More than “Silly Stories”: Sexual Harassment as Academic Training

Abstract

Sexism is pervasive in higher education. This paper explores one of the sites where academics learn how sexism structures the academy: the graduate teaching classroom. In this space, where teaching assistants are neither wholly students nor faculty, institutional power relations are ill-defined, and the power of cultural sexism is less constrained. We draw on our own experiences of sexual harassment as teaching assistants to interrogate our imbrication with the reproduction of sexism. As opposed to recent sexual harassment scandals perpetrated by men in institutional positions of power over women, we acknowledge a more holistic framing of sexual harassment: We experienced sexual harassment from our students. Following other feminist scholars, we catalogue our stories, and in revisiting them we bring attention to the complex structures of power in which they persist. Recognition of the spaces where we “learn” our place in these structures is imperative to feminist action.

性别歧视在高等教育中相当盛行。本文探讨学者习得性别歧视如何结构学术界的其中一个场域：研究生教学的教室。在此空间中，助教并非完全是学生或是职员，制度性的权力关系缺乏明确定义，而文化性别歧视的权力则较少受到限制。我们运用自身作为助教时遭受性骚扰的经验，探讨我们在性别歧视再生产中的层叠。与晚近在权力制度位置中凌驾于女性之上的男性所从事的性骚扰之丑闻不同的是，我们承认更为全面的性骚扰框架：我们经历来自学生的性骚扰。我们追随其他女权主义学者，记载自身的故事，并在回忆这些故事中，关注权力续存的复杂结构。识别我们在这些结构中“学习”自身位置的空间，对女权主义行动而言至关重要。

El sexismo es ubicuo en la educación superior. Este trabajo explora uno de los sitios donde los académicos aprenden cómo el sexismo estructura la academia: el salón de clase para enseñanza posgraduada. En este espacio, donde los asistentes de enseñanza no son ni totalmente estudiantes ni parte del profesorado, las relaciones de poder institucional se hallan mal definidas, y el poder del sexismo cultural es menos constreñido. Nos basamos en experiencias propias del acoso sexual en calidad de asistentes de enseñanza para interrogar nuestra imbricación en la reproducción del sexismo. Al contrario de los recientes escándalos de acoso sexual perpetrados por hombres en cargos de poder institucional sobre mujeres, nosotras reconocemos un marco más holístico de acoso sexual: Fuimos objeto de acoso sexual por parte de nuestros estudiantes. Siguiendo a otras eruditas feministas, catalogamos nuestras historias y al volver sobre las mismas ponemos atención a las complejas estructuras de poder en donde persisten tales conductas. El reconocimiento de los espacios donde nosotras “aprendemos” de nuestro lugar en estas estructuras es imperativo para la acción feminista.

Key Words:

• Cultural sexism
• feminist praxis
• higher education
• personal narrative
• sexual harassment

• 文化性别歧视
• 女权主义实践
• 高等教育
• 个人叙事
• 性骚扰

• acoso sexual
• educación superior
• narrativa personal
• praxis feminista
• sexismo cultural

Acknowledgments

Bartos and Ives are equal contributors to this article.

We would like to thank James Ferguson, Liisa Malkki, and Paul Kench for their support during the many hurdles of this project. We also thank Pamela Moss and Kathryn Besio for their insights. We are grateful to Deborah Dixon and the anonymous reviewers for offering their feedback during the revision process. And we thank the students over the years who have taught us as much as we have taught them.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ann E. Bartos

ANN E. BARTOS is senior lecturer at The University of Auckland in the School of Environment, Auckland 1142, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected]. Her work engages with feminist political geography, children’s geographies, food geographies, and political ecology. Her research focuses on questions around political agency, politics of embodiment, sexual violence, and geographies of care. She has explored these questions through research on sexual and gender-based violence in U.S. (higher) education, agriculture and food politics, and a longitudinal study with children in New Zealand. Her recent publications can be found in Geoforum, Area, and Gender, Place and Culture.

Sarah Ives

SARAH IVES teaches in the School of Behavioral Sciences, Social Sciences, and Multicultural Studies at City College of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94112 (she is formerly a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Stanford University’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric and Department of Anthropology). E-mail: [email protected]. Her research focuses on environmental anthropology, food studies, comparative studies in race and ethnicity, and gender bias in higher education. She is the author of Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea (Duke University Press, 2017). Other recent publications can be found in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, and Gender, Place and Culture.