Comfortable While Homeless: Resistance to the Annihilation of Space by Law

• In Event: 519 - Section on Race, Class and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 06. Intersectionality and Inequality in the Life Course

Abstract

This article uses photographic images and ethnographic experience to argue for the importance of taking comfort seriously in the discussion of homelessness. Taking a research interlocuter’s mention of comfortability as a starting point, the analysis finds the persistence of comfort amongst the lives of people sleeping rough to point towards the need to humanize how homelessness is perceived and discussed. Because the discourse around managing homelessness in urban spaces revolves around the comfort of housed consumers, the comfort of those experiencing homelessness falls off the terrain of discussion. Conversely, this article presents comfort as central to the politics of homelessness discourse because it carries the cultural history of the false binary between the private and the public spheres that underlies the rationale for excluding the homeless from public spaces. Rather than viewing actions such as sitting or lying on the sidewalk as passive, seeking comfort becomes a mode of political action in resistance to the “annihilation of space by law” that dominates homeless management.

Author

• Maggie Tate, University of Texas at Austin