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We must not look for who has the power in the order of sexuality (men, adults, parents, doctors) and who is deprived of it (women, adolescents, children, patients)…Relations of power-knowledge are not static forms of distribution, they are ‘matrices of transformations’. The nineteenth century grouping made up of the father, the mother, the educator, and the doctor, around the child and his sex, was subjected to constant modifications, continual shifts.
(Foucault, 1978b: 99)
Physical intimacy with students is not now and never has been acceptable behaviour for academicians. It cannot be defended or explained away by evoking fantasies of devoted professors and sophisticated students being denied the right to ‘true love’. Where power differentials exist there can be no ‘mutual consent’.
Introduction
Research on consensual F-S relationships has traditionally been situated within the extant literature on sexual harassment, as opposed to the broader literature on organizational sexuality in which it might also, arguably, be located (Bellas & Gossett, 2001). This is primarily because the F-S relationship has been understood as an asymmetrical one, in which the academic has power over the student. As the quote from Dzeich & Weiner (1990) prefacing this chapter indicates, this framing de-legitimizes notions of consent.
In this chapter I discuss research on sexual harassment. I begin by exploring what is meant by the term. In addition to examining legal definitions I consider research that has argued for its relevance as an analytically definable feature of organizational life (e.g. Hoffmann, 1986; McDonald, 2012). This research is critically appraised by drawing on the work of scholars who have conceptualized what we know about harassment (Brewis, 2001), and about the F-S relationship as an assumed exemplar of it (Taylor, 2011), as ‘historical artefact[s]’ (Brewis, 2001: 38.). Finally, I consider the advantages of adopting a discursive approach to study harassment and F-S relationships in order to address some of the concerns raised.
In reviewing the literature, I emphasize two issues. First, I highlight the main contributions and limitations of previous research on harassment and F-S relationships. In so doing, I argue for more interpretations of these phenomena in which a dynamic and nuanced approach to the power relations in which they are enmeshed is adopted. As with the last chapter, this entails consideration of the contributions of Foucault, and of scholarship influenced by his oeuvre. Second, and relatedly, I indicate how the thesis might extend the boundaries of the extant literature, highlighting new ways of understanding F-S relationships.
Defining ‘sexual harassment’
The naming of ‘sexual harassment’ (henceforth SH) in the 1970s by North-American psychologists and second-wave feminists such as Carroll Brodsky, Lin Farley, and Catherine MacKinnon (Fitzgerald, 1996; Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1995) brought concerns about certain kinds of institutional behaviour into the spotlight. Wilkinson & Kitzinger (1995: 32) assert that SH can, in some respects, be considered one of feminism’s greatest ‘triumphs’, giving shape to an experience shared by many women. They argue that workplaces have increasingly ‘been forced to take on board’ (ibid: 32) this ‘problem’ as a result of changes to employment legislation. Supporting this, McDonald (2012) notes that the term is now incorporated into workplace discrimination legislation in over 50 countries.
Initially coined to refer to the perceived intimidation and coercion of women by men in educational and work environments (Brownmiller, 1999), many of the countries legislating against SH now adopt legal and policy definitions which also cover the harassment of men by women and same-sex harassment (McDonald, 2012). However, despite this widening of the scope of legislation, SH continues primarily to be associated with men’s treatment of women (Brewis, 2001), and SH charges are disproportionately brought by women against men (Wilson & Thompson, 2001; McDonald, 2012). Scholarship has also foregrounded the harassment of women by men (McDonald, 2012). As I elaborate shortly, some have interpreted this as constituting a form of heterosexism, or victim feminism (e.g. Wolf, 1993).
McDonald states that, in legal terms, sexual harassment is typically understood as a form of discrimination involving unwelcome behaviour that has an ‘explicit sexual dimension’, and ‘which has the purpose or effect of being intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive’ (2012: 2). In the UK, the Equality Act (2010),
refers to ‘unwanted conduct of a sexual nature’ (s.3(a)) which either violates the dignity of the recipient of the behaviour, or creates an ‘intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment’ (s. 26. 1(b)(ii)). In determining whether or not an action might constitute ‘harassment’, the act states that one of the factors to be taken into account is the perception of the ‘recipient’ (s.26. 4. (a)).
This indexes the contingent nature of what gets labelled as SH, implying that judgements about whether or not an action by one person is labelled as harassing by another are subjective. As Wilson & Thompson (2001) observe, ‘all women will not interpret sexual behaviour in the same way. What can be defined as harassing for one may be exciting for another’ (Wilson & Thompson, 2001: 75). This resonates with scholarship noted in the last chapter (e.g. Pringle, 1989; Filby, 1992), which recognized that organizational sexuality is differentially experienced by subjects.
Certainly what is understood by the term SH is contested; a proliferation of definitions and typologies of sexually harassing behaviour abound in the literature (see McDonald, 2012 for an overview). Indeed, some commentators have argued that in order to achieve inclusivity, the scope of what counts as SH has expanded such that it has become an ‘accordian’ concept (Jafar, 2003: 44). In other words, what is understood as harassment has come to ‘stretch infinitely…a look, a violent assault, and a consensual relationship’ (Jafar, 2003: 44) can all fall under the rubric of harassment.
Despite its expansionist tendencies, some commentators (e.g. Hoffmann, 1986; Kitzinger & Thomas, 1995; McDonald, 2012) have observed how those writing about harassment continue to attempt to nail down what SH is. This has led researchers to develop classification systems for harassing behaviours, and to try and measure their frequency (Fitzgerald, 1996). In the US, quid pro quoharassment, in which accepting unwanted sexual advances is a condition of continued employment or work privileges,
is legally differentiated from hostile environment harassment, in which no overt condition is applied, but the behaviour is understood to create an intimidating work environment (Watts, 1996). However, the literature tends to break this twofold categorization down further still: Betts and Newman (1982) identify six types of harassing behaviour; Till (1980) locates five; and Fitzgerald (1996), divides her definition into four subcategories.
Researchers have also investigated the characteristics of harassers and the harassed (Gutek, 1985; Berdahl, 2007; Schweinle et al, 2009), and studied how the work environment influences the incidence of, and attitudes towards, sexual harassment (Gruber, 1998; de Haas & Timmerman, 2010). As Jafar (2003) and Taylor (2011) both observe, it is not uncommon for such studies to foreground campus harassment and, in so doing, incorporate F-S relationships as exemplars of SH (e.g. Stites, 1996a, 1996b; Zalket al, 1991; Zalk, 1996; Eyre, 2000; Levenson, 2006).
For example, in their round up of research on campus harassment, Rubin & Borgers (1990) criticise research by Pope et al (1979) and Glaser & Thorpe (1986) on non- coercive relationships between educators and students. They write;
Instead of identifying the experience as sexual
In two studies, which are related to the topic of sexual harassment, researchers examined sexual behaviours between psychology educators and graduate students. Instead of identifying the experience as sexual harassment, the terms ‘sexual contact’ and ‘sexual intimacy’ were used. The behaviours identified in these studies would correspond to the more severe forms of harassment described in other studies. They were specifically defined as intercourse or genital stimulation. (Rubin & Borger, 1990: 405)
Despite the apparent implication here that the two studies cited by Rubin & Borger downplay the ‘severity’ of the conduct they report, both of the studies mentioned are
critical of F-S relationships. However, their authors assert that many relationships are not experienced by participants - initially, at least - as coercive. Indeed, Glaser & Thorpe (1986) state that only 28% of their respondents experienced a degree of coercion at the time of the relationship, although they observe that some later came to re-assess this judgement. Consequently, Glaser & Thorpe (1986) problematize F-S relationships primarily by understanding them as unethical, rather than by conflating them with SH (see also Skeen & Nielson, 1983).
For Rubin & Borger (1990) however, the nature of the sexual contact ‘uncovered’ by these studies means that they should be understood as harassment, even if the student entered the relationship voluntarily. These authors claim to be able to locate ‘severity’ by referring to the nature of the contact, allied to presumed asymmetries (ibid: 410) inherent within the educator-student relationship, rather than by referring to students’ evaluations of the degree of coercion experienced. In contrast to legal definitions then, SH is not judged here according to whether the behaviour in question is perceived as unwanted by respondents, but rather becomes a matter for scholarly interpretation. Thus apparently consensual relationships between university students and faculty are subsumed within discussions of harassment.
Jafar (2003) finds a number of problems with the research cited by Rubin & Borger. For example, she pinpoints methodological problems, noting that most of the studies they cite only consider relationships that have ended. Further, Jafar argues that the appropriation of consensual F-S relationships by harassment knowledge abases what she terms more ‘egregious’ (2003: 44) forms of SH. Her contention raises certain difficulties however, since, like many of the studies she condemns, she seems to imply that what ‘really’ counts as sexual harassment can be objectively measured and classified. As with Rubin & Borger (1990), by differentiating between more or less ‘pernicious offense[s]’ (Jafar, 2003: 55) the notion of a harassment continuum is
invoked (see also Eyre, 2000 and McDonald, 2012). This, however, is to underestimate the multiplicity of ways in which harassment may be produced and understood, and ignores the historically and relationally contingent character of harassment knowledge (Brewis, 2001).
‘Harassment knowledge’, f-s relationships, and juridico-legal approaches to power
Analyses like Rubin & Borger’s suggest that definitions of SH are theoretical and a priori; they are not subjective, contingent, or contestable. Observing and critiquing such a line of thought, Brewis coins the term ‘harassment knowledge’ (2001: 37) in reference to what she considers the historically specific assumptions and ‘programmatic ideals’ (ibid: 38) that have become associated with SH.
Brewis argues that discourses invoking harassment, including scholarly and wider discourses, posit certain ‘claims to truth’ (ibid: 38). These include: a zero-sum conception of power; a related commitment to the notion that ‘good sex’, which is egalitarian and transparently consensual, is possible; and, as I have already implied, gendered and (hetero)sexist assumptions about female and male subject positions and relations. I now consider each of these points further. In so doing I align harassment knowledge with what Taylor (2011:200), following Foucault, refers to as ‘juridico- legal’ understandings of harassment3. I use each of these terms throughout this chapter, and also later in my empirical analysis of harassment discourse (Chapter 7), in reference to ‘orthodox feminist analyses’ (McDonald, 2012). This latter term rather glosses different varieties of feminism (see Tuana & Tong, 1995; Brewis, 1998a). Nonetheless, I use it here because harassment is a topic that has elicited some convergence between feminisms, although they are by no means united in their identification of, and responses to, the issue (Thomas & Kitzinger, 1995). It also helps to distinguish it from the critical and discursive views examined later in the chapter.
In common with other writers (e.g. Kitzinger & Thomas, 1995; Taylor, 2011; McDonald, 2012), Brewis’s unpacking of harassment knowledge finds power to have been isolated as a pre-eminently salient explanatory concept. In other words, SH is presented as less about sex, and more about power. Such claims are problematized by Brewis on a number of counts, which I consider below.
Power as zero-sum
First, harassment commentators, Brewis observes, have tended to represent power as if it were a resource which can be possessed or wielded by some against others. Thus power becomes a ‘“zero-sum” game’ (Brewis, 2001: 44), with clearly identifiable winners and losers. Like Brewis, other critical analyses of the SH literature (e.g. Roiphe, 1994; Dank & Fulda, 1997; Mahood & Littlewood, 1997; Jafar, 2003; Taylor, 2011) have been attentive to how the deployment of a resource model of power enables consensual relationships between academic faculty and students to be written into harassment knowledge.
Taylor (2011) argues that theorizations of F-S relationships typically operationalize what Foucault refers to as a ‘sovereign’ or ‘juridico-legal’ (Taylor, 2011: 200) account in which power is understood as operating negatively and from the top down, either through aggressive domination or by proscribing certain kinds of activity. Consequently, power is seen as residing with academics, universities, anti-fraternization policies, and indeed with feminist commentators themselves. Each of these groups is then able to make use of their societal and/or organizational status in order to wield power, albeit in the service of putatively different ends. Students, on the other hand, are understood as powerless; they are ‘deresponsibilized’ (see Hunt, 2003: 205).
Dziech & Weiner’s provocatively titled book, ‘The Lecherous Professor’(1984) is cited by Taylor (2011) as a case in point. Its authors advocate the banning of F-S relationships because they are perceived to be rooted in asymmetrical relations, thus
preventing them from being categorized as ‘consensual’ (see also Paludi & Barickman, 1991; Zalk et al, 1991; Zalk 1996; Stites, 1996a, 1996b; Levenson, 2006). Whilst scholars writing in this vein are overwhelmingly North American second-wave feminists (Dank & Fulda, 1997; Hunt, 1999) the one piece of academic research conducted in the UK on F-S relationships by Carter & Jeffs (1995) concurs. Arguing that ‘voluntary consent by the student in such a relationship is suspect’ (Carter & Jeffs, 1995: 54), they assert that universities need to publish clear and strictly enforced policies. They recommend that F-S relationships should be prohibited where the member of faculty is involved in teaching, assessing or supervising the student, in order to combat the sexual exploitation of students by academics.
Consequently, F-S relationships have become caught up in the rhetoric of harassment. They have also been consigned, alongside harassment in general, to the realm of, ‘bad’ (Brewis, 2001: 39) or ‘dangerous’ (Taylor, 2011: 200) sex. This is because they are perceived to represent an abuse of power, rather than emerging ‘on the basis of mutual attraction.’ (Brewis, 2001: 39).
Interestingly, Morgan & Davidson (2008) have made similar arguments in relation to mentoring relationships at work. Maintaining that such relationships involve asymmetries in power and status, they claim that, ‘A mentoring relationship which results in the mentor and the mentee having a sexual relationship is not a healthy one’ (Morgan & Davidson, 2008: 126). These authors emphasize the ‘risks’ of mentors ‘exploiting’ their positions (ibid: 126), concluding that organizations need to implement policies to deal with such relationships. In this sense they follow the trajectory of research on F-S relationships, and add impetus for considering such relationships in relation to the wider literature on organizational sexuality.
No ‘outside’ power
This leads to another of Brewis’s criticisms regarding how power is conceptually framed by harassment knowledge. Brewis (2001) rejects harassment knowledge’s implied notion of ‘good’ sex – sex that is somehow outside of, or free from, power relations – as a ‘chimera’ (Brewis, 2001: 40). This rejection stems from two related ideas, both arising out of Foucault’s work on power and sexuality. First, Foucault argues that since power is everywhere, one can never be outside it (Foucault, 1980: 141). Second, for Foucault, any overarching and unitary concept of sex is a construction; it is an effect of power, and not some natural state to which one can be returned through individual or collective emancipatory projects (Foucault, 1978b). Thus Brewis (2001) and Taylor (2011) argue that ‘good’ sex is not possible, and Taylor (2011) cites Foucault’s contention that sex and power are anchored to each other in ‘perpetual spirals of power and pleasure’ (Foucault, 1978b: 45) in support of this.
Both Taylor (2011) and Brewis (2001) claim that this observation that sex and power are inextricably linked, and may even be mutually reinforcing, is typically overlooked by the harassment literature. As a result, the possibility that harassment discourse might reproduce the very activity it seeks to denigrate, producing desire by constantly watching over it, is elided.
Heterosexist assumptions
As with the critiques of orthodox literature on SH in general, commentators noting how a harassment lens has been applied to F-S relationships have suggested that the adoption of such a perspective seems likely to result in something other than the emancipatory goals that second-wave feminism has set itself (Dank & Fulda, 1997; Hunt, 1999). Emphasizing the ‘powerlessness’ of students - and, in particular, female students - in fending off the advances of predatory (male) lecturers casts students as helpless, thus reinforcing their ‘victim’ status (Roiphe, 1994; Dank & Fulda, 1997; Dank, 2009; Jafar,
2003; Taylor, 2011). Brewis suggests that harassment knowledge ‘hysterizes’ women, positioning them as ‘peculiarly, even pathologically vulnerable’ (2001: 44). Furthermore, the clichéd portrayal of the aggressive male academic who seduces and sexually exploits his female students works to deny the sexual desires of women/students who might actively seek out or welcome F-S relationships (Jafar, 2003; Taylor, 2011).
As a result, women/students are constructed as passive sex objects rather than active sexual and desiring subjects. Exploring the ways in which notions of consent have been undermined by feminist proponents of university ‘anti-fraternization’ policies, Gallop considers how this move, which she sees as paternalistic at best, turns feminist goals on their head;
Prohibition of consensual teacher-student relations is based on the assumption that when a student says yes she really means no. I cannot help but think that this proceeds from the same logic according to which when a student says no she really means yes. The first assumption is protectionist; the second is the very logic of harassment. (1997: 38)
In other words, the US ‘banning movement’ (Dank & Fulda, 1997) propagated by what Wolf (1993: 135) refers to as ‘victim feminists’, rests on conservative or even misogynistic assumptions about women (Mahood & Littlewood, 1997; Taylor, 2011). It is mired in understandings of sex in which women/students are passive, whilst men/faculty are active; women/students’ sexuality is de-legitimized; and women/students are constructed as incapable of understanding what they want or what is good for them, resulting in the need for feminists and university administrators to intervene on their behalf. Consequently, women/students’ implied helplessness is reinforced, thus rendering them potentially more rather than less vulnerable (Gallop,
1997; Jafar, 2003). Faculty, meanwhile, are vilified (Roiphe, 1993) for being ‘sexually obsessed predators’ (Dank & Fulda, 1997:112).
This has the further effect of writing out of harassment knowledge cases in which female lecturers either date or sexually harass male students, or female students harass male academics. Studies exploring scenarios in which the gender roles constructed by harassment knowledge are reversed are scant (see Grauerholz, 1989, and Scarduzio & Geist-Martin, 2008, 2010 for two notable exceptions), as are those that consider same- sex relationships (Gallop, 1997; Bellas & Gossett, 2001; Taylor, 2011).
Perhaps part of the reason for neglecting such relationships stems from claims that SH is primarily caused by sociocultural rather than organizational power relations (MacKinnon, 1979; Gutek, 1985; McDonald, 2012). In other words, harassment is often conceived of as a manifestation of societal asymmetries between men and women (McDonald, 2012). Understood thus, the notions of women harassing men and same sex harassment are rendered virtually impossible.
Notwithstanding the heterosexism of such conclusions, they seem to imply that, where