Asen, Democracy, Deliberation, and Education / Volume 13 Shawn J. Parry-­­Giles and David S. Kaufer, Memories of Lincoln and the Splintering of American Political Thought / Volume 14 J. Michael Hogan, Jessica A. Kurr, Michael J. Bergmaier, and Jeremy D. Johnson, eds., Speech and Debate as Civic Education / Volume 15 Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-­Hye Han, Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t: How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation (Without Even Knowing It) / Volume 17 Belinda Stillion Southard, How to Belong: Women’s Agency in a Transnational World / Volume 18