‘I am lord, i am local’: Migrant masculinity, sex and making yourself at home

This chapter explores the experiences of ‘home’ and being ʼnot-at-home’ for Canadian-born, young men of colour who have experienced homelessness in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Research on lived experiences of homelessness can illustrate the relationships between senses of belonging, feelings of ‘home’, and different spaces and places. The constant search for a place to sleep becomes all-consuming, inhibiting the house hopper from looking for or finding work. The socio-spatial relationship between particular people and place creates the affective and emotional ties between young men and their neighbourhoods. An effective means of white subjugation of black people globally has been the perpetual construction of economic and social structures that deprive many folks of the means to make home place. The development of home place is explicitly political, with hooks suggesting it is both a place of ‘radical politics’ and ‘a site of resistance and liberation struggle’ in contrast to the apolitical idealisation assumed in normative meanings of home.