Rethinking ‘the personal is political:’ Enacting agency in the narrative of sexual harassment experiences in China

Abstract

Through a close reading of 1904 individual stories of sexual harassment collected through an online survey, the study investigates how storytelling constitutes a feminist media practice that (re)defines sexual harassment, exposes the power relations at play in the situations described in the stories, and opens up space for discursive politics in everyday life. In focusing on the active production of identities through discourse, we demonstrate how women themselves make sense of their experience. Most of the storytellers struggled to define what sexual harassment meant to them in their first-person narrations of their experiences. Guided by feminist standpoint methodology and narrative analysis, the study recognizes the narratives as powerful sites of knowledge production from a marginalized group of people who rarely speak out about their sexual harassment experiences, and it reconsiders the importance of the personal in digital space, evaluating how varied narratives can be cooperative and participatory to enact agency in contentious politics.

Mysteries, Battles, and Games: Exploring Agency in Metaphors About Sexual Harassment

“…Participants demonstrated the most productive agency in choosing allies and support for negotiating sexual harassment experiences, enacting agency by voicing their experiences to friends, family, coworkers, or superiors/HR. Simply being able to speak about the harassment in unconstrained ways is an important example of exercising agency, which past research calls "narrative agency" and enables survivors to name and make sense of harassment (Rose Luqiu & Liao, 2021).…”

Unveiling Gender Power Dynamics in Chinese Digital Discourse: A Case Study of the Discourse of Mutual Accusations in Allegations of Sexual Harassment

“…Similar to the complex trajectory of the #MeToo movement's development in China, allegations of sexual harassment have encountered significant criticism and the reception of these accusations in China has been marked by substantial contention and elicited public censure. On one front, the #Me Too movement in China was marred by intricate transitions, grappling with issues such as strict state censorship, which has constrained victims from voicing concerns about systemic gender discrimination, creating barriers for grassroots feminist movements that challenge patriarchal norms [11] [12]. Thus, as seen in other grassroots digital struggles in China, feminist activists have devised innovative digital camouflage strategies to sustain their movement, including the use of alternative hashtags, modification of sensitive keywords, and secure data storage on protected websites [13] [14].…”