“Fuck You With Your Recovery!”: Identity Work, Symbolic Violence, and the Recurrently Homeless

Exiting homelessness involves coming to terms with a precarious, stigmatized social identity, and the perceptions and behavior of nonhomeless persons. Based on longitudinal case studies, this paper explores the identity work of four men from the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands transitioning out of recurrent homelessness. The first part of the paper focuses on their cognitive liberation, disidentification with other homeless, status mobilization, and the challenges associated with the cleft habitus of having an embodied history of homelessness while being domiciled. The second part of the paper examines their resilience in the face of what can be described as institutional symbolic violence. The men engage in symbolic resistance through hidden transcripts and by avoiding care. Collusion takes place as well, as they must often accept the help of care institutions to get what they need. Here, they rely on performance, side tracking, playing the system, and having luck. Contrary to stereotypes portraying the homeless as care avoiders, the authors found the four men to be cautious care seekers, resisting symbolic violence and the degrading status of “human waste.” In addressing the neoliberal rationality of pathologizing the homeless, the paper challenges psychocentric discourse.