Nicole Kalms

Provocations of the Hypersexualized City

ABSTRACT An excess of sexualized images increasingly pervades public spaces in the United States, Europe and Australia. The article will discuss how the sexualized events of urban life have not only moved from the interior spaces of private consumption into public space but that the multi-modal proliferation of “hypersexualization” normalizes sexual transgression. A series of case studies will be analyzed through a feminist rubric to foreground emergent sociocultural sexualized systems “at play” in the city and will argue that sexualized urbanism legitimizes gender stereotypes and contributes to violence toward women.