The goal is to generate 2 pages of analysis (so that your descriptive + analytical essay is a total of 4 pages).

The once-bustling Main Street in downtown Memphis is left desolate under shelter-in-place orders during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Intersecting with the city’s most popular blues destination, Beale Street, the vacant streets are a sharp contrast to the normal rhythms of the area. Main Street is also a commonplace for the public congregation of tourists and locals, including members of the homeless community. The LUX was one of several hotels on the street.

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Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 36, Issue 2, pp. 379–400, ISSN 1058-7187, online 1548-7458. © 2020 American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/var.12216.

Living at the LUX: Homelessness and Improvisational Waiting under COVID-19

LINDSEY RAISA FELDMAN & MICHAEL VICENTE PÉREZ

ABSTRACT This photo-essay engages with the central theme of wait- ing under COVID-19 among a group of homeless women at the LUX hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. The images and text capture the structural shelter-in-place conditions and how the women worked within those regulations to construct a new relationship to time and the self. The images in this essay reflect what we call improvisational waiting, a con- cept that emphasizes the creative ways women at the LUX turned experiences of waiting into novel rhythms of life that held the promise of a better future.

KEYWORDS waiting, agency, homelessness, shelter, COVID-19

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Introduction

COVID-19 has brought more to the world than illness and death. Moving swiftly across borders by human carriers, SARS-CoV-2, the airborne virus that causes COVID-19, has simultaneously induced new forms of isolation while exacer- bating existing social and economic inequalities. But as indi- viduals around the world struggle differently against the threat of infection, one experience unites us all: the act of waiting. Watching the news, we wait for case numbers to drop. Hoping for conditions that will allow safe return to work, we wait for the economy to improve. Infected, we wait for symptoms to diminish. Wherever the virus and disease are found, we wait under the shadow of uncertainty.

Although waiting has taken a particular form under the COVID-19 global pandemic, with many government officials heeding the advice of medical experts and ordering people to “shelter in place,” waiting is diverse in both meaning and experience. Here, we explore one unique set of experiences of waiting during the global pandemic. We present images of a group of homeless women in Memphis, Tennessee, who used waiting in temporary shelter to improvise new daily rhythms that, in some cases, prepared them for the possibility of a more hopeful future. We show both the structures of life under shel- ter-in-place conditions and how it allowed for improvised so- cial and bodily practices that turned waiting into projects of transformation and well-being (Jackson 2005). Through this visual and textual exploration, we contribute to the scholarship on waiting that highlights the unique forms of agency that can occur within restrictive structures (Brun 2015; El-Shaarawi 2015; Hage 2009; Janeja and Bandak 2018; Jeffrey 2010; Kwon 2015). This visual essay aims to add new perspectives on the creative approaches people can take to conditions of waiting not of their own making.

Understanding the LUX

In the early days of the pandemic, city leaders had to act quickly and without precedent to address the directive for all Memphians to shelter in place. At the same time, overnight shelters closed throughout the city due to fear of viral spread as COVID-19 cases grew. This highlighted the persistent, structural issue of housing insecurity in Memphis as a large swath of individuals who needed immediate help to move into appropriate shelter was suddenly visible. The LUX hotel was one example of this ad hoc approach to public health and safety. It was one of several hotels that partnered with

LINDSEY RAISA FELDMAN Lindsey Raisa Feldman is assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Memphis. Her research examines incarcera- tion, identity, and masculinity. She is currently working on a portrait photography project with incarcerated men in Memphis.

MICHAEL VICENTE PÉREZ Michael Vicente Pérez is assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Memphis. His research has examined long-term displacement and statelessness among Palestinians in Jordan. Dr. Pérez is currently working on questions of authority and community among Muslims in Chile.

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a local nonprofit and city government to provide temporary residences for the homeless population.1 With the transfor- mation of hotels into shelters, houseless individuals and fami- lies throughout the city made their way into this unfamiliar context of sheltering in place. An upscale boutique hotel that just weeks before was bustling with tourist traffic, the LUX offered one of its f loors to a subset of this larger population: a group of about twenty-five currently homeless women in need of temporary residence.

We came to the LUX on the invitation of a nonprofit after this newly configured hotel/shelter had been in operation for three weeks. Because this nonprofit had never before run an overnight shelter, they wanted local anthropologists to help understand the backgrounds of new residents and asked us to interview the women. Accepting the agency’s request, we obtained IRB approval within two weeks. While the IRB pro- cess was swift—thanks to the university’s rapid response and relatively straightforward research partner approval process— conducting interviews and engaging in participant observation within the confines of a hotel under shelter-in-place conditions presented challenges to our fieldwork practice and praxis. For example, we wore face masks during all research encounters and, to the best of our abilities, remained socially distant from the women. Although the masks and distance helped protect us all from potential exposure to the virus, they also reinforced the sense of risk we brought to the research context and placed a physical limit on a fieldwork cornerstone: building rapport. During our month at the hotel, we relied on our ability to over- come the impact that masks and distance had on the embodied intimacy of the ethnographic encounter.

Another challenge concerned the role and reception of the camera in this fieldwork context. The LUX was a brack- eted space both for the women and for us as researchers. Establishing our presence in the few areas of the LUX available for communal interactions required careful attention to the line between fitting in the space and becoming an imposition. We presented the camera as a tool for capturing daily life in the shelter, while also providing several options for consenting to participate in the project that allowed the women to choose the extent to which they were photographed. These included con- senting to either interviews only with no photographs, taking photographs with no faces, or taking identifiable images. We continually checked in with our participants as interviews pro- gressed about these consent categories. We also showed them their images during the interview period by placing the camera with the images displayed on a nearby surface, and the women then reviewed it. In this way, we offered a chance to share their

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assessment of our ethnographic eye. This allowed for a sense of rapport building between ethnographer and research par- ticipant, and it also created a sort of co-constitutive process of image making in the field. Whether establishing rapport with masks or working with cameras in a limited space, fieldwork under shelter-in-place conditions was an inherently improvisa- tory act. It required the f lexibility and adaptability that exist in nearly all anthropological research but under novel conditions.

Through this improvisational research, life at the hotel revealed much more than stories of past hardships. For some of the women whom we met, staying at the LUX was conceptu- alized as just another stop on a longer journey. But for several others, staying at the LUX was an unexpectedly emergent and, in some instances, transformative experience. As we recorded these experiences, we began to understand how new forms of self and future-making were taking place within this unprec- edented context of the LUX-as-shelter and of shelter itself. It was from this situation that we began to question what waiting really meant—or could come to mean—in improvisational and rare circumstances such as these.

Sheltering at the LUX followed many of the same shel- ter-in-place procedures implemented throughout the nation and world: remain indoors as much as possible, wear a mask outside, and maintain a safe social distance in public. For the women living in the hotel, these basic practices were codified through a variety of rules for living at the LUX that were all designed to minimize the risks of viral spread.

To remain in residence, the women would stay in their assigned section of the hotel. Visitations of any kind were pro- hibited, though women were able to socialize among them- selves following safety measures of physical distancing and mask wearing. The women had their temperature checked three times a day. Cigarette breaks were permitted at the hotel entrance with supervision. Beyond the hotel, the women could shop at three local stores and visit the nearby park. All of these excursions were supervised by nonprofit staff.

During the month of our research, we observed and par- ticipated in the lived environment of the LUX as a transformed shelter. We joined several women in their daily routines, like meal delivery and temperature checks, walking to the local stores, and spending time brief ly outside. Importantly, how- ever, we spent a significant amount of time simply waiting with them in the few spaces they inhabited. These experiences provide the basis of the text in our essay. The images we pres- ent are the visible acts of waiting in shelter that address the experience of temporary shelter beyond its straightforward restrictiveness.

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Although our time at the LUX generated important in- sights into the practice of waiting among some of the women, we must also note that other women at the LUX waited differ- ently. For some, individual rooms became their primary do- mains and isolation their preferred mode of residence. Due to this and the limited time the LUX operated, ten weeks in total before being disbanded as the City of Memphis reopened to tourists, we did not connect with all residents. As such, our essay offers one vantage into life at the LUX and underscores the challenges of ethnographic research under rapidly chang- ing and contingent circumstances.

Theories of Waiting

The theme of this photo-essay is what we call improvisational waiting. By joining the concepts of improvisation and waiting, we want to emphasize the creative energies that can emerge under constraining conditions. Like jazz players immersed in a musical composition, we consider both the structures of shel- ter and the dynamic ways that women at the LUX reworked its form and significance for their lives. Waiting here is a form of improvisation connected to projectivity, that is, the active production of a present that anticipates the possibility of new futures (Brun 2015, 24). As the women repurposed the struc- tures of waiting to their own desires, they did so in ways that were inextricably linked to imagined future possibilities. In this way, we break with much of the social scientific literature on waiting among the homeless.

Shelter in this body of work is often depicted as a bu- reaucratic structure of immense regulation (DeVerteuil 2003), in which the homeless exist as passive subjects (Deward and Moe 2010). Waiting for housing, treatment, or social services, homeless populations are recognized through their subjection to disciplinary power (Cooper 2015). Focused on the institu- tional conditions that compel people to wait—or what some call the politics of waiting (Janeja and Bandak 2018, 3)—such approaches fail to see how people respond to its imposition in unexpected ways.

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During our fieldwork, we often joined the women on outings to the three local stores they were permitted to visit. More than an opportunity to leave the hotel, trips to the store were a reinsertion into the normative life of consumerism. With their own funds, some of the women could now enter stores as customers and buy things they once lacked while living on the streets.

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Understood through its limits, the LUX hotel may seem like a space of total confinement. The women had rules, and compliance was mandatory. Yet, the LUX was more than its regulations. Within the structure of shelter-in-place existence, there was a temporal space of improvisation in the waiting of things to come. This is what we observed during our time at the LUX. In the gaps of regulatory time and practice, we encoun- tered what some scholars have described as agency in waiting (Brun 2015; Hage 2009; Janeja and Bandak 2018). Although structurally imposed, waiting in these instances also can cre- ate opportunities for individuals to act within limits toward new outcomes. These actions do not challenge the regulations that govern daily life. Instead, they use them as parameters for new rhythms that shift the experience of waiting into an active set of practices that anticipate a novel, better future.

Improvisational Waiting

While always operating within the limits of shelter, life at the LUX was often profoundly improvisational. Prior to the pandemic, the nonprofit behind the LUX initiative had never functioned as a shelter. As such, there were no set rules beyond maintaining the safety of its team and the women it served. This allowed staff and guests to proceed creatively, impro- vising within the basic structure of reducing the viral risk of COVID-19. Beyond temperature checks, restricted mobility, and limited contact, daily rhythms emerged that brought the nonprofit staff and residents into relations of care and col- laboration toward futures that were, in some cases, previously unimagined.

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Temperature checks were mandatory at the LUX and taken three times a day. This is one of a series of regulatory acts taken up by nonprofit staff and could be viewed as a production of disciplinary power—for women to gain access to a safe living environment, they must be subject to continual bodily monitoring. We agree with this to a certain extent, but as discussed in detail in the following, this is not the only framework with which to view the LUX.

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One nonprofit staff member exemplified the act of im- provisational waiting. Along with millions of other Americans at the outset of COVID-19, she was laid off from her job in marketing. Looking for work, she found a job listing for the nonprofit and, although she had not worked in social services before, decided it was the time to try something new. As a dancer and yoga instructor, she asked the women within the first few days at the LUX if there was interest in offering in- formal classes to break up the monotony of daily life under the shelter-in-place orders. In this way, she matched her passions with homeless women’s desire for new bodily experiences and created opportunities to stretch and dance in a city park where just weeks before some of the women used to sleep. This was not part of any case management plan. It was, rather, an impro- vised response that exceeded the structure of shelter in place and allowed for profoundly new embodied practices of pres- ence and care in the liminal space of waiting.

There were other ways the women improvised while wait- ing at the LUX. Using objects provided by a network of donors in the city, they transformed noncurated hotel areas into spaces of interaction and activity. The women were only allowed ac- cess to one f loor of the hotel. All common areas like the lobby and eating areas were off limits. Operating under these restric- tions, the women intentionally crafted a communal space on small tables in front of the elevator doors. Here, the women ate together, played cards, and shared photographs of their children on smartphones. There was a donated Memphis ver- sion of Monopoly, which small groups of women would pull out of its box and pore over, recounting memories of visiting Graceland or living on the streets near Beale. There was also a set of UNO cards in this makeshift common room, and at all hours of the day, the women would sit in each other’s company forging temporary relations of pleasure and intimacy.

Games were more than simple ways of passing time. A form of routine interaction, they offered occasions for conversation and solidarity. For some of the women, these activities were novel experiences of pleasure. Unavailable in the past, when the struggles of either houselessness or unsafe living arrangements made life too precarious for these kinds of entertainment, conditions of shelter turned games like UNO into a reclaimed experience of recreation and leisure. Games also facilitated opportunities for intimacy as the women shared ideas about their favorite foods and the kind of lives they anticipated once the pandemic ended.

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In a city park next to the LUX, a nonprofit staff member leads a hotel guest in a one-on- one yoga session. Yoga was an example of what we call improvisational waiting, or the act of unplanned, agential forms of meaning-making for both guests and staff at the LUX. This park is where several of the homeless women once slept prior to COVID-19.

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Beyond the common area, shelter at the LUX turned hotel rooms into private spaces of residence. Women at the LUX waited on king-sized beds with WIFI-enabled f lat-screen tele- visions. Day after day, these lavish accommodations provided comfortable conditions for waiting and the unexpected antici- pation of new ways of living. Describing the first time she saw her room at the LUX, for example, one woman explained: I said this is not for real. I thought I was dreaming, I said I know this ain’t right. From the unimaginable setting of her new room, she began to settle into new ideas of a better life ahead. Clean from drugs for the first time in years, the experience of a temporary life in shelter opened a new vision on the future: I’m through. I ain’t never going to do it no more…this is the way I was supposed to live, and this is the way I’m going to be living. As this quote indicates, the physical space (the place and time of this mo- ment) of this improvised waiting matters. The stark difference between the LUX and life on the streets offers much more than a captivating mental image. It provides us with a way to con- ceptualize the relationship between material conditions and the agential dynamic of imagination. For some women, the safety and comforts of their accommodations provoked new imaginable futures. They offered tangible evidence of a differ- ent form of life and the possibility of achieving it through the new practices repeated and honed while in shelter.

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Luxury rooms at the boutique hotel became sites of newfound pleasures and comfort, with one hotel guest relaxing on her bed, laughing while watching cartoons. At the LUX, hotel rooms provided new experiences for a group of women unaccustomed to the comforts of consumer luxuries. For some, the very opportunity to dwell within spaces of comfort populated by flat-screen televisions and king-sized beds offered a compelling new experience of life. It opened the imagination to the possibility of living beyond the precariousness of the street or unsafe home environments.

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This was especially true for certain women who had arrived at the LUX under acutely traumatic circumstances. Fleeing intimate partner violence, Carol spent the first few days at the LUX adjusting to a room of her own. As she shared:

Basically, I’ve been through a whole life like, suffer with like depression, since my mom passed, and through my mar- riage and not having my kids right now and able, you know, financial situations with my husband like living the way I used to live. And basically, like coming down and have to walk away and leave everything. So I’ve been having a lot going on in my life even before the quarantine, it’s like God was just preparing me for the worst, you know.

Within the first week of living at the LUX, she began pre- paring for other things. She expressed a newfound resolve in picking up a lifelong passion that she described she had left behind in the face of decades of domestic abuse. In her hotel room, she began once again to sing gospel songs that she wrote long ago, vocalizing a resilient, more hopeful self. At the LUX, Carol and others imagined possible futures in the wake of complicated pasts and presents. As she explained: Oh, I’m ex- cited because it’s been a long time coming. …I’m looking forward to the future, like I got a son, he’s doing good. My daughter, she’s doing good, and I feel like the best is yet to come for me.

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A woman rolls back her shoulders, looks straight ahead, and clears her throat, in preparation to sing one of her original gospel songs for the ethnographers. For decades, intimate partner violence and addiction kept her from the music that gave her an important sense of self. At the LUX, she rediscovered the power of her voice through song.

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While guests waited under shelter-in-place orders, some improvised new forms of sociability. There were many con- versations held between the women about who stayed in their rooms, who reveled in the improvised communal spaces, and who among these groups changed their approach to socializing over the course of their weeks together. Some women initially never left their room and over time decided to sit by the eleva- tors. Some other women, immediately upon entering the LUX, attempted to forge new friendships with other guests. And oth- ers, who already knew each other, decided to strengthen their bonds. Two women whom we interviewed expressed that they deepened their connection under the circumstances at the LUX. Once friends on the streets, they now called themselves sisters, planning a unified future post-LUX. Sitting side by side in their interview, they explained that they would seek adjoin- ing apartments once the LUX experience ended. One ethnog- rapher asked whether that meant they would be roommates, and the women laughed. They had come to appreciate private space at the LUX, but also could not imagine a life without one another as sisters, and so they would seek separate housing side by side.

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Prior to the LUX, these two women were friends on the streets of Memphis. Navigating the vulnerabilities of life as women without permanent shelter, they depended on each other for material and emotional support. Now in a stable context with their own rooms, their bond has deepened. Once friends in need, today they are self-declared sisters committed to a common future. Reading the latest CDC guidelines for COVID-19, their concerns are focused on how to maintain their familial connection in a new living context.

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As is the case in many shelters, several women at the LUX experienced waiting as a time of transition. Clean for the first time in decades, Rhonda understood a day’s wait as, simply and profoundly, a day’s success. Surrounded by new clothes, bags, shoes, and a bible, she saw shelter as a break from the past. After losing her husband, mother, and father, she decided to “no longer lose herself.” And so she chose the LUX as a place to wait in sobriety. Getting clean might be considered a truly im- provisational act, requiring patience and acceptance with each new stanza of craving. As she developed these new rhythms each day at the LUX, she described a sense of increased com- fort with the notion of hope and the potential for a future of continuity, rather than one marked by loss.

From the comforts of her room, surrounded by new clothes, purses, shoes, and other material needs, Rhonda anticipated a new future. She was ready for the change and used the objects in her life as tools for a new way of living. With them, she improvised a better version of herself free from a past of drugs and the absence of shelter. I change clothes three times a day now. Heck yeah, one for every meal. Yeah, I’m ready. Ready. … I’m going to be right.

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Conclusion

At times during our research at the LUX, the communal table by the elevator, placed in front of the large portrait window overlooking downtown Memphis, would be empty. In those moments, certain guests who preferred solitude would emerge from their rooms to take advantage of the silence and the view. In this case, sitting still was a critical, improvised practice of self-making in waiting. Some of the women at the LUX had— just days or weeks before—experienced long stretches of rest- less and vulnerable mobility. The quiet space of the elevator lobby provided room for reacquainting themselves with an alternative lived space while also introducing them to a new bodily experience of respite from life punctuated by struggle. The act of stillness while sheltering in place, in this moment, was not stif ling, but freeing. It was a space of meditative ref lec- tion, of calm.

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A woman sits in silence after eating a donated lunch at the large window next to the elevators overlooking downtown Memphis. Once a true interstitial waiting space for pre-COVID-19 hotel guests, the small area next to the elevator doors was made into the primary communal living space for the women sheltered in place at the LUX.

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Promise. Transition. Hope. These were critical dimen- sions of waiting that we encountered among some of the women living at the LUX in shelter. These forms of waiting, borne out of structural constraints, constituted the improvised efforts of women committed to reconstituting their lives under unprecedented circumstances.

These were not the only possibilities for women at the LUX. Some came and went. Stif led by the regulations, they sought refuge in what they knew of the world before COVID- 19. But others stayed. In waiting, they improvised lives within limits and created novel forms of sociability, rituals, and be- comings (Biehl and Locke 2010).

Waiting for the end of temporary shelter, they were also waiting on their new futures (Hage 2009). Agentially and im- provisationally, they chose to work with and on their circum- stances in preparation for imaginable futures. For them, LUX became one stop on a longer journey of the self and world.

Note

1. The names of the hotel, the nonprofit agency in charge of the LUX shelter, and all participants have been changed or omitted to protect the privacy of all individuals in this research.

References

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the nonprofit agency in charge of the LUX for inviting us to conduct this project and for its cooperation throughout the research period. Without the kindness of its staff and its confidence in our work, this project would have never been possible. We are also grateful to the many women at the LUX who offered their time, patience, and trust during this research. We want to acknowledge the support of Darien Sproesser, who assisted with data management and coding. This project was partially funded by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis.