Race, Class, and Gender in the Regulation of Homelessness in Kuala Lumpur, 1870-1930

• In Event: 156 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 09. Race, Class, Gender, and Human Rights in a Global Context

Abstract

As British influence expanded through Southeast Asia in the mid-19th century, growing numbers of people identified as paupers, vagrants, and beggars became visible in major ports and cities. Sensing a crisis, colonial officers felt pressed to take action and, thus, a system of poverty management gradually began to take shape derived from British models and adapted to local colonial conditions. As in England, policy responses to homelessness—such as the establishment of poorhouses and detention camps—were riddled with implicit and explicit biases informing decisions of who was “deserving” of aid and who ought to be reformed or punished. Moreover, in the context of a colonial city, where white Europeans comprised a small but highly influential minority, elites had particular priorities that guided aggressive policing measures to ensure the integrity of the city and make empire respectable.

In this paper, I consider how race, gender, and class shaped the production of homelessness and its regulation in Kuala Lumpur at the turn of the 20th century. By tracing the localized formation of patterns of homelessness in Kuala Lumpur from the 1870s to the 1930s, I aim to illuminate how global and local capitalist development and processes of social differentiation shaped the city and, by extension, vulnerability to homelessness. In addition, by mapping changes in homelessness regulation, I illustrate how local British, Chinese, and Malay elites negotiated within the political structure of colonial rule to preserve particular strategic interests as they developed policy for addressing the growing “social ill” of vagrancy.

Author

• Rayna M Rusenko