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Abstract
Focusing on the issue of sexual harassment, I argue that comparative gender studies should go beyond tracking changes to laws that are presumed to be equivalent in meaning across political landscapes. The ‘facts’ that amount to the harm of sexual harassment are tied to normative frames about sexual difference and discrimination. In Russia, the frames of the woman question and gender symmetry animate how sexual harassment is recognized in law. My analysis shows that current law on sexual harassment will remain silent if the underlying questions of whether to politicize sexual difference and how to recognize discrimination are not addressed.
Notes
1. International Labor Organization (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights to Work, 1998. ILO Resolution on Women Workers, 1991. UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, 1979. UN Beijing Declaration adopted by the Fourth World Conference on Women, 1995. European Commission Resolution on the Protection and the Dignity of Women and Men at Work, 1991.
2. I place sexual harassment in scare quotes to indicate that there were/are laws that may function in ways that are similar to how sexual harassment is commonly understood but they are not categorized as such. In this way, any study of sexual harassment is implicitly a study of a particular socio‐legal discourse.
3. Not all Soviet policies emphasized women's differences from men, but I argue that this was the case overall. Despite attempts to protect women's difference de jure, demands on them to work a double‐shift (public and private labor) precipitated critiques by Soviet women that the system was “de‐feminizing.”
4. Valerie Sperling (2006) argues that in Russia the word gender is not widely known outside a small academic circle in St. Petersburg and Moscow (96). Since the late 1990's familiarity with the term gender has broadened some. For example the 2003 All Russian Census organized data by the category gender. The publication of the Russian dictionary of gender terms was reported in one of Russia's most popular newspapers Izvestiia (2005). Despite this, the terminology of gender is till limited to an elite (urban) group. “U rossiiskikh zhenshchin poiavilsia svoi tolkovyi slovar” [Russian women's own dictionary appears].
5. Tatiana Barchunova also has advanced a critique of gender asymmetry (Barchuvnova Citation2003). She argues that some Russian scholars who use gender theory to promote equality actually reassert inequality. This is because despite the use of gender theory, many scholars still rely on essentialist views of sexual difference. Although Barchunova's article influenced my research, her understanding of gender asymmetry is not the same as I use in this article.
6. The English term gender is borrowed from linguistics and designates a grammatical distinction. Some languages have more than three grammatical genders (feminine, masculine and neuter). In the Russian language, there are three grammatical genders, which are referred to as rod. The term gender, connoting the social construction of sex, is translated into Russian in a literal way – gender. For a discussion of rod and gender in Russian (Trofimova Citation2002).
7. Barchunova argues that the term gender is also commonly used as a proxy for “sex,” which she argues is one way that gender theory loses its political edge when translated into Russian. Joan Scott has made a similar argument regarding the de‐politicization of the concept gender in the United States (Scott Citation1999).
8. Olga Lipovskaia (Citation2003), director of the St. Petersburg Center for Gender Problems, also makes this analysis.
9. For example, the debate over the use of the term gender in the Beijing Conference Program for Action (Scott Citation1999, ix–x).
10. I have made this argument in previous work.
11. I am referring to the Ulozhenie o Nakazaniiakh Ugolovnykh i Izpravitel'nykh, which is volume XV of the Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (Digest of Laws of the Russian Empire Citation1913).
12. In one 19th century commentary from the Ministry of Justice, N. A. Nekliudov (1881) equated the taking away of a girl's virginal status and thus her honor with the political death that a man's loss of honor would incur.
13. I have begun to analyze the implications of this new language with respect to issues of sexuality in another writing.
14. One guide to criminal law explained compulsion with this example: Direzin (male), having met his acquaintance Lapin (female), led her to the park and began to bate her into sexual relations with him. Lapin refused and began to leave. At that point, Direzin grabbed her jacket and declared that he would only return it to her if she agreed to sexual relations. In court, Lapin argued that she agreed to sex with Direzin only because she did not want to lose her coat (Antonov and Ivanov Citation2001).
15. Marina Zlomnova (principle lawyer at St. Petersburg Crisis Center), in interview with author, November 12, 2002; Liudmila Iantova (lawyer), in interview with author, January 28, 2003; Liudmila Volga and Mariia Sagitova (social worker and lawyer at St. Petersburg Crisis Center), in interview with author, February 7, 2003. It is important to note that the major concern of these and other jurists was not that the statute on compulsion could not serve as an analog but that it was “dead” in a practical sense. This is supported by the recent findings of the ABA/CEELI CEDAW Assessment Tool Report for the Russian Federation (Citation2006).
16. To my knowledge, the organization is no longer in existence. In an Interpress Service news article in 1995, Vikulov states that when his office was robbed he decided that it was too dangerous to maintain a database targeting companies whose respect for the law is at a minimum.
17. A similar conference took place in Tula, Russia with the help of Diane Post in 1999. Both conferences were supported by the American Bar Association's Central and East European Law Initiative.
18. Interview with author, Moscow, January 15, 2003.
19. The most blatant displays of the sexualization of the workplace were found in job advertisements. It was not uncommon to see an advertisement that requested only female candidates under the age of twenty‐five, with long legs, and without inhibitions (bez komplekov). In 1994, the special court of the Judicial Chamber on Information Disputes in Moscow (which is tied to the office of the President), reviewed a challenge to the publication of job advertisements that were gender exclusive. The case was filed against Izvestia, Finansovaya Izvestia and Ekonomika i Zhizn for printing job ads that specify that men only need apply or for female applicants “without inhibitions” listed in separate sections. The court decided that the advertisements were a breach of Russian Constitutional Law (“Neither Jobs Nor Justice” 1995). There is some evidence that this is still practiced (CEDAW Assessment Citation2006, 80–81).