This Is home,or Is It?: Disrupting Grand Narratives of Home as Physical or Institutional Space

Abstract

In this article, as suggest by the subtitle, I try to expose a kind of hidden homelessness. One that is not worse than others but important to bring to light. One where narratives are missing. One that goes against the essentializing of home as a middle-class heterosexual construction while not negating the desire for a home by the ones that have none.This is a textual performance about the idea of linking traditional notions of home with how academic knowledge is constructed about the homeless—by disrupting grand narratives of home as physical or institutional space. It is a decolonizing performance autoethnography exposing homelessness that returns its gaze into the process of knowledge production in the hope that by reflecting on how knowledge is produced, troubling the Western concept of home, we academics may create narratives that help more people feel housed.

Keywords

decolonizing knowledge production autoethnography homelessness

References

Clough, P.T. ( 1994). Feminist thought. Cambridge, MA: Black-well.

Dimitriadis, G. , & McCarthy, C. ( 2000). Stranger in the village: James Baldwin, popular culture, and the ties that bind. Qualitative Inquiry, 2, 171-187.

Haraway, D.J. ( 1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature . New York: Routledge.

hooks, b. ( 1989). Talking back: Thinking feminism, thinking Black. Boston: South End.

hooks, b. ( 1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End.

Min-ha, T.T. ( 1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Richardson, L. ( 1994). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 516-529). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.