Rural Sociology

ABSTRACT

To explain the stigma around homelessness, scholars often focus on its physically visible forms in urban centers. However, in rural contexts, people experiencing homelessness are often unseen: they are doubling up with friends and family, living in vehicles or abandoned buildings, and camping in state parks. As such, rural homelessness is often referred to as “hidden.” This hiddenness makes theories built on physical visibility partial and unable to account for the stigma around homelessness in rural contexts. Based on 6 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 37 in-depth interviews in five rural counties in Wisconsin, this paper finds that the stigmatization of homelessness in rural areas hinges on its social hypervisibility. The scarcity of social service infrastructure forces people experiencing homelessness to depend on their social ties for support, making their struggles known to others, even when they are not directly observed. Social hypervisibility contributes to stigma by hindering opportunities to exit homelessness, including discouraging individuals from seeking help. These findings demonstrate that current policies not only fail to support people experiencing homelessness in rural areas but also exacerbate stigma, thereby intensifying the marginalization of people in poverty.