Description:
Young women experiencing homelessness ore confronted by a range of oppressive circumstances. Their disadvantage is multilayered; they are young, they are women, they do not have access to safe, secure accommodation and they ore poor. While these young women do not consfilute a homogeneaus group, they share gendered experiences of victimisation from within their families, their peer group and their wider social networks. Their active resistance to becoming victims is displayed in many aspects of their practices and behaviours. This paper discusses some of the queries that arose in the course of examining the relevance of feminism for understanding the experience of young women's homelessness. In particular some poststructural concepts are used to question the processes of victimisation as conceptualised from a more traditional feminist framework. The paper ends by suggesting that feminist work practice might need to develop more of an understanding of these processes and what they mean in young women's experience "-'if they are to be adequately and effectively addressed.
Description:
This paper tells a story. It relates how a 1940s photographic portrait of a smiling young woman became a conduit for telling the story of family violence hiding behind her smile. I suggest that although sharing this memory across three generations of women in the same family played a critical role at the personal level, 40 years after the silence was broken, it has the capacity for ongoing political effects at the collective level. This paper is one of those effects.