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
19th 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 15th
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 16th and 17th 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 17th
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 17th 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.
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 17th 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.
[3] Bowman, Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women, 519.
[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.
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