‘You’ve gotta learn how to play the game’: homeless women's use of gender performance as a tool for preventing victimization
As a masculinist space, ‘the streets’ present a variety of dangers to homeless women, a fact that has received too little attention within the social science literature. This study utilizes data drawn from interviews with homeless women and service providers in Edinburgh, San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa, to explore the complex survival strategies that homeless women develop to prevent criminal victimization. Through women's words, we see that gender is understood strategically as performance. Four gender performances are identified and discussed: the ‘femininity simulacrum’, the ‘masculinity simulacrum’, ‘genderlessness’ and ‘passing’. We discussed how each of these performances is employed in the pursuit of safety and security in frequently violent and chaotic social spaces.
Abstract For several reasons including the failures of deinstitutionalization, the inadequacy of community resources, and poor coordination among service agencies, the needs of people with long-term mental illness living in the community have not been adequately met. Yet recent changes in the mental health care treatment system have sustained the shift in the locus of mental health care from inpatient settings to the community. This article discusses the characteristics and needs of people with long-term mental illness living in the community. Gaps in service are identified, and an innovative assertive community treatment approach to close some of those gaps is described. Suggestions are proposed for differentiating the role of the psychiatric nurse from other clinicians in assertive community treatment teams.