| Throughout the 1990s, the United States dealt with rising levels of poverty, inequality and homelessness by policing and punishing the victims of the valorized "new economy," while erasing the issue of poverty from the public agenda. This study is an attempt to understand how the U.S. new media contributed to the regime of revanchist political discourse and practice, and how the homeless, as the most visibly impoverished, responded to the regime in their everyday talk and coping strategies.; Both of these questions address neglected areas of research: few ethnographies of the homeless have systematically analyzed homeless people's discourse, and even fewer communication studies have looked at how the news media portray homelessness, particularly during the '90s when dozens of major cities waged militarized campaigns to evict street people. This study pursues the questions by going "to the ground" in Tucson, Arizona for a close, contextualized analysis of how the local daily newspapers defined the homeless and homelessness in the late '90s, and how a group of six homeless campers contended against dominant definitions of themselves and their condition.; The study found that the newspapers and campers inhabited parallel discursive worlds. The papers defined the homeless as either pathological or criminal to align with the city's twin strategies for rehabilitating and policing the homeless; they defined homelessness to erase the problem both as a political reality and a subject for political debate. This was accomplished by means of four processes that interlinked in a chain of signification running through the homeless coverage. The campers, meanwhile, used their everyday talk and survival strategies to construct alternative homes and workplaces, an alternative, self-affirming conception of homelessness and the foundations of a critique against the "system" of institutions producing poverty and inequality.; The study concludes that these parallel discursive worlds help to illuminate the dialectics of discourse---they show how discourse functions to both subordinate people and seed resistance among the subordinated. |
