DISMANTLING BIFURCATING DISCOURSES OF HOMELESSNESS: TOWARD AN ONTOLOGY OF LAND/BODY SIMULTANEITY AND RESISTANCE TO THE SEVERING VIOLENCE OF OCCUPATION, SETTLEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

This thesis inquires into the transformative potentials and possibilities of attending specifically to matters of occupation, settlement and development for rearticulating discourses and knowledge relations on homelessness to undermine the projects of separation of land from body. Through an historiographical analysis applied to the National Housing Strategy (NHS), Reaching Home (RH), and Housing First (HF), as contemporary Canadian iterations of housing and homelessness policy and practice, this work critically examines representations, attentions, and omissions to understand, engage, and intervene on considerations of the common projects that constitute discourses on homelessness. This analysis found that contemporary understandings communicate and define the homeless body as an identity of lack, novel to the neoliberal contemporary that omit attentions to homelessness as a colonial capitalist process implicated in ongoing, relational, and severed histories of violence. This work also revealed that NHS, RH, and HF operationalize solutions to ending homelessness through abstracted/eugenic ‘expert’ medicalized, liberalized, and market-based systems/taxonomies of worth that reify/silo/silence/erase knowledges through and by embodied projects and discourses of ‘rights’, justice, care, and help. While NHS, RH, and HF claim ‘housing as a right’ and advocate deinstitutionalization via a discourse of ‘choice’ in a market system, this work revealed these discourses to be part of a redeveloped economic institutionalized politics severed, rearticulated, and managed in the social sphere. These findings are considered as a violence of Land/Body bifurcation possible through and by the imposition of claims on body and land in the creation and maintenance of ideal citizen subjects as settlement subjectivities becoming self-determined rights holders, consumers, tenants, and citizen placeholders in a commodified market for home. Overall, this project aims to contribute to a resistance of the severing violence of occupation, settlement, and development through an ontology of Land/Body simultaneity offering possibilities for transformational intervention into the context from which the ideas of homeless bodies and landscapes emerge.