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Window Seat: examining public space, politics, and social identity through urban public transportation

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Window Seat: examining public space, politics, and social identity through urban public transportation

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Window Seat:
Examining Public Space, Politics, and Social Identity through Urban Public
Transportation

by

Sabrina Howard

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

May 2020

ii
Table of Contents

ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................................iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................................iv
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
ONE: Liberal Green Commuters: Reimagining the urban subject in Los Angeles through the
BUSted Storytelling Show ............................................................................................................31
TWO: Policing Space, Policing Race: Understanding Racialized Policing through Public
Transportation ...............................................................................................................................74
THREE: Body Politic(s): Understanding space and the body through public transportation ....108
CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................149
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………156

iii
ABSTRACT
“Window Seat” is an interdisciplinary project that uses public transportation as a lens
through which to explore the relationship between social identity, public space, and politics.
Through ethnographic inquiry, media analysis, and critical engagement with literature in
sociocultural psychology, urban studies, and gender studies, “Window Seat” moves beyond an
urban planning approach to public transit to interrogate questions of individual and collective
identity and to better understand the broader political implications of the social interactions that
occur on public buses and trains. “Window Seat ” intervenes in the conversations of urban
scholars across the fields of political science, geography, sociology, gender studies, and urban
planning by asking: “How does using public transit as the entry point provide unique insights
into the relationship between social identity, politics, and public space?” and “How does the
vantage point that public transportation provides allow us to better understand how the mundane
experiences of everyday life are steeped in identity politics, which, upon examination, reveal
systemic constructions of race, gender, and class?” By revealing the ways that categories of
social identity are reflected, reaffirmed, and challenged within urban transit spaces, my analysis
contributes to our understanding of how the “micro” experiences of everyday life are intricately
shaped by the “macro” social, political, and economic systems that govern society.

iv
Acknowledgements

To the real ones.
You know who you are.

1
INTRODUCTION

Public transportation has been an integral part of my life for as long as I can remember.
Growing up on Chicago’s South Side, I rode public buses and trains often as a child. Sometimes
my parents would save enough money to buy a used car but eventually, the car would break
down and we would end up reliant on public transportation again. Even when we did have a car,
my parents and I would often still use public transportation throughout the week to avoid driving
into downtown and paying for parking near the Stock Exchange where they worked. Once my
parents deemed me responsible enough, somewhere around 7th grade, I began taking public buses
and trains on my own. I would travel to/from school, to my grandmother’s house, to the mall, to
friends’ houses. By taking public transit on my own I developed a new relationship with a city
that I already knew so well. Navigating between neighborhoods on my own allowed me to
experience Chicago on my own terms and take agency over how I moved through the space.
Although I exercised some freedom with regards to how I moved through the city, my
world was rooted on the South Side as all of my friends, family, and daily activities were in this
area of the city. When I was accepted into a magnet high school in the West Loop area, my
spatial world expanded, as I now had to commute from the South Side, through downtown, and
to the low West Side for school. Every school day for four years, I took two trains and one bus
each way to/from school: the 75th street bus to the 79th Street Red Line Station, the Red Line
train downtown to the Jackson Station to transfer to the Blue Line, the Blue Line to Racine. A
commute of this nature was common for many of the students with whom I went to high school
as we came from all parts of the city. As I sat on the Red Line headed into downtown, I
witnessed the demographic shift that occurred. When I boarded the train at 79th Street, everyone
2
else on the train was Black and working class. As we got into the low South Side, around 47th
street, the racial make-up of the passengers began to shift as students from the University of
Chicago, primarily White and Asian, got onboard. The next stop was 35th Street Chinatown,
where I saw an influx of people of Chinese-decent. By the time the train made it into downtown
proper, the passengers that filled the car more accurately reflected the city’s race and class
diversity. At one level, commuting through downtown introduced me to the diversity of my city
by bringing me in close proximity with people who were different from the working-class Black
people with whom I had grown up. At another level, this experience set the stage for me to
consider the race and class politics of urban space.
These questions derived from my experiences growing up stayed with me as I went away
to college. As a freshman, I stumbled upon American Studies. Through the American Studies
curriculum I began to see the larger questions that loomed underneath the observations that I had
made over those four years on the Red Line. Having grown up on the South Side, the Blackness
of that space was a given in my mind. However, my coursework positioned me to ask: But why
is the South Side Black? Furthermore, what histories undergird spaces such as “Chinatown” or a
“Little Italy” and how do these neighborhoods function in present day as demarcated culturally-
specific spaces? It is from this standpoint that I enter this project.
…
“Window Seat” is an interdisciplinary project that uses public transportation as a lens
through which to explore the relationship between social identity, public space, and politics.
Through ethnographic inquiry, media analysis, and critical engagement with literature in
sociocultural psychology, urban studies, and gender studies, “Window Seat” moves beyond an
urban planning approach to public transit to interrogate questions of individual and collective
3
identity and to better understand the broader political implications of the social interactions that
occur on public buses and trains. “Window Seat” intervenes in the conversations of urban
scholars across the fields of political science, geography, sociology, gender studies, and urban
planning by asking: “How does using public transit as the entry point provide unique insights
into the relationship between social identity, politics, and public space?” and “How does the
vantage point that public transportation provides allow us to better understand how the mundane
experiences of everyday life are steeped in identity politics, which, upon examination, reveal
systemic constructions of race, gender, and class?”
The field of urban planning has historically been concerned with the “livability” of cities.
This term encompasses a wide array of ideas and considerations including design/layout,
mobility concerns, efficiency of movement, sustainability, and the availability of recreational
activities.1 Given these priorities, urban planners have primarily approached public transportation
through a mobility lens that emphasizes form, efficiency, and use.2
The emphasis that urban planners place on form and efficiency does not mean that they
are not concerned with the ways that people experience space. However, conversations about
experience within urban planning are largely motivated by a desire to promote the use of a given
urban space.3 Planners rely heavily on metrics to assess how spaces are being used and
experienced and use those metrics to determine whether or not a given public space is successful.

1
Jan Gehl, Cities for People (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010); Anna Nikolaeva, “Designing Public Space for
Mobility: Contestation, Negotiation and Experiment at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.(Report),” Tijdschrift voor
Economische en Sociale Geografie, no. 5 (December 1, 2012); Stefan Bratzel, “Conditions of success in sustainable
urban transport policy: Policy change in 'relatively successful' European cities,” Transport Reviews, 19 no. 4 (1999):
177–190.
2
Von SchöNfeld, Kim Carlotta, and Luca Bertolini, “Urban Streets: Epitomes of Planning Challenges and
Opportunities at the Interface of Public Space and Mobility,” Cities 68 (August 2017): 48–55.
3
Xili Han and Wenqiang Zhao, “Perception and Planning Design for Urban Outdoor Public Space,” Landscape
Architecture Frontiers 4, no. 4 (August 1, 2016).
4
Thus, planners seek to manipulate urban space to produce experience and interaction, but they
are not particularly interested in exploring and interrogating these experiences and interactions.
Rather, the existence of experience and interaction is the end goal. This project picks up where
planners leave off to think about the politics that are produced and played out in public space as
they can be understood through the experiences and interactions of people. Although urban
planning scholars such as Gülçin Erdi Lilandaids4 and Maria Dolors Garcia-Ramon5 have studied
the politics surrounding the urban planning process as it relates to class and gender respectively,
my works is instead concerned with the everyday politics that make up people’s experiences in
public space as they manifest through interactions of micro and macro forces.
“Window Seat” pushes forward conversations in American and Urban Studies by
expanding our understandings of how individual and collective identities are produced through
interactions in urban public space as well as the politics embedded in and prompted by these
performances. By creating a stage upon which varied social identities can be performed in
juxtaposition to one another, public transportation offers a unique opportunity for studying these
identities and their systemic underpinnings. In doing this work, “Window Seat” falls into a
lineage of urban studies scholarship that underscores the presence of politics in everyday life as
well as the socio-political significance of public space.

4
Gülçin Erdi Lelandais, “Space and Identity in Resistance Against Neoliberal Urban Planning in Turkey,”
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 5 (September 2014): 1785–1806.
5
Maria Dolors Garcia-Ramon, Anna Ortiz, and Maria Prats, “Urban Planning, Gender and the Use of Public Space in
a Peripherial Neighbourhood of Barcelona,” Cities 21, no. 3 (2004): 215–223.
5
The Politics of Everyday Life
“Window Seat” follows in the tradition of scholars who consider how non-designated
spaces in cities become public space through their practical functions in the lives of urbanites. In
The Production of Space, Lefebvre co-constructs the concepts of appropriated space and
dominated space wherein dominated space refers to those “space[s] transformed—and
mediated—by technology, by practice”6 and appropriated space is defined as "natural space
modified in order to serve the needs and possibilities of a group.”7 Recently public space
scholars have adapted the concepts of dominated and appropriated space to make sense of how
urbanites make use of contemporary public spaces in their everyday lives. For example, in his
essay, “Making Public, Beyond Public Space,” Jefferey Hou mobilizes the idea of “insurgent
public space,” the term and concept around which he built his 2010 text, Insurgent Public Space.
Hou juxtaposes “insurgent public space” with “institutional public space,” the latter referring to
parks, plazas, squares, some private buildings, etc. that are “defined and produced by
governments and corporations.”8 Insurgent public spaces on the other hand, are those “created or
initiated by citizens and communities, often outside or at the border of the regulatory and legal
domain.” Some of the places that he categorizes as “insurgent public spaces” are community
gardens, flash mobs, “third places,” street-vending, street theater, etc. This idea of insurgent
public spaces broadens understandings of public space beyond typical places such as parks and
plazas and suggests that public space is “not the exclusive domain of institutions.”9 Hou’s idea of
insurgent public space aligns with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “appropriated space” as they both

6
Lefebvre, 164.
7
Lefebvre, 165.
8
Jeffrey Hou, “Making Public, Beyond Public Space,” in Beyond Zuccotti Park edited by Shiffman, Ron, Rick Bell,
Lance Jay Brown, and Lynn Elizabeth (Oakland: New Village Press, 2012).
9
Ibid., 92.
6
speak to an idea of public space that is constituted through the everyday uses of the space rather
than ritualized and/or institutionally prescribed (inter)actions.10
Adapting this broader approach to public space positions us to recognize the political
significance of social interactions that we might otherwise overlook. A strong example of the
kind of work that results from this kind of approach is Robin Kelley’s analysis of working-class
politics of resistance during the Civil Rights Era in Race Rebels.11 While much of the literature
on Black working-class politics has been centered around formal political organizations, Kelley
sheds light on the less formal ways working class Blacks resist power and oppression in their
everyday lives. Kelley asserts that, “We must not only redefine what is ‘political’ but question a
lot of common ideas about what are ‘authentic’ movements and strategies of resistance.”12
Kelley considers the “tiny acts of rebellion” that are sewn into the fabric of the everyday Black
working class experiences in order to highlight how they are bound up in performances of race,
culture, and identity. As part of this conversation, Kelley studies public buses and streetcars in
Birmingham, Alabama during World War II. Kelley shows that while the political nature of
buses can be understood through performances of deliberate protest, it can also appear through
more subtle forms of protest and political conflict as they play out within the spaces of public
transit vehicles. While teenagers triggering alarms by placing their hand or backpack in the door
or setting off stink bombs might be considered harmless pranks, within the context of the racial
contentious American South in the 1940s, these acts can be read through a context of rebellion
and power struggle. Like Race Rebels as well as more recent works of scholars such as Katherine

10
Ibid.
11
Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free press, 1996).
12
Ibid., 4.
7
Hankins,13 Kye Askins,14 and Harry C. Boyte,15 “Window Seat” uses the quotidian as an entry to
understanding the relationship between tangible everyday experiences and often invisible
structures of power. In this way, this dissertation is invested in expanding the meaning of the
term “political” by highlighting the politics that are embedded in everyday of experiences riding
public transportation.
“Window Seat” argues that the political function of public transportation operates at the
level of the quotidian.16 In focusing on the quotidian, this project follows in the tradition of
Michel de Certeau17 and other scholars and artists who have been inspired by his work. The
quotidian politics of buses and trains lies in 1) their being condensed spaces of “contact,” in
which different kinds of people are forced to negotiate and renegotiate space and identity on a
repeated basis and 2) by virtue of their practical function, which gives public transportation a
unique ability to cluster people from extremely diverse backgrounds. Because the demographic
and spatial organizations of most major cities are fraught with histories of race, class, and spatial
division, fixed public spaces are too shaped by segregation and inequality. By virtue of its
function, public transportation has the power to override race and class divides in a way that
other forms of public space do not. Thus, although countless public space scholars have
addressed issues of race, class, gender, and ability in their work, I argue that there is something

13
Katherine Hankins, “Creative Democracy and the Quiet Politics of the Everyday,” Urban Geography 38, no. 4
(April 21, 2017): 502–506.
14
Kye Askins, “Emotional Citizenry: Everyday Geographies of Befriending, Belonging and Intercultural Encounter,”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41, no. 4 (October 2016): 515–527.
15
Harry C. Boyte, Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2004).
16
My focus on the quotidian moves this project away from an understanding of urban politics that prioritizes
explicit political performances and instead interrogates how lived experiences are inherently political. In contrast
to urban studies scholars who focus on sites of protest and other forms of overt political action, I am invested in
the politics that are enacted as certain bodies move through public space.
17
In 1984, Michel de Certeau’s text, L’Invention De Quotidien, was translated into English as “The Practice of
Everyday Life,” inspiring the work English speaking performers and scholars throughout the world.
8
unique to be gained from exploring these topics through the lens of public transportation. By
using everyday interactions as the entry point into conversations about identity, politics, and
public space, I highlight the connection between the micro, quotidian experiences of urbanites,
and the macro power structures that shape these experiences.
This project is grounded in a conversation about the relationship between the tangible
lived experiences of urbanites and the invisible systems of power that are always at play. It thus
engages questions that sit at the foundation of the field of sociology about the connection
between the micro and macro scales. While some scholars decide to take either a distinctive
micro or macro approach to their research, this project falls in line with scholars whose work
instead grapples with the connection between the two, using public transit as a new context
though which to understand this relationship.18 Amongst those invested in the micro-macro
connection are those who study racial and gender micro aggressions. This project is particularly
inspired by this literature as it is similarly invested in understanding the link between everyday
interactions and systems of power.19
By focusing my analysis on social relations, “Window Seat” draws from scholarship in
sociology that has examined the social dimensions of public space and interactions between
strangers.20 I rely heavily on the framework offered by sociologist Erving Goffman to examine
the politics that surround performances of social identity in public spaces. In The Presentation of

18
Diego Ríos, “Social Complexity and the Micro-Macro Link,” Current Sociology 53, no. 5 (September 1, 2005): 773–
787.
19
David G Embrick, Silvia Domínguez, and Baran Karsak, “More Than Just Insults: Rethinking Sociology’s
Contribution to Scholarship on Racial Microaggressions,” Sociological inquiry 87, no. 2 (May 2017): 193–206;
Anthony D Ong, Anthony L Burrow, Thomas E Fuller-Rowell, Nicole M Ja, and Derald Wing Sue, “Racial
Microaggressions and Daily Well-Being Among Asian Americans,” Journal of counseling psychology 60, no. 2 (April
2013): 188–199.
20
William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Washington, D.C. Conservation Foundation, 1980);
Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Spaces (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1963); J Levine, A Vinson, and D
Wood, “Subway Behavior” in People in Places: The Sociology of the Familiar edited by Arnold Birenbaum and
Edward Sagarin (New York: Praeger, 1973).
9
Self in Everyday Life, Goffman offers a “dramaturgical analysis” or a framework for
understanding everyday social interactions through an analogy to the theater.21 He mobilizes the
concepts of the “front stage” and “back stage” as metaphors for the different versions of self that
people perform throughout their day, with the former representing people’s behavior in the
public sphere. Rather than focusing on what one would consider the theatrical moments of life,
however, Goffman is instead “concerned with the structure of social encounters - the structure of
those entities in social life that come into being whenever persons enter one another’s immediate
physical presence.”22
While Chapter 1 considers how some Angelenos literally perform the identity of “bus
people” by consciously crafting their public image around their use of public transportation, my
analyses in Chapters 2 and 3 engage a less explicit, Goffmanian version of performance by
thinking critically about how people’s “front stage” performances are complicated by race and
gender.23 Although Goffman himself does not speak directly to politics of race, class, or gender
in his work, contemporary scholars have used Goffman’s ideas to better understand how these
social categories factor into his dramaturgical theory.24 This project builds on the work of these
scholars by using ethnographic data to explore how the issues of race, class, and gender that take
shape on public transportation are in conversation with larger systems of power at the macro
scale.

21
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959).
22
Ibid., 254.
23
Goffman uses the term “front stage” to the choices that people make about their appearance, mannerisms, etc.
The significance of these choices lies in their ability to convey information about a person to their “audience” by
way of shared social understandings.
24
Imogen Tyler, “Resituating Erving Goffman: From Stigma Power to Black Power,” The Sociological Review 66, no.
4 (July 2018): 744–765; Mary Jo Deegan, “Goffman on Gender, Sexism, and Feminism: A Summary of Notes on a
Conversation with Erving Goffman and My Reflections Then and Now,” Symbolic Interaction 37, no. 1 (February 1,
2014): 71–86; Candance West, “Goffman in Feminist Perspective.” Sociological Perspectives 39 (1996): 353-69.
10
Using Goffman’s ideas about social performance as a basis, I argue that public
transportation serves as a space of exposure, giving society as opportunity to look closer at itself
and its issues.25 Public buses and trains provide a platform upon and through which individuals
consciously and unconsciously perform identity. On one hand, public space provides an
opportunity for people to present the version of themselves that they would like the world to see.
Through choices related to clothing, hairstyle, tattoos, etc. people exercise agency over how they
perform self in the world. These choices play into commonly shared understandings /
connotations about them.26 While an individual may exercise some control over how they are
perceived by those around them, their ability to control this image entirely is limited by physical
attributes over which they have little or no control. Thus, any identity that an individual chooses
to perform in public must always be negotiated with society’s pre-existing ideas about social
categories such as race and gender. Furthermore, these identities are constantly being reaffirmed
in public space as different kinds of people are juxtaposed against one another.
In carving space for public transportation within urban studies literature, I build on the
world of scholars such as anthropologist Marc Augé and sociologist Stéphane Tonnelat. Augé’s,
In the Metro, is an ethnographic study of the Paris Metro in which he records his observations on
the Paris subway to think critically about the space – its design and infrastructure – as well as the
ways that people conduct themselves as they move through the space. More recently, Stéphane
Tonnelat and William Kornblum published International Express, a qualitative examination of
the New York City 7 train to better understand the role that this public space plays in the lives of

25
John R. Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
26
Peter J. Burke, “The Roots of Identity Theory” in Peter J. Burke and Jan E. Stets, Identity Theory (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009): 19-32.
11
those who use it.27 Both these texts take an ethnographic approach to studying public
transportation, using empirical evidence collected on public trains to explore ideas of social
performance, spatial production, and identity. “Window Seat” builds on this scholarship by
examining empirical ethnographic data alongside news media to explore issues of race, gender,
and class, and the formation of group identity.

Public Parks and Protests: Public Space and Politics in Geography and Political Science
The conversation on politics and public space in contemporary urban studies literature
has largely revolved around parks and plazas throughout the world and the various protests that
have taken place in these spaces. Scholars across the fields of geography, communications, and
anthropology discuss the historic relationship between mass political activism and public parks
and plazas, drawing attention to the centrality of space in these movements.28 In their works,
these scholars highlight the centrality of public space to the success of these various protests,
noting that the accessibility of parks and plazas lend themselves to such performance of
democratic sentiment/contestation/defiance. Through their explorations of the role that parks
have played and continue to play in grassroots political action, these scholars highlight the way
that “parks tell stories about power, and about democracy.”29
Beyond thinking about the protests themselves, geographers and anthropologists have
considered the broader economic and political context through which parks are produced as
politicized spaces. Specifically, they consider how neoliberal methods of security and

27
Stéphane Tonnelat and William Kornblum, International Express (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
28
Payal Arora, “Online social sites as virtual parks: An investigation into leisure online and offline,” Information
Society 27 (2011): 113-120. ; Don Mitchell, “The end of public space? People’s park, definitions of the public, and
democracy,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85 no. 1 (1995): 108-133; Brett Williams, “The
paradox of parks,” Identities, 13, no. 1 (2006), 139-171.
29
Brett Williams, The Paradox of Parks, 139.
12
surveillance have compromised the “public” nature of public space, making streets and parks
unwelcoming to the certain marginalized populations and inhibiting protest. For example, “How
Private Interests Take over Public Space: Zoning, Taxes, and Incorporation of Gated
Communities,” Setha Low highlights the ways that public space is compromised to private
interest through the law. In Right to the City, Don Mitchell uses the People’s Park of Berkeley,
California as a site from which to study contemporary battles over public space revolving around
the ever-increasing efforts of city governments to remove the homeless from “public” parks.30 In
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, David Harvey uses the Occupy
Wall Street Movement, amongst other international social movements, as a lens through which
to better understand the hyper regulation of public space that is characteristic of contemporary
urban society and underscore the reality that the “public,” rather than being an all-inclusive term,
actually refers to the middle-class.31 This scholarship focuses largely on issues of class as they
play out in the traditional public spaces of parks and brings our attention to the ways that
neoliberal policing impacts the political function of public space. “Window Seat” takes the
powerful questions about space and politics that these scholars have posed in relation to parks
and instead explores them in relation to public transportation.
The literature on public space and politics has been largely shaped by Henri Lefebvre’s
social theory of spatial construction. In his 1975 text The Production of Space, French
philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre offers an analytical framework for understanding
space as a product of social processes. Lefebvre’s theory forefronts the idea of production to
emphasize the processes through which space comes to exist. This idea of space as a product of
human interaction pushes against ideas of fixed empty space and moves intellectual discourse

30
Don Mitchell, Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003).
31
David Harvey, Rebel Cities (New York: Verso, 2013).
13
towards an understanding of space as ever-evolving, constantly being made and remade through
varied social dynamics.
The Production of Space is concerned with constructing a science of space that
understands it through a web of connections between knowledge, history, and power. A
Lefebvrian understanding of space as being produced positions us to approach spaces as texts
that can be read for complex interactions between economics, politics, and culture. Lefebvre
argues that while there is no such thing as “true space” or essentialized space, we can uncover
the “truth of space” by critically examining the social, political, and economic factors that
compose processes of space-making.32 For Lefebvre, the social, political, and economic factors
that shape processes of spatial production all hold implications for knowledge and power.
Similar to Michel Foucault’s arguments about how power operates through space,33 Lefebvre’s
science of space asserts that because knowledge and space are co-constitutive, scholars often
conflate the two, rendering knowledge unrecognized. Lefebvre pushes for a critical debunking of
knowledge and space in order to understand them as distinct, yet inextricably linked. The co-
constitutive relationship between space and knowledge is central to the Lefebvrian spatial
analytical framework as it opens into the idea of space as a product of intersecting forces of
power as they operate through social categories. He argues that “...an already produced space can
be decoded, can be read. Such a space implies a process of signification.”34 Thus, Lefebvre
equips scholars with an analytical framework through which to critically read space and tease out

32
Ibid., 9.
33
In 1975, French philosopher Michel Foucault published, Discipline and Punish, a text concerned with the
mechanisms through which power operates in modern society. Within this text, he presented the concept of
panopticism, which highlights how the spatial designs of major cultural and social institutions of modern society
(i.e. schools, prisons, hospitals, etc) allow for the dissemination of power through surveillance tactics. Foucault’s
analysis established a foundation for understanding how power operates through space - power not only shapes
the design of built infrastructure but is disseminated and maintained through these spaces.
34
Lefebvre, 17.
14
the complicated dynamics of power that it reflects. It is only through this practice of debunking
and untangling that power structures can be challenged.
Lefebvre’s concept of spatial production forms one of the overarching theoretical bases
for this project as I seek to expand conversations of space, politics, and identity. Lefebvre’s
theoretical framing largely operates through an understanding of politics that emphasizes the role
of class in shaping social interactions and power. Given this emphasis on class, other social
categories such as race, gender, sexuality, etc go completely unaddressed in the text. Despite the
lack of direct attention that The Production of Space gives to these other intersections of identity,
Lefebvre engages in conversations about the human body as a means of understanding the nature
of resistance and power. He views spaces as a “product of the human body, as a perception and
as a conception, not simply as the physical imposition of a concept, or a space, upon the body.”35
It is through human’s ability to produce space that they are able to wield power in their everyday
lives. This connection between the human body, space, and power provides a framework through
which the relationships between social identities and space can be studied. Eugene McCann
underscores this idea in “Race, Protests, and Public Space” saying, “It is Lefebvre’s ability to
link representation and imagination with the physical spaces of cities and to emphasize the
dialectical relationship between identity and urban space that makes his work so attractive to
many contemporary urban researchers. His work provides a conceptual framework through
which the spatial practices of everyday life ... can be understood as central to the production and
maintenance of physical spaces.”36 Thus, while Lefebvre’s work is theoretical, its conversations

35
Lynn Stewart, “Bodies, visions, and spatial politics: a review essay on Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space,”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995): 609.
36
Eugene McCann, “Race, Protest, and Public Space: Contextualizing Lefebvre in the U.S. City,” Antipode 31, no. 2
(April 1999): 163–184.
15
about the body’s role in producing space ground the theory by lending itself to conversations
about everyday life and experiences of the body.
“Window Seat” expands on this aspect of Lefebvre’s theory by grounding it in the
everyday experiences of urbanites on public transportation. Using Lefebvre’s work as well as the
more contemporary works that it inspired, I think critically about how the space of public
transportation is produced through the politics of race, class, gender, and ability that govern the
quotidian lives of people in cities. Understanding the role that human interactions play in
constructing the publicness of public space reveals the nature of the relationship between public
space, politics, and social identity.

Moving Beyond the Park: Sociological Approaches to Public Space
The aforementioned literature is representative of the majority of scholarship on public
space and politics in that it focuses on designated spaces of leisure such as parks and outdoor
plazas. The easily identifiable political function of parks appeases public space scholars who
lament the traditional forum-like publics on which the concept of public space is founded. While
the golden age of democratic space was exemplified by the Greek agora and the Roman forum,
public spaces in the modern city are not typically spaces designed for political conversation and
debate. Hannah Arendt acknowledges this shift in the nature of public space in The Human
Condition when referring to the “the rise of the social.” Arendt describes a historical shift from a
society with clearly demarcated public and private realms to the present, where the social
elements of the traditional private sphere have been transferred into traditional public arenas,
constituting the spaces that we now deem “the public.” Arendt believes that this shift reflects the
‘occluding of the political by the social’ and the transformation of the public space of politics
16
into a pseudo-space of interaction in which individuals no longer ‘act’ but ‘merely behave’ as
economic producers, consumer and urban city-dwellers. Thus, white Arendt acknowledges that
public space no longer exists in the way that it did in Ancient Greece, she underscores the
inherently political nature of contemporary publics in that they are spaces through which
hegemony is reproduced through human actions and interactions. Given the emphasis placed on
the pronounced political nature of public spaces, it is clear why parks, particularly while housing
protests, are hailed as the quintessential form of urban public space. While today’s public spaces
are not always overtly political, this does not mean that these spaces are void of politics. Though
the political nature of modern public space is not always as deliberate or pronounced as they
were in Ancient Greece and Rome, the kinds of interactions that they facilitate are critical to the
formation of political citizens. Furthermore, as highlighted by scholars such as Annette Kim and
Donald L Kohn, these historical spaces excluded females and slaves from participation and were
thus not the egalitarian spaces that some scholars tout them to be.37
Although the literature on public space and politics is heavily skewed towards the idea
that parks and plazas are the centers of democratic urban space, some social scientists have
ventured beyond the park to study the socio-political implications of urban life. This scholarship
does not focus on parks, it is still heavily geared towards spaces of leisure. For example, in The
Great Good Place, sociologist Ray Oldenburg compares living patterns between the U.S. to
those of select European countries to argue that the United States’ lack spaces of informal life,
which he refers to as “third places.” He asserts that “in order to be relaxed and fulfilling, [a
society] must find its balance in three realms of experience” : The domestic, the “gainful or
productive” and “the third is inclusively social, offering both the basis of community and the

37
Annette Miae Kim, Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005): 5.
17
celebration of it.”38 Unlike Europeans, Americans do not make daily trips to cafes and banquet
halls - “We do not have that third realm of satisfaction and social cohesion beyond the portals of
home and work that for others is an essential elements of the good life. Our comings and goings
are more restricted to the home and work settings, and those two spheres have become
preemptive. Multitudes shuttle back and forth between the ‘womb’ and the ‘rat race’ in a
constricted pattern of daily life that easily generates the familiar desire to ‘get away from it
all’.”39 In this moment, Oldenburg fails to consider the spaces of commute. In making this stark
division between the spaces of home and work, he fails to consider the places that exist in
between. Though he makes reference to the transitional moments of everyday life through the
idea of being “shuttling back and forth,” he assumes these moments to be void of significance.
Despite the role that these transitional moments play in the lives of urban dwellers, Oldenburg,
like many scholars, does not stop to critically consider these moments or the spaces of interaction
that fill them.
Not all social scientists believe that the U.S. is void of a vibrant social sphere, however.
In The Cosmopolitan Canopy, sociologist Elijah Anderson examines various sites in Philadelphia
where diverse people spend “casual and purposeful time together” such as the city’s historic
Reading Terminal.40 Anderson operationalizes the idea of displaying “cosmopolitanism” to mean
that people accept the space as belonging to different kinds of people. “Cosmopolitan canopies”
are thus “heterogeneous and densely populated bounded public spaces within cities that offer a
respite from this wariness, settings where a mix of people can feel comfortable enough to relax

38
Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and other Hangouts at
the Heart of a Community (Marlowe and Company, 1999), 14.
39
Ibid., 9.
40
Elijah Anderson, Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2012): xv.
18
their guard and go about their business more casually.”41 He argues that these spaces operate
through a generalized feeling of tolerance that is “infectious” and “wills people who go there to
take leave of their particularism and show a certain civility and even openness towards
strangers.”42 Though Anderson’s study presents some useful ideas for thinking about the
potential for community-building amongst strangers, it paints an unrealistically harmonious
picture of people’s interactions in public spaces that completely dismisses how issues of race,
gender, class, sexuality, physical ability, etc. exist within these spaces.
It is on this basis that Reuben Buford May critiques Anderson’s notion of the
“cosmopolitan canopy” in Urban Nightlife. Rather than presenting an overly romanticized
account of interactions between different social groups, Urban Nightlife aims to show how the
interactions that occur in public space are always shaped by larger “historical and contemporary
institutional forces that support and perpetuate … tensions” between groups.43 Buford May
argues that interactions within the public spaces of nightclubs are characterized less by
Anderson’s notion of simple integrated social interactions between strangers and more by “what
[Buford May] refers to as integrated segregation - the idea that individuals in public space,
rather than experiencing unfettered interaction with others on the downtown streets, are socially
bound to interaction with those social types like themselves.”44 While I do not believe that all
interactions in public space are antagonistic, it is important that we do not overlook these
moments in favor of telling a more positive narrative about public life in the United States.
Rather than pushing the idea that these interactions are wholly harmonious, it is more productive

41
Ibid., 3.
42
Ibid., 43.
43
Reuben Buford May, Urban Nightlife: Entertaining Race, Class, and Culture in Public Spaces (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2014): xii.
44
Ibid., 9.
19
to think about how we can read public spaces and the interactions that they facilitate for
information about the state of contemporary race, class, gender, etc. relations.
Like Buford May, my goal is to uncover the nuanced ways that people “interact and to
reveal what these interactions tell us about the complex relationship among race, class, and
culture…”45 Although I in many ways adapt Buford May’s framework to approach my
examinations of public space, the nature of public transportation differs vastly from that of the
nightclubs that he describes. As a leisure-focused public space, people in nightclubs tend to
cluster with others who are similar to themselves rather than mingle with those who are different.
On public transit, however, represents a more perfect form of integration in that people’s
presence on public buses and trains is not rooted in social interaction but rather in the function of
getting to/from daily activities. I argue that the lack of social-emphasis of public transportation
as well as the fact that public trains and buses are mobile spaces allows them to create a more
perfect, though not entirely perfect, integrated public space. As Ron Shiffman, Rick Bell, et al
note in Beyond Zucotti Park, “Plazas, squares, and piazzas are often a site of education,
interaction, organizing, and action. However, the connective tissue of our communities – the
sidewalks and the pathways – also function as places for encounters, communication, and action
to take place.”46
The lack of attention paid to “in between” spaces within public space literature led me to
examine the scholarship that exists at the intersection of urban studies and mobility studies as a
means to understand how one might approach a critical conversation about public transit and
social politics. Scholars such as Ole B. Jensen and Helen F. Wilson have challenged the field of
urban studies’ dismissal of public transit spaces as critical political spaces. In “Flows of

45
Buford May, Urban Nightlife, 26.
46
Ron Shiffman, Rick Bell, et al. Beyond Zuccotti Park (Oakland: New Village Press, 2012), xx.
20
Meaning, Cultures of Movements – Urban Mobility as meaningful Everyday Life Practice,”
Jensen challenges characterizations of the city through the dichotomy of enclaves (fixed and
bounded sites) and armatures (infrastructure channels and transit spaces). He pushes against
scholars who participate in “sedentary thinking” as well as those who he believes to be overly
invested in mobility and fluidity and reconceptualizes the city through the framework of “critical
mobility thinking.” Jensen offers “critical mobility thinking” as a vantage point for exploring
urban space in a way that “moves beyond the sedentary and nomad conceptualisations.”47 By
offering this third position, Jensen argues that “our lives are not just what happen in static
enclaves, but also in all the intermediaries and circulation in-between place.”48
Building on Jensen’s framework, geographer Helen Wilson makes a case for the bus as a
space of “propinquity” where exchanges and closeness amongst strangers hold significance.49
Wilson highlights the bus as a site characterized by “tacit negotiations” and “intense encounter”
that calls for a certain level of engagement and tolerance.50 She highlights the bus as a space of
unique materiality that engenders “particular structures of encounter”51:

The bus is a space of intense materiality. No other urban setting places bodies in quite the
same way. The space is continuously (re)negotiated and (re)ordered through mobile and
constantly shifting practices of movement, behaviour, expectation, assumption, and
assertion as people come and go. Differences are negotiated on the smallest of scales,

47
Jensen, “Flows of Meaning, Cultures of Movements…,” 155.
48
Jensen, “Flows of Meaning, Cultures of Movements…,” 154.
49
Helen F. Wilson, “Passing Propinquities in the Multicultural City: The Everyday Encounters of Bus Passengering,”
Environment and Planning A 43, no. 3 (March 2011): 635.
50
Ibid., 634.
51
Ibid., 647.
21
individual itineraries come together - if only temporarily - subjectivities are continuously
(re)formed.52

Wilson uses ethnographic data to illustrate the breadth of social experiences that public
transportation can engender, especially highlighting how the “coming together of bodies, mass,
and matter” can produce moments of contestation.53

It can solidify prejudices and antagonisms as much as it can weaken them and might
produce something closer to recognition than it can to consensus or understanding. Yet,
regardless of the tenor of travel experiences, it is certainly a space that ‘works as requisite
for identity building’54 and points to the everyday challenges of contemporary urban
living and the throwntogetherness of different bodies. Thus, these reorderings and
encounters are, I argue, intrinsically political, not only in the affects and effects that they
produce and project into future encounters, but also in the way in which they combine
different elements of position, identity, and difference into new constellations and
moments of engagement, attraction, and aversion. From such moments of encounter, new
modes of living with difference might emerge and be demanded, yet may also be
concurrently challenged, undermined, or called to account.55

Thus, Wilson argues that the bus is an intrinsically political site not solely because it is a public
space that brings together diverse groups of people but because the unique materiality of the

52
Ibid., 646.
53
Ibid., 646.
54
Jensen, “Flows of Meaning, Cultures of Movements…,” 147.
55
Wilson, “Passing Propinquities in the Multicultural City,” 646.
22
space creates a dynamism that produces politicized interaction between strangers. These
interactions, which can be both harmonious and tension-filled, form the political basis of the bus
as a mobility space, as studying them allows us to understand the urban lived experience in new
ways.
This dissertation participates in critical mobility thinking by explicitly placing encounters
on public transit within the social, political, and economic contexts that inform them. Building
on Wilson’s work, I take public transportation spaces, by virtue of their unique materiality, to be
sites of exposure through which we can better understand systemic injustice and inequality as it
manifests in the everyday experiences of people moving through urban space. By drawing a line
between the experiences recorded in my ethnographic data to larger structures of race and class,
this chapter pushes past urban studies’ preoccupation with fixed spaces to critically consider
mobility spaces as critical spaces of “contestation and politics”56 where “identity, meaning, and
culture” are produced.57

Design and Methods
This project is rooted in qualitative data and discursive analysis. My primary site of
participant observation was BUSted, a monthly storytelling show that centers the experiences of
non-drivers in Los Angeles. Each month from January 2014 – May 2017, I attended the show,
listening to stories and generally observing the ways that people engaged with one another. On
four occasions, I was booked as a featured storyteller and on a number of other occasions, I
volunteered to tell stories during the portion of the show where audience members are asked to
share.

56
Ibid., 148
57
Jensen, “Flows of Meaning, Cultures of Movements…,” 140.
23

Figure 1: Image of me telling a story at BUSted in 2017

When attending a show, I would audio record them and take copious notes throughout
with rough timestamps of moments that stood out to me as potentially significant to my analysis.
I was particularly attentive to instances when race, gender, class, and physical ability were
evoked. To produce my analysis, I reviewed these audio recordings and written notes to develop
a more nuanced coding system that marked more specific themes within each show. For
example, while I used “gender” as a tag in my initial show notes, I used tags such as “touching”
“walking alone,” and “catcalling” to better organize data and work towards a more local analysis.
24
As part of a qualitative research course, I conducted five interviews with people who
were featured storytellers at BUSted in 2015. Because I conducted these interviews during my
second year of my graduate studies, however, many of the questions that I posed and thus, many
of the responses that I received were not geared towards the focus of my project as it evolved.
Although many of the insights that I gained through their interviews were not directly relevant to
my final analysis, they served as an important foundation for conceptualizing my project and
helped me better understand the kinds of people that were attracted to BUSted.
In addition to BUSted, I also conducted participant observation on trains and buses in Los
Angeles and Chicago. Much of the data that ended up featured throughout the chapters was
collected while using public transportation for my own personal commutes. In addition to my
regular commutes, I also took pointed research trips to different parts of the city to gain a more
comprehensive understanding of the LA transit system. These trips took me beyond my usual
routes and into neighborhoods that I don’t usually visit while conducting my personal and
professional activities.
While some of my personal experiences on transit are sometimes featured, my
experiences taking public transportation in Los Angeles largely functioned to provide context for
understanding BUSted as a political space of identity construction. Furthermore, exploring
public transportation in Los Angeles adds richness to my analysis as it allows me to better
understand the nuanced relationship between urban space, politics, and mobility. In conducting
research for this project, I rode all six Metro rail lines and 70 of 165 bus routes spanning Los
Angeles County from neighborhoods West LA, East LA, South LA, North Hollywood and the
San Fernando Valley. Beyond the spaces of the buses and trains, themselves, I was also attentive
to the transit spaces associated with bus and rail such as bus stops, train stations/platforms, and
25
transit hubs such as Union Station. Although I made an active effort to experience as many bus
lines as possible for the purpose of research, public buses were also my primary form of
transportation. For this reason, certain lines are over-represented in my data by virtue of those
lines being part of daily commutes (200, 2, 4, 704; shown below in Figure 2). For this same
reason, I possess more expertise with respect to the demographic makeup and operations of these
lines.

Figure 2: Transit Map of Echo Park / Silverlake / East Hollywood, Source: Metro.net
26

27
Figure 3 Map of LA Metro Subway and Light rail System, Source: Metro.net
“Window Seat” heavily relies on discursive analysis to understand public transportation
and the ways that people experience it. While a portion of my analysis is dedicated to making
sense of mobility spaces in Los Angeles, another portion is committed to thinking about the way
that society talks about public transportation. I am particularly invested in this as it relates to Los
Angeles given the city’s car-centric culture. I use a combination of my personal experiences,
stories told by transit-users at BUSted, and popular discourse from news and social media to
better understand how LA public transportation exists in the popular imaginary.
To engage discourse outside of academia, I collected transit-related articles and videos of
interactions on public transit that circulated on social media. I also collected examples of how
transit spaces were represented in contemporary popular culture. Although I drafted a chapter
that took a pointed look at representations of transit in popular culture, I decided not to include it
in the final version of my project. However, these materials gave me insight into the different
ways that transit spaces exist within the popular imaginary and shaped my analysis in
fundamental ways.

Overview and Chapter Summaries

In the first chapter “Liberal Green Commuters: Politics of Privilege at the BUSted
Storytelling Show,” I examine BUSted as a site of politics and collective identity construction. I
contextualize BUSted by examining contemporary discourse around the gentrification of Echo
Park, the neighborhood where the show takes place. Understanding the history and contemporary
reality of Echo Park highlights the irony of the show’s lack of engagement with race. Following
my discussion of Echo Park, I use qualitative data collected from BUSted to conduct a discursive
28
analysis of the show to understand how regular BUSted attendees construct a collective political
identity around using public transportation via their narratives and interactions. I then situate
BUSted within a broader conversation that links the politics of mobility, race, and class to
illuminate the irony that the show embodies. I argue that while the show rightfully politicizes
transit, it centers the experiences of White choice riders and consequently erases those of the
working class POC riders who have historically relied on Metro services. To support this claim, I
consider how transportation in Los Angeles has historically intersected with issues of race and
class to further exacerbate the marginalization of working-class people of color. Using popular
news sources as well as qualitative data collected at the BUSted storytelling show, I put this
history in conversation with contemporary discourse around public transportation in LA to
illustrate how this marginalization is reflected in both the transit infrastructure and in the ideas
that many Angelenos hold about public transit and those who use it.
The following chapter, “Policing Space Policing Race: Understanding Racialized
Policing through Public Transportation” examines the complicated links between race, class,
mobility, public space, and policing. As I illustrated in Chapter 1 of this project, race, class, and
transit have long been entangled in Los Angeles. Chapter 2’s arguments build on those of
Chapter 1 in that it uses Los Angeles as an example to reveal new dimensions of the historical
and contemporary connection between social identity, geography, and transit. While Chapter 1
studies the social and economic implications of these relationships through the BUSted
storytelling show, this chapter approaches this conversation through an examination of LA Bus
Riders’ Union (BRU), an organization dedicated to promoting race and class equity within public
transit through legal advocacy, and its parent organization, The Labor/Community Strategy
Center (LCSC). Studying the political campaigns around fare-policing and truancy that the BRU
29
and the LCSC have waged in the past twenty years reveals how mobility and mobility spaces
become racialized and classed through policing. While the LA MTA’s rationale behind
deploying LAPD on trains is to promote safety, I argue that this is shortsighted as it does
consider the fraught relationship that many people of color have with the police. I argue that by
increasing the likelihood that people of color will encounter police in their everyday lives, Metro
limits the mobility of these riders and makes them vulnerable to casual police violence.
Chapter 3, “Body Politic(s),” examines gender, race, the body, violence, and fear on
public transportation through an analysis of the New York Metropolitan Transportation
Authority (MTA) manspreading campaign, ethnographic data collected at BUSted, and case
studies of publicized incidents of gendered violence. Engaging literature in critical feminist
geography and urban studies as well as scholarly work that critically examines masculinity, I use
gender and spatial theories to interrogate the roots of the recent controversy surrounding the
practice of manspreading, thinking critically about how this practice is steeped in patriarchal
body performances. Using manspreading on public transportation as the entry point into a
conversation about how differently raced and gendered bodies navigate public space, I illuminate
the connection between the everyday and the systemic by demonstrating how the everyday
masculine/feminine practices and performances that occur in and through public space are
informed by the structural. By combing through issues of gender, race, violence, and urban space
this chapter inherently raises questions about women’s right to the city. I thus conclude the
chapter with a discussion of interventions that have been made at varied scales to promote
women’s safety and allow women to stake their claim over public space.
Although each chapter of this dissertation grapples with identity, politics, and public
space, I approach identity differently in each chapter. Chapter 1 considers the historical and
30
contemporary role of transportation in construction the identity of both Los Angeles as a city and
Angelenos as a group of people. In the second half of Chapter 1, I enter the conversation about
identity through the narratives of BUSted storytellers while using literature in identity studies to
understand the rhetorical strategies that they employ to give political significance to their use of
public transportation and subsequently perform the identity of the politically engaged liberal. For
this reason, Chapter 1 is perhaps more heavily invested in a conversation about how individuals
actively construct their social and political identities. Chapters 2 and 3 on the other hand center
identity through an examination of how unintentional performances of race and gender on public
transportation expose the structural underpinning of race and gender, revealing how these macro-
level manifest in the daily lives of people. By illustrating how the macro and micro scales engage
with one another within transit spaces, these chapters underscore public space, and specifically
public transportation, as political space.

31
ONE:
Liberal Green Commuters: Politics of Privilege at the BUSted Storytelling Show

Around 4:35pm on a Sunday, I leave my apartment and head towards the staircase at the
end of my block that connects my street to the next one over. After climbing the stairs, I make
my way through the hilly residential streets and eventually make a left on Rosemont and come
out onto Sunset Boulevard where most of the neighborhood’s commercial spaces are located. I
stroll past the dog daycare, PETA Headquarters, and the newly opened ice cream parlor. I check
in on the construction site at the corner of Sunset/Alvarado and make note of its progress. It’s
been about a year since the modest strip mall with a laundromat, a Starbucks, a small pizzeria
and a variety of mom and pop shops selling cheap toys and home goods shut down. Those
buildings were demolished to build an entirely new structure, which I heard would eventually be
a higher-end commercial center. The new buildings have sleek gray beams and tall glass
windows that mimic the modernist aesthetic that one can find in many of the new coffee shops
that have sprung up in the area over the past three years. I keep moving down Sunset, past the
Brite Spot Diner, the Taix French Restaurant, and what used to be a small family-owned
Mexican restaurant (it is now a small-chain barbecue place). I step off the sidewalk into the street
to avoid the crowds of people waiting outside of The Echo, a music venue that features live
performers every night of the week. I continue past Masa, the Chicago-style deep dish restaurant,
cross the street to pass Out of the Closet, a chain thrift stores whose profits go towards AIDS
research, and arrive at Stories Books and Cafe.
Although it provides some refuge from the noise and street traffic of Sunset, Stories
certainly has its own element of chaos. True to its name, Stories operates both as a full-fledged
32
bookstore that carries new and used books from all genres and as a coffeeshop/café that serves
beverages and small bites. I walk in and I am immediately surrounded by hundreds of books,
seemingly crammed into every nook and cranny. The books sit on shelves and tables that appear
disorganized at first glance but are actually divided by genre. I begin down the short, narrow path
that leads me past the large wooden booth that serves as the librarian’s desk. The desk is slightly
elevated from the floor so that the librarian has to look down at customers when speaking to
them. The person occupying this booth is usually one of two men, both of whom know the ins
and outs of the store’s book inventory. I continue walking, sliding past the people who are
scattered between the shelves leafing through books and make my way towards the back of the
store.
Like always, the tables are filled with people working on their screenplays, scripts,
theses, etc - all the tasks that keep the LA coffeeshop scene bustling. I take a place in line near
the register, attempting to stand in a way that does not block the traffic flowing from the café’s
front entrance on Sunset to the back of the store where the bathrooms, patio, and parking lot are
located. As I stand in line, I can hear Adam’s voice as he checks the microphone and attempts to
loosen up the crowd before the show. Just then I see Alyona Passo, a regular featured storyteller
and attendee that I met three years ago when I first began attending BUSted. She walks in from
the patio and gets in line to order her signature iced latte. We say hello, exchange a hug, and then
chat until I make it to the front of the line. We ask about each other’s lives, using information
gathered from our interactions on social media to inspire our questions. After ordering and
receiving my chai almond milk latte, I proceed through the backdoor and out onto the patio
where BUSted is just starting. Although the entire first row of seats are empty, I weave my way
through the crowd to get a seat further in the back. From here, I have a better vantage point from
33
which to take in the space, the people, and their reactions to the stories. As I sit down, Adam
looks over and says, “Hey Sabrina” with a big smile. I reply, “Hey Adam,” giving him a big
wave. I sit down, open the audio recorder app on my phone, and take out my notebook and pen.
…
“BUSted: True Stories of Getting Around L.A. By People Who Don’t Drive” is a
monthly storytelling show held in Echo Park, Los Angeles at Stories Cafe and Books. At
BUSted, storytellers relay anecdotes about their experiences related to riding public
transportation in L.A. The show, held on the fourth Sunday of each month, was created by Adam
Weber, a former freelance sports editor/photographer, writer, and storyteller back in 2013. Adam
continues to organize and host the show to this day. While Stories Cafe is the “home terminal”58
of BUSted, the show has participated in various festivals throughout the city, taking it to venues
such as the Silverlake Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library and Busby’s East Sport Bar and
Club on the Miracle Mile.
I was initially drawn to BUSted because I was a non-driver living in Los Angeles, a city
known for its elaborate freeway system and the consequent car-dependency of its residents.
When I told people that I would be pursing my PhD at the University of Southern California, the
most common response was, “you’re know you’re going to have to learn to drive, right?” Given
my schedule at the time, I knew I would not be able to take driving lessons before my move, so I
disregarded these comments by saying, “we’ll see.” Upon actually moving to Los Angeles, I
found an apartment in Echo Park that was conveniently located near the 200 bus line, went all
the way to the U.S.C. campus in under 30 minutes (without traffic). The apartment was also near
Sunset Blvd, a major thoroughfare with buses that could take me to east to downtown or west to

58
This is a term that the show’s host commonly uses to refer to Stories.
34
Santa Monica or Malibu. Furthermore, as a first year PhD student, I had more than enough
reading to keep me occupied in the event of a long ride. After a few months, I had gotten used to
my routine using public transportation. I downloaded all of the apps that I needed so that I could
strategically map my routes and adjust my plans in the event of a bus that didn’t arrive on time.
Although I had successfully integrated public transportation into my life in LA, it was
clear to me that I was an anomaly within my social circles. Aside from a friend that I met on the
bus (a German exchange student who also commuted to/from Echo Park to USC), I knew no one
who used public transit as their primary form of transportation. Given that I was somewhat
unique amongst those with whom I interacted, not driving became a great conversation starter.
Many people were fascinated when they found out that I didn’t drive. When those around me
complained about the traffic on the 101 or the 405, however, I was not able to relate. It was as if
they were speaking another language. If someone asked me about the location of a restaurant or a
coffee shop, I would describe the area through landmarks. While one might notice these elements
of the urban landscape while on foot or riding the bus, they could easily be missed while driving
by. Through these experiences, I began to see that driving is LA is cultural. No matter how
different two people might be, they could depend on finding commonality in their frustration
with gridlocked traffic and challenging freeway mergers. As a non-driver, however, I could not
participate in Los Angeles society on these terms.
BUSted could only exist in a city like Los Angeles where driving is a dominant part of
the culture. In cities where using public transportation is more common, a storytelling show that
centers transit experiences is not as interesting. In Los Angeles, however, public transportation is
an enigma to a lot of people. Throughout my time living in LA, I have met numerous people who
have grown up in Los Angeles and have never stepped foot on a public bus or train. This is
35
especially true for White people and those who grew up in more affluent homes. The vast
majority of those who use public transportation are working class people of color who cannot
afford to purchase a car.
Despite the ways that public transit in LA has been historically classed and racialized,
there have been shifts in the race and class demographics of transit users over the past ten years.
Historically, public transportation in Los Angeles has primarily been used by people of color and
immigrants who were financially excluded from owning cars. This was exacerbated in the 1950s
when large numbers of middle-class Whites left the urban core for suburban living.59 However,
this trend of White people leaving the inner city for the suburbs has been reversing in the past
two decades. With the costs of living increasing in major cities around the United States, more
White people have been neglected the suburbs in favor of the inner city neighborhoods from
which they ran in the 1950s.60 As more White and middle-class people move into neighborhoods
in central and east Los Angeles that are better connected to transit, public transit has become
Whiter and more socio-economically diverse. As of 2014, White people comprised 32 percent of
all L.A. commuters (driving and using public transit) but only made up 11 percent of public
transit riders.61 These numbers are shifting as LA Metro expands its rail lines, however. Between
2012 and 2016, LA Metro’s blue, red and green routes all lost ridership while the ridership on
the new gold and Expo lines increased.62 The demographics of the neighborhoods that these
trains serve tell a story about the shifts in demographics that are occurring on LA public

59
William H Frey, “The End of Suburban White Flight,” Brookings, July 23, 2015,
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2015/07/23/the-end-of-suburban-white-flight/.
60
Ibid.
61
Chris Walker, “Why Don’t White People in L.A. Take the Bus,” LA Weekly, June 23, 2014,
https://www.laweekly.com/news/why-dont-white-people-in-la-take-the-bus-4802145.
62
Daniel C. Vock, “Why Public Transit Ridership is Falling,” February 2, 2018, Governing.com,
https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-los-angeles-transit-ridership-study.html.
36
transportation. The blue, red, and green lines run through far less affluent neighborhoods (i.e.
Compton, Watts, North Hollywood, Hawthorne) than do the gold and Expo lines (i.e. Pasadena,
Culver City, Santa Monica). Thus, the fact that ridership on the gold and Expo lines is increasing
even as overall Metro ridership is decreasing signals that more affluent people have recently
been opting for public transportation.
BUSted highlights this growing population of Angelenos who are choosing to use public
transportation over driving. Most of those who regularly attend and/or tell stories at BUSted do
not own cars, but not because they are financially prohibited from doing so. Instead regular
BUSted attendees are what urban planners and policy makers refer to as “choice” riders because
they choose to use public transportation despite being financially able to own a car.63 In contrast
to “captive” riders who use public transportation out of financial necessity, choice riders usually
opt into public transportation for its practicality (i.e. not having to find parking, being able to
read or do work while commuting, etc.). With the continued expansion of the Metro rail system
as well as LA’s worsening traffic conditions and heightened concerns about the environmental
impact of cars, this is a choice that more people are making in an attempt to improve their quality
of life.
BUSted attendees are distinct from other choice riders, however, in that they view their
use of public transit as a political choice rooted in an appreciation for diversity. They see
themselves as actively pushing against LA’s dominant car culture by choosing to use public
transportation. Furthermore, they understand this choice to be a reflection of their social
consciousness. They strongly believe in the importance of diversity and find value in being in

63
In attending BUSted over the years, most storytellers have given information about their origin story with
transit. Many of them “ended up” on transit due to unfortunate circumstances such as DUIs or financial struggle
but they say that they continue to use public transportation even after their circumstances change and they are
able to own a car and/or drive.
37
close proximity with strangers from all walks of life while riding trains and buses. BUSted
provides a space through which they can perform their appreciation by interacting with other
transit users and sharing their experiences.
Attendees purported appreciation for diversity, however, is steeped in irony given the
show’s predominantly White choice rider audience. Rather than representing the working-class
people of color who have historically been and continue to be the predominant users of public
transportation in Los Angeles, BUSted instead reflects the growing contingent of White people
in Los Angeles who are opting for public transportation over driving. Because most storytellers
are White, race often falls out of the conversation. Outside of select moments where storytellers
of color engage race in their stories, race goes largely unaddressed at the show. White
storytellers’ failure to effectively address race in their stories de-racializes the experience of
being in public space and undermines the political ethos of the space.
In this chapter, I examine BUSted as a site of politics and collective identity construction.
I contextualize BUSted by examining contemporary discourse around the gentrification of Echo
Park. Echo Park has been gentrifying for nearly two decades but these processes were catalyzed
by the rehabilitation and reopening of the Echo Park Lake in 2013. Understanding the history
and contemporary reality of Echo Park highlights a certain tone-deafness regarding race that
undermines the show’s advocacy for mobility issues. My discussion of Echo Park is rooted in my
own experience living in the neighborhood as well as my analysis of popular discourse as
examined through recent articles published in popular news sources.
Using qualitative data collected from the show, I conduct a discursive analysis of the
show to understand how regular BUSted attendees construct a collective political identity around
using public transportation via their narratives and interactions. I then situate BUSted within a
38
broader conversation that links the politics of mobility, race, and class to illuminate the irony that
the show embodies. I argue that while the show rightfully politicizes transit, it centers the
experiences of White choice riders and consequently erases those of the working class POC
riders who have historically relied on Metro services. To support this claim, I consider how
transportation in Los Angeles has historically intersected with issues of race and class to further
exacerbate the marginalization of working-class people of color. Using popular news sources as
well as qualitative data collected at the BUSted storytelling show, I put this history in
conversation with contemporary discourse around public transportation in LA to illustrate how
this marginalization is reflected in both the transit infrastructure and in the ideas that many
Angelenos hold about public transit and those who use it.

The New Echo Park
Ten years ago, BUSted could not have existed in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Though I
myself did not experience the neighborhood at this time, I have learned through conversations
with those who knew the area in the 1990’s and 2000’s that the Echo Park of the past was vastly
different from what one finds today. When I first came to LA, people who had grown up in the
city would react strongly to hearing that I lived in Echo Park. For those who had not recently
visited the area, the name conjured strong images of violence, drug addicts, and homelessness.
The Echo Park lake, in particular, was a hub for elicit activities with high incidents of gang
violence occurring there. In 2011, however, the Echo Park Lake was closed for rehabilitation.
Over the next two years, the lake was cleaned, new lotus plants were planted, and a new
playground was constructed in the parklands surrounding the water.64 This new version of the

64
Larry Gordon, “Echo Park lake reopens after two-year makeover,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2013,
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2013-jun-15-la-me-0616-echopark-lake-20130616-story.html.
39
Lake sharply contrasts the old image; with a full-service café and swan-shaped pedal boats for
rent, the Echo Park Lake is a vibrant, family-friendly green space that attracts people to Echo
Park from all over the city. Aside from the Northwest corner of the park, which has, like so many
public spaces in Los Angeles, come to serve as a homeless encampment, there is little visible
indication of the strife and struggle with which the old Lake was associated.
Although the lake is undoubtedly a wonderful recreational resource for Echo Park
residents and Los Angeles more broadly, it is likely that the lake’s reopening catalyzed
gentrification in the area. Although there is not yet census data available to statistically support
this claim, the change can be read in the transformation of commercial spaces. I moved to Echo
Park in August 2013, just months after the lake had reopened. Although there were still many
working class Latinx and Asian residents when I moved in, there was also a strong contingent of
White people in their 20s and 30s, many of whom had moved to the area within the past two
years. Sunset Boulevard between Beaudry and Alvarado was lined with an eclectic mix of mom
and pop retailers whose façade and interior aesthetics gave the impression of having been there
for decades. There was the Asian grocery store where you could find produce that was not only
affordable, but that was difficult to find at other grocery stores because they were primarily used
for Asian and Latin-American cuisines. There were multiple dollar stores, selling an extensive
range of items ranging from cleaning products to office supplies. On my walks to and from the
200 bus stop, I would pass fashion boutiques and second-hand stores with mannequins sitting out
front to model the clothing. When I moved from Echo Park in 2018, none of these stores
remained.
Walking this swath of Sunset today you encounter, what some might consider, an
excessive amount of coffee shops. The clothing boutiques and second-hand stores have
40
transformed into vintage shops with price tags much higher than those of their original
counterparts. Brunch-oriented cafes offering varied renditions of avocado toast have made their
homes in the tiniest commercial spaces and taken over the sidewalks to seat their patrons. These
are the attributes of a neighborhood that I come to be known as the “hipster epicenter” of Los
Angeles.65
The gentrification of Echo Park has sparked popular discourse around race,
displacement, and cultural erasure in Los Angeles. In 2015, the Los Angeles Times, published an
article profiling a family who had lived in Echo Park for 31 years and was now being pushed out
of the neighborhood due to increasing real estate development and rent prices. Jose and Ana
Sanchez arrived in Los Angeles from El Salvador after having fled during the country’s civil
war. They settled in Echo Park where they rented a single-family home and raised two children.
Their 29-year-old daughter, Rosio, still lived with them at the time of the interview. With three
sources of income, the family was able to afford the $942 rent on their home until it was sold to a
real estate investment firm called 4SITE in 2015. 4SITE planned to demolish the house and
rebuild a 5-unit condo building on the land that the house occupied. Each of these units was
projected to sell for around $800,000. This profile garnered empathy for those who are displaced
during gentrification and raised questions about the role that the government should play in
protecting those who are vulnerable to displacement.66
While journalists at major news outlets center the economic challenges that gentrification
creates for many long-time residents, many of whom are working class people of color, the
residents themselves have used media to speak out about the social and cultural tensions that

65
Debra Kamin, “Highland Park, Los Angeles: A Watchful Eye on Gentrification,” New York Times, October 22,
2019.
66
Steve Lopez, “After 31 years in Echo Park, victims of gentrification,” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2015,
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0315-lopez-echo-20150313-column.html.
41
result from White people moving into working class POC neighborhoods. In “The Gentrification
Mi Barrio, Echo Park,” Eric Trules, a long-time resident of Echo Park, paints an image of the
Echo Park of the past. While he acknowledges the gang violence as a reality of the
neighborhoods past, he also sheds light on Echo Park’s history of art and politics. Trules notes
that before the neighborhood was a “trendy magnet for wannabe hipsters and musicians,” it was
home to activists such as Carey McWilliams, Grace Simon, and Leo Politi. Trules’ also
expresses frustration with his new White neighbors, drawing attention to the cultural clashes that
gentrification often incites. This comes through most powerfully in Trules’ recounting of an
instance when a White neighbor knocked on his door and asked him to turn his music down.67
Trules notes that upon returning to his apartment after having a heated yelling match with the
neighbor, he realized that his music might have actually been “a tad loud.” By acknowledging
this, Trules draws attention to the emotional dimensions of gentrification. His vexation with his
neighbor has less to do with this specific neighbor or with the volume of music and more do to
with Trules’ recognition of gentrification as the systemic marginalization of people of color and
the subsequent erasure of their cultures. His personal connection to Echo Park causes him to act
with hostility towards White people of their perceived lack of awareness and empathy.
In “A Portrait of Echo Park from an Angry Brown Girl,” Kimberly Soriano conveys this
same sentiment. She describes the way that her memories are wrapped up in the small businesses
that have had to close their doors as a result of rent prices. In lamenting the businesses that have
closed, Soriano expresses a sense of loss around the relationship that she had to those spaces by
highlighting the role that they play in her childhood memories. She resents the White middle-
class hipsters who have overtaken the neighborhood and calls out new residents and businesses

67
Eric Trules, “The Gentrification of Mi Barrio, Echo Park,” Huffington Post, June 4, 2014,
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-gentrification-of-mi-_b_5435209.
42
for not making an effort to preserve the cultural history of the space. She specifically criticizes
the Echo Park Rising music festival for its lack of inclusion, highlighting how few Latinx and
Spanish-language artists are featured as part of the lineup each year. Soriano laments businesses
that have closed and is critical of the way that the shift in the neighborhood’s demographics have
pushed long-time business owners to prioritize new White residents to stay in operation. The
Gold Room, located on southwest corner of Sunset Blvd. and Echo Park Avenue, closed for a
couple of weeks back in 2017 for remodeling. The bar, historically known for its $5 beer and
taco special, reopened with a new décor and a new menu, which Soriano believes caters to the
new White hipster crowd over the working-class Brown people who have been the bar’s primary
clientele.68
Given its history as a poor and working-class neighborhood, it makes sense that Echo
Park is so well-connected for public transportation. On Sunset boulevard, you can find local lines
(2 and 4) as well as their express counterparts (302 and 704) that run to/from downtown and the
West Side. On these buses, riders can easily access downtown, Union Station, Redline stations at
Vermont/Santa Monica Blvd. and Vermont/Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, UCLA, and the beach.
From Echo Park Avenue and Sunset, you can hop onboard the 200 and ride all the way to the
University of Southern California in South LA. Just beneath the Sunset overpass, the 92 takes
you to Atwater Village and Glendale. The availability of public transit options in and near Echo
Park are likely, in part, a function of the neighborhood’s residents having historically been
working class POC. However, the ease of using public transit in this neighborhood is also
something that makes the area more appealing to young White people moving to the area. These

68
Kimberly Soriano, The Hood Digest, “A Portrait of Echo Park from an Angry Brown Girl,” September 19, 2017,
http://www.thehooddigest.com/a-portrait-of-echo-park-from-an-angry-brown-girl/.
43
newcomers, many of whom are politically liberal and open to using public transportation in Los
Angeles, form the foundation of the BUSted audience.
BUSted: True Stories About Getting Around LA, Told by People Who Don’t Drive
I was first introduced to BUSted in 2013 by a flyer posted on a light pole in Echo Park.
Back then, flyers were the major form of advertising for the show. The creator and host, Adam,
would post them around the city himself. Sometimes, while hosting the show, he would mention
how he would go to different neighborhoods to post flyers along major thoroughfares where
Metro buses run frequently. The flyer was handwritten and contained no images, just text that
read: “BUSted: True Stories About Getting Around LA, Told by People Who Don’t Drive,”
followed by the date, time, and location. Over time, the sign evolved from this initial iteration to
include a quote from an LA Weekly writeup, mimicking the style of critical commentary that one
might see on the back of a book jacket. The quote describes the show as being “perfectly
tailored” to Los Angeles, “where public transportation is so underutilized” and characterizes the
stories as “hilarious and occasionally moving.” This more recent version of the flyer also
includes a mention of the award that the show won at the New Urbanism Film Festival for “Best
Emerging Idea.”
44

Figure 4: BUSted Flyer pinned to bulletin board, 2017

However, after being fined for posting his flyers in places where postings were prohibited, Adam
discontinued this practice. These days, the primary form of advertisement for the show is email.
During every show, Adam periodically directs audience members to a worn spiral notebook
sitting on a table to the right of the stage. He encourages them to write down their name and
email so that they can be kept in the loop about upcoming events. Once a month, a few days
before the next show, he sends an email that includes details for the show to everyone who has
signed up.
Aside from those who intentionally come to Stories for the show, the BUSted audience is
made up of people who just happen to be at the café when the show starts. When there are no
shows or special events, the Stories patio functions as an extension of the café’s indoor space.
Just like inside, the outdoor patio is filled with tables and chairs where people sit to work, study,
and/or chat with friends. Before BUSted starts, there are usually people using the space in this
way. It is only after Adam starts moving the tables off to the side and positioning the chairs so
45
that they face the stage that people realize that a show is about to happen. Those sitting on the
patio will often inquire about the show and after hearing Adam’s spiel, some will decide to stick
around for it. Before each show, Adam also announces the show to everyone inside and
encourages them to join.
Stories has the bustling energy that is characteristic of many of coffeeshops in the area.
While people in Los Angeles generally spend extended periods of time in cafes, Stories is
particularly conducive to longer stints of lingering because of its extensive drink and food menu.
Although some pop in to grab a drink or food to go, most people camp out to work on various
projects or to read in between the shelves of the crammed stacks of books. By most rubrics,
Stories is a hipster haven with the crowd reflecting more of the “new” Echo Park more than the
old. In my years of spending time in Stories, both to attend BUSted and to work on my
dissertation, I have never seen a strong representation of the working class Latinx and Asian
families that I see walking in the neighborhood or waiting on the bus stops.
This same description holds true for the BUSted audience. BUSted draws a crowd that is
primarily made up of 20- and 30-something year-old White people who are relatively new Echo
Park residents. Rarely have I seen audience members that appear representative of those who
have lived in the neighborhood for decades. The irony of this is that this latter demographic –
working class POC – is the primary demographic of public transit users in Los Angeles. Given
BUSted’s aim to center the experiences of transit riders, the fact that its audience does not reflect
those who make up the majority of Metro ridership is ironic. What does it mean that White
choice riders who, despite their slowly increasing numbers, still make up a miniscule proportion
of ridership are the primary speakers at BUSted? Furthermore, if BUSted is, as it strives to be, a
46
space through which politics around mobility and transit are performed, what is lost by not
having working class people of color represented?

We’re Bus People: Mobility and the Politics of Choice at BUSted
One of the major ways that a collective identity is substantiated at BUSted is through
knowledge-sharing. When Billy Lane began his performance at the L.A. Storytelling Festival by
saying that he was on the 733 heading down Wilshire, there was commotion in the audience as
people began whispering with looks of confusion on their face. Eventually the host, Adam, piped
up and said, “You mean the 720. The 733 goes down Venice not Wilshire.” Many audience
members nodded their heads, acknowledging that Adam was indeed correct. At other times,
feeling included at BUSted requires a more nuanced knowledge of the LA bus system. The
efficacy of these moments relies upon the audience’s familiarity with a particular route and an
understanding of its unique atmosphere. For example, after failing to get an enthusiastic applause
following his opening piece at the show on April 26, 2015, Adam encouraged the audience to be
more lively saying, “Come on! I feel like I’m on the 302.” Here, Adam used a specific bus route
reference to evoke a certain sentiment from the crowd. The 302 is the express bus line that runs
down Sunset Boulevard from Alvarado/Sunset in Echo Park and terminates at either
Westwood/UCLA or the Pacific Coast Highway, depending on the bus’s specific route. Perhaps
because it is frequently used by UCLA students and professors, the 302 has a more uptight
environment than some other bus routes. Understanding Adam’s comment requires audience
members to possess nuanced knowledge of Metro bus routes that can only be gained by actually
experiencing and recognizing the unique atmospheres of different bus lines. In these moments,
the “bus people” collective identity operates through a “shared knowledge paradigm,” whereby a
47
group shares knowledge by virtue of the people in the group being “situated in a common
context.”69 Because regular attendees use LA Metro as their primary form of transportation in
Los Angeles, they are able to draw from a shared repertoire of experiences to perform/construct
their group identity.
While seemingly insignificant, these moments of pooling shared knowledge give contour
to the bus-rider identity. They reaffirm a sense of belonging for those who understand the
reference and reaffirm the uniqueness of the identity by excluding those who don’t get it. These
small moments at BUSted draw lines between those who simply take public transit and “bus
people.” Being one of the “bus people” requires broad knowledge of the LA public
transportation system that cannot be gained from a few isolated trips. It also requires people to
take in and reflect upon their experiences in a thoughtful way. Hybrid commuters who only use
public transit to get to/from work or school and use cars for all other aspects of their life have a
limited frame of reference for bus lines. By the same token, those who exclusively use the rail
system would also find it difficult to effectively perform the “bus people” identity. Because they
only make limited use the system, they are not familiar with a wide variety of routes and are thus
less likely to understand niche references. Those “purists,” who use public transit for both
professional and non-professional commuting become familiar with a variety of bus and train
lines across Los Angeles and are thus more likely to have an understanding of LA transit that is
nuanced enough to understand references at BUSted.70 This further defines the figure of the bus
rider as it distinguishes “bus people” as a particular subset of people who use public transit.

69
Ibid.
70
At the show on June 25, 2017, four-term California State Assemblyman, Mike Gatto refers to himself as a
“purist” because he used public transportation for all of his life needs, not just to go to and from work.
48
Claiming this identity requires that public transit be integrated into one’s life in LA rather than
being the occasional alternative to driving or a convenient way to bypass parking-related stress.
More than being about shared knowledge, however, the bus people identity is rooted in a
liberal political ethos. This is reflected in storytellers’ shared appreciation for public
transportation as an important space of socio-political interaction. This ethos is embedded in the
creator’s vision for the show. At the show that took place on October 14, 2014, in between
scheduled storytellers, Adam articulates what he understands as the value of taking the bus
saying:
Even though we all kind of make fun of riding the bus, you know, we all enjoy taking it.
And one of the great things about riding the bus is it forces you to meet and talk with
people that you wouldn’t ordinarily speak with or deal with. And granted, a lot of them
are crazy. But a lot of them turn out to be really nice people. And a lot of the bus drivers
are crazy too ... And when you don’t drive, you’re taken out of your little self-contained
vessel and you’re forced to interact with people and meet people from other parts of the
city, other parts of the country, and other parts of the world. And it’s really neat to
experience. And I think that even those of you that have cars, you should leave them
home sometimes and take the bus, take the train, take your car to the train station and
take the train the rest of the way and you’ll get some good experiences out of it.71

In this passage, Adam applauds public transportation for its ability to bring different kinds of
people together. He finds value in the social interactions that being a public transit user in LA
affords him and encourages non-transit users to embrace transit and the social experiences that it

71
BUSted: October 14, 2014.
49
affords. Adam’s statement reflects the overall premise of BUSted as a collective space. Those
who regularly choose to be a part of BUSted do so because they believe in the socio-political
power of public transportation. This shared value is the foundation of the collective “bus people”
identity that BUSted participants construct through telling stories and interacting with other
transit users within the space.
Adam is not alone in this belief that public transit brings people together in important
ways. During her performance on September 27, 2014, Tasha Raymond, a regular storyteller at
BUSted, opens her story with a preface that frames her relationship to public transportation:
“Riding the bus has been so much more for me than just getting from here to there. I’ve
gotten more exercise than when I had a treadmill ‘cause I walk a lot. And I’ve had more
consciousness-raising than the third-floor self-help section in Barnes and Noble. I now
make eye contact with people that were invisible to me 5 years ago ... [M]oving west to
east on Pico, you see the entire city in its luxe and its disparity. You see booming,
bustling business. You see boarded up windows and failed ventures. You see taco shacks
and tax preparers. You see kosher butchers and weed and car washes, everything. It runs
the gamut ... Riding the bus has been tremendous for me. It’s become my church. I have
learned all my best lessons on the bus. Treat people the way that you want to be treated.
Patience is a virtue. And it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. Amen.”72

In this opening, Raymond characterizes the time that she spends on the bus as “consciousness-
raising,” as it puts her in close proximity with people who have, in some ways, been rendered
socially and poilitically “invisible.” Her bus rides take her through neighborhoods that she would

72
BUSted: September 27, 2014.
50
have otherwise never visited, expanding and complexifying her vision of Los Angeles and its
inhabitants. Bus-riding has become her “church” - a space that both challenges her morals and
provides her with guidance.
The ideas and sentiments expressed in this preface fall in line with those that Raymond
has put forth in her other performances. In her October 2015 BUSted performance at the LA
Storytelling Festival, Tasha Raymond notes that by riding the bus, she now “make[s] eye contact
with people that were invisible to [her] 5 years ago.” She also acknowledges the feelings of guilt
that she experiences when trying to avoid “people who are mentally ill … and very very visible.”
By being in close proximity with people who have been marginalized within society, Raymond
is able to see them in both a literal and figurative sense. By highlighting this in her story,
Raymond demonstrates her appreciation for public transportation for having facilitated this
personal growth.
These sentiments, expressed by Adam and Tasha, reflect the overall premise of BUSted
as a community space. To regularly attend BUSted and/or tell stories is to believe in the socio-
political power of public transportation. In this way, this shared value becomes the foundation of
the collective “bus people” identity that BUSted participants construct through the show. While
Adam and Tasha’s declarations reflect the ethos of BUSted as a show, they also allow audience
members to glean important information about them as individuals. By recognizing value in the
experience of interacting with different kinds of people, Adam and Tasha assert themselves as
socially conscious. Not only do they use public transportation in a city that privileges drivers, but
they also think critically about their experiences on public buses and trains and the impact that it
has on their personal development.
51
While the value that regular attendees place on their social experiences on transit
indirectly reflects liberal political beliefs, it is also common for the show to directly engage in
political conversation or activism. This became all the truer after the election of President
Donald Trump in November 2016. The election of this controversial political figure, who in
some ways defies bi-party lines but leans conservative in many respects, seems to have raised the
stakes of establishing BUSted as a liberal space. For example, on November 26, 2016, Adam
declared that “BUSted is officially pro-immigrant” before telling a story about his experience
covering the “Day Without Immigrants” when he worked as a freelance photographer back in
May 2006. The story was only loosely related to public transportation (public transit is only
mentioned because he took the bus to the rally) but brought attention to the liberal politics that
undergird the show. During this same show, Adam introduces Alyona Passo, a Russian
immigrant and regular featured storyteller, as “our immigrant” to further underscore BUSted as
an immigrant-friendly space.73 At the BUSted show following the Women’s March, a worldwide
political protest that took place in cities across the world on January 21, 2017, Adam announced
that BUSted was “officially pro-women” before Hailey Myers, a regular featured storyteller, told
a story about her experience attending the march in downtown Los Angeles. Like Adam’s “pro-
immigration” story, Myer’s performance included very little about public transportation and
instead served to highlight her experiences of being a woman in the world and what attending the
March meant for her. For the most part, the show’s engagement with politics have been purely
discursive; there has been little substantive engagement with the issues that the show evokes.
BUSted has never partnered with any socio-political causes or mobilized any particular issues.

73
BUSted: November 26, 2017.
52
Despite this, however, the storytellers actively perform social consciousness through both their
presence at the show and the stories that they tell.
As part of this performance of liberal politics, regular BUSted attendees often construct a
socially conscious identity that operates in contrast to their vision of the Los Angeles driver.
While the image of “bus people” is grounded in social consciousness )as reflected in their
appreciation for being amongst diverse groups of people), LA drivers are assumed to be less
socially conscious by virtue of not having these kinds of experiences. During any given BUSted
show, it is common for speakers to mobilize a two-dimensional figure of the “LA driver” as a
way of bringing their own identity as transit users into relief. In the show on April 26, 2015 at
Stories Cafe, Adam directly evoked this dichotomy by reminding the crowd that they are “bus
people” and not “proper motorists” when they failed to cheer loudly enough after he introduced
the night’s line-up. As referenced earlier in this section, Adam comments on the fact that drivers
in LA by virtue of being locked up in their “self-contained vessels” don’t really interact with
people in a way that allows them to develop empathy.74 In these moments, Adam
intersubjectively constructs the bus people identity in that he defines it in contrast to drivers.75
By juxtaposing those who use public transportation with those who drive, Adam depicts bus
riders as “comparatively more authentic, legitimate or better than” drivers.76 Motorists, by virtue
of being cooped up in their cars, are depicted as provincial and uptight; they have not reaped the
benefits of being in public transit spaces.

74
BUSted: October 14, 2014.
75
In “Identity and Interaction,” sociocultural linguists Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall set out a relational framework of
intersubjective identity construction; Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, “Identity and Interaction: a Sociocultural
Linguistic Approach,” Discourse Studies 7, no. 4-5 (October 2005): 585–614.
76
Lucy Jones, “If a Muslim says ‘homo’, nothing gets done”: Racist discourse and in-group identity construction in
an LGBT youth group,” Language in Society 45, no. 1 (2017): 115.
53
This driver/bus-people binary also holds strong implications for socio-economic class.
The bus people identity is steeped in a working-class ethos as BUSted speakers and attendees
align themselves with the proletariat. This is made evident through speakers’ remarks on the fact
that you don’t see many “suit people” on the bus77 as well as through the “rich people are
asshole” sentiment that is expressed both explicitly and implicitly at the show.78 Within the space
of BUSted, being a driver is made synonymous to being rich and “suit people” is used as a
euphemism to refer not just to people who make a certain income, but people who live a
conformist lifestyle that consists of working a 9-5 job and embracing “mainstream” ideals. Thus,
BUSted positions itself as an alternative space rooted in an anti-status quo ethos. However, this
“alternative” lifestyle is rooted in privilege in that most attendees are choosing to use public
transportation rather than having to do so as a result of economic marginalization.
Embedded within this co-construction of drivers and bus people is also a story about
conformists and non-conformists. On one hand, the collective identity at BUSted is premised
upon their non-conformity. They choose to take public transportation in a city that was designed
for drivers. They see themselves as resistors of the status quo, but the rebellion is rooted in the
element of choice. It is only because they opt to use public transit that they see themselves as
challenging the status quo. BUSted storytellers acknowledge the stigma that comes along with
being a non-driver in Los Angeles. They comment on the “surprised” reactions that they get
when they mention that they don’t have a car to someone that they meet at a social gathering.79
They discuss how it impacts their value on the dating market, as not owning a car makes them

77
BUSted: May 24, 2015.
78
BUSted: May 14, 2015.
79
Interview: November 28, 2014.
54
“undatable.”80 Because not driving in Los Angeles is non-normative, the choice to rely on public
transportation makes a statement that is both social and political.
The privileged standpoint of BUSted storytellers is rooted in class but also in race. Race
is central to the ways that we move through and experience social spaces and yet regular BUSted
storytellers rarely acknowledge race in their stories, giving little thought to how it might factor
into the narratives that they tell. This is particularly true of White storytellers. While they might
go out of their way to describe the color of someone’s hair or the style of clothing that they wore,
very rarely do White storytellers tell the audience the perceived race of the people with whom
they interact in their narratives. In fact, I have attended over forty BUSted shows and I can count
the number of times that a White storyteller has named the race of their “characters” on one
hand. In some instances, a White speaker will acknowledge that someone in their story is
“African-American,” 81 “Latino,”82 and sometimes even, “European American.”83 In these rare
instances, naming race largely functions to shore up the liberalness of the storyteller. By virtue of
having so few attendees of color, POC become props in White storytellers’ narratives with few
opportunities to actually see public space from their perspectives. By so often choosing to not
name/acknowledge the perceived racial identities of the people in their stories, these storytellers
imply that race is not significant to their understandings of the experiences that they portray nor
to their audience’s understanding of that experience. The fact that most BUSted storytellers can
cast racial identity off as insignificant to their narratives speaks to their White privilege. By
occupying the dominant racial subject position, they often fail to think about how race factors
into the lived experience of people of color as they move through public space. This practice of

80
BUSted: February 28, 2016.
81
BUSted: May 24, 2015; November 19, 2015; October 9, 2015.
82
BUSted: November 7, 2014; March 22, 2015; April 26, 2015; November 10, 2016.
83
BUSted: June 6, 2015.
55
not naming race de-racializes transit and undermine the show’s performance of progressive
politics by rendering the experiences of POC invisible.
In contrast to their White counterparts, POC storytellers are more likely to acknowledge
the race of the people in their stories and consider how their racial identity factors into the
experience that they’re describing. For example, whenever Oliver Sanchez performs his story
about mistakenly ending up in an Armenian cocaine den, he is compelled to declare, “I’m not
racist” before identifying the men in the story as Armenian. He also expresses anxiety around the
racial implications of language by double-checking with the audience that Armenian is in fact the
language that Armenians speak. Oliver’s discomfort with naming race in this instance especially
stands out because he is Latino. 84 It is also important to note that I have seen him tell this story
multiple times since I began attending BUSted and he has done this during every telling.
Although we could take Oliver’s disclaimer as a reflection of his own discomfort with
acknowledging race, I argue that it actually reveals information about who Oliver assumes his
audience to be. Oliver’s anxiety surrounding race highlights his awareness of BUSted as a liberal
White space. Because there are few people of color present, he takes precaution when discussing
race and offers “I’m not racist” as a disclaimer that primes the audience for his “problematic
utterance.”85 In other words, Oliver’s declaration that he is not racist ultimately serves to signal
to the audience that he is about to say something that they might view as racially insensitive or
problematic. Although Oliver clearly feels that it is important for the audience to know the racial
identity of the characters in his story, he is also aware that naming the race is not the norm in this
space. While it may be the case that Oliver himself believes that naming racial identity is indeed

84
During the show that took place on May 24, 2015 I learn that Oliver is a son of Guatemalan immigrants.
85
Karen Tracy and Jessica S. Robles. Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities (New York: Guilford Press,
2002), 101.
56
a faux pas within liberal social spaces, it is more likely that he understands the ways that ideas of
colorblindness are often at play within White liberal social spaces like BUSted. Due to this
awareness, he feels it necessary to issue the “I am not racist” disclaimer before naming the
Armenian racial identity of the people in his story. Despite knowing that the people in the story
are in fact Armenian, he is concerned that by merely identifying the racial identity of the people
in his story may prompt the audience to accuse him of playing into a problematic Armenian
gangster stereotype. Oliver’s announcement that he is not racist is his acknowledgement that by
naming the racial identity of the characters in his story, he is aware of the tacit colorblind
contract of the space and that he has breached it for the sake of his story.
While Oliver’s story brings the performance of White liberal politics of BUSted into
relief, the narratives of other storytellers highlight what is lost with the de-racializing of transit
narratives. On November 26, 2017, inspired by others who told stories of “solidarity from fellow
passengers,” Peter Ancheta volunteered to tell a story of his own during the audience portion of
the show. Peter is a dark-skinned South Asian man who is a regular BUSted attendee, although
he never performed as a featured storyteller during my time attending the show. When I first
started attending BUSted, I quickly gathered that he acted as the show’s resident public
transportation guru. Through my various conversations with Peter over the years, I learned that
he has lived in LA as a non-driver for over twenty years. As an audience member, he couldn’t
resist the opportunity to demonstrate his expansive knowledge of LA transit system. He was
often the one to correct those who named the wrong bus line in their story and offered
(sometimes overly-) thorough responses to small inquiries that someone posed about the Metro
system. On this particular day, Peter volunteered to tell a story after all the featured storytellers
57
had performed. Peter described a situation in “an African American man” who appeared to be
“very very angry” was yelling on the Metro Red Line Train. He said:

Some people looked afraid. Some people looked amused. And some people just didn’t
seem to notice that anything was going on - or [were] pretending not to notice. But all the
people who were trying to calm him down were fellow African Americans. They were
actually kind of trying to shame him by saying, “There are all these kids on the train. And
there are all these folks. There are all kind of folks.” Meaning there are White people and
Asians all watching us. You know, so they were trying to tell him don’t...you know. You
don’t want to bring disgrace or [shame] to our community.

Peter described the racial dimensions of his experience with ease. While his sheer
acknowledgement of the man in his story as “African American” did not, as one might have
expected from Oliver’s apparent need to offer a disclaimer, trigger a noticeable response from
the audience, an awkward tension ensued at the moment when he expects the audience to
understand the experiences of racial minorities. Peter stared into the audience for visual
confirmation that they follow what he is saying; he looked for nodding heads or comprehensive
expressions but instead he saw blank stares. In this moment, however, Peter assumed that most
the audience could relate to the experience of being in public and feeling as though you are
representing an entire group of people with whom people associate you based on your physical
appearance. Peter initially says that the other Black people on the train were trying to shame the
man about his behavior. Realizing that the audience does not immediately seem to relate what he
is saying, he then elaborates, saying, “Meaning there are White people and Asians all watching
58
us. You know, so they were trying to tell him don’t...you know.” In this moment, the audience’s
apparent confusion made Peter realize that they didn’t know. Most people in the predominantly
White audience could not relate to being in public and being ashamed of the behavior of
someone of their same racial background. They could not relate to carrying the burden of
representing their entire race in the presence of White people. The experience that Peter is trying
to convey to the audience is an example of both how race creates varied social experiences in
public space and how BUSted attendees, despite their purported social consciousness, has little
understanding of these experiences. Peter’s story incites a conversation about the social power
dynamics between different racial groups and the systems that maintain racial hierarchy. Rather
than being the norm, this kind of narrative is a rarity at BUSted. Because so few people of color
are present at the show, the intersection of transit and race politics often goes unacknowledged.
In addition to not acknowledging the race of the people in their stories, BUSted
storytellers rarely acknowledge their Whiteness and how it shapes their interactions with their
fellow transit riders. This is true even in cases when their Whiteness is central to the story that
they’re telling. A prominent example of this is the August 26, 2017 show. After a featured
storyteller recounted a humorous story about feeling disliked by his fellow bus riders, Adam
chimed in and drew a parallel between the featured storyteller’s experience and one of his own.
He noted that after the election of Donald Trump, people on the bus assumed that he was a
“Trump guy.”86 Given the controversies surrounding Trump’s presidential campaign, specifically
his problematic actions towards racial minorities and women, being a “Trump guy” implies
holding racist and sexist beliefs.87 He did not elaborate on this and instead left the audience to

86
BUSted: November 26, 2017.
87
Resources that talk about Trump’s controversial actions against racial minorities and woman are: “An Exhaustive
List of the Allegations Women Have Made Against Donald Trump,” The Cut, October 27, 2016:
https://www.thecut.com/2016/10/all-the-women-accusing-trump-of-rape-sexual-assault.html. “Trump’s history of
59
draw its own conclusions about why people might assume this about him. Aside from his being
White, there is no reason for people on the bus to associate him with Donald Trump. Rather than
noting the role that his Whiteness played in how he was perceived by his fellow transit riders, he
skirts around naming his race as the key factor. He leaves it up to the audience to connect the
dots rather than explicitly acknowledging the political implications of his Whiteness in a
predominantly POC space like the bus.
Even though Adam uses public transit, his fellow riders assume that he holds political
beliefs that are not only different from their own but antagonistic towards their existence.
Adam’s refusal to name race highlights the difficulty that some White liberals, despite their
theoretical progressive beliefs, have with naming Whiteness. They are not accustomed to
acknowledging their Whiteness or thinking critically about how it shapes how they move
through the world. In this moment, Adam is unable to identify his White maleness because as
someone who occupies the normative subject position, he is not accustomed to acknowledging
his racial and gendered identity. It is only by being on the buses and trains, where his body is put
into relief by the people of color who make up the primary ridership of public transit in LA, that
he is made aware of this own politicized identity. Adam’s inability to acknowledge his
Whiteness is ultimately a testament to “white liberalism’s failure to enact long-lasting social
change stems from its inability to account for whiteness as a racial category and as a site of
privilege.”88

racism, abridged: A timeline,” Metro, August 18, 2017. https://www.metro.us/president-trump/trump-racism-
history-abridged-timeline. Marc Fisher, “Trump and Race: Decades of fueling divisions,” Washington Post August
16, 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-and-race-decades-of-fueling-
divisions/2017/08/16/5fb3cd7c-8296-11e7-b359-15a3617c767b_story.html?utm_term=.50a96fe0f5d4.
88
Rebecca Aanerud, “Maintaining Comfort, Sustaining Power: Narratives of White Liberalism” (PhD diss.,
University of Washington, 1998), 15.
60
Despite their refusal to directly engage race in the stories, the liberal identity that
storytellers perform to their audience is dependent on a collective understanding that transit
spaces in LA are marginalized spaces predominantly occupied by POC. Thus, although race is
not directly acknowledged, it still plays a critical role in BUSted stories as race is already built
into the image of transit in Los Angeles. Because transit spaces have historically been
marginalized spaces, the fact that these White people would choose to venture into these spaces
reflects their anti-status quo mentality. BUSted storytellers play on the social stigma that exists
around transit in LA to shore up their identity as edgy liberals who are not afraid to mingle with
those who have been outcast from mainstream society. The stigma upon which storytellers’
liberal image relies has been constructed historically through urban development practices in the
18th century and are made evident today through both popular ideas about those who use transit
and the material realities of transit spaces.

No One Takes the Bus in LA: Race, Class, Mobility, and Stigma in Los Angeles
Back in early 2013 when I first began spreading the news that I was moving to Los
Angeles for graduate school, friends and acquaintances would often ask about my plans for
purchasing a car. I told them that I did not have a driver’s license and that I had no plans of
getting a car if I could avoid it. “But how will you get around?” they would ask. I’ll just take the
bus. “No one takes the bus in LA,” they would respond. While this comment sometimes came
from those who had only visited the city, it also came from friends who had grown up in LA.
They warned me against trying to live in the city without a car as they thought it would be nearly
impossible for me to get around. Having lived in Los Angeles for over six years now, I am not
surprised that so many people felt as though living in LA without a car would be challenging.
61
There are certainly benefits to having access to a car in a city with such a sprawling geography.
However, what stuck with me from these conversations is the sentiment that “no one in Los
Angeles takes the bus.” I vividly remember the first time I ever boarded a LA Metro bus. I had
just moved to the city and I was staying with a friend of a friend in Silverlake until I could move
into my apartment in Echo Park. I was headed to The Grove to meet another friend of a friend for
dinner. I boarded the westbound 4 bus on Sunset/Maltman on a Saturday around 5pm and was
shocked to find that nearly every seat was occupied. As I became a regular rider, I realized that
my first experience was not a fluke, a lot of people rode the bus in Los Angeles. So who exactly
was the “no one” that everyone had been referring to?
Upon first glance, it was obvious that most, though not all, of the people onboard were
people of color, mostly Latinx. A sizeable proportion of passengers were elderly and there was
also a person in a wheelchair. As I took public transit more, I got a stronger sense of the general
demographic makeup of bus-riders but also how these demographics shifted on different routes
and even over time. When I first began using LA Metro in 2013, it was pretty rare for me to see
White people on the bus on my usual bus routes. This was especially true on weekends when less
people were commuting to/from work. As I began using transit to go to different parts of the city,
however, I noticed that it was much more common to see White people on certain lines that ran
through certain areas of the city than others. For example, Metro buses that run to the UCLA
campus in Westwood (i.e. routes 2/302, 20/720, 734) are much more likely to have White
passengers who are either students, professors, or staff at the university. The same goes for buses
that run from neighborhoods in central and east LA into downtown (i.e. routes, 2/203, 4/704, 81,
28, etc.). I also noticed that many of the buses that ran through notably affluent Westside
neighborhoods such as Beverly Hills and Brentwood were far less likely to have White
62
passengers, with the vast majority of riders being Latinx women who presumably traveled from
their homes in East LA to work in the homes of the wealthy.89
As my graduate research shifted to center public transportation, I began studying the
history of the LA public transit system and learned how it was shaped by race and class politics.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Los Angeles had an impressive public transportation system
with 6,000 Red Cars operated on 115 routes each day, “covering 1000 miles of track and
between 520 and 700 miles of service.”90 Rather than being designed to promote the geographic
mobility of Angelenos, however, these street cars were a strategy for attracting home buyers to
LA’s sprawling suburban neighborhoods. 91
In the early 20th century, the Model T’s simple design in conjunction with Ford’s newly
developed assembly line mode of production, optimized mass car production. Henry Ford “made
the car an instrument for democracy,” as owning a car was now financially accessible to middle
class Americans.92 Owning a car gave people living the Los Angeles the opportunity to work and
spend time in parts of the city that had been geographically impractical. As urban historian, Sam
Bass Warner notes, “Such a distribution of automobiles and freeways gives the Los Angeles
employee the widest choice of job opportunities ever possible in an American city.”93 While it is
true that driving allowed people to move across greater distances for both personal and
professional pursuits, there were many for whom owning a car was cost-prohibitive. Even with
85 percent of household having access to at least one vehicle in 1981, the remaining 15 percent

89
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica : Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); John H. M. Laslett, Sunshine Was Never Enough Los Angeles
Workers, 1880-2010 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
90
Robert Gottlieb, Reinventing Los Angeles (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 178.
91
Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,1997), 130.
92
William Kunstler, Home from Nowhere (New York: Touchstone Press, 1996), 59.
93
Sam Bass Warner, The Urban Wilderness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 142.
63
of the population who could not afford a car were left to navigate the urban terrain with
transportation systems whose quality was significantly declining as a result of state and federal
resources being allocated to the freeway system.
The lower costs of cars combined with the building of an extensive freeway system set
the stage for middle-class and wealthy Whites to neglect the inner city and move to the outskirts.
This happened not only in Los Angeles, but in major cities across the country, causing an influx
in suburban development and a mass exodus of White people from the urban core. With this,
cities came to be associated with people of color and the poor, which in turn gave the “inner
cities” its connotations of seediness, violence, and poverty.94 These connotations extended to
public transit as it was primarily used by the poor and working class people of color who could
not afford the luxury of suburban living.
This history set the foundation for the stigma that currently exists around public transit in
LA. This stigma recently played out in my personal life when a friend and I walked past a bus
stop in Silverlake. A conventionally attractive Asian woman wearing what appeared to be high-
end clothes, designer shoes, and carrying an expensive-looking handbag waited for the 704 bus
heading towards Union Station. As we passed the woman, my friend commented that the woman
did not look like “the type” of person who he would expect to be taking the bus. He made this
comment despite knowing that I use public transportation and knowing that it is the focus of my
research. I pressed him on this question – “what is it about this woman’s appearance makes you
surprised that she is using transit?” I asked. He eventually said that it was because she looked
relatively well-off.

94
Jack Schneider, “Escape From Los Angeles: White Flight from Los Angeles and Its Schools, 1960-1980,” Journal of
Urban History 34, no. 6 (September 2008): 995–1012.
64
While public transportation in general is stigmatized in LA, the bus carries more of a
negative connotation than the rail system. Navigating a train station and being on the train carries
connotations of cosmopolitanism that the bus does not. Although trains in most major cities
throughout the world are not aesthetically glamorous, they have been accepted and appreciated
as part of the idyllic image of urban life with appropriate amounts of grit and glamor. Buses,
however, remain in the margins of urban life, commonly thought of as spaces for the down and
out. In part for this reason, it is common to encounter people in Los Angeles that are willing to
take the train but not the bus. When asked, they say that this is because they find the bus system
to be inefficient. I suspect, however, that the social stigma also plays a role in their resistance to
buses.
There is also an element of vulnerability that goes with waiting for the bus that is not
present when waiting for the train. While walking down into an underground tunnel certainly
comes with its own levels of vulnerability, once inside the tunnel, you are shielded from the
street and from drivers, only visible to your fellow train-riders. While waiting for the bus,
however, you are put on display for drivers as the go by. This is intensified in the case of a red
light, as the stationary positioning of both you and the cars can lend itself to stares. While both
the bus rider and the driver can stare at each other, drivers have their cars as physical barriers
that both inhibit/limit the views of onlookers. There is an added layer of insecurity for women in
this situation. In the same way that women face a certain kind of vulnerability when walking
down a public street, standing at the bus stop makes women sitting ducks for the male gaze as
men drive by in their cars and stop at red lights. This vulnerability, in its most humorous
variation is reflected in stories about having light-hearted conversations with homeless people95

95
BUSted: March 28, 2015.
65
and being pooped on by birds while waiting for the bus.96 In its heavier variation, this
vulnerability is represented in stories from women who have been harassed while standing on a
bus stop at night.97 This vulnerability takes on particular form within the car-centric culture of
Los Angeles. Because it is commonly believed that only people in precarious financial situations
use public transportation, waiting at the bus stop can make it feel as though not just your body
but your socio-economic status is being put on display and judged by those who go by, those
who are able to afford not to vulnerable in this way.
The socio-economic stigma of the bus-riding is reinforced by the physical appearance of
many bus stops and stations. Due to the limited availability of social services, homeless people
often make these spaces their homes, sleeping on bus stop benches or inside of bus shelters.
Because of this, the concrete surrounding these areas are often covered in trash and/or darkly
stained from urine. As a person waits for the bus, they become part of this unsightly scene of
poverty and misfortune that conflicts with the shiny Hollywood bubble version of LA in which
so many Angelenos strive to participate.
The connotations of poverty and marginalization can also be derived from the physical
conditions of the buses themselves. Although the LA MTA approved the purchase of 200 new
buses in 2005, these buses were not enough to replace all the buses in circulation.98 Thus, many
of the buses that are still in service today are dated. These buses are recognizable from the
outside. The orange paint on the new buses looks fresh and the marquees that display the route
are brightly lit and easy to read. The paint on the older buses is a bit faded, or perhaps just
covered in semi-permeant layer of dust and debris collected over decades. The marquees are

96
BUSted: October 24, 2015.
97
Ethan N. Elkind, Railtown (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 173.
98
The MTA’s decision to purchase new buses was largely a result of the BRU’s complaints about the awful
conditions of the vehicles. I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 2.
66
legible but lack the vibrancy of those of the newer buses. These buses are also shaped differently,
with the older buses having sharper edges that make them appear boxier and the newer buses
donning rounded edges that somehow make them appear more modern and inviting.
There are also major differences between the interior designs of the new and old buses
and the feeling that they inspire. By virtue of having been used less, the new buses obviously
have less wear and tear. The fabric on the seats, which features an abstract pattern of gray, red,
and yellow lines and dots, looks less worn. This combined with the bright lighting makes the
space feel energizing. In contrast, the “dingy” exterior aesthetic of the older buses is mimicked
on the inside. The lighting tends to be dimmer. The fabric on the seats is visibly worn and often
soiled. The windows are tinted from the dirt and grime that they’ve collected over the years and
it is common to find graffiti that has been etched into them with sharp objects. The ride on these
buses is also less smooth; they lack the stability of the newer buses so going over potholes seem
to shake the very foundations of the vehicle. When riding on buses in these conditions, it is hard
not to feed into the social stigmas of bus riding as the experience can be demoralizing. For this
reason, on some occasions I have let an older bus go by and waited for the next bus to come in
hopes that it would be a new model, feeling as though the ride of the dilapidated bus would send
me over the edge after a challenging day.
The stigma of public transportation in Los Angeles, as reflected through its physical
attributes, serves as the backdrop for BUSted stories, setting the perfect stage for storytellers to
establish their liberal identity. Although storytellers do not describe these spaces while telling
their stories, they play on the associations that many audience members already make with
transit in L.A. This stands out most prominently in moments where BUSted storytellers employ
caricatures of marginalized people. Many BUSted stories depend on a cast of urban characters to
67
shore up their anti-status quo image. These characters - the drunk, the drug addict, the
presumably homeless beggar - do the work of setting the precarious urban backdrop. Urban
streets, parks, buses, trains, etc. are characterized by the presence of those deemed undesirable as
much as they are by their various intended functions. Painting a picture of the motley crew that is
the public transit user population in Los Angeles is critical to the construction of the bus-rider
identity at BUSted in three ways. Firstly, the bus rider identity is premised upon an appreciation
of diversity. BUSted speakers faun over their experiences on public transit precisely because it
brings them closer to different kinds of people. Secondly, the diversity of people that one
encounters while using public transportation creates a certain precarity that gives bus riding an
edge. Given the kinds of characters that use public transit in LA, BUSted storytellers’
willingness to get on a bus and “let fate decide their neighbors for the next 30-40 minutes” is a
testament to their bad-assery.99 Lastly, this cast of characters and the way that the storytellers
engage them in their narratives, provides an important opportunity to perform politics. By
tapping into the audience’s existing imaginary of who people on the bus are and simultaneously
telling a story in which the storyteller has a positive interaction with one of these people, the
storyteller asserts their liberal identity. Thus, these figures - the drunk, the drug addict, the
presumably homeless beggar - operate as the foil through which the socially conscious
dimension of the “bus people” identity is put into relief.
As I mentioned earlier, there are rare instances where White storytellers named race in
their narratives. In these moments, the race of the characters was used to flag the storyteller’s
“wokeness” to the audience. These stories often began with the speaker encountering a stranger
who is stereotypically seen as dangerous while riding or waiting for the bus, with the storyteller

99
BUSted: September 27, 2015.
68
conjuring this image through markers of race, gender, and class. The narrative would then
progress depict a pleasant and often funny encounter between the storyteller and the
stereotypically dangerous person. By employing this story format, the storyteller attempts to
create a relatable subject out of the stereotypical dangerous character that they encounter.
One of the regularly featured speakers at BUSted, Billy Lane, is known for narratives of
him bonding with stereotypically unsavory urban figures through drinking and debauchery on the
back of the bus. For example, in one story, presenter Billy Lane said that there were “two Latino
gentlemen” who were “hanging out” on the back of the bus. By introducing the men in this way,
Billy set the stage for a potentially dangerous interaction by playing on existing stereotypes of
Latino men as well as the negative connotation of the back of the bus. By saying that these men
were “hanging out” on the back of the bus versus simply sitting or riding on the back of the bus,
he alluded to them being up to no good. He further played on stereotypical images of men of
color and set the stage for potential danger by describing how the men were drinking hand
sanitizer and orange juice and saying “once you see someone doing that, you know only one
thing. You know that they’ve been away for a while. They’ve done time.” The narrative then
unfolded with Billy joining in on the men’s drinking session. The three get off the bus to drink
more and end up throwing up together at the end of the night in a show of fraternal unity.
In another variation of such a story, Billy encountered two Black men “hanging out” in
the back of the bus. One of the men complimented his outfit saying, “You look sharp playaaa,”
and then started a conversation. Billy removed his headphones to thank the man for his kind
words. At this point, Billy said that he had to make a decision. He could put his headphones back
on and be “that dorky ass White guy” or “make really great friends.” He chose the latter and
69
moved their interaction forward by offering them some of the 100-proof Bourbon that he had in
his flask. The gentlemen accepted and their conversation developed. Billy said:
His name was Anthony Dayo, you can find him on Facebook. Anthony informs me that
he just moved from San Diego by way of Houston by way of Florida and all this stuff. I
start getting to know Anthony and then I hand the flask over…But we started talking
about strip clubs in the South. And strip clubs in the South are like different because then
you have them segregated as in a Black strip club and a White strip club and the Black
strip clubs are so much fun. We get to talking about Magic City and all the Platinum Plus
is Memphis and they know all of these places that I’m talking about….We’re in
Brentwood now and we’re talking about...this is where it gets strange.. we’re talking
about Southern food and then we’re talking about food out here and he talking about the
way to make certain foods. We get on the subject of alligator. I don’t know if any of you
have ever heard about people eating alligator. Yeah, my grandfather used to love alligator
and like frog legs and stuff like that and so we keep bonding and establishing this
relationship going forward and I give ‘em like the rest of the flask and they keep going
and literally when we get to the final bus stop down by the promenade Anthony is asleep.
He has gone into like snoring. He had a big long day, I guess. He worked at like a
children’s hospital around the way. So yeah. He had a shift and he had been working like
48 hours straight so he got really drunk really quick and fell asleep. And so Michael is
like drunk. I mean Michael is pretty drunk at this point. And I’m just like ‘yeah lets do
it.’ I’m ready for the show. I’m ready for everything else. I could lead the congregation
right now. He’s like ‘Can you help me, man? Can you help me?’ I’m like ‘I got a show to
go to. I’m sorry’ But then my conscious starts tugging at me. It’s like ‘how many times
70
have you been blacked out somewhere or passed out somewhere and had to have the
firemen carry you home?’ and so I was like ‘alright man. come on, let’s go.’ And then we
do the weekend at Bernie’s thing where we’re walking down off the bus. We try to get
him like woken up and shaken up and everything. Finally we get to their place. They live
together. That was how they knew each other. They lived together. They lived in the
same apartment building. And literally, like a prom date, I dropped him off at the front
door and I just rang the buzzer for the manager and everyone in the building and I was
like ‘your package is here. Come get it.’ And I just left them and went to the Moth.100

In this narrative Billy used racial identities of the men that he encountered to give the audience
important information about his identity. By telling the audience that the men were Black, Billy
flags his identity as a liberal White dude. Through his story he highlighted to the audience that he
is comfortable not just with Black people, but also with Black culture. On one hand, the fact that
Billy was willing to engage with these two men, who many White people would assume to be
dangerous by virtue of their race, gender, and class, speaks to a certain liberal-mindedness. Billy
underscores his comfort with these men throughout the story as well as by his saying that they
continued “bonding and establishing this relationship.” On the other hand, the fact that Billy was
able to hold his own in a conversation about Black strip clubs further speaks to his liberal
character as he displays a certain level of comfort with Black culture.
In using these characters to present a particular politicized version of themselves, BUSted
storytellers render these marginalized people flat. They become tools to shore up the identity of
the storyteller rather than three-dimensional figures in their own right. The stories told at BUSed

100
BUSted: September 27, 2014.
71
rarely give substance to these characters but rather play into the stereotypical presumptions that
the audience already holds of them. The storyteller is then seen as liberal and empathetic because
they are able to look past those prejudices. While some stories are more invested in humanizing
the “others” of LA public transportation, most BUSted stories center the storyteller. Thus, rather
than featuring racialized characters as a means to challenge these preconceived notions of the
marginalized groups that rely on public transportation in Los Angeles, storytellers instead
reinforce them for the sake of asserting themselves as liberal individuals.

Choice Rider- A Double Entendre
The social marginalization that bus-riders experience is structurally designed and
reinforced by the LA MTA itself. For years, public bus service in Los Angeles has been
underfunded and poorly managed, making life difficult for the already marginalized groups who
relied on the service. Los Angeles’ identity as a car city has been constructed not just through the
simultaneous development of the city’s freeway system and the automobile industry but also
through the neglect of public transportation and the subsequent marginalization of non-drivers.
As public transportation became “profoundly un-Angeleno,” urban planners and politicians
prioritized the building of freeways over the building of transportation infrastructure.101 Years
later, however, when freeways started to overcrowd and the city’s air quality began to diminish
from smog, the city began to reprioritize transit but with an emphasis on rail. The enthusiasm for
developing transit has been further catalyzed by the city’s winning bid to host the 2028
Olympics. In the summer 2017, shortly after learning that LA would be hosting the games,
Mayor Garcetti announced the “Twenty-Eight by ‘28” initiative, a plan that lays out 28

101
Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis, 126.
72
transportation projects to be completed by the start of the 2028 Olympics.102 These projects
include improvements/additions to bus, rail, bike, and freeway infrastructure. However, the MTA
is disproportionately allotting its budget to develop the rail system with little attention being paid
to bus service. Amongst the 28 planned projects, 11 are rail-related while only four are aimed at
directly improving bus service (the other projects 13 will improve either freeway infrastructure
or create walking/biking paths).103 The MTA’s favoring rail over bus is notable given that buses
make up a significantly higher portion of the service. This discrepancy in funding allocation adds
layers to the concept of the “choice” rider as Metro’s emphasis on rail is a reflection of the
MTA’s desire to attract more choice riders to the system. Increasing choice ridership makes
sense as a goal; in order to see significant shifts in traffic and air pollution more people have to
opt for public transportation. However, Metro’s neglect of the bus system and the “captive”
riders who rely on this service further reinforces this group’s marginalization.
This issue is not new by any means. It was first brought to light by the Los Angeles Bus
Riders’ Union (BRU). In 1996, the organization filed a suit against the LA MTA under the claim
that the MTA’s discrimination against bus service was ostensibly discrimination against the
working class POC who rely on it. The racial implications that the BRU reveals through its
lawsuit characterizes the figure of the “choice rider” as both White and middle-class. It uses
statistics to highlight how the organization’s commitment to improving rail is inherently a
commitment to increasing White ridership, even if it means that the working class POC who rely
on public buses to get around have to suffer from poor service.

102
Metro, “Twenty-Eight by ’28,” https://www.metro.net/projects/resources/28-by-2028/.
103
Metro, “Twenty-Eight by ’28 Project List,”
http://media.metro.net/projects_studies/resources/images/att_a_28x28_list.pdf.

73
The work of the BRU stands in stark contrast to BUSted. While both BUSted and the
BRU are highly political, the BRU’s work reflects an intersectional understanding of the politics
of mobility. I discuss the BRU and its advocacy in more detail in the next chapter of this
dissertation. I mention them here, however, to highlight the shortcomings of political
performances at BUSted. Although both BUSted and the BRU center people’s experiences on
transit, the BRU sees the way that race and class shape those experiences in a way that BUSted
does not. By presenting itself as a political space but failing to critically grapple with the race
and class implications of transit, BUSted falls into a trap of advocating for choice ridership,
which often comes at the expense of working class POC interests.
The other chapters in this dissertation further illuminate the importance of approaching
the politics of mobility through an intersectional lens. While BUSted attendees are able to
engage in the politics of public transportation by choice, people of color and poor people must
navigate the race and class politics of transit whether they want to or not. The actual politics
surrounding transit are complex; they operate at varied scales and have significant consequences
on the lives of working-class people of color.
74
TWO:
Policing Space Policing Race: Understanding Racialized Policing through Public
Transportation

On August 25, 2016 at 10:10am, the 200 bus came around the corner and stopped just in
front of me. I stepped to the side to let two older women board ahead of me. An older Latinx
woman, who I would guess to have been in her early 50s, got on the bus first and put a quarter in
the farebox. As the next women tapped her card, the driver, a middle-aged White man, called
back at the Latinx woman, telling her that the fare for senior citizens was thirty-five cents. He
alternates between English and very basic Spanish, repeating the amount of the fare until the
woman acknowledged that she’d heard him. She returned to the farebox where they went back
and forth in conversation, the driver employing his limited Spanish while the woman did her best
to understand. I tapped my card and then said that I would pay the remaining ten cents of the
woman’s fare. As I fumbled around with my wallet, trying to find a dime, the driver said, "you're
a good person. Better than me." I didn’t know how to respond to this, so I resorted to an
uncomfortable drawn out, "yeeeahhh." I hoped that something else would come to mind but it
didn’t, so I remained awkwardly quiet. As I continued trying to find a dime in my overstuffed
wallet the driver went on to explain that he has to deal with these kinds of situations every day.
He said that the "sad part" was that it was usually the “same people.” He explained to me that
with the new bus operating system,104 he could hit a button to flag “no fare” or “low fare” and if

104
In 1994, as a result of the suit filed against them by the LA Bus Riders’ Union, LA Metro reluctantly agreed to
replacing its old buses with new ones to reduce overcrowding and generally improve the experiences of its
dominant users. This would eventually result in LA Metro purchasing over 200 new buses for its fleet. See: Ryan
Reft, “From Bus Rider Union to Bus Rapid Transit: Race, Class, and Transit Infrastructure in Los Angeles,” KCET, May
75
there was a police car in the area, they could flag the bus down and issue tickets to whomever
didn't pay the proper fare. He said, "I love it. A $300 ticket for a dime is no good." I didn't know
how to respond to any of this, so I slowly worked my way to the back of the bus to find a seat.
As I sat down in a double seat near the middle of the vehicle, the driver yelled back to me. “It's
about morals and ethics,” he said. Wanting to end the conversation, I said, "that makes sense.”
The Latinx woman stood at the front, just behind the driver for the entirety of her ride. I got the
sense that she was unfamiliar with the bus route and stood at the front so that she could see the
street signs clearly through the front window. I don't think she understood English very well (or
at least pretended not to) so she did not have to acknowledge or engage in the conversation
between the driver and I, despite it being about her. About twenty minutes into the ride, as the
bus approached the turn onto Hoover, a Black man got on and put less than the required $1.75 in
the box. The man said that was all he had and walked to the back of the bus. The driver hit the
button that he had told me about earlier, shook his head, and said, "I sure hope they come."
The police never showed that day. However, from years of taking LA public
transportation, I know that this is not always the case. I have been present on numerous
occasions when the driver has called the police on a passenger and the police have responded.
Drivers’ reasons for calling ranged from someone paying no or too little fare, to teenagers being
rowdy at the back of the bus, to a homeless person refusing to get off the bus after having been
asked to leave because their body odor was a nuisance for other passengers. On the vast majority
of these occasions, I felt that police involvement was unnecessary for the “crime” committed. I
was empathetic towards those who had to deal with the police in those moments – primarily

14, 2015, https://www.kcet.org/history-society/from-bus-riders-union-to-bus-rapid-transit-race-class-and-transit-
infrastruc-in.
76
people of color (POC), youth, and the poor – and considered what these incidents revealed about
the relationship between public transit and policing in Los Angeles.
In retrospect, I am able to recognize that my discomfort when conversing with the driver
was rooted in his failure to comprehend the way that he was participating in a system of policing
that targets poor people of color and maintains their marginalization. I was troubled by his saying
that it was usually the “same people.” How was I to interpret this? Did he mean immigrants who
did not speak English very well? Did he mean people who visibly appeared to be less well off?
Regardless of what he meant by this statement, it was clear that the driver, whether he
recognized it or not, held some biases about the kind of people who did/did not pay their fare. He
sought to justify his choice to alert the police by saying that it was about “morals and ethics,”
which implied a value judgement. Rather than considering the structural dimensions of the
circumstances that would lead to someone being unable to pay their $1.75 fare, he instead
implies that a person’s inability to pay their fare was a reflection of their individual character.
Furthermore, although he acknowledged that a $300 fine for failing to pay 10 cents of the fare
was “no good,” he did not pause to consider the extent to which being policed for this small
infraction could impact someone’s life. Witnessing this incident, I began to consider the link
between “public order crimes” 105 like fare-evasion, mobility, class, and policing: How does fare-
policing on public buses and trains in Los Angeles target and punish people in precarious
financial situations? What does studying this system reveal about the relationship between transit
policing and neoliberal ideologies that emphasize narratives of individual agency over those of
socio-economic structures?

105
Public order crimes refers to non-violent crimes that are thought to disrupt the efficiency of society. I use
quotations around the word “crimes” here to signal criminalization as a political process that reflects social anxiety
around certain kinds of “deviant” behavior. Some scholars who discuss these ideas are: Larry Siegel, Robert F
Meier, and David Canter.
77
Beyond its class implications, I was struck by the racial dynamics of the interaction that I
witnessed. The bus driver was a White man while both of the riders who failed to pay their fare
were people of color. Though I do not wish to make any claims about the driver’s individual
politics surrounding race or to assume that he was targeting people of color in his citation
practices, the power dynamics that I witnessed in this moment point to a larger narrative about
race, transit, and policing. Because the majority of LA Metro riders are people of color, the racial
implications of its fare-policing practices must be examined alongside those related to socio-
economic class. I ask: How does the policing of LA Metro impact the lives of Black and Brown
riders with complicated relationships to police and the criminal justice system? How does their
reliance on public transit make them more vulnerable than their White counterparts to police
violence in their everyday lives?
This chapter examines the conversations encompassed in this scenario to reveal the
complicated links between race, class, mobility, public space, and policing. As I illustrated in
Chapter 1 of this project, race, class, and transit have long been entangled in Los Angeles. This
chapter’s arguments build on those of Chapter 1 in that it uses Los Angeles as an example to
reveal new dimensions of the historical and contemporary connection between social identity,
geography, and transit. While Chapter 1 studies the social and economic implications of these
relationships through the urban development history of the LA freeway system, this chapter
approaches this conversation through an examination of LA Bus Riders’ Union (BRU), an
organization dedicated to promoting race and class equity within public transit through legal
advocacy, and its parent organization, The Labor/Community Strategy Center (LCSC). In 1994,
the BRU filed a case against the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), arguing
that the MTA was discriminating against people of color through its disproportionate allocation
78
of resources between buses and trains. About fifteen years later, the LCSC became a major voice
in the fight against truancy policing practices in Los Angeles, arguing that truancy policies
inherently targeted students from low-income families who were less likely to have access to
reliable transportation. Studying the political campaigns around fare-policing and truancy that
the BRU and the LCSC have waged in the past twenty years reveals how mobility and mobility
spaces become racialized and classed through policing.
The work of these organizations illustrates that by virtue of the ridership demographics of
LA Metro, public buses and trains in Los Angeles are spaces where large numbers of Black and
Brown people circulate. Having established this in the first part of the chapter, I then go on to
think about the implications of the increased presence of the Los Angeles Police Department
(LAPD) officers on Metro trains since 2017. While the LA MTA’s rationale behind deploying
LAPD on trains is to promote safety, I argue that this is shortsighted as it does consider the
fraught relationship that many people of color have with the police. I argue that by increasing the
likelihood that people of color will encounter police in their everyday lives, Metro limits the
mobility of these riders and makes them vulnerable to casual police violence.
My analysis throughout this chapter thinks critically about the neoliberal underpinnings
of public transit policing in Los Angeles in order to better understand its social, political, and
economic implications. Political scientists characterize the neoliberal period, which began in the
1970s and continues through present-day, by its emphasis on individual responsibility and trust
in the free market. In other words, neoliberalism is the idea that “human well-being can best be
advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional
framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.”106 In

106
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
79
practice, this approach to social and economic policy has led to the drawback of social
programming designed to assist the poor and increased government support for private
interests.107
My analysis is shaped by the work of geographers and other scholars who have studied
the connections between race, class, space, policing, and neoliberalism. Scholars such as Vikash
Singh108 and Randolph Hohle,109 examine how progress towards addressing the inequality
produced by race has been stifled by the race-neutral language and philosophies of liberalism.
Scholars such as Kris Belben and Todd Gordon highlight the connection between space, race,
policing, and neoliberalism arguing that policing, as a tool of the racist and patriarchal capitalist
state, inherently upholds race and gender oppression in its regulation of space.110 The scholar
who is perhaps best known for discussing this issue is urban geographer, Mike Davis. In his 1990
book City of Quartz, Davis studied policing in Los Angeles in the 1980’s, to illuminate the
connection between the increasing militarization of policing and the neoliberal State. Davis pays
special attention to the policing tactics used against homeless people in public spaces as well as
against Black and Brown youth, showing how neoliberal policing practices served to further
stratify LA’s residents socially, politically, economically, and spatially.111 This scholarship
illustrates how policing in a neoliberal society functions to maintain a racist system while
operating through the race-neutral language of the economy.
Drawing on the work of these scholars, I argue that the hyper presence of LAPD officers
on Metro buses and trains makes these spaces subject to the same racialized neoliberal policing

107
Kris Belben, “Policing Space in Toronto under Neoliberalism,” (2008): 3-11.
108
Vikash Singh, “Race, the Condition of Neo-liberalism,” Social Sciences 6 no. 84 (August 2017).
109
Randolph Hohle, “The Color of Neoliberalism: The ‘Modern Southern Businessman’ and Postwar Alabama’s
Challenge to Racial Desegregation,” Sociological Forum 27, no. 1 (March 2012): 142–162.
110
Kris Belben, “Policing Space in Toronto under Neoliberalism,” 18.
111
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 2006).
80
practices that we have seen in other public spaces over the past forty years; while motivated by a
desire to reduce fare-evasion and improve perceptions of safety, the current structure of fare and
public order policing in train stations and on Metro vehicles serves to punish and discipline
bodies under a neoliberal logic that emphasizes individual choice and agency.

PART 1: “No Seat, No Fare!”: The LA Bus Riders’ Union and the Fight for Transit Equity
in Los Angeles

In 1992, the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union (BRU) was founded by The
Labor/Community Strategy Center (LCSC), an organization “founded in 1989 with the mission
to help rebuild vibrant, democratic working-class movements that directly challenge corporate
power and corporate-dominated agencies.”112 At this time, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit
Authority was dedicated to improving rail infrastructure and was moving forward with a $75-
billion rail expansion project that took up most of its three-billion-dollar budget, which was
compiled of money from sales tax and federal funds.113 To offset the cost of building new rail
infrastructure, the MTA implemented a fare hike of twenty-five cents (from $1.10 to $1.35 per
ride) as well as an elimination of the $42 monthly pass on which many of its “captive”114 riders

112
Geoff Ray, “LA Bus Riders’ Union Rolls Over Transit Racism,” Race, Poverty & the Environment 12, no. 1
(December 1, 2005): 54.
113
Lisa Duran, “Labor/Community Strategy Center Organizes Bus Riders Union in L.A.,” Race, Poverty & the
Environment 6, no. 1 (October 1, 1995): 8.
114
“Captive” is a term used in transportation studies to describe those who use public transportation out of
necessary as opposed to “choice” riders who opt to use public transportation despite being physically and
financially able to use other forms of transportation.
81
relied.115 Given the impact that these changes would have on the MTA’s primarily working-class
ridership, the LCSC became invested in the conversation. A leader in the LCSC, Eric Mann,
attended public hearings about this issue to challenge the MTA’s proposed fare increase arguing
that this change would significantly impact the working poor who relied on this service. After
going unheard by the MTA’s board, Mann proposed the creation of the Bus Riders’ Union as a
means to formally take on issues of transit equity.116
The Union was initially formed to research and challenge the LA MTA’s allocation of
resources between buses and rail. In 1994, the BRU partnered with the NAACP Defense Fund to
file a suit against the LA MTA, claiming that the company had established a “separate but
unequal mass transit system” that was in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.117 Using the
MTA’s budget records alongside the MTA’s demographic statistics, the BRU argued that the
MTA was discriminating against people of color by disproportionately allocating resources
between freeway maintenance, the construction of rail-lines, and public buses. The crux of the
BRU’s case hinged not on the uneven allocation of funds between bus and rail, but on the racial
demographics of the different transit services. The BRU found that although public buses carried
94% of MTA passengers (88% percent of whom were people of color), only 30% of transit
funding was being spent to maintain and improve bus service. On the other hand, although rail
only transported 6% of MTA’s total riders (a disproportionate percentage of whom were white),
70% of transportation funds were being used for rail maintenance and development.118 Nearly

115
Ibid. Also see: Lisa Duran, “Labor/Community Strategy Center Organizes Bus Riders Union in L.A.” and Geoff
Ray, “LA Bus Riders’ Union Rolls Over Transit Racism.”
116
James Sterngold, “A Los Angeles Commuter Group Sees Discrimination in Transit policies (Bus Riders Union
Pursues Case for Services on a Shoestring),” The New York Times, September 16, 2001.
117
Laura Pulido, Laura R. Barraclough, and Wendy and Cheng, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles. 1st ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012), 24.
118
Ibid.
82
100% of bus riders were working class with 65% having an annual family income of less than
$15,000. The majority of bus passengers were also women.119 The BRU argued that the fact that
the MTA was giving 70% of its funds to rail despite the rail system making up a much smaller
portion of the overall LA transit system reflected preferential treatment to White riders, who
used rail more than buses. To illustrate the effects of the MTA’s budget choices on bus riders,
the BRU highlighted overly crowded buses and long wait times as a result of having too few
buses in operation. The organization also underscored the poor conditions of the bus fleet, over
half of which were totally dilapidated and many of which had over 500,000 miles and were
between 14 and 20 years old.120
The BRU’s case against the MTA highlights mobility as a raced and classed issue. The
inefficiency of bus the system, made worse by the lack of resources being given to it, undermines
the mobility rights of the poor people of color who relied on these services. While those with the
financial means to afford a car enjoy the privilege of being able to access more neighborhoods
and thus take advantage of more resources (i.e. jobs, recreation, leisure), the mobility of those
who cannot afford a car is limited by both the physical and temporal constraints of public
transportation. Thus, more than simply highlighting the unevenness of MTA funding between
bus and rail, the BRU underscored mobility rights as a political conversation worthy of critical
attention.
To gain momentum around this issue, the BRU used the bus to connect with its
constituents. In his 1998 piece for Time Magazine writer and LA transit user, Steve Lopez,
describes how BRU organizers would board the crowded buses to tell passengers that they
should not pay for the subpar service that they were receiving, inciting people to chant, “no seat,

119
Geoff Ray, “LA Bus Riders’ Union Rolls Over Transit Racism,” 54.
120
Ibid.
83
no fare!” Lopez illustrates the experiences of transit users at that time, describing the “decrepit
buses [that broke] down, air conditioners [that didn’t] work and drivers [that blew] past waiting
passengers when they can't squeeze another one aboard.”121 By organizing on public buses, the
BRU employed a unique model of unionizing. Rather than targeting people working within a
certain industry and using their shared labor experience as a premise for unity, the BRU instead
used bus-ridership as the unifying factor. By doing this, the BRU created a truly class-based
movement that joined people across race, ethnicity, religion, and language. The success of this
campaign is a testament to the potential of mobility spaces to spawn powerful political
movements.
In October 1996, when it became evident that the BRU had a solid case against them, the
MTA settled the case to avoid being found guilty of transit racism is federal court. The MTA and
BRU agreed to a Civil Rights consent decree that required the MTA to reduce overcrowding on
buses and improve service overall by expanding bus service, maintaining equitable fares,
replacing old diesel buses with “greener” alternatives, and creating a plan to address transit
segregation.122 Despite the settlement, the BRU continued to fight the MTA over its choices as
the MTA’s attempts to “deny, delay, and destroy” the consent decree123 led to “uneven”
implementation.124 The BRU continued to fight and in March 1999, the court ruled that LA
Metro had to order 532 new buses and hire 1,500 new union drivers and mechanics. Although
the decree was not renewed after its 2006 expiration, the BRU continues to play a major role in
transit matters in Los Angeles, leading the resistance against the LA MTA’s persistence in

121
Steve Lopez, “The Few, the Proud, the Bus Riders (Bus Riders Union Protests Poor Bus Service in Los Angeles,
California),” Time 152, no. 9 (August 31, 1998): 8.
122
Laura Pulido et al, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, 24. Also see: Lisa Duran, “Labor/Community Strategy Center
Organizes Bus Riders Union in L.A.” and Geoff Ray, “LA Bus Riders’ Union Rolls Over Transit Racism.”
123
Geoff Ray, “LA Bus Riders’ Union Rolls Over Transit Racism,” 55.
124
Ibid.
84
developing rail at the expense of the bus service upon which the majority of its working class
POC riders rely.

The Race and Class Implications of Fare-Evasion Citation Practices
The demographic statistics that the Bus Riders’ Union’s used to support its claims against
the LA MTA make it evident that the politics of LA public transit are inherently raced and
classed by virtue of the populations who depend on this service. These data underscore public
transit in LA, and buses in particular, as a space for poor people of color. The context is
important for understanding the race and class implications of policing practices on Metro buses
and trains. These implications of this extend beyond the quality of service to impact the broader
lived experience of Black and Brown Angelenos. The connection between race, class, transit,
and policing is apparent in the citation practices of LA Metro. These citations can be issued for a
host of violations including not paying adequate fare, littering, playing loud music, and having
one’s feet on the seat.125 While bus drivers are the primary issuers of citations on buses, train
citations are commonly issued by LAPD officers who have been assigned to patrol the subway
and light rail cars. Critically examining these citation practices reveals how transit citations
function as a form of police punishment that disproportionately impacts poor people of color
under the logic of neoliberalism.
The racialized nature of LA Metro’s citation practices is reflected in the case filed against
Metro by The Labor/Community Strategy Center (LCSC). In November 2016, the LCSC, parent
organization of the Bus Riders Union, filed a Civil Rights complaint against LA Metro alleging
that Metro’s “highly discretionary fare enforcement, police detainments, citations and arrests on

125
Metro, “Rule and Regulations for Riding Metro” (Pamphlet),
http://media.metro.net/about_us/transit_education/images/Metro_Rules_Regulations.pdf.
85
MTA buses and trains, is discriminatory” against Black riders.126 To support this claim, the
organization presented findings from a study that they conducted in which they compiled data on
fare-citations from January 2009-May 2016. Based on this data, they argued that LA Metro
“systematically target[ed] Black riders who each year represent at least 50% of MTA citations
and 58% of Sheriff arrests on the MTA System, while they are only a reported 17% of bus and
19% of rail ridership.” They drew a comparison to the citations received by White riders who
made up an estimated 8% of MTA’s bus and 13% of rail ridership but only accounted for 11% of
the total citations in 2014 and 2015.
Biased policing on public transportation is further made evident by studying Metro data
that reflects the racial breakdown of issued citations alongside data that shows the breakdown of
issued citations on individual rail lines. The fact that citations are generally higher on the Blue
and Green lines, which serve neighborhoods with higher populations of people of color and
people of low-income families.127 According to the LA Metro statistics cited in the LCSC’s
claim, these lines have an overall higher frequency of ticketing in proportion to their ridership.
For instance, in 2013 there were a total of 28,175 citations issued on the Blue Line compared to a
total of 31,409 on the Red/Purple line. However, because the Blue Line only had a total of
2,389,132 monthly boardings in July 2014 versus 4,122,088 on the Red/Purple line,128 the Blue
Line had about a 54% greater rate of citations than lines with larger percentages of White and
middle-class riders. Of the top 20 stations where citations were issued 2015, 40% were on the

126
Labor/Community Strategy Center, “Civil Rights Complaint Against LA MTA and LASD for a Pattern and Practice
of Systemic Criminalization and Racial Discrimination Against Black Transit Riders” (Report), November 14, 2016, 2.
127
For detailed breakdowns of LA neighborhood demographics see: Statistics Analysis,
https://statisticalatlas.com/metro-area/California/Los-Angeles/Overview.
128
Ibid.
86
Blue line, which runs through predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods.129 Even on rail
lines that run through neighborhoods with predominantly White and Asian residents, Black and
Latinx passengers are most frequently cited.130 Furthermore, Black people are the only racial
group that “receive a greater proportion of citations than the percentage of ridership than they
represent.”131
In addition to presenting data on Metro citation practices, the LCSC offered a substantial
list of demands/suggested solutions that included:
1) An end to ‘stop and frisk’ discretionary fare enforcement and harassment of
Black passengers;
2) An immediate end to all fare collection on MTA trains and buses;
3) Withdrawal of all fare collection staff, officers, police (armed and un-armed) from
MTA trains and buses;
4) A thorough and public accounting of all police fare checks, detainments,
searches, use of force, citations, and arrests on the MTA system that is
disaggregated by race, gender, race within gender, age, location, criminal and/or
Transit Court outcomes, and underlying criminal and/or administrative violation132

The LCSC’s demands make it evident that they are not only concerned with the uneven issuing
of citations but also with the infrastructure surrounding this ticketing. Namely, the organization
disagrees with the level of discretion granted to police officers when giving citations as the lack
of oversight leaves riders vulnerable to police biases. Furthermore, the LCSC understands the

129
Babak Dorji and Jordan Faarde, “Race, Fare Evasion, and Police Practices on Los Angeles’ Rail Network,” (term
paper) November 30, 2016: 14.
130
Ibid., 13.
131
Ibid., 11.
132
Labor/Community Strategy Center, “Civil Rights Complaint Against LA MTA and LASD…,” 3.
87
stakes of the increased contact between police and people of color that fare-policing facilitates
and calls for greater regulation and accountability.
Although the case is ongoing, the LCSC’s findings and demands for action make it clear
that public order policing on public buses is intricately connected to the larger U.S. penal system
which disproportionately punishes Black and Brown people. The LCSC argues that the
“framework of fare enforcement empowers a ‘stop and frisk’ practice that is discriminatorily
impacting Black riders,”133 which has been statically proven to be bias and ineffective for
fighting crime. By explicitly naming “stop and frisk” in their demands, the organization places
Metro’s biased policing practices within a lineage of highly criticized Broken Windows policing
policies.134 “Broken Windows” policing refers to the policies implemented under New York City
Mayor Rudi Giuliani in the 1990’s. Using the theory of James Q. Wilson and George Kelling as
its theoretical underpinning, this policing approach was originally employed as a preventative
measure against larger crimes.135 It was thought that aggressively going after those who
committed public order crimes would discourage people from committing larger acts of violent
crime. Although Broken Windows policing was initially credited with decreasing crime in New

133
Labor/Community Strategy Center, “Civil Rights Complaint Against LA MTA and LASD…,” 7.
134
To learn more about Broken Windows policing and the critiques of this approach see:
Carla Barrett and Megan Welsh, “Petty Crimes and Harassment: How Community Residents Understand Low-Level
Enforcement in Three High-Crime Neighborhoods in New York City,” Qualitative Sociology 41, no. 2 (June 2018):
173–197; Ngozi Kamalu and Emmanuel Onyeozili, “A Critical Analysis of the ‘Broken Windows’ Policing in New York
City and Its Impact: Implications for the Criminal Justice System and the African American Community,” African
Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies 11, no. 1 (April 1, 2018): 71–94,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/2046674016/.
135
In 1982, social scientists, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling published an article in The Atlantic magazine in
which they advocated for the return of community-style policing. They argued that having more police on the
ground in blighted neighborhoods to police for small crimes such as vandalism, loitering, and public drinking would
decrease incidents of larger crime in those areas. This theory was adapted by police departments across the U.S.
and is considered to be the theoretical underpinning of the New York City Police Department’s notorious “stop and
frisk” campaign of the 1980s and 90s. For a more in-depth discussion of this theory, see Chapter 2 of this
dissertation and/or: George L Kelling and James Q Wilson, “Broken Window,” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media
Company, February 19 2014, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/brokenwindows/304465/.

88
York City, it has since come under fire for its disproportionate stopping and searching of people
of color with too few of these stops yielding cause for arrest. Thus, by making a connection
between bias fare enforcement practices on LA Metro and Broken Windows policing, the LCSC
mobilizes existing claims about the discriminatory nature of Broken Windows to support its case
and in doing so, underscores the far-reaching political implications of LA Metro’s uneven
application of citation policing.
By drawing this connection between Broken Windows policing and Metro citation
practices, the LCSC participates in a broader conversation about racialized policing practices
under neoliberalism. As discussed by scholars such as Candice Rai,136 Nick Blomley,137 and
Steve Herbert.138 the popularity of Broken Windows policing in the 1980s and 90s is due to its
compatibility with rise of neoliberalism during that same time. Rai argues that Broken Windows
helps “regulate urban spaces” while ignoring the structural underpinnings of urban criminality
such racial segregation and uneven urban development.139 Just as perceptions of crime in given
neighborhood serve as justification for hyper police presence, fare-evasion and perceptions of
danger on public transit in LA serve as the rationale under which LAPD officers can be deployed
in large numbers to patrol Metro rail cars and stations. By using space – in this case, the public
spaces of buses and trains - as the determinant for its application, Broken Windows is able to use
racially neutral language while systemically re-entrenching race inequality.

136
Candice Rai, Robert P Fairbanks, and Richard Lloyd, “Positive Loitering and Public Goods: The Ambivalence of
Civic Participation and Community Policing in the Neoliberal City,” Ethnography 12, no. 1 (March 2011): 65–88.
137
Nick Blomley, “Un-real estate: Proprietary space and public gardening” in Neoliberal Environments: False
Promises and Unnatural Consequences, ed Nik Heynen, James MaCarthy, Scott Prudham, and Paul Robbins
(London: Routledge, 2007), 177–189.
138
Steve Herbert “Policing the contemporary city: Fixing broken windows or shoring up neoliberalism?” Theoretical
Criminology (2001) 5 no. 4: 445–466.
139
Candice Rai, “Positive Loitering and Public Goods,” 83
89
Policing Space, Punishing Youth
Beyond its initial case against LA MTA, the Bus Riders’ Union’s other projects reveal
even more complicated connections mobility and policing that further highlights the racial and
class dimensions of urban mobility. A substantial portion of the working-class people of color
who rely on public transportation in Los Angeles are youth who use the system to commute to
school. Public transportation is essential for teens who do not live within walking distance of
their school and whose parents either do not own a car or do not have the flexibility in their
schedule to drive them.140 Examining truancy policing practices in Los Angeles over the past
fifteen years illuminates how policing, race, and class intersect with urban mobility to produce
uneven lived experiences for people of color and the poor. Furthermore, this examination reveals
how these policies operate through a neoliberal ethos that punishes the poor for being poor while
systemically reinforcing their economic marginalization through the imposition of expensive
fines.
In 2009, Los Angeles had very strict policies in place to combat truancy. The term
“truancy,” also referred to as “chronic absenteeism,” is used to refer to “any intentional
unauthorized or illegal absence from school.”141 Around this time, a slew of studies were
published showing that students who were chronically truant were more likely to perform poorly
on standardized tests, receive lower grades, and drop out of school.142 Dropping out of school is

140
Elijah Chiland, “LA will make DASH buses free for students,” Curbed, June 5, 2019,
https://la.curbed.com/2019/6/5/18653006/los-angeles-dash-buses-free-students.
141
Lauren N. Gase, Katherine Butler, and Tony Kuo, “The Current State of Truancy Reduction Programs and
Opportunities for Enhancement in Los Angeles County” Children and Youth Services Review 52, no. C (May 2015):
17.
142
Mel Kobrin, Truancy literature review. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs,
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (2009); Brandy Maynard, Christopher Salas-Wright, Michael
Vaughn, and Kristen Peters, “Who Are Truant Youth? Examining Distinctive Profiles of Truant Youth Using Latent
Profile Analysis,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 41, no. 12 (December 2012): 1671–1684.
90
associated with negative social outcomes such as higher rates of involvement in violence and
crime, teen pregnancy, substance abuse, and poor mental health.143 In response to these studies
the Los Angeles United School District, like many school districts throughout the country,
ramped up efforts to combat truancy. Given the “multi-faceted nature of school truancy”, the
LAUSD involved “a variety of multidisciplinary partners, including schools, social service
agencies, law enforcement, juvenile courts, and health.”144
One of the major interventions made during this time was the implementation of a fining
system. Although truancy fines were designed to discourage students from skipping class,
ticketing was at the discretion of school officials and LAPD officers who were assigned to patrol
school zones. This left students vulnerable to ticketing even in cases where they intended to go to
school as there was no system of regulation or accountability in place for these officers. In the
late 2000’s and early 2010’s truancy tickets could be issued from the first offense and ranged
anywhere from $250-$450 depending on where the ticket was issued. The amount of the fine
could also be increased at the issuing officer’s discretion.145 These tickets were often given to
kids as they were on their way to school, with some police even issuing tickets on school
grounds.146

143
Ellen Claes, Marc Hooghe, and Tim Reeskens, “Truancy as a Contextual and School-Related Problem. A
Comparative Multilevel Analysis of Country and School Characteristics on Civic Knowledge Among 14 Year
Olds,” Educational Studies (May 2009); Christopher A. Kearney, “School Absenteeism and School Refusal Behavior
in Youth: A Contemporary Review,” Clinical Psychology Review 28, no. 3 (2008): 451–471.
144
Lauren N. Gase, Katherine Butler, and Tony Kuo, “The Current State of Truancy Reduction Programs and
Opportunities for Enhancement in Los Angeles County,” Children and Youth Services Review 52, no. C (May 2015):
18.
145
Julianne Hing, “Young, brown-and charged with truancy,” Colorlines 12 no. 5 (September 1, 2009): 10–11,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/215531715/. This article discusses the experiences of Erick Casas-Fuentes,
then a junior at a high school in the San Fernando Valley, who had received a $250 ticket for truancy from a police
officer from the San Fernando force and during his sophomore year received a $570 ticket for the same violation
from an LAPD officer because they were near an alley that had recently been graffitied.
146
Barbara Lott-Hollan, “A mother challenges a ‘Guilty’ verdict on a truancy ticket,” Michigan Citizen, November 8,
2009, http://search.proquest.com/docview/368095234/.
91
The Bus Riders’ Union work to challenge truancy laws reveals how the unevenness of
truancy policing in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s was intricately linked to issues of transit and
mobility equity. In 2009 the Bus Riders’ Union became a major voice for working-class parents
and youth who were disproportionately impacted by these laws. The BRU found that in 2008,
12,000 truancy tickets were issued, most of which were for daytime curfew violations.147 These
policies specifically targeted youth and disproportionately impacted people of color and those
from low-income families who were less likely to have access to reliable transportation and more
likely to more likely to have family responsibilities that made it difficult for them to make to
school on time.148 Given their financial circumstances, these students were also more likely to
rely on public transit to get to school. Although Los Angeles changed its truancy policies in
2012, drastically reducing the number of truancy tickets being issued, 149 the Bus Riders’ Union’s
intervention in this issue reveals how race, class, and transit intersect with the criminal justice
system by highlighting a unique example how marginalized groups are further marginalized
through mobility inequity.
The high fines that were given for truancy effectively turned truancy tickets into poverty
traps. For working-class families with little disposable income, fines in the hundreds of dollars
can create a huge financial burden. Just as ticketing those who can’t afford to pay their fare is a
policing practice that targets and punishes a certain class of people, the fines associated with
truancy primarily fell on children from low-income families with fewer mobility resources. The

147
Julianna Hing, “Young, brown-and charged with truancy,” 10.
148
Ibid.
149
In 2012, LAUSD modified its truancy laws to implement a different strike system where the student would be
sentenced to community service for their first two offenses before finally being fined after their third offense. In
2013, it was reported that LAUSD was issuing 93% fewer truancy tickets than in the three years prior. For more
information see: Angel Jennings, “L.A. City Counsel scales back truancy law,” Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2012,
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2012-feb-23-la-me-0223-truancy-law-20120223-story.html; “Los Angeles
Issuing Fewer Truancy Tickets” The Associated Press, Education Week, November 13, 2013.
92
heftiness of these fines combined with the required court time not only targeted low-income
people but furthered their economic marginalization. Although students and their parents could
challenge these tickets, they could only do so during the mandatory court hearing that
accompanied each ticket. These court appearances, which required parents and students to take
time from school and work respectively, negatively impacted students’ school attendance and
parents’ work schedule. Even though the court might have removed the fine, parents often lost
wages for that day’s work to attend court, further contributing to the financial impact of these
tickets. The overall cost of truancy tickets combined with the fact that they were primarily issued
to those with limited financial and mobility resources reinforced the economic marginalization of
this demographic.
In addition to maintaining the economic status quo, truancy laws in the late 2000’s and
early 2010’s heavily impacted the youth of these communities, causing Black and Brown people
to enter the court system as teenagers. Criminalizing truancy has taken the task of holding
students accountable from the school and transferred it to police and the court/legal system.
Although this could be read as an attempt to minimize the disciplinary role of teachers and
administrators, allowing them more time to focus on pedagogy and overall quality of students’
education, it pre-exposed students to the criminal justice system and ultimately makes this more
likely to enter that system later down the line. Since the early 2000s, the number of police in
schools has been increasing, with 48% of schools reporting that they had police on site in 2005.
As of 2015, there was an estimated 17,000 school police officers.150 The presence of police in
and around schools leads to police addressing issues that were previously addressed by teachers

150
Robin L. Dahlberg, ACLU, “Arrested Futures: The Criminalization of School Discipline in Massachusetts' Three
Largest School Districts” (report), (Spring 2012), 9.
93
and resulting in higher arrest rates.151 These arrests disproportionately impact students of color as
well as students with emotional issues and learning disabilities.152
Scholars argue that these truancy laws, like other misdemeanor crimes, play into what
they refer to as the “school to prison pipeline.” This term is used to the connection between
criminalizing school-related status offenses, specifically in the cases of low-income POC,
predisposes children to the U.S. carceral system and increases the likelihood of these populations
going to prison in the future. Christopher A. Mallett, a professor of social work, argues that
increasing use of zero tolerance punishments in school as led to the increase in arrests and
juvenile detention referrals.153 Mallett argues that the unevenness of this impact across race and
class is a result of schools in “urban, multicultural, inner-city environments” are more likely to
rely on these discipline protocols, creating a “prison-like” educational environment. He further
argues that these schools “are likely to harm the students more harshly than schools with fewer
discipline measures or less discipline protocol rigidity.”154 Thus, while truancy fines were
theoretically implemented to reduce student dropout rates and consequently reduce the higher
incarceration rates to which these dropout rates are positively correlated, in practice this system
reinforces the social problem that it was designed to combat; this fining system predisposed
young people of color to criminal justice system which also greatly increasing the likelihood of a
child being incarcerated in the future.155

151
Ibid.
152
Matthew R Steinberg et al., Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago Urban
Education Institute, “Student and Teacher Safety in Chicago Public Schools, The Roles of Community Context and
School Social Organization,” 26 (May 2011), 8.
153
Ibid.
154
Ibid.
155
Robin L. Dahlberg, ACLU, “Arrested Futures: The Criminalization of School Discipline in Massachusetts' Three
Largest School Districts” (report).
94
The policing of fare-evasion and truancy are undergirded by a neoliberal logic that
emphasizes individual responsibility and downplays systemic inequality. By targeting transit
riders who cannot afford fare and children who lack access to reliable transportation, LA MTA
along with hired LAPD and LBPD officers punish the poor for their socio-economic
circumstances. Targeting those who have been economically marginalized completely disregards
the structural underpinnings of poverty in the U.S. while charging them with fines puts further
strain on their financial resources. Thus, those most affected by the neoliberal turn of the 1980s
are the very same populations that are being the most heavily policed and punished for their
financial circumstances.
The fact that fines were the decided penalty for truancy reflects the Los Angeles School
District’s tacit embrace of neoliberal philosophies that emphasize individual agency over
structural inequality. Had the school district examined the root causes of truancy, they would
have realized that financial instability was a major factor and thus, may have determined fining
to be an inappropriate means to addressing the issue. Thus, by operating through a lens that
overemphasizes individual agency and failing to examine the structures that underpin truancy,
the school district reinforced a structure that disproportionately punishes poor people of color.

Part 2: For Safety’s Sake: The Dangers of Heightened Police-Passenger Contact

As the Expo line train pulls into the 7th and Metro station, the automated system
announces that it is the terminal stop for this train. The doors open and hordes of people exit,
walking towards the turnstiles through which they must pass to exit the station or transfer to
another line. Although only those who are transferring to another line are required to tap their
95
farecards, everyone begins digging in their pockets and fumbling through their bags to find their
TAP cards as they realize that the police are doing fare-checks. For those who have paid their
fare, this situation is simply an annoyance – having to wait for the officers to check cards slows
down the process of leaving the station. For those who have not paid their fares, however, this
situation is one of anxiety as it requires one to either own up to having evaded the fare (and face
the consequences) or move strategically through the crowd to avoid the police officers and their
fare-checking devices. As I tap my card on one of the officer’s electronic readers, I hear an
officer ask a young Latinx man in baggy shorts, “So what happened here?” The young man was
holding a Tap card in his hand, which I assume the reader had flagged as not having an active
fare. The young man responds by telling the officer that the train was coming when he got to the
station and he didn’t have time to tap his card. “Are you sure you weren’t trying to get a free
ride? You know that’s a $75 fine, don’t you?,” the officer asked. The young man did not
respond. The LAPD officer alerted one of his fellows that he was stepping to the side to handle
this issue.
This scenario is one that is common to most who regularly use the public rail system in
Los Angeles; interacting with LAPD officers while riding on Metro subways and light rail is part
of the experience of using public transit in present-day LA. This vignette demonstrates how
police presence has become normalized in the everyday lives of those who use public transit in
Los Angeles and more broadly, it reflects the ubiquity of police presence in public space. While
the LA MTA names safety as the primary rationale behind police presence on trains, the
organization’s approach to safety does reflect an understanding of its subjective nature. Given
that perceptions of safety vary between different groups, the measures taken to promote safety in
a given context requires a nuanced understanding of how those involved perceive safety. I argue
96
that the LA MTA’s choice to deploy LAPD officers on Metro trains and buses does not take its
primary ridership into account as if fails to consider the complex relationship that communities
of color have with police. Furthermore, by entering a partnership with the LAPD and the Long
Beach Police Department (LBPD), the LA MTA embraces Broken Windows policing and plays
into a neoliberal idea of safety that criminalizes poverty and favors middle-class interests.
Given the historically rooted tension between the LAPD and Black people, the stakes of
heightened police presence on LA Metro vehicles are greater. While police presence on Metro
buses is unlikely outside of instances where drivers request officers, LAPD officers regularly
patrol train cars and train stations. At train stations, their primary purpose for being there is to
catch people who try to evade paying fare by jumping the turnstiles or failing to tap a valid
farecard at stations where there are no turnstiles installed. Outside of fare policing, officers also
routinely walk through train cars to check for violations of Metro rules. However, there is little
regulation or oversight with regards to what this patrolling should actually look like. The high
level of discretion given to police officers makes Metro passengers vulnerable to the
“hyperpunativeness”156 of the Neoliberal state.
Although police presence is ubiquitous on LA Metro today, police officers have not
always served such a major role in the LA transit experience. Los Angeles public rail stations
were initially built on an entirely honor-based system and fare payment was not heavily policed.
Under this system, riders were trusted to purchase a ticket at the platform before entering the
train despite there being no one there to monitor their behavior and no physical barriers to
prohibit them from boarding if they hadn’t paid. Occasionally, an un-armed Metro employee

156
Steve Herbert and Elizabeth Brown, “Conceptions of Space and Crime in the Punitive Neoliberal
City,” Antipode 38, no. 4 (September 2006): 755–777; Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the
Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996).
97
would stroll the train cars and check for tickets.157 In 2007, however, the MTA Board votes to
install turnstiles at Metro rail stations. The implementation was tricky, however, as many Metro
light rail stations were designed with the honor-system in mind and were not physically
conducive to turnstiles. In some cases, stations were simply too small to accommodate turnstiles
and doing so would put passengers too close to the tracks as they stood in line to tap their
farecards.158 For this reason, only about half of Metro rail systems that exist today have turnstiles
to encourage fare payment. At stations without turnstiles the honor-system still applies;
passengers are expected to tap a farecard that has been loaded with the appropriate fare/pass on a
fare machine before boarding the train car. Although riders are legally required to tap a valid
farecard at the machine located on the platform before they board the train, there is no physical
barrier prohibiting their entrance if they do not pay. Given the design of train stations, police
commonly patrol both the trains and the platforms with handheld machines that determine if
someone has paid their fare. It is most common for officers to check fares at large transit hubs
such as the downtown 7th street Metro station and the Wilshire/Vermont station, where large
numbers of commuters enter and exit.
The formal relationship between the LA MTA and the LAPD is relatively new. In
February 2017, Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Office announced that LA Metro would be entering a
contract with the LAPD. Under this $645.7 million contract, the LAPD would serve in
conjunction with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) and the Long Beach
Police (LBPD) to patrol Metro buses, trains, and light rail with the LAPD will receiving $369.3
million, the LASD the receiving $246.3 million and the LBPD receiving $30.1 million. Later that

157
The Time Editorial Board, “Editorial: Shouldn’t Metro know how many people are riding for free?,” LA Times,
July 29, 2014, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-metro-fare-evasion-20140730-story.html.
158
Jon Schleuss, “Gate dilemma will keep Metro rail riders on honor system,” LA Times, November 17, 2013,
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2013-nov-17-la-me-gate-locking-20131118-story.html.
98
year, the contact went into effect with officers being deployed in July 2017. This increased the
number of officers on trains and buses on a given day from approximately 170 to 314.159
In its announcement of its partnership with the LAPD, the Mayor’s office did not focus
much on fare-enforcement specifically and instead emphasized a broader message about how
increased officer presence would help create a safer environment for transit users. The
announcement quoted Charlie Beck, the LAPD Chief, describing how officers would “play an
integral role in protecting the millions of people” who commute on Metro services each day.160
Beck went on to say, “This new agreement with the MTA will have far-reaching impacts, well
beyond just our rail and buses, with faster response times for emergency and priority calls for
service, increased law enforcement visibility throughout the City, and added protections against
the threat of terrorism."161 The emphasis that both the MTA and the LAPD place of “safety” in
the announcement is a common discursive strategy for justifying increasing policing. Whether
regarding police presence, heightened use of surveillance technologies, or removing homeless
people, ideas of safety are discursively leveraged to justify the increased securitization of public
spaces.162 But who is society invested in protecting and from what?
The MTA’s emphasis on safety is primarily rooted in its desire to increase ridership and
incite “choice” rider to use transit despite having the financial resources to own a car. Because
Los Angeles is steeped in nearly seventy years of dominant car culture, the LA MTA has to work

159
“LAPD to Patrol Metro Buses, Trains Under New Contract,” CBS Los Angeles, February 23, 2017,
https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2017/02/23/lapd-to-begin-patroling-metro-buses-trains-under-new-contract/.
Also see: https://www.dailynews.com/2018/04/11/bolstered-police-presence-on-la-metro-lines-shows-results-
but-challenges-remain-in-luring-back-wary-riders/
160
LA Mayor, “LAPD Office to Patrol Metro Buses, Trains in the City of Los Angeles,” February 23, 2017,
https://www.lamayor.org/lapd-officers-patrol-metro-buses-trains-city-los-angeles.
161
Ibid.
162
Luis F. Nuño, “‘Police, Public Safety, and Race‐Neutral Discourse,’” Sociology Compass 7, no. 6 (June 2013): 471–
486; John Fiske, “Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism.” Theory, Culture &
Society 15, no. 2 (May 1998): 67–88; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (New York:
Verso, 2006).
99
harder to attract and maintain middle class riders than cities where using public transit is more
common. With the expansion of its rail system, Metro has seen a growth in its middle-class
White ridership, despite a decline in the number of people using the system overall. Between
2012 and 2016, LA Metro’s blue, red and green routes all lost ridership while the ridership on
the new gold and Expo lines increased.163 The demographics of the neighborhoods that these
trains serve tell a story about the shifts in demographics that are occurring on LA public
transportation. The blue, red, and green lines run through far less affluent neighborhoods (i.e.
Compton, Watts, North Hollywood, Hawthorne) than do the gold and Expo lines (i.e. Pasadena,
Culver City, Santa Monica). Thus, the fact that ridership on the gold and Expo lines is increasing
even as overall Metro ridership is decreasing signals that more affluent people have recently
been opting for public transportation.
One of the major challenges that the MTA faces in trying to entice “choice” middle-class
riders, however, is safety. It in most recent surveys, Metro found that around 30% of former
Metro users stopped using the system due to concerns about safety.164 These concerns were
particularly pronounced among Blue Line riders as this line accounted for 35% of crime reported
throughout the entire Metro rail system.165 While former Metro riders’ ideas about safety are
presumably rooted in their actual experience, these perceptions extend to those who have never
used Metro; those who have never used Metro name inconvenience and safety concerns as the

163
Daniel C. Vock, “Why Public Transit Ridership is Falling,” February 2, 2018, Governing.com,
https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-los-angeles-transit-ridership-study.html.
164
Kelly Puente, “Bolstered police presence on LA Metro shows results, but challenges remain in luring back wary
riders,” April 11, 2018, https://www.dailynews.com/2018/04/11/bolstered-police-presence-on-la-metro-lines-
shows-results-but-challenges-remain-in-luring-back-wary-riders/.
165
Andrew Edwards and Jeremiah Dobruck, “Can Long Beach Police improve the Blue Line’s Reputation,” Press
Telegram, December 4, 2016, https://www.presstelegram.com/2016/12/04/can-long-beach-police-improve-the-
blue-lines-reputation/.
100
major reasons why they don’t use the system.166 Given these findings, it is not surprising that the
LA MTA decided to enter a partnership with local police departments. The idea is that having
large numbers of police assigned to patrol rail cars and stations functions as a visible market of
safety for those who are wary of using transit for fear of danger. The issue with this rationale,
however, is that it fails to consider the subjectivity of safety. Rather than thinking about what
might constitute a “safe” environment for its primarily working class POC ridership, the LA
MTA instead views safety through the lens of the White middle-class “choice” riders that it
hopes to entice.
What the LA MTA doesn’t realize in talking about safety, however, is that it is subjective
and must be contextualized. People of color in the United States have always had a complicated
relationship to law enforcement. This relationship is reflected in scholarship that examine
different racial groups’ attitudes towards police.167 While the fraught relationship between people
of color and the police has more recently come to light through a number of high-profile police
killings of unarmed Black men throughout the U.S., the Los Angeles Police Department is
somewhat notorious in this regard. With highly publicized events such as the beating of Rodney
King in 1991 and the “Rampart Scandal” of the late ‘90s168 still alive in popular memory and

166
Eric Jaffe, “Why Correcting Misperceptions About Mass Transit May Be More Important to Improving Service,”
City Lab, November 27, 2013, https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/11/why-correcting-misperceptions-
about-mass-transit-may-be-more-important-improving-service/7719/.
167
Darren Wheelock, Meghan S Stroshine, Michael and O’hear, “Disentangling the Relationship Between Race and
Attitudes Toward the Police: Police Contact, Perceptions of Safety, and Procedural Justice,” Crime &
Delinquency 65, no. 7 (June 2019): 941–968; Yung-Lien Lai and Jihong Solomon Zhao, “The Impact of
Race/ethnicity, Neighborhood Context, and Police/citizen Interaction on Residents’ Attitudes Toward the
Police,” Journal of Criminal Justice 38, no. 4 (2010): 685–692.
168
“The Rampart Scandal” refers to the series of events that unfolded around officers in the LAPD’s Rampart
Division in the early 1990s. Investigations surrounding these events, which included a bank robbery and stealing of
three kilograms of cocaine from evidence, revealed gross misconduct within the LAPD. These investigations led to
the overturning of over one hundred criminal convictions as well as the removal of over 20 police officers, many of
whom were convicted of criminal charges. Sources that discuss this incident are:
101
culture, the LAPD is commonly considered “one of the worst” with regards to corruption and
racism.169 Despite various reformations of the LAPD since the 90s,170 this corruption of the
organization’s past has been brought back into popular conversation with the recent resurgence
of interest in the OJ Simpson Trials,171 and the publishing of journalist, Jill Leovy’s,
Ghettoside.172 Supporting these media portrayals, some sociologists, criminologists, and public
policy scholars have argued that Black America’s relationship to policing and the wider criminal
justice system positions this group as an “internal colony” within the U.S.173 These scholars are
attentive to the role that space plays in the continued subjugation of Black Americans under the
U.S. policing system. Geographer Steve Herbert, argues that policing practices in the U.S. are
rooted in territorial control and that “officers are more likely to see minority-dominated areas as
unsafe and morally unclean, as spaces where they can find dangerous foes against which they

Carl Scott Gutié rrez-Jones, Critical Race Narratives a Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury (New York: New York
University Press, 2001). ; Paul J. Kaplan, “Looking Through the Gaps: A Critical Approach to the LAPD’s Rampart
Scandal,” Social Justice 36, no. 1 (115) (January 1, 2009): 61–81.
169
Floyd W. Hayes, III, “Fuhrman Tapes Confirm LAPD’s Racialized Tyranny. (Los Angeles Police Department
Detective Mark Fuhrman)(Race & Racism in the Last Quarter of ’95: The OJ & Post-OJ & The Million Man March - A
Symposium),” The Black Scholar 25, no. 4 (September 22, 1995): 48–49.
170
See this text for a comprehensive history of the LAPD and its reforms: Joe Domanick, Blue: the LAPD and the
Battle to Redeem American Policing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).
171
Over the past five years, the conversation of the OJ Simpson Trials re-entered the American popular sphere with
the airing of “The People Versus OJ,” an FX mini-series which chronicled the events surrounding the murders of
Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and the subsequent trial of OJ Simpson. The 10-episode series, which
aired on the FX television Network in February 2016, went on to win nine Emmy Awards. In depicting the events
surrounding the murder and trial, the show unveils the corrupt and racist underbelly on the LAPD through
depictions of evidence tampering and police affiliation with the Klu Klux Klan. A few months after the airing of “The
People Versus OJ,” ESPN released, OJ: Made in America, a five-part documentary film series covering the life of OJ
Simpson before and after the trial. Just as in “The People Versus OJ,” the documentary paints the LAPD as corrupt
and untrustworthy for both their seeming fascination with Simpson’s celebrity and their handling of the murder
case.
172
Ghettoside traces the narrative arc of the murder of Bryant Tennelle in South Los Angeles to unfold the
complexity of the killings of young Black men in the U.S. In combing through the details of this case, Jill Leovy
highlights the complicated relationship between the LAPD and the people of the predominantly Black
neighborhoods that they patrol.
173
Mary Texeira, “Policing the Internally Colonized: Slavery, Rodney King, Mark Fuhrman and Beyond,” The
Western Journal of Black Studies 19, no. 4 (December 1, 1995): 235–243.
http://search.proquest.com/docview/1311798827/. (235); Also see: Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America
(New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
102
can act with masculine aggressiveness.”174 Sociologist, Mary Texeira supports this, arguing that
“poor African Americans are more vulnerable to abuses of all institutions – but especially
policing – because it is their communities that are more heavily ‘watched over’ than other
communities.”175 As spaces that are predominantly occupied by people of color, the policing of
the public transportation in Los Angeles functions as an extension of the historic over-policing of
Black and Brown neighborhoods that has “resulted in a general feeling of hostility toward police
officers in communities of color and especially the African American community.”176
Police presence at Metro stations in Black neighborhoods limits the mobility of transit
users who live in those communities. When studying commuting patterns in Watts and Compton,
Monique López, founder of Pueblo, an urban planning firm specializing in social and
environmental justice issues, found that residents in these neighborhoods often used Blue Line
stations that were further from their homes in order to avoid stations that were heavily policed.
Many of these people reported that their choice to walk further was a reaction to having had
negative encounters with officers while commuting in the past.177 On one hand, the findings of
this study illuminate how policing practices in mobility spaces are racialized through space. The
high presence of police officers at Metro stations in Los Angeles neighborhoods with
predominantly Black populations assumes that these people are more prone to criminality than
others and increases the likelihood of arrest for this demographic. However, this study also
highlights one of the ways that race shapes the lived experiences of urbanites. Walking to Metro
stations that are further away adds to the commute time for people in these communities and

174
Steven Kelly Herbert, Policing Space Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 5-6.
175
Texeira, “Policing the Internally Colonized…,” 238.
176
Texeira, “Policing the Internally Colonized…,” 239.
177
Emily Han, “The Continuing Quest for a More Walkable Los Angeles,” Prospect.org, April 20, 2018,
https://prospect.org/article/continuing-quest-more-walkable-los-angeles.
103
denies them access to the ease of mobility that White people and people living in higher income
neighborhoods have.
Beyond introducing poor people and people of color into the criminal justice system, the
heightened police presence on Metro increases the likelihood that transit users will come in
contact with the LAPD and consequently increases the likelihood that they will be arrested. Law
professor, Alexandra Natapoff argues that over-policing leads to increases in misdemeanor
arrests, which in turn floods the court system with cases. Due to the over-policing of poor people
and people of color in particular, this results in disproportionate numbers of these groups being
introduced into the criminal justice system.178 Along with other non-violent, low-consequence
crimes such as loitering, jaywalking, littering, and spitting, fare-evasion citations function to
criminalize people who are of little to no harm to society. When coupled with the fact that public
transportation users in Los Angeles are overwhelmingly people of color,179 this criminalization
becomes both classed and racialized as the vast majority of those being cited are belong to
marginalized communities.
These conversations about police racial bias, social control in public space, and increased
police presence on LA public transit all culminate in the story of the arrests of Bethany Nava and
Selena Lechuga, which hit the media in early 2018. Popular news reported that Nava, who was
18-years-old at the time of the incident, was arrested after having refused to remove her feet
from a seat while riding the Red-Line train. A video recording of the incident was posted on
Facebook and received over 14 million views.180 The video opens showing the officer tugging at

178
Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and
Makes America More Unequal (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 136.
179
LA Metro, “Quality of Life Report,” 2016, https://media.metro.net/docs/report_qualityoflife.pdf.
180
While I was not able to find the original Facebook post that included the video, I was able to view it on Youtube
as it was uploaded by (username) Jason black. “LAPD Officer Drags 18-Year-Old Bethany Nava off a Metrorail ‘How
Not To Behave.’” YouTube, YouTube, 26 Jan. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYSusjEiXlA.
104
Nava’s arm as she holds on a subway pole and yells that she is trying to get her bag. Once on the
platform, Selena Lechuga, along with the person recording the video (whose voice the viewer
hears but whose face the viewer never sees), intervened with Nava’s arrest. They told the officer
that it wasn’t “that big of a deal” that Nava had her foot on the seat, making it clear that they
didn’t believe that the officer’s physical handling of Nava was justified given the offense.
Lechuga repeatedly called the officers derogatory names while the person filming told the officer
that his actions were an “abuse of power” and asked for his badge number. The interaction
continued to escalate with Lechuga accusing the officer of being a “racist.” As the officer
collected information from Nava, Lechuga asks, “Is this the end of the month?” to which the
person filming replies, “yes,” prompting Lechuga to accuse the officer of trying to meet his
citation quota. Shortly after, three additional LAPD officers arrive on the scene, and the initial
officer tells them to take both Nava and Lechuga into custody. Lechuga resists being handcuffed
while yelling, “this is racism!” Additional officers enter the scene and as the initial officer steps
in front of Lechuga, she spits on him and yells, “Fuck you!” The recording ends with all of the
officers who had been called standing around the platform as Lechuga continues to yell.
This highly publicized interaction between Nava, Lechuga, and the LAPD illustrates the
fraught dynamic between people of color and police and the consequences of increasingly
contact between these two groups. Although having your feet on the seat is a violation of the
Metro code of conduct,181 as the officer states to Nava in the video, his use of physical force to
remove her from the train is an excessive use of force given the gravity of her offense. Putting
one’s feet on the train seats does not immediately translate into potential harm for that person or
anyone else. However, under Broken Windows logic, these minor offenses must be punished as a

181
LA Metro, “Metro Customer Code of Conduct,” May 2017 (last updated),
http://media.metro.net/about_us/ethics/images/codeofconduct_customer.pdf, 6.
105
strategy for preventing bigger crimes. Because LAPD officers have discretion over who they cite
for these offenses, it leaves people of color vulnerable to racial bias just as they are other
contexts. Bethany Nava has since been found not guilty of “being loud and unruly on the train,”
the violation for which she was arrested although the LAPD has deemed the officer’s action
“appropriate.” Following her trail, Nava and her lawyer have reportedly filed a lawsuit against
the city of Los Angeles, claiming that the LAPD’s use of force was excessive.182 The police
officers’ treatment and arrest of Nava and Lechuga illustrate how biased policing on public
transportation represents one example of the way that policy decisions at varied levels impact the
daily lives of differently raced and classed people as they move through urban space but also
how these policies “perpetuate a contentious relationship between the police and racial minorities
based on social control rather than public service imperatives.”183
This snap shot that I witnessed is part of a much larger portrait of the American penal
system - one that depicts the intricate relationship between race, space, and policing that was
established in early American history and has evolved into the present. It highlights flaws in our
policing system, drawing attention to the ways that the policing of public order crimes serves to
maintain a larger system of oppression rooted in the subjugation of certain groups through social
control and social regulation. Situating this moment within the context of LAPD-people of color
relations and the broader racially bias U.S. penal system not only connects this micro moment to
the macro structures through which it was produced but also illustrates how these two systems
are co-constitutive. While the mundane experiences of public transportation might appear
inconsequential, they actually reveal significant information about the U.S.’s social, political,

182
Jory Rand, “Metro passenger pulled off Red Line train by officer found not guilty of charges,” Abc7, May 11,
2018, https://abc7.com/metro-passenger-pulled-off-red-line-train-found-not-guilty-of-charges/3463435/.
183
Ibid.
106
and economic systems, grounding these diffuse structures in the bodies and interactions of
everyday people.

Space, Race, Class, and Policing and the Paradox of Neoliberal Cities
The conversations of race, class, and policing that I take on in this chapter illuminate both
what neoliberal public spaces look like and the paradox that inherently characterizes these
spaces. According to some urban studies scholars, public transit has become a space of “social
conflict over how the contradictions of neoliberalism will be resolved in cities of the USA.”184
By highlighting the conflicts creating by the policing of transit, this chapter depicts public spaces
as spaces within which the marginalized positions of people of color and the poor are reinforced
through the policing of money (fare) and time (truancy). Due to its ridership demographics,
public transportation in Los Angeles serves as a space through which people of color and those
from low-income families can be targeted and punished through costly fines. These fines are not
only a major financial setback to families with little to no disposable income but introduce youth
into the criminal justice system for minor status offenses.
Despite this discussion, this chapter also highlights how public spaces act as tools for
challenging the very same practices. The existence and success of the Bus Riders’ Union is in
and of itself a testament to the power of public spaces in general, and urban mobility spaces in
particular, to further resistance movements. The BRU’s success as a grassroots working-class
movement can be accredited to the bus itself, as it draws large numbers of working-class people

184
Joe Grengs, “The Abandoned Social Goals of Public Transit in the Neoliberal City of the USA,” City 9, no. 1 (April
1, 2005): 51–66. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13604810500050161. Also see: Joseph A.
Rodriguez, “Rapid Transit and Community Power: West Oakland Residents Confront BART,” Antipode 31, no. 2
(April 1999): 212–228; Joe Grengs, “Community-Based Planning as a Source of Political Change: The Transit Equity
Movement of Los Angeles’ Bus Riders Union,” Journal of the American Planning Association 68, no. 2 (June 30,
2002): 165–178.
107
of color together in one space. In this way, the bus was an important facilitator of this movement.
The ongoing success of the BRU is thus a testament to the political significance of public transit.
The Bus Riders’ Union’s approach to creating a resistance movement participates in an
international historical narrative that centers public spaces as sites of struggle that act as visible
platforms upon which everyday people could air their grievances with society and be heard by
their fellow citizens. From Berkeley’s “People’s Park” to New York City’s Zuccotti Park to
Cairo’s Tahrir Square, public spaces have proved essential for challenging oppressive systems.
Like the aforementioned parks and plazas, public transportation too has played a role in politics.
Most notably buses were a critical site of resistance during the Civil Rights Movement of the
1960s as Black people challenged the racialized spatial hierarchy of seating on public transit
made most apparent through Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat at the front of the bus which
sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This history reflects the ways in which public space
serves not only as a site through which to witness and better understand inequity and injustice
but also as the “stage upon which democracy is performed.”185 Thoughtful investigating the
politics of urban space and urban mobility require one to be attentive to the ways that public
spaces are both productions of neoliberalism and critical tools through which to learn and
challenge the inequities produced within this system. Through this approach we better
understand the power that public spaces hold and the unique insights that they afford.

185
John R. Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance (Oxford
University Press, 2012).
108
THREE:
Body Politic(s): Understanding Space and the Body through Public Transportation

In the summer of 2014 after completing my first year of graduate school, I set out for a
six-week European adventure that would consist of reconnections with friends, cities, and food
that I’d missed since studying abroad in college as well as some preliminary research for my
dissertation. After having spent about three weeks in Chicago with my family, I packed my bag
and hopped on the train to go to O’Hare International Airport. I took the Ashland bus from my
parents’ apartment on the South Side to the 63rd Street Green Line station. The Green Line took
me into downtown where I transferred to the Blue Line at the Lake Street station. The Blue Line
was calm. It was a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of June and most people were at work.
There were about 15 people on the train car - others who were on their way to the airport and
some who I assumed had come into the city from the Northwestern suburbs and were now
heading back. On the Blue Line I chose the seat at one of the furthest ends of the train car, a
single seat next to the door that was intended for the conductor to use to transfer between cars.
Though these doors were technically not to be used by passengers, they were a convenient way
for people soliciting for money and selling goods to travel through the entirety of the train
without having to repeatedly get off and on.
I was reminded that people did in fact use these doors when a I saw the door begin to
open, looked up to see the face of a large Black man through the small window on the door, and
realized that my legs, which were holding my bag in place on the floor, were slightly in front of
the door. Before I could reposition myself, the man forcefully pushed through the door, banging
my leg in the process. As he came into the car, he angrily chastised me for not moving out of his
109
way. As he continued into the car, I retorted, telling him not to yell at me and reminding him that
it technically illegal for people to passengers to pass through the train cars this way. Despite
having re-lived this event in my mind several times over the past two years, time has still blurred
the details of our back and forth. What I do remember is him “accusing” me of being a lesbian,
as he could not rationalize a woman standing up for herself against a man as anything but in
indication of her distaste for heterosexual sexual experience. What I do remember is him
standing over me as I sat in my seat, threatening to “knock me out” if I continued to argue with
him. What I do remember is the approximately 15 predominantly White people who watched the
scenario unfold without saying or doing anything.
This incident rattled me for a number of reasons. This man’s threats to physically harm
me in the middle of the day, on a public train car in a major U.S. city, over a trivial argument is
disconcerting to say the least. It speaks to issues of gendered violence that go far beyond the
space of the train and are riddled with complex conversations of historical racialized violence
and problematic constructions of masculinity. “Outing me” as a lesbian was the man’s attempt to
both insult me and reconcile my feminine presentation with what he deemed unfeminine
behavior. This experience also raised critical questions about public space as it challenged the
idea that heavily populated urban spaces are inherently safe by virtue of the presence of
onlookers. Furthermore, it pushed me to think about the many factors upon which my safety in
public spaces is contingent - if I had been a White woman, or perhaps even if my combatant had
been a white man, would any of the presumably middle-class white people on this train have
tried to come to my rescue? Did the fact that both I and the male aggressor were Black somehow
normalize the violence in the eyes of White passengers? Or did internalized stereotypes of the
“big Black guy” lead everyone to fear for their own safety in ways that they may not have if the
110
aggressor were another race? Though the answers to these questions remain unknown, or even
perhaps because the answers remain unknown, they continue to haunt me.
…
As evidenced through this opening vignette, a deep reading of public space through the
lens of gender unveils conversations of violence, the body, and patriarchal systems of power and
influence our everyday lives. These themes are further nuanced by their intersections with race,
class, and sexuality. In this chapter, I explore these themes through an examination of
manspreading on public transportation. “Manspreading” is a term whose origins are rooted in the
third wave feminist movement of the late 2000’s. While use of this term was initially relegated to
blogs and online forums, it has gained mainstream traction over the past decade and was
officially added to the Oxford dictionary in August 2015.186 According to this definition
manspreading is, “the practice whereby a man, especially one travelling on public transport,
adopts a sitting position with his legs wide apart, in such a way as to encroach on an adjacent
seat or seats.” I enter this conversation through an analysis of the Metropolitan Transit
Authority’s (MTA) 2014 “anti-manspreading” campaign. This campaign, which aimed to
dissuade men from sitting on New York City public buses and trains with their legs spread wide
apart, sparked controversy for its seemingly anti-male, feminist agenda.187 I study this campaign
and the discourse surrounding it to consider what is at stake with the conversation surrounding
manspreading and explore the ways that is linked to larger conversations of hetero-patriarchy,
gendered violence, the body, and fear.

186
Oxford Online Dictionary, Accessed: March 12, 2017,
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/manspreading.
187
Jenny Yuen, “Anti-‘manspreading’ campaign called sexist,” Toronto Sun, December 29, 2014,
http://torontosun.com/2014/12/29/anti-manspreading-campaign-called-sexist/wcm/b30005af-ecde-4210-9f89-
5fabdd1ca5c1.
111
Using public transportation as the point of entry is an attempt to understand systemic
injustice and urban inequality through experiences of the everyday rather than through the top-
down approach that urbanist have traditionally taken. The latter is largely theoretical, activity-
oriented, and “underpinned by a patriarchal gender perspective.”188 A close examination of
public transportation, as both a topic and a physical site of study, highlights how it serves as a
hub for the micropolitics of race, gender, class, and sexuality and also as space through which we
can better understand larger systems of power.
As stated in the introduction, this project operates from the premise that public transit
operates as a site of exposure that allows for scholarly readings of contemporary socio-political
relations. In this chapter, I focus specifically on how studying transit exposes the patriarchal
power structure that scaffolds contemporary U.S. society and how this system is at play in our
everyday lives through our bodies and our interactions with strangers in public space.
Furthermore, by highlighting themes of violence and safety, studying gender and public
transportation inherently raises questions about public space itself. In line with theories about
catcalling and other forms of street harassment, I argue that manspreading is a distinguished
masculine spatial practice that serves to remind women of their vulnerability and feeds into a
larger system of constructing gender through the policing of male and female bodies. While
some might view it as political insignificant, manspreading feeds into the fear mindset that
characterizes women’s experiences in public space and consequently impacts the choices that
they make about how to move through public space.

188
Yasminah Beebeejaun, “Gender, urban space, and the right to everyday life,” Journal of Urban Affairs 39, vol. 3:
2.
112
Scholars in spatial and gender studies have taken varied approaches to articulating the
relationship between space and gender. Daphne Spain,189 are concerned with the ways that
physical spaces have historically been stratified according to gender while Doreen Massey is
invested in using gender to theorize space as "particular moments" within intersecting webs of
social relations that have "over time been constructed, laid down, intersected with one another,
decayed and renewed.”190 Rather than focuses on space itself, scholars like Jessica Ellen
Sewell,191 Yasminah Beebeejaun,192 and Delores Hayden193 focus on women’s experiences in
urban space and how they are shaped by gender. While these scholars take varied approaches to
studying gender and space, they all assert that arrangements of gender and space have
historically been designed to reinforce an existing gendered power structure in which men
control society’s major institutions. In line with the work of the latter group of scholars, this
chapter is concerned with how women’s experiences in public space are shaped by gender as it is
performed through bodily performances.

Gender and the Body
To fully develop my analysis of how gender factors into the lived experiences of people
in urban space, I turn to the body. I draw from the work of gender studies scholars such as Judith

189
Daphne Spain, Gendered Space (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
190
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 121.
191
Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
192
Beebeejaun, “Gender, urban space, and the right to everyday life.”
193
Delores Hayden, “What would a Non-Sexist City be like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human
Work,” Signs 5, no. 3 (1998).
113
Butler,194 Susan Bordo,195 and Carole Spitzack196 that helped shape conversations surrounding
the body as a site of gender construction. In “The Body and Reproduction of Femininity,” Susan
Bordo examines the body as an important site of struggle. Through a discussion of illnesses with
which women have historically been diagnosed - hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia nervosa -
Bordo calls our attention to the way that gender is enacted through the body, and in the case of
these illnesses, how the body responds or resists the constraints that gender norms place upon it.
She asserts, “We are no longer given verbal descriptions or exemplars of what a lady is or of
what femininity consists. Rather, we learn the rules directly through bodily discourse: through
images that tell us what clothes, body shape, facial expression, movements, and behavior are
required.”197 Though Bordo’s essay largely focuses on the policing of female bodies through
aesthetic gender norms such as wearing makeup, being thin, and wearing certain styles of dress,
her arguments lend themselves to thinking about the politics at play with an act such as
manspreading. I use Bordo as a foundation for thinking about the different ways that the
feminine/masculine binary is constructed and maintained through public displays of the body.
This chapter engages work that critically examines masculinity as it exists at both the
systemic198 and individual levels. 199 Given that “male behavior and the male body are
inextricably linked under the umbrella of masculinity,” I work to understand the connection
between the bodily practice of manspreading and masculinity. 200 At the systemic level,

194
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
195
Susan Bordo, “The Body and Reproduction of Femininity,” in Feminist Theory: A Reader ed. Wendy K. Kolmar
and Frances Bartkowski (New York: McGraw Hill, 2010).
196
Carole Spitzack, Confessing excess: Women and the politics of body reduction (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1990).
197
Bordo, “The Body and Reproduction of Femininity,” 461.
198
Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); D.H.G. Morgan,
Discovering Men, (London: Routledge, 1992).
199
John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press., 2002) ; Erving Goffman, The
Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books 1971).
200
Billy W Wooten, “The Modern Adonis” (PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2006), 14.
114
masculinity is inscribed in patriarchy as it operates to reaffirm the hegemonic power structure. At
the individual level, we can study the “social script” that has been laid out by “family, peers,
school and media” who “prescribe and validate” behaviors that are “appropriate.”201 Using
manspreading on public transportation as the entry point into this conversation, I bring these two
scales together to demonstrate how individual masculine practices and performances are
informed by the structural.
When I speak of “masculinity” it is with awareness that “each man’s ability to wield and
benefit from patriarchal power is … different” as men are stratified “into different categories of
privilege and power.”202 Despite the singularity term, “masculinity” embodies a plurality in that
notion(s) of masculinity held by an individual or a particular group are influenced by several
factors including but not limited to “historical context, geographic location, class standing,
ethnicity, culture, age, marital status, sexuality and various individual differences.”203 Thus,
masculinity is a shifting idea that must always be contextualized. Furthermore, because
masculinity is both socially constructed and performative, masculinity can be expressed by any
individual, not solely men.204 In doing so, it is imperative that various interpretations of the
masculine be examined to establish the ways in which “masculinity is an effect of culture, a
construction, a performance, a masquerade rather than a universal and unchanging essence.”205
While this chapter’s conversation about manspreading does not directly engage politics of race,
class, etc. my analysis inherently draws from the work of scholars who have examined the ways

201
Linda Y. Tuncay, “How Male Consumers Construct and Negotiate Their Identities in the Marketplace: Three
Essays” (PhD diss, Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005), 110.
202
Stephen S. Hall, “Size Matters,” in Gendered Bodies, eds. Judith Lorber and Lisa Jean Moore (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 96.
203
Tuncay, “How Male Consumers,” 106.
204
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998).
205
S. Cohan and I.R. Hark, Screening the male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge,
1993), 7.
115
that performances and perceptions of masculinity are influenced by race and ethnicity,206
religion,207 sexuality,208 and class.209
By combing through issues of gender, violence, and urban space this chapter inherently
raises questions about women’s right to the city. While Henri Levebre’s ideas about “the right to
the city”210 have greatly influenced the way that scholars think about urban space and power,
urbanists often fail to think critically about “how patriarchal power relations are the most
affecting elements in abusing women’s rights to the city in different way to those as men.”211 By
taking up the conversation of patriarchal power in urban space and drawing attention to the ways
that “the discourse of urban rights has neglected their gendered nature,”212 “Body Politic(s)” adds
theoretical depth to the question that Delores Hayden posed 20 years ago – “what would a non-
sexist city be like?”213

206
Thomas DiPiero, White Men Aren’t (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Robert McKee Irwin, Mexican
Masculinities (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Maurice Wallace, Constructing the Black
Masculine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
207
Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise f Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, (London:
University of California Press, 1997).
208
David Forrest, “’We’re Here, We’re Queer and We’re Not Going Shopping:’ Changing Gay Male Identities in
Contemporary Britain,” in Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, eds. A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne
(London: Routledge, 1994); Halberstam, Female Masculinity.
209
Douglas B. Holt and Craig J. Thompson, “Man-of-Action Heroes: The Pursuit of Heroic Masculinity in Everyday
Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (September 2004): 425- 40.
210
Henri Lefebvre, “The right to the city,” in Writings on cities, eds. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996).
211
Tovi Fenster, “Gender and the City: The different formations of belonging,” Journal of Gender Studies 14 (2005):
223.
212
Beebeejaun, 2.
213
Delores Hayden, “What would a Non-Sexist City be like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human
Work,” Signs 5, no. 3 (1998).
116
Anti-manspreading Campaigns
In 2014, the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) launched an
official campaign that urged people to be considerate of their fellow riders by not taking up more
than one seat. The posters featured an image of a generic male figure sitting with his legs spread
wide apart while two other passengers -one presumably male (as denoted by the wearing of a
suit) and the other presumably female (as denoted by the wearing of a dress) stand next to him.
To the right of the image, in bold text, read, “Dude...Stop the Spread Please. It’s a space issue”
(Figure 1). These ads, which were posted on MTA trains across New York City, sparked
controversy amongst public transit riders, inciting conversations surrounding gender and the
politics of public space.

Figure 5, MTA Anti-Manspreading Ad, 2014

117
This ad was a part of a $76,000 MTA campaign that aimed to encourage riders to exercise proper
etiquette when using public transportation. While this campaign also featured ads that
condemned other practices such as “clipping” one’s hair, “primping,” and “blocking doors,” the
posters against, “manspreading” were the only ones that came under fire in newspapers and
online articles and forums.214
The distinctly male figure featured in these posters along with the use of the term “dude”
as a way of generically addressing the imagined perpetrator of this socio-spatial faux-pas
explicitly identifies men, though not all men, as the culprits. By singling out men, this ad
inherently flags the gendered dimensions of manspreading. By depicting both a man and a
woman as victims of manspreading, however, the ad implies that only certain men manspread.
One might even interpret the fact that the man being denied a seat is wearing a suit while the one
doing the spreading is in some other form of attire as a comment on the class of men who
manspread; manspreading is the act of the uncouth/less sophisticated. By calling out
manspreading as a specifically male practice that impedes upon the train riding experiences of
others, the ad challenges problematic bodily performances of masculinity. The qualifying caption
- “it’s a space issue”- pushes viewers to consider how space and gender are not only linked but,
in many ways, co-constitutive.
As the first documented official anti-manspreading campaign launched by a major city’s
transit authority, the MTA set the stage for other cities to call out man who deprive others of
seats with their legs. In September 2014, Pennsylvania unveiled its “Dude It’s Rude campaign,”
which used the refrain “dude, it’s rude,” on a series of posters that urged passengers to refrain

214
Elizabeth Harrington, “New York’s Anti-Manspreading Campaign Cost $76,707,” The Washington Free Beacon.
January 16, 2015. Last accessed March 28, 2018. http://freebeacon.com/issues/new-yorks-anti-manspreading-
campaign-cost-76707/.
118
from activities such eating, talking loudly, and leaving trash.215 The poster targeting
manspreading read, “Dude, it’s rude...Two seats, really?” and featured no image (Figure 4). In
January 2017, Sound Transit in Seattle, an octopus is used in place of a human individual (Figure
5). An “X” is placed next to the image of the octopus’ tentacles spreading while a check mark is
used to denote the proper etiquette of it sitting with all of its tentacles pulled in towards its body.

Figure 6 Dude It's Rude, Pennsylvania 2014

Figure 7 Seattle Sound Transit, 2017

215
SEPTA 2015 & 2014 Dude It’s Rude Campaigns. SEPTA. Last Accessed: March 28, 2018.
http://www.septa.org/service/dudeitsrude/index.html.
119
Since manspreading has gained popularity as a topic of political debate, journalists have
discovered evidence of other campaigns calling out the male tendency to spread has surfaced.
While the term only came about as part of the third wave feminist movement of the late 2000’s,
both the practice and campaigns against it have existed as early as 1918. Although archived
cartoons from popular newspapers show that New Yorkers have been critical of the practice
since as early as the 1930s,216 New York is also not the only, or even the first, major city to
address this issue. In 1918, The Elevated News, a Chicago-based transportation pamphlet,
published a cartoon that featured two men sitting next to each other on a bus with their legs
spread wide while a woman stands next to them (Figure 2).217

216
Jen Kirby, “See Vintage Manspreading Ads and More from the 40s and 50s Subway Courtesy Campaign,” New
York Magazine, March 10, 2015, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/03/see-courtesy-campaign-ads-from-
the-40s-and-50s.html.
217
Jenavieve Hatch, “PSA Proves Manspreading has Been an Issues for Nearly 100 Years,” The Huffington Post,
February 9, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/1918-psa-proves-manspreading-has-been-an-issue-for-
nearly-100-years_us_56ba085ae4b04f9b57db228c.
120

Figure 8 The Elevated News, 1918

Both conversations about manspreading and formal campaigns against the practice go
beyond the United States. In July 2017, the Istanbul Metro announced that it would be installing
anti-manspreading “warning” signs inside of the city’s train cars, following in the footsteps of
New York City and other major U.S. metropolitan areas.218 Around the same time, Microrrelatos
Feministas, a women’s rights organization based in Spain, gathered over 10,000 signatures on a
petition that called for manspreading to be condemned.219
While these campaigns in these two European cities all happened very recently, social
critique against manspreading has been happening in Japan since the 1970s. In 1976, Toyko

218
“Istanbul’s public transport to get rid of manspreading,” Daily Sabah, July 12, 2017,
https://www.dailysabah.com/istanbul/2017/07/12/istanbuls-public-transport-to-get-rid-of-manspreading.
219
Julia Glum, “Men on public transportation around the world just won’t close their legs,” Newsweek, June 8,
2017, http://www.newsweek.com/manspreading-madrid-spain-trains-buses-623089.
121
Metro circulated a provocative poster inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film The Great
Dictator. The ad featured three men against a red background, sitting on a shared seat (Figure
5).220 The one in the middle is dressed in full dictator’s uniform complete with military patches
and knee-high black boots. Two cartoon versions of Charlie Chaplin sit on either side, with their
knees turned inward towards their bodies, away from the dictator as they stare in his direction.
Although the poster does not show both of their legs, they hold their bodies tightly together.
Their thighs are close together, holding their canes in place.

Figure 3 “The Dictator,” July 1976 by Hideya Kawakita for the Tokyo Metro
While there are no women on the poster, the placements of two Charlie Chaplin figures
on either side of Hitler brings gender construction to the forefront. The Hitler-esque figure is
centered on the poster with his legs spread wide and the two formally dressed Chaplin characters
glare at him judgingly while he stares aggressively straight ahead. The contrast in bodily
positioning between the dictator and the Charlie Chaplin figures prompts the viewer to make a
connection between space, bodily comportment, and power. The dictator’s wide spread legs

220
Johnny. “How Mass Transit Has Combated Manspreading,” Spoon and Tomago. December 25, 2014. Last
accessed: March 28, 2018. http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/12/25/how-mass-transit-has-combated-
manspreading/.
122
exude power because positioning his body in this way allows him to take up more space. The
glares of the Charlie Chaplin figures symbolize their displeasure with having their space intruded
upon with no regard.
More than any of the other anti-manspreading ads, this ad incites a conversation about
power and control. The poster draws directly on Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, whose storyline
centers around a Jewish barber (played by Chaplin) who is injured while serving in the army.
The barber spends years recovering in the military hospital, during which time a dictator by the
name of Adenoid Hynkel (also played by Chaplin) rises to power, persecuting Jews and
committing other horrendous crimes against humanity. When the barber returns home to his
small town and learns of the political climate, he joins the rebellion. The film was released in
October 1940, not long after the start of World War II and Chapin makes it evident that dictator
in this film is a parody of Adolf Hitler. To portraying manspreading as a practice of a fascist
dictator, Hideya Kawakita makes a statement about the power implications of our spatial
practices. He evokes a history of spatial domination as it relates to the conquering of geographic
territories, war, persecution, and violence. Drawing on understanding of War World 2 and the
Holocaust, this poster represents manspreading as a sort of “power play” that is enacted through
the body and shared space.
Examining anti-manspreading campaigns both in the U.S. and around the world pushes
us to think about how gender, space, and the body intersect to construct a narrative about power.
An examination of online conversations about manspreading reveal that the topic highly
controversial. While many of those in favor of anti-manspreading campaigns believe the practice
to be linked to a larger gendered power hierarch, some simply find it rude. On the other end of
the spectrum, some people dismiss the validity of the ads altogether, arguing that these posters
123
are a form of “reverse sexism.”221 In this chapter, I will examine the conversation on
manspreading as it takes place through online news sources as well as my own ethnographic
data. Mobilizing scholarship in Gender and Urban Studies, I interrogate the link between
manspreading and power by exploring connections between masculinity/femininity, sexuality,
space, and the body. In doing so, I seek to substantiate the claim that manspreading operates as a
“power play” within the larger gendered socio-political structure of the United States.

“Your Balls Are Not That Big”: Biology versus Social Conditioning
When the MTA announced its campaign back in 2015, debates unfolded across the web
with people voicing pro- or anti-manspreading stances. Although there are some nuances to this
conversation, it in many ways reflects a classic nature versus nurture debate. Feminist bloggers
and writers applauded the MTA for their campaign on the basis that manspreading is just an ego-
driven “display” of virility222 that is symbolic of a “bigger problem of male entitlement” that
“goes back to men controlling the public sphere.”223 Those opposed to the campaign felt that the
MTA was unfairly targeting men and dismissed any politicized readings of manspreading as
feminist paranoia.224

221
Mark Shrayber, “Men’s Rights Group Demands Their Balls Be Allowed to Breathe on Breathe,” Jezebel,
December 29, 2014, https://jezebel.com/mens-rights-group-demands-their-balls-be-allowed-to-bre-1675999597.
222
Leah Morrigan, “Man-spreading is All About Ego,” Huffington Post, January 9, 2015. Accessed April 14, 2015.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/leah-morrigan/manspreading_b_6443154.html.
223
Nicole Cash, “Sit to yourself: ‘Manspreading’ irks on the CTA,” UWIRE Text, December 9, 2015.
224
Cathy Young, “Manspreading? But Women Hog Subway Space, Too,” Newsday, January 5, 2015,
http://www.newsday.com/opinion/columnists/cathy-young/manspreading-but-women-hog-subway-space-too-
cathy-young-1.9776186.
124
The most common response to anti-manspreading sentiment is a claim about the
particularities of the male body. This anatomy-based retort takes on a few different forms. The
most basic version of such a rebuttal is the claim that men simply need space for their testicles.
By sitting with their legs spread far apart, men are allowing their “balls to breathe.”225 In more
sophisticated variations of this argument, articles presented scientific studies on the different
“shape and configuration” of male and female hips to undermine politicized critiques of
manspreading.226 In the July 2017 Tonic article, “There’s a Reason Some Men Take Up So
Much Space When They Sit,” Lou Schuler sites the work of Stu McGill, a professor of spine
biomechanics and “the world’s most sought-after specialist in back pain.” Based on his work
with patients, McGill asserts that “most men find [that] the least stressful sitting position is with
their knees apart…Women, on the other hand, have a wider pelvis and thighbones that more
naturally angle in toward the body's midline, rather than away from it.” The wider pelvis and the
angle of their thighbones thus makes women more inclined to sit with their legs close together.
That same month the U.K. based online publication, The Independent, posted an article entitled,
“REVEALED: The Scientific Explanation Behind Manspreading,” in which it quotes spinal
neurosurgeon, John Sutcliffe, as saying: “The overall width of the pelvis is relatively greater in
females and the angle of the femoral neck is more acute. These factors could play a role in
making a position of sitting with the knees close together less comfortable in men.”227 Through
slightly different anatomy-based arguments, both of these articles seek to justify manspreading
through biology and consequently undermine any claims that the practice is rooted in patriarchy.

225
Shrayber, “Men’s Rights Group Demands Their Balls Be Allowed to Breathe on Buses.”
226
Lou Schuler, “There’s a Reason Some Men Take Up So Much Space,” Tonic, July 18, 2017,
https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/evdkwm/manspreading-is-an-anatomical-necessity.
227
Petter, Olivia. “REVEALED: The Scientific Explanation Behind Manspreading,” Independent, July 27, 2017,
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/manspreading-scientific-explanation-revealed-men-behaviour-public-
transport-etiquette-a7862771.html.
125
Biological anthropologist, Caroline VanSickle takes issue with the claim that
manspreading is a result of biology. In her 2017 Medium post, “The False Biology of
Manspreading,” she speaks directly to the previously referenced article by Lou Schuler published
on Tonic.228 VanSickle uses her knowledge of human anatomy to scientifically debunk biological
explanations for manspreading, underscoring that “there is good evidence that repeated behaviors
(which could include martial arts, dancing, weightlifting, or manspreading) train muscles
and remodel bone to accommodate those behaviors.” Thus, “if you have a narrow pelvis (whether
or not you are male) and you regularly sit with your knees together, you will train your muscles
and eventually your bones to be able to do so comfortably.”229 With this comment, Van Sickle
deliberately highlights conditioning as a critical element of manspreading. Unlike Schuler and
Petter, VanSickle uses science to support the claim that manspreading is learned behavior that
could be unlearned through deliberate action.
Arguments that justify manspreading through anatomy must be situated within a larger
conversation about the relationship between biology and gender. Gender Studies scholars have
long battled attempts to reduce socially constructed gendered behaviors to biological differences.
While many scholars assert that “gender is linked to biology, a philosophy that classifies an
individual’s gender through any combination of body type, chromosomes, hormones, genitals,
reproductive organs, or some chemical essence,” social constructionists push back against this
idea, arguing that the “belief in biological gender is in fact a belief in the supremacy of the body
in the determination of [gender] identity.”230 Thus, those who turn to biology to make sense of

228
Schuler, “There’s a Reason Some Men Take Up So Much Space.”
229
Caroline VanSickle, “The false biology of manspreading,” Medium, August 5, 2017,
https://medium.com/@cvans/the-false-biology-of-manspreading-f789abd709f5.
230
Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Routledge, 1994), 30-31.
126
manspreading run the risk of essentializing gender rather than understanding it to be “constantly
created and recreated out of human interaction, out of social life.”231
In addition to her arguments about the body’s ability to (re)condition itself, VanSickle
pushes for a social constructionist reading of manspreading by asserting that “only a certain type
of dudebro or man-man manspreads.” By comically referring to individuals who manspread as
“dudebros and man mans,” she alludes to the idea that manspreading is not only a socially
constructed masculine performance but a performance of a particular kind of masculinity. In
calling out a specific version of masculinity VanSickle, like scholars in gender, sexuality, and
queer studies, is careful not to homogenize masculinity by underscoring its plurality. Because
masculinity is “shaped by several factors, such as a person’s place in history, age and physique,
sexual orientation, education, status and lifestyle, geography, ethnicity, religion and beliefs, class
and occupation, and culture,” it is impossible to speak of masculinity as a singular generalized
concept.232 These masculinities are socially and historically constructed, created, and reinforced
by social expectations rooted in shared meanings.233
VanSickle’s “dudebros” and “man mans” connote “hegemonic masculinity,” a term
rooted in critical gender studies. The term was first used by Australian sociologist, Raewyn
Connell, who states that hegemonic masculinity “requires the social construction of a
hypermasculine ideal of toughness and dominance”234 as well as the “subordination of women
and the marginalization of gay men.”235 According to Connell, “Force and competence are...

231
Wooten, “Modern Adonis,” 6.
232
Tuncay, “How male consumers construct...,” 109.
233
Steve Craig, “Considering men and the media,” in Steve Craig, ed. Men, Masculinity, and the Media (London:
Sage, 1992), 1-7. ; Erving Goffman, Gender advertisements (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
234
Raewyn Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University
Press,1987), 80.
235
Ibid., 93.
127
translations into the language of the body which defines men as holders of power. This is one of
the ways in which the superiority of men becomes naturalized.”236
Since Connell’s initial characterization of hegemonic masculinity, other scholars have
expanded upon her idea. Communications scholar, Nick Trujillo notes that masculinity is
hegemonic when power is maintained through “physical force” and “control.”237 He goes on to
identify five major criteria for assessing representations/performances of hegemonic masculinity
in the U.S.:

(1) when power is defined in terms of physical force (particularly in the representation of
the body), (2) when it is defined through occupational achievement in an industrial,
capitalistic society, (3) when it is represented in terms of familial patriarchy, (4) when it
is symbolized by the daring, romantic frontiersman of yesteryear and of the present-day
outdoorsman, and (5) when it is heterosexually defined and centered on the
representation of the phallus238

These scholarly accounts of hegemonic masculinity highlight a critical connection
between the body and masculinity/femininity as social constructs. If the male body is the site
through which physical strength and control are exerted, the significance of manspreading as a
bodily practice cannot be diminished. 239 I will return to these definitions of hegemonic

236
Raewyn Connell, Which Way is Up? Essays on Sex, Class and Culture (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin,1983), 28.
237
Nick Trujillo, “Hegemonic Masculinity on the Mound: Media Representations of Nolan Ryan and American
Sports Culture,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8, no. 3 (1991): 290-308.
238
Ibid.
239
Wooten, “The Modern Adonis,” 23-24.
128
masculinity throughout the remainder of this chapter to consider its connection to manspreading
and how it might factor into the lived experiences of women.
In addition to claims about the biological differences between male and female bodies,
those against anti-manspreading efforts draw attention to women who take up more than one seat
on public transit with bags and other belongings. Aptly referred to on the internet in some cases
as “bagspreading” 240 or “femspreading”241 this practice is used to challenge the notion that
spreading in public space is uniquely attributable to men. Unlike arguments about anatomical
differences, this argument does not need the support of scientific evidence. The claim is simply
that if men are being called out for taking up more than one seat with the spread of their legs,
women should also be held accountable for taking up more than their fair share of space. While
this argument seems sound on the surface, it creates a false equivalence between manspreading
and a more generalized notion of “space hogging.” The difference between these two practices is
bound up in conversations about the body as a site of gendered identity construction.
For this reason, I will spend the remainder of this chapter exploring the relationship
between gender performance and the body as it relates to constructions of
masculinity/femininity. By putting popular discourse in conversation with scholarly literature
and empirical ethnographic data, I provide evidence in support of the feminist claim that
manspreading is an embodied practice of patriarchy, underscoring why it has become such a
controversy political topic. This examination reveals important connections between
masculinity/femininity, the body, sexuality, and power, which sit at the foundation of

240
Caroline McGuire, The Sun, April 20, 2017, “Forget Manspreading Bagspreading is the big bugbear on public
transport and it’s enraging men,” https://www.thesun.co.uk/travel/3372614/bagspreading-is-the-latest-annoying-
trend-on-public-transport-and-its-enraging-men/.
241
Peter Lloyd, Daily Mail, May 19, 2017, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-
4522350/Hilarious-photographs-women-FEMSPREADING.html.
129
understanding gendered experiences in public space, particularly how some women’s
relationships to urban space is mediated by real and perceived vulnerability.

Gender Performance, the Body, and Sexuality
Understanding manspreading as a practice of hegemonic masculinity requires an
excavation of the relationship between gender performance and the body. The ways that
individuals use their bodies and negotiate space send messages to those around them about the
degrees to which they fit into the boxes of man and woman. Gender theorist Kate Bornstein
refers to this process of social performance and public judgement as “gender attribution.”242
People constantly engage in this process as they move through the world as a way of making
sense of other people. We use physical cues such as “body size, hair, clothes, voice, skin type,
and movement” as well as “behavior oriented” cues such as “manners, decorum, protocol, and
deportment” to assess whether an individual is male/female, masculine/feminine in accordance
with shared social understandings of these identities.243 According to Bornstein, “We look at
somebody and say, ‘that’s a man,’ or ‘that’s a woman.’ And this is important because the way we
perceive another’s gender affects the way we relate to that person.”244 Thus, the body, as the
initial point of contact between two strangers moving through public space, is the first, and often
only, basis upon which urbanites draw conclusions about their fellow city-dwellers. It serves as
an invaluable tool through which to garner understandings about those around us.
Ideas about what constitutes masculine/feminine body positioning is rooted in ideas about
sexuality and promiscuity. Through media representation and casual social policing,245 society

242
Bornstein, Gender Outlaw.
243
Wooten, “The Modern Adonis,” 15.
244
Bornstein, Gender Outlaw.
245
Wooten, “The Modern Adonis.”
130
has conditioned woman to position their bodies in ways that convey sexual innocence while men
have the privilege of performing a virility that is deemed biologically “natural.” In contrast to
men, who are more likely to sit in wide-legged positions, women are more likely to sit with their
legs crossed to avoid the sexual connotation of straddling. Historians and feminist scholars have
traced these habits back to as early as the 14th century, noting the moment when sidesaddle
riding for women became a standard of common decency in England after centuries of women
riding horses astride. At this time, this practice was said to “protect the hymens of royal
brides.”246 Although women today operate in a vastly different context than that of 14th Century
England, contemporary researchers have found that sitting positions in present day continue to be
restricted in similar ways. While studying the ways that women and men use their bodies
differently for sports, political theorist, Iris Young, found that women generally tend to take up
less space with their bodies than men, as they fail to “make full use of the body’s spatial and
lateral potentialities.”247
These histories continue to shape the ides that we have about what constitutes bodily
performances of masculinity/femininity in contemporary society. When asked about his sitting
behavior on the Metro, Fabio Panceiro, a proud manspreader, was unapologetic for his practices,
saying “I’m not going to cross my legs like ladies do, … I’m going to sit how I want to sit.”248
Panceiro’s comment highlights the ideas that we, as a society, hold about bodily comportment

246
Emma A. Jane, “’Dude … stop the spread’: antagonism, agonism, and #manspreading on social media,”
International Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 5: 462.
247
Iris Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” in
‘Throwing like a Girl’ and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 32.
248
Emma Fitzsimmons, “A Scourge is Spreading. M.T.A’s cure? Dude, Close Your Legs,” New York Times, December
20, 2014. Last accessed April 14, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/MTA-targets-
manspreading-on-new-york-city-subways.html.
131
and gender. By saying that crossing one’s legs is a lady-like practice, he underscores how certain
bodily displays and behaviors not only reflect gender but constitute it.
If we take the body as a site of communication in public space, we must then consider
what manspreading, as a masculine bodily performance, communicates. On the one hand,
manspreading is about spatial occupation. By spreading legs wide and taking up more space than
is allotted to an individual on public transportation, manspreading operates as a show of
dominance. This falls in line with aforementioned theories of hegemonic masculinity. On the
other hand, this practice holds implications for masculinity that are pound up in ideas of sexual
prowless and virility symbolized by the phallus. More than simply taking up space,
manspreading inevitably draws attention to the male reproductive organs. While the penis does
not in and of itself hold extra-biological significance, the penis has been culturally transformed
into a phallic symbol that “functions as an assertion of man’s ‘natural” dominance.”249 In
“Reading the Male Body,” Susan Bordo argues that there is an important distinction between the
penis and the phallus, stating that while the “phallus [is] embodied in the erect human penis…the
penis – insofar as it is capable of being soft as well as hard, injured as well as injuring, helpless
as well as proud, emotionally needy as well as cold with will, insofar as it is vulnerable,
perishable body – haunt the phallus, threatens its undoing.”250 Thus, while the penis in its flaccid
state embodies a vulnerability that society attributes to femininity, the phallus is always erect.
The perpetual erectness of the phallus is rooted in its ability to penetrate the weak, the
vulnerable, the feminine.
As a result of this threat that the unaroused penis poses to the symbol of the phallus, it is
rare that we, as a society, see the penis, as “a male’s body is not anatomized nor is it ever made

249
Bordo, “Can a Woman Harass a Man?”, 60.
250
Susan Bordo, “Reading the Male Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review 32, no. 4 (1993): 698.
132
the object of study in the same way as female bodies.”251 I argue that while the penis is not
overtly displayed when men spread their legs on public transportation (assuming that the
perpetrator is wearing pants), the act of spreading itself is intended to create the illusion of the
phallus. Spreading one’s legs wide implies that the penis is so large that it must be
accommodated in this way. By spreading their legs wide, men align themselves with the phallus,
implying that the size of their penis requires such body positioning. In a less literal sense,
manspreading also operates as a “phallic display of power” by dominating space.
Some supporters of anti-manspreading theorize that manspreading might also serve as a
tactic to avoid contact with other men for fear that this contact might be read as homosexual and
thus detract from one’s masculinity. Feminist writer Mirah Curzer makes this point, stating,
“Women are always a little afraid of being in physical proximity to strange men, and men are
afraid of physical contact with other men because of overt or subconscious homophobia.252 In
another instance, a male tweeter comments on the heteronormative dimensions of the
manspreading as a performance of masculinity by sharing his strategy for dealing with
manspreaders: "Won't work for women, but when men annoyingly #Manspread on the #TTC
with me I just let my leg 'touch' them ...they recoil in homophobia," he tweeted.253 The
homophobia to which these comments draw our attention to a version of hegemonic masculinity
in which heterosexuality is compulsory.
In line with earlier conversations about the plurality of masculinity, sexuality factors into
different masculinities in different ways. In contrast to cultures in which homosexual practices

251
Ibid, 697.
252
Mirah Curzer, “Manspeading Kills! (No Really),” Medium. December 15, 2015. Last accessed March 28, 2018.
https://medium.com/@mirahcurzer/manspreading-kills-no-really-c4482ff36979.
253
Anna Bracewell Worrall, “Manspreading Bans on Madrid public transport,” Newshub, August 6, 2017 Last
accessed April 1, 2018, http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2017/06/manspreading-banned-on-madrid-
public-transport.html.
133
are encouraged to promote masculinity, in the U.S. “gay men are considered to be subordinated
in their masculinity because of their intimate relationships with other men.”254 Thus, while
homosexual men can certainly perform masculinity, their masculinity is rendered illegible within
a hegemonic masculine paradigm. Raewyn Connell emphasizes this idea when she states that,
“Oppression positions homosexual masculinities at the bottom of a gender hierarchy among men.
Gayness, in patriarchal ideology, is the repository of whatever is symbolically expelled from
hegemonic masculinity.” 255 Judith Butler furthers this point saying, “hegemonic
discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility assumes that for bodies to cohere and make
sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male,
feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the
compulsory practice of heterosexuality.256 Thus, we can interpret manspreading as a performance
of hegemonic masculinity that is bound up not only in the marginalization of women but also in
that of non-heterosexual men.
If hegemonic masculinity is premised upon a male’s attraction to a female, femininity
inversely requires an attraction to men. This is evident in the opening ethnographic vignette, in
which my sexuality comes into question as a result of my failure to behave in ways that comply
with normative femininity. That afternoon on the Chicago Blue Line, my femininity was not
legible to this man due to my refusal to submit to his performance of dominance. By talking up
space and talking back, I challenged the “dominance and control” upon which masculinity is
premised. In this instance, the process of gender attribution was complicated not by my physical
appearance but by my behavior. This example, along with others discussed in this chapter,

254
Wooten, “The Modern Adonis,” 9.
255
Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 78.
256
Butler, Gender Trouble, 151.
134
demonstrate how public space operates as a stage upon which individuals constantly perform
gender/sexuality for an audience of strangers who use physical appearance and bodily
comportment to “make sense” of those around them. In order to do this, the bodies and behaviors
of strangers are situated within social paradigms of gender and sexuality as well as though of
race, class, and other dominant social categories.

The Bag v the Body
Having now established a foundational understanding of the connection between the
body and gender performance, we can now return to the idea that manspreading is equivalent to
women putting their bags in the seat next to them in order to understand this false equivalence. In
order to support this claim, I return to Nick Trujillo’s aforestated characterizations of hegemonic
masculinity. The first and last of Trujillo’s points are most relevant for my argument. The first
being, “when power is defined in terms of physical force (particularly in the representation of the
body),” and the last being “when it is heterosexually defined and centered on the representation
of the phallus.”257
Trujillo’s first characterization emphasizes the role of physical force in giving power to
hegemonic masculinity. While placing one’s belongings in a separate seat does in fact take up
space, it does not use physical force of the body as the means to do so. Furthermore, although we
could argue that putting one’s bags in a seat on public transportation is about power in the sense
that it challenges someone to ask before they sit down, this is a “power play” of a very different
nature than that of manspreading. In this scenario, the “power” of the sitting individual relies on
the aversion that many strangers often have to conversing with other strangers in public. Many

257
Trujillo, “Hegemonic Masculinity on the Mound.”
135
people would rather stand their entire trip on a public bus or train than ask someone to remove
their bags from a seat so that they can sit down. Within this scenario, identity politics are at play
in more ways than one, as the way that the person standing “reads” the body of the space hogger.
Depending upon where in the matrix that person’s identity is situated by virtue of race, gender,
class, etc. and the standing person’s perception of that identity, they might be more/less likely to
interact.
In some cases, manspreading can function in the same way; a person could be deterred
from sitting down because they don’t want to ask someone to move their leg out of the way. In
situations where two people are already sitting next to one another and someone manspreads, the
“power play” operates differently. When asked about manspreading women often reference
uncomfortable situations that they’ve had while sitting next to a man who refuses to control his
spread. An article published on Jezabel in late 2014 quoted Sabreena Delhoun, “a 32-year-old
communications professional who rides the TTC daily to work,” who described her experience
with manspreading on public transit by saying, "It happens to me on a regular basis…Usually
you're sitting next to the window and a man will come and sit right beside you in a two-seat spot
and spreads his legs wide open so his knee is digging into my leg…And then his arms and
shoulder are pushing me against the window, like completely oblivious, or 100 per cent
conscious and just trying to flex his power.” For Delhoun, the “power” of manspreading is
rooted in the act of using the physical body to infringe upon the space of another. By examining
this woman’s testimony through these theorists’ characterization of hegemonic masculinity,
“power” is highlighted as the distinguishing factor between cases of manspreading and
generalized cases of space hogging.
136
Trujillo’s last criteria further illuminates how manspreading might be read differently
than a bag in the seat. A man sitting with his legs spread open can easily be interpreted as a
brandishing of his reproductive organs. Thus manspreading can be interpreted as a phallic
performance. Susan Bordo argues against the conflation of the penis and the phallus on the basis
that the penis, as a real object, can be either hard or soft and thus, not always powerful, while the
phallus always functions as a symbol of power. Based on Bordo’s claims, I argue that
manspreading is a practice that transforms the penis into a phallus regardless of the state of the
actual penis. In dominating public space, manspreading is a “power play” bound up in phallic
performance.
Under this claim, a person’s attempt to spread in response to manspreading is not of the
same consequence if they are not perceived to have a penis.258 Again, this is not to say that there
is no political significance in the act of a person without a penis taking up space with their legs in
public, it is to say if the power of manspreading is, to some extent, rooted in the notion of the
phallus, then the posture does not operate the same way when female-presenting individuals take
it on.
Aside from the perceptions of the phallus, we must be weary of attempts to “undo”
patriarchy through simple acts of performance reversal. These strategies fail to address the
systemic roots of oppression and in some cases, can overshadow these complex histories to
create a false perception of progress. Thus, while some women advocate for reclaiming space by
creating a spread of their own, “the belief that there can be a simple ‘reversal’ of subject
positions [between] subject positions with a long and deep history” is flawed.259 It is perhaps true

258
Here, I emphasize the role of perception. This is to say that whether an individual actually has a penis does not
matter in so far as those around them believe them to have one. This is important to factor into cases involving
queer-identified individuals.
259
Bordo, “Can a woman harass a man?”, 54.
137
that women sitting on public transportation with their legs wide might serve as a form of protest
that might help to sustain the conversation about manspreading and gendered spatial practices.
Woman manspreading, however, does not do the work of dismantling the social constructs that
give manspreading its efficacy.
Having explored how gender and space are co-constructed via performances of the body,
this chapter will now turn to consider how patriarchal power shapes individuals’ everyday lived
experiences in urban space. While theory helps illuminate abstract structural connections, these
abstractions have more concrete implications for people as they move through the world.
Through empirical ethnographic data from the BUSted storytelling show and an opinion piece
published on Medium.com. I trace some of the ways that power, as rooted in gendered public
space practices, impacts the experiences of some women as they navigate cities. Doing so
underscores the connection between manspreading and power. I make a case for classifying
manspreading as a strain of gendered harassment that, while very different from violent forms of
aggression, still operates as an oppressive gesture within the broader context of patriarchal
society.

Do You Feel Safe?: Gendered Harassment and Fear
On October 14, 2014, Busby’s East, a sports bar in Hollywood, Los Angeles, hosted the
annual L.A. Storytelling Festival. Each room of the bar featured a different storytelling show
from around the city. BUSted, a storytelling show centering narratives of life on public
transportation, was in a room on the second floor.260 The main segment of the show was filled

260
See introduction for more detailed information about BUSted.
138
with comical tales of mischief, heart-warming encounters with strangers, and the recounting of
eye-opening/perspective shifting experiences.
After the featured storytellers, the show transitioned to “Ask the Green Commuter,” a
segment of the show that gives audience members an opportunity to pose questions to
storytellers about their stories or their experiences as avid public transit users. At the start of the
segment, a white male audience member raised his hand. “I tell a lot of women that I take the
Metro for leisure and a lot of them are impressed that I do it but they’re very scared to do it
themselves because of safety reasons. They’ve always had a car,” he says. The man goes on to
ask the female storytellers, “What do you do to feel safe?” Sicily Johnson, one of the night’s
featured storytellers, responds saying, “Check it out dude. I can get raped doing just about
anything. Might as well be on the fucking bus. Put on your big girl pants and fucking grow the
fuck up and fucking take the bus if you want to.” She continued to say, “What’s wrong with
them? The whole gender-based question. What the fuck is wrong with us? Always afraid to be
raped everywhere that I go. Almost always happening. Really, what we should be talking about
is why women are afraid to get on the fucking train in the first place because some guys are
complete fucking assholes.” Two of the other female presenters chimed in, offering more
practical advice for navigating the bus as a woman, including pretending as if you’re listening to
music or talking on the phone and employing “resting bitch face.” The conversation meandered a
bit away from gender specific issues but was brought back by an audience member, Calisa, who
was eager to give her own safety tips for women riding the bus. Calisa is a thin white woman of
small stature. She wore semi-baggy light blue jeans and a navy-blue t-shirt with script that I
could not identify from where I sat in the room. Her long brown hair that hung in her face as she
spoke. She says:
139

Los Angeles took my car away because I didn’t know who to park it ... These safety tips
are for females riding on the Metro. Number 1: Don’t make eye contact. You aren’t there
and the other people aren’t there either. No matter what kind of state of mind that they
happen to be in. Step 2: The earbuds, those are perfect. You put them in but don’t space
out because the next thing you know, you’ll have a preacher with a Bible in one hand and
his dick in the other and they’re trying to mess with you on the bus. The other thing that
happens is drunk dudes. And drunk guys are very very famous because they tend to fall
and grab ... like on you. But they never ever fall on another guy. They only fall on
woman helplessly. But the other thing that drunk guys do is that they really ooze into the
next seat, you know. I don’t know why they do this. They think they can just ooze into
another seat but they don’t do it with other guys. If you can see two really big huge
football player looking guys sitting next to each other on the bus, they are very respectful
of each other’s space. As soon as they sit next to a female, they will ooze all over the
place, ooze into you. It’s so gross. The way to avoid that is to always have a pencil and
maybe something that you’re working on to sort of hold it to the side and if they ooze,
you poke them and they go ‘oop!’ The other thing to do is kinda take your bag and put it
in the seat next to you to where you can kinda choose, maybe, you can kinda move it if
you see another female get on the bus, you can kind of let them get on the bus next to you
but if it’s a guy then just don’t move your bag and then they look at you all expectantly
cause that’s another thing that they do, they expect a woman to give up her space. Uh, but
you don’t have to. And just can kind of crazy or really really ill if that fails. Those are my
basic safety tips.
140

Calisa’s tips for how to avoid unsolicited male attention on the bus, although performed
with a quirky humor that offsets the seriousness, powerfully illustrates the challenges that
women face while in public. Though she does not delve into her own personal narratives, the
detail with which she speaks make it evident that these “tips” are rooted in personal experiences.
Both Sicily and Calisa prompt important conversations about gender, space, and the
body. Johnson’s response to the man’s question is complicated. Earlier in the evening, Johnson
told a story of being stalked and harassed by a man while waiting for the bus late at night. Given
the nature of her story, the audience likely expected Johnson to empathize with women who fear
for their safety when using public transportation. Rather than acknowledging the very real
experiences that underlie some women’s fear of taking public transportation, she instead berates
these women for being afraid. She rationalizes that because women are almost always at risk of
being raped, there is no reason to stay away from public transportation. In Sicily’s view, public
transportation is no different any other space, as women are constantly vulnerable to attack. In
saying that she can “get raped anywhere” Johnson crudely validates the dangers that shape some
women’s decisions about public transportation while simultaneously delegitimizing them.
Although a woman is statistically more likely to be sexually assaulted in private by someone she
knows that by a complete stranger, both the audience member’s question and Sicily’s reaction
draw attention to how fear of attack, particularly that of a sexual nature, significantly impacts
some women’s experiences.261
Sicily’s reaction to the white male audience member’s question indirectly acknowledges
and critiques the way that women have been conditioned to fear rape. She points to how the

261
Elizabeth Stanko, “Women, Crime, and Fear,” AAPSS 539 (1995): 48.
141
“control” and “dominance” that scholars deem critical characteristics of hegemonic masculinity
have consequently conditioned some women to fear bodily harm when they navigate public
space. Gender studies scholars in varied fields of study have drawn our attention to the way that
fear of rape serves as a tool of control. In her classic text, “Rape: All American Crime,” Susan
Griffin posits that, “The fear of rape keeps women off the streets at night. Keeps women at
home. Keeps women passive and modest for fear that they be thought to be provocative.”262
Psychologist Harmony Sullivan discusses this idea in her 2011 doctoral dissertation stating,
“Women receive messages from the time they are small to both fear rape and to avoid situations
that could lead to rape. However, because rape is not under their control this leads to a constant
low-level fear whenever they leave the house.”263 Johnson is able to view this fear through a
critical lens in a way that, perhaps, the other women on the stage do not. Thus, while the fear that
characterizes women’s experiences of being in public is valid as it is a response to real life
incidents of physical masculine violence, this fear is itself a tool of patriarchy; the fear that
woman carry with them throughout their daily lives serves to police their choices and mitigate
their relationships to urban space. Johnson’s response makes it clear that she understands that
fear works in this way. For Johnson, not using public transportation out of fear of violence would
mean succumbing to patriarchal power, as fearing violence in this way would literally shape the
way that she moves through the world.
Calisa’s comments illustrate the hegemonic performances of masculinity discussed
earlier in this chapter. She points out the difference in the way that men hold their bodies when
sitting next to women versus next to men, noting that when men are sitting next to other men,

262
Susan Griffin, “Rape: The All-American Crime,” in Forcible Rape: The Crime, the Victim, and the Offender, ed.
Duncan Chappell, Robley Geis, and Gilbert Geis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977): 66.
263
Harmony Sullivan, “’Hey Lady, You’re Hot!’: Emotional and Cognitive Effects of Gender-Based Street Harassment
on Women,” Dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, August 2011.
142
they tend to hold pull themselves in tightly as to keep themselves from touching the other man.
With woman, however, men tend to “ooze” into the woman’s seat. Calisa’s observations about
the different ways that men hold their bodies when sitting next to men versus women also speaks
to a masculine fear of homosexual behavior. By actively ensuring that their bodies do not come
in contact with one another.
What Calisa characterizes as “oozing” is the constant unwanted forms of “contact” that
women endure while riding public transportation. Whether it’s having to navigate the
inconsiderately splayed legs of men or outright physical assault, women are subject to
unsolicited forms of touch by men that contribute to their sense of disbelonging in the public
sphere. These moments of unwanted contact constantly remind women of their vulnerability
while in public. Although not all of these moments lead to egregious violent encounters, they
prevent women from truly feeling a sense of ownership over public space. Furthermore, these
moments remind women of their place within the patriarchal structure. They remind them that
they must behave in ways that will keep them from falling into victim to the violence of
patriarchy, all the while knowing that this fear - this policing of behavior and movement- is itself
the violence.
Calisa’s testimony further complicates the idea that manspreading is equivalent to a
woman putting her bags in the seat next to her. Given the realities of being a woman in public, a
woman’s choice to put her bag(s) in the seat next to her could be understood as an attempt to
extend her “personal buffer zone” to protect herself from potential unwanted forms of contact. If
we consider the range of actions that, for many women, constitute unwanted forms of contact -
the “oozing” that Calisa describes, a man’s casual grabbing of a woman’s waist as he moves past
her in a crowded space, and incidents of sexual harassment such as grabbing or touching of
143
women’s body parts – we start to see the ways that women’s behavior in public are perhaps
shaped by fears and paranoia that are produced by patriarchy. When we take manspreading
alongside egregious forms of violence as well as the fear that the threat of said violence creates, a
woman putting her bags in the seat next to her becomes a tactic to protect herself from
potentially experiencing unwanted forms of contact rather than an attempt to dominate space.
Calisa’s story along with that of (woman who discussed man actively spreading against
her) highlight a connection between certain instances of manspreading and gender-based
harassment. This link is critical to understanding the way that some women’s experiences in
urban public spaces are circumscribed by gendered power relations. To bring this point into
relief, I now turn to a 2015 article published on Medium entitled “Manspreading Kills (no
really!).” 264 In this piece, Mirah Curzer, a lawyer and self-identified feminist, asserts that
“manspreading kills” women by perpetuating “a world order in which women’s bodily integrity
is less respected than men’s.” Curzer directly links her experiences with manspreading to her
broader experience as a woman living within a patriarchal system.” I was initially drawn to
Curzer’s story because, unlike the other scenarios involving gendered power dynamics in public
space, Curzer links her experience on a NYC to a much broader system of gendered violence and
oppression.
She highlights the larger gender implications of manspreading by pointing out how often
people opt to ask a woman to move her bags from seat so that they can sit down over asking a
man to move his leg so that they can take the empty seat next to him. After repeatedly
encountering this issue, Curzer “decided to take the radical step of acting like [she has] just as
much right to take up just as much space as the dude sitting across from [her].” She describes a

264
Mirah Curzer, “Manspreading Kills (No, Really!).”
144
scenario in which she refused to move her bags when a man walked her to her on the train and
“made the universal gesture for ‘move your stuff so I can sit down.’” Instead of moving her bag,
she said no and suggested that he take the empty seat right across from her. The man responded
by giving her “a death look,” muttering “damn bitch!” and then walking further down the train
car to ask a different woman to move her stuff, “which she did.”
Curzer takes the conversation one step further by describing how the man who she’d
refused a seat exited the train at the same stop and walked behind her for an entire block. She
notes how she felt as though she’d put a “target on [her] back” by “demanding the right to take
up space.” Although she says that the man “walked behind” her for a block, Curzer does not say
that he “followed” her. Although the reader might assume that the man was intentionally
following Curzer out of anger over their confrontation, Curzer herself does not state that. She
does not state that because she herself does not know. She notes that she was “at least a little bit
worried that he might retaliate with physical violence” but she leaves open the possibility that the
man was coincidently going in the same direction.
By refusing to make claims about the man’s intentions, Curzer creates a sense of
discomfort and uncertainty, mimicking that which many women often experience in public
space. Given that this scenario took place in New York City, it is highly plausible that this man
was indeed going in the same direction. But as a woman who lives every day with a conditioned
fear of physical violence, Mirah could not help but be uneasy. As someone who is already hyper-
aware of her vulnerability, manspreading and other microagressions become triggers that
constantly remind woman of their place within the patriarchal structure.
For those who do not understand manspreading as a politicized act, and surely for Cathy
Young, Mirah’s articulation of her concerns about her safety could easily be dismissed as
145
“feminist paranoia.”265 They would question whether there were any concrete signs that this man
was indeed following her with intentions of doing harm. They would claim that her articulation
of her experience is an exaggeration rooted in her feminist hatred of men. They would do these
things all while failing to realize that Curzer’s fear itself is the violence. The anxiousness that she
felt both during and after her encounter with this male stranger is a critical aspect of the
experience of being a woman in public. It is this fear, maintained through both internalized ideas
about gender and vulnerability266 as well as through knowledge of real life incidences of
gendered violence. While Curzer’s knowledge of gendered violence is likely shaped by a wide
range of incidences ranging in scale and nature, there are also cases that highly resemble her
experience that have resulted in violence.267 Thus, though Curzer’s concerns of being attacked
may not be justified by the specific details of this particular experience, they are justified on a
broader systemic level.
I have argued that manspreading should not be likened to those of other forms of “space
hogging,” as it holds political implications that stretch far beyond the bus or the train. As the
stories discussed in this chapter demonstrate, however, manspreading can be considered
alongside various forms of harassment that impact some women’s relationship to public space.
While common forms of street harassment such as groping or catcalling can be classified as
sexual harassment, I do not seek to equate manspreading with these acts. In line with Susan

265
While I don’t employ this term in its full theoretical capacity in this chapter, I would like to acknowledge that
this term was coined by Naomi Schor. To learn more about her theory see: Naomi Schor, “Feminist Paranoia: The
Case for Psychoanalytic Criticism,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 204-219.
266
Young, 43.
267
On November 20, 2017, a man was arrested in New York City for reportedly punching a woman in the face
when she asked him to stop manspreading. See: Alexandra Richards, “Man arrested for ‘punching a woman in the
face when she asked him to stop manspreading,” Evening Standard, November 20, 2017:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/man-arrested-for-punching-woman-in-face-when-she-asked-him-to-
stop-manspreading-a3695941.html.
146
Bordo’s cautioning against limiting our readings of harassment to “specifically sexualizing
gestures rather than the willful reduction and stripping of one subjectivity by another,”268 I assert
that manspreading can act as a form of “gender harassment” rather than “sexual harassment.”
This is to say that rather than being sexual in its nature, manspreading instead operates to
disempower women by reminding them of their subordinate subject position and vulnerability to
violent aggression.

Claiming the City
The feeling of safety is critical to an individual’s right to the city as it impacts the way
that one moves through urban space and thus, their ability to “claim” it in a particular way. Holly
Kearl, founder of Stop Street Harassment, a nonprofit organization dedicated to documenting and
ending gender-based street harassment across the globe,269 asserts that, “Experiencing sexual
harassment on the transit system can cause women to change their routes to take alternative
transit options that may be less convenient, take longer or are more costly, and on the extreme
end, they may leave jobs or school if public transit is their only option and they are tired of or
scared from the harassment they face.”270 Sociologist and gender studies scholar, Daphne Spain,
see an important connection between the way that an individual is able to move through urban
space and democratic citizenship. In Constructive Feminism, she notes that, “Most people in the
United States understand what it means to be a citizen in a democracy... Safety from violence is
also a prerequisite for autonomy and empowerment. Citizenship includes the ability to speak and

268
Bordo, “can a woman harass a man?” (63)
269
Stop Street Harassment, Accessed: May 2, 2018, http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/.
270
Laura Paddison, “Women Around the World are Harassed and Abused on Public Transportation” Huffington
Post, October 29, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/women-public-transportation-
harassment_us_59e88cfee4b0d0e4fe6d8202.
147
move about freely in public, which can be inhibited by the threat of male violence outside of
inside the home…”271
This chapter’s conversation of gender and urban space inherently raises the question,
“who can and cannot claim urban space?” which forces us to consider, “what does it mean to
claim urban space in the first place?” Scholars in various fields and disciplines have taken
various approaches to this question. Newman’s defensible space theory posits that women need
to a sense of ownership over a particular space to feel safe and comfortable and feel that they
have the “right and power” to defend it.272 Feminist geographer, Tovi Fenster, draws attention to
the importance to the “construction of belonging” is to the urban experience.273 Geographer and
anthropologist, David Harvey describes the right to the city as, the “right to change ourselves by
changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this
transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the
processes of urbanization.” He goes on to say that the “freedom to make and remake our cities
and ourselves is … one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” 274
Considering these various takes on claiming urban space evoke ideas of ownership,
belonging, and activism, we begin to see the ways that women are working to claim their due
space within the urban public landscape, despite their relegated social position. For example, in
her viral online essay, “I Have Been Sitting on Manspreaders for the Last Month and I Have
Never Felt More Free,” author Cassie J. Sneider describes the power that she had recently

271
Daphne Spain, Constructive Feminism: Women's Spaces and Women's Rights in the American City (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2016), 17.
272
Rivadeneyra, Aldo Tudela T., Abel Lopez L. Dodero, Shomik Raj R. Mehndiratta, Bianca Bianchi B. Alves, and
Elizabeth Deakin. "Reducing Gender-based Violence in Public Transportation Strategy Design for Mexico City,
Mexico." Transportation Research Record 2531, no. 2531 (2015):
273
Fenster, 223.
274
David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23-40.
148
experienced from sitting on men who sat on the train with their legs spread wide and refused to
reposition themselves when she said, “excuse me.” She remarks at how women have been
socialized to be literally and figuratively small, harkening back to criticisms that she received as
a child of being “too loud, too big, too everything.” In March 2016, news surfaced that the
“Guardian Angels,” a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering people to fight crime in
their own communities that was originally founded in 1979, was back on patrol. They reemerged
in the form of a new all-female faction dedicated to combatting sexual harassment on the MTA
given New York City’s backing out of an agreement to deploy cops in response to a recent surge
in subway sex crimes.
There is an important parallel between the work of the Perv Busters and the “vigilantism”
of women like Cassie J. Sneider. While the specific projects of two parties differ, the larger
system that they are working to challenge is the same. Both recognize the ways that patriarchal
social systems beget a sense of entitlement amongst men that dictates power hierarchies and
makes women vulnerable to varied forms of violence.
Like historical sociologist Elizabeth Wilson, I too believe that “it is possible to be both
pro-cities and pro-women, to hold in balance an awareness of both the pleasures and the dangers
that the city offers woman, and to judge that in the end, urban life, however fraught with
difficulty, has emancipated women more than rural life or suburban domesticity.”275 By
illuminating the challenges that women face in their daily lives, I only hope to incite
conversations that will ultimately allow women to better enjoy the spoils of urbanity that many
of us hold so dear.

275
Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991), 10.
149
CONCLUSION

In this dissertation, I use transit spaces as an entry point to understanding how different
bodies experience public space. While on the surface, urban public spaces appear to be spaces of
inclusion - an homage to a city’s diversity - a deeper examination reveals another story. Because
they attract different kinds of people, public spaces are effective sites through which to
understand the ways that individual everyday experiences are systemically shaped and
reinforced. Through these spaces, we can better see the way that the macro social of race, class,
and gender are reproduced at the micro level. Although it might be tempting to only engage in
theoretical conversations about these systems, understanding how they play out on the ground
helps us better identify what is actually at stake as we strive to redesign them.
To highlight these stakes, I have explored varied ways that public transportation
intersects with issues of race, class, and gender. By using public transportation as the anchor of
my project, I seek to highlight the ways that these issues take shape in people’s everyday lives.
Rather than assuming that politics only exist in places that are deliberately political, I show how
our everyday interactions are inherently politicized by virtue of the bodies that we occupy and
the social value/connotations with which they have been inscribed. While I focus on race, class,
and gender throughout this project, I recognize that there are a number of other social identity
categories that also impact individual experiences (some examples include physical ability, age,
and body size) and I hope that this project can serve as a resource for those who might want to
explore urban experiences through these lenses.
In the first chapter, I explored how those who attend the BUSted storytelling show built a
collective identity around their choice to use public transit in a city known for its car-centrism. I
150
thought critically about the ways that this performance of identity was rooted in a liberal political
ethos; my analysis revealed that BUSted storytellers understood their use of public transportation
in LA as an extension of their broader political belief system. Despite this, the show never
critically engaged all of the politics that were at play in the space. They failed to acknowledge
the privilege of being a “choice” rider and by virtue of its predominantly White audience, the
show omitted the experiences of the working class POC riders who make up the majority of
public transit users in Los Angeles. To further illustrate the complicated entanglement of race,
class, and mobility politics that BUSted embodies, I highlighted the way that the show’s
existence is a reflection of Echo Park’s gentrification. The history and recent demographic shift
of Echo Park provides important context for understanding who is at BUSted and consequently,
how the space operates. By studying BUSted in this way, I hope to incite a conversation about
how we might be more critically reflexive in our daily lives so that we might better understand
our unique positionalities and the nature of privilege that we carry.
In the second chapter of this project, I highlight how the connection between space, race,
class, and the law exists within transit spaces. I show how the bus in Los Angeles becomes a
space wherein certain groups are targeted and drawn into the penal system. Because public
transit in Los Angeles is highly classed and racialized, Metro buses and trains generally function
as working class POC spaces. Given this reality, any regulatory practices implemented in these
spaces disproportionately impacts this groups. By examining the social implications of Metro’s
policing practices, I bring attention to an important example of the ways that our everyday lives
are entangled with larger systems of power. For working class riders who are unable to pay their
fare, fare-policing serves to punish them for being poor and sends them further into a financial
151
hole, perpetuating a cycle of poverty. These practices reflect a neoliberal ethos wherein those
who have not achieved economic success under capitalism are held individually responsible.
Beyond fare-policing, the enforcement of public order crimes on public trains puts people
of color and poor people at heightened risk for police harassment. Major cities such as Los
Angeles and New York have recently increased police presence on their transit systems, claiming
that their intention is to reduce fare-evasion and consequently improve revenue for the service. In
practice, however, fare-policing on trains has become an excuse for police forces to use violence
against transit users, who are commonly people of color. As recently as October 2019, New York
put 500 MTA and NYPD officers into the subway patrol system and reports of young Black male
riders being tackled and tased over fare-evasion immediately surfaced.276 These reports, many
accompanied by video footage and photos, make it clear that this issue is not specific to Los
Angeles but rather reflects a broader issue with neoliberal policing in the U.S. In these moments,
transit spaces provide insight into the pressing political issues with which we must contend as a
society. When critically examined, these spaces provide examples of how systems of oppression
operate by removing them from the abstract and showing how they tangibly impact the daily
experiences of marginalized groups.
In the third and final chapter, I turn to think about how politics of space, race, class, and
gender manifest within the spaces of the bus and the train. Rather than thinking about how
people actively construct identity, I instead examine how identity is more subtly performed

276
Nick Martin, “The Class War of Fare-Dodging Crackdowns,” New Republic, October 31, 2019,
https://newrepublic.com/article/155540/class-war-fare-dodging-crackdowns; Ashley Southall, “Subway Arrests
Investigated over Claims People of Color are Targeted”, New York Times, January 13, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/nyregion/letitia-james-fare-beating-nypd.html; John Surico, “Why Public
Transit is an Equity Battleground,” CityLab, November 18, 2019,
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/11/public-transportation-security-safety-laws-protests-
equity/602212/.
152
through the body. While BUSted storytellers are literally crafting their identity through
narratives of their experiences in public space, people are always consciously and unconsciously
performing as they move through public spaces in their daily lives. These performances are often
compulsory, having been conditioned over time through social norms. “Body Politic(s)” uses the
controversy surrounding recent anti-manspreading campaigns in major cities throughout the
world as an opportunity to unpack this conditioning and think about what’s at stake with the
ways that certain bodies occupy space. My analysis in this chapter illustrates how we can read
the interconnectedness of gender, race, and the body through public space. I show that the
controversy surrounding manspreading is rooted in a collective fear of upending the gender
paradigm. Acknowledging manspreading as a socio-spatial practice rather than as a biological
necessity threatens gender as a legitimate social category and thus, challenges our foundational
understanding of our identities. It is my hope that this chapter will inspire future scholars to do
work that continues to expose social constructions as such.
This chapter brings attention to reality that public spaces are not truly egalitarian spaces.
Although often touted for their openness, these spaces were created within the same racist
patriarchal structure as the rest of society. Though we might take them to be accessible to all
based on their lack of perceived barriers, those living in marginalized bodies must always
navigate the challenges that come with being non-normative. Their presence is these spaces is
still questioned or read as threatening to others. Their ability to fully live in these spaces is thus
restricted by their desire to keep themselves safe. Whether it’s a White woman who is afraid of
being followed home or a Black man who feared being harassed and/or brutalized by the police,
certain bodies are always vulnerable in particular ways when in public. This chapter shows that
by paying close attention to the ways that different bodies occupy public space and experience
153
safety, we can start to understand not only the gendered and raced dimensions of space and vice
versa but how we might eventually create spaces that are truly for everyone.
Studying transit reveals the political dimensions of, not just of social interactions in
public space, but of mobility. Using transit spaces as an entry point to understand contemporary
politics opens up a much broader conversation about mobility and access. While all non-private
spaces are technically open to anyone, my research reveals that this openness is actually
contingent on a number of factors. To move through “public” spaces in a Black or Brown body is
not to have the same freedom as those in White bodies. Thus, this project calls for a rethinking of
ideas of publicness. It asks us to be more critical in our understanding of access and to think
about not just who is able to physically access certain spaces but what their experiences are like
within those spaces. Furthermore, it challenges us to understand how those experiences are
shaped by macro systems.
With this in mind, I admonish urban planners to operate through an ethos of social justice
over that of profit. Making egalitarian public spaces requires an understanding of how
experiences are shaped at varied levels. We need to be attentive to the ways that issues of
mobility intersect with institutionally maintained social categories such as race, class, and
gender. Approaching transit through a strict urban development standpoint sets us up to reinforce
systems of marginalization rather than challenge them. Rather than imagining spaces through the
lens of a generic monolithic figure, consider varied experiences and account for them in designs.
By prioritizing the experiences of those who have historically been overlooked with regards to
urban development, we can design cities that are more inclusive.
While urban planners should operate through a lens of social justice to design the
physical infrastructure of spaces, government officials are responsible for designing policies to
154
effectively regulate these spaces. Part of this means understanding safety more contextually and
taking a more nuanced approach to promoting the safety of different kinds of people. Rather than
defaulting to over-policing, city leaders must think critically and creatively about how they can
create safe environments for urbanites. This requires them to have a nuanced understanding of
violence that takes into account its systemic underpinnings.
While it makes sense that city officials seek to design and implement policies that
promote safety, they operate through a very limited scope of what safety is. Similar to urban
planners, they operate with a “normative” body in mind and by doing so, they design politics that
align with the interested of middle-class White men. This undermines the subjectivity of safety
and puts those who are not middle-class White men at risk of harm, not just from their fellow
passengers/citizens, but form the very authority figures that are theoretically supposed to protect
them. Designing laws that have equal impact requires us to acknowledge the unique factors that
shape our individual experiences, gain a nuanced understanding of how they operate, and take
them into account within every area of policy. By centering my work about public transportation,
I hope to illuminate the way that even the most mundane aspects of urban life are uneven and
riddled with injustice.
Rather than making decisions in isolation, city leaders should instead take a holistic
approach to regulating public space. This means considering the ways that social issues such as
violent crime, poverty, and sexual harassment intersect with transit policy. Although the social
issues with which transit intersects are complex and cannot be easily solved, factoring them into
the decision-making process with regard to design of transit infrastructure and the regulation of
transit spaces might illuminate some of the impacts that different decisions might have on
155
different marginalized groups. Engaging in this process may prevent cities from reinforcing the
marginalization of those groups and move towards urban spaces that are more egalitarian.
“Window Seat” underscores the reality that no spaces are innocent. While we might be
tempted to de-politicize transit spaces, viewing them as nothing more than functional spaces,
they have been produced within a patriarchal racist capitalist system and are thus inherently
those things. This is not to say that the we should not strive to bring public spaces more in line
with democratic values. It is to say, however, that this will only be achieve through recognition
and intention.

156
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Asset Metadata

Creator Howard, Sabrina Marie (author)

Core Title Window Seat: examining public space, politics, and social identity through urban public transportation

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 02/25/2020

Defense Date 10/07/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag OAI-PMH Harvest,politics of everyday life,public space,Public transportation,social identity

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor De Lara, Juan (committee chair), Hill, Edwin (committee member), Kim, Annette (committee member)

Creator Email howard.sabrina@gmail.com,smhoward@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-274229

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Legacy Identifier etd-HowardSabr-8204.pdf

Dmrecord 274229

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Howard, Sabrina Marie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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