Abstract
This chapter introduces a basic typology for identifying key narratives of homelessness that permeate contemporary American social culture. What the sociologist Teresa Gowan aptly describes as sin-talk, sick-talk, and system-talk represents common caricatures of homelessness heard by the media, professionals, and the homeless themselves. Drawing from Gowan’s (Hobos, hustlers, and backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2010) ethnographic study of homeless men in San Francisco, we summarize how these narratives reduce the complex realities of individuals without secure housing to singular causes related to criminal behavior, mental health, or affordable housing. Given this, our chapter has a couple of goals. First, we provide an overview of Gowan’s research by discussing how these discourses have evolved over time and reflect the confluence of various political efforts to manage poverty and inequality in the USA. Second, we argue for the importation of Gowan’s typology into social work as a useful heuristic for praxis. Third, as part of our critique, we discuss some limitations to Gowan’s work for applied practice, and therefore we offer an additional discourse, one of social-talk, to help conceptually congeal and extend these “talks” for social work and its practitioners.
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- 1.
Indeed, Foucault argues that discourse shapes our perspectives but also our relationship and interactions to the world itself, which he terms as our subjectivities or the process of subjectivation.
- 2.
Originally derived within anthropology, ethnography is a sustained inquiry into a topic sometimes characterized as prolonged participant observation. These observations often include verbal interviews, continuous note-taking, multimedia texts (e.g., photographs), and real-time encounters (e.g., engaging in everyday tasks with research participants). Depending on the theoretical motivations of the researcher, ethnography can serve a variety of ends, though largely to provide in-depth, rich description of cultural practices often of poorly understood cultural groups.
- 3.
Gowan suggests that these enduring US values also stem from the colonial founding of the country as well as its eventual expansion throughout the continent. Moreover, during the late nineteenth century, these sentiments at times blended with Social Darwinist theories that not only rationalized the imperial pursuits of the USA but were also used to make sense of the unequal outcomes of unfettered capitalism.
- 4.
Despite the expanding role of the federal government during the twentieth century to provide social welfare services, many safety-net programs continued to be wedded to notions of deservingness and virtues of hard work. The emergence of social welfare programs was largely predicated on a system-talk discourse, as Gowan discusses, but in the US context, the moral construction of poverty has nonetheless continued to periodically shape the more restrictive aspects of the welfare state, particularly in comparison to other industrialized countries (Esping-Anderson 1990). One of the clearest examples of this was the federal welfare reforms in 1996, which ended a number of safety net entitlement programs for poor families under the banner of welfare-to-work reform.
- 5.
Similar to a Marxist analysis, system-talk purports that laissez-faire capitalism inevitably perpetuates systemic inequities because class interests will always be misaligned and in conflict with one another, given that the broader economic system demands that groups, in a word, exploit one another for survival.
- 6.
Welfare scholars of this era stress that progressive sentiments were far from universally accepted in the USA and were in fact actively resisted by many segments of society. Welfare theorists, particularly those informed by Marxist frameworks, have often discussed the emergence of welfare regimes through the lenses of class conflict (in particular the disputes between labor and capital). Accordingly, the state, in the face of acute civil strife and disorder, will initiate and extend social supports in attempts to appease and placate constituents. For example, Piven and Cloward (1971) suggest that welfare expansion in the 1930s was the government’s response to widespread fear of growing social disorder and economic calamity. Other theories of welfare expansion emphasize the role that social movements play in mobilizing the state to counteract the inequities of the market.
- 7.
Deinstitutionalization broadly refers a number of initiatives during the late 1950s through the early 1980s that dramatically altered the institutional landscape by which large mental health institutions operate in the USA. Generally speaking, these varied state and federal initiatives (e.g., the Community Mental Health Act of 1963) sought to (1) dramatically reduce the number of persons residing in state mental hospitals and transfer them into the community, (2) expand community-based mental health and supportive services, and (3) decrease the use of prolonged institutionalization by diverting inappropriate hospital admissions and shortening inpatient stays in psychiatric hospitals (Lamb 1984). As a result of these initiatives, mental health institutions in the USA declined dramatically in the last half of the twentieth century, as did the number of individuals residing within them—national estimates from 550,000 in the mid-1950s to less than 100,000 in 1980 (Mechanic 2008).
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Baiocchi, A., Argüello, T.M. (2019). Street Talk: Homeless Discourses and the Politics of Service Provision. In: Larkin, H., Aykanian, A., Streeter, C.L. (eds) Homelessness Prevention and Intervention in Social Work. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03727-7_6
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