Lisa Lazard - Sexual Harassment, Psychology and Feminism: #MeToo, Victim Politics and Predators in Neoliberal Times

Cover illustration: Melisa Hasan

This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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There are many people that I owe a debt of gratitude to for their incredibly generous support of this project. First and foremost, I would like to thank Rose Capdevila for her encouragement and friendship over the last 20 years. This book began in a conversation that Rose and I had about 6 years ago. We were discussing the fact that no one really seemed to talk about sexual harassment anymore and why the issue had lost relevance. The visibility of the issue now still seems extraordinary to me given that conversation happened in the not so distant past. I am grateful for Stephanie Taylors support during the writing of this book and her insightful comments on earlier draft chapters. I would also like to thank Sarah Crafter, Lauren McCallister, Kate Milnes, Brigette Rickett, Martin Tolley and the Open Universitys CuSP research group, for their incisive comments on chapter drafts. I am particularly grateful to Sarah Wakelin, Jess Wakelin and Lauren Wright for reading the last draft over so carefully. I also would like to thank Calen and Mark Wakelin for allowing this task to take over their household for a week. It is impossible to express my love and gratitude for my partner Richard, who has provided me with immeasurable support in this process. I am also especially grateful to my family but particularly Cleo and Dexter who tolerated my distraction with kindness and understanding. This book is dedicated to Cleo, Dexter, Aria, Vicky and Chay, with love. This book is also dedicated to Marcia Worrell, a brilliant academic and a wonderful friend.

If you have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted write me too in reply to this tweet. Me tooif all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted write me too. as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. (@AlyssaMilano, 15 October 2017)

This tweet was the springboard for the meteoric rise of the # MeToo hashtag activism against sexual harassment and violence in 2017. Actress Alyssa Milano posted the tweet in amidst growing public condemnation of film producer Harvey Weinstein , whose long history of sexual violence against women was exposed by The New York Times on the 5th of October 2017 (Kantor & Twohey, ).

The supportive response to # MeToo could not be further from how the issue of sexual harassment has been treated in the not so distant past. Prior to #MeToo, relatively few people disclosed their experiences either formally or informally (e.g. Fitzgerald & Cortina, ).

How have we got from a place where victims are subject to routine social censure to one which appears more socially supportive of those harassed? How is sexual harassment made sense of and understood? What implications do such understandings have for perpetrators and victims? These questions guide the analysis of sexual harassment presented in this book. Situated within a feminist psychological framework, my aim is to explore particular shifts in the cultural landscape which are relevant to how sexual harassment has become constituted, and how this has shaped the way in which victims and perpetrators come to be understood. To set the scene for this book, I will briefly contextualise the more recent resistance to sexual harassment within the trajectory for activism and theorisation around the phenomenon. In doing so, I will explicate the feminist theoretical influences that shape the arguments in this book. At this point, I would like to add a caveatthe contexts I attend to refer largely to the US, from which # MeToo arose, and the UK, the place from which I write. As such, I make no claims that the shifts I discuss are global, complete or mark firm breaks from patterns of understanding that have been dominant. This book aims to articulate predominant understandings around sexual harassment that have been particularly relevant in the global North.

In this book, the exploration of sexual harassment starts with how it is primarily understood as something that men do, most commonly to women and, to a lesser extent, other men. This book is also concerned with how the context of work has been central in getting the issue on the public agenda. This is not to say that my analyses presumes that sexual harassment only occurs in the workplace. Rather, I start from the position that the recognition of workplace sexual harassment as a gendered phenomenon has been a key frame within which developments in feminist theorisation and activism have largely taken place. In this section, I will discuss key developments in the trajectory of sexual harassment as a social problem which shape the direction of this book.