The silence of the homeless. Science of marginality and discursive segregation of the homeless

The paper examines the forms of cognitive categorization by which social professionals refer to homeless people. To this aim, research material collected during an ethnographic inquiry in Genoa on social services providing support for homeless persons has been taken into account and analyzed. Third sector local workers' definitions on homelessness are considered along with the European Typology of Homelessness and Housing Exclusion (ETHOS) - a reference classification of homeless condition at EU level - in order to understand how they link each other and whether they are produced by the same linguistic mechanism. The analysis also encompasses the representation of homeless people that can be found in the most important Italian street magazine, Scarp de’tenis [Tennis Shoe], expressing the catholic standpoint on poverty and homelessness. Lastly, for the same reason, one has also considered the way of telling the life of a homeless couple in La Bocca del Lupo [The Wolf’s Mouth], an internationally award-winning documentary, that has been produced and shot in Genoa. The aim is to show how professional common sense, underpinned by scientific one, produces a paradoxical discourse on homelessness. Homeless people are deemed to be lacking in moral, cognitive and linguistic skills, but to be re-educated to the social standards, they must demonstrate the abilities they are supposed not to possess. All the texts considered, from the social workers’ interviews to the documentary, could be thought as the discursive effects of such a paradox, that they seek to work out unsuccessfully. What they really achieve is to confine even further homeless people in the cage of their inabilities, making impossible to hear their discourse and to understand their way of living.