On Being Aesthetic Unequals: The Case of Individuals Experiencing Homelessness

ABSTRACT Aesthetic appearance is a powerful source of various forms of unjust social relations, such as demeaning stereotypes, discrimination, harassment, and social exclusion. Surprisingly, however, the issue of aesthetic injustice has been largely overlooked in the relational egalitarian literature. This article addresses this gap by examining aesthetic injustice in the context of homelessness. It argues that individuals experiencing homelessness are subject to two distinct kinds of aesthetic injustice. First, they are treated as disgusting elements of the urban landscape that must be rendered physically invisible in prime public areas. Second, they are deprived of the aesthetic resources necessary to control and shape how they present themselves to others. By drawing these two aspects together, this article proposes a novel account of the aesthetic dimensions of relational equality: it shows that achieving relational equality requires not only fostering inclusive and egalitarian social norms of respectable appearance but also enabling individuals to exercise reasonable control over their appearance as equal self‐presenting persons.