The Streets Belong to All of Us: Dismantling Violence in the Public Sphere
As protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement spread around the world, Simone Kolysh contextualises their years of research on street harassment as part of a larger call to dismantle violence in public spaces. In this piece, they reflect on how violence in the public sphere flows in and out of violence experienced in private spaces while identifying the common thread that runs between all forms of street harassment - a need for some to exert power over their chosen targets.
It feels as if I’ve tried to write this post a dozen times. My brain is quicksand as the pandemic rages on. The president of the United States deployed the military on its own people for protesting police brutality. Breonna Taylor would be 27 today, but she was murdered. My LGBTQ community, my activist community, my community of parents raising Black babies are suffering. There is every kind of connection to be made between global White supremacy, state violence, and everyday violence, which is what I address in my work.
Nearly ten years ago, I was a PhD student in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan in New York. In many ways, I was truly ignorant, but angry about facing catcalling on the daily. My students were sick of facing it too. It didn’t look like many scholars addressed catcalling in a nuanced way. It felt wrong to address it as an issue of patriarchy alone. It felt just as wrong to have a separate conversation about public harassment faced by LGBTQ people. What I knew from my lived experience is that many people dealt with catcalling and LGBTQ-directed aggression at the same time and that race, class, and space (to name a few) influenced their navigating of urban environments.
At first, I interviewed catcallers in Washington Square Park. They’d try to hit on me or recoil when I said that I was queer. Some were suspicious of my whiteness, which I did not understand, because I was ‘a Karen.’ Now I know that I was a threat to them and that speaking about sexual violence means facing that White people (women in particular) can bat an eyelash and a Black man can die. That some can rely on the police and that some will be raped by them and they will get away with it. That there are no answers to everyday violence.
But it is June and this is also about pride, which feels both cancelled and renewed. In the U.S., the infamous Stonewall riot was led by Black trans folks and people of color as an overdue middle finger to the police. Not much has changed regardless of what Ellen says. LGBTQ people are not protected, but targeted in the streets and in their homes. Sure, if a moneyed White cis gay man living in Chelsea has a problem, they may listen. Everybody else is on their own. Looks like the common thread is that the state does not care about people who are marginalized, people who face violence, because the state itself is violence.
Later in my research, I interviewed people who faced harassment, because, after all was said and done, what does it matter what catcallers think? Now, trauma spilled into the room day after day. Trauma of childhood sexual assault connected to the trauma of not being believed after coming out connected to the trauma of having some guy masturbate in front of you on the train. I built an oral history made of pain. Here’s what I learned: the streets belong to straight cis men and they want to keep it that way. Hitting on a woman and then calling her a dyke are two sides of the same coin. Flipping the coin is about having unlimited access to people straight cis men find appealing or exterminating gender and sexual ‘deviance,’ sometimes in the same toss, which is just another facet of compulsory heterosexuality. Ultimately, everyday violence like catcalling and LGBTQ-directed aggression is a show of power that initiators exert over their targets.
To be sure, straight cis men are not the only initiators of everyday violence. Cis people as a whole are a threat to those of us who are transgender. Many of us who are transgender do not even go outside, because cisgender people, including those in the LGBTQ community, are a danger. Many of us who are also bisexual or asexual are both invisible and targeted by straight and gay people alike. Many of us hide because there is nowhere to be queer, nowhere to live and love, nowhere to learn how to be LGBTQ and all right. Violence is not just about assault, but it’s about gentrification and lack of healthcare. It’s laws that want our marriages, children, and happiness gone. It is a lack of representation in media, politics, and our families. It is about race and religion and sex. For example, the current administration just rolled back healthcare protections for transgender people in the US and reiterated that gender=sex and that sex is binary and static from birth. This kind of thinking made law bolsters anti-trans rhetoric and actions and contributes to everyday violence, which looks like another two black trans women murdered this week.
It’s time to rethink the limited definitions of violence given to us by the Department of Justice (shouldn’t justice be placed in quotes here?) or the FBI. Our notions of violence must be expanded to include slights small and large, symbolic and physical, short-term and a lifetime worth of exhausting. My research finds that violence in the public sphere flows in and out of violence facing people at home, school, and the workplace. For example, a person may face domestic violence in their home, go outside and be catcalled incessantly throughout the day, be sexually harassed at school and slapped on their ass at work, and have to come home late while being followed. Everyday violence is a reality for many people, so common as to be utterly and completely dismissed, a nice trick played by the devils in power. Shouldn’t you focus on rape instead, they say. How can you abolish the police, who would help you, they say. Hell would freeze over on the day violent institutions like police would take care of rape victims, I say. Do not criminalize catcalling, I say. Burn it all down, I say. Then rebuild as if all of us have the right to move freely through the world without the fear of violence.
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Simone Kolysh is a feminist sociologist focusing on everyday violence in urban environments. They are an incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hood College in Maryland, U.S. and a fierce advocate for marginalized students and communities. Mx. Kolysh is also an agender mother of four, a lesbian powerhouse, and a scholar forever enamored with a revolutionary future.
