Men's Intrusion, Women's Embodiment

A critical analysis of street harassment

Fiona Vera-Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317360100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Research on violence against women tends to focus on topics such as sexual assault and intimate partner violence, arguably to the detriment of investigating men's violence and intrusion in women's everyday lives. The reality and possibility of the routine intrusions women experience from men in public space – from unwanted comments, to flashing, following and frottage – are frequently unaddressed in research, as well as in theoretical and policy-based responses to violence against women. Often at their height during women's adolescence, such practices are commonly dismissed as trivial, relatively harmless expressions of free speech too subjective to be legislated against.

Based on original empirical research, this book is the first of its kind to conduct a feminist phenomenological analysis of the experience for women of men's stranger intrusions in public spaces. It suggests that intrusion from unknown men is a fundamental factor in how women understand and enact their embodied selfhood.

This book is essential reading for academics and students involved in the study of violence against women, feminist philosophy, applied sociology, feminist criminology and gender studies.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315668109-1

He started talking to me more like saying oh where are you going?

My thing has been to physically remove myself, not to confront.

He followed me literally all the way home.

I just don’t see them, my eyes glaze over.

He was shouting at me and whistling at me saying sexy thing

and all of this

and I was 13.

He got off and he called me a tranny and a minger.

I don’t know yeah I try to brush it off.

He’s definitely having a wank, he’s definitely doing it. In Morrisons.

I built up such a barrier.

He just had his hand there on my chest.

It’s easier just to get off.

He snapped a picture and then walked back out,

he didn’t run, he just walked back out

really casual as if he’d just strolled in.

And then he pointed out to me his massive erection.

I’ll tuck my hair into my hat.

I had this big long fringe and he made some comment

about that must get in the way

when you’re giving blowjobs.

He leaned over and asked if he could take my photograph.

I try not to sit next to a man.

He bit my neck and he had his hand on my left breast

and he squeezed my breast really hard.

He hit me.

A couple of guys as I was walking were like hey babe.

I’ll wear jeans just because it’s safer.

Oi bitch, oi slag, get your tits out you slag.

I always walk with purpose.

The other guy waiting there goes oh cheer up love.

I want to talk back but you’re taking that risk.

Oi you come over here, sit on my face.

His trousers around his ankles

just jerking off.

He slapped me across the face. He said can I come on your tits. He was pushing the gate trying to get through and screaming. It’s easier to pretend I don’t hear anything.

The knowledge base that has been built since the explosion in feminist consciousness-raising, research, theory and practice on violence against women during feminism’s second-wave, illustrates vast contributions to the project of defining the world from women’s phenomenological position. The urgency of developing frameworks that could be translated into the language of law and policy however, has resulted in an increasing disconnection from the initial calls to articulate women’s everyday experience. The reality and possibility of the routine intrusions women experience from men in public space, from the ubiquitous ‘smile or cheer up’ to flashing, following and frottage, remain mostly unaddressed in current research as well as in theoretical and policy-based responses to violence against women and girls. Often at their height during women’s adolescence, such practices are frequently dismissed as harmless expressions of free speech, too subjective to be legislated against: the claim one woman’s harassment may be another woman’s compliment. At worst such experiences are understood as a part of what psychologist Richard Lazarus (1984) has termed ‘daily hassles’, low-level stressful experiences that irrespective of their potential for negative health and adaptive impacts, are an unavoidable part of life.

It is remarkable then, that in the face of such trivialisation, men’s stranger intrusions on women in public have become a point of mobilisation for modern feminist movements; unifying feminist perspectives that may diverge in discussions of pornography or prostitution. Responding to the existence of significant legal barriers to prosecution globally, ¹ social media has been harnessed as a tool to share experiences of what is commonly termed ‘street harassment’ as well as to support and validate women’s experiential realities. Established by Emily May in 2005, the non-profit Hollaback! movement currently has chapters in 84 cities and 31 countries, whilst another American based site ‘Stop Street Harassment’ has developed as a resource hub for research and prevention work on street harassment, as well as an online blog space (Kearl, 2010). In 2012, a website and Twitter account created in England to record experiences of ‘everyday sexism’ quickly went global, spreading to over 15 countries and collecting more than 50,000 entries within just 18 months (Bates, 2014). In India, the 2011 publication of a study on women’s safety and freedom in Mumbai’s public spaces has begun a movement of women ‘loitering’ as a political and social statement across several Indian cities (Phadke, Khan & Khan, 2011). Alongside this, the accessibility of the internet in public space has been seized upon to provide an avenue for immediate active response to intrusion whilst avoiding the potential for escalation perceived in responding to the perpetrator. As such, smartphone applications have been developed to map harassment, including in India (Fightback) ² , Egypt (Harassmap) ³ and worldwide through Hollaback!’s iPhone application. ⁴

The popularity of online spaces to record this particular form of men’s violence when not used as frequently for other forms, may stem in part from contextual factors inherent in the encounter itself. It may be that such experiences singularly lend themselves to online sharing due to their occurrence in public space – thus bearing a public nature – and to some of the same reasons problematising effective legislation: the inability to conclusively identify the perpetrator or the difficulty in validating one’s own experience. Despite the increase in visibility of men’s intrusion, due in no small part to this rise of online sharing, there are still large gaps in knowledge on the more mundane examples of men’s intrusive practices, their frequency, content and, importantly, meaning. The spread of community-based activism has helped direct attention to the existence of an international problem in need of both an expanding evidence base and new perspectives for understanding the experiential realities for women of both victimisation and survival. This book answers such a call, carving a space where the experience of men’s intrusion is not discounted due to its regularity, nor the impact denied due to the multiple and complex ways women habituate ourselves to it. At its core is an analysis of 50 women’s accounts of their experiences, both those given on reflection and those recorded on the street, alongside the development of a theoretical framework that participates in the current reclamation of unique philosophical insights of Simone de Beauvoir, drawing together phenomenological analysis and empirical social research.

Bringing back Beauvoir

One of the central claims here is that Simone de Beauvoir’s work to develop what Sara Heinämaa (2003) terms ‘a phenomenology of sexual difference’ offers unexplored conceptual tools for speaking about connections and commonality, without collapsing the diverse ways in which women live men’s violence based on social and personal histories. Beauvoir can be drawn on to help us build theory across forms of violence against women and girls, linking questions of agency and autonomy to a context of structural power relations, and reconnecting feminist research on men’s violence to what is routine in women’s lives. Her unique development of the concepts of situation and ambiguity offers a compelling philosophical frame through which to explore the impact of men’s violence on women’s sense of self. Mobilising her conceptualisation of the self as a situated freedom expressing the ambiguity of existence, enables a balancing of complexity, difference and commonality in a similar way to one of the foundational frames used in current studies of violence against women: Liz Kelly’s (1988) continuum of sexual violence. Despite acknowledgement of the importance of The Second Sex for the feminist movement in France and, following the English translation, across both America and England, Beauvoir’s philosophical contributions have traditionally been subsumed under that of Jean-Paul Sartre’s, and her insights on women largely relegated to feminism’s history. A resurgence in Beauvoirian scholarship in the past 30 years, however, seeks to reclaim her unique philosophical contribution, a contribution Beauvoir herself repeatedly denied. ⁵ Margaret A. Simons has written extensively on the problematic positioning Beauvoir herself made of her work, most often claiming her writing as simply exercises in Sartrean ontology (see Simons, 2010). Simons argues that on closer examination – and particularly in light of her posthumously published texts – Beauvoir’s insights are startlingly original and that her work deserves its own position in the philosophical canon. ⁶ It is in her development of – and departures from – her colleagues that Beauvoir has considerable potential for feminist research, theory and practice on issues of violence against women and girls. Her notable departures here are from Sartre in her vision of the self as situated freedom and her development of a Merleau-Pontian view of the self as an embodied body-subject, the ‘bodily-self’.

Parallel to this renewed interest in Beauvoir, there is what has been described as a ‘chronic need in contemporary feminist debates to theorise responsible female agency’ (Stavro, 2000: 133), particularly in regards to women’s embodied agency. Shelly Budgeon (2003) critiques the way in which analyses of female embodiment often figure women as passive objects of representation rather than subjects acting on, in and through the body. Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook (1998) advance a similar critique in their argument for a positive feminist ethics, foregrounding how the Cartesian mind/body dualism haunts much corporeal feminism. For Budgeon, Bray and Colebrook, approaches that focus on the body as a site of representation – and that posit such representation as a negation of materiality – hide the ways in which we live our bodies as an ambiguous blend of both, situated within a whole series of events, connections and contexts. Such a claim is comparable to the binary set up in the early 1990s between ‘victim’ and ‘power’ feminism, where the former was criticised as constructing women as lacking agency (Wolf, 1993; Paglia, 1994; Roiphe, 1994) and the latter as failing to acknowledge the complex and problematic relationship between feminists and power (Kelly, Burton & Regan, 1996). This tension is growing again in some modern feminist debates where the focus for some feminists on the contexts in which women are making choices is held by others as negating women’s ability to choose. Such contestations demonstrate the need to find an accessible conceptualisation of women’s agency that can also hold the multifaceted and complex ways in which structural oppression impacts, conflicts, points to and limits choice and action.

It is here that revisiting Beauvoir’s work offers particular possibilities for mobilising what Lois McNay (2004) terms a ‘reworked phenomenology’ – moving away from the idea of a pure phenomenology with its assumed universality and belief in a detached observer. Beauvoir develops a form of feminist phenomenology, an expression of individual experience mobilised for the social and political purpose of taking stock of women’s situation under patriarchy – articulating rather than abstracting from shared social and material realities. Her work provides a framework for theorising corporeality that foregrounds the temporality of human ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, alongside refusing to resolve the tensions of living experience. ⁷ This ability to maintain ambiguity is central to Beauvoir’s unique contribution and creates an interesting space for work on modalities of female embodiment, ⁸ though much corporeal feminist analysis has instead built on the work of male philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze (1994...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The importance of the ordinary
• 3 The situated self
• 4 Living men’s intrusion: part one
• 5 Living men’s intrusion: part two
• 6 It’s all part of growing up
• 7 Embodying intrusion
• 8 Inhabiting ourselves
• Afterword
• Index