Sexual Harassment

This chapter explores the origins, development, and current status of workplace sexual harassment law. Sexual harassment law owes its genesis to a combination of grass-roots feminist organizing and legal feminist theorizing. After initial losses in the courts, feminist lawyers and their clients scored significant victories in the court system. Employers and those accused of discrimination soon fought back, including by participating in the development of an extensive system of training and anti-sexual harassment policies that have not proven helpful to targets of sexual harassment. Feminist legal scholars have offered critiques of the courts’ decisions, taking a variety of approaches to increasing the law’s efficacy and extending its reach to encompass the experiences of men, women of color, and sexual minorities. Yet, plaintiffs using Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the main federal antidiscrimination statute applicable to sex discrimination in employment, continue to find themselves thrust out of court due to formalistic rules developed in the court system. This has led other scholars to suggest different legal approaches to address this persistent and disturbing form of workplace discrimination. Whether current grass-roots campaigns like the #MeToo movement will prove more effective than prior legal efforts remains to be seen.

The Title IX Movement Against Campus Sexual Harassment

Beginning in 2009, hundreds of thousands of students and their allies began to mobilize against campus sexual assault, organizing around the groundbreaking civil rights statute, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and achieving remarkable progress in advancing gender equality in only about a decade. Moving from the Title IX movement’s genesis during the Obama administration to the movement’s direct-action protests and litigation challenging regulations issued in May 2020 by then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, this chapter tells the story of how Title IX and the student movement interacted from 2009 to 2020. During these years, the movement not only weathered backlash but also influenced later feminist movements such as #MeToo and nonfeminists’ understanding of sexual harassment, demonstrating the continued power and promise of both feminist law and feminist organizing.

THE PROS AND PERILS OF INTERDEPENDENCE: FEMINIST ORGANIZING IN ONLINE GAME FORUMS

Within video game culture, where the medium's association with masculinity remains strong, it can be difficult for female players to connect with one another or to find safe spaces for play. Without support systems, many drop out of gaming over time. This indicates a need to build greater interdependencies between affected players, to provide interpersonal support and develop collective responses to gaming’s inequalities. Research in other areas suggests that targeted internet communities, such as Facebook groups, could provide space for feminist networking, consciousness-raising, and action, but it also reveals that such spaces have limits. Like games, the internet is often seen as masculinized, meaning explicitly feminist conversations and communities can draw disruptive trolls. Groups that police their boundaries to avoid these problems may implicitly prioritize some participants—i.e. straight, white, cisgender women—over others. This exploratory study analyzes top posts in two gaming forums—one general and one female-specific—to begin assessing if/how online communities for female gamers build interdependencies and raise feminist consciousness. More specifically, it assesses posts about harassment—which is often directed at female players as perceived “outsiders”—to determine if, when, and how toxicity is discussed as a general vs. a gendered problem, as well as if resulting discourses offer opportunities for consciousness-raising and collective action. This paper seeks to help marginalized players build stronger, more inclusive gaming and internet cultures.

Rethinking Spaces of Confinement Through Black Girl Embodiment

Carcerality in educational settings tends to focus on the school-to-prison pipeline and other ways that bodies differentially marked by race, gender, and, more recently, sexuality and ability are punished and tracked into the juvenile justice system. The ongoing chain between marginalized bodies and criminality is evident in rates of incarceration based on race and gender specifically. Black lesbian feminist organizing of the late 20th century called attention to the relationship between social identities and carcerality. Expanding on this work, Black feminist scholarship argues that Black womxn and girls are inherently valuable and that liberation is necessary for autonomy. Scholarship, however, illustrates how freedom for Black womxn and girls are directly mediated by systems of race, gender, sexuality, class, as well as by the discourses created to maintain order through institutions such as schools and prisons. Building on the preceding connections between social identities and confinement, Black girls’ specific encounters with high-stakes policies, such as zero-tolerance, and school discipline reveal new textures and distinct qualities of carcerality that expand education’s understanding of carceral spaces and experiences. In a society that presumes Black girls need no protection because their Blackness is feared while their femininity remains unrealized, Black girls’ bodily deliberations and embodied choices are acts of resistance and self-definition.

Special section: Is feminism doomed? Feminist praxis in the times of ‘gender ideology’ in Slovakia

Thirty years after the Velvet Revolution, Slovak feminist activists look back to the 1990s and early 2000s as the time of exceptional capacity building and knowledge production which was barely sustained in later years. The last decade of feminist organizing has been marked by waning financial resources for civil society organizations, and appropriation of feminist and gender equality agenda by the state, which led to the hollowing out of its content. What is more, strong and pervasive conservative pressure with the aid of ‘gender ideology’ rhetoric has been successful in delegitimizing gender equality policies and is consistently threatening sexual and reproductive rights in the country. Facing such prospects, this article examines newfound alliances and diverse forms of broadly understood feminist praxis, which go beyond institutionalized civil society, but have developed to counter neoconservative and far-right political pressure in Slovakia.

Being a Feminist in the Fallist Movement in Contemporary South Africa

This short essay offers reflective feminist insight into the Fees Must Fall Movement of 2015–16 that was led by students and workers at universities in South Africa. It considers the ways in which Black feminist life is negotiated and embodied in a contemporary student-worker movement that remains oriented by and toward hegemonic hypermasculinities. This text further argues that Black feminist intervention and mobilization is distinct from women's movements as they happened under apartheid. Feminist organizing is principled in particular ways, and these ways are evidenced by Black feminist interventions within the Fees Must Fall (FMF) movement. This essay demonstrates how intersectionality functions as more than a diagnostic tool. Intersectionality and how it is imagined and used in the contemporary South African feminist context does not only recognize multiple and interlocking oppressions. Intersectionality is also in itself a methodology. Intersectionality as demonstrated by feminists and the LGBTIQA community of the FMF movement is a methodological choice that requires that various forms of protest and intervention be used simultaneously to challenge systemic oppressions. Centering intersectionality as methodology works to disrupt archaic perspectives on what is and is not activism, thought, or feminist work. Relying on the intellectual work of student-activists in the movement, otherwise known as “fallists,” and memory and story-telling as methodological tools, this essay begins to imagine how we can think, research, and write in ways that memorialize and archive our lives, our histories, and our collective imaginaries.

Disentangling Antifeminist Paradoxes: Alternative Organizing in Antifeminist Online Spaces

In this study, we revisit alternative feminist organizing in order to identify the dialectical tensions, paradoxical discourses, and agentic qualities of women’s participation in an online antifeminist space. We engage in text mining, semantic network analysis, and the constant comparative method to identify dialogical tensions and the paradoxical organizing strategies of Red Pill Women, an online community on the social networking platform, Reddit. Through analyzing Red Pill Women as an antifeminist space constituted through postfeminist logics, we identify three paradoxical tensions, begin to disentangle postfeminism from antifeminism, and build on alternative organizing theory with recent work on hidden and invisible organizations to further theorize gendered (in)visibility and (anti)feminist organizing practices.