Citizens Without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion. By Leonard C. Feldman. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. 224p. $35.00.

American attitudes toward the homeless tend to shift back and forth between compassion and compassion fatigue, between supporting policies to provide resources to the homeless and supporting punitive policies to exclude them from public spaces. This ambivalence is often explained by invoking “economic functionality” and/or “a cultural logic” (p. 5), but neither of these approaches is adequate. Rather, Leonard Feldman argues, we should see the problem of homelessness as a “problem of sovereign state power” (p. 18). Citizenship, and political life generally, are defined in opposition to “bare life,” or “mere physical existence”: Citizenship as full membership is constituted as the exclusion of bare life” (p. 18). Feldman continues, “Home-dwelling citizen and homeless bare life are political statuses, not social statuses or elements of personal identity” (p. 20), and so an adequate response to homelessness must also be political. He calls for a move toward a “pluralized citizenship” (p. 21), in which we deconstruct “the rigid oppositions between … bare life and citizenship.” Acknowledging a plurality of ways of dwelling, we can then recognize “that those displaced from ‘house’ and ‘home’ must dwell … and that public policy should be oriented toward enabling dwelling, not criminalizing it or reducing it to the stripped down client relationship of the shelter” (p. 147). More specifically, rather than repressing the habitats and networks that the homeless have themselves created, we should recognize these communities, including, in particular, “politicized homeless encampments” (p. 107) as participants in the political processes through which we formulate policy.