ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the gendered meanings of home and homelessness, the social and spatial ordering of the home in relation to the construction of identity, the experience of home-as-prison among many 'homeless-at-home' women, and ways of becoming and being homeless. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the 'unaccommodated woman' is the homeless woman, one who is literally without accommodation. In a sense, home is so closely identified with women that the homeless woman becomes an anomaly, someone so deviant that she can exist only within the shadows. For many women, the home is not primarily a place to return to after a journey, a place of rest and relaxation: rather, it is a place of domestic and emotional labour. Drawing on the life-stories told by homeless women, two major ways of being homeless can be identified: the management of body space and identity work. Homelessness serves to define and delineate home, in a dynamic and dialectic fashion.
