Article
Bailey Street remarks to women in women in five countries and four languages: Impositions of engagement and intimacy
Sociolinguistic Studies
(2016)
Abstract
In this paper I analyze the remarks men make to passing young women on the street in 134
naturally occurring encounters that were video recorded in 2013 and 2014 across five
countries and four languages and posted on the internet. I categorize these remarks in terms
of the speech acts they contain, showing the most common acts, in descending order of
frequency, to be addressing, greeting, expressing astonishment or admiration, summoning,
and asking rhetorical questions. In immediate interactional terms, the great majority of the
men’s actions are thus oriented to constituting what Goffman (1963) called a ‘focused
interaction’, a face-to-face engagement with a common focus of attention. The very
ordinariness of these acts in terms of content and surface meaning – they are not vulgar or
explicitly threatening – may explain why defenders of street remarks regularly draw attention
to seemingly benign referential or speech act content, e.g., ‘He was just saying “Hi”’
or ‘He was just giving her a compliment’. At another level, however, street remarks impose
intimacy on passing strangers, thus flouting the normative conventions for interaction
through which we manage social and personal risk and establish trust. Women targeted by
street remarks treat them as breaches by not responding to them. The very ordinariness of
the language in the street remarks documented, along with the relative difficulty of
articulating the implicit social conventions that they breach, may veil their harm and
indirectly contribute to the perpetuation of male domination of women in public spaces.
Keywords
- street remarks,
- catcalls,
- street harassment,
- cross-cultural
Disciplines
Publication Date
Winter 2016
Citation Information
Benjamin Bailey. "Bailey Street remarks to women in women in five countries and four languages: Impositions of engagement and intimacy" Sociolinguistic Studies Vol. 10 Iss. 4 (2016) p. 589 - 609 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/benjamin_bailey/94/