To call attention to the unequal gender politics of city streets, Beth Breslaw started walking “like a man.” Men are less likely to get out of the way when another person is walking in their path, so Breslaw decided to do the same thing. Within a month she’d crashed into 28 men. This led an article about her to coin the term “manslamming”–the tendency of men to overlook people, especially women, and keep walking no matter who is in their way. As she describes, she felt “invisible.” Men wouldn’t even think to get out of her way, and so they would walk straight into her.
As a piece of performance art, the piece appeals to me because it’s quotidian but still forces people into minor confrontations. While Breslaw is able to amplify her ideas through news sources, within the context of the experiment itself, she never needed to let people know it was an experiment or a work of art. As with Augusto Boal’s Invisible Theater, she never let you know that there was art or artifice involved. Instead, she potentially made the men who crash into her think twice about overlooking women and about their movement patterns. She used her body as a literal obstacle to interfere with men’s sense of over-entitlement to public space.
Beth Brenslaw’s work also reminded me of Claire Bishop’s idea in Artificial Hells that community is not always warm and fuzzy. When society has systematically taught women to occupy less space and men to occupy more space, the social and communal are not pleasant. Brenslaw’s work brings that unpleasantness to the foreground.
http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/01/manslamming-manspreading-microaggressions.html