Space, Time and Rhythms: Introducing a Mobilities Framework
Mind the Gender Gap: A Mobilities Perspective of Sexual Harassment on the London Underground
ISBN: 978-1-83753-029-8, eISBN: 978-1-83753-026-7
Publication date: 25 October 2024
Abstract
This chapter introduces the conceptual framework that I use throughout the rest of the book. Taking a mobilities perspective and focussing on space, temporalities and rhythm, I use this framework to develop our understanding of the way in which sexual harassment is feared, anticipated, experienced, negotiated and remembered in the complex setting of public transport. It problematises the way in which these experiences are often viewed as static and contained (both literally and figuratively), despite happening on the move and blurring time–space boundaries. Applying this framework to women’s empirical accounts that are presented in subsequent chapters offers a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the before, during and after of a specific incident of sexual harassment.
Keywords
Citation
Lewis, S. (2024), "Space, Time and Rhythms: Introducing a Mobilities Framework", Mind the Gender Gap: A Mobilities Perspective of Sexual Harassment on the London Underground (Feminist Developments in Violence and Abuse), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 39-50. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83753-026-720241003
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2024 Siân Lewis
License
This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this work (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
Might there be hidden, secret, rhythms, hence inaccessible movements and temporalities? No, because there are no secrets. Everything knows itself, but not everything says itself, publicises itself. Do not confuse silence with secrets! That which is forbidden from being said, be it external or intimate, produces an obscure, but not a secret, zone. (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 17)
The order … does not arise from intimacy and connectedness, but rather from some of the very things more often presumed to bring about conflict and violence – transiency, fragmentation, isolation, atomization, and indifference among people. (Baumgartner, 1988, p. 134)
In their review of research that explores sexual crimes in transit in the global North, Ding et al. (2020) show that the few studies that examined the relationship between attributes of the physical and social environment of transit settings and sexual crimes did so using police records, google street view, geographical information systems (GIS) and regression models (Ceccato, 2017; Ceccato & Paz, 2017; Ceccato & Uittenbogaard, 2014) and focussed on the role of environmental factors such as lighting, visibility, seclusion, dirty environments and proximity to alcohol sales or drunk people. A theme that weaves through much existing research is the application of routine activity theory to understand sexual assault on or near transit (Cohen & Felson, 1979; Felson et al., 2021; Lersch & Hart, 2023; Savard, 2018), thus offering solutions located within the realm of situational crime prevention, or crime prevention through environmental design. Though these approaches have been invaluable in linking incidents of sexual harassment with space and time, locating hostile environments, and identifying an axis of vulnerability, they can be limited in their scope. For example, routine activity theory posits that crime happens because of the convergence of a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian. However, on a crowded bus or Tube, there are arguably numerous capable guardians to intervene – and yet sexual harassment is rife. Here, in the husk of the carriage, in the spaces between strangers, the atmosphere is thick and laden with an intangible substance that both constitutes and regulates social interactions and acts to invisibly disarm and confuse normative explanations. These, I think, are Lefebvre’s rhythms, and as he describes above – they are obscure, but they need not be a secret.
Throughout this book, by using a mobilities framework with a focus on rhythms, the invisible and unseen elements of these experiences can be articulated and revealed and can offer insights that deepen our knowledge of sexual harassment in transport environments. The focus of this chapter is to outline an in-depth mobilities perspective and the conceptual framework that will be used in subsequent chapters to make sense of women’s experiences of sexual harassment on transport. This includes operationalising sociological understandings of mobilities, space, rhythms and temporalities. These conceptual dimensions are present throughout the book and inevitably overlap with one another; however, Chapter 4 (‘before’) focusses on women’s experiences of navigating gendered urban space; Chapter 5 (‘during’) focusses on how experiences of sexual harassment on transport are shaped by mobilities and rhythms; Chapter 6 (‘after’) looks at how the impact of sexual harassment changes over time. As such, I will provide an overview of these concepts and how they will be operationalised in the corresponding order.
Space
As discussed in the previous chapter, sexual harassment has been theorised as a normalised part of everyday life for women in public spaces. Being a victim of sexual harassment can cause women to experience high levels of fear and vulnerability, leading them to undertake adaptive strategies that restrict their access to and enjoyment of public space (Boyer, 2022). Included in this ‘safety-work’ (Vera-Gray, 2018) is the preparation and planning involved before leaving the house (Kearl, 2010), and the regular assessment of surroundings for perceived risk. Common examples of this include choice of attire, avoiding certain areas, avoiding being alone (particularly after dark), using public transport instead of walking, or using private transport instead of public transport (Fileborn, 2016; Nicholls, 2017). Interestingly, those who did not undertake adaptive strategies, such as avoiding certain areas to avoid sexual harassment described making a conscious and active decision not to let the fear of male violence impede on their choices (Kearl, 2010). It was not that they had not considered it − it was that they had thought about it and, in an act of resistance, claimed their right to public space. Indeed, Koskela (2010) insists that fear should not be seen and portrayed as an essential female quality and the only experience women have when moving through public space. In her work ‘Fear and its Others’, she takes a social geographical approach and focusses on women’s boldness and defiance in public space:
Although it is probably true that all women feel fear sometimes in some situations, the feelings are rarely either/or. Even if part of the boldness is denial of fear the feeling of boldness can still be real. It could be taken seriously and respected as such. For some women, boldness can be seen as an absence of fear, an indicator of confidence, and not an attitude defined in terms of standing-up to fear. What if we try to look at this side of the story: How does it feel not to be afraid? How do we describe women laughing when they meet men down a dark alley? Can we speak about women saying it never occurred to them that they ought to be afraid? Can we talk about young women … who say that they own the city they live in? (Koskela, 2010, p. 305)
This book focusses on incidents of sexual harassment, and as such, many of the stories in the book are laced with fear – anxieties brought to the forefront by the subject matter. But bearing Koskela’s question in mind helps illustrate what these intrusions are disrupting: women’s boldness, a sense of freedom and ownership of the city. It also encourages us to avoid inadvertently naturalising female fear as the normal or only response and makes room for the complexity of women’s gendered interactions in public space.
To explore these dynamics in public space, we must first conceptualise space as alive, eventful and in flux, rather than static and apolitical. In Lefebvre’s (1991) work The Production of Space, he highlights the conceptual fragmentation that exists around the concept, calling for a reconciliation of physical space (nature), mental space (formal abstractions about space) and social space (the space of human interaction). Conceptualising space by combining these modalities allows for an intellectual approach that challenges dominant ideas of space as fixed. These notions tend to ignore how space itself is perceived and conceived, and how that can determine the interactions that occur within it. Similarly, feminist geographer Doreen Massey (1984, 2013) forwarded the idea that space is dynamic and important in the way in which we organise our lives and how society interacts. She argues that space is the dimension of multiplicity, presenting us with the question of the social and is not so much a physical locality as relations between human beings: the product of our relations with each other. I find these conceptualisations of space useful for underscoring the importance of the social space of the London Underground. It is, to use Lefebvre’s (1991, p. 87) words, a space that constitutes ‘great movements, vast rhythms, immense waves – these all collide and “interfere” with one another …’. Knowing this, it is difficult to dispute the idea that it is generative and active in shaping the way sexual harassment is perpetrated and experienced in its milieu.
In the previous chapter, I described the London Underground as a semi-public space. Urban environments are composed of various spatial domains, often categorised as public, semi-public/semi-private and private places, varying from free to limited and exclusive access. Historically, public space has been observed as ‘open space’. However, in the context of neoliberal urbanism (which sees the application of neoliberal economic principles applied to the urban environment), cities are becoming increasingly restructured around the proponents of privatisation, gentrification and commodification. As such, semi-public spaces that are managed privately or publicly-privately, are increasing (Nissen, 2008; Pratt, 2017). Despite its name, public transport sits within this categorisation. Both public and semi-public spaces can be considered the realms of unfocussed interactions between anonymous strangers (Goffman, 1971). In her book on street harassment, Brooks Gardner (1995, p. 44) describes these places as:
[…] regions that are simultaneously everyone’s and no one’s, to which all are theoretically allowed access. Yet they are also sites for mockery and humiliation, the threat of interpersonal violence, verbal insults and injuries, avoidances and shunnings and the mere withholding of the rituals of civility.
This is significant, as despite many spaces being labelled as public and supposedly demonstrating freedom and access to all, they are often exclusionary to certain sectors of the population, whether due to discomfort, intimidation, or fear of real danger. Thereby these places remain public but are not freely utilised by everyone equally. Mitchell (1995) writes about how historically, women, men of ethnic minorities, and sexual dissidents have had to fight for access to the public sphere. This concept of public spaces as sites of struggle and exclusion is well-documented and often dominates urban politics, with particular focus on marginalised groups such as people who are homeless (Doherty et al., 2008), young people (Malone & Hasluck, 1998), sex workers (Hubbard, 2012), LGBTQ persons (Binnie & Skeggs, 2004; Hubbard, 2001), ethnic minorities (Peters, 2011), people with a lower income (Bancroft, 2002) and women (Massey, 1994; Wilson, 2001). Wilson (1991, p. 80) argues that whilst women have flourished in the city, they are still negotiating the contradictions of urban spaces and are not ‘full citizens in the sense that they have never been granted full and free access to the streets’. Therefore, sexual harassment forms part of the wider (gender) politics of urban space. As a semi-public space, the Underground is theoretically accessible to anyone who can pay the travel fare. And yet, incidents of sexual harassment on the network implicate women’s experiences of access to this space, making it fraught with negotiations of the right to be private in public. Whilst critiquing the physical nature of the space of the Underground is integral to understanding the (gendered) behaviours that occur within it, I contend that to understand sexual harassment in a peripatetic environment or ‘on the move’, a more appropriately nuanced conceptual framework is needed.
Mobilities: Rhythm and Friction
Drawing on a mobilities perspective to understand sexual harassment ‘on the move’ in a transit environment is highly fitting and yet this framework has scarcely been applied. Here, I will introduce a broader mobilities perspective, and then connect this with what it reveals about gendered access to the city. The mobilities paradigm or ‘mobility turn’ (Urry, 2000) in the social sciences sought to address the complex yet neglected role that mobilities, or the movement of people and things, play in the (re)configuration of social interactions and the social world. Bringing together social science and transport approaches, mobilities studies often connect the concepts of time and space, aiming to challenge the ‘static’ nature of social sciences, and the lack of social consideration of transport planners (Larsen et al., 2006). This approach drew attention to the significance of travel, automobility (Lumsden, 2015; Urry, 2004, 2006) and the practices of public transport in urban spaces (Bissell, 2018; Urry, 2007). It also asks us to attend to the affective and atmospheric experience of movement and transport (Cresswell, 2010). As an essential part of the urban fabric of any city, public transportation systems enable the movement of people and link activity in the rest of the city – connecting work, leisure and home. Yet despite this, Larsen et al. (2006, p. 3) argue that travel has (outside of mobilities studies) been seen as ‘… a neutral set of technologies and processes …’ and that consequently the analysis of social interactions and encounters that occur when on the move has been largely neglected.
In relation to urban mobilities, modernity caused a change in how people travelled, and therefore how they interacted whilst on the move, creating ‘new mobilities’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006) and sociabilities (Bissell, 2010). In a nutshell, modernisation accelerated the pace of life in the city. A key component of this was the Victorian railway, which mechanised mobility and formed a ‘new connectedness’ as masses of people were able to move more freely through extended time and space. As well as this evolved accessibility, rail travel created new sites of sociability where large numbers of strangers were impelled together in an enclosed space (Bissell, 2010; Urry, 2007), and bodies in carriages became ‘anonymised parcels of flesh’, passively avoiding each other (Thrift, 1996). The carriage moving rapidly through space was also a source of anxiety, forcing travellers to viscerally feel the fast-paced individuality of the city. The railway carriage acted to embody the urban experience of simultaneous confinement and exposure (Barrow, 2015).
During this period, limitation on mobility was a crucial means of the subordination and exclusion of women from the public realm. The introduction of rail travel had a substantial impact on women’s mobility and access to public space as it shifted the boundaries of acceptability. Waiting for and being on transport provided a legitimate purpose to be in public space, and women were able to interact and engage with strangers, a privilege that was previously reserved for men. However, Victorian rail compartments were both public and highly intimate spaces and these new spatial and social dynamics, where men and women who were strangers found themselves in close proximity (Urry, 2007), led to intense cultural anxiety and moral panic around women’s sexuality, vulnerability and the potential for sexual violence. This was particularly true for women travelling alone who were often regarded as inviting sexual attention (Barrow, 2015). It is important to consider that whilst the introduction of rail travel increased mobilities and provided a legitimate purpose for women to be in the public arena, the lack of safety associated with the space of the rail carriage and reports that emphasised the danger for female travellers, acted as a paternalistic form of social control, curtailing women’s movements, and discouraging them from public space.
As well as the development of rail travel, over time there have been significant advancements in both gender relations and the nature of mobility. The development of the motorcar and automobility has had a significant impact on the design and everyday experience of cities (Gottdeiner & Hutchinson, 2006) and personal mobility. Graves-Brown (2000, p. 157) states that the car can be viewed as a ‘mobile personal space’ that is not to be challenged or invaded. As Lumsden (2009, p. 45) understands it, ‘the private car is an instrument for exercising our right to unrestricted individual motion’. Unequal access to automobility has been considered, most commonly in relation to social class (Gartman, 2004), and work that has explored the relationship between gender and automobility has focussed on the increased mobility and freedom from the domestic sphere that the car has provided for women (Wosk, 2001). Yet others have argued that women have historically had limited access to automobility, with car ownership being perceived as a masculine venture, with male journeying to work prioritised over women’s journeys to service the domestic requirements of a household (Lumsden, 2009). This has meant that both historically and in the present day, on a global scale, women are more dependent on public transport than men (Dobbs, 2005; Levin, 2019).
The dialogue around women in public and liminal arenas such as transport has also evolved significantly over time. It has become less preoccupied with identifying areas of exclusion and more attention has been given to how women negotiate and navigate these spaces. Rather than being confined to the domestic sphere, women’s increased journeying and nomadic tendencies have developed (Tilley & Houston, 2016), and access and relative safety have improved over time. Yet the persistence and prevalence of sexually harassing behaviour within transport spaces demonstrates that it is still structured in a way (spatially and socially) that is conducive to these behaviours being perpetrated. I contend that these intersections of space and mobilities and their role in shaping gendered experiences can be explored more comprehensively by using the concept of rhythms.
Earlier, I mentioned Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space. His work on rhythms or Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004), is lesser known, and yet ‘This little book does not conceal its ambition. It proposes nothing less than to found a science, a new field of knowledge [savoir]: the analysis of rhythms; with practical consequences’ (p. 3). Simply written, Rhythmanalysis ‘deepens the study of everyday life’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 73). The concept of rhythms will be applied throughout this book to explore various aspects of sexual harassment on the Underground, including how women experience and move through urban space; how the rhythms of the city and the Underground mean sexual harassment is perpetrated and experienced in particular ways at particular times, and how rhythms and temporalities intersect in the remembering of sexual harassment. Lefebvre (2004) states that ‘Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’ (p. 15), and this is nowhere more explicit than in a bustling urban space, especially a transport system like the Underground. These rhythms are present in a multiplicity of forms; they can be biological, psychological, social and mechanical; corporeal, natural, institutional and collective, differing in characteristics such as frequency, intensity and regularity. They can be intermittent, volatile and surging and they continuously interact, harmonise and clash with one another (Edensor, 2010). These collections of rhythms ‘… form the polyrhythmic ensembles from which spatiotemporal consistencies and places emerge’ (Schwanen et al., 2012, p. 2066), essentially constituting the ambiance and feel of a place, which in turn impacts the social dynamics and interactions that occur within it. As Highmore (2002) considers, rhythm analysis has the ability to reveal the politics of pace.
Lefebvre’s (1991) interest in rhythms is already apparent in his previous work as he describes spaces as: ‘great movements, vast rhythms, immense waves – these all collide and ‘interfere’ with one another …’ (p. 87). In Elements of Rhythmanalysis, he expands on the notion of space as dynamic. Indeed, rhythms fundamentally challenge the notion that space is fixed and demonstrate that the urban field is in motion, rather than a mute staging. It is both transforming and transformative. This brings us to Lefebvre’s insistence that first and foremost rhythmanalysis demands that time and space be regarded as interrelated in order to not only deal with the spatial, but also the temporal order of everyday life. As Mulicek et al. (2015, p. 116) elaborate ‘the city can be defined not only through its spatial attributes but also through its affiliation to a particular spatiotemporal system’. This linking of time and space removes the idea of self-contained moments and establishes that rhythms cannot be detached from one another and should be observed and listened to ‘within wholes’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 24). This holds relevance when observing how the activity of the city above impacts the rhythms of the Underground network. For example, during the Monday to Friday ‘working week’, the flow and temporality of capital takes priority, and business hours create ‘rush hours’ on the Tube network, that possess an entirely different ambiance and normative mode of behaviour in comparison to the ‘night tube’ on weekends, where sociabilities and rhythms are largely impacted by the night-time economy. These spatial, mobile and temporal dimensions intersect and impress on how sexual harassment is perpetrated and experienced. In the same vein, when considering the dominant rhythms that regulate everyday city life, urban public transport schedules are an example of institutionally inscribed urban cyclical time (Mulicek et al., 2015; Schwanen et al., 2012). The rhythms of the London Underground are dominated by attributes of rationalisation, punctuality and calculability, which Simmel (1997, p. 177) recognised as necessary to avoid ‘inextricable chaos’ (you only have to envision London on the day of Tube strikes or delays to know this holds true). These regular and repetitive rhythms of the Underground allow a sense of predictability that is highly valued by commuters and creates a sense of certainty or everyday ‘ontological predictability and security’ (Edensor, 2010, p. 8). Yet this rationalism and functionalism exist in constant tension with the corporeal rhythms of the autonomous individuals that move through the system, with an ever-present risk of disjuncture.
Lefebvre puts great emphasis on corporeality, claiming that capturing, expressing and understanding urban rhythms is always done through the body. He states that ‘at no moment have the analysis of rhythms and the rhythmanalysis project lost sight of the body’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 67). He emphasises the necessity to always locate the body as a first point of reference and ‘the tool for subsequent investigations’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 12). As Prior (2011, p. 205) considers, rhythmanalysis: ‘… locates the body as a constant reference point for the alliances and conflicts of rhythms – not just the anatomical, physiological body, but the body as being-in-the-world, perceiving, acting, thinking and feeling’. Essentially, Lefebvre (2004) suggests that the ‘rhythmanalyst’ uses their body as a ‘metronome’ (p. 19), a continuous position through which rhythms are known and expressed. With regard to polyrhythmia, that is, multiple rhythms, it is significant to consider biological rhythms and how they interact with broader or external social rhythms: or, how biological rhythms are impacted by the social environment and vice-versa. Because rhythms are multitudinous and coexist, they can be aligned, or they can be in discord. Lefebvre suggests that the body can be used to recognise both when rhythms are operating in their natural state or in harmony (eurythmia) and when there is a disruption and breaking apart of rhythms (arrhythmia). The second is perhaps an easier task, as he considers: ‘we are only conscious of most of our rhythms when we begin to suffer from some irregularity’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 77). A recognition of the role of bodily rhythms and their interaction with external rhythms is significant in advancing debates on the negotiation and impact of sexual harassment. For example, when looking at the immediate impact of sexual harassment, rhythms reveal how women’s actions (e.g. ‘freezing’) are not simply a ‘natural’ corporeal response out of fear but are also implicated by uncertainty as to what is happening to them and the anticipation of other peoples’ behaviour within a particular space. This is exactly what I experienced when the man masturbated at me on the bus (described in the opening vignettes). Lefebvre’s acknowledgement of the coexistence of biological and social rhythms demonstrates the embodied relationship between individuals and the spatiotemporal nature of the city. The body is the point of contact for these rhythms and often the site of collision and arrhythmia, as demonstrated by the women’s stories presented in this book.
Since the ‘mobilities turn’, a significant body of work has focussed on or recognised the importance of immobilities, or how mobilities can be limited and disrupted (Adey, 2006; Hannam et al., 2006). Hubbard and Lilley (2004) proffer that where there is speed, there also exists interruptions and slowness, and Sheller and Urry (2006) consider how feminist work has been significant in drawing attention to inequalities in mobility (Ahmed, 2004; Morley, 2000). As Skeggs (2004, p. 49) states: ‘Mobility and control over mobility both reflect and reinforce power. Mobility is a resource to which not everyone has an equal relationship’. Therefore, a lack of, or disruption to mobility and access can act to reinforce social exclusion. As the stories presented in this book show, sexual harassment often forced women to slow down or restrict their mobilities, therefore this is an important notion to consider further.
A concept drawn from mobilities studies that is useful to conceptualise immobility, or a slowing down of mobility, is Cresswell’s (2010) notion of friction. In his work on the politics of mobility, Cresswell deconstructs mobility into six parts: motive force, velocity, rhythm, route, experience and friction. Here, rhythm and friction are both recognised as important components. Friction is described as a social and cultural phenomenon that can be lived and felt when our mobility is prevented or slowed down, both involuntarily and out of choice. He offers examples of encountering suspicion at border control or stopping to take in a scenic view. Mobilising the concept of friction with regard to sexual harassment on the Underground, this notion of slowing down holds relevance, as women’s mobilities are often interrupted or disrupted, rather than stopped altogether, leading to ‘blockages’ or ‘coagulations’ (Adey, 2006; Marston et al., 2005) in mobility, which can cause anxiety and frustration. Cresswell (2014) also discusses how those with power can slow down or restrict the mobility of others by increasing friction. This is significant to the discussion in Chapter 4 of women’s freedom and ability to engage freely in the city without the risk of male intrusion, as (fear of) sexual harassment is often experienced as a friction and interference with both women’s ideas of and actual freedom and movement in the city. Friction is also used throughout Chapter 5 to demonstrate how experiencing sexual harassment can cause a slowing down of women’s urban mobilities. The concept of friction illustrates how, as discussed above, women’s mobilities often remain punctuated with fear and disruption. However, these notions of mobility are not complete without a consideration of the temporal dynamics at play.
Temporalities
In this book, temporalities are significant in our lens of analysis to expand knowledge of the occurrences of sexual harassment on transport. I want to first draw attention to how the temporalities of the Underground reflect the disciplinary pacing of the city above. In the modern capitalist city, time is money. The Underground serves the city its workers, like veins to the heart, and thus, unwavering efficiency and predictability are paramount for maximum productivity. It also incites the notion of time spent travelling (or time not at the destination) as ‘dead time’ and something to be minimised. In a highly affective atmosphere, these temporal policies become embodied by commuters. As we see in some of the women’s stories in later chapters, many regular Tube travellers plan their journey’s down to the minute, leaving little time for disruption of any kind. In the space of the carriage, agitated bodies are forced into corporeal immobility, and, in this physical-psycho-spatial nexus, many commuters actively disassociate in order to subjectively speed up their journey. Consequently, there is significant disdain towards anything that disrupts this collective condition – something that many of the women we hear from in this book were acutely aware of. Time, when considered in this way, significantly implicates the response of both victims and bystanders of sexual harassment on the Tube. Thus, I argue later, that this disciplining, standardising temporality breeds inertia and apathy in the face of sexual harassment happening ‘on the move’ and we see an interesting manifestation of ‘moral minimalism’, where the preferred reaction to wrongdoing is the least extreme, and people are reluctant to exercise social control against one another (Baumgartner, 1988). Baumgartner’s work on moral minimalism centres around understanding suburban order, however, it is startlingly applicable to the temporally implicated social order of the Tube. She states: ‘The order … does not arise from intimacy and connectedness, but rather from some of the very things more often presumed to bring about conflict and violence – transiency, fragmentation, isolation, atomization, and indifference among people’ (p. 134).
As well as this underlying (or overarching) temporality, we can observe various ways in which time structures experiences of sexual harassment. Firstly, the circadian temporalities of the city rhythms impact on how sexual harassment manifests differently at particular times of day. Secondly, the Underground is a transitory, mobile place with a temporal nature seemingly dominated by speed, which shapes how women negotiate harassment. Thirdly, women’s subjective experiences of time are impacted when they are exposed to sexual harassment. Finally, as time structures human experience, I use it as a concept in the form of memory in order to analyse the impact of sexual harassment when looking back and looking forward.
The role of spatial-temporalities (or time–space geography) has, to an extent, also been considered as a significant factor that impacts women’s experiences of (fear of) crime in transit, with substantial attention paid to understanding both environmental factors that increase levels of fear and perceived risk (poor lighting, lack of visibility, etc.) (Gilchrist et al., 1998; Loukaitou-Sideris, 1999; Pain, 1997; Valentine, 1990), and when actual incidents of crime in transit environments occur (Ceccato, 2017). Studies have often focussed on the impact of the spatial and temporal attributes of criminal activity, as discussed earlier in regard to routine activity theory (Ceccato & Uittenbogaard, 2014; Cohen & Felson, 1979; Felson et al., 1994). In this piece of work, it is rhythms that intimately connect space and time, recognising that sexual harassment happens in a particular space, in a particular way at certain times of day. During morning and evening rush hours the Underground takes on what Bissell (2010) describes as characteristic of commuter train travel, where bodies are densely packed in and pressed up against one another in a confined space. This proximity (alongside the sociabilities it induces) permits sexual harassment to be perpetrated in a particularly physical way, commonly in the form of groping, frotteuring and grabbing. In the evening, especially at weekends, the carriages take on an altered, more affable and sociable atmosphere, and sexual harassment often comes in the form of alcohol-fuelled interactions, more overt and often verbal. In the middle of the day and late at night carriages are often relatively quiet, to the point where it is not unusual to be alone or with only one other person in the carriage. It is in this spatiotemporal setting that exposure or masturbation is more commonly perpetrated. This highlights how it is necessary to consider not only space but also temporalities in order to understand the nature of sexual harassment on the London Underground.
As well as occurring in specific ways at particular times, sexual harassment on the Underground is happening within a space of abundant and seemingly high-speed mobility (Auge, 1995; Urry, 2007). It is fast and repetitive, a system through which an individual can (generally) move with speed and predictability. In such an environment, Urry (2007, p. 98) states ‘Time becomes a resource … consumed, deployed, exhausted’, or rather, time becomes a resource to be measured and managed. The mechanised movement of rail travel saw a rise in the value of speed of travel (Thrift, 1996; Virilio, 1986), with the presumption that time spent travelling is ‘dead time’ (Urry, 2007, p. 99) and should therefore be reduced. Whilst this has been challenged, and the pleasures of time spent travelling highlighted (Lyons & Urry, 2005), on the London Underground, the normative temporal order (re)produces the notion that the less time spent travelling, the better. This in turn impacts the sociabilities that occur within the space, with Goffman’s (1963) concept of ‘civil inattention’ (a deference owed to strangers in public space) and Simmel’s (1903) ‘metropolitan individuality’ dominating the social scenes in carriages, allowing passengers a predictable journey with minimal unnecessary interaction or interruption. This is significant in three ways. Firstly, as we will see in Chapters 5 and 6, some women did not challenge harassers or immediately report to authorities due to not wanting to prolong their journey and further disrupt their mobilities. Furthermore, some were unwilling to speak out when experiencing sexual harassment, for fear of disrupting the decorum of the carriage. Here, the temporal nature of the Tube has a strong impact on the sociabilities that occur within it, and consequently shapes how women react to sexual harassment. Finally, some women felt they did not have time to react before the perpetrator slipped away with the crowd.
Rail travel is said to have changed notions of the relationship between time and space (Thrift, 1996). Urry (2007) recognises the sensory perception of the speed of travel, and Watts (2006) discusses how the experience and passing of train time have interesting characteristics, including the stretching out and compressing of journey times. In Chapter 5, I show how some women, whilst experiencing sexual harassment, felt like time had slowed down, or their regular and routine journeys were prolonged. In some ways, this links back to the concept of friction, yet it takes a more abstract and perceptual form in the sense that the journey itself is not being prolonged, but rather the subjective experience of the temporal is causing time to slacken and drag.
Another way in which temporalities are key to this research is that they allow us to explore how the impact of sexual harassment alters and is (re)negotiated across time. This is explored in Chapter 6 through the social concept of memory. The concept of memory relates to the way in which we reconceptualise the past, present and future. The temporal aspect of memory relates to how and what is remembered over time and the impact that has (Adam, 1991). It helps to conceptualise how incidents of sexual harassment are remembered and negotiated over time and how they impact on women’s experiences of urban space. It also highlights how experiences of sexual violence are often re-defined as such after a prolonged period of time, based both on personal life trajectories and societal context (an example of this is how, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, many women began recognising historical workplace experiences as sexual harassment). Chapter 6 explores how the memory of an event of sexual harassment impacts on women’s future behaviour within the space of the Underground. It aims to understand the negotiations that women undertake in order to ‘deal with’ the incidents of sexual harassment and claim back their mobility and freedom, and how this often changes over time and space. It permits a move beyond discussing women’s access, fear and vulnerability and allows an examination of how sexual harassment in public space is negotiated and resisted, and how the experiences or memories are also suppressed and thus embolden women. I use the conceptual framework structured around space and mobilities to offer a unique temporal analysis of the impact of sexual harassment.
Each of the concepts outlined here play a role in how sexual harassment is shaped and experienced on the Underground. To summarise: Space is conceptualised to be active in (re)producing gender inequalities, in this case, affecting the manifestation of sexual harassment; mobilities and rhythms are active across space and show how women’s experiences of sexual harassment are shaped by and impact on their movements through this space; temporalities allow insight into how, over time, women negotiate the impact and memory of sexual harassment as they move through the city and the Underground. This conceptual framework opens up a new angle from which to understand incidences of sexual harassment on the Tube network, by locating them within the rhythmic, spatiotemporal environment. As we journey through women’s negotiations of urban space and incidents of sexual harassment on public transport, this framework assists in drawing out the nuanced and often ‘invisible’ or overlooked elements of these experiences.
- Prelims
- Chapter 1. Introduction: Arrhythmia and Egg Yolk
- Chapter 2. Everyday, Everywhere: Theorising Sexual Harassment
- Chapter 3. Space, Time and Rhythms: Introducing a Mobilities Framework
- Chapter 4. ‘Before’: Gendered Experiences of Urban Space
- Chapter 5. ‘During’: Moments of Sexual Harassment on the London Underground
- Chapter 6. ‘After’: The Impact of Sexual Harassment – Remembering and Resisting Across Time and Space
- Chapter 7. Conclusions: Slowing Down
- References