The cultural politics of housing in a capitalist society: Representations of homelessness in contemporary American newspapers

The homeless have been viewed historically as objects of sympathy and disdain in the American media, political, and economic spheres. These sentiments are tied to how homeless people violate ideologies of productivity, personhood, and stability in American culture. This study examines how these ideologies are connected to the relationship between the American capitalist economy, the state, and homeless people. Using a theoretical perspective combining Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, urban studies, and sociology, this study examines the homelessness coverage in two elite American newspapers (The Christian Science Monitor and The Washington Post) to discuss how the representations are informed by ideologies in a wider social context.; This study extends the previous homelessness research, which generally only acknowledges that media stereotypes of homelessness exist. This study seeks to go further by analyzing what linguistically comprises a negative newspaper stereotype of homelessness in discursive terms. To pursue this problem in greater depth, I combined elements of CDA, critical cultural and media theory, and ethnographic text analysis to conduct a content and textual analysis of newspaper articles appearing during two-week periods in June and December in 1986, 1996, and 2001.; The analysis focuses on how representational modes such as reported speech, news values, news genres, and representations of agency and patiency contribute to the portrayals of homelessness that tend to follow certain patterns. The patterns tend to reflect issues that are connected to the relationship between homeless people, the state, and political economy. The issues include: cultural values and criminalization of homeless people; the relationship between zones of space (personal, private, public, and commercial) and the homeless; and how domains of discourse (legal opinions; state officials; homeless versus passersby; homeless and journalists) reflect issues of agency and power.; At the heart of this study is the idea of how discourse in language carries certain histories of domination, subordination, and resistance. Newspaper discourse is politicized because it can be used to refute or defend the objectives of particular discursive communities. This wider perspective addresses how the newspapers' homelessness coverage is informed by macro-discourses regarding ideologies of housing, consumption, and capitalism.