Talking Back to Stigmatized Identities

The article is based on interviews with 17 shelter residents. The culturally dominant way of categorizing both shelters and their residents is negative, producing stigmatized identities. The questions asked are: do the shelter residents make references to the stigmatized identities and, how do they talk back to these identities? The residents often refer to their `given' identities, but instead of taking them for granted, adopt a critical position towards them. The talking back consists in a negotiation in which one's own identity is compared with the identities of either the shelter or the coresidents. The interviewees stress, on the one hand, the ordinary quality of the shelter and its residents or their own ordinariness. On the other hand, it is also possible to locate in the residents' talking back an identity politics, which attempts to replace the dominant categorizations with different ways of representing the shelter and its residents, ways which are conscious of diversity.