ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes intersectionality as a critical lens, to highlight structural and individual issues, as well as intersecting social categories such as gender, class, socioeconomic and geographical locations that contribute to the portrait of homelessness in the Asia Pacific. An intersectional approach enables people to understand that homelessness is embedded in intersecting power relations that are contextual and dynamic, and shaped by political, social, economic, and cultural change. This critical frame that focuses on the intersections of structural inequality at the micro-mezzo-macro levels is used below in analysing definitions, state responses, and lived experiences of homelessness. Homelessness increasingly became an issue in western developed countries in the1980s. There is a diversity of experiences of homelessness across Asian Pacific countries. The chapter explores diverse portraits of homelessness, which shows how gendered experiences of homelessness intersected with multiple other issues associated with class, age, employment, health, and emotional wellbeing.
