Homelessness: Emotion Discourse and the Reproduction of Social Inequality

<jats:p>ABSTRACT This article draws on data gathered in focus groups to analyze how people talk about homelessness and compares the findings to how homelessness is represented in the media, specifically newspapers. It examines how ideas about homelessness that circulate in society are taken up, used, and reproduced by people in social interaction. People “care” about homelessness and use emotion discourse in the focus group context to construct a moral identity and to manage interactional dilemmas. They express sympathy for homeless people, deflect responsibility for any negative feelings they may have, and shift responsibility for doing something about homelessness. In using emotion discourse, they reproduce conceptions of homelessness that circulate widely in the media and in society generally; this, in turn, reproduces existing social relations of inequality and exclusion.</jats:p>