Breaking the continuum: network aesthetics, infrastructural violence, and media responses to London Underground sexual harassment posters

This paper combines critiques of network thinking and feminist approaches to infrastructural violence to examine London Underground design aesthetics and media discourses surrounding Transport for London’s sexual harassment poster campaigns. The paper starts by addressing how London Underground’s plural design philosophies – emerging in the early-20th century and elaborated upon in contemporary standards – aspire to govern mobility and passenger conduct through a unified network aesthetic. Adapting Martin Coward’s critique of ‘network thinking’, multiple elements of design shape behaviour on the move by tying localised actions to networked vulnerability and risk. Drawing on Claudia Aradau’s reading of Barad’s mattering of matter, the paper then asks what is deprioritised through these aesthetic orderings. Focusing on growing issues of sexual harassment on the network and Transport for London’s attempts to manage them via recent poster campaigns, the paper argues that network thinking exacerbates a struggle to recognise the severity and infrastructural character of such violence. This is examined through news media responses to these campaigns, in particular the material-discursive enrolment of the ‘intrusive staring’ poster in discourses which break apart the continuum of harm, selectively (a-)politicising sexual violence and its policing.