Youth Homelessness and Survival Sex

This book explores young women’s experiences of homelessness through the context of their intimate relationships. It draws attention to, and broadens understandings of, survival sex, a practice usually understood to be the transaction of sex for material support. Through a critical analysis of young homeless women’s personal narratives, this monograph demonstrates that they undertake intimate relationships for a variety of reasons of which seeking material support is only one aspect. Watson locates young women’s experiences of homelessness and survival sex within the wider context of inequality in post-industrial capitalist societies. By engaging with contemporary theory and debates about social discourses, this monograph identifies the complex ways in which young women negotiate the material and subjective challenges that homelessness brings; this examination of survival sex provides greater knowledge of young women’s negotiation of structural disadvantage. This book takes gender out of the abstract world and makes visible how it interacts with discourses and produces practices that shape subjectivities.