Contribution short abstract:

In Brooklyn, womxn securitize everyday objects like sunglasses as safety tricks, subverting gazes and redirecting expectations. By reclaiming and reframing the mythological figure of the trickster as a feminist trickster this paper un-writes narratives of womxn’s safety and security in urban spaces.

Contribution long abstract:

Through an ethnographic exploration of the use of everyday objects, like sunglasses and headphones, amongst womxn in Brooklyn, New York City, this paper explores the material culture of safety and security for gendered bodies in urban spaces. This paper argues that the securitization of such everyday objects function as safety tricks, moving beyond their functional use to instead subvert the male gaze and operate as surveillant and sensorial security objects. Such objects locate the body as a technology of security and a site of trickster performance, which this paper will also discuss through an exploration of the impact of eye contact and voice. Following Donna Haraway, this paper reconceptualizes the ‘trickster’ or ‘coyote’ as a figure for the creation and dissemination of feminist situated knowledges (1988), un-writing narratives of womxn as supposedly insecure and vulnerable and circulating oral knowledge of tricks to resist and redirect harmful gender norms and gender-based harassment and violence.

For example, by reclaiming the traditional mythological figure of the trickster as a feminist trickster, this paper explores the trans femme experience of harnessing the power of “cyborg” sunglasses, to watch and surveil others unnoticed on the street as a safety trick. This is powerful and transgressive in the context of mass surveillance of trans bodies in the US. Moreover, this paper demonstrates how such shared situated knowledges create fluid ‘safety assemblages’, of various intersecting actants, positionalities, places, and modalities, where agency flows relationally throughout, un-writing and reconceptualizing everyday security for gendered bodies in urban spaces.