In the middle of the media, or homelessness as a rhetoric of marginalization

Abstract

The way homelessness has been treated by the media makes it appear as a reality made of incompleteness and alienations. In the former, the image of the impairment that can only be there (being homeless seen as a lack but not only of housing), and in the latter, its consideration as an effect of forces that are beyond itself (being homeless as a result of structural dynamics). The population in question, despite finally emerging as an object of public attention, has not exactly been seen as subjects. They are no longer people, but people living on the street. Its rhetorical articulation as a problem is posed as a simplified issue crossed by readings that point at it from a synonym of death, scarcity, vulnerability or violence, to a source of conflict and a product of displacements and unwanted non-urban sites, even as objects of intervention and charity, or as stories of improvement and entertainment. The purpose of this article is to present a panoramic view of how the subject has been approached in the media, the way in which it becomes another part of the forces that act in its construction. To do so, the crystallized speeches of the national and international written press during a period of approximately fifteen years (1997 to 2012) and the form and time in which they were carried out are reviewed. The conclusions, which emphasize that it is not a phenomenon of purely residential exclusion, point out the non-neutrality of the frames of representation, in addition to the blindness around the seasonal, overshadowing and reproductive effect of such treatment.