Thick skins in place, thick skins out of place: re-placing homeless bodies in spaces of care

Abstract

The ‘homeless body’ has been largely constructed in scholarship as a ‘discursive body’ while it has been inadequately grounded in empirical space. Drawing from ethnographic research, this article attempts a twofold, gradual re-placement: a conceptual replacement of the ‘discursive homeless body’ as material bodies, which shape homeless subjectivities; and a spatial re-placement of these bodies in Athens’ formal spaces of care, where homeless subjects respond to the provided care through a personal body work. The re-placement is conceptualized through ‘stigma dialectic’, namely, the continuous embodiment and emplacement of the homeless stigma within these spaces. There, the stigmatized as ‘dirty’ homeless subjects achieve a geographical-social ordering as visceral practices of cleanliness make homeless bodies ‘in place’, closer to the non-stigmatized staff and volunteers. At the same time though, and while ‘in place’, homeless subjects try to make their bodies ‘out of place’, away from other, stigmatized homeless bodies. Informed by literatures on geographies of care, visceral geographies, and by performative approaches to homeless geographies, the article suggests that the personal body work might have significant implications for a neoliberalizing ethic of care, the spaces it structures and is enabled through, and the homeless subjectivities it structures, especially in times of welfare restructuring.