Whose Tale Gets Told? The Whitewashing of Homelessness and Mobility

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Pamela Robertson Wojcik is Professor and Chair of the Department of Film, TV, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. Her work on urban space in cinema includes The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (Duke UP, 2010) and Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction(Rutgers UP, 2016).

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6December 7, 2021<December 9, 2021

Whose Tale Gets Told? The Whitewashing of Homelessness and Mobility

Arguing that mobility has to be understood intersectionally, Pamela Robertson Wojcik shows how Hollywood genres about tramps, hitchhikers, and "street people" overwhelmingly privilege white characters even as film and television have started to pay more attention to female homelessness.

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6November 12, 2021<November 14, 2021

Is the Home Ever Not Precarious? The Long Arc of Genres of Precarity

Tracing the historical roots of the current cinema of precarity via the image of the tramp, Pamela Robertson Wojcik argues that narratives about the unhomed have always been central to American film.