Youth Homelessness and Survival Sex

Juliet Watson is a lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, at RMIT University, Australia.

• AcknowledgmentsChapter 1. Introduction: youth homelessness, gender, and the significance of survival sexChapter 2. Young homeless women and the neoliberal subjectChapter 3. Social capital, performativity, and gendered subjectivities in the homeless sphereChapter 4. Survival sex, stigma, and managing material conditionsChapter 5. Survival sex and gender-based violenceChapter 6. Intimate relationships, social exclusion, and belongingChapter 7. Constructing authentic selvesChapter 8. Conclusion: diversifying homelessnessAppendix: more storiesIndex

Young women’s homelessness is often hidden from view – not showing up in official statistics nor in popular representations of ‘rough sleepers’. In this important and original new study, Juliet Watson vividly illuminates young women’s experiences. In doing so she makes us question our understandings of both homelessness and of transactional sex, opening up nuanced ways of thinking about the intimate relationships women build in order to survive.Rosalind Gill, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, City University of London, UKIn Youth Homelessness and Survival Sex, Juliet Watson offers a compelling and confronting account of how young women face, understand, and manage the risks they face in homelessness. Through exceptional empirical research, deep theoretical expertise, and sensitive engagement with experiences of poverty, gendered violence, and social exclusion, Watson illuminates how these young women make strategic use of heteronormative femininity in their search for security, survival, and resources. This is an important and valuable book that reinforces the critical importance of gender analysis of precarious lives. JaneMaree Maher, Director, Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Monash University, AustraliaIn this fascinating and disturbing book, Juliet Watson provides us with a scholarly yet unflinching examination of the reality of survival sex for young homeless women. She shines much needed light on a topic that is too often referred to in passing, and seldom given the in-depth consideration it deserves.Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Professor of Housing and Social Policy in the Institute for Social Policy, Housing, Environment and Real Estate (I-SPHERE), Heriot-Watt University, UK