No Room of Her Own: Women’s Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death, and Resistance, and: Beside Oneself: Homelessness Felt and Lived (review)

There are significant parallels in Desiree Hellegers’s and Catherine Robinson’s recently published accounts of homelessness. Both authors, informed by their past personal experiences working in homeless social services, draw on a series of life history interviews that they have conducted with unhoused people. In each case, the heart-wrenching stories that they document uncover a stunning array of violence and trauma that has shaped the lives of their narrators. By examining these stories, the authors hope to counteract the dehumanization of homeless people and crack the pervasive disregard for their plight. With their works, they seek to develop affective connections between their readers and their narrators. These bonds, they argue, are needed in order to foster the political transformations necessary to effectively address this social crisis.

There the similarities end. The books incorporate oral history in dramatically different ways. Hellegers carefully edits the transcripts into coherent life stories of fifteen different women that she presents in separate chapters. Each chapter offers an introduction that puts the narrator’s story in a larger historical context. Hellegers also incorporates throughout the text the background information addressing her relationship with each interviewee.

Robinson’s book, while based on her interviews, is not an oral history book. Rather, it is a theoretical treatise informed by brief extracts from the interviews. She offers little background context on the interviewees or on the interview process itself. She consciously avoids addressing any of the structural conditions shaping the lives of her narrators, as she instead seeks to explore the “feeling-states central to homelessness” (xiv). Her use of the interviews would not inherently be problematic; however, she argues that in order to understand how homelessness is felt and lived, the researcher needs to be corporeally engaged in the homeless world. There is little sensory description of that reality, so we are left assuming that because Robinson was physically there, she empathetically understands what it means to feel homeless. Furthermore, while Robinson emphasizes the importance of an emotional politics rooted in care, it is nearly impossible to develop any affective bonds with her narrators, given how little we know about them.

Robinson displays an impressive command of the complexities of social theory as she draws on the works of scholars such as Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu to make her case. She also demonstrates a firm grasp of the scholarship on homelessness over the last three decades, although she rejects many of the insights gained from this work. She concludes that trauma is the central cause of homelessness. As a result of physical and sexual abuse, people are incapable of being at home in their own bodies, they experience dramatic degrees of suffering, and they are “primally homeless” (78). While her narrators emphasize to Robinson their efforts to build networks of support and belonging with other homeless people, turning to theory, she dismisses these efforts and concludes that they reinforce chronic homelessness. The only way out, she argues, are the external support services that function as places of care, community, and healing. While she makes a strong case for recognizing the suffering of the homeless, she allows her narrators no productive agency. Perhaps she fears that if we acknowledge their power, it may undercut our capacity to understand their pain.

While Robinson acknowledges the work of others, such as Joan Scott, who make the case that individual experiences are products of larger historical processes and social structures, she dismisses them as irrelevant to what she is trying to do—to study what it feels like to be homeless. She offers no account of the structures of violence or the historical and social geography that shape the lives of her narrators. She does not account for the...