The author reviews approximately a half-century of history (from the 1890's through the Great Depression) and examines a succession of three constructs of homelessness, each of which serves to locate the figure of the homeless man in a kind of cultural limbo. He then asks how this distancing maneuver has informed the official response to homelessness. He argues that the rhetoric of disdain and the accompanying practice of institutional isolation may be read as ways of staying off a recognition of this society's complicity in the making of unaccommodated men (author).
Journal