gender-based violence

I wrote in Part I about the problem of a "neutral" women representing all victims of street harassment, and in this post I want to tell a story about how I've seen this happen in my own work. I will also provide strategies that anti-street harassment activists who conform (in various ways) to the "neutral" woman standard can constructively use their own visibility to better represent the breadth of street harassment's victims beyond the traditional archetype.

In my last post I wrote about a few of the problems I've observed regarding the way anti-street harassment blogs and the media construct "perpetrators" of harassment. In this post I want to build on those thoughts by bringing in their construction of "victims" as well. Collective Action for Safe Spaces asked in the comments of my first post of this series for an analysis of the roles race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and sexual identity play in street harassment, and I think this is a good place to dig into that more deeply. However, this will be a multi-part post because these issues require too much unpacking for just one entry.

You know, I was gonna start off with a standard intro, but that was mucking up my flow, so I had to switch it up in order to get unstuck. If you’ve spent some time around these parts, you may remember my original Bitch blogging series, a two-parter called On the Map, where I provided a slight peek at feminisms that exist around the globe. It’s been a year since that gig ended, and I am thrilled for the opportunity to return for a new series—this time about an issue I’ve been struggling with for two decades that has picked up steam in the mainstream: street harassment. I use the word "struggle" intentionally because of its multiple meanings, and if you continue to read Takin’ it to the Streets (which I dearly hope you do!), then you’ll soon find out what I mean.