Flower of Asphalt

A few months ago, our dear colleague from the University of Barcelona, María Virginia Matulič-Domandzič, proposed to Laura Haro Pérez, a colleague from the Inclusion Area of Lleida City Council, and myself, to participate in an adventure led by Fran Calvo, with the support of the Scientific Association on Homelessness from a Gender Perspective. Without a doubt, a narrative on female homelessness was much needed in the field, and it goes without saying that we were enthusiastic about the project from minute zero. And writing a chapter hand in hand with María Virginia has been a new opportunity to learn and grow, because her trajectory has opened doors that today we can cross together. A pleasure and deep gratitude.

Flowers of Asphalt. Good practices in addressing female homelessness is a collective and essential work to understand one of the most invisibilized dimensions of social exclusion: homelessness from a gender perspective.

You can read and download it open access (FREE!!) here: Spanish version:

https://www.documentauniversitaria.media/omp/index.php/horitzo/catalog/book/354 and in Catalan —although there is an error to be corrected in the title of our chapter— https://www.documentauniversitaria.media/omp/index.php/horitzo/catalog/book/355

This book not only combines theory, a transfeminist perspective, and real cases, but it dares to do something unusual: to name the structural violence that traverses the lives of thousands of women, from the cold street bench to the offices of social services. And it is so, in no uncertain terms: the lack of a home is not an accident, nor a personal bad patch, nor that cheap moralizing that some people like so much when they say “she brought it upon herself.” No. The lack of a home is the result of a system that knows perfectly which women it wants to expel —and does so— depending on where you come from, what you have lived through, what inequalities you accumulate, or in what margins you have been forced to live.

In Sex work, employability, and residential exclusion, we see how migration, trans identity, and prostitution form an impossible triangle that pushes directly onto the street; and in Trans-iting the street and life, we discover that a specialized resource can sustain much more than certain policies. In Building collective networks, women create care when institutions fall short, while in Voices in the silence we understand that trauma plays at hiding in untold stories. Between two waters shows that migrating breaks much more than geography, and Young, formerly under guardianship, but with a home reminds us that, when guardianship ends, exclusion often continues.

In Psychosis, prayer, and homelessness, mental health appears as a raw wound, and The experience of living in a hostel warns us that not everything with a roof is a home. Social transformations and motherhood reveals that being a mother can be a lifeline or an abyss, and in Invisible fragilities consumption is viewed from humanity and not from judgment. The home that never comes denounces the stigma that pursues poor women, and Creating practices that adapt to new realities opens windows to imagine other ways of accompanying.

In Institutional barriers, the structures themselves can cause harm, and Working with street adolescents shows the young and forgotten face of homelessness. From residential exclusion to community integration advocates for community as a space of dignity, while Homelessness with a childhood perspective sheds light on children who inhabit scenarios where they should never have been.

Finally, The world through Elena's eyes, we have been able to leave it as the last heartbeat of the work: intellectual disability that not only invisibilizes, but multiplies violence. But also, when there is a feminist and ethical perspective, it can open paths of accompaniment that seemed unthinkable.

When we wrote this chapter, we did not want to add one more story to the volume, nor to turn Elena into an illustrative case. What we intended was to break the surface, question the official narrative of homelessness, and show that there are women who disappear twice: first from the right to decent housing and then from the social narrative. Among all of them, Elena embodies this double invisibility that is so hard to look at.

Hidden Lleida: when disability sleeps on the street. This phrase came out almost in a sigh, perhaps because we needed to say it without filters. When intellectual disability intersects with gender, extreme poverty, and residential exclusion, the result is not just a more fragile life: it is a sum of violence that often goes unnoticed because no one has wanted to see it.

We wanted to question the ableism hidden behind many protection discourses: those who decide “what’s best for her” without asking her anything, who turn guardianship into control, care into infantilization, and accompaniment into another form of silence. Instead, we wanted to present Elena as a woman in the full complexity of the term: with history, with a body, with desire, with pain, and with a life journey that no label can encompass.

We also felt the need to challenge, to voice uncomfortable questions: what do we understand by autonomy in a woman with a disability? Who decides what she needs? In the name of what protection do we justify the denial of rights? And how many forms of violence are exercised from the very structures that should guarantee safety?

That this chapter closes the book is no accident: it is a conscious and deliberate gesture. A way of saying that female homelessness does not have a single face, and that the most invisibilized are also those who demand the most courage to be seen, even if they are at the end. Because, if we are not capable of naming what happens when disability is literally left exposed, we will continue to talk about homelessness without understanding its even harsher and more silent dimensions.

If there is one thing we wanted to convey, it is that behind a diagnosis there is a life, and behind a life there is a right. And that, as long as we continue to leave the Elenas of the world in the shadows, our discourse on rights, feminism, and inclusion will only be a beautiful theory with too many holes.

In the end, Flowers of Asphalt not only speaks to us of female homelessness, but of all those forms of resistance that women have had to invent when the system has closed all doors to them. Reading it is to approach a reality that is often tried to be concealed, but it is also to open windows to new ways of accompanying, caring, and transforming.

In the end, nearly fifty professionals have decided to contribute perspectives, experiences, and knowledge so that this reality stops being relegated to the margins and finally becomes a shared struggle. And yes, we continue to believe that naming violence is a way to begin to defeat it. Perhaps that is why we have all come together to write this book: because, as long as there are women sleeping exposed to the elements, we will still have much to say… and even more to do.