“I made myself small like a cat and ran away”: workplace sexual harassment, precarious immigration status and legal violence

ABSTRACT

This article examines the intersection between workplace sexual harassment, immigration status, and insecure employment status (‘precarious work’). Although a rich body of literature explores how gender impacts all three fields independently, less is known about how they interact. Drawing on narratives from migrant women with precarious immigration status in Toronto, Canada, I propose that experiences of sexual harassment illuminate the workings of migrant illegalization through ‘legal violence’. Furthermore, findings demonstrate that precarious status migrant women do not experience sexual harassment in isolation; other axes of oppression interlock to exacerbate it. Despite this, precarious status migrant women negotiate their experiences, sometimes enduring sexual harassment; referred to here as aguantar, and sometimes resisting it explicitly.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual harassment
• precarious immigration status
• precarious work
• legal violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paloma E. Villegas

Paloma E. Villegas is an Assistant professor in Sociology at California State University San Bernardino. She works at the intersection between migration, citizenship, race, and gender.