Relevant

In wandering around the internet this morning, I find that the anti-street harassment movement is flourishing. There is new press coverage, a new book, new orgs... (several of which appear in my links to the right). It puts in me in the somewhat odd position of feeling like the history I'm working on is relevant. It also reinforces the current trajectory of the book, namely that what unites everything from campaigns for public restrooms to the Hollaback movement is a quest for privacy in public in the belief that privacy holds the key to (feeling) both safe and autonomous.

Look, there is even an accessible PSA that articulates a few of the issues raised in my work!

"Give Her a Kiss First Man"

(Before: Dovre Hall, Sons of Norway meeting hall)


I'm working on a piece about social change organizations that buy/build their own spaces. I want to look closely at the decision to take on (through building or buying and refurbishing) a building. What led the org to that decision? What did they try before making this commitment? How did they choose a location? What did they envision for the relationship of the organization and its new neighbors? Because I'm playing with some new ideas, I decided to play with the model for this part of the study and I'm comparing the San Diego YWCA (which built in the 1920s) to the San Francisco Women's Centers (which bought and refurbished a building in the Mission district in the late 1970s). It is kind of odd to compare different orgs, in different cities, in different time periods, but I'm hoping that leads me to think more deeply about the issues involved. Both orgs were committed to social change (though the SFWC were more upfront about this) but both also felt that there was a need to offer women a bevy of services now. I think that combination of social change and social service is important. What else will I find? Both are quite successful and not only manage to pay off their buildings, but keep them running for decades, adapting the physical space to meet the evolving mission of the organizations.

(After: The Women's Building)

The one piece that gives me pause in all this is that the SFWC people were incredibly self- reflective. The papers of The Women's Building are full of analyses of what a building would mean for the organization, what challenges they expected to face, how they might meet those, how they should work with their new neighbors alleviate any animosity that might come from them repurposing a building that reflected the older immigrant heritage of the area, etc. etc. Really? I feel sort of guilty. They did much of my work for me, it seems. I guess my job is to weigh in on what they got right but it feels odd to skip the first step that I usually face, which is just figuring what happened. It feels a bit like I am jumping straight into the deep on this one, hence the Monty Python reference in my title. Ah well, off I go to "stimulate the clitoris"...

Virtual Revenge -- "Hey, Baby"

And now we have this: a new video game in which a presumed-female (it is First Person Shooter, so you never actually see yourself, just how people act toward you) retaliates against the catcalls of a walk through an urban setting. Interesting to me is the number of comments that focus on the (poor) graphics and sound effects of the game -- not the premise. I fully expected full-on rants, not just one recommendation for a psychiatrist and one reference to the "punch" packed by "feminist atheists." Also missing are defenses of the male-characters' behavior or street commentary in general. Color me surprised.

Indeed, one strong point of the game may be its ability to unite multiple audiences in their disdain for it. If only we could all agree so readily that street harassment is a) real and b) bad. Research by Carol Brooks Gardner and others reveals that most men do not intend to harass, but rather are motivated by boredom or a desire to impress their buddies. Kudos to Ms. Magazine blogger Kate Whittle for concluding, "society needs to teach men that making women uncomfortable should not be a casual pastime."

"Excuse me, where is the toilet?"

I'm in the process of retraining my brain: from now on, I'm going with "toilets" as my word of choice. Yes, much of this comes from being awash in a sea (a somewhat annoying sea when one is using lots of indices and databases) of changing terminology for public facilities over the course of the 20th century, but it is more than that. First, as I've already gone on about in other posts, I think we should label facilities not by who should use them (if they are truly public facilities) but by their function/equipment, which I think "toilet" represents. Second, it pokes at American's delicate sensibilities about elimination by referring to the space by the fixture into which we eliminate (okay, it works less well for urinal-only users... suggestions?). My thinking is that until we (that would be the collective, societal "we") can get past our studied silence about this topic (the fact that people need to pee, poop, change tampons, etc), we aren't going to do a better job about providing truly public facilities for the public good. So, from now on, when I "need to excuse myself" (as my mother taught me to say), I'm going to ask for the toilet.

Old words/phrases to do away with:
comfort stations
facilities
bathroom
restroom
"men"/"women" (or the many equivalents)
lavatories
water closet or WC
convenience stations
washrooms
T(ea) room

Theorizing Social Space (week 4)

This week's grad class on "Women and Public Spaces" was pretty cool. The students struggled to get through Hiller and Hansons' The Social Logic of Space (2003), but with a whole lot of prompting/leading/interpreting on my part, they finally got it:

“The global form has not been conceived of or designed by any individual: it has arisen from the independent dynamics of a process that is distributed among a collection of individuals, ” (i.e. a “local rule”). (p. 36) So basically societal rules (etiquette, manners, tradition, custom) followed by discrete entities (individuals) ultimately create the structure of space because those rules are acted out in space.

The example that made it finally work for the students was the cloud of midges.... midges don't have some overarching entity that creates the cloud, rather it is created by each individual in their little space following shared rules (specifically to always keep another midge about so close). But that the midges on the other sides of the cloud are following the same rule creates the physical shape/space of the cloud. That means that the midge on one side is in a spatially concrete and socially bounded relationship with the midge on the other side, even though the two may never meet face to face. The model suggests that there is some coherent whole to social space… a knowable pattern (H & H call this a "morphic language"), a system in which all are connected.

I'm pretty sure our discussions for the next ten weeks are going to include the behavior of little bugs. Time to get out my fly swatter, lest the students wed themselves to this relatively simple and orderly model. Time for them to get good with multiple social systems, transpatial elements, conflicting categories, and other sources of messiness!

Time to revisit Elizabeth Grosz, methinks. Grosz suggests the connection of intersection or space and society is "a fundamentally disunified series of systems and interconnections, a series of disparate flows, energies, events or entities, and spaces, brought together or drawn apart in more or less temporary alignments." ("Bodies-Cities," in Sexuality and Space, Beatriz Colomina, ed., p. 248)

Homeless Republican Dude on a Bike

Last night I stopped off at a Mexican restaurant in Allen Park, a few miles south of campus. In the parking lot, as I was saying goodbye to the friend I had met there, a guy on a bike paused on the sidewalk nearby and did one of those "excuse me, sir (to my friend), can I ask you for 85 cents?"

Friend gave him a couple of bucks, but instead of leaving, the guy got all chatty. He told us about how his family had lost their house and now they were going to have to move back to Detroit with all the "niggers and crack heads." Then he switched gears and started analyzing us. "Are you married?" "That's a pretty lady you got there." "What is she... a teacher, a professor, a doctor?" (note how the guy did not approach or speak to me directly, rather he focused on my male companion and seemed to expect all answers to come through him)

We laughed and said yes ('cuz I kinda am all three). He asked again what "she" did and I answered him. Then he wanted to know where. Well, here I paused. Good girl common sense screamed "don't tell him where you work!" and so I paused and then less-than-artfully fudged with an "up the road" kind of answer.

He interpreted my hesitancy as fear connected to race, not gender. He teased me for being uncomfortable talking to a black face. Well, then my tongue really tied itself up in knots as I considered what I must look like to him. Huh. I look like a little privileged white chick (I was still in my teaching clothes). Oh wait. I am a privileged white chick. But, but, but... But what? "I'm uncomfortable because you're a man, not because you're black!" Gack.

Anyway, him declaring himself a Republican loosened my tongue again soon enough and I returned to my normal opinionated self, able to overcome my good girl training that taught me to never ever ever speak to a male stranger on the street. I have my suspicions that his political views were designed to show us for the bleeding heart white liberals we are, but it was a funny/sad moment to hear him declare his faith in McCain creating a job for him. And then he rolled away. And I told him to ride safely.

Go Jump in the Lake

I've been getting back into the self-defense manuals I collected while at the Library of Congress this fall. In the grand scheme of things, they will become part of a chapter (?) on advice literature aimed to guide women's behavior in public space. In the short term, they will be a part of my presentation for the Michigan Women's Studies Association meeting next week (yes, yes, I'm working on it now... really).

The whole self-defense craze in publishing (and classes as well, though I am not looking at those) came in the 1970s and 1980s. The literature divides pretty neatly into two camps: (1)feminist and feminist-influenced books that assert women's right to be in public space and right to react aggressively and proactively to anything there that makes them feel endangered and (2)conservative tracts that stress women's need to avoid public space (or at least avoid entering it alone) and practice a whole set inconvenient, limiting, accommodating, and, at times, degrading behaviors to keep themselves "safe" in the hostile world.

Here is just one example from the latter group, from a book entitled The Womanly Art of Self Defense: A Commonsense Approach, by Kathleen Keefe Burg (1979):

"Strolling by the lake. It sounds lovely, doesn't it? But what if you are walking down by a lakefront in a city like Chicago and someone attacks you? If you're a good swimmer (and it's not midwinter), your best escape route might be the water. Jump in and swim underneath the surface as far out as possible... In the water, you'll have a far better chance of survival than on dry land. be sure to stay underwater as long as possible. When you do have to surface, try to come up just enough to obtain sufficient air for you to go under again."

C'mon, what are you scoffing at? As the subtitle for the book clearly indicates, this is just pure common sense!

Why blog?

Well, there are scholarly outlets for the work I'm doing on public space, but I want a place where my personal experiences and half-baked ideas can play along with my more academic and intellectual interpretations. After all, I may be all credentialed up as a scholar, but I am still a woman and I still negotiate allegedly "public" spaces everyday from that vantage point -- I watch people, I get harassed, I wait in lines to pee, I go to marches and rallies, I follow the rules of engagement (mostly), and I wonder about why my world looks like it does and how that built environment shapes my perception of what is right, good, and possible...

I started doing this type of pondering on my "regular" blog, so I think I will copy those posts and paste them up here. Unfortunately, I'll lose the comments they generated, but you can go look for them on Yesterdaylooksgood, if you are interested.

What's wrong with this picture?

I've been reading some classic treatments of social behavior lately. On my lap this morning was Goffman's Behavior in Public Places (1963). The book (tho he persists in calling it a "report" for some reason) came out of his experiences observing patients in a California mental ward. Basically, watching all these people not following the conventions of society, convinced him that the rest of us actually do a pretty damn good job of following the "rules" of the societal game -- so much so that we don't even notice that we are doing it.



The only time the rules generally come to the surface, is when someone does something that breaks the rules -- and then they receive negative sanctions. In general, however, responses only go in that negative direction. In other words, we receive little direct positive response for doing the "right" thing, but people are free to call us out if we do the "wrong" thing.



Take this fine specimen spotted in an Ann Arbor coffee shop yesterday:

Yep, he is flossing his teeth. In public. And the price he had to pay for having the broken the rules was to be heckled, photographed, and blogged about by me. (Great, now I'm the enforcer of all things proper?!?!?)But what is it that he is really doing wrong? Well, part of the rules are that we are supposed to show up in public ready to play the game. Goffman refers to the combination of "controlled alertness" (behavior) and appropriate appearance as "interaction tonus." It is something that is supposed to be "on" all the time when in public, not something you put on when you get there or, as was the case with the flosser, you drop and readjust and then put back up while you are there.

Fortunately, there are spaces and props in public space that help us to maintain the fiction that our interaction tonus is our "natural" state. If we need to drop it temporarily or adjust it, we can retreat to the bathroom (a semi-public space with its own set of rules that allow for such activity) or hide behind a newspaper.

BTW, and this continues a conversation Steve Krause and I have had, I'm liking the Primo coffee shop in AA (on Liberty and Fifth). They have two walls of windows overlooking the street, it is warm (even if the fireplace is fake), and they serve their coffee in real and big ceramic mugs.

The only part that disappoints me is that they have single-occupancy (one-holers), gender segregated bathrooms. Riddle me that one, batman. I checked them out -- both bathrooms are the same. No gender specific equipment in either one. But labels matter, as evidenced by the man that showed up to use the restroom and found the men's locked. I had just checked the women's, knew it was empty (and the door was even open), and encouraged him to go on in (he had a sense of urgency about him...). He hesitated. I encouraged more. It took a promise that I would stand outside the door to get him in there. Now what was that all about? Was I there to protect him? Nah, there was a lock on the door. Nope, I was his "excuse" -- if he got strange looks coming out (as he might -- he was acting out of role by presenting as a man but coming out of a door marked "women" so others who were sticking to their appropriate roles would be playing by the rules to call him out -- just as I had done with the flosser), I was supposed to explain it away. As in, "it's okay, the other was full so I told him to go in there." And yes, that I am a woman is the largest part of what would have made that possible. If I'm a woman, and I gave him a pass to use the "women's" room, it must be "okay."

Posted by Zoe the Wonder Dog at Friday, January 25, 2008
Labels: academia, bathrooms, etiquette, flossing, public space

5 comments:
biscodo said...
You should be careful with that "price he has to pay for having broken the rules" photojournalism business - you never know when someone might have some look-what-you-did-in-public photos of you. I'm just sayin', ya know?I wholeheartedly agree with you about Single Occupancy Gendered Toilet (SOGT) segregation though. I'm tempted to make a personal crusade over it. Somewhere in public architecture standards of practice, there might be a reason for SOGTs. It might just be a reason to sell different signage. It might be a "boys tolerate dirty bathrooms, so let them wallow in it". It might be that builders/architects expect that retailers/customers expect there to be SOGTs (the "I-thought-that-you-thought-that-I-thought" problem). I know there's a nugget of a reason in there somewhere, it just needs finding.As far as your encounter with the man going into a woman-designated SOGT, I say it's both a Territory and Permission thing. It's clearly marked territory. Like a No Trespassing or Employees Only sign, we are taught from a young age to drive between the lines, stop at the red light, listen to what the police officer tells you, and don't go where you're not allowed to. The REASONS aren't understood (if at all) until later in life. But for children to be able to operate in the world, they are taught to take certain rules/cues as axiomatic. One of those is that the room labeled "women" is for women, and the one labeled "men" is for men. I'm wondering if the genders were turned around and you were a man, the waiting pisser was a woman, and the open SOGT was labeled "men", what the waiting pisser would have done? And what would your reaction have been to their choice to go or wait? and why? Riddle you that one too. As for Permission - yes, once you have the notion of marked territory (not the fire hydrant version, the Employees Only version), then you are giving him permission. And that permission is social liability protection for him ("it's not my fault, she said I could"). And going a step further, because that space is marked, you and your gender "own" it. Only you (women) can be perceived to release control of it. Same is true for socially perceived men's spaces.As far as SOGT permutations of will-they-won't-they... Are you looking for an assistant in some urban social experimentation? I work for very reasonable rates.

January 25, 2008 12:36 PM
Zoe the Wonder Dog said...
Yes, yes, I'll have to mind my p's and q's tomorrow night at that social gathering, lest I end up as blog fodder (can that be shortened to "blodder"?)I'm up for the experimenting, but we need more folks. Wonder if we can set W up for stealth video taping... It's always better with video. I think we should enlist some of those tweener sprogs our friends have too -- kids that are obviously not adults but do look like they are old enough to "know better". We could get a whole passle of people who appear on the boundaries of categories we use to organize society (gender, obviously, but also class, ability, etc.) and test just how the rules get applied... [mental wheels turning furiously]Think I can get an article out of it? :)

January 25, 2008 12:55 PM
TeacherPatti said...
I like Primo, too!Speaking of breaking societal rules...I was at Hillers the other day, and the lady in front of me had a few items on the belt, and was fussing with her purse and wallet. I figured that she had loaded all of her groceries, so I put mine on the belt. A few seconds later, she was all, "Wait! Stop!" and then fussed at the cashier, demanding, "What are you going to do about this???""This" was the fact that she had unloaded a few items and then stopped, leaving the rest of her items in the basket. Therefore, after I unloaded mine, they traveled merrily down the belt, thus preventing her from putting the rest of her stuff up there.After the lady left, I commented to the cashier on how the lady had broken the social norm and had no business fussing. Sorry folks, but the "rules" say that you unload all and THEN worry about money. Why? I don't know, but that is the rule. And see what happens when you break it? My lovely Guernsey Farms milk bumps against her nasty-ass generic brand.

January 25, 2008 8:23 PM
Daye said...
I love primo too!!! Izzy's piano lesson that is where I get my chai latte fix!!

January 27, 2008 1:37 PM
Warren said...
The enforcer of all things proper.