Abstract
Healing Home: Health & Homelessness in the Life Stories of Young Women adeptly weaves storytelling and science to engage readers in the narratives of eight young women in exceptionally unstable circumstances. In a time dominated by neoliberal ideology, narratives often serve to vilify or victimize homeless people, silencing marginalized voices. Oliver and the women sharing their stories breathe life into the complexity and contradictions of lived experience. Oliver situates her qualitative research in current scholarship and the Ontario policy context, identifying gaps in health and social welfare services provision. Healing Home uses a feminist lens to examine the intersections of structural factors while affirming individual agency, resistance, and resilience in these young women’s lives.
A major contribution is Oliver’s skillful application of theory to her analysis of personal narrative and homelessness research. She builds a compelling argument for the study’s methodological choices in foregrounding narratives of young women in their own words and the need for better understanding their experiences particularly consequences to their health. These opening chapters provide a succinct overview of feminist theory touching on the essential theoretical tenets and important considerations of power, subjectivity, and resistance. The strength of her argument for narrative theory teaches readers about the telling of their own narratives and disallows objectification of the young women’s life stories.
From this theoretical grounding, Oliver next presents the participants’ narratives without conceptual analysis. Her strong editorial choices create an absorbing version of the young women’s stories—with an emphasis on their own words, holding true to their voice and definitions however contradictory. This format allows the narratives to stay undigested through the lens of social policy analysis and evaluation, reflecting Oliver’s commitment to antioppressive methodologies. These portraits demonstrate commonality with many coming of age stories and the distinct realities their housing circumstances present.
The subsequent chapters unpack the complex intersecting concepts. Despite Canada’s stated commitment to equal access to health care, this discussion highlights the results of neoliberal policy on differential access to health care and health of people as a function of their access to wealth and power. This specific population—“not quite child, not quite adult”—faces particular challenges to accessing health and social welfare services for a number of reasons. Oliver presents a vast array of scholarship on concepts ranging from gender performance to relationships to citizenship, demonstrating their influence on access and use of services.
Given these realities, Oliver takes health care providers to task and prescribes solutions to remedy access to health care. She calls on providers to acknowledge and respond appropriately to homeless women by providing “… services that treat women holistically, not only as receptacles of sexually transmitted infections or bearers of children, but also as sexual beings with unique desires and concerns” (p. 137). Providers must also understand the importance of the person asking for help and their inclusion in decision making, while appreciating the vulnerability inherent in being there in the first place. Additionally, specific recommendations of female-only services, walk-in, mobile units, and colocation of services are offered. Solutions focus on improving access to health care for homeless young women and do not address housing status as a moderator of health care access and use. Healing Homes would be an excellent addition to social science courses focusing on experiences of homelessness, meta-level theory application, or philosophical arguments for qualitative and participatory research.