Urban Outcasts,Disposable Bodies,and Embodied Research in a Western Canadian “Arriviste” City

Cracked Teeth, Saving Face, and Sober Research

By the summer of 2011, Jordan had been “hanging out” at the HRC for several weeks when he was first introduced to a group of young men who played in the weekly floor hockey games. Jordan’s initial physical presence at the floor hockey games was, most notably, greeted with confusion, curiosity, and skepticism from the floor hockey “regulars.” It must be emphasized that, especially in the earliest phases of the research, Jordan made a conscious, performative effort to alter his body and physical appearance to blend in with the group in terms of adopting a particular aesthetic style that was part of his researching “line”—“a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which he expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of the participants, especially himself” (Goffman, 1967, p. 5). For example, to maintain “face”—“the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular context” (Goffman, 1967, p. 5)—Jordan deliberately wore old, baggy sweat pants, a baseball cap, and did not shave for several days to avoid appearing as an academic “outsider/Other.” Despite his best dramaturgical efforts and “face-work” (Goffman, 1967, p. 5), though, it was Jordan’s physical appearance and embodied dispositions that revealed a host of unforeseen tensions associated with his entry into this unfamiliar sport setting.

Consider the following performative dialogue between Jordan and Tony, one of the long-standing members of the floor hockey group.

It is clear from this excerpt that Jordan’s body functioned as a key text and marker of his class status and his differential stake in this particular urban space. Indeed, despite his “face-work,” his healthy and sober body was immediately and astutely recognized by the young men in this space as “out-of-sync” with their own genres of embodiment. As Tony noted, the pristine condition of Jordan’s teeth (the result of a lifetime of taken for granted dental care and general good health) was simply incongruent with the standard of oral hygiene practiced by many of the other men, several of whom are heavy drug users and did not have consistent access to dental care or healthy food over the course of their lives. As a result, it was not uncommon for these young men to have stained, broken, and missing teeth and, as we shall see below, a host of other physical injuries and manifestations of ill health—all personal troubles that are inevitably connected to a host of public issues associated with social class. In fact, the condition of one’s teeth emerged as a recurring theme in our fieldwork and, indeed, an issue of struggle for many of these men. That Jordan did not smoke, use drugs, or drink heavily and was, generally, healthy, pointed to an inescapable disconnect between Jordan’s physical body and those of the other young men, many of whom bore several visible injuries of class.

As such, Jordan was “called out” in the early days of the study and “invited” to explain these key physical distinctions, a defining moment in the research process that ultimately would determine his acceptance and the nature of his relationship to the group. Jordan’s embodied distinctions were further punctuated by the research team’s collective decision to prohibit his consumption of alcohol in the company of the other men during his fieldwork and subsequent interviews—a decision that contrasted against those of recent ethnographies in sport studies where various subcultural analyses have, at times, encouraged a research culture of drinking (Joseph & Donnelly, 2012; Mair, 2009; Palmer, 2009, 2010; Silk, 2005). Despite being periodically invited “for drinks” and to “smoke up” after the floor hockey matches early on in the study, Jordan never once indulged these requests and opted instead to deflect invitations with a consistent “No thanks” or “I don’t drink much these days anyways, but thank you.” Unlike the aforementioned studies in which the consumption of alcohol was employed as a necessary strategy to develop rapport among research participants and collect data, the tenuous context of the HRC (i.e., the ethnographic “hub”) and the fact that several of the young men actively struggled with various addiction-related illnesses (e.g., several were diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and others were flagrant about their drug/alcohol abuse and lifelong struggles with addictions), created a dilemma in which the ethical consumption of alcohol or other substances for research purposes was simply impossible to reconcile. ¹⁰ In fact, as an ethical commitment, Jordan consciously refrained from even telling an alcohol-related story as a means of expressing sensitivity to the few men who were, at the time, enrolled, or trying to enroll, in a drugs and alcohol detox program in downtown Edmonton. These conscious research decisions, however, inevitably shaped Jordan’s relationship to the field and exacerbated his bodily distinctions.

Despite these physical disjunctures, there were, however, several key performative elements and dialogues that lead to his gradual acceptance by the group and allowed Jordan to save "face” (Goffman, 1967, p. 5). First, as Tony noted, Jordan was identified and embraced by the young men along physical lines as a “gym teacher” and not as an abstract academic/sociologist. We believe that this perception of Jordan’s occupation was encouraged not only by Jordan’s age (late 20s), but also by his participation in the floor hockey matches and, importantly, the masculine capital of his gendered sporting body. Indeed, Jordan had played hockey throughout his own childhood and, as a result, was able to compete and consistently demonstrate a combination of skill, technical competency, and power in the floor hockey matches—these were embodied physical traits that were valued to some degree by the group of young men. Hence, these displays of physical skill, in combination with Jordan’s age and gender, worked to divert attention away from other aspects of his “positionality” (Madison, 2012, pp. 7-8), namely, the fact that he was an academic from a completely different class background. Instead, he was simply embraced as one of the guys and as a “prospective” gym teacher who, like the other young men, was also seeking future employment.

Still, many of the young men were acutely aware that Jordan’s taken-for-granted embodied middle-class dispositions (beyond the overt physical markers such as teeth) and style of play were vastly different from those that were embraced by the group. For example, Tony easily identified that Jordan’s upbeat and relaxed physical disposition and poise was incongruent with other physical cultural expressions in this space, most notably those characterized by more overt displays of physicality and sometimes anger. Jordan’s unconscious “indifference,” of course, signaled that he did not “take the game too seriously” as many of the other young men habitually did, especially in terms of more overt displays of physicality (not to be confused with violence) and the instrumental uses of their bodies in the weekly games. To be clear, none of these men had delusions of grandeur or were motivated to participate in the weekly floor hockey matches purely for reasons of social mobility; nor were they there to simply dominate others. They were, however, keenly interested in using their bodies to publicly stake their claims to a particular masculine habitus that, at times, necessitates displays of both skill and force (see Connell, 1984).

Finally, Jordan’s “relaxed” disposition was undoubtedly a product of the peace of mind that was afforded to him by the knowledge that he could return to his outsider middle-class lifestyle and the comforts of home, regular access to food, consistent access to other amenities, and the social capital of a stable and safe family life. All of these embodied differences were regularly on display; for example, all of the other men were regularly fatigued and aggravated by the various struggles that they endured in everyday living; for example, lining up for food, seeking out places to sleep, craving drugs and alcohol, and the sheer exhaustion caused by always having to be on guard in the inner city and, for some, having to use their bodies as weapons to achieve certain ends even if opposed by others. Thus, while Jordan’s attire and other distinctions could be more easily shed via his entrance into the HRC and interacting with these men as would any other new service user, other embodied markers of class and masculinity remained relatively “fixed” within and upon his body and thus prohibited his becoming “visibly invisible” (Newman, 2011, p. 552) in this space.

“You a Cop?” Taken-for-Granted (Body) Privileges

By the spring of 2013, Jordan had attended the weekly floor hockey matches for over two years and had developed a strong rapport with almost all of the regular players. Indeed, Jordan was often approached for advice on a variety of everyday issues ranging from relationships with women, employment, housing, the police, and, occasionally, dealings with addictions and drug dealers. Associated with these bourgeoning relations was a gradually normalized level of comfort in “inner city” spaces that contrasted against Jordan’s initial “fish out of water” experiences at the HRC. However, we later recognized that what was associated with this newfound sense of ease and comfort was a host of taken-for-granted privileges related to his physical appearance and embodied dispositions.

Consider the following excerpt between Jordan and Bruce, a 32-year-old Euro Canadian man struggling through poverty, homelessness, mental health, and addictions-related issues. The exchange began on the April 5, 2013, post-hockey van ride and continued as the two young men walked through Edmonton’s “inner city.”

This excerpt offers a powerful illustration of the body’s role as a signifying force in Edmonton’s “inner city.” Jordan’s “face” (his clothing and other apparel such as a laptop bag) once again contributed to his being “out-of-sync” with the bodies and appearances of other, similarly aged men in this space. Bruce astutely read these physical manifestations against the distinctive social context of Edmonton’s “inner city” and, sensing disconnect, intuitively abstracted from Jordan’s body a host of professions that would potentially explain and/or justify his presence as a visible Euro-Canadian minority in this urban environment. Indeed, the regularity with which Jordan’s body was coded as a police officer, social worker, or doctor proved a recurring theme in our fieldwork and speaks directly to the visibility of whiteness in this particularly racialized urban setting.

The relative “indifference” with which Jordan’s body was met by most members of the HRC signaled, among other things, its ambiguous stake in Edmonton’s “inner city.” Jordan (and his body) was interpreted more as a friendly and sympathetic “tourist” in this space than as a full-fledged community member. Indeed, the privilege of visiting the HRC and other social service facilities infrequently, as Jordan pleased (the privilege of both mobility and being able to “research”), was a luxury that was simply not afforded to Bruce and many other “inner city” dwellers. Unlike Jordan, most other members of “Friday hockey” remain comparatively immobile thanks to any number of social, economic, and other practical reasons. That Bruce’s entire social network including his friends, family, and support workers (not to mention his lack of a private home) were based almost entirely out of this one particular corner of the city rendered it nearly impossible to avoid and essential to his survival. Evidence of this appeared in Bruce’s rather impromptu decision to re-enter the HRC simply to gather mail and spend time with Jordan, a decision that occurred in spite of his keen awareness that a potentially violent assault could descend upon his body at any given moment.

Finally, the contextually specific implications associated with Jordan’s “body” underscored several embodied power relations associated with class, race, gender, and age politics in Edmonton’s inner city. According to Bruce, Jordan’s body sent powerful messages to any potential assailants that he, and by extension anybody with him, were not to be physically harmed in any way. Reading deeper into this message, Jordan’s body was afforded a sense of relative privilege that more or less insulated him from the threats of violence to which Bruce, and presumably other less affluent and periodically homeless young men in this context, were more readily exposed. The substance of this corporeal message was so manifestly obvious and powerful to Bruce, moreover, that he was ultimately willing to stake his own life and personal safety upon what he felt Jordan’s body communicated. As Bruce acknowledged, the nature of this embodied privilege hinged upon the assumption that a more rigorous criminal investigation and related punishment would inevitably result if Jordan’s (white, middle-class, masculine) body were physically harmed in this urban setting:

Um yeah you, you just . . . it’s like yeah there’d probably be repercussions [if something happened to you] because you just naturally give that, off that aura. And when people see you, he’s a cop and they’ll be on the phone, blah, blah, we have a possible uh rat here, right? (personal communication, April 12, 2013)

Bruce’s insight was confirmed on several occasions when “inner city” men habitually greeted Jordan with a polite “Hello officer” or with the question: “You a cop?”

Such an embodied state of safety was not lost on Jordan when he reflected on his initial hesitations and fear of entering this “Other” urban setting and the early dramaturgical efforts he actively undertook to “blend in” with the community and to save “face.” Jordan’s body (his skin, gender, teeth, attire, etc.) was “read” as being associated with a higher rank of class and associated state protection than that afforded Bruce and, presumably, the other young men and women of Edmonton’s inner city. Ironically, the sheer visibility of the very distinctions that Jordan sought to shed was what contributed to his relative safety and privilege in this space, a powerful reminder that “[e]mbodiment is never neutral” (Hargreaves & Vertinsky, 2007, p. 10). Ingeniously, and for his own protection, Bruce sought to manipulate and exploit the privilege afforded to Jordan’s body and “outsider” status to suit his own needs (see Fine, Weis, Weseen, & Wong, 2003). The depth of our initial blindness to Jordan’s embodied privileges, however—indeed the luxury of being blind to our body’s privileges—raises important questions about the politics of (in)visibility within various cultural boundaries and social milieus. On this latter note, we can’t help but wonder, “Had Jordan not identified within the boundaries of a White, middle-class, masculine normativity (i.e., an ‘outsider’), how would these and other interactions have been different?” ¹¹ Still, while Jordan’s physical differences illuminated a range of alignments and strategic corporeal compromises, other embodied political distinctions provided, at least initially, a more significant challenge to understanding the “connectedness between people who are simultaneously similar and different” (Krumer-Nevo, 2012, p. 200).

Embodied Politics?

On the August 17, 2012, van ride to Friday hockey, Jordan sat next to Baxter, an Aboriginal man in his early 30s from northern Saskatchewan. Upon Baxter’s face and neck were a number of fresh bruises, scrapes, and other marks that suggested he had been involved in a recent physical altercation. Indeed, the injuries were sufficiently gruesome to compel at least one man in the van to inquire about their origins, if only as a matter of concern for Baxter’s well-being. Baxter responded by describing in detail a recent assault that he had endured.

On the van ride back to the city, Baxter again sat next to Jordan. Baxter’s demeanor and overall body language, however, was much more open and relaxed than it had been prior to the game. In between rounds of “hockey talk,” Baxter stoically shared with Jordan some other stories from his personal life that illuminated a life of poverty, violence, and unstable familial relationships—all themes commonly encountered over the course of Jordan’s fieldwork. To Jordan’s surprise, though, the conversation shifted to recent matters of public policy.

Baxter’s strong public condemnation of “abusers” (of both illicit substances and, more significantly, the state) and his passionate endorsement of several neoliberal and neoconservative ideological positions immediately caught Jordan off-guard. There was, for example, a decisive disjuncture between Baxter’s beliefs in these viewpoints and the simple fact that he was traveling to and from a subsidized (free) recreation event in a publicly owned van with a group of men on social assistance, many of whom are addicts living in heavily subsidized group homes. Still, Jordan took the opportunity to further engage Baxter’s subjective ideas:

Notably, at the time of the discussion in the van, the federal Conservative government in Canada had enthusiastically endorsed plans to radically expand existing prison facilities across the country, allocating millions of public funds toward the incarceration of thousands of men and women despite well-publicized decreases in federal crime levels (The Canadian Press, 2012). Baxter’s unwavering consent for a conservative political project as “common sense” thus raised a number of questions surrounding the relationships between the state and the “inner city,” and the embodied political viewpoints that many of the less affluent young men have come to understand as natural. Why, for example, did such a deeply neoconservative political agenda articulate so fluidly with the conscious ideals of many of these “urban outcasts”? And, crucially, why did Jordan (and the other members of the research team) take for granted, and even expect, that these young men would be committed to an alternative political agenda and issues of social justice aligned with their own politicized qualitative research process (see Fine et al., 2003)?

We believe it is far too simple to suggest that Baxter and many of the other young men are merely cultural dupes of an “official” political agenda and/or passive receptors of neoliberal/neoconservative ideologies, even if they at first appear to have embraced much of these messages. A more contextually nuanced and, indeed, historically sensitive interpretation of these issues would suggest that Baxter and many of the other young men have internalized a politics of survival and a rugged, masculine individualism that, over the course of their lives, has sustained their bodies in Edmonton’s downtown core, and that these experiences and beliefs articulate fluidly with a depoliticized discourse of personal responsibility in the neoliberal era. If “social reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside of agents” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 127), then Baxter’s cultural world—a world of physical violence, family instability, poverty, systemic racism, mistrust of the state and public officials (especially the police and paramedics)—has encouraged his embodiment of a politics of self-reliance and individualism. His bodily “hexis” (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984, 1990), in other words, has been socialized via its habitual exposure to unstable and disappointing human relations and a lifetime of vulnerability. Indeed, the fresh bruises on Baxter’s face and neck provided a strikingly physical reminder to all of the men in the van that they, and their “disposable” bodies, are left on their own to fend against the hardships of everyday life on the divided streets of Canada’s neoliberal cities.

Young men like Baxter, we want to suggest, have quite literally been socialized from decades of simply trying to survive on the streets (let alone in a deeply conservative province in which social services and their outreach workers come and go at an alarming and erratic rate). An important part of these long-term processes of socialization, moreover, has been a personal investment in the rubric of equality and advancement through merit; an understanding that with hard work they, too, will eventually climb up the social ladder without public assistance. The tantalizing possibility of real upward mobility appears to be within Baxter’s grasp, even if it is a future of manual labor and the “free” sale of his labor power. As part of an embodied homology, moreover, Baxter has learned how to creatively “work the system” (Goffman, 1961) in the underworld of Edmonton’s inner city, and his sense of self has emerged over the years in direct opposition to various public authorities and, indeed, the public sector in general. Baxter’s political claims, therefore, are better understood as an active negotiation of those historical conditions (i.e., a dominant discourse of personal responsibility), and his own palpable desire to shed the devastating stigmas of being unemployed and homeless on his own terms. Moreover, after years of exposure to social disappointment via erratic relationships with family members and the state, many of these men are, understandably, heavily invested in the belief that they can stand on their own two feet as “normal,” functioning citizens. In many ways, then, Baxter’s public claims must also be understood as a psychological defense strategy and a way of insulating and empowering his body as distinct from “Others” who are perceived as lazy, depend on social assistance, and may never escape the brutal cycles of poverty and addiction.

This type of ideological disjuncture may raise some concerns for SPCS scholars who make their own claims for progressive political action (with a wide range of constituents) in academic work that is often saturated with revolutionary language. It is almost taken for granted in these intellectual “call to arms” that members from across the social structure, especially the most vulnerable in society, will embrace, or share in, similar political agendas, outlooks, and positionalities. Yet, in his article in Socialist Register, Casanova (2002) has persuasively argued that it remains a significant mistake in Marxist theory to view workers as victims or, conversely, to idealize and romanticize them as “inherently revolutionary, rather than as negotiators who have been embroiled in the class contradictions that generate change within capitalism” (p. 267). We want to follow Casanova and suggest that any research project that does not account for—and come to terms with—a wide range of “negotiated contradictions” not unlike those addressed by Paul Willis (1977) in his seminal book, Learning to Labor, will struggle to grasp what is happening in the hearts and minds of today’s youths and “ordinary,” working people, let alone those on social assistance, and ultimately risk further “Othering” the very individuals and groups that, through their advocacy, they are seeking to help (Fine et al., 2003; Madison, 2012).

In our case, there was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a noticeable absence of political language that many on the Left would identify and applaud as progressive, and there was certainly no outspoken discussion of socialist ideals or revolutionary values that many would hope to be at the forefront of “working class consciousness.” Instead, the range of political conclusions that many of these young men have internalized (from across the political spectrum) in relation to various issues have been reached via an entirely different means of socialization than most members of the academy have even contemplated let alone experienced given their location in a broader class structure. This is a location that is, of course, the result of an accumulation of privilege and ease of access to various forms of capital (e.g., economic, social, and cultural) in contrast to a lifetime of very different material struggles and the embodied disposition of being denied these luxuries. Again, in this very real sense, it is crucial not to “Other” those in marginalized communities (by victimizing or framing them in relation to our own political ambitions and positionalities) but, instead, to underscore the complexity of social relations, the similarities and common bonds that we all share, and the contradictions and tensions that each of us embody as we internalize and resist various power relations at different stages of our lives.