Abstract
Given the precarity and mobility of neoliberalism, there has been increasing interest into constructs of ‘home’. In this article, the author defines ‘home’ as an active and relational process encompassing interactions between materiality and immateriality. Participant observation research conducted amongst shelter families in Toronto, Canada, living in motels can shed light on some of these larger global conversations about what ‘home’ is, and particularly, what it is not. These motels are utilized as part of the City of Toronto Shelter, Support and Housing Administration providing free shelter to impoverished families in need. Social workers, shelter managers and local faith group volunteers assert that the motels should be considered ‘home’ and the problem is that the women living in the motels with their children treat the physical space as transitory. In contrast, the women assert that the motel space is not a home and can never be made into one. The author argues that for these women, there are three critical elements missing in the motel: control over space, safety/security and privacy. The assertion that the motel space is not a home is a significant form of resistance to the regulatory bureaucratic structuring of daily life. However, despite this absence of home, the women feel strong identification as mothers and have formed systems of informal shared networks. This research helps to further illuminate not only our understandings of ‘home’, but also deepen and complicate normative associations equating ‘home’ with physical structure, domesticity and family.
Introduction
Within the current flux of neoliberalism, the ‘home’ has become a perceived stabilizing focus. Much pivotal research has explored the processes of home-making (Boccagni, 2017; Kusenbach, 2013; Lauster, 2013; Wästerfors, 2013) and constructs of ‘home’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Douglas, 2012; Duyvendak, 2011; Kusenbach and Paulsen, 2013; Mallet, 2004; Rybczynski, 1987; Short, 1999; Stack, 1974, 1996) within the context of late capitalism. However, what happens when the perceived security of ‘home’ is eroded? Given the current global context of migration, precarity and poverty, naturalized assumptions regarding continuity between ‘home’, family and stability have become fractured by forced circumstance. As Margarethe Kusenbach points out, ‘People’s emotional connections with places, and specifically feelings of “home” and “belonging” within their daily environments, are typically taken for granted’ unless these ‘place feelings’ are disrupted (2013: 199).
In this article, I argue that living in motel rooms produces an affective and intentional dislocation from place. For families living in these motels, their processes of identity-construction are predicated upon resistance to identifying the motel as ‘home’. Despite insistence from social workers, shelter managers, local faith group volunteers and motel owners that the space of the motel should be considered home, for the women living with their children in these motels, it will never be ‘home’ because it lacks three crucial elements: control over space, safety/security and privacy.
The making and unmaking of ‘home’
How are we to understand the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘family’? In What Is Family, Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein (1990) define ‘family’ not as an objectified thing, but rather as a kind of practice. How does one do family? What are the relations that define family? ‘Home’ is to be understood as ‘relativistic and socially contingent’ (Wästerfors, 2013: 114). In other words, rather than focusing on ‘home’ and ‘family’ as fixed, I explore the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘family’ as fluid and contingent upon current social relationships, processes of identity construction and understandings of immediate physical realities. An integral aspect of my research is to break down naturalized assumptions objectifying the family in the home. Instead, I explore the concepts of home and family as fluid and even disconnected.
It is through the processes and everyday actions of ‘home-making’ that we can gain insights into the physical/emotional relationships that bind people to what they do or do not identify as ‘home’. It is the affective dimensions of ‘home’ that I have prioritized in my research because it is those daily emotional connections, social interactions and habitual activities that help us define who we are and what we feel is our place in the world. Whether we see our current living space as a ‘home’ or not is fundamental to our understandings of selfhood. The intimate connection between ‘home’ and identity is integral.
Whether or not we identify our current living space as ‘home’ is equally contingent upon deeply ingrained normative narratives. As Kusenbach and Paulsen write, ‘Normative ideas . . . about home offer important reference points that not only guide action . . . but are also linked with emotion codes or ideas of how one should feel’ (2013: 7). As Paolo Boccagni writes in Migration and the Search for Home:
What is felt, understood, and enacted as home is affected by variables such as social class, gender, age and ethnocultural background. Likewise, it is typically shaped by strong normative representations on what a ‘good home’ should be like. (2017: xxiii).
In other words, we all exist within the constraints of these normative assumptions whether we intentionally comply or not.
Despite this rich theorizing about ‘home’, my central question regards the absence of home. As Kusenbach (2013) writes, those who live in stigmatized environments are forced to confront their place identity on a daily basis. My research contributes to the growing data on home, migration and ‘homelessness’, where transitory realities bring ingrained assumptions about the fixity of ‘home’ to the forefront (Ahmed, 2003; Boccagni, 2017; Borchard, 2013; Counts and Counts, 2001; Kusenbach, 2013; Sullivan, 2018; Wästerfors, 2013). It is precisely this confrontation with place and identity that is of significance for families living in motel rooms. Normative assumptions equating home with domesticity and family become disarticulated for mothers living in motel rooms.
There is a paucity of qualitative academic literature about families living in motels and my research aims to fill in this gap (Thomas and So, 2016). Homelessness in North America is gendered in a particular way. The fastest growing group of those experiencing homelessness are mothers living with their children (Bridgman, 2003; Connolly, 2000; Liebow, 1995; Novac et al., 1999, 2002, 2006; Paradis, 2009). Neoliberal austerity measures coupled with the eroding welfare state has led to a housing crisis, and it is those living on the edge of poverty who have fallen through the cracks (Kingfisher, 2007; Lyon-Callo, 2004). These larger statistics became evident in the daily lives of the women living in these Toronto motels, and it is their stories I chose to specifically focus on.
My research aligns with other kinship literature complicating normative assumptions equating the physical structure of the ‘home’ with domesticity, family and mothering (Carsten and Hugh-Jones, 1995; Counts and Counts, 2001; Stack, 1974). Government programmes addressing homelessness in North America, particularly the current trend of ‘housing first’, do not take into consideration the emotional/cognitive dimensions of home (Borchard, 2013: 77). It is my argument that it is precisely these affective dimensions of identity construction that are integral to understanding the experiences of families that are homeless, and to creating relevant public policies. The overarching expectations and normative assumptions regarding ‘family’ and ‘home’ counter the everyday material realities of families living in motels.
For the women living in the Sands Motel, their conceptualizations of ‘home’ were predicated upon particular signifiers without which the motel could never be identified as ‘home’: control over space, safety/security and privacy. Despite social workers, motel owners and faith group volunteers encouraging the mothers to make the motel feel like ‘home’, they continually insisted that such home-making attempts were impossible. It is this very resistance that enabled the women to maintain a sense of their identity within bureaucratic regulatory requirements that structured their daily lives.
This concept of control over space became integral to my research since it was highlighted numerous times by the women I spoke to in addition to interviews with social services workers. Conceptualizations of ‘home’ were predicated upon perceptions regarding who was in control of the space of the motel room. My research particularly aligns with Mary Douglas’s discussion of the concept of home as located in space, but not necessarily a fixed space:
It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a boat, or a tent. It need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control. Having shelter is not having a home, nor is having a house, nor is home the same as household. (Douglas, 2012: 51)
Douglas goes on to add a dimension of temporality by suggesting that a home is also about people living in a certain space and time (p. 52). She discusses home in terms of rituals, regularity and control over space through actions punctuated by time. The ‘making of home’ is an active and relational process. I argue that the ‘unmaking of home’ is equally an assertive process. As Aritha van Herk writes, ‘Making home is active, determinative, assertive. The agency exercised in making home bespeaks a configuration of belonging, a public declaration of the very opposite of dislocation, location’ (2012: 194). But what happens when the public declaration is dislocation? Can the assertive process be an intentional and public refusal to identify a specific space as ‘home’? Kusenbach defines ‘doing home’ in terms of the assertion of privacy, familiarity and the exercise of control (2013: 11). But what happens when these daily rituals and opportunities for home-making and the desire for privacy are eroded by forced circumstance?
The lack of safety and security and the need for privacy in the Sands Motel were highlighted numerous times, which aligns with much research indicating how perceptions of safety/security and privacy directly co-relate to subjective identification with ‘home’. Home is infused with ideological associations of family, mothering, community, warmth, comfort, stability, security and care (Watson and Austerberry, 1986: 8). ‘Home’ has been idealized as the place of the maternal, love and familial relationships, governed by what is ‘natural’ (Schneider, 1980 [1968]: 46–48). Despite the sustained feminist critique of this work/home, public/private dichotomy (Carsten, 2000; Collier and Yanagisako, 1987; Scheper-Hughes, 1993), the imaginary of home continues to be pervasive. As a result, concepts of safety and privacy have become integral to the subjective identification of home, as was exemplified in my research. The need for safety, security and privacy was continuously highlighted by the women, but also the social services workers. The conflict was one of interpretation. While the social services workers and volunteers insisted the motel was a private and relatively secure space that could and should be made into a ‘home’, the women living in the Sands Motel insisted that the motel room completely lacked any form of safety/security or privacy and could only be identified as a public space.
Fieldwork context
In September 1986, the City of Toronto established an agreement between two shelters operated by the city, Family Residence and Birkdale Residence, and local motels to serve as ‘emergency shelters’. According to the City of Toronto Shelter, Support and Housing Administration, as of 15 June 2011, the city has been working with three motels in Scarborough to serve as supplementary emergency shelters (City of Toronto, 2011). Newcomers to Canada make up a large portion of homeless families living in motels; however, the 2009 documentary Home Safe Toronto suggests an increasing number of white, middle-class families becoming homeless due to massive lay-offs from manufacturing jobs in the Greater Toronto Area (Sky, 2009). This finding is further supported by the University of Toronto Scarborough study ‘Citizenship and Urban Spaces’. The authors of this report state that there has been a substantial increase in the number of ‘home grown’ citizens, identified as Canadian-born, taking up shelter in Scarborough motels in addition to the overrepresentation of aboriginal women (Khan et al., 2010). Increasingly, motels provide a space for families living on the edge of poverty who can no longer afford to pay rent. They also provide a refuge for women and children who need to escape situations of domestic violence. As of 1 January 2018, 1682 motel beds/spaces were available in the shelter system, which can expand or contract to meet demand (City of Toronto, 2018). Demand for shelter services in Toronto has risen by 38% since early 2016 and in May 2018 the City expanded their motel programme to open 648 additional beds in hotels across the City (City of Toronto, 2019).
Methods and data
My fieldwork extended from the summer of 2010 to spring 2017. I utilized qualitative methodologies including multi-sited participant observation (Robben, 2007), both formal and informal/semi-structured interviews (Bernard, 2006), life histories (Watson and Watson-Franke, 1985) and critical discourse analysis (Blommaert, 2005). My research project was divided into three stages. The initial phase involved a critical discourse analysis of legislation and policy reports regarding homeless families in Ontario since the mid-1990s to consider how homeless mothers are defined by the state within child welfare and social welfare discourses.
The second phase of research involved multi-sited participant observation when I spent time with homeless mothers and their children, and also with members of the local community.
Although I continuously visited three motels along Kingston Road serving as family shelters, attended faith group meetings and volunteered in the local community over the seven-year span of my fieldwork, the core of this research phase involved spending eight weeks doing participant observation at one particular motel. It was at the Sands Motel (pseudonym) where I met a group of five mothers who were connected with each other and who formed an informal social/economic network that I became immersed on a daily basis in September and October 2014. All visits have been recorded in detailed field notes in addition to digital recordings of conversations. Although I also encountered three single fathers and many single individuals, I decided to focus on the experiences of these five women because I was particularly interested in understanding the gendered dynamics of living in a motel with children.
A significant portion of this fieldwork time was spent in conversation with the homeless mothers attempting to understand both the current realities of their lives, but also the multiple stories leading them to their current situation. Using pseudonyms, I have identified the five women as Laura, Melanie, Kara, Grace and Ada. All five women were living in the shelter section of the motel and therefore the motel accommodation was paid through the City of Toronto Shelter, Support and Housing Administration in addition to receiving different levels of social assistance depending on their at-risk status.
I collected life histories for all five women, but will only reveal relevant information for the purposes of this article. Laura, identifying as white Canadian-born, and her five children occupied three rooms in a row on the second floor of the Sands Motel. Even though the three eldest children were working minimum-wage factory jobs, it wasn’t enough to support the family. They had been living in the motel for 10 months when I met Laura. She had been living with her husband and children in a five-bedroom Mississauga home when her husband was laid off from the car manufacturing plant where he worked, was in a car accident and died with no life insurance. Laura was then also laid off from the same company and when she was no longer able to pay her mortgage the house was repossessed and she rented an apartment. Her rental unit had a fire and all her remaining possessions were destroyed. That was how Laura came to the motel with her five children ranging in age from 11 to 20.
Melanie had been living in the motel for a month with her two girls aged three and eight and was six-months pregnant when we met. Two months before, she’d had a two-bedroom, two-floor east Toronto apartment with her husband and family. Her husband went to jail for conspiracy. Unable to pay the rent without his income, they were evicted and Melanie went to shelter services with her daughters. Melanie had been married for 14 years, since she was 19, and she wasn’t used to being alone. Melanie was proud to identify herself as ‘half-native’.
Kara is an aboriginal woman with two children but they lived apart from her and she was with her boyfriend, although she mentioned issues with not being allowed ‘guests’ in the motel room over night. The father of her children had died four years earlier. According to Kara, her deceased husband had been a hit-man for the Hells Angels and she had gone through the past four years being accused of having killed him. Her sister-in-law would not let Kara have any of her own things because she took possession of their place. Kara had also lost custody of her children to CAS (Children’s Aid Society) with no access, and had eventually found herself with nowhere else to go but a shelter.
Grace, also identifying as white, Canadian-born, was living in the motel room with her husband and 13-year-old daughter. She hadn’t finished high school and was having a difficult time finding work, even at the Tim Hortons fast-food restaurant across the street. She spoke about her depression and how her life had been a series of downward spirals. They’d had an apartment in Mississauga but the exact circumstances of how they found themselves in the motel were never fully explained other than mentioning how much money they had to spend every month storing their things since the motel room had no space.
Born in Croatia, Ada had been living in the motel for six months with her husband and nine-month-old baby waiting for their refugee claim to be processed. Ada was 19 years old when I met her, six-months pregnant and also looking after her baby. Their refugee claim had been denied and they were now waiting for paperwork so they could get passports and return ‘home’ to Croatia even though she did not want to leave Canada. Ada’s husband was never there since as Ada explained, he was always out looking for work.
The third research phase involved critically examining my data and juxtaposing the life stories, experiences and words of my informants with state understandings of homeless mothers. I conducted 21 formal recorded interviews with various experts and officials working in the homelessness sector including social workers, other service providers, motel owners and shelter supervisors. I also conducted an afternoon focus group with four homelessness outreach nurses. I volunteered at the local shelter and for a local church preparing food for homeless individuals, participated in monthly meetings at the local faith group organization dedicated to helping families living in the Kingston Road motels and did motel visits to deliver welcome packages, and participated in a weekly free-flow writing workshop for women at the local shelter. During this research phase, I also had the opportunity to interview an expectant mother residing at the shelter. For the purposes of this article, I have decided to focus on the second phase of research and specifically the voices of the five mothers living in the Sands Motel.
Living in a motel is not living in a ‘home’
In the process of data analysis, I highlighted particular keywords and themes such as home, home-making, mothering, family and community. I also highlighted words that the literature has often associated with ‘home’ such as ‘control’, ‘privacy’, ‘safety’ and ‘security’. As mentioned earlier, I am defining ‘home’ as a process rather than a fixed entity. As such, regardless of physical structure, home can be defined in terms of three primary elements: control of space (Douglas, 2012), safety/security (Watson and Austerberry, 1986) and privacy (Kusenbach, 2013). I will now address each of these themes individually to reveal how for the mothers living in the Sands Motel, the motel can never be ‘made’ into a ‘home’ because those basic three elements are missing. There is no feeling of control over the space of the motel room, there is a complete lack of safety/security, and given that the motel is inherently a public space, there is also no sense of privacy. The fourth theme I will be discussing involves what is not lacking in the motel: a strong sense of ‘family’ and feeling of ‘community’.
Sense of control
The five mothers I spoke to in the Sands Motel said unequivocally that they did not consider the motel room ‘home’. It was this very lack of ‘home’ and their feelings of ‘being lost’ and ‘in-between’ that determined an affective state of despondency and often depression. Many of the women felt that their lives were ‘on hold’ and could not begin again until they could access proper housing. This concept of control of space is integral. The women felt that they could not control the space of their motel room because it was not theirs to control. They had no idea how long they would be there and they specifically regarded their present moment living in the motel as an aberration in the normal functioning of their lives. Despite length of stay, even in Laura’s case when it had been 10 months, this did not alter the distinct rejection of the motel space as home.
Normative ideas regarding ‘home’ structured their sense of identity in relation to the motel, and they were all eager to distance themselves and their sense of self from their current living arrangement. It must be emphasized that for all five women, they felt the motel represented downward mobility in their lives. They all expressed emphatically that they had a home previously, and a motel room did not in any way match their conceptualization of what a home had been for them, or what it could or should be.
When I asked Melanie, ‘Do you consider this a home in any way?’ she said emphatically, ‘No. Not to me it’s not. I’ve lived in my own home for so long. I had a two-bedroom, two-floor apartment so we had lots of room, we had our dog. We kind of lost everything.’ Melanie had become emotional the moment I mentioned home. She then started crying. ‘Sorry, it’s depressing for me. I don’t like it at all. I just feel really bad for my kids. It’s not what I wanted for them. It’s not a home at all here. I hate it.’
There is a distinctive sense of loss of control. Melanie looked at me and told me she couldn’t even process how she had ended up in the motel. She knew the facts, but because her daily life was so far removed from any idea of ‘home’ she possessed, her mind was unable to accept her current life. It was very important for Melanie to stress how she was not really living in a motel, just staying there with her children for a bit, until things could be sorted out. Until she could regain control of her life and her daily living space.
When I casually asked Ada, ‘So what do you think of this motel?’ one afternoon while we were playing with her baby, Azra, the mood changed suddenly. Ada looked distressed and put her baby back on the floor to play. ‘Big problem here. This motel, everything no good. This is no home, this motel. We have nothing.’ Ada had been told that her refugee claim was denied and they were waiting for their passports to ‘go home’ to Croatia. But she said they had no home in Croatia either. Similar to Melanie, Ada, who had been living in the motel for six months, also emphasized that she had a strong idea of what a home should be and the motel was definitely not a home.
Issues of temporality and control were crucial – the feeling that you can control how you spend your time in your own living space. Ada went on to talk about how her case worker would stop by to bring her a cheque, but there was no scheduled time so she could come by at 11am or noon or even at 5pm. This left Ada feeling a loss of control, over both her finances but also her sense of space in the motel. She had to be there when the case worker decided to come by, but she had no idea what time it would be. She could never plan out her day, basic things such as when to do groceries or buy diapers for her baby. Even the feeling of knowing her daughter could nap uninterrupted. She was always left wondering and waiting and worried that if she stepped out for just a moment, she would lose out on getting the cheque and maybe have to wait another day.
Control of one’s space should be an active and assertive process. The ritualistic everyday processes of home-making often work to reinforce this sense of control over one’s space through repetitive familiarized actions. But what if the very basic ability to perform those everyday tasks is taken away?
All of the women discussed the limitations of living in such a constrained space whether it was the rules such as no guests being allowed overnight in their rooms, or the division of the motel between paying customers and shelter residents. Kara talked about how she would be yelled at if she stepped across the boundary and Melanie pretended to draw an imaginary line. ‘Don’t you dare cross that line hey’, she said. ‘The paying customers get the golden treatment. They get their sheets washed. We get nothing.’ The shelter residents did not have access to laundry or even a communal kitchen despite having nothing other than a microwave or maybe hot plate in their rooms.
It was difficult to feel like they had control over their living space when it lacked the basic necessities. As Melanie said to me one day, ‘I find myself eating out a lot because there’s only a microwave, one little hot plate. I wasn’t the best of cooks to start with. So it’s kind of hard that way.’
‘Do you have a fridge?’ I had asked.
‘Yeah. I mean it’s doable but there’s no oven. Just one little burner.’
Daily rituals that are often taken for granted or go unnoticed become enormous challenges. Melanie continued when I asked about her daughters:
We’re all in one room and I find it’s really hard to put them to bed at night now. Like they used to have their own room, their own beds. They used to be on a schedule and now that we’re all in one room it’s so hard to get them to sleep and now they’ve grown so attached to being with me and sleeping with me. You know. Yeah, it’s going to be tough when we leave again to get them back to a normal routine.
Issues of time management and routines, and the inability to feel a sense of control over the basics of cooking and sleeping make it impossible to identify the motel space as home. Not being able to cook a family dinner because you lack a kitchen, not being able to finally get your baby to go to sleep with the peaceful knowledge that she will not be disturbed. Recognizing that the space in which you reside is not your own and never will be, not even in a temporary sense. Knowing that your children are coughing from the mould and waking up with bedbug bites and you can do nothing about it. This is a fundamental loss of control over even the most rudimental elements of what we might associate with ‘home’.
Ideas about ‘control’ were equally utilized by the social workers, motel owners and faith group volunteers, however the interpretation differed. The social services workers often commented that if only the women could make their motel rooms ‘home-like’, they might feel more ‘in control’ of their living space and also their lives. Yet, as illustrated above, the feeling of being ‘in control’ has to come first. If the living space negates the possibility for control over the basic necessities of living (sleep, cooking, free time, bedtime rituals, health), how can a motel room be made ‘home-like’?
At one of the monthly faith group meetings there was an intense discussion regarding whether the faith alliance should support becoming more membership-driven and reducing the priority of financial aid to motels. One faith group volunteer said in support of reducing funding to motel residents, ‘It’s just how they live you know. They punch holes in the wall just to see each other. They don’t like to be alone. No attachment to anything. They just keep moving. They make a mess of places there so they do the same here. No sense of home at all.’ A primary reason given for centring support more internally on the faith community was a sense of who was most ‘deserving’ of aid. Not all of the families living in the motels were ‘appropriately appreciative’ of the church’s support. Many faith group members felt certain groups of families living in the motels were not able to properly consider the motel their home and therefore did not treat the space with respect, despite the effort of church members to invite them into the community by bringing welcome packages to their motel rooms upon arrival.
In response, other faith group volunteers who wanted to continue the same levels of funding for the motels passionately argued, ‘Housing is the core of what we’re about in the Faith Group. Trying to find housing for people in motels.’ They referred to the history of the faith group and the original mandate. ‘It is an alliance of working together. We care for people and we advocate for people. Poverty and homelessness are the most important things.’ Connected to the fight for affordable housing was also the crucial concept of ‘home’. As another member said, ‘It can’t just be housing. We have to look at the whole family and offer things so they can feel like they have a home.’
‘Home’ provides a powerful construct that is utilized by social actors in the homelessness sector to push for various agendas. The idea of ‘home’ is equally powerful when speaking to motel owners, many who believe precisely what they are providing is a ‘home’ for their residents. Again, those who are ‘deserving’ of living in the motel are the families who can prove they see the motel as their ‘home’ and therefore are respectful, versus those who treat the motel room as a transitory space. As one motel owner said, ‘Most of the families were okay, sure, but then you just can’t imagine . . . this other family . . . what they did to that room. And the room is all paid for so they just don’t care.’
With so much pressure to make their motel rooms ‘home-like’ or to prove that they viewed their motel space as a ‘home’ in order to access different forms of support, the women often responded through resistance. They made it very clear why the motel could never be a home and their actions only verified this. The women did not make an effort to ‘hang up curtains’ or ‘tidy up’ or make their motel space more ‘domestic’ despite constant suggestions from their case workers.
One drizzly afternoon when I was visiting with Melanie, Kara marched over and showed me proudly where she’d punched a hole in the drywall of her neighbour’s room when they covered up the mould with paint instead of removing it. I could see that they had painted the walls a fresh grey and you could still smell the paint, but you could also see where the paint covered the dark black mould underneath where the entire ceiling was caving in. ‘Look at this!’ Kara pointed out the ceiling and the dark streaks around the window. ‘They need to take out the drywall and fix this whole thing. But instead they just paint it over.’
Laura left her dirty bedbug infested mattress outside her door when the motel owner refused to replace it. She ended up having to bring it back inside that evening and proceeded to lift her mattress against the motel room wall every morning to try and avoid the bedbug bites. Kara took pictures of her neighbour’s children’s bedbug bites as evidence and even attempted to contact Public Health about both the mould and the bedbugs but said no one seemed particularly interested in doing anything about it. Even though the motel was part of the shelter system, it was still considered private property. As one of the faith group volunteers put it:
Sometimes these rooms have bedbugs. I’ll tell Jennifer [shelter supervisor], but what can you do? They have mice, too. They can’t even store groceries because it attracts the mice. We never go in the rooms. Never know what you’ll end up with on your pant cuff. Sometimes [the shelter] can put pressure on the motel owner, hit them in the jugular. It’s over half their business, these rooms.
All of these actions are forms of resistance. They are ways in which to regain some semblance of control over daily living space when it has been taken away. For the women living in the motels, identifying that the motel is not their home is crucial to their sense of self and self-worth, and establishing an affective dissonance from place identity is precisely what enables their survival.
Safety and security
Another theme that arose frequently was the lack of security at the motel making the women feel unsafe. One sunny afternoon as Laura and I were crossing the motel parking lot on our way back from Tim Hortons, I asked her how she was doing and she responded with her usual caustic smile. ‘Oh, ya know, could be better, could be better.’ She kind of laughed and looked at me. ‘Anyone could be better livin’ here. You know, I couldn’t even sleep last night with all that noise. This place. You know, the shelter’s only this side of the motel.’ She pointed to the front half of the motel directly facing Kingston Road. It just happened to be that I chose that side of the motel to begin knocking on doors. I had no idea the shelter was only on the one side.
‘Who are the other people then?’ I had asked as we returned to her room.
Laura laughed again:
Oh who knows! That’s the thing. Drug addicts. Lots of those. Got one here too in that room right there. She comes knockin’ on my door all hours asking for stuff. I ain’t got any of that I tell her but she just keeps comin’ back. And thank god my kids are doing fine. They’re not into any of that. They don’t do no drugs and I make sure to keep it that way. But this place. Prostitutes. You hear them screaming every night. Fist fights. I don’t ever want my kids being out there at night. We get back here before it’s dark because I don’t like to be out there in the dark. And I don’t want my kids out there either.
It is clear that Laura did not consider the motel a safe environment for her children. Although she was often cavalier about the presence of drug addicts, dealers and sex workers at the motel, she tried to ensure her children were exposed as little as possible by not allowing them to go out at night and ensuring they always returned to the motel before dark.
All five mothers expressed different levels of vulnerability, whether it was the fact that in the other half of the motel they could never know who the transient population might be, the lack of security or dead bolts on the door, or the sensation of being exposed as a woman alone in a precarious environment. As Ada had told me, ‘Everyone in this motel no like. No happy here. Other mothers, two or three children. Fight here. No camera. Nothing here. Come outside. You can look at everybody here. Come the police. Look here. One door.’
‘There isn’t even a latch,’ I commented.
‘No. There is nothing here.’
Ada was very clear that she did not feel safe in the motel room. Since her husband was frequently gone, she did not feel the simple lock on the motel room door protected her and her baby in any way, particularly when she could hear fighting outside. As Ada mentions, unlike in the shelter system, there are no security cameras at the motel.
In one of our conversations, Melanie had said, ‘I want to get out of here. You never know who’s over there. People see that I’m a single woman and it’s scary.’
‘Do you feel safe here?’ I had asked.
‘Not really. I’m just trying to get out as quick as possible.’
Of all the women, Melanie seemed to feel the most direct fear. She wasn’t used to living without her husband and she already felt vulnerable as a pregnant woman with two young daughters. The lack of security at the motel only served to exacerbate her feelings of being unsafe.
Privacy
Another symbolic marker of ‘home’ is privacy, something also lacking in the motel. The motel is a public space. The shelter side is governed as an institutionalized space in which the case workers’ office and the motel owner’s office are just at the edge of the parking lot. Any regulations governing tenancy and rights to privacy do not exist at the motel because it is regulated as a public institution on the shelter side. On the motel side where customers pay for their rooms, hourly rates encourage increased transience thereby negating any potential for privacy. The motel parking lot was constantly filled with people, cars and activity, whether children playing on the concrete or people smoking outside their rooms.
The women had to adhere to strict regulations in terms of who could visit in the ‘private’ space of their rooms. Anything from a bedbug check to painting over the mould could mean a resident had to leave their room for a given length of time. Additionally, as mentioned previously, the case workers could stop by at any moment for a visit. The visits were intentionally unscheduled because they served as implicit forms of regulatory control to ensure the women were complying with shelter regulations. All of these factors ensured a complete lack of privacy for the women living in the motel despite assurances from the shelter staff that the motel was far more private than the shelter itself. As one shelter manager said:
The motels are the best place. Unlike shelters that are communal, such as dorms, the motels are private. Although there are six or seven family members in one room. And they don’t have kitchens so there is no Christmas turkey dinner and they have to rely on fast food.
Clearly the concept of ‘privacy’ is relative in this case. Perhaps compared to the shelter, the motel rooms appear ‘private’ because they are a contained space with a door that can at least be locked. However, compared to what the five women understood as the privacy one would experience in one’s own ‘home’, the motel room represented a very public space.
Family and community
Despite lacking the markers of ‘home’ such as a sense of control, safety/security and privacy, what the women did have in the motel was a strong sense of community. The women were also unequivocal in asserting that mothering was their primary role. They did not see any disconnect between feeling closely bonded within their families and lacking a ‘home’. They all asserted that their mothering – and their conceptualizations of being a mom – were not at all affected by living in a motel. If anything, because they felt they lacked a ‘proper home’, their mothering identity and their positioning of themselves as being in a family unit was strengthened, as were their bonds with other mothers. Where many of the women had been previously isolated in the shelter system despite being surrounded by people, it was in the space of the motel that they found the greatest sense of community with other mothers living in the same motel. And they even asserted that the close spatial quarters and stressful circumstances had increased their familial and community bonds. In fact, the women identified their families as their greatest source of pride and joy even if they were not living with their children or spouse. For all of the women, the missing piece in their lives was finding a ‘home’.
One drizzly afternoon as we were sitting on the motel steps, I asked Melanie, ‘How do you find it here, in terms of being a mother, being an expectant mother?’
‘I’m managing the best I can I guess. One day at a time.’
‘Do you find it isolating?’
Melanie said in response to my question:
It helps that there’s other families. There’s other people here. My kids don’t seem affected. There’s other kids here. They like it because they’re usually outside playing after school and stuff. There’s a lot of families here. So that part is okay. They don’t mind it. But I’m sure it’s not what they want. I’m sure they want more than one room to be in right?
‘Have you gotten to know some of the other moms in the motel?’
I’ve gotten to know some people. There’s some nice people here. One lady, like she’ll cook extra food and bring it down to us sometimes. She’ll give the kids stuff. My kids go and play in her room. Sometimes her kids play in my room. Our next door neighbour has two daughters.
The sense of community appeared strong as I chatted with the women either outside on the motel steps, or going to the park or Tim Hortons. Kara would often look after Melanie’s children. They would sometimes cook for each other and share the buying of groceries or toilet paper in bulk to save on cost. When I spoke to Kara later, she talked about how she hoped to get an apartment in the same building as Melanie so they could continue to help each other. Kara was bipolar and Melanie often gave her support. Laura’s children often played with Melanie’s girls and Grace’s daughter. If any of the children were playing outside in the parking lot, Laura mentioned how they all looked out for each other, including her eldest children watching out for the younger ones. Laura laughed and said if they heard a child cry, they would all come running.
It is clear that for these women, the usual association between family and home becomes disconnected. ‘Home’ is not the site of family or the maternal. In other words, all of those strong connections between home as the private, maternal, domestic space become disarticulated for these mothers creating the dissonance and fragmentation they feel. The alienated public motel space is the place of mothering, family and community. It is this very act of denying the motel as ‘home’ while attempting to perform the daily rituals of home-making (making dinner, putting children to bed) that is significant. For these five women, an active denial of the space of the motel as ‘home’ enables them to retain their sense of coherent self despite the incoherence of their current lives. The dissonant articulation between the women living in the motels making a claim that the motel is not a home is just as significant as a claim it is a home. Their assertion of the motel room as space disarticulated from an imaginary of ‘home’ despite being the physical location of mothering and community is a distinctive vocalization of resistance. Regardless of suggestions from case workers to ‘pretty things up’ or ‘hang up curtains’, or assertions from the shelter manager that the motels are really the ‘best’ and most ‘private’ space, for Laura, Kara, Melanie, Ava and Grace, the motel was not a home, and never would be.
Conclusion: What ‘home’ is not
My research findings help to further our understandings of not only what ‘home’ is in the current globalized context of mobility, but more significantly, what it is not. The space of the motel offers no sense of control, no feeling of safety or security, and no privacy. A physical structure cannot be ‘made’ into a ‘home’ if these three fundamental elements are missing and perceived as integral. It is essential to reiterate that conceptualizations of ‘home’ are subjective and based on normative assumptions regarding what ‘home’ should be. It is precisely because Laura, Melanie, Ada, Grace and Kara had a strong image of what ‘home’ ought to be, based upon previous experience, that they actively rejected the motel space as home. It was through this overt rejection that they could resist the regulatory surveillance and governance structures of the institutionalized shelter system.
Another central element revealed in my research is the disarticulation between family, community and home. In other words, for these women, lacking a ‘home’ did not mean they lacked family or community, nor did it impair their ability for strong relationality within their social spaces. However, these social spaces configured through living in the motel did not translate into a ‘feeling of home’. The ritualistic and everyday processes of mothering and daily life occur in the physical space of the motel room. There is sociality. The mothers in these motels have revealed the disjuncture between naturalized assumptions of home, family and community. Community alliances, strong sociality and mothering can and do occur within spaces disarticulated from home places. It is the absence of home as much as its presence that requires theorizing, along with the significance of emotional attachment, or in this case intentional ‘disattachment’ to place.
Given the neoliberal globalized context, it is becoming increasingly crucial to examine the emotional and experiential understandings of ‘home’, particularly in the case of forced migration and homelessness. It is significant that for Kara, Melanie, Ava, Grace and Laura, they did not choose their current circumstances. My research specifically focuses on the gendered dynamics of forced precarity and the institutionalized responses. This differs significantly from discourses of mobility representing privilege and affluence. In the context of globalization, the symbolic spaces of the ‘hotel’ and ‘motel’ are very different. A ‘hotel’ is a space of global communication, affluent social networking and information transfer representing a privileged fraction of the population wherein discourses of mobility, flexibility and transience reflect ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’. A ‘motel,’ however, remains a liminal space. The ‘motel’ has become a symbol of suburban modernist decay, marginality and gross inequality.
My research can contribute to these larger narratives of migration, homelessness and poverty, furthering our understanding of what it means to live long-term in forced precariousness and impoverishment. My research also builds upon existent home and home-making literature by further expanding conceptualizations of ‘home’ and what it is not. The particular space of the motel room, as semi-‘private’ and institutionalized, provides a unique and necessary perspective given its increasing prevalence as a governmental response to familial homelessness. It is crucial to further our understanding of how families make sense of their lives within these spaces of long-term flux, particularly when increasing numbers of families are feeling disenfranchised. The alienation resulting from emotional detachment to place can have severe consequences just as much as obsessive attachment. By theoretically investigating the absence of home, we can come closer to deepening our understanding of the disjunctive meanings of ‘doing home’, and thereby allow the narratives of the women living in these motels to express on a localized level the precarity of our neoliberal age.
Footnotes
Funding
This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program (OGS), and the Munk School of Global Affairs Comparative Program on Health and Society Lupina Foundation.
