Homeless women Don't wear Prada: The geographies of beauty standards and the bodies of homeless women

Abstract

Mainstream society expects women to look and behave in particular ways. Women are expected to adhere to conventional Western beauty standards of grooming, fashionable clothing, and hygiene. They are also traditionally associated with the home, homemaking and being indoors. The bodies of homeless women transgress in both ways: through lacking the resources to engage in the body work which would allow them to adhere to the beauty standards; and through lacking a home and predominantly being outdoors. This in turn, results in particular stigmatization for homeless women, who have unique experiences of homelessness. A lack of gendered literature has left many of these experiences underdiscussed, and even those approaches which do focus on gender, rarely account for other social differences such as race, age, and sexuality. This paper extends existing debates by arguing that framing homelessness through beauty standards and embodiment enables a new and more nuanced understanding of homelessness, which is not only gendered, but also allows for the acknowledgement of other intersectional difference, such as race, age, sexuality, and disability. It concludes that future research into homelessness should not only account for gender but should take an intersectional approach to consider the ways that homelessness is not one universal experience.