‘Homelessness is a queer experience.’: utopianism and mutual aid as survival strategies for homeless trans people
Edith England
Housing Studies, 2025, vol. 40, issue 7, 1545-1562
Abstract:
Trans people are at considerably elevated risk of homelessness, yet services poorly meet their needs. I explore how community support, anchored in queer praxis and concrete utopian thinking enables trans people to survive homelessness. Drawing upon interviews with 35 trans people who have recently experienced homelessness in Wales, I explore how queer practices of mutual aid, contextualized by utopian possibility, engender community support for trans people experiencing homelessness. I argue that trans and queer communities provide extensive, often exhausting, practical, material and emotional support which counters well-established queer exclusion within statutory services. I show that community support is critical to the survival of homeless trans people within a complex and unwelcoming system, and that informal crisis alternatives are enabled by idealism, hope and pragmatism. These findings are important in visibilising how shared precarity produces practices of care, in offering strategies to address inequitable service failures, and in demonstrating the relevance of queer theoretical approaches to housing justice.
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02673037.2022.2108381 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:chosxx:v:40:y:2025:i:7:p:1545-1562
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/chos20
DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2022.2108381
Access Statistics for this article
Housing Studies is currently edited by Chris Leishman, Moira Munro, Ray Forrest, Alex Schwartz, Hal Pawson and John Flint
More articles in Housing Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().