1. The demand to be left alone in Brussels

In 2018, posters and spray paint started to appear in Brussels (Belgium) that stated “Laisse les filles tranquilles.”Footnote ¹ Put up by an anonymous feminist collective to denounce rampant levels of street harassment, the posters, the slogan of which echoes a common response to unwanted attention, could be found all over town, especially in spots where people had been harassed (see Figure 1). New posters by the same collective, recognizable by their straightforward black-and-white design, soon appeared calling for queer people and racialized groups to be left alone. Starting as a feminist practice reclaiming the streets, the posters multiplied, naming different groups who suffer from street harassment, while refusing to name any specific group as culprit. In its generic reference to filles (“girls”) and “queers,” gouines (“lesbians”) and “gays,” the sentence was at once a stark reminder of the efforts by big swaths of the city population to avoid harassment, and a rhetorical move that placed the onus for maintaining a harassment-free public space squarely on the perpetrators. Soon thereafter, the slogan took on a life of its own, independent of the collective: words were spray-painted onto the posters—sometimes in approval, sometimes in mockery—and the slogan itself was tagged on the walls of buildings, sometimes in variations playfully alluding to the original sentence. Mediated by the built environment of the city, and spread out over time, a process was initiated by the posters in which anonymous people agreed or disagreed with one another about the status of street harassment.

Figure 1.

Brussels, January 2022. Photo by the author.

I am not a member of the collective, but their message and strategy resonated with me, as it did with many others. The interventions had clearly been successful in some respect: but in what way, exactly? And who were they addressing? The grammatical form of the sentence—an imperative in the informal second-person singular—suggests that the posters were addressing (potential) perpetrators, but it seems unlikely that someone who intrudes on strangers would be responsive enough to take the posters’ demand to heart. For those on behalf of whom the posters were claiming a right to the street, the posters surely affirmed a pervasive dimension of quotidian city life, denormalizing it and emphatically including those who might hesitate to identify with feminist efforts (for instance because of their sexual or racialized identity) in the fight against street harassment. Moreover, the sentence’s wide circulation suggests that it appealed to the wider city population, and not only (potential) victims and perpetrators.Footnote ² While the response among some members of this larger audience may have been one of indifference, many—as evidenced by the posters’ uptake—responded with agreement or disagreement. What seems to have happened is that the posters galvanized the wider city population around the claim that everyone should be left alone in public spaces, such that the colleuses (gluers or stickerers) were joined by both those who had faced street harassment but hadn’t yet shifted the burden for it to the perpetrators and those who might not directly have suffered from street harassment but stood in solidarity with those who had. In doing so, the posters deepened the antagonism toward those committing or condoning street harassment.

My suggestion is hence that the posters constituted one node in a longer process of the politicization of street harassment, that is, the multivalent transformations and interactions between collectives passively defined by the experience of street harassment and those actively organizing to fight it, seeking to establish a counterhegemonic common sense in which street harassment is no longer normalized. While this process might involve those typically not facing strangers’ intrusions, a politically privileged role is played by those who, like the members of Laisse les filles tranquilles, mobilize on the basis of their own experiences and define the latter in a manner sufficiently open that others who have similar experiences can join them. This transformative, expansive mobilization raises a number of questions with regard to its conditions of possibility. Specifically, I am interested in the efforts to consolidate the common sense that one is to be left alone in public space. This struggle highlights the ambivalence of urban anonymity as both desirable, especially insofar as it is a condition for urban diversity, and detrimental, for street harassment is oftentimes a lonely experience. Although I focus on the anonymous, object-mediated dimensions, this struggle also raises questions of solidarity across differences (which will resurface throughout this essay).

Understood quite literally as taking place in the streets, squares, parks, and other publicly accessible urban spaces such as stations and tunnels, street harassment is committed by strangers amidst strangers.Footnote ³ It encompasses a continuum of intrusive acts, ranging from staring, catcalling, insinuative gestures, and verbal insults to acts of physical aggression and sexual assault, with most examples in this paper being toward the first end of that spectrum, often considered trivial by all parties involved—a dismissal that exacerbates feelings of loneliness and the hesitance by victims to identify these intrusions as street harassment.Footnote ⁴ A typically urban experience, street harassment deprives individuals from the anonymity granted by the city crowd, while this anonymity also often keeps bystanders from intervening. Given this condition of isolation, what possibilities exist to organize against it? The ingenuity of the posters, I argue, lies in exploiting the dispersed dimension of everyday street harassment through the creative reclaiming of the physical space in which these intrusions take place.

Characteristic of activist street art, in contrast to protest forms constituting physical gatherings like “take back the night” marches, is their mediation by the built environment in such a way that it can establish political affiliations between dispersed individuals. I argue that street harassment and the process of its politicization should be understood through Sartre’s account of “seriality” (and its concomitant concepts of “totality,” “practico-inert,” “group,” and “indirect gathering”), introduced in his 1960 Critique of dialectical reason (hereafter: CDR). Seriality refers to the constitution of a collective that has no a priori essence and instead derives its unity from its members being similarly positioned vis-à-vis material and immaterial circumstances, like physical objects and the thing-like accumulated behavior of others. Crucial to Sartre’s social ontology is the dialectic between inert beings and human activity, where the latter is embodied, habitual, and historically contingent. Sartre illustrates seriality with observations of Paris city life, where individuals mind their own business amid a myriad of relations with unknown others and in the midst of a built environment that solicits individuals to act in great conformity. Under these conditions, Sartre asks, how can a series whose members are united only by the obstacles they encounter in the pursuit of their individual interests actively form a group intent on challenging these obstacles? This question, in which a “series” and a “group” are not co-extensive but overlap and interact in ways that are mediated by objects and abstract others, speaks directly to the challenges negotiated by Laisse les filles tranquilles. Specifically, street harassment forms a series, which we can preliminarily refer to as “the harassed,” that is internally heterogeneous, and whose partial transformation into a group is driven by the collective effort to combat street harassment.

Seriality provides a rich phenomenological vocabulary that illuminates the material and immaterial conditions of structural injustices and their politicization. My approach belongs to the recently established field of critical phenomenology,Footnote ⁵ which critiques social suffering and injustices by analyzing the lived experience of oppressed and marginalized people, in order to show that its conditions of possibility lie in historically contingent power relationships. CDR is underutilized in critical phenomenology, especially compared to Sartre’s earlier work, Being and nothingness. It nevertheless shows a greater affinity with the main tenets of the field, in part because of its incorporation of elements from Beauvoir (Reference Beauvoir2011), Fanon (Reference Fanon2008), and Merleau-Ponty (Reference Merleau-Ponty2013).Footnote ⁶ My aim is not to reconstruct Sartre’s concept of seriality but approach his social ontology as a toolbox to theorize specific political problems, which, paraphrasing Foucault, means suspending “the theoretical unity of their [here: Sartre’s] discourse” (Foucault Reference Foucault and Macey2004, 6; Schoonheim and Vintges Reference Schoonheim and Vintges2023, 2–3). It thus shows great affinity with earlier redeployments of seriality that engage in what Iris Marion Young calls “pragmatic theorizing,” specifically for its non-essentializing concept of a collective that is nonetheless based on objective conditions (Young Reference Young, Julien and University Park1999, 718; also, Woodly Reference Woodly2015, 214; McMahon Reference McMahon, Aho, Altman and Pedersen2024). Compared to these approaches, my critical phenomenological reading highlights the embodied dimensions of seriality. Furthermore, I argue that political organization and resistance draw on concrete ways of living and the self-understanding of subjects (McNay Reference McNay2014). In the case of street harassment, this means, as I will show, that people mobilize against it because they also understand themselves and each other as anonymous participants in city life.

This paper, in reconstructing the politicization of street harassment under the urban conditions of isolation, proceeds in three steps. Drawing on empirical literature on Brussels, I first situate the poster campaign in feelings of unsafety and the prevalence of street harassment. In the next section, I interpret these findings through Sartre’s seriality to show that street harassment constitutes a series. I conclude that section with the argument that seriality is compatible with the discussion of street harassment in Beauvoir’s The second sex (Reference Beauvoir2011: hereafter TSS) and Fanon’s Black skin, white masks (Reference Fanon2008: hereafter BSWM), setting my reading apart from those influential readings that interpret TSS and BSWM implicitly or explicitly in light of early Sartre and the latter’s account of the gaze (Bartky Reference Bartky1990; Vera-Gray Reference Vera-Gray2016; Vera-Gray and Fileborn Reference Vera-Gray and Fileborn2018). My interpretation, highlighting Beauvoir and Fanon’s emphasis on long and materially mediated histories of gendered, racial, and colonial oppression, has political-methodological implications, because it underscores the multiple and intertwining histories of (post)colonial and feminist struggles that define Brussels and the experiences (including of street harassment) of those present in its public spaces—experiences that are cleverly invoked by the posters. The section thereafter deploys Sartre’s concept of the indirect gathering to show that, as the posters are modified and copied over time by unknown others, they generate an opposition between those agreeing with their claim and those disagreeing with it.

2. Street harassment and posters: the situation in Brussels

In 2012, a few years before the collective Laisse les filles tranquilles was formed, a young Flemish filmmaker released a short documentary entitled Femme de la rue (Woman of the street), in which she filmed herself walking the streets of Brussels in a summer dress, recording the sexist comments she received from men. The very legitimate concern with the impact of harassment on the freedom of movement of young women was quickly taken up in a stereotypical and racist manner to mean the harassment of young, white women by men with a migration background. While this framing is not unique to Belgium, it was amplified by a set of specifically Belgian political dynamics, such as the tension between, on the one hand, the Dutch-speaking Flemish community, with its demographic bias toward small towns and villages, which has elected many Flemish nationalists with an anti-immigration, anti-Islam agenda, and, on the other hand, the predominantly French-speaking city of Brussels, whose highly diverse population reflects long and diverse histories of migration and colonialism.Footnote ⁷ Most non-Belgian residents in Brussels hold European nationalities, but the stigma of Brussels is closely linked to communities that have settled there as a result of Belgium’s colonial history and post-war labor migration (Statbel 2024). Garnering extensive media coverage, the documentary and the ensuing debates resulted in the introduction of fines for street harassment in Brussels and a federal law criminalizing “sexism in public spaces.”Footnote ⁸ Tellingly, both legal instruments have barely been used: of the 50 fines issued in 2014, 90 percent were for racist or sexist comments toward police officers, and the few legal charges were likewise for insulting police officers (Arnoudt Reference Arnoudt2015; Rombaut Reference Rombaut2018)—thus ironically exposing the false promise of carceral feminism.Footnote ⁹

In interviews about its actions, the collective Laisse les filles tranquilles has explicitly opposed the right-wing narrative presenting street harassment as a problem arising due to immigration from “non-Western” countries, and has stressed the variety among those both perpetrating and being subjected to street harassment:Footnote ¹⁰ they put up their posters in several neighborhoods, poor and rich, selecting their locations on the basis of suggestions by those who had been harassed (De Valck Reference De Valck2018; Coutereel and Majecki Reference Coutereel and Majecki2018; Houdmont Reference Houdmont2018). They also stated their desire to live in Brussels despite the harassment they were facing, embracing its diversity.

In the empirical literature on street harassment in Brussels and Belgium, one group stands out: young women, who are the primary targets of harassment. This is even more true when they are students, belong to racialized groups, live in dilapidated areas, or have received a lower degree of education (Chaumont and Zeilinger Reference Chaumont and Zeilinger2016, 18–20). Statistically, almost all Belgian women have experienced street harassment, with numbers as high as 98 percent, overwhelmingly perpetrated by strangers (Genin Reference Genin2017; cited in Vierendeel Reference Vierendeel2019). This gendered dimension does not mean that men are free from sexual harassment; 28 percent of boys have also suffered from it (Plan Internationaal n.d.). The empirical literature suffers from significant and undesirable omissions regarding race, ethnicity, disability, trans gender identity, and (to a lesser extent) sexual orientation, and so we would do well to keep in mind both that the category “woman” is internally fractured by these axes of oppression, and that these axes correspond to categories of people who have been harassed who neither belong to nor primarily identify with that category.

Individual cases of street harassment are closely tied to general feelings of unsafety in public spaces. The relationship between the two is complex. Unsafety also concerns other risks such as those related to traffic and pickpocketing, and hence the prevalence of street harassment cannot be directly deduced on the basis of feelings of unsafety. But the few available statistical studies on Brussels mostly conduct attitudinal research rather than documenting the prevalence of street harassment, leading to the less-than-ideal situation that one must rely on the former to deduce the latter. Furthermore, taking seriously the research on the continuum of violence, we can see how risks that we might wish to exclude from the category of street harassment (traffic accidents, petty crime) attain an additional layer of risk from the perspective of those facing street harassment, as they fear that such accidents might escalate into sexual, gender-, and/or race-based violence. With this important caveat in mind, I thus suggest that street harassment and feelings of unsafety are mutually imbricated in meaning-making practices in public space, defining if, where, and how one moves through the city.

A very small percentage of people in Brussels report always feeling unsafe in public space, with that figure being only slightly different between women and men (5.04 and 3.22 percent), but the percentage of women who often or occasionally feel unsafe is much greater than that among men (52.42 and 36.5 percent) (Moniteur de Sécurité Reference de Sécurité2021, 42: hereafter MS). This difference is corroborated by other surveys carried out in Belgium, which have found that fewer women feel safe in public spaces than men (76.84 and 91.47 percent) (Bureau fédéral du Plan 2024). Given that feelings of unsafety are more prevalent among women (albeit not exclusive to them), it is not surprising that they more often report avoiding situations that they consider risky: women are less likely to go out after dark, with 14.58 percent of women in Brussels reporting that they always avoid doing so and almost 40 percent stating that they do so often or occasionally (MS 2021, 47). Women are also more inclined to avoid particular parts of town compared to men, where it should be noted that the more years of education one has received, the less one is inclined to do so (MS 2021, 44, 45).Footnote ¹¹ Being bothered on the streets is more likely to be considered a problem by women than by men, and by those whose occupation is to study rather than by those with other professions. Interestingly, in 2021 opinions on this seem slightly more divided than in 2018: in 2021, 9.06 percent considered it very much a problem and 42.79 percent not a problem at all, while in 2018, these numbers were only 7.89 and 38.4 percent, respectively (MS 2021, 32). It is unclear why this light increase in both positions took place, but it roughly coincides with the increase in attention for street harassment, including that generated by Laisse les filles tranquilles.

Experiences of street harassment and of insecurity result in groups of people developing patterns of urban mobility, and thence distinct lived geographies of the city (Fileborn Reference Fileborn2020). These behavioral patterns include “safety work,” “the strategies that we use in our attempts to limit or avoid intrusions” (Vera-Gray Reference Vera-Gray2016, xi; Vera-Gray and Kelly Reference Vera-Gray, Kelly, Ceccato and Nalla2020; also, Stanko Reference Stanko1997). Somewhat paradoxically, these fairly stable patterns of mobility result in part from the individualistic way in which we (are told to) conceive of our safety as our personal responsibility.Footnote ¹² While these precautions might include withdrawal from aspects of city life, the criminologist Stanko reminds us that “the majority of people actually cope with their anxieties [about violence] on most levels,” and we do so as we “shop, work, socialize, care for children and for our homes as full participants in modern life” (Stanko Reference Stanko1990, 7). These observations are confirmed by the few qualitative studies on mobility and safety in Brussels. These studies—one about women’s mobility and sense of safety (Gilow Reference Gilow2015), and the other comparing women’s nocturnal mobility in Brussels and Recife (Brazil) (Farina, Boussauw, and Plyushteva Reference Farina, Boussauw and Plyushteva2022)—interviewed primarily white, young, and tertiary-educated women (Farina et al. Reference Farina, Boussauw and Plyushteva2022, 1235; Gilow Reference Gilow2015, 4). Because of this positionality, which is roughly shared by the authors of the studies and by myself, certain aspects of mobility are particularly prominent; for instance, the interviewees are more likely to enjoy night life and are less likely to drive a car. Respondents in these two studies typically do not fully restrict their movements, which implies that safety is not an overriding concern. In their study of night-time mobility, Farina, Boussauw, and Plyushteva (Reference Farina, Boussauw and Plyushteva2022, 1237) argue that “being less concerned about unsafety [than respondents in Recife] allowed more women in Brussels to prioritise a range of different concerns around night-time trips,” such as the desire for some fresh air or to reduce costs.Footnote ¹³

Concretely, the measures that women in Brussels report include walking faster, especially in closed spaces such as metro stations (Gilow Reference Gilow2015, 3), or opting for biking rather than walking (Gilow Reference Gilow2015, 3; Farina et al. Reference Farina, Boussauw and Plyushteva2022, 1243). Given the preference for moving quickly, the built environment is criticized for impeding movement. For instance, one interviewee is cited as expressing dislike of the exit gates of the metro because they slow her down when exiting an empty station at night-time (Farina et al. Reference Farina, Boussauw and Plyushteva2022, 1240). Similarly, they report picking clothes that allow for rapid movement or disguise female identity and moving confidently, in an assertive manner (Gilow Reference Gilow2015, 5; Farina et al. Reference Farina, Boussauw and Plyushteva2022, 1244). Furthermore, these studies show that respondents consider the time and day of travel and adjust their precautions in light of how many people will be around, and who (with the absence of women feeling less safe). They also develop practices with friends, such as traveling home together or texting to confirm safe arrival (Gilow Reference Gilow2015, 3; Farina et al. Reference Farina, Boussauw and Plyushteva2022, 1238). These three measures—high-paced movement and an assertive, determined comportment; adjustment to the city’s noctidiurnal and weekly patterns; and mutual acts of care—can also be witnessed in other cities (Gardner Reference Gardner1995, 199–220; Fleetwood Reference Fleetwood2019).

In Brussels, feminist action groups have been at the forefront of efforts to eliminate street harassment. Some concrete proposals have, to different degrees, been taken up by the local authorities, such as changes to the built environment and the launch of a phone app that offers support during assaults and facilitates reporting afterwards.Footnote ¹⁴ Students have been very vocal in organizing protest events, organizing marches that echo the “take back the night” walks of earlier feminist moments (Chaumont and Zeilinger Reference Chaumont and Zeilinger2016, 27–28). Feminist street art, finally, has left a semi-permanent mark on the public space, with Laisse les filles tranquilles being among the most emblematic (Boulvain Reference Boulvain2020, 11–14; Schoonheim Reference Schoonheim2023).

3. Street harassment as seriality

The street art by Laisse les filles tranquilles transforms, I argue, the dispersed dimension of street harassment into the very condition of possibility for protesting against it. In this section I show that this isolation unfolds on various levels of intersubjectivity in its mediation by material objects. Street harassment takes place, in Brussels as in other cities, in urban spaces where individuals live side by side while engaging in mundane, often self-interested activities, such as shopping, sports, and socializing. This mode of life is, as Sartre suggests, the primary product of the city, which “occasions isolated behaviour in everyone,” such that “isolation is a historical and social form of human behaviour in human gatherings” (Sartre Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 1: 257, 258). These gatherings should not be understood as groups convening for a shared goal. Instead, they entail individuals mutually conditioning each other’s behavior in complex and mediated relations of dependency that give rise to semi-autonomous processes. These relations remain largely impersonal, as the unknown others simply happen to be people with whom one has to share urban spaces, especially as the latter are partitioned for different activities and each space is used for a set of activities (what Young Reference Young2011, 239, calls “multiuse differentiation of social spaces”).Footnote ¹⁵ In other words, urban spaces are defined by individuals that go about their business alongside others, each expecting to be left alone, while also being mindful of ruptures in this state which Goffman calls “civil inattention,” such as unwanted attention (Goffman Reference Goffman1963, 86; Gardner Reference Gardner1995, 79, 92; Fileborn and O’Neill Reference Fileborn and O’Neill2023, 4; Cousens Reference Cousens2025).

The anonymous and latently conflictual dimensions of urban sociality are captured very well by Sartre’s concept of individual praxis and social ontology. Incorporating insights from Beauvoir, Fanon, and Merleau-Ponty on the habitual, embodied, and historically conditioned dimension of action, he stresses the sedimentation of past action into entities that delimit the possibilities of present and future action, and offers a differentiated understanding of alterity. I do not argue that Sartre provides a better description of street harassment than Beauvoir and Fanon (as, in contrast to them, he doesn’t offer one), but rather that he offers a theoretical vocabulary that is exceptionally well placed to describe the material and immaterial dimensions of urban coexistence in which intrusions take place. It thus supplements feminist-phenomenological research that focuses on the intrusions of street harassment and that, mostly drawing on Beauvoir, Fanon, and Merleau-Ponty, describes these as disruptive moments of objectification (Bartky Reference Bartky1990, 27; Tuerkheimer Reference Tuerkheimer1997; Ahmed Reference Ahmed2016, 23; Vera-Gray Reference Vera-Gray2016; Vera-Gray and Fileborn Reference Vera-Gray and Fileborn2018).

A comparison with the rich, empirically informed studies by Vera-Gray, Fileborn, and Kelly might be instructive here. Very generally, they are interested in the effects of sexist street harassment on women’s gender identity construction, specifically the message that “women need to be less—less vocal, less visible, less free—in order to be safe” (Vera-Gray and Kelly Reference Vera-Gray, Kelly, Ceccato and Nalla2020, 218). They attend to differences among women on the basis of race, sexuality, and class, and include incidents that are too often dismissed as innocuous, such as being told to smile (Vera-Gray and Fileborn Reference Vera-Gray and Fileborn2018). While they consider the wider context, such as the normalization of men’s intrusions by other women (Vera-Gray Reference Vera-Gray2016, 124), the primary focus is on the dyad of masculine perpetrators and female harassed people. My focus is on the counterhegemonic effort to assert that everyone should be left alone in public space, which relies on an open-ended definition of the harassed and is inspired by the posters’ multiplication to include other groups, thus aligning with Sartre’s non-essentialist concept of series. In this category, women and racialized people (each being internally heterogeneous and partially overlapping) are central, as street harassment is a major factor in the construction of the meaning of public space and their own identity. It also entails those who might not be easily placed in either of those categories but who are nevertheless susceptible to strangers’ intrusions and who have developed routines in anticipation of such occurrences. This implies that my category of the harassed is less clearly delineated than the groups that Vera-Gray and her collaborators focus on, but it does not mean that everyone is and can be included in it. Consequently, my Sartrean account emphasizes aspects that are complementary to those focused on by Vera-Gray, Fileborn, and Kelly. Theoretically, it supplements the dyadic model with other models of intersubjectivity and their mediation by historically contingent objects and object-like human behavior. Methodologically, it acknowledges both the pervasiveness of harassment and the centrality to the lived experience of those subjected to processes of othering, while describing these processes through the historically and locally specific factors that shape urban space, such as complex and intertwining struggles by migrant communities, feminist movements, and governmental policy. Politically, it recognizes the coping mechanisms with which individuals navigate gendered and racialized public spaces, and adds to that an interest in collective practices that challenge street harassment and reclaim public spaces.

Let me now go over the key concepts of Sartre’s social ontology—totality, the practico-inert, and series—to show that street harassment constitutes a series, that is, a passively constituted collective, which has to be understood in the dynamics of human-made objects, thing-like social behavior (such as the cumulative effect of crowds), and anonymity.

Totality refers to all those things that “are encountered as already existent, inert entities” (Kruks Reference Kruks1990, 151–52). These beings can be of various kinds (material/immaterial, natural/human-made), but particularly relevant here are use objects. Such “instruments” entail the objects of the built environment cited in the previous section, like the entry gates of the metro (as we will see later, the posters of Laisse les filles tranquilles are another example of a totality). These items display the tension between inert being and human activity. As material objects, they are defined by the “inertia of the in-itself” (Sartre Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 1: 46): they consist of passive matter and, when going unused, disintegrate into their component parts. Yet, a totality is also the product of human activity, from which it still carries traces, and indeed in two different ways: praxis refers “not merely [to] the labour which has produced it [the totality], but also the activity of inhabiting it” (Sartre Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 1: 46). Made to fulfill a specific function, instruments exert a motivating force such that most people deploy them according to their intended use. Instruments in the public space, such as “pavements, a thoroughfare, a taxi rank, a bus stop, etc.” are “proclaiming with their frozen voices how they are to be used” (Sartre Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 1: 324). In this way, instruments give rise to predictable patterns of social behavior. Objects can also be repurposed, and these new functions might or might not in turn result in stable behavioral patterns (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2019). Finally, Sartre reminds us that human activity involves various totalities that together constitute a subject’s “practical field,” which constrains some actions and enables others. The practical field is shared with others of whom we assume that they feel the similar motivational push and pull of the various totalities, regardless of whether they are actually physically present.

How is this relevant to street harassment? The practical field corresponds to the lived geography that results from people’s routine activities, which include safety work. This is particularly clear from the set of precautions related to moving quickly and seeming unapproachable. The respondents in the studies referred to in the previous section synthesize the sum of a great number of totalities, such as clothing, means of transport, and built environment. Some of these objects are used according to their intended use, albeit for more specific reasons, such as using a bicycle as a means of transport, while others are endowed with a new use, such as pretending to be speaking on the phone in order to keep potential intruders at bay. Intersubjectivity plays out indirectly or, put differently, offers a background condition such that even in the absence of any strangers, safety work allows one to blend in with the predictable patterns of urban behavior.

What about the other precautions, namely the adjustments of one’s mobility in light of the city’s rhythms and the coordination of one’s mobility with friends? Sartrean seriality does not lend itself well to a description of the latter practices due to its masculine bias and latent conflictuality, as a consequence of which he struggles to account for generosity, friendship, and acts of care (Young Reference Young, Julien and University Park1999, 212). But the adjustment of mobility can be easily understood through the concept of the practico-inert: the sedimentation of the activities of others into patterns, which are experienced as possessing a thing-like facticity, and which in turn condition individuals’ actions. Being congealed activity, the practico-inert is conditioned by objects and made up of hundreds of beings that are “neither thing nor man, but practical unities made up of man and inert things” (Sartre Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 1: 324). Sartre’s examples are usually related to gatherings of people, such as queues in front of ticket machines, where each individual is pursuing their own goals but must reckon with the accumulated effect of others pursuing theirs. For Sartre, the presence of others is mostly a hindrance, in contrast to those who feel unsafe, for whom the presence of (selected groups of people) is a reassurance. For instance, in the interviews described in the aforementioned studies, respondents indicate that when exiting the metro at night, they make sure to stay close to the other passengers (Gilow Reference Gilow2015, 3). More generally, the practico-inert can be taken to refer to the noctidiurnal and other periodic rhythms of city life, which are central to people’s considerations of safety in public space. Urban rhythms are the combined effect of a range of social, legal, economic, and other factors, and these considerations indicate the complex reasoning by harassed people that goes into the analysis of semi-predictable patterns of human behavior, rather than, for instance, directly associating night-time with (sexual) violence.

We are now in a better position to understand that street harassment constitutes a series. A series is a contingent collective “whose members share a connection to an external object but have no internal connections between themselves” (Caws Reference Caws, Churchill and Reynolds2014, 187; Sartre Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 1: 259). This collective is passively constituted, deriving its unity only from the objective conditions that its members encounter in the pursuit of their actions. These conditions can be material and immaterial, like totalities and the practico-inert discussed above, as well as social practices that unfold directly between strangers. Members of a series show a variety of emotional and practical responses to these conditions, and different extents to which these conditions determine their possibilities—and yet all of them, whether or not they are aware of it, have to deal with them. This means that, in spite of very significant differences, members of a series often share certain routines, albeit more as a dynamic family resemblance of habits than a static inculcation of norms. Consequently, no clear demarcation of a series can be given: series are open-ended and often overlapping, and it is more helpful to think of them as “vectors of meaning and action” than “in terms of genus and species” (Young Reference Young, Julien and University Park1999, 226). Furthermore, members of a series do not identify with one another in spite of having the same direct interest. Everyone belongs to multiple series at the same time, and it is neither possible nor desirable to transform each of these into politically salient identities. The transformation from a series into a group, that is, a collective actively unified as the members recognize each other as having identical interests and organize to collectively pursue a shared goal, is partial and contingent (Sartre Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 1: 324): not all members of a series will join the group, and neither is it necessary that they do so.

Street harassment (along with feelings of unsafety) constitutes a series: it is a structural phenomenon, as suggested by the high levels of prevalence, that passively unites people in spite of their differences. These conditions, as we have seen, include the built environment and the rhythms of the city, but also the interactions that unfold directly between people, including shouting slurs, staring, and assault. Consequently, the harassed share certain routines, such as moving quickly and considering the time and day of travel, all the while trying to blend in with the regular patterns of urban behavior. Such habits cannot be summed up in a set of necessary conditions that stipulates who belongs to the series of the harassed, but rather shows a patchwork of affinities, which correspond to the heterogeneity of the harassed: as the empirical data show, mobility patterns and safety measures overlap, but it matters in what neighborhood one lives, what access one has to alternate means of transport or support practices, and what age, gender, and profession one has. Instead of defining the harassed “in terms of genus and species”—that is, as a subset of the wider city population that can in turn be disaggregated into subsets along lines of gender, age, ethnicity, etcetera—I define it as an open-ended collective whose activities in public space (and engagement with the objects and interactions therein) suggests a vector connected to concerns over safety and harassment (Young Reference Young, Julien and University Park1999, 226). This vector is deflected by vectors arising from membership in other, partly overlapping series, such as “city residents,” “students,” or “queer people.” In the empirical literature, this point is further complicated due to the above-mentioned entanglement of feelings of unsafety, safety measures, and the prevalence of street harassment, as a result of which safety concerns apparently disconnected from strangers’ intrusion acquire for those belonging to the series of the harassed a meaning distinct from that of those not belonging to this series.

What about the incidents of street harassment that unfold directly between people? These often reinforce stereotypes that are the product of past action, specifically histories of oppression in their interaction with social struggles (colonialism and decolonization, migration, LGBTQ+ movements, feminist struggles, gentrification, etc.). People can relate to these intrusions very differently, but they have to relate to them in one way or another. We get a sense of this inevitability from Beauvoir and Fanon’s writings. Beauvoir describes adolescent girls who are met with insults, assault, and intrusive gazes, and who consequently refrain from enjoying city life and cultivate a subdued presence when in public (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir1999, 37, 276; Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir2011, 321, 333, 346–47). Fanon, evoking his own arrival in mainland France from Martinique, describes the racial slurs, many with sexual overtones, that are hurled at Black people (Fanon Reference Fanon2008, 91, 93, 94). These observations are part of their wider argument on subject formation under conditions of patriarchal, white supremacy, and specifically the double-bind faced by feminized and racialized subjects upon entering public space. This argument has been developed by later scholars, criticizing the marginalization of feminized and racialized subjects in public space and hence in meaningful activities such as politics (Baldwin Reference Baldwin1998, 119; Bowman Reference Bowman1993; Tuerkheimer Reference Tuerkheimer1997, Whatley Reference Whatley2018), a claim made particularly forcefully by Black feminists (hooks Reference hooks1981, 58–59; Davis Reference Davis1993, 146; Fogg-Davis Reference Fogg-Davis2006, 63). It is noteworthy that Brussels, not unlike the French cities of Beauvoir and Fanon’s descriptions, owes its high degree of diversity to the interrelated histories of colonization and labor migration, even if it lacks the centralized status of Paris vis-à-vis the French provinces due to Belgium’s division in two monolinguistic regions that each have their own urban centers (de Schaepdrijver Reference Schaepdrijver1997, 648). In addition, Beauvoir and Fanon describe a range of responses that, personal and social differences notwithstanding, crystallize in fairly stable and predictable patterns, which can also be discerned in the case of Brussels, as people make similar decisions in terms of mobility.

Beauvoir and Fanon focus on femininity and blackness, but their analysis can be extended to other markers of difference, such as sexuality, disability, religion, and gender identity. Because the series is a non-essentialist collective irreducible to ascriptive identities, seriality “mak[es] it possible to identify and organize around other kinds of problematic relations [than race and gender] that we are not in the habit of seeing” (Woodly Reference Woodly2015, 222). At the same time, a series is conditioned by the members’ individual interests, many of which correspond to their ascriptive identities. This tension applies a fortiori to a serial analysis of street harassment. When the objective condition is defined in terms of feelings of unsafety, preventive measures, and intersubjective violence, this would likely encompass incidents that are usually excluded from street harassment, such as racist police violence. Such a definition results, in other words, in a more comprehensive claim to be left alone in public space but loses the specificity of street harassment. On the other hand, when street harassment is described in terms of ascriptive identities, one is likely to understand street harassment as a moment in a comprehensive process of subject formation that runs the risk of being bifurcated from other dynamics in public space. This tension is also clear in the posters by Laisse les filles tranquilles, which eventually came to cover racist police violence, as well as general LGBTQIA+ phobia and the reproduction of rape culture in the raising of boys (see Figure 1). More generally, the question how feminist solidarity can be enacted such that it allows for difference in the construction of a shared identity has, and rightly so, been central to feminist politics and other movements on the left for many decades. Unsurprisingly, this question also figures in the mobilization against street harassment. Rather than representing a conceptual issue that can be solved, it requires activist practices that acknowledge, negotiate, and actively construct such identity-with-difference. Insofar as the posters were successful, this success lay in mainstreaming the conviction that public space constitutes a site where one should be left alone, regardless of who one is.

In conclusion, by understanding street harassment as a series we can make sense of its isolated character and the challenges to political mobilization. As we have seen, members of a series do not need to identify the conditions from which the collective derives its unity as an obstacle to be removed; nor do they necessarily identify with each other through the acknowledgment of identical interests. Consider, for instance, that the percentage of women reporting being harassed is as high as 98 percent, while only 26.1 percent indicate that being bothered in the streets by strangers is a problem: this discrepancy highlights the gap between belonging to a series and politicizing the objective circumstances at its core. The failure to identify with the direct interests of unknown others is illustrated by the refusal of bystanders to intervene on behalf of girls when they are being harassed (Chaumont and Zeilinger Reference Chaumont and Zeilinger2016, 26). This individualism should be understood as the historically contingent product of the city, instead of an inherent human trait. Given this anonymous dimension of street harassment, how can we understand the success of the posters in politicizing it? As we will see in the next section, this mobilization involves the intricate interaction between different series (some of which overlap), groups, and totalities.

4. Posters as objects of antagonism

The posters of Laisse les filles tranquilles, we have seen, originally appeared in locations where people had been harassed or felt unsafe. Put up by an anonymous collective whose authorship was recognizable from the distinct black-and-white design, the sentence soon started to circulate as graffiti tags: sometimes verbatim, conveying approval, at other times with alterations expressing disapproval, and in yet other cases with ironic or playful variations. In the following, I want to read these reactions through Sartre’s reflections on the “indirect gathering,” where he thematizes how strangers who are not in a direct physical relation establish antagonistic social relations that are mediated by discursive objects, some of which are the product of groups. The posters are such discursive objects that are made by the group Laisse les filles tranquilles. Their success, in other words, lies in galvanizing indirect gatherings involving many among the population of Brussels.

Street art, by which I am primarily referring to bottom-up interventions in public space such as hastily written tags, posters, spray-painted cut-outs, and collages, has long been part of the repertoire of feminist and queer activism, both in Belgium and elsewhere (Boulvain Reference Boulvain2020, 11–14; Avramidis et al. Reference Avramidis, Gupta, Tsilimpounidi, Carastathis, Awad, Hansen, Panlee, Tulke and Zaporozhets2022).Footnote ¹⁶ Countering top-down control of public space and allowing others to augment, modify, and copy their content, it reveals a democratic potential for collective action that challenges the conditions under which we live (see Figure 2). The interventions by Laisse les filles tranquilles are thus part of a wider movement but are unique because of their reflexive nature: their ingenuity is that they, to paraphrase Butler, denounce a city infrastructure that is failing to support those suffering from street harassment (Butler Reference Butler, Butler, Gambetti, Sabsay and Durham2016), but do so using that very infrastructure. Hence, some parts of the following analysis are relevant to street art more generally, while others are specific to Brussels and to art protesting street harassment. Let’s now turn first to the production of the posters, which involves the partial transformation of a series into a group, and then to the indirect gathering that these posters establish.

Figure 2.

Brussels, February 2022. Photo by the author.

Recall that most of us belong to multiple series at the same time. Some of those series might be more pertinent to our self-identification than others, and while each comes with its specific set of challenges, they do not equally solicit political mobilization. Additionally, such mobilization is not likely to involve all members of a series but only sections of it, for instance those sharing another series. This is particularly clear in Brussels, where young women and female students have been at the forefront of combating street harassment, rallying not exclusively around their gender identity or employment status, but a condition that they share with many others: having been harassed. While students’ predominance in organizing might lead to biases, this doesn’t have to be the case if they politicize their experiences in a way that highlights the shared, objective conditions of the full series and that also involves other members of the series (Young Reference Young, Julien and University Park1999, 225–27). Such a process would very likely unfold along the lines sketched by, among others, Butler, Cavarero, and Gago in their description of assemblies (Butler Reference Butler2015; Cavarero Reference Cavarero2021; Gago Reference Gago2020). Instead of the internal process of politicization, however, I am here interested in the collective’s outward strategy of street art, which we can understand, with Sartre, as totalities. The posters are not quite instruments (and are thus less stringent in soliciting behavior), but they still carry the traces of their maker, whose intention is clear from the written sentence: “laisse les filles tranquilles.” How do they alter people’s practical field? And the practical field of whom, that is, of what series?

The posters use the urban infrastructure, which refers more generally to the material specificity of the city in its interaction with anonymous strangers. The latter imbue these posters with their efficacy, reading them as they appear on the walls of tunnels or across the street from bus stops. The posters, as totalities in public space, appeal to members of different series that might partially overlap, such as that of ‘Bruxellois·es’ (Brussel residents), public transit passengers, and children. Through their routine behavior, members of these series might encounter the posters, and, in the best-case scenario, this encounter will disrupt this routine. Such interruption might be an aim of the interventions (people slowing their pace to read them), but it could also be a consequence of where they are placed (opposite a bus stop, at a popular hangout spot, on a busy square). Whatever the reason for the initial break, one’s gaze follows the lines, tries to read it, and takes in what is being communicated. In a way that extends Sartre’s phenomenological description of totalities, Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2006) extensively theorizes the relationship among physical objects, patterns of accumulated behavior, and the break-down of the self-evidence of the latter: she elaborates on the involuntary “acts” of the body, as well as the agential force of material objects, which can lead to a break in which the failure to carry on as usual opens up a moment of estrangement or even subversion.

For Ahmed, the suspension primarily has a critical potential in causing longstanding and problematic conduct, for instance street harassment, to no longer be taken for granted.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet the posters elicit graffiti both approving and disapproving of the demand by Laisse les filles tranquilles, thus setting in motion a back-and-forth among people who remain unknown to each other, and that others can see as they walk past the posters and graffiti. As discursive totalities, these graffiti refer back to their authors and their intent, while also being an object in public space, where we know that many anonymous others will read them too (Sartre Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 1: 324). More specifically, Sartre’s concept of the “indirect gathering” provides a heuristic distinction between proponents, opponents, and waverers that is helpful in describing a chain of reactions to the posters. The analysis of indirect gathering, as we will see, thus elucidates the consolidation of the common sense (Gramsci Reference Gramsci1971, 421).

For Sartre, “indirect gatherings” are those where people are not in physical proximity, and which therefore cannot develop relationships of reciprocity and collective action. This collective-without-reciprocity is marked by a mediated “relationship” with the other and the self as an abstract, general, and interchangeable other. He illustrates the indirect gathering with the example of listening to a Gaullist radio broadcast, where both those agreeing with the position of the government propagated in the broadcast and those from the Left disagreeing with it listen to the broadcast in a way that anticipates the reaction of the other: “one no longer listens to it for oneself,” Sartre (Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 273) argues, “but from the point of view of Others.” The posters also fit his description of indirect gatherings, underscoring the antagonism underlying all counterhegemonic shifts in the common sense: they are bottom-up interventions from the Left that denormalize harassment.

The posters do so by invoking an experience that everyone reading the posters is familiar with and that is especially precious to members of racialized and sexualized groups (Tonkiss Reference Tonkiss2003): being left alone. In fact, those targeted by street harassment have also participated in what Heidegger calls, in the characteristically dismissive tone he reserves for the self-forgetfulness of the “They,” the city’s tranquilizing “uninhibited ‘busyness’” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger2010, 171). The research cited in section 2 shows that while women almost all suffer from street harassment, they are also participants in public life, albeit with significant restrictions. The posters consolidate the expectation that, regardless of gender, sexuality, and race, one can move through the city unhindered—an expectation explicitly endorsed by many, and implicitly in many more people’s behavior. In other words, while the posters will particularly speak to those belonging to the series of the “harassed,” it also appeals more generally to all those moving through the city and sharing public space with strangers.

The posters are read by people belonging to different and multiple overlapping series, which are internally heterogeneous, each displaying various routine interactions with the built environment. Out of this variety, an opposition between proponents and opponents crystallizes around the posters. Consider, for instance, this anecdote shared by a member of Laisse les filles tranquilles: she once walked past a poster just when a father was discussing it with his young daughter, telling her “‘Look, it is important to leave girls alone’” (De Valck Reference De Valck2018 [my translation]).Footnote ¹⁸ Contrary to the habitualized expectation that the street is a place of harassment, the poster (and in this case the parent as its mouthpiece for the child, who could not yet read) reinforces a competing set of expectations: this is a place where we are left alone. The member of the collective does not say who stopped first, or for what reason, but I like to imagine that the child, as toddlers do, asked about the poster for no other reason than that it happened to catch her attention. And while we might speculate that the father’s response was meant to prepare his daughter for the street harassment that she is very likely to face in the future, I also like to imagine that it serves as a rebuke to those who disagree with the poster and who normalize street harassment.

Such positive responses appear to outnumber the negative ones. For instance, in a number of places, the “l” from “laisse” has been changed to a “b,” as a result of which the posters state the very opposite of the original. Such adolescent and misogynistic alterations in turn vex those who agree with Laisse les filles tranquilles. These different and opposing responses are in part shaped by the response that we think others will have, others whose political position one might be familiar with even without knowing them personally, in the realization that they walk past these posters just as we do, that we will never meet, and that I will remain as abstract to them as they are to me.

Let me rephrase the above in Sartre’s terms. Those who agree with the demand to leave girls alone, such as the father in the anecdote above, and those copying it on walls throughout the city, feel validated by the posters, because they suggest that others, who they do not know, are in agreement with them. They might also excitedly anticipate the posters’ effect on waverers, who, because of the posters’ mainstreaming of the denouncement of street harassment, may be moved from accepting street harassment as a fact of urban life (even if they think it is reprehensible) to calling it out: “it [the text] is Other for those who support [the feminist collective], in that for everyone in isolation it is backed up by the approval of Others (those who share his opinion) and by its effect on waverers” (Sartre Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 274–75). Those who disagree with the posters disapprove of Laisse les filles tranquilles and all those agreeing with its content, while directing frustration at the posters for their potential impact on the waverers. The poster is, in Sartre’s words, “Other for those who reject the [feminist collective] which inspires it, both as expressing certain Others and as action on Others” (Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 274–75). Finally, the waverers might be convinced by the posters and the graffiti, partly because they convey a widespread support for the demand: the claim “is Other for the waverers, who [read] it already as the opinion of Others (of those Others who [surreptitiously intervene in the public space]) and who are influenced by the mere fact that this [position] has the power to propagate itself publicly” (Sartre Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 274–75). For Sartre (who starts his analysis from a Gaullist radio broadcast), this conviction is not backed up by the moral or political correctness of the position, but by the predominance of this position; in the case of the posters, however, the waverers are more likely to be convinced because they already implicitly engage in practices that presume the right of everybody to move through the city.

For Sartre, indirect gatherings, such as listening to the radio, are defined by the impotence of not being able to reach the anonymous others who are also listening, and by one’s being precisely such an anonymous other for other people. This impotence and the feelings accompanying it—“indignation, ironical laughter, impotent anger, fascination, enthusiasm, the need to communicate with Others, collective fear, shock, etc.” (Sartre Reference Sartre and Ree2004, 275)—follow partly from the example of listening to the radio, where one can only passively listen and where the inability to reach others is total, and partly from the right-wing content being promulgated by the state-aligned mass media. In the case of activist street art, this impotence and these feelings are not fully resolved, but they are somewhat diffused because one can respond: the posters can be removed, altered, and imitated. Such responses further galvanize the antagonism between opponents and proponents of the slogan. So, in the wake of “laisse les filles tranquilles,” graffiti appeared insisting “laisse les hommes blancs cis hetero tranquils”—a playful allusion to the most typical response anticipated from anonymous dissenters: “what about all the white, cis, straight men who are facing street harassment?”Footnote ¹⁹ These and similar comments do not mark the end of street harassment, but they reinforce the demand to be left alone, and the success of the posters in kickstarting this consolidation.

5. Embodied street politics beyond gathering

As the study of Brussels shows, a critical phenomenology of street harassment and feminist street art benefits from understanding these phenomena through seriality, deploying related concepts like totality, practico-inert, the group, and the indirect gathering. Seriality is very useful, first, because it offers a vocabulary for describing the dynamics of human-made objects, thing-like patterns of social behavior, and anonymity at play in safety work and street harassment. It is compatible with the phenomenological analyses of street harassment by Beauvoir and Fanon, as well as those working in their wake (Bartky Reference Bartky1990, 27; Tuerkheimer Reference Tuerkheimer1997; Ahmed Reference Ahmed2016, 23; Vera-Gray Reference Vera-Gray2016; Vera-Gray and Fileborn Reference Vera-Gray and Fileborn2018), underscoring the historically contingent struggles that are constitutive of public spaces and the experiences therein. Secondly, seriality clarifies the interaction and transformation among passively constituted collectives and actively, self-organized political groups, paying great attention to the mediation by abstract others and material objects, and is thus particularly useful in understanding the mobilization of isolated individuals through street art.

In conclusion, I want to highlight one implication of my account, picking up on recent work on the closure of public space (Arendt Reference Arendt1998, 200; Butler Reference Butler2015, Reference Butler, Butler, Gambetti, Sabsay and Durham2016; Gago Reference Gago2020, 162; Cavarero Reference Cavarero2021). Streets, in this reading, turn into truly public spaces when they are the site of people gathering to collectively pursue the improvement of the socio-economic and political conditions of coexistence through movements such as the Latin American feminist strike, the Sardines in Italy, and the movements of the squares of the 2010s (for instance Occupy, Indignados, Tahrir, and Gezi Park). Butler, Cavarero, and Gago problematize the relation of “streets” to politics, focusing on the impossibility of political action, for which the physical gathering is paradigmatic, and on the foreclosure of public space, typically their inhospitability to political action (street harassment being one instance of such inhospitability). The considerations in this paper show that this theoretical focus should be expanded to include the quotidian ways in which streets are spaces of political contestation that do not presuppose the physical proximity of people in relationships of reciprocity, but rather consists in an indirect and abstract togetherness mediated by objects and their entanglement in complex patterns of behavior. Posters, and street art more generally, are such objects, stimulating antagonism and forming part of a counterhegemonic project of winning over waverers. Like street protests in which groups of people gather (Borren and Robaszkiewicz Reference Borren and Robaszkiewicz2024), these interventions in public spaces possess an embodied dimension, in that they are experienced by people moving through the city. Such political objects are not opposed to physical gatherings, but are integrated into the dialectics of individual and collective action.