The articulation of the homeless subject position as subaltern other: A visual analysis of the Greek street paper shedia
Abstract
This article examines the alternative representations of homeless people, as they appear in the Greek street paper shedia. Street papers are publications that are distributed by homeless and poor people, frequently hosting their vendors' voices, and offering spaces of visibility to these highly marginalised groups.
By deploying discourse theory and the theoretical work on subalternity and othering, together with the frameworks of discourse-theoretical analysis and visual and multimodal analysis, this chapter analyses the discursive construction of the homeless subject position in shedia's visual representations. This analysis focusses on how shedia critiques, through its visual contents, the hegemonic discourse on the homeless identity, which constructs homeless people as subaltern others, through three main components (nodal points): the absence of house as stigma, the lack of agency for the homeless and the reduction of their political identity to that of the denizen.
The analysis also shows how shedia simultaneously taps into an alternative discourse that aims to re-humanise, re-subjectivise and re-politicise the homeless subject position. shedia's alternative discourse is largely built through strategies of de-othering, however, as it is explained in the analysis, there are certain limitations to these strategies, as the homeless' subalternity is not always, or not fully, reversed.