Identity, Agency, and Complexity

This chapter focuses on the importance of self-representation and considers how autobiographical performance facilitates access to unique narratives and performing personas that reveal complicated, multi-faceted, and disparate experiences of homelessness. It examines performances created and performed by David Tovey, Nell Hardy, and gobscure and explores their different staging and performance strategies. Rejecting the homogenising discourses and representations that circulate around homelessness, conceptually, the chapter draws on intersectional theory to examine how these artists contest reductive understandings by locating their experience as one component of complicated life trajectories and exposing the multiple axes of their identities that have intersected with homelessness in complex and nuanced ways. Recognising how the trauma and multiple legacies of their homeless experience continue to mark their subjectivities, the chapter considers how their performances relate to thorny questions around performances of memory, authenticity, emotion, and trauma. The chapter argues that these three artists write and perform from a position of personal experience, but that this experience is put to work to critique failing social systems and persistent structural inequalities that have defined and policed their identities.