Othering the ‘bag-lady’: Examining stereotypes of vulnerable and homeless women in popular culture

To protect their membership rights to social resources, services and benefits, Australian citizens constantly renegotiate and reconceptualize sociocultural and political parameters around who belongs as a rights-worthy member of their society. Popular culture has the potential to shape the social, cultural and political attitudes that underpin these considerations. Popular culture mediums such as film and television are visual and narrative devices that posit binaries such as good/bad, men/women, citizen/non-citizen and so on. In particular, the binary of good/bad acts as a discourse through which audiences develop an understanding of what actions and behaviours are considered socially and culturally acceptable, and what actions and behaviours are not. This article seeks to broaden understandings of popular culture’s potential to influence how a society construes its social strictures around who is a member of the hegemonic group and who is the ‘other’. It examines depictions of poor, vulnerable and homeless women characters in film that frame them as the monstrous ‘other’ and argues that these representations negatively impact the visibility of real women who are poor, vulnerable and homeless in Australia, within spaces of sociopolitical discourse. The ongoing repercussions of which, it is contended, are that the needs of this cohort are less visible to the governments and policymakers who are tasked with protecting them.