Disruptive pregnancy

This chapter examines what happens when the pregnant body in public space is perceived to be troublesome, or, because of its ambiguous position, disruptive. This chapter focuses on the pregnant body in public space as a sexualized body. Running through this chapter are snippets of sex advice given to pregnant women in specialist magazines. The first part examines representation of sexualised pregnant bodies in mainstream discourses; notably ‘sexy’ pregnancy photoshoots and advertising. The concept of herethical sexual ethics is analysed in dialogue with these representations of motherhood-to-come (Kristeva, 1985). The second part of the chapter draws on data from women in the USA and UK to examine sexual harassment of pregnant women. Sexual harassment is a mode of gender exclusion, in any case. When women who are pregnant experience sexual harassment in pregnancy, it becomes a further technique of control, fuelled by rape culture, which codes public spaces as places in which pregnant women do not belongThis chapter establishes how norms of pregnancy uphold heteropatriarchal performances of, and interactions with, gender and sexuality in public space. It argues that mobilising becoming-minoritarian politics established by Deleuze and Guattari and the herethical approaches of Kristeva, we start to set the scene for a guerrilla war machine to emerge.

Disruptive protests

This chapter builds on themes established in Chapter Two and considers the naked or nearly naked protest as a carnivalesque disruption in public space. Part One posits that these protests rely on spectacularisation (in the Debordian sense (1994 [1967]) of the naked body to function. We explore this in the context of so-called feminist anti-rape protests, such as SlutWalk or Femen. Part Two analyses these gendered dynamics in the context of non-human animal rights protests including those of PETA and Lush, One of these campaigns is analysed and I draw on the auto-ethnographic experience of participating in naked protest to explore the potentialities of this as a mode of forging a war machine. This chapter demonstrates how the eroticisation of sexual violence is mobilised as part of these politics.This chapter examines the interplay between smooth and striated space, rape culture and the capacity that protest harbours for revolution.

Causing trouble

This chapter introduces the themes of the book. It uses evocative case studies to explore the ways in which the female body can be a disruptive body in public space. This sets the scene for the types of other troublesome bodies we encounter in the book. The theoretical framework is explained (war machines, molecular revolutions, carnivalesque) and key concept of rape culture defined. The chapter talks about the power of walking, and the gendered qualities of walking for causing trouble in public space. The chapter then outlines how the stories that the book tells will unfold.

Disruptive play

In recent years, BDSM communities and sexual practices have received increasing attention in academic circles and in popular discourse. Part one explores what happens at the threshold of kinky subculture and its penetration into the mainstream, within contemporary legal, cultural, and commercial discourses. Part Two explores the penetration of the disobedient body within the kink community and interrogates how ‘the community’ responds to trouble or disruption. In this part, I draw on interview data with men and women in the US and the UK who talked about how for instance, community is forged, consent violations are dealt with, undesirable behaviour of members of the community are negotiated, and how sexualised relations emerge.This chapter explores the ways in which social and spatial (in)justice through disavowal, exclusion, and the promotion of rape culture prevail in these encounters. Yet it is also hopeful and considers how some interventions might become transformative and how molecular revolutions might emerge.

Disruptive bodies

This chapter builds on themes established in previous chapters by examining these potentialities in relation to the creation of war machines and establishment of a praxis (Freire, 1968). I return to a consideration of how the guerrilla war machine works in relation to State apparatus which produces codes in public space which, for instance, privilege certain types of body over others. I consider how we might create a war machine and imagine how this might foster the sort of molecular revolution which alters what dominant systems of exclusion, marginalization and commodification might do.Mobilising some politics of ‘making the familiar strange’ (Brecht, 1996 [1964/1935]), of critical exteriority (Kristeva, 1981; Lorde, 1984), and of disinvestment from power (Freire, 2017 [1970/1986]), it does offer some ways in which to conceive of different ‘Becomings-’ and alternative imaginations of social, spatial, gendered justice.