



































Homeless Chic in US American Novels


[Expositions 5.1 (2011) 62-69]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747-5376 
 

 

Fashion/ing Statements: Reading Homeless Bodies in Contemporary Fiction 

DOROTHEA LöBBERMANN 

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 

 

 

Alex Shakar‟s satiric novel The Savage Girl,
1
 published in 2001, addresses the ironies of 

“homeless chic.” The title character of the novel is a nameless homeless woman whose 

adventurous outfit inspires trend spotters to create a “savage” trend. While the marketing experts 

observe, sketch and exploit her style, the homeless woman‟s identity remains mysterious. At one 

point in the novel she is seen lying asleep in the street, her body “curled up like a question mark” 

(53). While her clothes signal the message – the fashion statement, as it were – of an “authentic,” 

anti-consumerist lifestyle, her body is fashioned as a sign that challenges this very readability.  

What is the question that the homeless body poses, and to whom is it addressed? What is the 

answer, if there is any? And, more abstractly, what are the functions of the homeless body and its 

dress in this novel and in others? How is the discrepancy between social concern about and 

cultural fascination with homelessness negotiated in fictional texts? These questions gain 

relevance given the large number of homeless characters in contemporary North American 

novels.
2
 The following exemplary readings of their bodies search for answers to these questions 

through a focus on the relationship between bodies and clothes. This relationship tends to be 

constructed as an opposition between a material body that to a certain extent remains outside of 

representation and a readable message that is located within the homeless person‟s attire. In 

locating the homeless both inside and outside of representation, literary texts, I claim, explore the 

political practice of inclusive exclusion.  

At the beginning of The Savage Girl aspiring trend spotter Ursula Van Urden watches the 

homeless woman whom she has nicknamed “the savage girl” stitch together pieces of pelt; her 

gear consists of clothing and accessories made from fur and bone. It is not only self-made but 

also self-hunted, combined with second-hand clothes and found objects. Her initial description of 

the outfit shows that it is filtered through Ursula‟s consciousness, through the lens of a fashion or 

lifestyle scout: 

 

The sleeves and sides of her olive-drab T-shirt are cut out, exposing her flanks and opposed 

semicircles of sunburned back […]. Her pants are from some defunct Eastern European 

army, laden with pockets, cut off at the knees. Her shins are wrapped in bands of pelt, a 

short brown fur. Her feet are shod in moccasins.
3
 

 

Ursula reads the woman‟s dress as a message of primitivism and anti-consumerism and starts the 

successful marketing campaign of a “savage” trend. Her pitch of the savage girl as an advertising 

image contains powerful keywords that explain the cultural fascination for homelessness: she is 

“sick of modernity,” she “tries to live authentically,” she “may be deeper than the rest of us. She 

may be superior.”
4
 In Shakar‟s novel, then, this is how the marketing industry answers the 

question that the homeless woman‟s body poses.  



63  Löbbermann 

 

 

The list of clichés with which Ursula explains the symbolic power of the homeless woman 

reverberates in contemporary representations of homelessness. A popular parallel for the savage 

girl‟s superiority, authenticity and flight from modernity is, for instance, Robin Williams‟s 

character Parry in Terry Gilliam‟s 1991 film The Fisher King,
5
 who invites his middle-class 

friend Jack (Jeff Bridges) to lie naked in Central Park, to feel the air on his body, free from the 

constraints of civilization. This metaphorization, idealization, and romanticization is part of a 

larger cultural ambivalence about homelessness, the other extreme of which is the violent 

exclusion of homeless persons from the public and political realm, which is enacted not only 

through political and juridical, but also through cultural practices like the Bum Fights series that 

construct the homeless as the ultimate abject.
6
 

The savage girl‟s “sick[ness] of modernity” circumscribes the prominent yet paradoxical 

position of contemporary homeless characters. As a sign of a critique of modernity, the homeless 

embody modernist discontent itself;
7
 they thus simultaneously symbolize and critique the culture 

that has turned them into a symbol. If, as an emblem of alienation, the homeless are inherently 

modernist figures, as an emblem of paradox, fragmentation, displacement
8
 and the postmodern 

“lack of „home,‟” the homeless are simultaneously recognized as the “soul of Postmodernity.”
9
 

The “other” to the system, they are its symbolic embodiment; a socially peripheral figure that 

becomes symbolically central.
10

 

Shakar is obviously aware of this discourse and the cultural significations of homelessness. 

His satire uses the homeless woman to reveal the absurdities of postmodern consumer culture. 

What is interesting, however, is how Shakar dramatizes the difference between the homeless 

woman and the image she becomes, as this difference indicates the powers and the limits of 

representation itself.  

From the start, the homeless woman is represented as the savage girl. “The savage girl kneels 

on the paving stones of Bannister Park,” are the first words of the novel. However, this identity is 

entirely the creation of trend scout Ursula. The woman is always already part of Ursula‟s concept 

of her: there is no person prior to the savage girl in the novel. As a savage girl, she “naturally” 

cannot speak. Ursula is so convinced of her own invention that she has never tried to talk to her. 

The homeless woman disappears behind the idea of the savage girl, that is, behind a particular 

representation of herself. In pointing to the powers of representation, Shakar‟s fiction parallels 

the procedure by which unhoused persons lose their individuality behind the moniker “the 

homeless.”
11

 But Shakar carries the idea even further. In the course of the novel, the homeless 

woman is not only figuratively replaced, but literally so. While she disappears from the text (she 

is arrested for killing a pet dog), the savage trend has become omnipresent: images of a 

professional model in savage girl gear adorn the buses city-wide. Sprawled out in a tenement 

entranceway, and dressed in a one-shouldered hide minidress that exposes much dirt-streaked 

flesh, the model promotes a new brand – “litewater,” a mineral water that is advertised as fat-

free.
12

 The homeless woman thus becomes the (absent) center of a satire on consumption that 

promotes “useless product[s]”
13

 that – irony of ironies – promise to boycott consumerism in the 

act of consumption. 

Shakar thus situates homelessness at the intersection of a social and a cultural agenda, wherein 

the social satire attacks postmodern capitalism and consumption and the cultural satire lashes out 

at the nostalgia for primitivism. But Shakar does not stop at the observation that these two 

agendas are connected. In a further, more abstract, move, he demonstrates the removal of the 



Fashion/ing Statements  64 

 

 

ground on which the whole operation is founded: the homeless woman is excluded from the 

operation, she disappears – figuratively behind her representation, and literally behind the image 

of that representation. The power of the homeless sign is accompanied by, if not conditioned on, 

the removal of the homeless body. 

The question mark that the savage girl forms thus also asks about the difference between the 

homeless and their representation. It asks about the relationship between body and discourse: is 

there such a thing as a body outside of discourse? A body prior to representation? The question 

signals a longing for the freedom expressed in an autonomous body, an authentic body, a body 

free of representation. When the clothes can be read as signs (of authenticity, of freedom), does 

the “material” body stay free of signification? 

Representations of the homeless body amplify a tendency inherent in the representation of all 

bodies, namely the implied reference to that which is outside of discourse, to the body‟s 

prediscursive materiality or “naturality.” The fantasy of the homeless body‟s hyper-materiality 

not only ignores the harsh physical realities of homelessness, it also participates in the exclusion 

of the homeless body from the body politic.  

English scholar Samira Kawash analyzes this practice with the example of an everyday 

subway scene. A body “is folded up” in the limited space of a subway seat: “I can tell very little 

about this person,” she writes, “I see what the others on the train see, a body folded impossibly 

small, a body marked by its position and its effects as a homeless body.”
14

 The question that this 

body poses for Kawash concerns the powerful effect it has on the other subway riders, who, “as a 

body,” “studiously avoid” looking at it.
15

 In her scene, Kawash describes the formation of a 

public that is sketched out as a body politic (“as a body,” the other passengers close ranks against 

the homeless person). But since the public is always an idea, and always in negotiation, Kawash 

argues, it is in constant need of expression, visualization, materialization. The homeless body is 

one such materialization. Through its denial of societal wholeness, it makes visible, ex negativo, 

what is generally invisible: the concept of a public sphere.  

Kawash‟s observation explains both the body‟s “necessary” materiality and the exclusion or 

abjection it is subjected to. The romantic notion of the freedom, authenticity, and 

prediscursiveness of the homeless body perpetuates the exclusion of the homeless from the 

public realm for the sake of the construction of a public (a community – of citizens and readers). 

In this move, homelessness connotes the “bare life” outside of the public through which the 

public constitutes itself, as Leonard C. Feldman argues in his reading of the homeless person as a 

homo sacer.
16

 The homeless body – turned into bare life – is politically excluded yet 

symbolically included. This practice of inclusive exclusion is exemplified and, to some extent, 

analyzed in Alex Shakar‟s novel. The marketing success of the “savage trend” demonstrates that 

a postmodern consumer culture constitutes its identity through the simultaneous appropriation 

and exclusion of the homeless body. 

In looking at homeless “chic,” fictional texts have repeatedly explored the tension between the 

notion of the supposedly prediscursive body and the semantics of its clothing. If the savage girl 

connotes the wish for the return to a “primitive” and “authentic” lifestyle within postmodernity, 

the homeless parade in Paul Auster‟s City of Glass connotes the absurdity of the American 

Dream:  



65  Löbbermann 

 

 

There is the man wrapped in the American flag. There is the woman with a Hallowe‟en 

mask on her face. There is the man in a ravaged overcoat, his shoes wrapped in rags, 

carrying a perfectly pressed white sheet on a hanger – still sheathed in the dry-cleaner‟s 

plastic. There is the man in the business suit with bare feet and a football helmet on his head. 

There is a woman whose clothes are covered from head to toe with Presidential campaign 

buttons […].
17

 

 

Auster‟s text performs the ambivalence of representation: the repetition of the phrase “there is” 

signals the inability to see the homeless in context;
18

 yet the focus on the homeless‟ colorful 

accessories shows that the observer – Auster‟s protagonist Quinn who “discovers” the homeless 

in a moment of crisis – has become a skillful master of the objects of his observation, whom he 

contains in a text that focuses on the spectacular. His catwalk parade of homeless “freaks” plays 

with the strong visual effects that the street persons‟ accessories create – flags, masks, football 

helmet, campaign buttons – and that make them visible at the same time as they hide them from 

sight, which the Halloween mask implies in particular. The insignia of American society, 

“abused” (or appropriated in a subversive manner) by the homeless, become a grotesque 

caricature of American cultural values. Significantly, this description is the culmination of a 

longer scene in which Quinn attempts to make sense of the homeless, who “seem to be 

everywhere the moment you look for them,”
19

 recording his observations in his notebook. It is as 

if one of his prospective literary objects stages a last revolt against his act of capturing her reality 

into prose, when – directly before the paragraph quoted above – a homeless woman shouts (the 

reader does not know at whom, about what): “What if I just fucking don‟t want to!”
20

 Her protest 

signals an outside of representation that invites comparison to the savage girl‟s questioning 

posture: when the savage girl questions the semantics of her own body, Auster‟s homeless 

woman refuses to be turned into text.  

Her protest anticipates that of another novel character, namely the homeless protagonist of 

George Dawes Green‟s novel The Caveman’s Valentine, Romulus Ledbetter. He protests against 

being read by a social worker who tries to remove him from his cave in a New York City park to 

a shelter: 

 

You figure now you got me in your clutches, you going to read me, like a book, right? – 

going to look right into my brain and you going to read it page by page, like I was some 

cheap-jack midnight entertainment to make you forget the mess you’re in – right? Get you 

chuckling, get your greasy thumbprints all over my thoughts, get you through another 

miserably lonely night, right […]?
21

 

 

This beginning paragraph of the novel introduces what will soon be revealed as the speaker‟s 

clinical paranoia, but of course it also self-reflexively catches the book‟s readers in their act of 

reading and puts up for discussion the novel‟s contribution to the cultural fascination for 

homelessness (signaling that The Caveman’s Valentine intends to be more than a mere escape 

fantasy). Green describes reading as an act of control that he contrasts to the visual spectacle of 

the homeless man‟s bodily presence at the end of the opening scene, which announces the social 

worker‟s defeat: 

 



Fashion/ing Statements  66 

 

 

Romulus Ledbetter glared at his visitor. 

Then he slouched off his blankets and came out of his cave and rose up to his full height. 

Rose up before the social worker the way in a nightmare a grizzly will rise on its hind legs 

and it‟s too late to run. His hat was a Teflon saucepan lined with the furs of squirrels killed 

on the Henry Hudson Parkway. His stink was enormous. For a scarf he wore the “Week in 

Review” section of the Sunday New York Times. […] 

He stood there and simply loomed. Until at last the social worker shrugged and went 

away.
22

 

 

Romulus refuses to be read/controlled and – uncovering his body, stepping into view and rising 

to his full height in a strong dramaturgy – offers the spectacle of his body as a sign of freedom 

from social coercion. However, the opposition between reading and the spectacular body does 

not hold very long: his body is immediately turned into text; the comparison to a grizzly bear 

reminds the reader of adventure novels, which are also suggested in the image of the hat lined 

with squirrel furs, parodying a trapper‟s outfit. While the savage girl is compared to a Native 

American (viz. her “moccasins”
23

), Romulus rather connotes their European counterparts, as the 

references to trappers and the allusion to Henry Hudson suggest. But like her, he also is a savage, 

an animal. This is the effect the body has on the social worker: its “enormous stink” and 

menacing posture affect him immediately. Thus this opening passage oscillates between a 

reading of the homeless body and its suggested unreadability, its hermeneutic freedom. And 

indeed, this latter quality is what Romulus claims for himself at the end of the scene: “I‟m still a 

free man.”
24

 This freedom, however, is deeply ambiguous as it is also a sign of the inclusive 

exclusion of the political abject. 

What these examples suggest is that fictional representation, although clearly an integral part 

of cultural representation and an agent of cultural discourse, negotiates the discursiveness of 

homelessness and thus makes it visible. At the same time as Shakar, Auster and Green connote 

homelessness with freedom, individuality, and originality, they also make visible the processes 

of inclusive exclusion involved in this romanticization. Even if the homeless body becomes 

unreadable and unspeakable – hidden behind its representations, under its clothing – it is still 

discursively produced: as an unnamable materiality that embodies cultural signification. 

What then, if the discursive parameters are changed? Samuel R. Delany suggests a change in 

the parameters of genre in what at first sight looks like a very provocative take on the subject of 

homelessness. For genres, Shakar had chosen satire, Green and Auster variations of detective 

fiction (if we agree to call the latter‟s novel a “metaphysical detective fiction”
25

). Delany, 

however, opts for the genre of pornography (or rather, he uses a similar cocktail of genres as 

Auster does, one important element of which is pornography). The homeless bodies in his novel 

The Mad Man (2002)
26

 are significant not for their symbolic meanings, but because the novel‟s 

protagonist, a young philosopher, desires them sexually. In contrast to Green‟s social worker 

who is driven away by the homeless man‟s smell, Delany‟s protagonist is attracted by stinking, 

dirty, leaky bodies. On the one hand, the fetishization of the homeless body can be interpreted as 

just another act of romanticization and appropriation. But on the other hand, a different frame – 

that of physical desire – inverts the received notion of the abject and of exclusion. In the novel, 

sexual attraction is part of a larger social interaction: the protagonist and the homeless men share 

not only bodies and beer, but stories, feelings and relationships. In its representation, therefore, 



67  Löbbermann 

 

 

the homeless body is neither abjected nor symbolically elevated or appropriated. Here‟s an 

example:  

 

A refuse drum […] stood on Broadway‟s island. With his curly hair, curly beard – both 

gray-shot brown – in a blue sweatshirt, the bottom of which hung high above the stretched-

out waist of his brown woolen pants, too tight and too hot for summer, a thick and hirsute 

giant gazed down into it. […] 

The beltless pants were low on a broad gut, pelt thickening to pubic density below his waist 

– low enough on his hips so that if I‟d been behind him, I would have seen inches of fur 

clamped in his buttock‟s bevel. He bent over the drum‟s rim and swept a hand with a dessert 

plate-sized palm through what was inside. […]
27

 

 

The precision with which physical details are described here is owed to the refusal to 

differentiate between the significant and the banal.
28

 There is no metaphor in the description 

above, rather a somewhat stubborn realism mixed with hyperbole (“giant”) likely to be found in 

pornography. In contrast to the other excerpts analyzed here, the homeless man‟s clothes signal 

no message other than that they cover up and – luckily – also reveal the desired body. 

Furthermore, a first-person narrator directs the reader‟s gaze to the sexually stimulating parts of 

this body (in fact, the narrator operates with knowledge gained from subsequent physical contact 

with his future lover, whose behind he can describe although he cannot see it at this moment). 

The materiality of the homeless body is acknowledged but not metaphorically appropriated. No 

additional signification diverts the reader from its presence: this body may be on the lowest rank 

of the social scale, but it does not carry the meaning of bare life. To the contrary, as potentially 

sexual object, it is not excluded from the social/political but part of it.  

Delany is well aware of processes of abjection and representation. His close description of the 

body does not lead to the conclusion that there is nothing abjected from discourse, nothing 

unspeakable. To the contrary, in Delany‟s work the unspeakable is the explicit precondition for 

the speakable;
29

 but in his case it is not the homeless body that is abjected from representation 

but the contents of the refuse drum: “what was inside” indicates the unspeakable. The strategy of 

circling an abject (note the mentioning of the drum‟s rim) is the trademark of this novel that 

rescues the homeless body from abjection. 

Delany‟s decision to change the representational parameter sheds light on the reading of the 

excerpts from Shakar, Auster and Green in that it makes visible the exclusion that is produced 

through metaphor and symbolization. As long as the homeless body is covered in semantically 

significant gear that turns it into a sign for something else (savagery, primitivism, the absurdity 

of civilization or the freedom thereof), as long as the homeless body is supposed to convey a 

meaning outside of itself, it is at the same time abjected, pushed outside of representation and the 

public. 

To some extent, then, narrative containment of homeless bodies in fictional representation 

parallels the policing of homeless bodies as well as their exclusion from the public and the 

political. It is important to recognize the act of violence committed in these representational acts, 

which is sometimes implicit, as in the sarcasm of Shakar‟s novel, and sometimes made explicit, 

as in the examples that dramatize the futile refusal against representation in Auster‟s and in 

Green‟s novels. The paradox of representation – the fact that it acknowledges presence at the 



Fashion/ing Statements  68 

 

 

same time as it contains it – becomes particularly apparent in these texts. “Homeless chic,” it 

turns out, is the epitome of homeless representation, a practice that rarely operates without 

inclusive exclusion. 

 

 

Notes 

 

1. Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). 

2. The lists of novels, memoirs and films on homelessness fill as much as eight pages of The 

Encyclopedia of Homelessness, ed. David Levinson, vol. 2 (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2004), 627–

634). Some important contemporary novels are: William Kennedy, Ironweed; Column McCann, 

This Side of Brightness; Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace and Timbuktu; 

Don DeLillo, Mao II; Robert Majzels, City of Forgetting; and, Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of 

Orange. Detective fiction is rich in homeless characters; see the works of Sara Paretsky, Andrew 

Vacchs, John Grisham and many others. 

3. Shakar, 3. 

4. Shakar, 97. 

5. The Fisher King. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Columbia, 1991. 

6. See Amanda F. Grzyb‟s argument about “contradictory images” of homelessness in “Images of 

Homelessness in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature” in Levinson, 296. 

Many other scholars have commented on the conflicting images (Kenneth Kusmer, Down and 

Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)) 

and polarities (Leonard C. Feldman, Citizens Without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and 

Political Exclusion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)) of homeless representation. See also 

John Allen, Homelessness in American Literature: Romanticism, Realism, and Testimony (NY: 

Routledge, 2004). The Bumfights video series (2002–2006) was a highly controversial reality 

show in which (mostly intoxicated) homeless men were asked to fight each other, to hurt 

themselves, or to do reckless stunts. 

7. See Chaplin‟s tramp figure or the homeless figures in Samuel Beckett‟s work. Paul Auster, 

although clearly a postmodern author, has inherited much from these characters, particularly in 

his early work. 

8. Grzyb, “Images of Homelessness,” 300. 

9. Dean MacCannell, “Postmodern Community Planning: Notes on the Homeless and Other 

Nomads,” in Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers (London: Routledge, 1992), 111. 

10. Cf. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: 

Methuen, 1986), 5. 

11. See, e.g., Anthony Marcus, Where Have All the Homeless Gone? The Making and Unmaking of a 

Crisis (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 51. 

12. Cf. Shakar, 145. 

13. Shakar, 95. 

14. Samira Kawash, “The Homeless Body,” Public Culture 10.2, 319. 

15. Ibid. 

16. Feldman, Citizens Without Shelter, 14–24; cf. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power 

and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 

17. Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985), in The New York Trilogy (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), 110. 

18. Cf. Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 109. 

19. Auster, 109. 



69  Löbbermann 

 

 

20. Auster, 110. 

21. George Dawes Green, The Caveman’s Valentine (New York: Warner Books, 2001), 3. 

22. Green, 4. 

23. “A true redskin, more so than any Indian ever was, her skin more red than brown,” is a further 

element from the homeless woman‟s initial description commenting on her sunburn (Shakar, 3). 

24. Green, 4. 

25. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, eds., Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical 

Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 

1999), 1–2. 

26. Samuel R. Delany, The Mad Man (Rutherford: Voyant Publishing, 2002). 

27. Delany, 277. 

28. See Mary Catherine Foltz, “The Excremental Ethics of Samuel R. Delany,” SubStance #116 37.2 

(2008), 47. 

29. See Samuel R. Delany, “On the Unspeakable,” in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics 

of the Paraliterary (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan UP/UP of New England, 1999), 58–66. 


