Reading the Archive after #metoo
In the fall of 2017 sexual harassment came to the forefront of public conversation. Accounts of harassment and its consequences soon proliferated under the banner of the #metoo movement, first organized by Tarana Burke more than a decade earlier. While ‘sexual harassment’ as a distinct term only emerged in the 1970s, unwanted sexual attention has long had a presence in, and impact on, people’s lives. As historians of the human sciences operating in the post-#metoo era, how might we read the archive for traces of sexual harassment in the lives of our historical actors? What challenges and opportunities present themselves by attending to sexual harassment’s presence in the archive? How can we productively engage with sexual harassment as both an experience and exercise of power? What kinds of sources lend themselves to revealing these kinds of stories? How might an awareness of sexual harassment and its dynamics inform understandings of who our historical actors are and the knowledge they produced? In this session we will explore these questions and consider how sexual harassment may inform histories beyond those explicitly centred around gender.
Reading:
Young, J. L., & Hegarty, P. (2019). Reasonable men: Sexual harassment and norms of conduct in social psychology. Feminism & Psychology, 29(4), 453–474.
Kim, S., & Rutherford, A. (2015). From seduction to sexism: Feminists challenge the ethics of therapist–client sexual relations in 1970s America. History of Psychology, 18(3), 283–296.