They Can See Us

I’ve always thought I had a good handle on love

Like it was something I could plan for, calculate,

Like an itinerary, or a map with a compass.

Almost so calculated that it was easy to avoid the thought of it,

See the multitudes of ain’t shit mothafuckas in the street and laugh

They never had a chance with a woman like me,

It’s part of what got under their skin.

It’s a part of their attraction to me - their need to dominate me just… being.

All these people moving in, moving through, moving out, of the mountains and valleys of my existence - But that, that was never love, or even came close. 

Love is present - constant throughout my journey without a map or a compass, no plans, wrong turns, calculations awry, nothing is handled, I am the golden rule, I am every plane of direction, I am reckless, tidal waves of me… being.

Like color theory, me next to you changes the primary landscape

And they can see us from far out. 

We are what it is to file away at the confines,

Shatter the perception of what it is to love in present tense.

Though my being is a tantrum and a solace - you understand my process.

Street Harassment & Primitive Accumulation

            This paper will explore the historical relationship between primitive accumulation and contemporary street harassment. Primitive accumulation and its subsequent forms of antagonisms set up the conditions for gender roles that continue to oppress women and break female solidarity. By attempting to control and violate our bodies and minds, men demean us by openly verbalizing and asserting that our existence is for their pleasure or use.  When the female body moves through public space, she is subconsciously considered to be outside of her prescribed area, the domestic, where the process of women’s unwaged labor as reproducers and homemakers is set to take place. Our presence in public space signifies our independence from domestic work, and thus we must be reduced to sexual objects when we enter it. Men’s gaze, words, and actions, tell us that we should see ourselves the way they see us, as objects to be used. Our use is prescribed to us on a daily basis, it is reinforced in our psyches, and some of us believe it. But the concept of ‘use’ is exactly what surfaces the connection between the process of primitive accumulation and street harassment. Primitive accumulation is a “social system of production that does not recognize the production of the worker as a social-economic activity, and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or personal service, while profiting from the wageless conditions of the labor involved.”[1] In this historical transition to capitalism, the female body was appropriated as a machine to be used and controlled; the female mind was shaped to deny her own thoughts, desires, and agency.

       The effects of these 19^th century transversal antagonisms in our contemporary society are real; they have penetrated the culture through the “creation of homogenous bipolarized fields of subjectivity.”[2] As this subjectivity is reproduced, certain behaviors are normalized, and many forms of street harassment, sexual assault, and other gender based violence fall into this cycle of value production.

       I will begin by redefining contemporary street harassment.  Cynthia Grant Bowman defines street harassment as “the harassment of women in public places by men who are strangers to them,”[3] in Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women. My critique of this definition lies in that this is a gender binary-based understanding of street harassment, which does not include the diversity of ways gender-based violence manifests. These forms vary, depending on a number of prejudices, xenophobias, and/or intersectionalities including race and sexual orientation/presentation. This paper focuses on the relationship between women in public and street harassers, but acknowledges the complexity of forms of gender-based violence and the need to firmly denounce all forms of such violence.

            I also part with Cynthia Grant Bowman’s definition of street harassers only as ‘strangers’. Because the focus is on street harassment in an urban environment, many women do not drive vehicles. This means that they must walk regularly in and through their neighborhood in what is often called a ‘daily round’[4]. Women walk to and from the train or the bus, to the bodega, the grocery store, or the pharmacy. This presence moving through public streets is a very different process than a suburban woman who drives to each location and enters a private institution. Under urban circumstances, many times women’s street harassers are repeat offenders, often occupying the same public spaces as a woman’s daily round. This means that not only must a woman deal with street harassment from strangers, but that she must also make a choice with whether to respond, and deal with the repercussions from someone she very well may see again in the neighborhood.

          

          So perhaps street harassment can be defined as the gender-based harassment of a person who moves through public spaces. This harassment can vary from sounds, to words, physical touching, and sexual assault. It can occur from strangers or familiar harassers. Legally, sexual harassment “has entered the law as a form of sex discrimination forbidden under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,”[5] which demarcated the acceptable social interactions between people of different gender presentations in the workplace. In the 50 years since it was enacted, street harassment is still a “phenomenon that has not generally been viewed by academics, judges, or legislators as a problem requiring legal redress, either because these mostly male observers have not noticed the behavior, or because they have considered it trivial and thus not within the proper scope of the law.”[6] With this in mind, I would like to examine a decisive turn in history where so many socio-economic relationships changed in ways that continue to reverberate in the contemporary moment. This is what Silvia Federici calls the “transition to capitalism”[7] and of particular interest is how the process of primitive accumulation set up the conditions for the patriarchal family and signified the loss of women’s control of the commons.

            Federici explains that “Primitive accumulation” is the term that Marx uses, in Capital Vol. 1, to characterize the historical process upon which the development of capitalist relations was premised… However, my analysis departs from Marx…Whereas Marx examines primitive accumulation from the viewpoint of the waged male proletariat and the development of commodity production, I examine it from the viewpoint of the changes it introduced in the social position of women and the production of labor power.”[8] Federici examines the ways in which that social position was restructured, with methods including the subjugation of women’s labor to the “reproduction of the workforce” and the “mechanization of the proletarian body,” as well as the exclusion of women in waged work.[9] Caliban and the Witch delves further into understanding the connection between the “body in their applications to an understanding of the history of capitalist development.”[10]

            Federici examines a 15^th century political project, which decriminalized rape, giving male proletarian workers unlimited access to proletarian women’s bodies, creating a sharp rift in their solidarity. “The gang rape of proletarian women became a common practice which the perpetrators would carry out openly and loudly at night, in groups of two to fifteen, breaking into their victims’ homes, or dragging their victims through the streets without any attempt to hide or disguise themselves.”[11] This physical violence is just one of the manifestations of a changed power relationship between proletarian men and proletarian women. This was only the beginning of “violence by means of which male-centered systems of exploitation have attempted to discipline and appropriate the female body, demonstrating that women’s bodies have been the main targets, the privileged sites, for the deployment of power-techniques and power relations.”[12]

            The transition to capitalism included “the expropriation of European workers from their means of subsistence, and the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans,”[13] which each deserves a lengthy critical look beyond the scope of this paper. However, a method of primitive accumulation often overlooked was the “transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work force.”[14] Federici examines how, in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, policies encouraging population growth begin to take shape. Jean Bodin was quoted as saying “the strength of the commonwealth consists of men.”[15] These policies surfaced at the time when mercantilism was at its height and nation-state formation was underway. This created a paradigm of the female body as “raw materials, workers and breeders for the state… laws were passed that put a premium on marriage and penalized celibacy… the family was given a new importance as the key institution providing for the transmission of property and the reproduction of the work-force… intervention of the state in the supervision of sexuality, procreation, and family life… witch hunts literally demonized any form of birth control and non-procreative sexuality.”[16] What is most important to take from this is that both enslaved black women in the colonies and European proletarian women were “turned into an instrument for the reproduction of labor and the expansion of the work-force, treated as a natural breeding machine, functioning according to rhythms outside of women’s control.”[17]

            With this came the devaluation of women’s work and the relegation of women to domesticity. By the end of the 17^th century, “the assumption was gaining ground that women should not work outside the home, and should engage in ‘production’ only in order to help their husbands… [Arguing] that any work women did at home was ‘non-work.’” This denied the agency of women, taking the female body and prescribing and mechanizing its purpose, and removing it from public space. This differs greatly from feudal organization in which “’collective relations prevailed over familial ones’ allowing for great solidarity to fester among serf women.”[18] With the creation of the patriarchal family under capitalism, this ceased to exist, and the women who resisted were denounced as “sexually aggressive shrews or even as ‘whores’ and ‘witches.’”[19]
            This restructuring also speaks to the cultural perception of the ‘pure woman,’ whose primary role is wife and mother. The pure woman is the mechanization of her body, which exists more as a vessel that reproduces labor power than an autonomous human being. Contemporary examples of the effects of this restructuring are widespread, and the link between misogynist violence and the absence of a pure woman perception is rooted in the political restructuring of gender relationships that had occurred by the end of the 17^th century.
            Domesticity is a private space, and the family became a small economic unit with the male patriarch as the owner of both property and people. Borders between public and private land were more clearly demarcated, and public space became a place where workers moved to and from their home, rather than a space that was occupied as a commons.

            The ways in which Silvia Federici examines the architecture of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy can be examined through the contemporary urban phenomenon of street harassment. When we look at how deliberate this restructuring was, we can begin to see its relationship to its contemporary effects. Street harassment can be examined in relation to the “Perception that every woman is merely a sexual object, [this] results when stereotypes surrounding the ‘pure woman’ – wife and mother – are exhausted. A woman who works and has no need for masculine protection becomes the antithesis of the ‘pure woman’ fantasy… a circle of hatred is closed and violence is unleashed: a situation that moves from the body to territory.”[20]

            In what ways could the roots of the restructuring of gender relationships under white supremacist capitalist patriarchy be exemplified through street harassment?  This relationship between body and territory is important. The presence of the female body in public continues to invoke a deployment of power techniques, which make it known that this body has a specific purpose that is prescribed to it.  The contradiction in street harassment lies in that the female body must exist for the entertainment of men, or to allow ones body to become public, while simultaneously reinforcing that public space is not a space that the female body should be allowed to occupy. “Any incident of harassment… reminds women that they are vulnerable to attack and by demonstrating that any man may choose to invade a woman’s personal space, physically or psychologically, if he feels like it. Thus, street harassment forms part of a whole spectrum of means by which men objectify women and assert coercive power over them, one which is even more invidious because it is so pervasive and appears, deceptively, to be trivial.”[21]

            What is troubling about the triviality with which this topic is discussed is that the psychological effects and emotional distress of street harassment is damaging, but not recognized as such. It disrupts women’s image of self. “Street harassment reduces women to sexual objects. The comments and conduct of a harasser then force this perception upon his target. One woman explained: “…There is more involved in this encounter than their mere fragmented perception of me. They could, after all, have enjoyed me in silence… But I must be made to know that I am a ‘nice piece of ass’; I must be made to see myself as they see me.” [22] In this way, street harassers attempt to reproduce their subjectivity in the minds of the women they harass, in hopes that they will believe it and succumb to the subservient status of an object to be used. 

           Street harassment becomes a legitimate concern to geographical mobility through urban space.[23] Women tend to be conscious of what spaces or circumstances may be particularly unsafe for them, especially after having long term experiences with street harassment. “Unlike men, women passing through public areas are subject to “markers of passage” that imply either that women are acting out of role simply by their presence in public or that a part of their role is in fact to be open to the public. These ‘markers’ emphasize that women, unlike men, belong in the private sphere, the sphere of domestic rather than public responsibility.”[24] This again brings us to the conclusion that the female body is not welcome to move with autonomy outside of domesticity, and confirms that street harassment is rooted in a historical restructuring of gender relationships which places women in an inferior role and then shames them for occupying space.

            Through the dense work of Silvia Federici, we learn that so much of our history as women has been taken from us, that our greatness continues to go unrecognized and unappreciated. We learn that the ways gender relationships are expressed in the contemporary does not derive from an ahistorical or natural phenomenon that places men above women in terms of strength and leadership, but rather from an intentionally directed political project in which a massive amount of generational exploitation could be disguised. Street harassment is one of the many methods in which rape culture rears its ugly head. It damages our self-esteem, makes public space an unsafe place, and continues to keep us from holding healthy and loving relationships with one another. Through an understanding of how these conditions developed over the last five hundred years, we can act in a way that reaches outside of the confines of these hierarchies to a world that respects all people’s bodies, minds, and choices.             

Works Cited 

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch. (p. 8-96). Autonomedia.  

González Rodríguez, S. (2012). The femicide machine. (p. 34). Semiotext(e). 

Grant Bowman, C. (1993). Street harassment and the informal ghettoization of women. Harvard Law Review, 106(3), 518-580.  

Guattari, F. (2008). The three ecologies. (p. 21). Continuum Impacts. 

Logan, J., & Molotch, H. (2007). Urban fortunes: The political economy of place. (p. 103). University of California Press.  

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[3] Bowman, Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women, 519.
 [4] Logon, Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, 103.
[1] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 8.[2] Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 21.
[5] Bowman, Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women, 518.
[6] Bowman, Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women, 519.
[7] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 4.[8] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 12.[9] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 12.[10] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 15.
[11] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 47.
[12] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 15.
[13] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 63.
[14] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 63.
[15] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 87.
[16] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 88.
[17] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 88.
[18] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 25.
[19] Federici, Caliban and The Witch, 96.
[20] González Rodríguez, The Femicide Machine, 34.[21] Bowman, Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women, 540.
[22] Bowman, Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women, 538.
[23] Bowman, Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women, 539.
[24] Bowman, Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women, 527.