The Homeless Body
When I was really young, maybe seven or eight, I witnessed an extremely violent fight between three homeless people in front of the Sheppard’s of Good Hope. Two men were brutally beating a young woman on the streets while many people watched. My mom grabbed my arm and pulled me away and we left very quickly, along with many other people. I remember thinking “why didn’t anyone try to stop them?” I asked my mom why these people were fighting and all she could say was “because they’re homeless”. Despite being very young, I knew that assumption was wrong.
As Samira Kawash (1998) suggests, the homeless person does not have a face, but instead is an imagined figure who is innately dangerous, filthy, dependant, and intrusive (Kawash, 1998). This imagined perception of the homeless body could explain my mother’s explanation for the fierce attack we had witnessed. It may also explain the lack of aid given to the woman who was being beaten by the two men. It is just assumed that this sort of behaviour is typical “homeless” behaviour. What the general public tends to forget, as Kawash (1998) points out, is the reasoning behind these individuals state of being (or not being). Over the past three decades, since the 1980s, states around the world have decided to cut funding and social programs for those who need them the most. Many scholars have argued that the same State that supposedly protects the public has also created the body which threatens it: the Homeless Body (Kawash, 1998). The safe streets act found in many cities throughout Canada (Hitchen, 2005) as well as the recent “Tent city” in response to the Vancouver Winter Olympics are perfect examples of this argument. In the safe streets act, the homeless body is assumed to pose a threat to the success of local businesses and their clients. The proposed act wishes to ban these bodies from inhabiting the streets surrounding these commercial properties. What this act seems to have left out is an alternative housing and economic plan which will be needed to support the homeless bodies elsewhere.
The second example, Vancouver’s “Tent City” is especially great in capturing the general public’s perception of the homeless body: an eyesore. In response to the recent Winter Olympics, many homeless individuals were displaced. A makeshift “tent city” located in Downtown Vancouver’s West Hastings was created to host (or hide) the homeless for the duration of the games (Vancouver Sun, March 15, 2010). There have even been reports that suggest that homeless people were given Olympic gear to blend in to the crowds. It should be noted that in both cases, the well being of the homeless individual is not the leading concern. Instead, both tent city and the distribution of Olympic clothing have occurred out of the nation’s concerns surrounding its public image.
These actions beg the question; why do we feel threatened by the homeless body? Kawash (1998) suggests that the moral panic stems from the imagined dangers the homeless body possesses. For example, a man sleeping on the subway is feared and avoided in the event that he may act violent without warning. It is in this unpredictability that many feel threatened. Although there have been times when a homeless person has acted violently towards another citizen, the reality of cases next to the believed threat do not match. It is interesting then to question where this supposed threat stems from. One must ask to who’s interest the Safe Street Act lies, or in the case of the “tent City” in Vancouver: Who has implemented these policies, and for what purpose? Similar to Gary Kingsman’s (2001) evaluation of the Canadian Government’s campaign to “out” Canadian homosexuals, one could ask what stakes the Canadian government hold in the displacement and “abolishment” of a specific marginalized group of people. In the case of homosexuals in the late 1950’s, homosexuals were believed to be easily infiltrated and compromised by Russian agents (Kingsman, 2001). With the homeless population of Canada, one could argue that these “bodies” pose a similar threat; they compromise the Canadian image as a caring, protective, democratic society that serves all people equally. Perhaps the Government of Canada is released from her duties by recognizing the homeless population as less than human, a threat to the state rather than a part of it (Kawash, 1998., Kingsman, 2001).
References
Hitchen, A.M. (2005). Safe Streets Act: Discourses Around Legislating Citizenship and Public
Spaces in British Columbia and Beyond. Variegations, 2, 1-11.
Kawash, S. (1998). The Homeless Body. Public Culture, 10(2), 319-39.
Kinsman, G.. (2001). Challenging Canadian and Queer 5 Nationalisms. In Terry Goldie (Ed). In
a Queer Country: Gay & Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context (pp.209-234). Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Rebecca, L. (2010, March 15). Tent city residents scramble to find shelter. Vancouver Sun.
Retrieved from:
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Tent+city+residents+scramble+find+shelter/2683325/story.html
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