#RopaSucia and No me llamo mamacita. Illocutionary Female Power Against Street Harassment, "Locker Room Talk," and "Mansplaining"

Abstract

Through the intersectionality of a feminist approach and a phenomenological lens, this article examines groups of women who use social media to enact resis-tance against street harassment, derogatory expressions against women, piropos, and “locker room talk.” The analysis focuses on the project “#Ropasucia” by writ-ers/artists Maricela Guerrero, Paula Abramo, and Xitlali Rodriguez Mendoza,who conceived a project that forcibly identifies—by employing a public stage such as the Internet—how a perpetrator’s remarks obligate women to react and share their experiences. The artists then interpreted their project’s results using large-scale artistic installations exhibiting interior clothing and soap. In the project “No me llamo mamacita; arte vs. acoso callejero,” we explore how illocutionary forces combat verbal violence/harassment in public and semi-public spaces in the nation’s capital, Mexico City, as well as how catcalling not only affects self-esteem but translates to increased statistics of violence in both public and private spaces. In viewing violent assaults and aggression as phenomenological events, we discuss how artists convert language, “dirty laundry” (undergarments), soap, drawings, and posters into tools for writing the human, women experience as a phenomenon of a response against verbal violence. Connecting these artistic works to others similar in nature across the world, we demonstrate the global trend of women rising in resistance