On Bodies and Embodiment

Our bodies, and the fact that they will all die and decay one day, is something we all have in common: We understand pain, shivering, fever, itch. I don’t believe it’s possible to talk about death or homelessness without talking about the body. Both things bring the physicality and temporality of our existence to the forefront in ways that we can ignore or deny in other aspects of our daily lives. Death leads to the decay and destruction of the body, and homelessness has immediate visceral effects on the body through exposure to the elements, lack of nutritious foods, injury, illness, restricted access to health care, and violence. Therefore, it felt unsurprising that my exploration of the body intersected with the research I was doing around dying while homeless. Yet I could still hear Desjarlais yelling from the pages of his book, “Shame, shame!”

Was I wrong to be focusing on the bodies of those who were homeless, spectacularizing them in an effort to induce empathy? Did my white, safe, housed, privileged body have any right to comment? On the other hand, it’s not possible to talk about life and death and the inequalities and disparities that exist for the unhoused without talking about the physicality of such an experience. The body can be an entrance into seeing the person, the mind, and the humanity without reducing someone to only the physical.

It’s a difficult proposition: wanting the housed to understand the unhoused by means of physicality, wanting to show both the horrible and the beautiful, the wretchedness and the survivorship. Yet such an approach risks ostracizing, othering, and marginalizing the experience of homelessness by parading it as a tourist attraction, something that unhoused people can dip into and out of, returning to relative comfort, rather than as a way for those unfamiliar with the homeless experience to develop a better understanding of and empathy toward it.

However, the body also provides the opportunity for us to become more intimately familiar with death and homelessness. Once a year, across cities in the United Kingdom, there are sleep outs, organized events that bring people together to sleep outside, usually in the late autumn, to raise awareness and money toward ending homelessness. A sanitized simulation of the real thing, sure, but a physically powerful one nonetheless. It’s perhaps the closest way someone can physically embody one small facet of  an experience that they might otherwise not know: Teeth falling out from years of alcohol abuse and lack of necessary dental care, staples in the head causing radiating nerve pain down the length of the body, trench foot from sleeping under bridges on rainy nights, blisters on feet from ill-fitting shoes and constant walking, eight toes down to the nubs—a result of frostbite after nights outside in a New England winter, sleeping in the backs of abandoned cars.

Those experiencing chronic homelessness will certainly suffer effects to their physical self, their lived bodies. But it’s also evident how those physically visible effects can play out in a larger context as symbols and metaphors that relate to culture, society, and political control. Assumptions are often made about those who are homeless in relation to their levels of personal hygiene, looks, and other physical effects, and in some ways, when we see someone who is homeless exemplifying those assumptions (dirty, disheveled) this validates and confirms those assumptions. It could also be said that those physical stereotypes of someone who is homeless—including the negative connotations, moralistic judgments, and assumptions that people in that situation are lazy, have chosen to be unhoused, or are addicts or mentally unhealthy—all play into the body politic of maintaining class structures. Poor people are that way because of their own personal failings, the thinking goes, not because of systematic injustices that are near impossible to overcome.

“Homelessness denotes a temporary lack of housing, but connotes a lasting moral career. Because this ‘identity’ is deemed sufficient and interchangeable, the ‘homeless’ usually go unnamed. The identification is typically achieved through spectral means: one knows the homeless not by talking with them but by seeing them” (Desjarlais 2). Home- lessness is also often conflated with uselessness, criminality, or a lack of moral character or fortitude. Unhoused people are sometimes referred to as loitering, taking up space, dirty, or trash, thereby making it easier to justify moving them on or hiding them away, busing them out of one town and into a neighboring one, or fining them for sitting in public spaces. All this makes it easier to dispose of these humans like trash in death. You can’t be forgotten if you’re never remembered. You can’t be seen if you’re never visible.

The embodied homeless are sometimes seen as disruptive, potentially causing chaos in civilized places. They are blights on doorsteps and sidewalks, betrayed by their bodies, which transgress physically against social order. They fall out of chairs they’re not meant to be sitting in, lie limp on floors from overdose as coffee and food orders are taken and filled.

In “Contemporary Hospice Care: The Sequestration of the Unbounded Body and ‘Dirty Dying,’” Julia Lawton describes her study of the dirty, unbounded bodies of the dying sequestered within hospices when their symptoms of incontinence, vomiting, or bleeding become uncontrollable and spill forth from their bodies with impunity. Lawton suggests that one reason Westernized societies hide this away is because over time we have come to highly value independence and selfhood, the success of which can be judged by how able one is to control their bodily functions. Our identities have become inextricably bound to our bodies and our ability to control those bodies. Often the homeless are seen as lacking control over such things simply because they have no choice but to defecate, urinate, vomit, and bleed in public. The homeless body is regularly illustrated as the other—a defiance or opposition to the civilized, housed body—something that needs removing, exterminating, hiding, burying. This sometimes takes shape in the form of loitering and encampment laws to move along those without homes to places where they will not be seen.

Found: Dead man in dumpster behind Amazon building. Frozen in a position on his hands and knees, as if trying to stand, blood-stained nose and dirt-caked hands, surrounded by ice cream, bananas, strawberries, frozen pizzas, cans, and packaging.

Vulnerable bodies, indigent bodies, unclaimed bodies, homeless bodies, Black bodies, female bodies, unwanted bodies, marginalized bodies, forgotten bodies. The streets can affect a social death, where a person is not fully accepted as human by the wider society. You die a social death the day the word homeless is attached to your person. Once labeled as homeless, this identification clings to the body, to the self. Nobody, no body, deserves to be thrown out, disposed of like trash.

Reprinted from Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins by Amy Shea. Copyright © 2025 by Rutgers University Press. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.