‘A locked door’ – The meaning of home for punitively homeless young people in Sweden

Abby Peterson

Anthony Steinbock (1994) argues that we have experientially formulated social relations, and specifically the so-called ‘problem of the Other’, in terms of home and homelessness. Unlike previous discourses of the past millennium, according to Steinbock:

 

social relations are conceived today around a conceptual pair — home and homelessness — that reaches deeply and even passionately into our very self-understanding (p. 207).

 

Home and homelessness express underlying discourses of belonging and estrangement, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, discourses which are at the centre of interest for contemporary cultural theorists.

In many western post-industrial countries, homelessness is claiming unprecedented popular attention across the political spectrum and is a persistent theme in both mass media and academic journals precisely because it is a way, consciously or unconsciously, of attempting to articulate or clarify the structure of social relations; we perceive home in its relative contrast to the ‘alienworld’, the ‘Other’. Steinbock argues that it is in terms of home and homelessness – this underlying conceptual dyad for intersubjectivity – that we predominantly understand ourselves today. While notions of home, as well as homelessness, are overburdened with meanings for us, they are nevertheless little understood and often taken for granted. Hence, our unflagging commitment to the homeless is counseled by our own lack of acceptance of the state of homelessness, which is in turn seldom informed by a clear notion of what this ‘home’ is that we are frantically trying to place everyone in in order to ‘end homelessness’. We rarely ask ourselves what homelessness is, much less, what it means to be home. Or as Christine, a thirty year old woman we interviewed stated: ‘I don’t know how it feels to be homeless because I have never had a home.’^[1]

Almost all social scientific books and articles dealing with the homeless begin with ‘the numbers game’. The inherent problems of defining the homeless are discussed against the concurrent problem of measuring homelessness. (cf. Jencks, 1994; Rossi, 1989; Koch, 1987; Hutson and Liddiard, 1994) Without a more or less firm definition of what constitutes homelessness, the social scientist lacks a target for his/her more or less exact measurements. (cf. Perhoff, 1987; Stefl, 1987) The methodological problems encountered by researchers in attempting to measure homelessness have been described by Rossi (1989) as trying to ‘count the uncountable’ (p. 47). And indeed, the question as to ‘how many’ defines homelessness as a social problem which can, or even must, be remedied. (Jencks, 1994: 2-3) So the numbers game is not practiced by the ‘counters of homelessness’ in an irresponsible manner, even if it is practiced haphazardly. What recent research does seem to agree upon is that the category homeless, however large its numbers are deemed to be, is an extremely heterogeneous group of people living in the condition of homelessness where the former simplified images of the male alcoholic and female mentally ill ‘bag lady’ no longer suffice to capture the diversity of homeless people. (Davis, 1995) According to Järvinen (1992), recent research in Scandinavia points towards more heterogeneity and visibility among the homeless. Homelessness has become increasingly a problem which can strike at all socio-economically weak groups in society. Järvinen emphasizes that this research points to a trend, albeit slight, indicating that numbers of women in particular are rising among these ‘new’ groups of homeless, and that the proportion of women among the group ‘young homeless’ is particularly significant.

So the question always revolves around who are the homeless; how do we isolate the group ‘homeless’, which can be subsequently measured and analyzed? But if we take the question back a bit, what is home that some people have less of or none at all. Our cultural sociological study will focus upon this latter question. What is home and what does it mean to ‘be home’? While the dominant approach to analyzes of homelessness today has tended to see the problem as one of housing needs, Rossi (1989) stresses that this definition of homeless as those without housing, or with highly inadequate housing, is relatively new. According to Rossi, all the commentators on homelessness up to the most recent times, beginning with Nels Anderson’s classic study from 1923, The Hobo: Sociology of the Homeless Man, designated persons as homeless who were living transient lives outside conventional family contexts.

 

It was not their housing conditions which rendered them homeless so much as their not participating in a life that gave them homes in the larger sense of that term. (p. 22)

 

Continuing in this vein, social science research during the 1950s and 1960s on ‘Skid Row’ homelessness within major urban centers in the US emphasized the social isolation of the homeless, which is reflected in the title of an anthology edited by Howard Bahr from 1970, Disaffiliated man: Essays and bibliography on Skid Row, vagrancy and outsiders. In short, historically, social scientific interest in homelessness has focused upon the social isolation, the disconnectedness, of homeless men — the ‘outsider’ position of the homeless to the conventional familial norms of society. (cf. Jencks, 1994) Bahr (1970) writes:

 

[h]omelessness ... is a condition of disaffiliation, a lack of bonds, a pathology of connectedness, and not an absence of proper housing. (p. 18)

 

Similarly, Baum and Barnes (1993) argue that:

 

Homelessness suggests an extreme condition of disaffiliation, a continuing marginalization and finally a complete loss of community, loss of sense of self. (p. 153)

 

The analysis here will connect to this older approach to homelessness by untangling what the home is that some people have less of than others. As such, it is as much a study of disaffiliation or estrangement — of what it means to be outside of a home as a place and outside of the discursive space of what home means in contemporary society.

Contemporary western societies are increasingly fraught with uncertainties about individuals, and particularly, about young people trying to find their ‘places’ in these societies – anchorages in the waves of change, with uncertainties, and contingencies sweeping over them. The search for a ‘home’ — a sense of belonging and safety — is at the core of our search for identity, our very self-understanding. (cf. Bauman, 1995) For young people, caught in a more or less prolonged situation of what youth researchers have called liminality, this is all the more important for their passage from childhood to adulthood. (eg. Kahane, 1997; Hetherington, 1998). The liminal situations of young people are a ‘set of transitional qualities betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1969:93) their living within different worlds — adult and childlike — at the same time. Young people are simultaneously outsiders to the adult order and insiders of the existing adult order, that is, they are nevertheless subject to the controls of the ‘adult order’. Catharina Eriksson (1999) has called this paradoxical situation:

 

a contradictory outsiderness whereby they [young homeless women] feel that they are treated as if they were outside of society while at the same time they feel that they are controlled by society. … They seek to find different strategies in order to deal with the contradiction between wanting to come in (-doors) at the same time that they want out from under the control of the system. 

 

In a sense these young women (more or less ‘young’) are seeking strategies which can come to terms with the liminal situation they find themselves involuntarily in, locked within the period of what society recognizes as youthfulness (cf. Apter, 1971) in order to take the step into a socially recognized adulthood. To have a ‘home’ of one’s own is to have a ‘place’ in society — it is a central process in the rite de passage to adulthood.

We will deconstruct the elusive and ambiguous concept of home by analysing the meanings this concept are given by young women who are a priori defined as having less of this mystical quantity of home, and who are on the fringes of Swedish society or ‘the people’s home’, perhaps caught up in its protective web but actively denying its ideal. What does to ‘be home’ mean to women? In what ways are these punitively young female homeless co-constitutive of a home? In what ways are the meaning of home for these punitively young homeless women imbricated in the dominant discourse of home in contemporary Swedish society? And finally, in what ways can the experiences and reflections of punitively homeless young women deconstruct the underlying hegemonious discourse of home and its concomitant partner homelessness to help us understand our own inherent experiences of and reflections on a fundamental sense of ‘homelessness’?

 

Youth homelessness

Hutson and Liddiard (1994) contend that similar factors lie behind the emergence of young people as a significant category among the homeless in many western post-industrial countries: widespread youth unemployment, a reduction in state benefits, particularly those available to young people under 25, and a reduction in affordable housing accessible to young people. Furthermore, these authors argue that similar factors put young people at risk of homelessness in these same countries: conflict or abuse within the family or a background of state care. In addition, the government responses to youth homelessness are remarkably similar: the setting up of schemes by state and/or voluntary agencies for special categories of young people, particularly those with substance abuse problems and/or a background of criminal activities.

Swedish researchers have identified ‘new groups’ emerging among the homeless, among these are the group young homeless. The 1980s signaled a change of course in the Swedish welfare state. The struggle against rising inflation took priority over the long established Swedish policy for full employment. The Swedish model’s policies for welfare redistribution lost credibility, and have become more and more difficult to realize in connection with full employment. In short, many researchers have claimed that the Swedish model of welfare was gradually dismantled during the 1980s and that this process has accelerated during the 1990s to come more in line with the welfare politics of the rest of Europe. (cf. Bergström, 1992; Salonen, 1994)

Tham (1994) claims that, on the basis of his research, if one defines marginalization as increasing inequities in the living conditions among the general population, then marginalization in Sweden has not taken place. However, if one defines marginalization as worsened living conditions among certain especially exposed groups — single mothers, unqualified young men, long-term unemployed, people dependent upon social assistance, and immigrants — then indeed marginalization has taken place in Sweden’s ‘people’s home’. In addition, the proportion of the population belonging to these groups has increased substantially. Fritzell and Lundberg (1994) state that the youngest cohort from 1991 in their study, 18-29 year olds, appear to have a lower standard of living than the comparable group from 1981. According to these researchers, this is the first time that a group of young people did not have a higher standard of living than that of a comparable group ten years earlier. They warn that perhaps age, or generation, is becoming the most important dimension in the politics of welfare redistribution. Hence age is increasingly becoming a potent factor behind marginalization processes in Sweden.

Rising unemployment and the sinking income level of certain groups (particularly among the youth) during the 1980s and 1990s directly affected the numbers of individuals relegated to seeking social help, and hence changes within the labor market led to marginalization processes which hit certain groups especially hard: single mothers, young people, and immigrants. Not only were these groups especially heavily affected by unemployment as compared to the general population, but also were the groups most often subjected to long-term unemployment (more than 6 months). It is among the group long-term unemployed that the greatest risks for landing in a negative spiral of increasing social disaffiliation and peripherization. (Salonen, 1994) While the situation among immigrants has deteriorated, particularly for immigrant ‘new-comers’ where unemployment among certain immigrant groups is almost total, the situation of young people has also worsened. Unemployment among 20-24 year olds increased from 2.6 percent in 1989 to 10.1 percent in 1992. Nearly 100,000 young people have remained unemployed each month since 1992, despite a new labor market policy, i.e. youth apprenticeship, which was introduced in 1992 and included approximately 80,000 young people during 1993. (ibid) In addition, among the group unemployed young people, one third lack the right to unemployment benefits. Their only means of support then becomes social assistance, or help from family and relatives.

Changes within the Swedish housing market have also directly affected young people seeking a ‘home of their own’. Affordable housing for single households has drastically decreased. Housing authorities are not unaware of this problem – if nothing else countless house occupations by young people have brought this message home to the general population and politicians alike. However their measures to create housing for young people, while laudable, have been insufficient.

It is against this context — high rates of youth unemployment, cut-backs in social benefits to young people, and a shortage of affordable housing — that our discussion of young punitively ‘homeless’ women is outlined. It is within this group of young people most subjected to society’s marginalization processes that a potential found of homeless, both cognitively and materially, is drawn upon.

In the face of these structural factors relating to the youth labor market, youth housing market, and state policies towards young people and homelessness in general, youth homelessness is increasingly becoming both a recognized, and still concealed problem in most western post-industrial societies. Despite these factors, according to Hutson and Liddiard (1994), politicians and media are inclined to place the blame for youth homelessness on the young people themselves. According to O’Mahony (1988),

 

there is a view often expressed that it is the fault of the young people if they find themselves without anywhere to live. This argument stresses that the young do not have to leave home (p. 2).

 

However, comprehensive research substantiates that many of the young people who become homeless have no real choice over whether or not to leave home. Many homeless young people come from state child care, which means that they must leave their care accommodation on a certain date. (Randall, 1988; Rossi, 1989) And those who leave their parental homes, often have had no other choice. In some cases they may have been evicted by their parents, and in other cases, they have left on their own initiative due to family conflict, (O’Mahony, 1988) and/or physical or sexual abuse (Thorton, 1990). The connection between the sexual abuse of young women and their subsequent homelessness has been corroborated in a number of studies. (Ralston, 1996; Hutson and Liddiard, 1994; Hendessi, 1992; Newman, 1989; Kenward and Hevey, 1989)

In addition to this link between abuse in the family and youth homelessness – which appears to be a causal relationship – there are a number of additional factors which readily appear together with youth homelessness. However, here it is difficult to establish whether these factors are a cause or effect of homelessness, and Hutson and Liddiard (1994), among others, tend to regard these additional factors as both cause and effect, arguing that they are subtly interrelated. These factors linked to youth homelessness include mental illness, criminality (where prostitution, while not as widespread as media reports would have us think, is intimately interrelated with past experiences of child sexual abuse), and alcohol and drug abuse. However, Hutson and Liddiard (1994) maintain that research confirms that these factors (mental illness, crime and substance abuse) are as much a consequence of homelessness as a cause. Regardless of their causal force, they compound the problems a young homeless individual faces and reinforce their situation of homelessness.

David Wagner (1994) argues that homeless people, and in particular, homeless young people are struggling to resist dominant imperatives — traditional family forms and the rules of employers and bureaucracies. Homeless people, intentionally or not, are transgressing gender and familial norms. How are these transgressions articulated by our group of punitively young homeless women, young women who according to the normative ideals of gender and nuclear family, ‘belong at home’?

 

The cast of cultural critics

The role of a sociologist engaged in ethno-sociological cultural criticism can be likened to that of a cartographer. The analytical project is one of mapping daily lives where, for example, ‘home’ in contemporary societies, in the present case, in contemporary Swedish society, is invested with various depths and strata of meaning. These depths and strata of meaning, it is argued, are intertwined in complex ways so as to form dominant discourse(s) of home and what it means to ‘be home’, and conversely, of homelessness and what it means to be homeless. Similarly our discourses of home/homeless are intertwined with underlying discourses of belonging and estrangement. In charting, or at least in part, ‘mapping what matters’ in this complex terrain of meaning, in teasing out the various strands of meaning and practices embedded in the discourse(s) of home, the analyst can take many paths. How the terrain is mapped depends on the paths noticed and followed. Some paths, of course, lead to dead ends; others reveal rich possibilities. I have secured the help of seven young women to guide me though the thorny discursive terrain of ‘home’. The experiences of home of the young women interviewed, and conversely, their experiences of homelessness, are unequivocally different from my own snug and secure experiences of home (and even summer home). The paths they led me on opened up new understandings of the meaning of ‘home’; their insights unlocked ‘doors’ of meaning construction which would have otherwise remained unlocked, and hence, unseen. The informants’ insights were subsequently brought into an intimate dialogue with a variety of theoretical fragments which is a research style that borrows its inspiration from Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) development of the ‘grounded theory’ approach (see also Strauss and Corbin, 1998). That is, the transcribed interviews were coded as to themes and perspectives, which were in turn informed by theoretical discussions that resulted in the generation of new theoretical insights as to the meaning of ‘home’ and ‘homelessness’ in contemporary Swedish society. However, in contrast to the methodological paradigm of Glaser and Strauss, my own role in the research — both in the choice of themes and paradigms for coding and comparison and in the choice of relevant theoretical partners in the dialogue with the empirical materials — was not devoid of prior theoretical ‘grounding’. Indeed, my ‘theoretical grounding’ inevitably steered these choices, even if I have attempted to keep as ‘open’ a mind as possible and lend these analyses a broad choice of theoretical partners in the dialogue.

In relating their experiences of homelessness, all of these young women told stories of survival and hidden narratives of invisibility. In the homelessness literature they would be classified as ‘resource people’ (as opposed to those sleeping on the street, ‘street people’, or those using homeless shelters, ‘shelter people’, see Roth and Bean, 1987: 17-20;). Single women, feminist researchers have argued, are the most concealed category of homeless, even though most surveys over the so-called ‘new homeless’ which ‘represent a diverse cross-section of the citizenry’, include a rising number of women (Baxter and Hopper, 1984: 50). For various reasons women tend to frequent less homeless shelters, tend seldom to expose themselves to the dangers of living visibly on the streets, and tend to prefer to solve their homeless situation by temporarily staying with friends or relatives — often moving from one male ‘friend’ to another, acquiring a place to sleep in exchange for sexual services. (Ralston, 1996) As one of the women we interviewed stated:

 

[s]ure there are a lot of girls like myself who have sometimes resorted to prostitution and other times have had relationships and moved around to different flats. 

 

In short, the women we interviewed relied on their own resources to find a roof over their heads. And while all of the women we interviewed had found themselves at times sleeping in public places — stairwells, toilets, bomb shelters, even a bush — they most often solved their homeless situation by staying with friends or acquaintances. None of the women we talked to had sought help from a shelter.

Why is this particular group of punitively homeless chosen as my cast of cultural critics in this analysis? It can be argued that for women the meanings of home and homelessness, as a result of the sexual division of labor within the household and the dominant ideology of ‘home’ and women’s ‘place’ within it, have vastly different implications than they do for men. Passaro (1996) states rather bluntly that the only women who remain homeless are:

 

[t]he renegades of gender, the women who are wary of protection, wary of recreating toxic homes, and wary of bureaucratic condescension and paternalism. (p. 63)

 

These renegades of gender are per definition traveling down different paths on the discursive terrain of home than the publicly legitimate ones. Traveling on these ‘delegitimate’ pathways, their choices at each crossroads are subsequently reflected upon in new ways. Home is a place and a discursive space which for these particular informants is invested with considerable energy. In their ‘mattering maps’, home and to be at home matter a great deal, simply because home is not a place they can, or have, taken for granted. (regarding ‘mattering maps’ see Goldstein, 1983: 272)

 

The Swedish context: The fear of homeless in a country ‘where there are no homeless’

We interviewed seven women between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-six with experiences of homelessness. All of these women related experiences of homelessness which began either in their early teens or early twenties. The young women we interviewed were explicitly aware of the meaning home has for their own sense of identity, as well as how their state of homelessness cast them in the role of outsiders by society at large. In expressing their own state of uncertainty connected with having no place to go, they could recognize that their very presence as homeless in a society where ‘there are no homeless’ could awaken a sense of uncertainty among those they called ‘normal’ people. For these young women the society around them was divided between ‘normal’ people and themselves, de facto, abnormal. The most fundamental underlying discourse of normalcy is the discourse of domesticity in which one insists on one’s ‘normal’ relationship to others in what is considered a ‘normal family’, i.e. a heterosexual nuclear family in which you live under one roof and where you cook dinners every evening and celebrate the holidays written on the calendar, in this way one articulates normalcy. Without the possibility of invoking this discourse of normalcy, lacking even the most superficial trappings of domesticity, a home of their own, the young women in our study subsequently placed themselves outside of its protective symbolic perimeters, they became de facto, abnormal. These women expected that their ‘abnormal’ presence would be met with uncertainty among those people who can profess normalcy, who find themselves safely within a discourse of domesticity. Ulla tells us:

 

[i]t is funny. Normal people don’t think there are any homeless. It makes you laugh. I mean there are bloody many. All normal people just can’t comprehend because it is so far from their reality. In general I think that people can think that anything can happen but that they will always have a roof over their heads because that’s basic security you know. So I am convinced that a normal person can never think that it could happen to them. ... If I were to sit and talk with someone, a normal person, and then tell them that I was homeless, I would guess that 50% would never talk to me again. It is just a lack of understanding, they just can’t understand because they are so bloody afraid of it [homelessness].

 

Marris (1996) discusses the homeless, and convertly the ‘home’, as a physical base from where we try to protect ourselves from the uncertainties of daily life. According to Marris, all our actions depend on reducing uncertainty to a residue of unknowns within a context of predictable relationships, so that we can find ways to evade, resolve or plan contingently around whatever remains unsure. He argues that the homeless lack this ability to even minimally control uncertainty, and that their situation is not a result of their own actions, or lack of actions to deal with misfortune, but that of the strategies and actions of those more powerful. In his account, the homeless are the hapless victims of this societal process wherein individuals, some more powerful and hence more successful than others, attempt to contain uncertainty — the ‘management of uncertainty’. The fate of the homeless is a symbol for the accumulated helplessness and insecurity which threatens us all. In the words of Marris:

 

society as a whole protects itself from the deeply troubling insecurities realized in their [the homeless] fate. They belong nowhere, and no one accepts responsibility for what becomes of them. Their existence itself can be challenged, because their number has no certainty. They have virtually no right to be anywhere. (p. 14)          

 

In 1967 the Swedish Parliament passed a bill, the so-called ‘Million Program’. With this bill the Swedish state was committed to the construction of one million flats during the next ten years, a gigantic housing construction project in a country with eight million inhabitants. The idea for this housing program came as a climax of a social policy program which aimed at eliminating over-crowded living conditions in the country and providing all Swedish inhabitants with affordable, healthy and well-planned housing. Certainly the utopian aims of this bold venture in social engineering were laudable, even if some of the results are, and have been, highly criticized in Sweden. The construction of ‘cement ghettos’, the social isolation of marginalized groups in satellite suburban areas in mass produced anonymous high-rise residential structures, has not lived up to the program planners’ social political vision. Nevertheless, in Sweden the pervading result of this ‘ten year plan’ in housing is the assumption that everyone’s housing needs are met, even if they are met with housing that many perhaps do not want. But the uncertainty of not having an adequate roof over one’s head in Sweden was in the mind’s eye eliminated, once and for all, with this massive building boom in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps we can interpret this Social Democratic vision as an attempt to ‘build away’ the uncertainty experienced by a Swedish population with all too poignant memories of the poverty and uncertainty of the pre-war era.

Thus by decree, there are no homeless in Sweden; the security of, at the very least, a roof over one’s head, a home of one’s own, is a reality for all, hence, by decree, all of the country’s inhabitants are enclosed within the safe boundaries of normalcy within a discourse of domesticity. The young women we interviewed, experiencing nowhere to go, and not knowing when they wake in the morning where or how they will spend the night — caught in a state of liminality, both spatially and temporally — certainly do embody the worst fears of modern man, being prey to the ever present and over-riding uncertainties of daily life. However, their plight is their ‘own failure’. (see Hydén, 1994) This appears to be the diagnose of their situation made by authorities, the general public, and the women themselves.

 

The notion of home

Rossi (1989) cites the definition of home supplied by the American poet Robert Frost: ‘[h]ome is the place where, when you have to go there, /they have to take you in’ (p. 14). Today, the primary everyday meaning of ‘home’ is the ‘private’ space from which the individual travels into the public sphere and to which he or she returns at the end of the day. ‘Home’ is a place to go to. Anne, who is 28, describes her need to have a place to go.

 

What is tough is not being able to go home to my own apartment and lock myself in. That is what has felt empty, not having somewhere to go. Everyone has to have a home, a place to fix a meal once a day and eat breakfast. And not have to go out and steal all the time to keep oneself afloat.

 

Louise, also 28, stated quite simply that ‘you have to start somewhere and a flat is point A. ‘You have to have somewhere to go’. Ulla, 26, related for us her life as homeless, how she felt ‘locked into’ a situation of homelessness.

 

It’s bloody hard living like I do. You can never relax. You can’t go to bed when you want to or wake up when you want to. It doesn’t work like that. There has been alot of times when I haven’t had anywhere to go. Slept in air-raid shelters, places like that. And sometimes you can’t get in anywhere, so you have to wander around all night. It’s times like that, especially when it gets cold, that you don’t mind a prison sentence. ... The whole thing is like going around in circles. If you don’t have anywhere to live, and don’t have a good economy, then you have to become a criminal and you have to use drugs to put up with the situation. And if you use drugs then you don’t get a place to live. ... When I haven’t had anywhere to go I always know about places that others don’t know about, where I can find a little peace and quiet. You can be damn sure that I have never slept anywhere where people can walk over me. Air-raid shelters are my favorites even if they are damn cold. Sometimes I’ve had to sleep in toilets but I always choose a fresh one.

 

Both Anne’s and Ulla’s narratives substantiate Hutson and Liddiard’s (1994) argument regarding the treadmill homeless young people find themselves on. Whether substance abuse and criminality are causes or effects of homelessness, they are factors which nevertheless reinforce a situation of homelessness.

Acccording to Eviatar Zerubavel (1991), the most obvious form of identity is the experience of an insular self that is clearly cut off from one’s surrounding environment, a ‘self with clear and sharp lines of demarcation that we experience as autonomous and marked off distinctly from everything else’ (p. 14). We thus associate selfhood with a psychological ‘distance’ from others and experience privacy as having some ‘space’ for ourselves or as a ‘territory’ of inaccessibility surrounding us. (cf. Goffman 1963: 38-39) In short, spatial differentiation is fundamental for our sense of self, our individuation from the social environment we are enmeshed in. We construct boundaries, both cognitive and material, with which we create ‘gaps’ between ourselves and others. ‘The experiential separateness of the self ... is clearly enhanced by the actual gaps of ‘personal space’ that normally envelops it’ (Zerubavel, 1991: 22). By literally insulating the self from contact with others, such a gap promotes its experience as an insular entity. Perhaps the most obvious boundary which can construct an actual gap of personal space is a lock on the door. ‘A lock on the door’, notes Virginia Woolf in her study of privacy and selfhood, A Room of One’s Own, ‘means the power to think for oneself’ (p. 110). The young women we interviewed emphasized their need to lock themselves in, to create a ‘room of their own’, a ‘private space’ where they controlled entry.

Jencks (1994) defines home as a place which affords its occupant(s) a minimum degree of privacy. According to this author, ‘what the homeless need right now is some private space, however small, from which they can exclude others’ (p. 116). The young women we interviewed all emphasized the meaning of home as a place where you exclude others. Margaret is 36 and has been more or less homeless since she was 29 — in and out of institutions or in temporary housing. Margaret is skeptical to so-called intermediate housing.

 

It’s just that I have been inside institutions for so long and have been so controlled that I have felt violated. I have had to accept so much that goes against my nature, have had my freedom constrained. ... So now I want my door and I want to be able to lock it. I don’t want them to have a key and be able to walk in whenever they want. And I don’t mean that I don’t want an open door so I can take drugs or party or isolate myself. Rather, when I am free after all of these years, I want to shut and lock my door. I want to be left alone and not have to go down and eat breakfast or such ... I don’t want that type of control, it feels like I am still doing time then. ... It is like a violation, like they can still do whatever they want with me and I just have to sit back and take it. I have had to accept that inside, but do I have to accept that outside?

 

Anne, 28 years old, shares Margaret’s skepticism to so-called intermediate housing.

 

They make all sorts of demands. You can’t change the locks like I usually do. I don’t like the fact that they can just unlock the door and walk in, so it is not really private.

 

For these young women home meant a locked door, control over their immediate environment, being able to choose who comes in and who stays out. Home is a place for them where they can ‘do as they like’, where it is their rules that prevail. For all of the young women we interviewed the state of homelessness, of having no place to go, implied a state of dependency and having a home of one’s own, literally, a locked door, was a way of protecting their individual autonomy. Anne describes this sense of dependency in the following way:

 

[i]t is a tough life, but if you are tough you manage, but it is no fun. You always have to rely on someone’s help. And they can’t always stand by you. My parents don’t like it when I come home to them. But then I don’t really want to either. But I had my clothes and things in their cellar and I could come and fetch a change and wash my clothes in my mother’s laundry room. So I lived like that, in a backpack one could say.

 

Ulla’s narrative is much the same, not only does she feel that her survival is dependent upon the good will of her friends, but she has felt dependent upon the rules which prevail in these ‘borrowed’ homes.

 

With nowhere to go you become dependent upon your mates. You move in with mates, but its bloody hard, moving around all the time. Your belongings get spread around everywhere. ... You just have to hope that you have good mates. But I don’t want to be dependent upon anyone. And it’s not like having a home of your own. You can’t have any of your personal things around. You try to be there as little as possible. After all, it’s their place and they have to feel like it is their home. So you just stay there to sleep and look after your hygiene, otherwise you try and stay away as much as possible. You have to respect those that live there and its their rules that count. If they ask me to go, well then I go, I don’t think that is strange. If I had my own place I would do the same.

 

Rosemary George (1996) suggests that the basic organizing principle around which the notion of the ‘home’ is built is a pattern of select inclusions and exclusions. Home is a way of establishing difference. Home is where we invite some and exclude others.

 

A home is a flat where you go in and shut the door, where you can prepare meals, where you take care of everything yourself. Someplace that is mine. Where I decide who can come in and who stays out. That’s what I want. (Christine, 30)

 

For these young women, not having a home, a door they could lock, meant not only a state of dependency, but also a perpetual state of accessibility, their ‘territory’ of inaccessibility in an environment they literally floated around in was, at best, confined to their own bodies.

 

Home for me is when you open the door and lock it after you. Then you are at home. Things and such don’t mean so much. Home is security. It is my territory where I can do as I like. It is a stationary base. Like now when I don’t have any place to run to and lock myself in, it feels like I am on the run all of the time. ... Here it is a so-called open prison, and I know it is really sick, but I miss not being locked in. In a regular prison you’re locked in at seven o’clock, then it is my room.  (Ulla, 26)

 

For Ulla, not having a home was like ‘being on the run all of the time’. One could say that without the spatial differentiation offered by a locked door, a room of her own, Ulla could not avoid the sensation of ‘free-floating’ in some boundless void. Ulla, and the other young women we interviewed, found themselves in a state of spatial liminality, caught in the interstitial cracks betwixt and between geographical spaces — young women with ‘no where to go’.

George (1996) argues that this space designated as home is most often patently awarded an ambience of safety and stability and from within its geographic comforts individuals find identity, security and stimulation. In other words, the notion of home often carries with it a coziness which denies that it is the physical terrain of power relations within which, for example, forms of domestic violence may as readily be enacted as practices of confirmation and nurturing. (cf. Martin and Mohanty, 1986; Ralston, 1996) Passaro (1996) states the case succinctly by stating that homelessness for many women is a ‘haven from heartless homes’ (p. 63). Homelessness for these women is an active choice, the lesser of two evils. And whereas, according to Passaro, some homeless men may be fleeing home and what they describe as the obligations and constraints of breadwinning, women are fleeing individual men.

All of the women we encountered emphasized that the world they lived in was a male world. Anne stated quite bluntly, ‘in drug circles there aren’t so many girls’. Home for the young women we interviewed referred to the place where they felt protected, shielded behind locked doors and a place within which they controlled entry. They could decide who (what man or what social authority) could enter. Home is the place where one is in because an Other(s) is kept out. Home in this sense can be understood as the place where an Other(s), who is psychologically or physically abusive is kept out — given, for example, a women’s power to maintain this act of elective exclusion within the physical confines of the ‘home’. Karin is 35, but the first time she was homeless she was 23.

 

I stayed with friends, went from one sofa to another. I lived in a suitcase. The only clothes I had were the clothes on my back. I had to wash them in the evening, hang them up and hope they were dry in the morning. The last time I was homeless I lived in basements, attics, even stairwells, for over a year. I knocked on some friend’s door or I just went up to some junkie’s place and hoped that they were awake so that I could at least sit there over night, without feeling like I was butting in. A lot of times when I slept over at a friend’s place I felt like I was intruding as I couldn’t do so much to help this person. I couldn’t pay for myself, neither with my body nor with money nor anything else. So I felt like I was free-loading all the time, most of the time I went around feeling like a beggar. And you sink really low. I had to do things that would never have crossed my mind if things had been normal. You really have to swallow your pride.

 

Karin described in these words her sense of powerlessness as homeless in her lack of ability to exert this act of exclusion, of being subject to another (male) person’s demands. She emphasizes that this situation of not being able to exclude was not normal.

Ulla relates as well a reluctance to intrude, to be in the way, and claims that women experience this more often than men.

 

Sure, there are more guys that are homeless. In a way it is easier for them. I think girls are maybe afraid of being in the way. But a man can behave that way, more rough like, can just go in and stomp around. A girl just can’t stomp in in the same way, so sure there is a difference.

 

Christine, who is 30, states that she has never had a home, a place of her own.

 

I have had a place to live when I have been together with some guy, but I have never had a place of my own. It has been under their conditions. It has been their flat. I have never furnished my own flat. I moved away from my parent’s home when I was about twelve or thirteen. So I have lived in a lot of institutions, spent time in prison, I’ve slept here and there, or I haven’t slept at all. I’ve moved around from one guy to another. Or I’ve lived in a car, I’ve lived in the bushes, I’ve even lived on a bicycle.

 

If their survival strategies meant that they would go from one male friend to another, wandering between different friend’s and acquaintance’s flats, this strategy was fraught with uncertainty. Karin describes her insecurity in the following words.

 

Those times when I got to stay a little longer with some mate I was terrified of stepping on his toes. Or if I would complain they would just throw me out, get tired of me. So I never felt like I was at home or that it was my home. Never. You had to accept the rules where you came, accept anything the other person did. If he blew his nose in the curtains, well that was OK. But a lot of times I was thrown out anyway. Maybe I stepped on someone’s toes or they just got tired of me. Maybe I didn’t come back with any food, or dinner wasn’t ready when he came home. It could be anything, a real trifle.

 

Karin’s insecurity prevails from the time when she was homeless. She is secure only as long as she is behind her locked door.

 

As long as I am in my flat I feel like I am at home. But as soon as I go out the door, go down to the laundry room or something, then I feel real insecure, as if I am going to step on someone’s toes so that the neighbors start complaining and maybe have me evicted. Sometimes I hardly dare cough. ... My home is my castle. It is security, it is everything. My own room like.

 

What was perhaps surprising with the responses we received was that home for these young women was primarily a place for individual autonomy — a place where you can tell people to push off and just be yourself. For most of these young women a home was an individual project, not a place necessarily for intimate relations. They did not in general envision a home as a place one shared with significant others, rather a home was a ‘room of my own’. Ingela, 34 years old, was somewhat of an exception and expressed an ambivalent position in regards to what home means for her. According to Ingela:

 

a home is somewhere I can receive people and where I can also be entirely alone. ... It is my home, where I can invite people.

 

Putman (1993) claims that the ambiguity of the notion of ‘home’ disguises that the home is not only a concrete environment, home is the relationships enacted within its parameters, as well as an ideal envisioned or imagined — what Putnam calls ‘home-making’. While home was a place from which they could exclude others, who was included in this place they called home? For Ingela, home meant a place where she could invite people, where she had control over who would enter, ‘on my conditions even if it is often lonely’. Anne, who is 28, described her envisioned ideal home in the following words:

 

My home is my castle where I can shut the door and lock it. Take care of myself. I am a pedant and I try to have things nice around me, clean and tidy. I clean at least once a week, from top to bottom. My home is my home. And I usually have a cat. I am sociable and a cat is a companion. A home is where you can have things as personal as you want. I want a lot of flowers and plants in my home, so I want a home full of life.

 

I would like to change my way of life. My birthday is in April and I will be 29 then, not to late too have children, but you can’t have children before you have your life under control. But still it is not too late. I don’t know if I could have children, but that would change my life. Find love and dare to love and be loved. ... But then you are in a situation of dependency and then you become weak. Alone is not strength, but in love you are weak. ... I often clash in relations with girls but with men it is easier. And while I want them just as friends they often fall in love with me and that makes things difficult for me. I don’t know if it is somehow my fault, but it always ruins things. Some can accept that, but most can’t. So it is hard. I try to be honest with myself and I don’t want the responsibility.

 

So while Anne could toy with the idea of a home filled with familial relations — children and a male partner — it appears to be an imagined home which is rather distant from what she regards as her lived experiences. ‘I try to be honest with myself and I don’t want the responsibility.’

We have discussed home in its geographical scale as a roof over one’s head, in its cognitive sense as a feeling of belonging and/or not belonging. And while cultural sociologists, among others, emphasize that ‘home’ is not simply a roof over one’s head — it is the center of a web of human relationships, a terrain of meaning construction — for the young women we encountered, home was largely an individual project and not the envisioned site of human relationships. Perhaps we can regard them in Passaro’s (1996) terms as ‘gender renegades’. In refusing to ‘buy into’ the familial ideal of home, these young women regarded ‘home’ as a protective ‘skin’, a locked door, from which they could develop their own individual autonomy. 

 

A sense of self

The notion of home is conflated with the notion of self. ‘Home’ and ‘not home’ are the basic divisions of geographic space, just as ‘self’ and the ‘Other’ represent the basic divisions of psychic space. Home is a basic spatiality for identity construction; it is the place where we ‘work’ on our identities. Our ‘home’ pervades the meanings we attribute to ourselves and in a fundamental sense gives meaning to our relation with the ‘Other’. Ingela relates how her situation of homelessness has lent a deeply felt sense of rootlessness. ‘Even if I have origins somewhere I can’t associate myself to any place’. She claims that in not having a home where she can: ‘open the door for someone and show that I am someone feels like no one knows who I am’. Having a home for Ingela is a way of securing an ‘acknowledgement that one is the person one is’.

Louise, telling us about the apartment she now has, says:

 

the place I have now isn’t really a proper apartment. It is a place where they put people with problems, it has a really bad reputation, it’s been called all sorts of names. So if you live there you are stigmatized. It is not in an ordinary residential area, living outside of an industrial area I felt like I’ve been shoved aside. Sure I can live there, and I have a roof over my head and I can invite my friends there and so on, but I feel like an outcast.

 

Is Louise a student of the work of Erving Goffman? Probably not. Nevertheless, she eloquently expresses the ‘stigma trap’ discussed by this theorist. She realizes that by being relegated to ‘problem housing’ she is de facto categorized as an ‘outcast’. She has a ‘home’, but it is not the ‘right home’. She is fully aware that the complement of rights, entitlements, and recognition which are the ‘birthright’ of membership in Swedish society, her place as a ‘normal Swede’, is denied her. Louise, as a stigmatized young woman — a condition which she is very much aware of — is confronted by the perpetually recurring possibility of ordinary, ‘normal’, members of society rejecting her claim to be one of them.

We questioned Karin how she perceived society during the time when she was homeless. Her narrative was also one of estrangement, of being an ‘outcast’. According to Karin:

 

I felt like it was me and them. They had all of this power in their hands which they in turn abused. What can I say. They were like gods. You just had to accept things, they treat you just like they want to. Even now it is me and them, it’s more than just the question of housing. It is a lot. First when you have a job and feel like you do right by yourself, maybe then I can feel like I’m one of them too.

 

A home is a place from which you can construct a sense of belonging in the society surrounding you, or it is a place to hide from society’s ‘gaze’, a place to conceal a sense of not belonging. Lacking a place called home from which this sense of belonging (or of not belonging), can be constructed, Ulla describes her strategy to ‘fit in’ in the following words:

 

[y]ou are so vulnerable, you just want to go and find somewhere to hide. It is the same thing with a shower. That is something you are really careful about. I think that we are actually more careful about our hygiene ... when you usually think about the homeless you relate it to torn jeans and shit. But it is exactly the opposite. You always have new clothes. You can’t wash them so you always have to steal new ones. You have one bloody wardrobe, always the latest fashion. I’ve had a lot of clothes that I have only worn once because they got dirty and I couldn’t wash them. It is the only thing I have that I can fix up. The only thing we can fix is ourselves, if you know what I mean. So I am always dressed in clothes that are fresh and clean, it is all I have to work with. You really become a label freak. So there is absolutely no one that could meet me on a street and think that I was homeless. It is the only way that I can melt into a crowd.

 

Ulla’s narrative of ‘fitting in’ attests not so much to an attempt or desire to feel ‘one of’ the society surrounding her, but to not standing out in that society as being an identifiable ‘outsider’. Through her dress and careful hygiene she can wear a mask of ‘normalcy’ and withdraw from society’s ‘gaze’ — not ‘belonging’, but hidden from society’s stamp of estrangement and ‘abnormalcy’. Lacking the closed door of her own home, work on her body allows Ulla to maintain a closed door on herself — a space of inaccessibility — in her contact with the society surrounding her.  According to Smith (1993), the scale of the home provides the most immediate context for the construction of self. Hence, he argues that homelessness is a dramatic loss over the way in which one’s identity is constructed, since the home no longer shields one from the public gaze. Margaret describes her need to be alone in her own home, where she can just be herself, or in Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘think for herself’.

 

A home for me is a place that is mine and where only I have the key. But I haven’t had a home for so long that my room is my home now. But it is just a station. ... I think that you have to be firmly rooted somewhere, then you can have a free rein to leave that place but it has to remain there. That is why a home is so important for me. It is a place that is mine, a place I can lock and I can go and be alone. It is a real skill the ability to be alone, especially when one has lived like this, but I think it is a need everyone has. ... It is a need to be alone sometimes and not have to wear that little mask all the time. In your own home you can tell people to push off. Even if I almost never do that, it is still your right.

 

Without the geographical space of a home, the site for identity construction revolves around the body — ‘it’s all I have to work with. The only thing we can fix is ourselves.’ Without the protective ‘skin’ offered by the walls of a ‘home’, for these young women the scale of spatial identity construction is reduced to the body. ‘It is all they have to work with’. Concerned with their hygiene, feeling fresh and clean, wearing the latest fashions, allows them to construct an identity which makes them ‘one of them’ — at least during an encounter on the street. Following the thoughts of Mary Douglas, Zerubavel (1991) argues that the aversion to ambiguity is often manifested in a pseudo-hygienic avoidance of ‘filth’. For the young women in our study, their concern with their hygiene is a process of putting themselves back in their mental ‘place’, where they ‘belong’ — among everyone else — and not among the unpure, the ‘outsiders’. By keeping themselves fresh and clean they can melt into the crowd and no one could suspect that they were ‘outsiders’, homeless.

While the space of identity construction, or identity work, has collapsed upon the body itself, the temporal space of identity construction has collapsed as well. In the words of Ingela: ‘you are just here and now and in the place you are sitting at the moment’. Ulla says:

 

[y]ou live for the moment. You use every minute in a whole different way. You don’t live for what has been or what is going to happen, you just live for what is now. You don’t even wake up in the morning and think about what will happen in the evening. You learn to be bloody flexible.

 

Not only were these young women narrating experiences of spatial liminality, the sensation of being ‘free-floaters’ in geographical space, they were also in different ways telling us of the experiences of temporal ‘free-floating’. Their lives were in a sense in limbo, their days spent suspended in an ever present ‘now’ — cut off from the past and with little hope for the future. In the words of Louise:

 

I like to make things homey, fix things like. That’s really cool, but it isn’t so easy when you don’t have anything. I just have to accept the way things are. Sure I have thought a lot about how things could have been [a home of her own], but it is a wish that has become more and more a dream and now it is just an illusion.

 

Henri Lefebvre (1984) has argued that in the postwar era daily life has been restructured through the production of ‘everyday life’, where a historically produced plane of existence is built upon principles of repetition, redundancy and recurrence. It is a space of boredom and ‘intolerable tediousness’ where every possibility of transcendence is eliminated. Everyday life involves not only the commodification of spaces and places – for example, home – but their routinization as well. This is a bleak picture indeed. Grossberg (1992) turns this apparent bleakness on its head by suggesting that everyday life can be seen as something of a luxury. Firstly, Grossberg argues that there is a real pleasure and comfort in everyday life’s mundanity, in the stability of its repetitiveness. Not only its practices, but also its emotional investments are made into routines. One can ‘sit back’ and enjoy life:

 

[i]n everyday life, one has the luxury of investing in the mundane and the trivial, in the consumption of life itself (p. 149).

 

Secondly, Grossberg maintains that everyday life is a luxury simply because it is not available to everyone. For our informants, everyday life, its commonplace, boring and routinized security, is just out of their reach. The resources necessary for an inclusion in everyday life’s warm and secure (albeit boring and tedious) embrace — its capitalized spaces — are simply beyond the reach of the young women we interviewed. The economic, social and cultural resources necessary for an inclusion in the place and space of home, in the mundane security of everyday life, are unavailable to them. While the women we interviewed had indeed daily lives, what they apparently longed for was everyday life’s routinized, boring, and predicable character – in short, a safe and secure harbor. Freefloating in time and space, they described a longing for anchorage, a place to go to, a place to dream and perhaps realize those dreams.

 

‘A place of your own’

What home means to us is shaped by both the material circumstances of our experience and by the various narratives that attempt to define and interpret that experience for us. For the punitively homeless young women we interviewed the meanings they attached to home, their individual narratives, were deeply interwoven with their material circumstances of houselessness, as were their experiences of houselessness in turn interpreted within, as well as in opposition to, dominant discourses of home and domesticity. Home for these young women is a place to go and perhaps most importantly, home is a locked door, a protection of their own autonomy. Home becomes the walls which differentiate the self — the woman behind the locked door — and the Other, that is, society at large; this, whether the ‘home’ is the door of a flat or the ‘skin’ of their bodies offering them a measure of invisibility in a crowd. Home is the place where one is in because an Other(s) is kept out which is in its widest sense, society, and the controls that society exercises over them. Home for the women we interviewed was not primarily a site of human relations, but a site for the establishment of individual autonomy.

Home was also an anchor in place and in time. Home means a place to go, but it also means a relationship to temporality, an ability to ‘place’ oneself in both the past and future — whether that place is memories of childhood or yesterday or that future is the immediacy of tomorrow or dreams of tomorrow. Home as walls around oneself, is perhaps the most concrete expression of a past and ‘possible’ future for the women we met. Home is an individual path in the ever present now of their daily existences, a path of contemporary survival or hope for survival — a closed door.

 

 

 

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