The promise and peril of agency as motion: A feminist new materialist approach to sexual violence and sexual harassment

Abstract

Organizational scholars have established that sexual harassment, the most studied kind of sexual violence, is an organizational problem. Extending this work, we analyze two critical events regarding sexual violence in the United States—one in the military and another at a university—in which discourse detracts from understanding the problem in this way. We draw upon feminist new materialism and its primary method—diffraction—to track ‘cuts’, the practices that simplify and pause agency’s complex, perpetual motions. Our analysis shows that agency moves in discussions about the aftermath of violence. That momentum highlights the organization’s capacity to respond to rape. Even so, during discussions about enacting violence, the perpetual motion of agency congeals around discrete humans, thereby maintaining assault as an individual act. These cuts, whereby agency pauses on individual perpetrators, obscure how organizational dynamics make sexual violence more or less likely to occur. We suggest that a focus on agency’s kinetic qualities can help feminist scholars continue to highlight how the systemic aspects of harassment and other forms of violence become hard to notice.

There’s No Such Thing as a Gay Bar: Co-Sexuality and the Neoliberal Branding of Queer Spaces

“…First, though it did not fully emerge in our data, we saw a context rife with acts of and opportunities for “normalized” sexual harassment (e.g., Clair, 1993) Gay bars’ “norm” of sexual openness privileges the individual and destabilizes accountability around sexual violence. Similar to Harris et al’s (2020) new materialist approach, we found that agency was paused when sexual harassment remained situated as an “individual act” rather than an organizational problem.…”

Note passing as gendered practices of public ambiguity in a hyper‐masculine organization

“…Women often become degraded and sexually objectified targets of these routine military performances (e.g., Kaplan, 2003;Sasson-Levy, 2006). Accordingly, the study of gender and the military tends to focus on explicit, visible degradation violent practices such as sexual harassment or rape, as well as role exclusion (Bonnes, 2017;Harris, McFarlane, & Wieskamp, 2019;Höpfl, 2003;Wilén & Heinecken, 2018, but only few studies provide conceptual and analytical tools for examining implicit and invisible gendered power practices in a hyper-masculine organization such as the military. To address this gap, this article attempts to answer the following questions: How are organizational power relations reflected in daily practices such as passing notes during official meetings?…”

The Tyranny of openness: what happened to peer production?

“…Writes Ehmke (2014b): "Codes of conduct are, in part, intended to communicate that organizers put a priority on the safety and comfort of marginalized members of the community." These codes also reject tendencies to regard rudeness and more extreme forms of abuse as individual faults rather than emanations from social norms (Harris, McFarlane, and Wieskamp 2020).…”