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Salvaging Decency: Mobile Home Residents’ Strategies of Managing the Stigma of “Trailer” Living
Abstract
This paper is based on 45 ethnographic interviews conducted with residents of mobile home communities in West Central Florida
between 2005 and 2008. It investigates their strategies of managing the stigma that is commonly associated with living in
a mobile home. Informants routinely encounter negative stereotypes regarding their “trailer” home, community, and lifestyle
in public discourse and personal interactions, and consequently have developed ways of salvaging their decency. My analysis
of these strategies particularly emphasizes two versions of distancing, here called “bordering” and “fencing,” as examples
of symbolic boundary work. Other techniques discussed include ignoring, passing, humoring, resisting, normalizing, upstaging,
and blaming. Throughout the paper, I argue that mobile home residents’ ways of salvaging decency are both similar and different
compared to how other disparaged groups deal with stigmatization. The conclusion discusses broader sociological implications
of the research in enhancing our understanding of the experience of stigmatization, folk conceptions of decency, symbolic
and social differentiation, as well as race and class dynamics.
... For example, residents distance their own lifestyles from their neighbours, or claim that the street they live on is better than the next (August 2014). Distancing was the most used strategy to manage stigma in Kusenbach's (2009) research with mobile home residents in Florida, United States, which she divides into two distinct forms. The first she calls "bordering", which involves strategies to demarcate residents' communities from "geographically, culturally, and/or symbolically distant others" (Kusenbach 2009:408). ...
... Both also illustrate the way territorial stigma interacts with other forms of stigma, including those based on individual and group identity, and housing type and tenure (Horgan 2018). This stigma negotiation strategy can be understood as a form of bordering in that it operates through broad geographical differences (Kusenbach 2009). Particular parts of Shirebrook are named as places to be avoided, illustrating how the territorial stigma that affects the whole town is reassigned onto, concentrated in, and sticks to, smaller territories within. ...
... Those that live in the Model or Pear Tree Estate, tasked with the double burden of negotiating living on a stigmatised estate within a stigmatised town, negotiated this through ever smaller geographies. As the scale reduced, these distancing strategies become more like fencing (Kusenbach 2009) which require increasingly nuanced local knowledge. For example, I asked Henry, a 74-year-old retired postal worker, to tell me about where he lives: ...
This paper draws on a multimethod ethnographic study, conducted between 2016 and 2017 in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, England—a small and relatively isolated deindustrialising colliery town—examining how residents negotiate living in stigmatised territory. In doing so, microspatial strategies of distancing, avoidance, and deflection are illustrated, revealing how residents reassign and deepen stigma in particular locations within a stigmatised territory. This highlights the relationship between social and physical space, and while spatial strategies of negotiation do not mitigate stigma, they do (re)produce internal social hierarchies within a place that is homogenised from the outside through disparaging narratives. A key contribution reveals the significance of the racialised production of space in shaping how territorial stigma is negotiated within this distinct socio‐spatial location. Residents use strategies to redirect the stigma toward those seen as out of place and draw attention away from sticky sites of racialised urban stigma towards symbols of unspoilt rural Englishness.
... The term 'spatial stigma' has been used to describe how place-related attributes, such as alcohol or drug abuse, long corridors, and standardised institutional furniture, are discredited to the point where all the complexities of place are reduced to something dirty and 'discounted' (Goffman, 1963;Keene & Padilla, 2014;Kusenbach, 2009;Wacquant et al., 2014). At the same time, places can be considered relational in that they are shaped by social networks and the political context (cf. ...
... For people dealing with spatial stigma, the best-known strategies are exit and voiceby moving away or by acting to change the setting's negative image (Kearns et al., 2013;Permentier et al., 2007). There are other ways, as when people construct themselves as differing from others in the same setting, as is the case when people in homeless shelters claim to be more 'honourable' than others in the same place (Keene et al., 2018), when people in low-income neighbourhoods favourably compare their morals with others (Wacquant et al., 2014), or when people in trailer parks believe themselves to be living in the 'better' part of the park (Kusenbach, 2009). ...
... Recalibration is a technique where differentiation and comparison create value (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999). Studies of stigma management have drawn attention to the way people distance themselves morally from others in a particular area, or from the area itself (Keene et al., 2018;Kusenbach, 2009;Wacquant et al., 2014). This creation of hierarchies of residents featured in our interviews: residents who only used alcohol detested 'drug addicts', while some residents described themselves as straight and honourable in contrast to 'thieves', 'idiots', or 'imbeciles'. ...
Settings in social work may be associated with spatial stigma. This study uses the case of a highly stigmatised setting to investigate ways of ascribing positive characteristics to tainted contexts. Guided by symbolic interactionism, the aim is to analyse how residents in ‘wet’ eldercare facilities manage to view these in a positive light. Wet eldercare facilities are designed for older people with long-term substance use problems, where abstinence is abandoned for well-being. Forty-two residents of four such facilities were interviewed, revealing how the hybrid status of these places enabled residents to frame their situation as being ‘in the right place’, but for different reasons. Some framed the place as a care home, others as an ordinary flat. Both frames were made credible by the formal hybrid organisation: Swedish wet eldercare facilities are part of the eldercare system, and residents’ rooms are formally regarded as flats. The study suggests that it is social work’s (often neglected) responsibility to counter spatial stigma and improve residents’ sense of dignity. Based on promising practices in the Swedish system, the study presents three strategies that enable residents in nominally tainted settings to ascribe positive characteristics to the place where they live.
... Take, for example, the persistence of prejudice against SROs and their residents (Dear & Taylor, 1982;Dear & Wolch, 1987;Derksen, 2017;Freeman, 2017;Harris, 1992). Similar patterns of prejudice, whether interpersonal, community-based, or formal-legal have been delineated across research on SROs, sober houses, group homes, and mobile homes (Crystal & Beck, 1992;Grant, Derksen, & Ramos, 2019;Heslin, Singzon, Aimiuwu, Sheridan, & Hamilton, 2012;Kusenbach, 2009;Mifflin & Wilton, 2005). This sometimes infuses battles over municipal zoning, where the 'saturation' of a particular housing type is rhetorically deployed to propose desaturation through zoning as a means of destigmatization (Finkler & Grant, 2011;Horgan, 2018). ...
... Cultural expectations around housing type and tenure figure strongly. For example, Lauster (2016) shows how the single family home is disappearing as a norm in Vancouver, while Kusenbach (2009Kusenbach ( , 2017 shows that despite the fact that many trailer homes in Florida are owner-occupied, this form of tenure does not protect trailer homes from being stigmatized. ...
... While housing stigmatization draws on abstract symbolic structures, it must be enlivened in particular grounded contexts. While some housing typeslike mobile homes, for example (Kusenbach, 2009)are widely stigmatized, in some contexts they may not be-for example, mobile homes used as holiday homes. Similarly, prejudice against rental properties on predominantly owner-occupied streets, or student rentals in family neighbourhoods (Sage, Smith, & Hubbard, 2012) highlight this contextual element of housing stigmatization. ...
This article treats housing stigmatization as a social process of symbolic ascription, connected to inhabitants, housing form, housing tenure, and/or housing location. Stigmatization research tends to focus on personal stigmatization, or to examine housing only in relation to territorial stigmatization, while housing research tends to focus on health and policy. This article demonstrates that housing stigmatization, which is differentiated from personal stigmatization and territorial stigmatization, is a viable unit of analysis in its own right for stigma research. Seven core elements are identified, showing that housing stigmatization is: (1) relational; (2) contextual; (3) processual; (4) reinforceable; (5) reversible; (6) morally loaded; and (7) treated as contagious. Comprehending the elements of housing stigmatization will benefit destigmatization efforts.
... While common, the "trailer trash" stigma, an example of both housing and neighborhood/territorial stigma, has been understudied in contemporary research. Through a range of discursive strategies, many subgroups within this larger population manage to successfully distance themselves from the stigma and thereby render it inconsequential (Kusenbach, 2009). But what about those residents-typically white, poor, and occasionally lacking in stability-who do not have the necessary resources to accomplish this? ...
... Even though stigmatization is a powerful form of othering (Link & Phelan, 2001), it would be wrong to assume that place-based prejudice and discrimination affect everyone who is generally targeted in similar ways and degrees. Certain subgroups and individuals within the larger category of mobile home dwellers manage to successfully distance themselves from the stereotype while drawing on positively valued social memberships (Kusenbach, 2009). However, others are more vulnerable and must come to terms with the housing and neighborhood-based stigma they experience as a serious challenge, often among many other obstacles. ...
... There were many other privileging attributes and social categories that offered protection and isolation from the sting of the "trailer trash" stigma, such as residency in an age-restricted (so-called "senior") mobile home community, living in a high income neighborhood, living in a normative nuclear family household (two heterosexual parents with their own children), working fulltime work in a respectable job, and full ownership of a new mobile home. In a previous article (Kusenbach, 2009), I examine the distancing strategies that were associated with these and other privileging-as opposed to stigmatizing-conditions in more detail. People with these advantageous attributes typically believed that "trailer trash" lives elsewhere but that they could not possibly be considered part of this group. ...
p>In the United States, residents of mobile homes and mobile home communities are faced with cultural stigmatization regarding their places of living. While common, the “trailer trash” stigma, an example of both housing and neighborhood/territorial stigma, has been understudied in contemporary research. Through a range of discursive strategies, many subgroups within this larger population manage to successfully distance themselves from the stigma and thereby render it inconsequential (Kusenbach, 2009). But what about those residents—typically white, poor, and occasionally lacking in stability—who do not have the necessary resources to accomplish this? This article examines three typical responses by low-income mobile home residents—here called resisting, downplaying, and perpetuating—leading to different outcomes regarding residents’ sense of community belonging. The article is based on the analysis of over 150 qualitative interviews with mobile home park residents conducted in West Central Florida between 2005 and 2010.</p
... Mobile homes and their collective neighbourhoods, often called trailer parks, are viewed in many communities as places of crime and as unattractive and are often viewed as detrimental to the value of neighbouring properties (MacTavish, 2007;McCarty, 2014;Wubneh & Shen, 2004). Those who live in this housing type are likely to experience shame and isolation as well as financial instability via high rates of eviction and a lack of legal protections (MacTavish, 2007, Kusenbach, 2009Desmond, 2012;Sullivan, 2017b, Sullivan, 2018. Juxtaposed with these adverse outcomes is the fact that mobile homes are a significant source of affordable housing in the United States and account for a significant portion of the growth in this sector of the housing market (Boehm & Schlottmann, 2008;Sullivan, 2017b). ...
... The term "trailer trash" is often used to describe those living in mobile home communities (Sullivan, 2018). Often meant as a derogatory term, the term refers to one's low income and undesirable lifestyle (Kusenbach, 2009). This othering often extends into schools, limiting children's educational outcomes, and the attainment of public services (Miller & Evko, 1985;Jackson, 1994;MacTavish, 2007;Notter, MacTavish, & Shamah, 2008). ...
... Social isolation has been shown to increase due to the presumed, but not necessarily accurate, temporary nature of living in a mobile home (Aman & Yarnal, 2010) and the lack of public spaces and amenities provided in mobile home communities (MacTavish & Salamon, 2009). Something of note is that the positive social effects of homeownership, something that is widely valued by many Americans, are not felt by all who own mobile homes, with Hispanic immigrants being more likely to see mobile home ownership as an accomplishment to be proud of than other groups (Kusenbach, 2017). ...
Mobile home residence in the United States is associated with negative social, economic, and health‐related outcomes. However, although research on mobile home residence at the individual level has been performed, a geographic understanding of mobile home prevalence in the United States remains absent from the literature. Therefore, the purpose of our analysis was to evaluate the county‐level drivers of mobile home prevalence in the continental United States in 2015. The influence of five groups of variables—demographic, economic, housing, industry and occupation, and natural amenities—were assessed in a series of nested ordinary least squares regressions. Additionally, the full model was run as a spatial lag regression to control for spatial autocorrelation. Our results indicate that the primary drivers of mobile home prevalence in U.S. counties were the percent of population in near poverty, the labour force participation rate, and the percent of the population employed in natural resource occupations.
... How does living in a mobile home, as opposed to a site-built home, townhouse, or condo, influence older Floridian's sense of home and belonging? Despite the prevalence of mobile homes especially in this part of Florida, all participants were clearly aware that, in mainstream American culture, there is a social stigma attached to living in a 'trailer' (Kusenbach, 2009;MacTavish, 2007;Saatcioglu & Ozanne, 2013). 'Trailer' people are commonly portrayed as poor, uneducated, narrow-minded, immoral and undeserving. ...
... Interestingly, while this stigma typically was a serious concern for white residents of family mobile home communities, none of the interviewed senior migrants conveyed the impression that the disparaging views regarding 'trailers' posed a problem for them. As I have discussed elsewhere in greater detail (Kusenbach, 2009), and similar to Latino/a mobile home residents (Kusenbach, 2017), senior Florida migrants have developed effective strategies to circumvent popular opinion and disarm the impact of the stigma on their place-based personal and collective identities. ...
... Hank strived to distance himself from prejudice by emphasizing the age restriction and 'resort' type amenities of his mobile home park, which are not 'stereotypical'. In my earlier paper on how mobile home residents managed the 'trailer' stigma (Kusenbach, 2009), I described Hank's strategy of salvaging his personal identity as 'bordering' because it relied on erecting a moral boundary between different kinds of mobile home communities. Similarly, Randy explained that he was not bothered by other people's negative opinions because they did not apply to his kind of community. ...
... Likewise, Jules felt the effects of home-lessness because she lacked a house (although she found a sense of home in creative pursuits) and felt like an incomplete person as a result. Jules engaged in identity-maintenance to preserve her personal identity in the face of a stigmatised social identity, by 'normalising' homelessness (Kusenbach, 2009) and 'talking back to' it (Juhila, 2004). ...
... She acknowledged the stigma that others applied to her as a homeless woman, while simultaneously adopting a capacity to cope, to manage her sense of self, and to feel in control. Such strategies of managing stigma are referred to here as 'normalising' (a term borrowed from Kusenbach, 2009) and 'talking back' (Juhila, 2004). ...
... Other practices were found in Kusenbach's (2009) research, which she termed 'bordering' and 'fencing'. 'Bordering' referred to the erection of boundaries between one's own community and distant 'others', while 'fencing' referred to accounts that emphasised differences within someone's community. ...
This thesis addresses the oft-neglected experiences of ‘homeless’ women. It explores how homelessness impacts on women’s identities and how this is negotiated and/or resisted. An integrated theoretical framework links homelessness and identity literature with feminist insights surrounding marginalised women. By centring the experiences and identity-work of homeless women, this thesis contributes to bodies of work on homelessness, women and identity from a feminist perspective. The study advances knowledge of home and homelessness and the relationship between these supposedly binary concepts; and contributes to existing understandings of identity, in relation to marginalised women. Findings are based on a combination of in-depth qualitative interviews, participant-produced photographs, and follow-up photo-elicitation interviews with twelve women accessing homelessness support services – hostels, supported housing projects, day-centres, and women’s centres –in a range of homelessness situations.
... Neighborhoods beset by poverty and crime develop reputations reinforced through the adjectives, 'run-down,' 'trashy,' 'blighted,' or simply, 'bad.' Words not only impugn neighborhoods, but also stigmatize people who reside there, as evidenced by slurs such as 'trailer trash' (Kusenbach, 2009) or names for impoverished neighborhood as 'badlands' (Kissane, 2010). As noted in a study of stigma surrounding trailer parks, (Kusenbach, 2009), neighborhoods serve as symbolic expressions of people's identities; one with a 'bad' reputation may stigmatize residents. ...
... Neighborhoods beset by poverty and crime develop reputations reinforced through the adjectives, 'run-down,' 'trashy,' 'blighted,' or simply, 'bad.' Words not only impugn neighborhoods, but also stigmatize people who reside there, as evidenced by slurs such as 'trailer trash' (Kusenbach, 2009) or names for impoverished neighborhood as 'badlands' (Kissane, 2010). As noted in a study of stigma surrounding trailer parks, (Kusenbach, 2009), neighborhoods serve as symbolic expressions of people's identities; one with a 'bad' reputation may stigmatize residents. Social psychologists argue that place identity reflexively informs individual's self-identity and ultimately encompasses conscious and unconscious ideas, beliefs and values (Low and Altman, 1992). ...
... Perceptions of neighborhoods as 'bad' may discourage some from walking or even driving through them, reinforcing beliefs that the area is not only poor but that residents are of questionable character. Mobile home park residents may accept the terms 'trailer' and 'trailer parks,' but use, 'trailer trash' only to distance themselves from residents whose behavior transgresses the symbolic moral marker between 'good' and 'bad' (Kusenbach, 2009). By using the word, 'trash,' residents may protect themselves from stigma by distancing themselves from other trailer residents who behave badly. ...
... In lieu of formal recognition, MHC residents nonetheless use conventional housing as a way to assign value to their homes. In Florida, Margarethe Kusenbach (2009Kusenbach ( , 2015 observed widespread normalizing rhetoric among MH owners who insisted their homes were "just as good" or "no different" from site-built units. Likewise, Esther Sullivan (2018) finds that MHC residents in Texas and Florida tend to perceive their housing as permanent despite the perceived or actual threat of mass eviction due to park redevelopment. ...
... In lieu of formal recognition, MHC residents nonetheless use conventional housing as a way to assign value to their homes. In Florida, Margarethe Kusenbach (2009Kusenbach ( , 2015 observed widespread normalizing rhetoric among MH owners who insisted their homes were "just as good" or "no different" from site-built units. Likewise, Esther Sullivan (2018) finds that MHC residents in Texas and Florida tend to perceive their housing as permanent despite the perceived or actual threat of mass eviction due to park redevelopment. ...
Although an estimated twenty‐two million Americans occupy manufactured homes (MHs), less than one‐quarter of MH owners title their homes as real estate. Instead, most title their homes as personal property, which offers fewer legal protections against sudden eviction or unit repossession. Drawing from five years of anthropological research conducted within urban MH Communities (MHCs) in Lincoln (Nebraska) and Boulder (Colorado), this article details the many complicating factors MH owners in land‐lease MHCs consider before deciding to occupy depreciating assets titled as “chattel.” MH owners in Lincoln, for example, tend to emphasize the cost‐saving features of their manufactured homes, in particular the lower tax rate and maintenance costs. By contrast, Boulder MH owners typically describe their homes as investments, and resist efforts to restrict or limit (mobile) home sales even when located in land‐lease MHCs. Together, these case studies illustrate differing perspectives, motivations, and sociolegal contexts in which MHC owners claim respectability as well as citizens’ rights through “landless” homeownership.
... While housing has a prominent place in the literature dealing with territorial stigma, the focus is placed on those living in public or social housing developments that are owned and managed by municipal, state, or national government entities (e.g., Watt & Smets, 2017). However, there are other forms of housing, as well as other forms of tenure, that are also stigmatized and will also need consideration: for instance, barrio, favela or "slum" dwellings (Bredenoord, van Lindert, & Smets, 2014;Ferguson & Smets, 2010), manufactures housing and mobile homes (Kusenbach, 2009), Single Room Occupancy (SRO) residences (Horgan, 2018), and, in some contexts, even privately rented homes and apartments (Vassenden & Lie, 2013). ...
... Over the past two decades, one growing thematic focus in the literature on housing and territorial stigmabesides the social production of stigma by powerful actors, including the state-are the experiences and behavioral responses of stigma recipients. Evidence from numerous studies shows that their reactions vary greatly and can be located on a continuum unfolding between two extremes: acceptance/internalization of, and resignation to, the inflicted stigma on the one side (Wacquant, 2007(Wacquant, , 2008 and rejection of, and resistance to, stigma and stigmatization on the other (see, for instance, Hastings, 2004;Jensen & Christensen, 2012;Kirkness, 2014;Kusenbach, 2009;Palmer, Ziersch, Arthurson, & Baum, 2007). ...
This introduction to the thematic issue on housing and territorial stigma provides concise overviews of the concepts of stigma, housing stigma, and territorial (or neighborhood) stigma, while tracing back current research on these topics to the pioneering work of Erving Goffman and Loic Wacquant. In doing this, we place particular attention on social responses to, and coping strategies with, stigma, especially various forms of stigma resistance. Finally, in brief summaries of all articles in the thematic issue, we emphasize their shared themes and concerns.
... On average, their educational status and household incomes are significantly lower, they are more likely to depend on government assistance, and 25.3% of them live below the poverty line (USCB 2011a(USCB , 2011b. Studies suggest that these problems are particularly true of trailer park residents (see Baker et al. 2011;Kusenbach 2009;MacTavish 2006;Milstead et al. 2013;Schmitz 2004;Shanbacker 2007). Furthermore, a number of authors argue that examination of the underlying conditions reveals that the trailer parks provide a primarily precarious form of housing. ...
... The Jobcenter does not urge or encourage anyone to take such a step. Nonetheless, besides the very individual motivations, there are also unequivocally financial reasons that suggest a dimension of dis-30 The latter is made clear especially in the US studies of trailer parks and through the societal discourses in the US about 'white trash' and 'trailer trash,' which are closely tied to this form of housing (Harry 2004;Hurley 2001, p. 247f;Kusenbach 2009). placement. ...
Gentrification is arguably the most dynamic area of conflict in current urban development policy – it is the process by which poorer populations are displaced by more affluent groups. Although gentrification is well-documented, German and international research largely focuses on improvements in the built environment and social composition of neighbourhoods. The consequences for those who are displaced often remain overlooked. Where do they move? What does it mean to be forced to leave a familiar residential area? What kinds of resistance strategies are developed? How does anti-gentrification work? With a focus on Berlin – the German "capital of gentrification" – the chapters in this volume use innovative methods to explore these pressing questions.
Contents
• Gentrification and Displacement
• Gentrification in Subsidized Rental Housing
• Hotspots of Gentrification
• New Forms of Displacement and Protest
• The State-Made Rental Gap
• Trailer Living as Displacement Phenomenon
• Residential Biographies as an Instrument of Sociospatial Displacement Analysis
Target Groups
• Researchers and students in the fields of sociology, urban studies, geography, and urban planning
• Practitioners in the fields of urban planning, housing policies, and neighbourhood development
The Editor
Ilse Helbrecht is director of the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Metropolitan Development and full professor of social and cultural geography at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. She works on gentrification, housing, and urban governance.
... During the housing boom in the 1970s, these suburban Whites reaped the benefits of soar ing housing prices (e.g., higher nee worth), which could be leveraged for capital and transferred inter generationally. These practices prevented people of color from acquiring assets and increasing their net worth, thus directing subsequent generadons along a path toward spiraling disadvantage (Kochhar, Fry, & Taylor, 2011;Shapiro, Meschede, & Sullivan, 2010). Cultural practices even served to undermine gains attained by people of color during the civil rights era. ...
This chapter reviews the interdisciplinary literature in the field of critical Whiteness studies to situate the research, teaching, and practice concerns of counseling psychology in the historical context of Whiteness. By understanding the social construction of Whiteness in the United States, readers will note its inextricable ties to capital (i.e., material assets and investments) and its role in the social division of labor. The chapter specifies key historical markers to highlight the production and reproduction of a classed Whiteness since the seventeenth century. Through an intersectional approach that links Whiteness and social class, the authors next discuss various social class strata among Whites (i.e., unemployed and underemployed, professional-middle class, and elite), emphasizing k~y concerns that may be salient in each stratum. Finally, the chapter turns readers' attention to implications for the field of counseling psychology, addressing future research directions and providing implications for training and practice.
... An ethnography by Kusenbach focused on the stigma felt by people living in mobile homes. 18 Kusenbach discovered that most people who lived in mobile homes and felt stigma dealt with it in several ways. Kusenbach's list included four primary ways that my family dealt with stigma: resisting, blaming, distancing, and normalizing. ...
Stigma is a powerful social construct that fluctuates, yet it can stay with a person for their entire life. When someone moves from a stigmatized to a socially acceptable position, it creates tension between their social and personal identity. This article examines how stigma is internalized and presented in different contexts. The author utilizes autoethnography to explore how his family, socioeconomic class, criminal history, vocation, and religion intersect and impact how he manages and presents stigma. The author finds that his transition from a stigmatized identity leaves him in a liminal space where he does not belong to the new or old group. The significance of the study is that it offers insight into how people process and present stigma, which is helpful for rehabilitation and recovery.
... The etiology of this gap is complex, overdetermined and rooted in a variety of structural disadvantages. First, MH is inappropriately, yet commonly, stigmatized [11,13] and disparagingly depicted (e.g., "Trailer Park Boys") as low-quality "trash" housing for "low-class" people [14]. Second, roughly a third of MH in the US is in MH parks, where residents do not own the land on which their homes sit, making them more susceptible to impacts from site-rent increases as well as land-use and land-ownership changes. ...
This article contributes to theoretical understandings of the relationships among extreme heat vulnerability, energy equity and home thermal security (HTS) – the ability to maintain a home thermal environment consistent with basic health, social and financial needs. Based on three years of mixed-methods qualitative research among social service practitioners, landlords and residents of mobile and manufactured housing (MH) communities, we argue that thermal insecurity is a socially produced, rather than intrinsic, feature of MH. We use the thermal struggles of MH residents to illustrate how gaps in research, markets, landlord-tenant law, policy, and specific government programs overlap to produce MH as a site of hyper-exclusion from many tools used to mitigate and adapt to climate risk. We find that most MH residents, despite barriers and a warming climate, are able to maintain some level of HTS. We highlight the small-scale, improvisational strategies that households use to cope and adapt to the extreme temperatures. HTS is an achievement sustained by a variety of elements that cannot be reduced to simple metrics (e.g., presence of air conditioning). We conclude with a practical set of policy recommendations as well as a call for an expansive “climate finance” that includes the improvisational practices of excluded groups as innovations worth learning from and investing in.
... While the debasement of mobile home residents is hardly new, these comments highlight, on the one hand, presumed abhorrence of "white-trailer trash," and on the other hand, their assumed gullibility and stupidity. Such stereotypes are well known to mobile-homeowners, in particular white mobile-homeowners (Kusenbach 2009(Kusenbach , 2015, whose subsequent attempts to narrate their racialized hopes I interrogate using the concept of "untruths." ...
For decades, studies have shown that white households have greater access and benefit most from the racialized US housing market. Homeownership is the material realization of the American dream, and for many it is read alongside middle‐classness and normativity as cultural markers of hegemonic whiteness. Conversely, this article explores personal narratives from white homeowners that are excluded from this dominant understanding: white mobile‐homeowners. I apply the concept of “untruths” to illustrate how my interlocutors discursively situated their racialized hopes, anxieties, and aspirations against the disparaging “white‐trailer trash” trope. I then consider how I, as a white, working‐class anthropologist conducting “home‐work,” was figured into these narratives as representing this idealized—yet deeply problematic—whiteness. Bringing together anthropological perspectives on lies and sincerity, I show how white racial “untruths” reveal a more complex and fragmented whiteness that belies the dreamlike fiction of hegemonic white normativity.
... Vehicular dwelling has a long and mixed history in the U.S. Mobile homes emerged in response to the Great Depression and the Second World War to meet the need for low-cost housing (Hall & Muller, 2018). Many people viewed them negatively as both cheap and transient relative to permanent housing firmly rooted in communities (Beamish et al., 2001;Hall & Muller, 2018;Kusenbach, 2009;MacTavish, 2007). Consequently, mobile residents were stigmatized, a prevalent attitude captured by the phrase "trailer park trash." ...
Homelessness continues to grow and to affect the lives of an increasingly diverse group of individuals. Many scholars have studied people living in homeless shelters and outdoors in tents. An overlooked population is the growing number of the unhoused living in vehicles. We draw on data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s Homeless Demographic Survey to understand the characteristics of people living in vehicles and the extent to which they differ from the nonvehicular unhoused population. Compared to those living in tents, in makeshift shelters, and in public spaces, people living in vehicles are more likely to be women and to live in larger households with children, and are less likely to be chronically unhoused. These findings will help effectively target policies and services. Safe parking programs can provide temporary relief to those living in vehicles and, if done well, the interventions necessary to transition into permanent housing.
... Evidence exists that mobile homes lower the values of nearby single-family homes (Munneke and Slawson, 1999), but the underlying causal mechanisms have not been identified, at least from the rigorous econometric analysis. However, there has been ethnographic research that suggests several ways mobile home communities may hinder youth development, beyond their possible association with environmental hazards: 1) mobile homes, because they are almost always located in parks, socially isolate youth from the broader community, excluding them from educational and cultural experiences, 2) mobile home parks provide little or no play space for children, and 3) youth living in mobile home parks are stereotyped and stigmatized by outsiders, including teachers, which results in youth having negative views of themselves (Miller and Evko, 1985;Morris, 2005;MacTavish and Salamon, 2006;MacTavish, 2007;Kusenbach, 2009). ...
Land uses within the neighborhood where poor youths reside have important effects on their development and therefore may predict their welfare as adults. Mean household incomes as adults and teenage birth rates of youth growing up in poor households are predicted based upon the land uses within the neighborhood they occupied as teenagers. Controlling for an extensive set of neighborhood socioeconomic and demographic variables, land uses are found to add to our understanding of the characteristics of places with upward mobility. Differences in land use between white and minority youth neighborhoods are also found to explain racial gaps in adult outcomes.
... Bundling multiple jobs within prestigious restaurants represents another strategy workers such as Kevin are able to use to manage contested work identities. By valorizing higher-end restaurant jobs while implicitly drawing status distinction with lower-end restaurant jobs (e.g., fast food cashiering), Kevin engages in a strategy that Kusenbach (2009) refers to as "bordering." Kevin's daily interactions with affluent "guests" at each of the restaurants he works allows him to frame himself as a purveyor of refined tastes to a cultured audience (see Ocejo 2017;Sherman 2007), rather than "just" a restaurant worker. ...
Research shows that people who face stigmatized work identities attempt to reconfigure their employment more positively, such as by concealing their involvement with their jobs or reframing the value of it. Yet, in an era of rising nonstandard work, how might managing work identities also involve managing multiple jobs across fluid employment contexts? We draw insights from two cases of nonstandard workers facing differing degrees of contested work identity—frontline restaurant workers and sex workers. We find that these workers use similar strategies to manage their employment that involve identity work and job searching, yet their decision to stick to their line of work or opt for alternatives stems in part from the symbolic characteristics of their respective jobs. We conclude by laying out a broader framework for how workers manage contested work identities in an era of nonstandard employment.
... Manufactured housing has long been an important part of the U.S. housing stock but is receiving substantial first-time attention in housing and planning studies (Kusenbach, 2009(Kusenbach, , 2017Salamon and Mactavish, 2017 manufactured home is built in a manufacturing plant and then transported on a permanent chassis and installed on-site (Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2018). Manufactured homes provide the single largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the U.S. (Corporation For Enterprise Development (CFED, 2010) and account for a significant portion of all affordable housing development (Boehm and Schlottmann, 2008). ...
Informal subdivisions and manufactured home communities make up a substantial share of the United States’ housing stock but receive relatively little attention in the scholarly literature. The time-intensive nature of identifying these often-invisible communities through the analysis of satellite imagery and property records limits their systematic study. What research does exist on these communities suggests that they are often exposed to concentrated forms of economic, social, and environmental vulnerability. This paper uses big data to develop building footprint-derived landscape metrics capable of identifying and distinguishing between informal subdivisions and manufactured home communities based on their morphology. We use a data set of building footprints developed by Microsoft and released publicly in 2018 to measure the size, type, orientation, placement, and uniformity of housing in more than 2000 residential neighborhoods Hidalgo County, Texas, where more than 1000 informal subdivisions have been documented by prior research. Support vector machines (SVMs) and cross-validation are used to test the ability of these metrics to distinguish between three neighborhood types: informal subdivisions, manufactured housing communities, and formal subdivisions (or traditionally planned neighborhoods). Our models can accurately classify these three types of community approximately 91 % of the time. We then examine whether there is evidence to support the further disaggregation of these types of neighborhood, as is the case in both policy and scholarship. Our analysis of the morphology of these communities points to little evidence for the current distinction in state and federal law between pre- and post-1990 informal subdivisions; we do, however, find evidence for the need to distinguish between manufactured home communities with distinct tenure arrangements: namely, land-lease communities that we call manufactured home parks and land-owner communities that we call manufactured home subdivisions. We conclude by offering new research directions made possible by this novel identification method.
... On the demand side, in turn, the dream of becoming a homeowner, even only of cheaper structures and without land, was just as important as the normative change of what legitimately and legally counts as a house to buy. Even if mobile homes have not yet replaced their residents' aspiration to conventional homes [Fehl 1988], they have at least established themselves as a de facto form of permanent living, distancing themselves from the threatening stigma of mere "trailer" living [Kusenbach 2009]. This image was inherited from temporary war-time trailer parks, the recurrence of bad examples at the lower end of the market, and the sight of collapsing homes in the face of high winds [Thornburg 1991]. ...
Why durability matters? Towards a comparative economic sociology of market organization – ERRATUM - Alexander Dobeson, Sebastian Kohl
... On the demand side, in turn, the dream of becoming a homeowner, even only of cheaper structures and without land, was just as important as the normative change of what legitimately and legally counts as a house to buy. Even if mobile homes have not yet replaced their residents' aspiration to conventional homes [Fehl 1988], they have at least established themselves as a de facto form of permanent living, distancing themselves from the threatening stigma of mere "trailer" living [Kusenbach 2009]. This image was inherited from temporary war-time trailer parks, the recurrence of bad examples at the lower end of the market, and the sight of collapsing homes in the face of high winds [Thornburg 1991]. ...
What can a good's durability tell us about its market organization? This paper argues that the socially expected durability of goods is one of their most important features. It illuminates temporal and material aspects of market organization and social change across different markets. While recent literature in the sociology of markets tends to emphasize financial goods, intangible assets, and the service economy, markets for material durable and nondurable consumer goods are still surprisingly pervasive in everyday life and in the household economy, as well as in modern economies' basic infrastructure. Based on a comparison of the extreme cases of durable housing and fresh fish markets, we come to the general finding that the higher a good's expected durability, the smaller the share of its new production will be and the larger its aftermarkets. Furthermore, it will be more tightly linked to credit and insurance markets, and its market will be more volatile in the short-term, but more inert in the long-term. Beyond this static distinction, we show how socio-technical mechanisms can "durabilize" or "dedurabilize" goods and hence change their market form. By comparing markets along the durability dimension, this paper contributes to a comparative sociology of market organization that goes beyond single-market studies, while at the same time opening up space for a more dynamic understanding of social change and market segmentation over time.
... Stewart, Franklin, Felicite and Avery), prolonged housing precarity contributed to diminished expectations. Consistent with previous work regarding long-term residents of low-quality dwellings (Golant, 2015;Kusenbach, 2009;Rollings et al., 2015), participants adjusted their perspectives in order to cope with their living conditions, resist stigmatization, and experience a sense of home and control within the constraints of their personal situation and the broader housing market (see also Bates et al., 2019). Such adjustments are indicative of prevailing precarity, but could also be seen as an expression of resilience, especially where these strategies enable the older person to continue to enjoy their surroundings and be engaged with their friends and community despite adversity. ...
In light of housing affordability concerns, we examine older people’s experiences of renting within a context of enduring home-ownership norms and aspirations. Adapting Clapham’s housing pathways framework, we ask: How is rental tenure experienced by older people who have encountered precarity in their housing history? Drawing on interviews with 13 older tenants, we observe the uneasy relationship between tenure insecurity and housing quality, and tensions between choice and luck in experiences of renting in later life. Three pathways related to renting in older age were apparent: life-long renting; loss of homeownership through adversity; and deliberate decisions to transition to renting. We note that challenges encountered in current and previous housing situations lead to diverse narratives of precarity in later life. These precarious experiences can be exacerbated by intersecting uncertainties associated with health, financial and personal circumstances. Older tenants’ housing pathways and experiences illuminate ways in which precarity can disrupt opportunities for ageing well and ageing in place.
... Stewart's deep attachment to the island, combined with his lengthof-residence in the house-bus, contributed to his diminished housing expectations. His description is consistent with Kusenbach's (2009) observation that residents in low-quality mobile dwellings (buses, caravans, trailers, etc.) may defend themselves and their home against perceived stigma attached to their housing by emphasising positive aspects of their living arrangements (see also Collins et al., 2018). By contrast, Franklin (65, retired) explained that he had no sense of home or attachment to his dwelling or the island, and described a range of challenges associated with his living arrangements since moving to Waiheke from overseas: ...
Older renters may encounter a wide range of challenges and constraints in their experiences of ageing, housing and community life that influence their wellbeing. We employ a two-part conceptualisation of precarity and resilience to investigate how housing-related precarities may impact upon experiences of ageing and home during later life. We draw on narratives collected through in-depth interviews with 13 older renters living in a particularly high-pressure housing market within the greater Auckland area. We ground our analysis in ideas of precarity and resilience evident in participants' experiences of being 'at home' at the scale of both the dwelling and wider community. Results show that experiences of renting and ageing can be complicated and compromised in diverse ways by interrelated aspects of precarity and resilience related to housing, community, health, financial and personal circumstances. Distance or isolation from services and healthcare, tourism-related infrastructural pressures, and community changes can intensify precarious experiences of home, and can have implications for older people's wellbeing, as well as their ongoing opportunities to age well in place. In addition to these potential precarities, older renters appear to draw strength from their familiarity with, attachment to, and enjoyment of, place and community. These responses demonstrate older renters' capacity for resilience to challenge and adversity when ageing in rented places.
... "Defensive othering is identity work done by those seeking membership in a dominant group, or by those seeking to deflect the stigma they experience as members of a subordinate group. The process… involves accepting the legitimacy of a devalued identity imposed by the dominant group, but then saying, in effect, 'There are indeed Others to whom this applies, but it does not apply to me.'" Defensive othering has been observed among seemingly disparate populations: from homeless men at shelters trying to distance themselves from other shelter residents (Snow and Anderson 2001) to residents of trailer park communities separating themselves from their "criminal" neighbors (Kusenbach 2009). Because defensive othering does not require individuals to combat commonly accepted stereotypes, it allows stigmatized individuals an easier path forward. ...
Family scholars have documented how powerful institutions intrude upon marginalized parents. Yet, few have examined the effect that intrusion on parenting takes on a more intimate level. Guided by insights from theories of emotion management and family inequality, I compare how two religiously marginalized groups in the Bible Belt cope with a ubiquitous experience they face as parents—unwelcomed proselytizing by Christian family members. Based on participant-observation and forty in-depth interviews, I document nonbeliever and Pagan parents’ experiences with proselytizing by Christian family members to be common, intrusive, and often perceived as potentially harmful to children. Failing to enforce desired boundaries between children and proselytizers, many parents resort to constructing narratives of equality to describe a condition of inequality. They do so by claiming a “we just don’t talk about religion” arrangement. This narrative, though seemingly equitable, serves as a family myth, obscuring painful truths about power and inequality. Nonbeliever and Pagan parents differ in their reliance on this rhetoric. While nonbeliever parents cling to the family myth as an emotion management device, Pagans more readily acknowledge the “we just don’t talk about religion” strategy as more fiction than fact. I analyze how differences in social class explain nonbelievers’ and Pagans’ differing levels of commitment to this family myth. I place this phenomenon within the culture of Christian hegemony in the Bible Belt, where proselytizing is normative and prevailing norms of privatization within parenting are overridden by a culture of evangelism.
... The communities that we collectively term MHPs for the purposes of this analysis vary significantly in community age and size, in the type and quality of MH units they contain, and in the maintenance and amenities offered by the community. Despite this variation in community attributes, a common housing tenure distinguishes these communities, whether they are termed trailer parks, MH communities, or (most common in the academic literature) mobile home parks Kusenbach, 2009Kusenbach, , 2017Sullivan, 2018;Wallis, 1991). MHPs are land-lease communities, where residents rent lots from park owners (whether they then own or rent their home). ...
Manufactured housing (MH) is a central component of affordable housing in the United States. Yet the MH tenure ranges from manufactured homes on privately owned property to rental units, to owned homes placed on rented lots in mobile home parks. Despite the widespread use of MH, no current research has analyzed the high level of internal variation within MH or documented how this variation impacts housing affordability between MH tenures. Moreover, little is known about the degree of segregation of manufactured homes, which are often clustered in mobile home parks and informal subdivisions. This study represents a first-time national analysis of demographic, spatial, and affordability characteristics with regard to variation between MH tenures, using data from the American Housing Survey. By disaggregating various MH tenures and clustered community arrangements, we detail the demographic and geographic characteristics of MH households by housing tenure, analyze how housing costs differ across MH tenures, and demonstrate that MH is highly segregated from the conventional housing stock in a way that impacts housing affordability. These findings offer policy prescriptions for MH policy specifically and may contribute to broader affordable housing policy in the United States.
... See also media scholar Viallon ( 2012 ) on French RVers in Morocco. Th ere also exists a few studies about caravan parks and mobile home parks in the United States and Australia (Brooker and Joppe 2014;Caldicott and Scherrer 2013 ;Hurley 2001 ;Kusenbach 2009 ;Newton 2006 ). In Europe, the research on camping and caravans is sparse. ...
Manufactured housing communities (MHCs), commonly referred to as mobile home parks, provide an estimated 2.7 million American households with largely unsubsidized, affordable housing. Climate change threatens those who call these communities home by exacerbating known structural and social vulnerabilities associated with this housing type—including but not limited to increased risks to flooding, extreme temperatures, high winds, and wildfires. Climate change requires emergency managers to understand the diverse, integrated, and complex vulnerabilities of MHCs that affect their exposure to climate change risk. This article presents findings from an integrative literature review focused on the climate-related vulnerabilities of these communities described at three levels of scale: household, housing structure, and park community. It then draws on 15 years of engagement and action research with MHC residents and stakeholders in Vermont, including several federally declared flooding disasters, to distill key recommendations for emergency managers for assisting MHCs to prepare for and respond to emergencies. As climate change accelerates, emergency managers can increase efficacy by learning about the MHCs in their jurisdictions by leveraging the best available data to characterize risks, integrating MHCs into planning and mitigation activities, and engaging in conversations with stakeholders, including MHC residents and their trusted partners.
In this article I focus on stigma, and more specifically on territorial stigma in a Dutch suburb built in the 1970s. This publication is based on ethnographic fieldwork that lasted two and half years and which took place at the end of the 1980s. The data is reanalyzed in the light of recent developments in studies on stigma and territorial stigma, specifically how this is countered. I will use the conceptual pair—doing stigma and undoing stigma—to unpack stigma as a complex and dynamic process in which a diverse range of actors, such as inhabitants, civil servants and youth, are involved. The aim of this article is twofold: to describe and analyze the social construction of territorial stigma (doing stigma) of the neighborhood over a period of ten years and whether and how this stigma is countered (undoing stigma). This article highlights the agency of those targeted by stigma by paying attention to local narratives and using a multi-perspective ethnographic lens. The narratives show that stigma did not gain a master status because (1) the stigma producers were marginal in the social world of the targeted inhabitants and (2) it did not align with structural stigma (as in e.g., housing, health care, income, and education).
This paper focuses on how stigma is constructed and deconstructed through linguistic and aesthetic dimensions of “Rapid Build” housing in Dublin, Ireland. Through analyses of in-depth interviews and focus groups with residents and stakeholders, we explore how the nomenclature and brick-clad modular construction of the builds influenced residents’ experiences of stigma. Emphasizing the importance of the symbolic dimensions of housing materialities in mediating stigma, we argue resident experiences reflect the importance of understanding relationships between social housing construction and stigma power in three interrelated ways. First, the nomenclature and materiality of housing has a profound effect on social imaginaries of residents and their self-perceptions. Second, stigmatized groups are not devoid of agency within constructions of stigma, and are both actors in the embedding of, and resistance to, its production. Third, engaging with residents’ experiences is integral to better understanding, and resisting, the role of architecture in the “stigma machine”.
In the eyes of experts, Florida mobile home residents near the Central Gulf coast experience high levels of disaster risk and physical vulnerability, mandating special warnings and protections during hazards. However, this view is not typically shared by mobile home residents themselves who generally consider the risk of hurricanes to be low or acceptable, and who often believe their homes are safe enough, at least up to a certain point. These mundane perceptions, in combination with other factors, rather than “objective” risk and vulnerability, significantly influence how mobile home residents make evacuation decisions. Contributing to the issues of social vulnerability and marginality in disaster research, this paper offers a qualitative analysis of 103 interviews with Florida mobile home households conducted between 2008 and 2010. Besides demonstrating patterns of risk and (physical) vulnerability perception among study participants, and evaluating their impact on evacuation decisions, the analysis highlights the need to account for human agency and interpretation in scholarly disaster discourse, proposing symbolic interactionism as a relevant theoretical framework.
This case study of Nova Scotia, Canada, inspects the uptake and circulation of provincial government health messaging during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, organized around the motto “stay the blazes home.” Messaging and collective narratives are analyzed by way of Norbert Elias’s “established/outsider” dynamics, especially focusing on his concepts of “group charisma” and “praise and blame gossip.” Economic realities and identity practices helped make this motto recognizable as a proffered collective call to action around themes of self-restraint rather than neoliberal risk calculation. Outsiders in this collective identity formation are understood to bring more than disease to the province but “anomic infection” itself. Furthermore, the mechanisms of reopening the province are also found in a longstanding and related collective ethos toward hospitality. Finally, the problematic post-pandemic dynamics of established group identity formation are examined.
Manufactured homes provide a critical source of affordable housing and are the primary source of low-income homeownership in the United States. Yet manufactured housing (MH) is both socially stigmatized and spatially marginalized, which translates to significant inequalities for MH residents. The law figures centrally into how MH is perceived and how it is located, segregated, and financed differently from other housing. This review explores how the law has treated MH with legal hybridity, as personal property similar to an automobile rather than real property like other forms of housing. This core legal distinction structures an array of zoning, financing, and policy provisions that together create a gulf between the opportunities available to conventional owners and renters and those available to residents of MH. I explore existing research on the outcomes of this disparate legal treatment to offer an agenda for future research on a broader range of housing insecurities.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 18 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Based on 84 in-depth interviews and ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the impacts of gentrification and housing shortages in a rural Western U.S. community. In-migration by wealthy outsiders to the high-amenity community has driven up housing costs, privileging newcomers over longtime locals. The paper examines the impacts of social inequality on the community’s most vulnerable residents, exploring the ways in which housing insecurity is reproduced and how formal and informal infrastructures fail to provide adequate housing options for low-income residents. While income is a significant factor in determining an individual or family’s ability to access stable and affordable housing, symbolic resources, including social and moral capital are also found to play significant roles. The paper describes the mechanisms by which these resources come into play, illustrating how a lack of financial, social, and moral capital disadvantages residents in their struggles to procure housing. It finds that in a rural context where in-migration leads to high inequality, socially marginalized rural residents face a distinctive set of challenges and disadvantages that magnify housing instability and deepen exclusion and precariousness.
Research on affordable housing and disasters in the United States largely focuses on owned and rented housing, the nation's two most common housing tenures. Researchers have largely overlooked mobile home parks (MHPs), a third housing type that is home to 2.7 million households. Mobile home parks are characterized by their private ownership, stigmatization in popular culture and by local governance institutions, and unique tenure arrangement, in which residents own their individual homes but rent the land underneath. Existing studies have narrowly focused on the physical vulnerability of mobile home units and, to a lesser extent, the sociodemographic characteristics of residents. The interactions between MHPs and the environmental, social, and regulatory contexts of disasters remain largely unexplored. To holistically examine the factors that interact to produce disaster risk (exposure and vulnerability) for residents living in MHPs and assess whether parks are uniquely at risk compared to other housing types, an exploratory case study of the 2013 Colorado flood is presented. The central research question here is as follows: What characteristics structured disaster risk for MHP residents before and after the 2013 flood? Six MHPs located in 3 flood-affected communities, drawing on (1) surveys of 101 households whose homes were significantly damaged or destroyed by the 2013 floods, including 44 households living in MHPs; (2) semistructured interviews with 21 key informants who were active in the recovery; (3) observations at dozens of housing recovery-related meetings and events; and (4) analysis of recovery plans and government documents. Five mechanisms of exposure and vulnerability are revealed that together describe how MHPs and their residents were uniquely at risk to the disaster. The findings of this study may be summarized as follows: (1) MHPs were exposed to flooding at a higher rate than housing generally, (2) MHPs spatially concentrated socially vulnerable households, (3) MHPs and their residents were stigmatized by local governance before and after the disaster, (4) post-disaster regulatory exposure was a barrier to recovery, and (5) postdisaster recovery policies and plans disadvantaged MHPs and their residents. The article concludes by describing the importance of MHPs to community resilience and suggesting several avenues for future research.
The service hub concept is strongly associated with deprived areas of North American inner cities, where agglomerations of low‐cost housing and service providers form a space of survival for marginalised populations. In this paper, we contend that service hubs can take other forms, including as small‐scale sites of housing and service provision, informally networked across an urban region. We develop this argument with reference to suburban campgrounds in Auckland, New Zealand—a city experiencing a severe housing affordability crisis. Both individually and collectively, campgrounds enable vulnerable households, as well as tourists, to inhabit an increasingly exclusionary urban environment. Drawing on interviews with 24 resident campers and eight managers, we highlight the role of campgrounds in supporting residents through the provision of informal housing and on‐site services. This provision also benefits the facilities' owners and managers, by creating a year‐round rental income stream. We find that campgrounds are critically important for those whose lives are rendered precarious by the housing market.
Manufactured homes occupy a unique space in the American sociopolitical landscape. Colloquially referred to as “mobile homes” or “trailers,” manufactured housing’s ambiguous social, legal, and financial categorization produces continuous displacement pressure for millions of mobile-homeowners living in for-profit mobile home communities (MHCs). This article examines the consequences of mobile-homeowner disparagement as “trailer trash” through the case study of Isabel, a mobile-homeowner whose twofold eviction—of both owner and home—was justified based on her possession of socially undesirable (mobile) housing. Drawing on fieldwork in urban MHCs from 2011 to 2016, this article reconstructs Isabel’s story via the materiality of eviction and demonstrates a methodology for urban ethnographers who encounter displacement after the fact. Whereas corporate and municipal narratives attempt to delegitimize mobile home residents as “not quite” homeowners, reintroducing Isabel as an absent subject illustrates how potent sociocultural disdain produces, and even anticipates, the material ruination of “trailer trash.” [Housing; United States; Absence; Materiality; Ruination; Mobile Homes].
As code for spaces of mobile dwelling, the camp and its verb “camping” occupy ambivalent territory. For the well-housed, camping out can be a space and time of recreational discretion, while for those living precariously, the camp can offer temporary respite from forced and continual mobility. We argue that notions of camping are defined in part by their opposite: regular, permanent, secure and formal housing. However, not all campers have housing to “return” to. We examine these nuances and tensions with reference to campgrounds in Auckland, New Zealand, which function as sites of tourist accommodation and informal housing. Our survey of eight urban campgrounds reveals that many have become disciplined sites, recalling Agamben’s conceptualization of the camp. Drawing on the accounts of managers and campers, we examine the ambivalent geographies of campgrounds through three key narratives: residing, moving and mooring. We focus in particular on the experiences of long-term resident campers, for whom campgrounds offer a sense of home and community, while subjecting them to control and inherent insecurity. In addition, campgrounds themselves have an uncertain foothold in urban space, as they are sought-after for redevelopment. Hence, it is useful to conceptualize campground occupation in terms of mooring – a static site that may be occupied for an indeterminate length of time as part of a longer housing “voyage”. At the same time, the fact of long-term residence suggests the emergence of a form of camp space that is not counterpoised with a permanent home elsewhere.
Second homes have become an increasingly important component of both tourism and housing studies. They can directly and indirectly contribute a significant number of domestic and international visitors to destinations and may be part of longer-term retirement, lifestyle and amenity migration that can have significant economic and social effects on communities and destination development.
This volume offers an overview of different disciplinary and methodological approaches to second homes while simultaneously providing a broad geographical reach. Divided into four parts exploring governance, development, community and mobile second homes, the book provides a contemporary account of the major issues in an area of growing international interest.
This timely handbook covers a wide range of dimensions – from planning to the role of second homes in development and the management of their impact. The international and cross-disciplinary nature of the contributions will be of interest to numerous academic fields in the social sciences, as well as urban and regional planners.
PART 1 INTRODUCTION 1
1 Second home tourism: An introduction 1
Dieter Müller & C. Michael Hall
PART 2 GOVERNANCE, PLANNING AND ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY 15
2 Governing and planning for second homes 17
C. Michael Hall & Dieter Müller
3 The role of second homes in a Mediterranean coastal mass tourism destination: An evolutionary perspective 27
Maria Trinitat Rovira Soto & Salvador Anton Clavé
4 Second homes and the commons: Terms for second home leaseholds and collective action in Kvarken Archipelago, Finland 39
Kristina Svels & Ulrika Åkerlund
5 Rights to the rural: Comparison of political and property/land rights of second home owners in Canada, Finland and Poland 52
Greg Halseth, Kati Pitkänen, Czesław Adamiak and Mia Vepsäläinen
6 National Mexican tourism policy and North American second home owners in Mexico: Local tourism development and Mexican identity 64
Helene Balslev Clausen & Mario Alberto Velázquez García
7 Recreational second home governance in China: Policy implementation and structural framework 75
Yuefang Wu and Honggang Xu
8 The rise and fall of the houses of Attefall: Effects of reduced building regulation in coastal municipalities with large numbers of second homes 86
Ingrid Persson
9 Displacement and second homes: Full circle or time to move on? 98
Gijsbert Hoogendoorn and Roger Marjavaara
PART 3 DEVELOPMENT AND COMMERCIALISM 113
10 From common ground to elite and commercial landscape 115
Dieter Müller and C. Michael Hall
11 Uncertain benefits: How second home tourism impacts community economy 122
Adam Czarnecki
12 Undervaluing a sector: The enigma of micro-enterprise self-contained accommodation in Australia 134
Clare Keogh, Anton Kriz and L. Barnes
13 Australian holiday homes: Places of escape and sites of investment 152
Chris Paris
14 From socialist Yugoslavia to the European Union: Second home development in Croatia and Slovenia 167
Vuk Tvrtko Opačić and Miha Koderman
15 Stretching the boundaries: Building the Russian dacha dream 179
Olga Hannonen
16 Second home tourism in Sicily: Development, current trend and future outlook 191
Serena Volo
17 Changing social structure of second home owners in Poland 201
Czesław Adamiak
PART 4 COMMUNITY, CULTURE AND IDENTITIES 213
18 Community, culture and identities 215
Dieter Müller and C. Michael Hall
19 Second homes, their users and relations to the rural space and the resident communities in Czechia 222
Dana Fialová, Jiří Vágner and Tereza Kůsová
20 Do second home owners only play a secondary role in coastal territories? A case study in Charente-Maritime (France) 233
Caroline Blondy, Christine Plumejeaud, Luc Vacher, Didier Vye and Caroline Bontet
21 Host community perceptions of international permanent tourists: The case of Didim, Turkey 245
Imren Uysal Waller and Richard Sharpley
22 The moral dilemma of second-home owners’ position in the host community 258
Maja Farstad
23 The family and the second home: On building sandcastles, sharing places
and the passing of time 267
Annika Strandin Pers, Maja Lagerqvist and Urban Nordin
24 From makeshift to makeover: Materialising the beach shack as architectural heritage 278
Felicity Picken
PART 5 CARAVANNING AND MOBILE SECOND HOMES 289
25 Caravanning and mobile second homes 291
C. Michael Hall and Dieter Müller
26 Caravan cultures: Second homes on wheels 298
Hege Høyer Leivestad
27 Caravan people and space attachment 306
Martyn Steer-Fowler and Paul Brunt
28 Wherever I park my RV, that’s my home: Freedom camping and local community tensions in eastern Australia 319
Rod Caldicott, John M. Jenkins and Pascal Scherrer
29 Follow the sun: Retirees motorhomes’ movements, meanings and practices during the winter season in the Algarve 338
Joana Afonso Dias and Alexandre Domingues
PART 6 THE FUTURE OF SECOND HOMES 353
30 The future of second homes 355
C. Michael Hall and Dieter Müller
Index 361
Please order from your library should you wish for a copy
The practice of living in mobile homes on a permanent basis is widespread in the US. It is a 20th-century phenomenon whose roots lie in the early 1920s and the American dream of the limitless freedom to travel in your own trailer. Over time, however, trailers, which had previously been used for camping, became a more stationary makeshift solution for homelessness in major cities.
This article examines the stigma associated with needing and receiving assistance after a natural disaster. I conducted a qualitative, longitudinal study of women who survived the 1997 Grand Forks, North Dakota, flood. Based on sixty in-depth interviews and observation, the data show the ways in which the stigma affected these women when they had to accept charity, many of them for the first time in their lives. Factors that played a role include the self-sufficient culture of North Dakota, the caregiving role of giving and self-sacrifice, the experience of downward mobility and loss of middle- class status, the utilization of impression management techniques, and the ways in which the women shifted their former views of poor people and welfare recipients. I conclude with a discussion of how the examination of the stigma of charity illuminates the construction of class, gender, and race in white, middle-class consciousness.
This article examines the stigma associated with needing and receiving assistance after a natural disaster. I conducted a qualitative, longitudinal study of women who survived the 1997 Grand Forks, North Dakota, flood. Based on sixty in-depth interviews and observation, the data show the ways in which the stigma affected these women when they had to accept charity, many of them for the first time in their lives. Factors that played a role include the self-sufficient culture of North Dakota, the caregiving role of giving and self-sacrifice, the experience of downward mobility and loss of middle-class status, the utilization of impression management techniques, and the ways in which the women shifted their former views of poor people and welfare recipients. I conclude with a discussion of how the examination of the stigma of charity illuminates the construction of class, gender, and race in white, middle-class consciousness.
In recent years, the concept of boundaries has been at the center of influential research agendas in anthropology, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology. This article surveys some of these developments while describing the value added provided by the concept, particularly concerning the study of relational processes. It discusses literatures on (a) social and collective identity; (b) class, ethnic/racial, and gender/sex inequality; (c) professions, knowledge, and science; and (d) communities, national identities, and spatial boundaries. It points to similar processes at work across a range of institutions and social locations. It also suggests paths for further developments, focusing on the relationship between social and symbolic boundaries, cultural mechanisms for the production of boundaries, difference and hybridity, and cultural membership and group classifications.
This article explores how teachers perceived and interacted with white students in a predominately racial/ethnic minority school in Texas. On the basis of ethnographic data, the author found that different teachers expressed different views of the family and class backgrounds of white students in this setting, which ranged from “middle class” to “trailer trash.” These views of social class stemmed from how teachers interpreted the whiteness of students in this predominately minority context and influenced how they reacted to these students academically. An interesting finding was that the black teachers and the white teachers had different perceptions of these white students. The black teachers typically saw the white students as middle class and good students, whereas the white teachers tended to view the students as low income and unremarkable students. The results of this study clarify the processes of teachers' perceptions and white advantage.
This paper elaborates processes of identity construction and avowal among homeless street people, with two underlying and interconected objectives in mind: to advance understanding of the manner in wich individuals at the bottom of status systems attempt to generate identities that provide them with a measures of self-worth and dignity and to shed additional empirical and theoretical light on the relationships among role, identity, and self-concept. The data are from an ethnographic field study of homeless street people. "Identity talk" constitutes the primary form of "identity work" by means of which homeless street people construct and negotiate personal identities. Theree generic patterns of identity talk are alborated and illustrated: distancing, embracement, and fictive storytelling. Each form contains several subtypes that vary in usage according to the length of time one has spent on the streets. The paper concludes by discussing the theoretical implications of the findings and suggesting a number ...
The central concern of this article is the differences in participation patterns between mobile-home and single-family dwellers residing in contiguous suburban areas. Based on a random sample of 60 mobile-home and 55 single-family dwellers, our findings indicate that when sociodemographic characteristics are controlled, mobile-home residents participate more in some forms of informal activities and less in voluntary associations. Type of residence appears to have a greater impact upon associational participation than do sociodemographic characteristics, indicating the need to consider this variable when examining participation patterns.
While researchers have recognized the effects of the "new immigration' on metropolitan centers, few authors have explored its impact on rural communities. Trailer courts constitute one locale for interethnic relations in a setting of rural industry and rapid community change. This study analyzes neighboring behavior between trailer court residents of different racial and ethnic groups in Garden City, Kansas. It raises issues of accommodation and accord between established residents and newcomers, particularly Anglos and Southeast Asian refugees. Two basic patterns of behavior emerged during research, self-segregation and accommodation or friendly interaction. The majority of Laotians and Vietnamese relied heavily on relatives and friends of the same ethnic group. Most had little or no contact with Anglo or Hispanic neighbors, although exceptions to this pattern occurred. Barriers to interaction as well as factors promoting accommodation or collective action are explored. Relations between neighbors are shaped not only by culture and personal attitudes, but by conditions created by the wider society. -Author
Multiculturalism has emerged as both a fact of the modern workplace and an important value reflecting needed tolerance in a diverse global society. Researchers have measured the emergence of this new value with "patterned tolerance" and cultural omnivorous-ness among the elite. Other research has focused on the possibility of racism implied in the musical genres rejected by this elite. The cultural omnivorous-ness also reflects the growth of a cosmopolitan elite tied neither to local places nor to local people. Finally, writers about "white trash" discuss the stereotypes and attitudes associated with poor whites. This paper examines these elements to find that poor whites are demonized both for what they represent as stereotypically racist and closed minded, and for what they are as local people left out of the global cosmopolitan culture, and against which that culture is defined.
"Even though we lived a few blocks away in our neighborhood or sat a seat or two away in elementary school, a vast chasm of class and racial difference separated us from them."-From the Introduction. What is it like to be white, poor, and socially marginalized while, at the same time, surrounded by the glowing assumption of racial privilege? Kirby Moss, an African American anthropologist and journalist, goes back to his hometown in the Midwest to examine ironies of social class in the lives of poor whites. He purposely moves beyond the most stereotypical image of white poverty in the U.S.-rural Appalachian culture-to illustrate how poor whites carve out their existence within more complex cultural and social meanings of whiteness. Moss interacts with people from a variety of backgrounds over the course of his fieldwork, ranging from high school students to housewives. His research simultaneously reveals fundamental fault lines of American culture and the limits of prevailing conceptions of social order and establishes a basis for reconceptualizing the categories of color and class. Ultimately Moss seeks to write an ethnography not only of whiteness but of blackness as well. For in struggling with the elusive question of class difference in U.S. society, Moss finds that he must also deal with the paradoxical nature of his own fragile and contested position as an unassumed privileged black man suspended in the midst of assumed white privilege. Copyright
Wacquant’s essay is less a review of three ethnographies about the inner city than a throwback to the sectarian days when leftists who failed to toe the Party line were deemed objective enemies of the working class. In this instance, we are told that research by Duneier (1999), Anderson (1999), and Newman is exhibit A for the charge “that U.S. sociology is now tied and party to ...t heneoliberal state and its ‘carceral-assistential complex’ for the punitive management of the poor” (p. 1471). The three of us do not hew to Wacquant’s politics, so we are indicted, along with the rest of American sociology, for a lockdown in the ghetto and the repression of the poor. Wacquant’s “review” is built upon a relentless distortion of the research and writing in these three books. Repeatedly, Wacquant tells AJS readers that an argument presented in them rests upon implausible assumptions when it does nothing of the kind. The position he puts in the writer’s mouth is consistently the opposite of what appears on the page. Having created a series of straw men, Wacquant then razes them, often by parroting the arguments made by the authors as if they were his own. He buttresses his critique of these books using data provided in them, crediting the evidence itself, while ignoring the fact that Anderson, Duneier, and Newman collected and carefully presented that evidence on purpose. He claims that our observations undermine the core analyses in these books, when they simply highlight the absurdity of the caricatures he has created. In the end, there is almost no link between these three books and what Wacquant makes of them. Long before its publication in AJS, Wacquant has been busy distributing his attack around the globe and across the profession. Inevitably many people who have received copies from Wacquant will not see this rebuttal, but we hope many others do. It is important for interested readers to form their own judgment, not only of the books discussed here, but
The study of inequality has been largely defined as the study of its measurable extent, degree, and consequences. It is no
less important, however, to understand the interactive processes through which inequalities are created and reproduced in
concrete settings. The qualitative research that bears on understanding these processes has not yet been consolidated, and
thus its theoretical value remains unrealized. In this article we inductively derive from the literature a sensitizing theory
of the generic processes through which inequality is reproduced. The major processes that we identify are othering, subordinate
adaptation, boundary maintenance, and emotion management. We argue that conceiving the reproduction of inequality in terms
of these generic processes can resolve theoretical problems concerning the connection between local action and extralocal
inequalities, and concerning the nature of inequality itself.
List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Names and Transcriptions xiii Abbreviations xv Introduction 3 Detroit 9 Three Neighborhoods 11 The Localness of Race 13 White People or Whiteness? 16 Structure of the Book 19 1. History of the 'Hood 24 "Disgrace to the Race" 26 The Color Line 37 Riots and Race 50 Franklin School 69 2. "A Hundred Shades of White" 83 "Hillbillies" 88 "That White and Black Shit" 107 The Wicker Chair and the Baseball Game 128 3. Eluding the R-Word 145 The "Fact" of Whiteness 151 Encounters 158 "Gentrifier" 168 "History" 191 4. Between "All Black" and "All White" 209 Statements 214 "White Enclave" 224 "Racist" 245 Curriculum 263 Conclusion 278 Notes 28S Index 347
The central concern of this article is the differences in participation patterns between mobile-home and single-family dwellers
residing in contiguous suburban areas. Based on a random sample of 60 mobile-home and 55 single-family dwellers, our findings indicate that when sociodemographic characteristics are controlled, mobile-home residents
participate more in some forms of informal activities and less in voluntary associations. Type of residence appears to have
a greater impact upon associational participation than do sociodemographic characteristics, indicating the need to consider
this variable when examining participation patterns.
Conditions affecting the organization of a community are more apparent when planning is involved in the creation of that community. A case in point is the retirement community designed for an age homogenous population by real estate developers. Three structural conditions resulting from planning and marketing are isolated. These are: (1) land tenure, (2) involvement of the entrepreneurs in community life, and (3) the financial solvency of the development. The effect of the differences in these structural conditions upon the political administration and the social organization of the community is examined in two age graded mobile home estates in Arizona.
Poor people have long been stigmatized and blaned for their situation. According to theory about stigma and about inequality-legitimating ideologies, homeless people should be stigmatized even more severely than the "generic poor". Recent research suggests that the opposite may be true, but the data used in comparing attitudes toward homeless and other poor people have not been strictly comparable. Thus the conclusions that can be drawn are limited. Using a vignette experiment designed to directly compare attitudes toward a homeless and a domiciled poor man and to compare the effects of being labeled homeless with those of being labeled mentally ill, we find that (1) the homeless man is blamed no less than the domiciled man and generally is stigmatized more severely; (2) the strength of the stigma attached to the "homelessness" label equals that for mental hospitalization; and (3) the stigmas of homelessness and mental hospitalization are independent of one another. Thus, in addition to the hardships of the homeless condition itself, homeless people suffer stigmatization by their fellow citizens. The results also suggest that the robust tendency to blame the disadvantaged for their predicament holds true for modern homelessness as well.
Professionals are not supposed to feel desire or disgust for their clients, and they presumably begin to learn " affective neutrality" in professional school. Medical students learn to manage the inappropriate feelings they have in situations of clinical contact with the human body, but two years of participant observation revealed that the subject of "emotion management" is taboo. Yet the culture of medicine that informs teaching also includes a hidden curriculum of unspoken rules and resources for dealing with unwanted emotions. Students draw on aspects of their training to manage their emotions. Their emotion management strategies include transforming the patient or the procedure into an analytic object or event, accentuating the comfortable felings that come from learning and practicing "real medicine," empathizing with patients or blaming them, joking, and avoiding sensitive contact. By relying upon these strategies, students reproduce the perspective of modern Western medicine and the kind of doctor-patient relationship it implies.
Chicago's Southwest Side is one of the last remaining footholds for the city's white working class, a little-studied and little-understood segment of the American population. This book paints a nuanced and complex portrait of the firefighters, police officers, stay-at-home mothers, and office workers living in the stable working-class community known as Beltway. Building on the classic Chicago School of urban studies and incorporating new perspectives from cultural geography and sociology, Maria Kefalas considers the significance of home, community, and nation for Beltway residents.
It is clear from the outset that Wacquant has a particular "theoretical" ax to grind—one with an ideological blade—and that in doing so he seriously misreads Code of the Street, distorting its findings to fit his polemical purposes. At best, he seriously misunderstands my work; at worst, he willfully misrepresents it in his review. Regardless, Wacquant fails to engage the main thrust of the book: As a result of the breakdown or weaknesses of civil law in the most distressed inner-city communities, a survival strategy with implications for local public order has emerged—a "code of the street" that relies on "street justice," whose transactions in- volve a currency of reputation, respect, retribution, and retaliation. Be- cause civil law has been so compromised and eroded locally, people often rely on themselves and their reputations for protection, a situation that leads to high rates of urban violence. A legacy of institutionalized racism, joblessness, and alienation suffuses distressed inner-city neighborhoods and exacerbates these conditions. In some of Philadelphia's most distressed ghetto areas, the community divides itself into two opposing status groups—"decent" and "street" —each with its own value orientation. "Decency" is most often associated with the wider, conventional society, whereas "street"—or its own de- scriptive analogue, "ghetto"—is often used as an epithet (especially by those identifying themselves as decent) and strongly associated with the most troublesome aspects of ghetto life. In the name of "keeping it real,"
Using data collected during a four-year ethnographic study, this article examines the stigma management strategies of kids who are homeless in the San Francisco Bay area. We focus specifically on strategies of inclusion and exclusion. Strategies of inclusion are attempts by homeless kids to establish harmonious relationships with both peers and strangers. The most common are forging friendships, passing, and covering. Strategies of exclusion are aggressive and nonconciliatory attempts to gain social acceptance. They include verbal denigration and physical and sexual posturing. Some of these strategies successfully protect the kids' sense of self, while other strategies had the unintended effect of reinforcing their spoiled identities. We argue that these stigma management strategies are both informed by and interpreted through their disadvantaged social structural location.
Modeling is a challenging occupation because employment is irregular, the physical demands are great, and competition is fierce. Success as a model requires the careful management of bodily capital and the performance of emotional labor. Drawing on participant observations and interviews with models in the Atlanta fashion industry, the authors examine how they do the former and why they do the latter. They manage their bodily capital by subjecting themselves to intense self-regulation. Models perform emotional labor to sell themselves to clients and agents, to create illusions for observers and the camera, and to find dignity in a job that is often degrading and humiliating.
This ethnographic study of service interactions in Korean immigrant women–owned nailsalons in New York City introduces the concept “body labor” to designate a type of gendered work that involves the management of emotions in body-related service provision. The author explores variation in the performance of body labor caused by the intersection of the gendered processes of beauty service work with the racialized and class-specific service expectations of diverse customers. The study examines three distinct patterns of service provision that are shaped by racial and class inequalities between women: (1) high-service body labor, (2) expressive body labor, and (3) routinized body labor. These patterns demonstrate that a caring, attentive style of emotional display is dominant in workplaces governed by white, middle-class “feeling rules” but that different racial and class locations call forth other forms of gendered emotionalmanagement that focus on displaying respect, reciprocity, fairness, competence, and efficiency.
Cet ensemble d'articles fait part de recherches ethnographiques concernant l'etat actuel des comportements sociaux des quartiers pauvres des Etats-Unis. Les AA. debattent et critiquent vivement le point de vue de L. Wacquant et defendent l'objectivite et la validite de leurs recherches respectives
The trailer community under study, composed exclusive of retired and quasi-retired persons, manifests a well-developed and diversified program of activities. A large majority prefer to live in a community composed of retired persons because of advantages such as equal status, social activities, and association. Even with respect to mobile-home living itself, they see sociability as the chief advantage.
Much literature on contemporary U.S. racial relations tends to view black middle-class life as substantially free of traditional discrimination. Drawing primarily on 37 in-depth interviews with black middle-class respondents in several cities, I analyze public accommodations and other public-place discrimination. I focus on three aspects: (1) the sites of discrimination, (2) the character of discriminatory actions; and (3) the range of coping responses by blacks to discrimination. Documenting substantial barriers facing middle-class black Americans today, I suggest the importance of the individual's and the group's accumulated discriminatory experiences for understanding the character and impact of modern racial discrimination.
This study provides an ethnographic account of a mobile home park with specific attention upon the lives of adolescents living in the park and attending a local suburban high school. A symbolic interactionist perspective is utilized. Historical factors leading to the mobile home experience, as well as present policies at the local, state, and federal levels, perpetuate the outsider status of the mobile home park dweller. The mobile home unit and the mobile home park defy conventional categories and are thus “polluted”; an extension of this attitude comes to attach to the consumer of the mobile home experience as likewise being polluted or undesirable. Furthermore, the park dweller appears in the eyes of the American “mainstreamer” to fail to uphold an important symbolic value: the sacred site-built house. Park students are shunned in the school and, when at home, tolerate an adversary relationship with park management. An aura of fear in the park is reflected in the passivity on the part of the tenants. Most importantly, his lack of belonging is an obstacle to the self-image of the park adolescent. He is considered profane in one-to-one relations and becomes part of a new minority group (the mobile home park dweller) in terms of other group relations.
The sociology of emotions has concentrated on individuals' socially guided management of their own emotions to the neglect of interpersonal processes of emotion management. This article suggests that the interpersonal management of emotions is socially ubiquitous and significant, and does so with the example of wheelchair users' distinctive public experiences. We draw on our own participant observation while using wheelchairs in public, on conversational interviews with wheelchair users, and on published autobiographical accounts. Our specific focus is the emotional challenges that wheelchair users face when in public and their consequent management of both their own and other's emotions. We conclude that wheelchair users pay for even limited public acceptance with considerable emotion work and micropolitical sacrifices. We also conclude that their experiences demonstrate the more generally emotional character of contemporary public life and the often interpersonal character of emotion management.
This paper draws on participant observation in a male- dominated blue-collar job to understand how the con- Irene' Padavic* cepts of masculinity and femininity are re-created Florida State University through coworker interactions on the shopfloor and the effect of this on women. Men typecast women in these jobs as either feminine or unfeminine and treated them differently, but in both cases, women's presence was useful for defining-and in the case of sex-role ap- propriate women-enforcing masculinity. Such treat- ment isolated women from the on-going work culture and constrained them to certain behaviors. The idea that gender, rather than being a property of individuals, is created in the course of social interaction is relatively new in sociology (Goffman 1 977; Kessler, and McKenna 1 978; Leidner 1 99 1 ; West and Zimmerman 1987). West and Zimmerman (1 987) argued that gender is continually constructed in everyday life, a process they describe as "doing gender." In what is essentially a process of reification and legitimation of gender differences, "participants in interaction organize their.. .activities to reflect and express gender, and they are disposed to perceive the behavior of others in a similar light" (West and Zimmerman 1987: 127). Gender con- struction is a process negotiated among participants, but symmetry be- tween the negotiators is often lacking. Male and female participants negotiate from the basis of different resources stemming from historical contexts and organizational structures (Hall 1987), and do not necessarily contribute equally to the definition of gender that prevails in a situation (Margolis 1985; Warren 1 988). Gender is enacted in institutions, one of the most important of which