Beside One's Self: Homelessness Felt and Lived

1 Corporeography

23 1 Corporeography Sensing the Other Something gets under my skin. —Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity In this chapter, I aim to give a fuller account of the way in which I think my gut feelings about homelessness have formed through corporeal engagement. I do so as a disruption to social scientific approximations of homelessness and with an insistence that engagement in methodological debate and development is central to also addressing the widely acknowledged theoretical paucity of the field of homelessness research. I also aim to account for corporeal engagement foreseeing discomfort with my positive assessment of the affective knowledge capacities of the researching body. My central claim is that, over time, I have built a bodily knowledge of felt homelessness; I have built a slow corporeal register of being-without-place. Through being there in homeless places and being with homeless people, through being tangled up in homelessness, I have developed a corporeal comprehension of how it is felt and lived. I seek to account in more detail here for the possibility of such corporeal comprehension, for how it might be engendered. Following Michael Jackson (1989, 3), I move to further “clarify the ways in which knowledge is grounded in practical, personal and participatory experience in the field.” I want to unravel the fragile possibilities 24 | Beside One’s Self of experiential, bodily knowledge, whatever limits to knowing such “bodily engagings” (Laurier and Parr 2000, 100) also imply. I return to the dangerous territory of claiming to know the experiences of others as a justification for speaking on their behalf, and as such, to the “self-legitimation” (Kirby 1993, 25) embedded in the practice of ethnographic research. In particular, I reconsider the possibilities of experiential authority, of claiming “I was there” and had a “‘feel’ for” homelessness (Clifford 1988, 35). Such claims to the researcher’s own felt-experience as a basis for knowledge are dangerous in that they have been understood, at best, to naïvely obscure the ideological constitution of experience (Scott 1991, 778), to be potentially “self-indulgent” (Parr 2005, 479) in giving primacy to researchers’ rather than research participants’ experiences (Widdowfield 2000, 202), to be “anti-theoretical” and “anti-intellectual” (Grosz 1993, 207), and certainly to unreflexively assume the direct availability of one’s own experience (Kirby 1993, 30; Rose 1997, 309). In a context in which legitimated knowledge has evolved as “abstract and reductively derived knowledge” (Lawler 1991, 226), and efforts to establish the alternative value of experiential knowledge have been seen to repeat authoritative claims to truthful and valid representation, being there and being with remain doubly contested as knowledge-production processes. As Jocalyn Lawler (ibid., 225–27) suggests, given the paucity of investigations of experiential knowledges—a function of their fundamental devaluation as disturbingly unscientific and specifically as women’s knowledges—not only do such knowledges remain relatively silenced and “privatised” and their critical capacity “to demonstrate the shortcomings of positivist patterns of enquiry” curtailed, but the documentation of what is experiential knowledge remains underdeveloped. This is a situation, without excusing poor accounts of knowledge production, which lends itself to intellectual clumsiness and, further still, is a situation not helped by the emergent, “unpredictable, uncontrollable” (Okely 2007, 77) nature of affective bodily knowledges that thus “exceed representability” (Bondi 2005, 438). “How do we write emotion?” ask Eric Laurier and Hester Parr (2000, 100). The necessary struggle for the articulation in research of the “utility or otherwise” of bodily knowledge, including “emotional resources” Corporeography | 25 (Wilkins 1993, 97), continues to lead to the development of new and useful methodological vocabulary. It is to the growing range of ways of making critical sense of emotional and corporeal knowing that I aim to contribute here. In reemploying Kirby’s (1989, 119) term “corporeography” in this chapter, I echo Lawler’s (1991) use of “somology,” a term she introduces in an attempt to address the legitimacy issues faced by “nurses’ knowledge.” According to Lawler, nurses’ knowledge, in particular nurses’ holistic sensation of patients’ bodily experiences and needs, stems from the corporeal practice of nursing itself. For Lawler, the practical, nursing body is the central tool and possibility of the communication of the felt and lived bodily experiences of others, and yet the critical knowledge nurses’ intimate engagement with patients gives rise to is silenced in a context in which medicalized knowledge specifically fragmenting bodily experience is privileged in health care delivery and research (Lawler 1997...