Reflection & Data:
Upon reviewing my research blogs and reading notes, I decided that I had acquired sufficient material to begin writing the final paper. As of now, I have drafted a preliminary outline, which flows as follows. After presenting a brief history of informal housing in the United States since the 1970s, I state my study questions, emphasizing their potential importance in both reconceiving squatting communities and suggesting future policy recommendations. Thereafter, I elaborate upon my theoretical framework, establishing squatting as a tactic of makeshift urbanism that evades formal definition and instead capitalizes upon manifest opportunities, often through subaltern infrapolitics. In this section, I assess prior scholarship to develop a unique analytical lens that assesses how squatting communities might reimagine neoliberal subjectivities of a “right to the city,” as well as propertied citizenship and participatory governance. Next, I summarize my principal conclusions before applying such theory to several region-specific case studies: New York; Detroit; and Seattle, in that order. I then discuss alternative practices of ‘home’ in the context of the recent Occupy Movement, which widely legitimized squatting as a political strategy, thus further blurring public-private boundaries. Finally, I plan to conclude the project by accentuating the need to denaturalize neoliberalism’s presumed hegemony and highlight other imaginaries. After finishing the outline and preparing my presentation this upcoming weekend, I will succinctly capture these core arguments in a brief abstract.
In addition to planning my paper this past week, I revisited material from SOC 3010 and previous courses, hoping to incorporate more comprehensive theoretical terminology. First, I reexamined how neoliberalism naturalizes inequity, such as lack of affordable housing, by reifying certain ideals of governance. As Michel Foucault (2008) argues, neoliberalism does not simply entail destructive consequences in the Marxist sense, but rather productively creates new modes of governmentality. As a “normative order of reason,” neoliberalism constructs a novel subject of “rationality” who, as an “entrepreneur of the self,” must augment their own human capital (Brown 2015:50-54). Wendy Brown (2015) proposes that this concept reimagines the state as responsible to market growth but not to capital’s “exchange” (access), “distribution” (equality), or “collateral damages” (social, environmental, and political; 68). Conceiving of poverty as a personal deficit, mainstream neoliberal discourse thus “moralizes” individuals to adopt “strategies of self-investment” to survive, ultimately “blaming” those unable to thrive (Brown 2015:130-34).
Accordingly, neoliberalism configures new social contracts, or rather citizenships, between the state and populace; although, I hesitate to frame my analysis of squatting as such. Echoing Marcia Ochoa (2008), I do not believe that the notion of citizenship sufficiently captures the nuanced forms of control and resistance that affect individuals’ lives, which often occur outside the guise of the state, as with infrapolitics. Furthermore, a discussion of citizens’ rights subtly renders civil protections and guarantees conditional upon documented status – an idea that I outright reject. Nevertheless, since I assess makeshift urbanism as partly informed by municipal regulations and law enforcement, citizenship (as both a formal legal category and informal set of relations) aptly applies here. However, I do not define citizenship solely as a political structure that grants rights (i.e. civil protections), but also as an affective one that facilitates identities of belonging. These two apparatuses overlap to construct “a subject of rights,” based not necessarily upon legal documentation but on conformance with standards of a “good citizen” (Ochoa 2008:156-9).
Such a framework applies to propertied citizenship and neoliberal conceptions of a right to the city, whereby urban spaces of “identity formation” and sociability depend upon economic capital – mainly private property (Sparks 2012:1514). Yet, this concept of citizenship also functions in squatting settlements, informing flexible norms of collective governance, as with the “campzenship” of Seattle’s tent cities. Recognizing these other constructions of social contracts will serve as a foundation to my paper, as will acknowledging the countless motivations for and manifestations of squatting. Such theoretical ‘dirtiness’ seeks “not to subsume, but to clarify” my study subject, permitting a multiplicity of concrete realities (Connell 2007:207). This investigation aims to conceptualize such alternatives and, as a result, destabilize neoliberalism’s accepted hegemony. As dialectical materialism contends, both society and history develop through power struggles, implying that distinct subjectivities not only exist but successfully resist normative ideals (Mills 2000). Without trivializing the precariousness of informal housing, I hope to deconstruct the “analytical bifurcation” that reinforces capitalism’s totalizing nature and instead emphasize the “interactional constitution” of practices that permit other forms of empowerment (Go 2013:28). Rejecting neoliberalism as “the only major force in contemporary life,” this paper will highlight such subaltern “relation[s] to power” (Gibson-Graham 2006:2, 6) and reimagine new opportunities for social justice.
Bibliography:
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Ed. Michel Senellart & Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Go, Julian. 2013. “For a postcolonial sociology.” Theoretical Sociology, 42:25–55.
Mills, C. Wright. 2000. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ochoa, Marcia. 2008. “Perverse Citizenship: Divas, Marginality, and Participation in Loca-lization.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36(3):146-169. Retrieved April 29, 2019 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27649792).
Sparks, Tony. 2012. “Governing the Homeless in an Age of Compassion: Homelessness, Citizenship, and the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County Washington.” Antipode 44(4):1510-31. Retrieved April 28, 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00957.x).
Lopez’s Comments:
Wow. This work is really coming along. Are you sure you don’t want to do a PhD? I really like the thought and nuance that you have put into your research project. I look forward to reading it.