“Let feminists tell me my fault”：a study of the discourse strategies of sexual harassment suspects

ABSTRACT

The spread of the #MeToo movement in China has led women to speak out about their experiences of sexual harassment through social media. However, most of these incidents have not been responded or acknowledged by the suspects, and even if they responded, their attitude was to evade accusations through various strategies. This paper analyzes the response of 15 male suspects who were revealed to the public in 2017 and 2018, and finds that the discourse strategies they used include mixing up the characters’ images, shaping a victim identity for themselves, transferring the main issue, and beautifying harassment behaviors. These discourse strategies show that sexual harassment suspects remain deeply entrenched by patriarchal thinking. The suspects’ ignoring the experience of female victims continue to sustain the unequal gender power relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual harassment
• the #MeToo Movement
• discourse
• feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Wuhan University [1104-600400001].

Notes on contributors

Kaibin Xu

Kaibin Xu (Ph.D., University of Colorado Boulder, USA) is Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication, Wuhan University, China. His research areas span organizational communication, group communication, and culture and communication. His work has appeared in Communication Monographs, Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, Feminist Media Studies, and Gender, Place & Culture. E-mail: [email protected]

Yan Tan

Yan Tan is a graduate student in the School of Journalism and Communication, Wuhan University, China. Her research interests focus on critical studies of media and communication. E-mail: [email protected]