Results and Discussion This section will explain how, by using narrative practice to analyse them, Hollaback! narratives can be viewed as political processes designed to challenge the acceptability of street harassment. The researcher analysed the content and the structure of the narratives to investigate what meanings the narrators intended to put over to the reader. Findings showed that the narratives challenge the acceptability of street harassment in three ways, by showing why harassment is not harmless and highlighting the negative effects on victims, by challenging the harassers, both directly and indirectly and by encouraging other women to speak out if they experience harassment. Additional findings challenge Livingston et. al. [n.d.] in their view that the type of harassment doesn’t affect the victim’s emotional response and endorses Kearl’s (2010) assertion that an underlying fear of rape does. The narratives were grouped according to their tone into three categories, negative, neutral and positive. The negative narratives, so called because the narrator’s selfimage is negatively affected by the harassment, are N1, N2, N4, N5, N9, N14 and N15; they focus on informing the reader of the harmful consequences of street harassment. The use of adjectives is interesting here, the narrators describe themselves as vulnerable, anxious and scared and describe their harassers as aggressive, intimidating and entitled (see appendix 5 for examples of this). This use of adjectives alludes to a gendered power inequality and demonstrates how being harassed has a negative impact on one’s emotional state and how victims take on a weak, powerless identity. The neutral narratives, N3, N6, N8, N11 & N12, so called for their lack of emotional reference, aim to challenge the harassers, both directly, like N3 who demands harassers “Just leave me alone. I want the freedom to go about my day without some reference to the way I look, some pathetic come-on or intimidating comments”, and indirectly, by creating an undesirable persona for the harasser; using adjectives like, creepy, annoying and pathetic to describe them (see appendix 6 for examples of this).
7