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From Madonna to Marx: Towards a Re‐theorisation of Homelessness
Author(s) -
Hennigan Brian
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/anti.12410
Subject(s) - sociology , materialism , ideology , consumption (sociology) , scholarship , politics , population , working class , gender studies , class analysis , political economy , law , social science , political science , epistemology , philosophy , demography
Homeless people, so the story goes, are regularly excluded from spaces of consumption because they offend customers. For a significant portion of homelessness scholarship, such exclusion is the point of departure for subsequent analysis. Others, by examining homelessness within these consumption spaces, theorise that anti‐homeless policies and attitudes emerge because homeless people cannot or have not properly consumed (e.g. nice clothes, housing). This article, conversely, argues that homeless people's “offensiveness” derives from their relation to production (rather than consumption), from their class position. Homeless people's spatial incongruity, specifically, originates in their apparent unproductivity, their violation of the capitalist law of value and its ideological justifications. This historical materialist analysis is not only more revealing, it also positions homeless people as a working class faction in need of political organising rather than an abstract population in need of pitiful charity.