Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-10, Section: A, page: 3805.

Adviser: Kathryn Marie Dudley.

This dissertation, based on ethnographic research conducted over a three-year period in Boston, considers how the homeless women of the "Willow Street Shelter"---primarily those inhabiting the shelter's "Older Women's Program"---attempted to rebuild social identities in the wake of homelessness. Along their journey into homelessness, these women had not only lost access to material resources; they had also lost the social scaffolding that once supported their social identities and with it those identities themselves. At the same time, the experience of homelessness deprived them of the material and financial resources that might have permitted the reconstruction of their social identities. Thus it was the shelter system itself that provided women virtually the only resources with which to recraft their social selves.

In the course of this project, I examine women's small acts of institutional resistance and their relationships with the institutional structures that surround them, their fraught relations with their children, and the performative games they played through speech and bodily acts. I show that the social and cultural resources available to women, and the uses to which they put them, allowed for certain types of communities and practices while foreclosing on others, such that even the most earnest engagements of the homeless with the shelter system often only served to reproduce the social identity of "homeless" that women tried fervently to "resist." In failing to recognize homelessness as more than a material struggle and thereby failing to support women's efforts to reconstruct their identities, I thus argue, the shelter system and American society at large may in fact inhibit the homeless from regaining their social footing in society.