(Re-)framing the Homeless Experience

Exploring Homeless Lives and Identities on TikTok and YouTube

Abstract

Despite the ongoing prevalence of homelessness throughout the world, the experience remains highly stigmatized. Presentations of homelessness in traditional media tend to render subjects faceless, nameless, static, and passive, dehumanizing them in the process. In response to this presentation, some homeless individuals are using social media to share their lives and experiences. This _Article examines the social media posts of two young homeless women. It explores their experience and presentation of homelessness in their daily videos on TikTok and YouTube. Acting as a confessional and relational diary online, posting on social media allows these women to challenge existing perceptions and narratives about homelessness by showing their authentic day-to-day experience of it. By sharing their lives online, these women offer their viewers a deeply intimate, vulnerable, and relational window into the experience of homelessness, which challenges the faceless, nameless and largely invisible experience depicted in traditional media. They achieve this by sharing their routines of self-care and care for others; by participating in public space and community; and by performing gratitude, selflessness, hard work, and humility. Sharing their experience of homelessness on social media enables these women to craft a self-presentation, framing themselves as more-than-homeless.