#MeToo happened. But we don’t really want to start there, because #MeToo happened in 2017 while sexual harassment has been around for way longer than that.
However, as a direct consequence of #MeToo we found ourselves engaged in an extensive demand for knowledge on sexual harassment. Since 2017, we have reviewed the majority of the research in this field from the Nordic region, and a great deal of the existing international literature, as well as examining policy making at the Nordic and European levels (Simonsson, 2021; Svensson, 2021; Bondestam and Lundqvist, 2018, 2020). These research reviews show how juridical definitions dominate the research field. While a juridical definition is important in legislative contexts, it also presents a risk: it limits our understanding of sexual harassment (Bondestam and Lundqvist, 2020).
There are so many stories about sexual harassment out there. Not only in the way that #MeToo showed, through thousands and thousands of individual accounts of the experience and consequences of being exposed to sexual violence that share both similarities and differences, but also many different stories about what sexual harassment is and what it does in the world. As feminist theorist Donna Haraway suggests, we need to be aware of the demarcations and continuities that we create with our stories (Haraway, 1992). The stories about sexual harassment that we have come across and the stories that we create have made this clear (Franks, 2019).
The juridical approach has influenced both policy and how we understand the phenomenon in some limited ways as something countable − something that lends itself well to a specific definition and understanding, and consequently as something that can be eradicated by means of legislation, policies, and education. We felt frustrated by this and felt a need for new ways to discuss and approach sexual harassment. And we wanted to do this as a part of a long-standing tradition in the Nordic countries: by facilitating dialogues between researchers, politicians, policy makers, practitioners, and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). The infrastructure for these dialogues already exists, but we wanted to see the topic of the conversation
When one critically engages with research on and policy development to counter sexual harassment, the phenomenon appears on the one hand to be inherently naturalised, as something that is a given in a heteronormative and heterosexist society, something that is integrated into everyday decisions about where to work, where to live, and how and when to move through public spaces (Gunnarsson, 2018; Mellgren, Andersson and Ivert, 2018). Concepts such as ‘a culture of silence’ attempt to capture this normalisation and how it affects organisations and individuals. Normalisation is yet another way to understand gendered vulnerabilities and the heterosexualisation of relations between men and women (Butler, 2004, 2006).
On the other hand, sexual harassment is understood as an anomaly, a deviation from the normal and the common order (Gottzén and Jonsson, 2012). When presented as anomalous, sexual harassment can be described as not fitting a given set or series of acts, as something that threatens the perceived social structure of society. Sexual harassment as an anomaly, and its relationship to supposedly functioning systems, echoes in a particular way in contexts that put a great deal of trust in the transparency of social structures in well-organised and regulated societies, such as the societies of the Nordic region. The anomalous is often seen as disgusting, disruptive and dangerous. It is treated as something that violates a system of values and therefore something must be done about it.
‘Uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained’ (Douglas, 1984, p 50). Inspired by the well-known anthropologist Mary Douglas’s work, we argue that anomalies are interesting since they say something about the context, the pattern, the supposed ‘normal’ that the anomaly deviates from: a normal workplace or public space and normal social relationships that have no room for oppression, inequalities and harassment. This is a normality where the idea of someone using sexual acts to harass someone else is an abnormality. The way that sexual harassment emerges in research and policy making relies on the notion of rational and transparent management. It relies heavily on quantitative surveys and the phenomenon of sexual harassment as something that is neatly defined and managed by the enforcement of transparent routines for reporting it, investigations at organisational level, and that is ultimately settled in a court of law.
Douglas’ apt formulation: ‘Dirt is a matter out of place’ comes to mind (Douglas, 1984). Hair on the head is not dirt, hair in your food is. But the hair on your breakfast sandwich is not dirt if you found the sandwich under the table. If you found and picked up a sandwich under the table, from the kitchen floor, the hair on the sandwich is not an anomaly, the hair is not dirt – the whole sandwich is. For sexual harassment to be seen as dirt, the
The understanding of sexual harassment that comes into view through this way of telling the story does something not only to its supposed normality, but also to the possible ways of thinking, talking, and dealing with it. For us, other ways to produce knowledge will have to start by problematising the very concept of sexual harassment and the specific contexts in which it has been produced as a scholarly, juridical and policy concept. What would happen if, instead of looking at sexual harassment as an anomaly, we were to explore and examine it as a social and cultural phenomenon, as something that – no matter how destructive – is a part of our world? Of course, this is not to say that it is natural, a given or a should-be. Rather, looking at sexual harassment as a social and cultural phenomenon is a way of trying to do the work of taking responsibility for the knowledge we have about how intersecting power relations work and of asking questions about how this relates to issues of sexual violence and harassment.
Theorising re-imagination
Sexual harassment as a field of knowledge production is in need of new imaginaries to think and act with. We have therefore taken the concept of ‘imaginaries’ as our point of departure. The sandwich on the floor under the breakfast table is a striking image that goes beyond mere illustration. It is an intrinsic part of the conceptualised intellectual work that Douglas takes us through. As a term, imaginary is related to images and notions of, as well as the capacity to imagine beyond, the current situation. The psychoanalytical interest in imaginations stems from Jacques Lacan’s analysis of the ego’s development through the mirror image of the self: a figure at once more superior and lacking, that is developed through the mirror’s imaginaries (Lacan, 2020). In the theoretical tradition of cultural studies, Graham Dawson has contributed the concept of cultural imagination − a way to try to capture broader patterns that form strong conceptualisations, reproduced in actual imaginaries, narratives, and other meaning-making processes as well as in identity formations (Dawson, 1994). In the social sciences, imaginaries have broadened their scope to include the individual micro level, the organisational meso level and the collective macro level of continual, collective, and contested processes. At the collective level, social imagination takes place in the public sphere and through social interactions. Individuals, organisations and movements are involved in these processes, internalising prototypical understandings, challenging and (re)inventing them. ‘Social imagination is the essential social-cognitive process that generates, validates, or challenges understandings’ (Hart-Brinson, 2016, p 3).
We need to re-imagine sexual harassment to help us think beyond restrictive concepts and understandings of vulnerabilities. The objective of this anthology is therefore to investigate the field of sexual harassment research from other perspectives, primarily the field of Nordic gender, sexuality, and intersectionality studies, but also from outside of academia. Our intent is to explore other social imaginaries in order to contribute to a more nuanced body of knowledge and to see sexual harassment theorised and expressed in relation to numerous contexts, giving space for particularities rather than abstract definitions. In this book, we explore the ways in which sexual harassment is interwoven into the fabric of practices in everyday life in spaces that we share. How it intersects with conditions in the labour market, in legislation and the practice of law, and in the organisation of the welfare state. We need imaginaries that help us think through the diversity of violence and power relations and challenge dichotomies between regulated work and unpaid care work, between the public and the private, and to think about justice beyond the juridical. We believe that these imaginaries, questions and perspectives are of great importance far beyond the specific geographical region of the Nordic countries.
The Nordic region is the context for this edited volume, as well as its empirical starting point. By ‘Nordic’ we do not mean coming from or even working in the Nordic countries, but ‘working with’ the structures that take place in and form the imaginaries of the Nordic region. The anthology of course does not have the ambition to cover all aspects of the Nordic region or the countries within it, but calling something a context means that the region has some specificities, and the countries in it some communalities, at the level of societal structures as well as at the level of cultural and social imaginaries. We will broadly describe some aspects of the Nordic region context − historical, economic and political − that are important for framing the chapters of this book, as well as discussing the critical use of the concept of Nordic exceptionalism and the imaginaries that it relies on (Jensen and Loftsdóttir, 2012; Sawyer and Habel, 2014). This forms a cartography of the Nordic region, in Rosi Braidotti’s account acknowledging the co-creation of the specific location, the powers that have structured this location, and the possible new ways to imagine it (Braidotti, 2011).
The Nordic countries are not all alike, not historically and not currently. Between the Icelandic North Atlantic, almost deserted coastlines and the pulse of the traffic and nightlife in central Stockholm, there are more differences than similarities. But these differences between urban and rural settings are similar in many regions. In the following, we will focus on some significant areas of resemblance within the Nordic region, especially at a policy level, which have had important structural effects. At the turn of the last century, the social movements for worker’s rights, education, religious freedom, sobriety, human dignity and democracy fostered the growth of actual organisations, such as the region’s strong social democratic parties, as well as democratic structures across the Nordic countries (Boje, 2008; Brandal, 2013). The politics that brought these movements together used public protests and strikes as their tools, but they were often considered a violent force that threatened to overthrow traditional values and political hierarchies. When the Nordic states allowed universal suffrage, it should be seen in the context of the many revolutionary tendencies throughout Europe in the 1900s, in particular the Russian revolution (Jakobsen and Kurunmäki, 2016). National liberalisations can be described as means to deflect the revolutionary influences coming from the uprising in Russia. The development of democracy in the Nordic countries is thus tightly intertwined with narratives of the benevolent, reasonable government that wants to keep the national order in place. The cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek distinguishes between different forms of violence (Žižek, 2008). What he calls subjective violence are visible acts of violence, while symbolic and systemic violence are inherent to maintaining the status quo. These latter are forms of violence
Parallel to these political developments, societal support for growth based on an expanding industrial sector is also a vital part of the historical narrative of the region (Brandal, 2013). The five Nordic countries – Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland – went through fairly similar processes of modernisation and industrialisation throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Differences in geography and politics have meant that the five countries went in different industrial directions, but their reliance on raw materials such as wood, iron, fish and other food products, and later oil and gas, have been consistent through the region and have meant that all the Nordic countries rely on exports. Being able to refine their raw materials and their development of technology means the Nordic countries have also relied on an expansion of their education sectors, creating educational and social mobility as well as a differentiated labour market − but with industrial production firmly at the centre.
So far, this is a rather unproblematic account of the economic and social development that forms the basis of imaginations of Nordic rational modernisation. That is true, but it is also storytelling of a particular kind. It is vitally important to carefully navigate the specificities of the Nordic context without reproducing what scholars have called Nordic exceptionalism − a deeply integrated collective self-understanding of one’s own countries as exceptions from the impacts of and contributions to colonialism and historical and contemporary racist and sexist structures (Keskinen, Stoltz and Mulinari, 2020). The processes of recognising and exposing colonial history and breaking down the cultural amnesia that have dominated the Nordic countries in the 21st century concerning the direct and indirect profits from slave trading and colonial exploitation are ongoing. Denmark and Sweden had colonies in the East Indies, at different times Denmark and Norway have both colonised Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. This denial of historical involvement in colonial violence and exploitation is deeply intertwined with the notion of the Nordic countries as modern, enlightened, rational and democratic (Keskinen et al, 2009). Sápmi − the land of the Nordic indigenous Sámi people that is spread across the northern parts of today’s Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia – has not been recognised by these nations as colonised land. All these four nations have failed to acknowledge their involvement in the theft of land, settlement policies, deportations, and the stigmatisation of the Sámi population. In 2021, it was 100 years since the Swedish government decided to establish
Nordic exceptionalism takes different forms in different countries depending on the history of each nation, but also that of the whole of the Nordic region. Understanding oneself as an exception is supported by notions of one’s own country as excelling in having a transparent state apparatus, democratic systems, ‘colour-blindness’ and gender equality. This self-image also relies on the notion that the Nordic countries are welfare states and the Nordic variants of the welfare state are closely linked to sexual politics. The industrial work on which the Nordic countries have built their wealth has historically been coded as masculine. The idea of the Nordic family is firmly founded on a nuclear structure with complementary gendered roles, which has led to far-reaching structures in the division of work between women and men, in families as well as in the labour market. The notion of welfare as building on ‘robust’ economic growth and playing the game of the market economy subordinates women’s care work and also relegates women to the tax revenue ‘consuming’ part of the labour market. After the economic expansion that began in the post-war era, the Nordic countries have gone through fairly similar legal and social reforms to support gender equality and building systems for universal welfare. Women’s traditional care work was professionalised and institutionalised outside of the private sphere. However, neoliberal restructuring during the 1980s and beyond has led to numerous systemic cuts that affect women’s participation as welfare workers as well as the welfare system itself. The public sectors in all five countries have made significant cutbacks in welfare-related spending in the last thirty years. Education, healthcare and pensions have all been subject to privatisation and in some of the countries – Sweden stands out here – formerly state-owned public services have also been outsourced and now operate on the basis of market logics (Lundahl et al, 2013).
Today the Nordic countries have the world’s highest rates of female participation in the regulated labour market. The normalisation of a two-breadwinner family model, as well as strong discourses on women’s rights to individual fulfilment, can be seen as systemic violence since it offers a myth about gender equality which is no longer systemically supported by the welfare system. Instead, gender equality has become symbolised as a ‘Nordic trait’ (Griffin, Martinsson and Giritli Nygren, 2016). These discourses reproduce nationalist ideas about equality as a notion of modernity that
In the Nordic countries, #MeToo shed light on the silencing of women’s exposure to sexual violence and harassment at work and it is telling that the calls for action against sexual harassment were often organised within occupational categories. #MeToo not only showed that gender equality has not been achieved, but also that there was considerable awareness of and capacity for conducting feminist analyses and utilising a gender equality discourse. Close connections between women’s movements, political gender equality goals and gender research have formed a robust feminist discourse, which is also connected to international interventions within the UN, the EU and international social movements.
From the 1990s and beyond, different gender equality indices have been used to compare gender equality between countries, and these indices usually have one or more of the Nordic countries at the top of their rankings. The notion of gender equality as something measurable is highly criticised, as thinking that it is measurable neutralises power inequalities. But the gender equality ‘mantra’ (as it is called in Griffin, Martinsson and Giritli Nygren, 2016) has also contributed to a strong identification with gender-equal norms and awareness of inequalities based on gender. The reporting of sexual harassment, sexual violence and gender discrimination is high in the Nordic countries, but so is the level of knowledge, and maybe also the tendency to report. So international comparisons will evidently suffer from methodological difficulties.
As Angela Y. Davis notes in The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of the #MeToo Movement, the historical development of the Nordic countries and their welfare models shows that closing economic and social gender gaps is in no way a guarantee that a society will be free from gender-based violence and sexual harassment (Chandra and Erlingsdóttir, 2020). On the other hand, the economic gaps between men and women have ceased closing since the economic crises of the 1990s and 2000s. They have instead increased (Swedish Gender Equality Agency, 2022). Universal welfare is a vital aspect of the imaginations of the Nordic region, but these need to be revisited and re-imagined as well.
In the Nordic countries, research on sexual harassment has never formed a research field as such. Gender studies and related research fields, which are extensive and vibrant in all the Nordic countries, have shown little interest in sexual harassment, despite strong fields of research in gender and working life, as well as research on violence against women and intimate partner violence. Some clues to the reasons for this might be found in the historical development of gender research in the Nordic region. Gender studies is institutionalised to varying degrees in the different Nordic countries, but in all five countries there are gender studies researchers working in
The social and cultural imaginations of the Nordic region are vivid and productive, and in need of critical deconstruction. However, while there is an abundance of imaginaries regarding the Nordic region, there seems to be a deficit of these with regard to understanding and theorising about sexual harassment. Or rather, Nordic imaginaries seem to run the risk of preventing other more extensive imaginations of sexual harassment from taking shape, and thus challenging and reconfiguring the complacent image of the Nordic region, almost as if the region’s self-image is acting as a protective shield, keeping the Nordic region clean and tidy, and not a messy co-construct of sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment: previous research
We will use three questions as starting points for a discussion on the existing research field. What is sexual harassment? What is wrong with sexual harassment? And what do we do with sexual harassment? Through engaging in these questions, we want to describe how the phenomenon of sexual harassment comes into view when critically engaging in research and policy on sexual harassment. We are not trying to capture the entirety of the field, but rather its main traits. The questions are not asked primarily to be answered, but rather to sketch the contours of the field and its main concerns as well as its blind spots and what is implicitly taken for granted. Overall, it will continue this storytelling, and follow the delimitations that the field has established.
The concept of sexual harassment has been disseminated by transnational movements, and ideas and expertise are spread through direct and indirect ties between researchers, activists and policy makers. However, the US has been at the forefront regarding regulation, policy development and the development
What is sexual harassment?
The term sexual harassment was coined in the US in the 1970s (see for example: Farley, 1978; MacKinnon, 1979). When Catharine MacKinnon published her book Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination, she described sexual harassment as ‘an experience for which there has been no name’ (MacKinnon, 1979, p 27). Sexual harassment was of course experienced, theorised about, and resisted even before MacKinnon’s book in 1979. Women have talked about it, but their voices have not been heard. Even more so, some women’s voices have been seen as less important than others. Women of colour are one group whose theorising and conceptual knowledge about sexual harassment has been ignored (Berenstain, 2020).
As further developments have been made to this definition – through both judicial and tribunal decision-making and legislative tinkering – it has become increasingly apparent that the nature, context and harm of sexual harassment continues to defy simplistic definition. Each time we attempt to improve and refine our legislative understanding of sexual harassment, we run the risk of trivialising or excluding experiences that do not fit the new model. Clearly, these difficulties do not provide an
excuse to be satisfied with the status quo but they do invite us to take a modest view of what can be achieved through legislation. (Mason and Chapman, 2003, p 223)
A focus on prevalence as the main interest of research, and questionnaires as the preferred method of inquiry, also formed the basis for studies of sexual harassment during this period.
Several methodological challenges were later identified in relation to different methodological approaches. One approach was the direct query survey, where respondents were asked to define sexual harassment, and another concerned behavioural experiences, where the researcher defined what constituted sexual harassment. However, these different methods lead to differences in reporting rates: using the respondents’ definitions generated one set of results that differed from those in reports that relied on the researcher’s definition (Ilies et al, 2003).
The close connection between sexual harassment and the labour market is another common aspect of the field, mediated by legislation and regulation affecting what is understood to be sexual harassment. In Europe, empirical research shows that millions of women suffer from sexual harassment in their workplaces, and discussions of sexual harassment were initially included in a broader context of violations against workers’ dignity (Zippel, 2006; Latcheva, 2017). The workplace is also the context in which the majority of research and policy on sexual harassment has been generated (McDonald, 2012). Anti-discrimination law regulates relationships in the workplace, between employees, and between employees and employers. The idea of a labour market with an employer who is legally responsible for their employees is not a given, but dependency on legal definitions of sexual harassment seems to take such simplified relations for granted. Many people work but are not employed or they work outside of regulated employment arrangements. Many are harassed outside the workplace, and so this juridical framework limits the understanding of society’s perceptions of sexual harassment.
What has become clear when examining the development of terms and investments in theory over time in the research field as a whole is how a gradual closing of the gap between legal definitions and the scientific definition of sexual harassment is occurring (Bondestam and Lundqvist, 2020). Legal definitions vary by juridical context, but most legislation in the area contains similar elements, such as descriptions of the conduct as unwanted or unwelcome acts of a sexual nature (McDonald, 2012). These definitions in themselves leave many questions unanswered: how do we understand and measure ‘unwelcome’; what kinds of ‘acts’ are to be included, and what actually is meant by ‘of a sexual nature’? To some extent these questions have been dealt with in the research, resulting in validated scales for questionnaires such as the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ)
Other challenges relate to socio-cultural differences in understandings of sexual harassment and the skewed distribution of samples: in the 1980s basically only women were respondents in studies concerning sexual harassment (Bondestam and Lundqvist, 2020). A review article of study context and participants in research on campus-based assault and dating violence in the US showed that the respondents in most of the reviewed research did not reflect the demographics of US higher education. The respondents in the reviewed studies were substantially younger and White, heterosexual and middle-class to a greater extent than US college students were overall at the time (Voth Schrag, 2017).
A culture of silence was explored as a term that acknowledged the social and cultural aspects of difficulties in talking about experiences of sexual harassment. Underreporting is well established as a phenomenon in the research field, and shame, victimhood and fear of retaliation are described as some of the reasons for this (see for example: Superson, 1993; Cairns, 1997; Bergman et al, 2002; McDonald, Backstrom and Dear, 2008). But silence is not only about who speaks or not, it is just as much a question of listening and acknowledging (see for example Fricker, 2007). To not acknowledge minorities, such as women of colour, as knowing subjects limits our understanding of sexual harassment (see for example: Buchanan and Ormerod, 2002; Welsh et al, 2006; Richardson and Taylor, 2009; Berenstain, 2020). The silencing is not just about the execution of power but is also reproduced by the research field that was originally established to break that very silence.
The strong juridical framework, how work and the workplace are understood, and the situating of sexual harassment mainly within these realms all limit the understanding of what is perceived as sexual harassment. The context of employment and labour markets in the Nordic region features collective agreement systems in different industries, within different welfare systems, in parallel with relatively strong anti-discrimination laws. The question ‘what is sexual harassment’ has been handled as if it is actually possible to contain and draw lines around a universally consistent concept, or, to draw on Mary Douglas: keep the concept clean and separated from contextual dirt. Hence, perspectives exploring the intersectional dimension of exposure to sexual harassment, listening to other voices and investigating different contextual continuums will be the means by which we aim to provide a range of possible answers to the question: what is sexual harassment?
‘We have constructed the phenomena around the available legal remedies, rather than around a comprehensive normative account of the wrongs at stake’ (Anderson, 2006, p 292).
Importantly, no matter how studies are carried out and whether or not respondents described their experiences as sexual harassment, the negative consequences at an individual level are similar. Negative psychological, work-related and health consequences seem to be common ground in experiences of sexual harassment (Magley et al, 1999; McDonald, 2012; Bondestam and Lundqvist, 2020). This is one obvious wrong: the negative consequences of sexual harassment at both individual and societal levels. However, the question of what is wrong with sexual harassment is not very much elaborated on in the majority of studies of sexual harassment. Rather it seems to be an implicit consensus that sexual harassment is wrong in and of itself. So while there seems to be an abundance of efforts to map the prevalence of sexual harassment, efforts to investigate its broader ramifications are scarcer. One of the consequences of this apparent consensus seems to be that difficult questions about the complex situations and contextual factors involved are not often included in studies of sexual harassment.
In the following section, we will let Elisabeth Anderson’s 2006 review, ‘Recent thinking about sexual harassment: A review essay’, exemplify a discussion of the theories regarding sexual harassment as a wrong. In research discussing how to conceive of the wrong of sexual harassment, one central fault line is whether the core wrong consists in an injury to groups or to individuals. Group-based theories, also called equality theories, view the core interest injured by sexual harassment to be equality among social groups, mainly based on sex/gender. Individual-based theories, also called dignity theories, locate the wrong in the means that harassers use to achieve their objectives, where the harm done is done to an individual’s standing as a person (Anderson, 2006).
These theories each capture important aspects of the wrong of sexual harassment but both strands of thought also run up against different types of limitations. The equality theories on the one hand take as their point of departure a heteronormative paradigm, and fail to include a variety of sexually harassing acts, behaviours and situations (Anderson, 2006). These theories risk making the understanding of sexual harassment one-dimensional.
Dignity theory, on the other hand, ignores the material disadvantages inflicted by sexual harassment, individualises and depoliticises the harms of sexual harassment, and fails to grasp the ways in which the indignities of sexual harassment are institutionalised in, for example, the gender segregation of the labour market. In the Nordic countries, the wrong of sexual harassment, as far as it has been dealt with at all, seems to have ended
Another theory discussing the wrong of sexual harassment is the autonomy theory, where workers’ freedom to express their gender and sexuality at work is of importance. This understanding boils down to a conflict between the exercise of one person’s sexual liberty and another person’s sexual autonomy (Anderson, 2006). Queer-feminist researchers have pointed out that the mere existence of a queer person could be read as sexual harassment by homophobic and/or heterosexist employees, while others pay attention to how sexual harassment laws might collude with managerial motives to suppress different sexual identities in the workplace (Anderson, 2006). This perspective on sexual autonomy shows how previous research tends to unify the category of women in ways that intersectional approaches have interrogated in other fields of research. The unifying of the category ‘woman’ not only excludes experiences of different forms of oppression based on race, gender, sexual orientation, class or age, but also tends to base its traits on the White, Western, middle-class, heterosexual woman and reproduce broader social and cultural imaginations of (White, young, beautiful) women as victims.
These theories have contributed to the development of the research field, but they still tend to focus on the juridical aspects, the main disciplinary domicile being in philosophy of law (Berndt Rasmussen and Olsson Yaouzis, 2020). The limitations of all three perspectives are their inability to include intersecting power relations along the lines of gender, race/ethnicity and sexual orientation, but also their inability to contextualise and relate sexual harassment to structural circumstances. Ultimately, the research that has been done primarily defines sexual harassment as an occupational health and safety issue which can be remedied by better policies and more frequent reporting till the employer.
What do you do with sexual harassment?
The urge to eradicate sexual harassment, to make it stop, has affected the structure of the research field. Two focuses permeate much of the research on sexual harassment: the focus on prevalence and the focus on prevention. Over and over again, the research field approaches the question in almost the same way: establishing if, how and how much sexual harassment there is in certain industries, workplaces or occupational groups. A vast number of studies of sexual harassment follow this logic. A questionnaire is sent out with questions about experiences of sexual harassment, the percentages are summarised, and the study concludes with a list of recommendations. The recommendations are seldom based on the actual results, but are generic
All of these starting points contribute to an understanding of sexual harassment as something first and foremost to do something about. These kinds of studies might well be of great importance, but they do not seem to generate any kind of foundation for the development of well-targeted preventive measures. Effective prevention would seem to require something else or something more in terms of empirical or theoretical foci.
The focus on doing gives the impression that we all agree, that we already know enough, that we have already got it figured out, and now all we need to do is to write an adequate policy plan, inform all the employers about the reporting systems and routines, or tighten the legislation. This urge to do something and the measures recommended are what Sara Ahmed calls non-performative actions. With a critical use of Judith Butler’s performativity concept, Ahmed notes the lack of action in upholding policy: ‘Non-performatives describes the “reiterative and citational practice by which discourse” does not produce “the effects that it names”’ (Ahmed, 2012, p 117).
This repetitious call for measures can be described as a need to ‘name’ sexual harassment as a problem: not in the sense of giving voice to a silenced experience, which was Catharine MacKinnon’s main project, but as an ambition that this ‘naming’ in itself will bring about change. What the concept of non-performatives shows is that to name is not to bring into effect. Rather, naming ends up standing in for the effect; thus naming can be a way of not bringing something into effect (Ahmed, 2012). The urge to produce studies and attach recommendations with weak relation to the results of these studies, or to write and amend policy documents that end up in a drawer, become non-performative: a stand-in for the effect. The seemingly never-ending need for recommendations, implementability and checklists does do something with knowledge about sexual harassment; it keeps it tidy and manageable without looking at the contexts that enable sexual violence and harassment.
Together these three questions − what is sexual harassment? what is wrong with sexual harassment? and what do we do with sexual harassment? − and how they have been dealt with in research, politics, and policy, affect the building of knowledge about and our understanding of the phenomenon of sexual harassment in certain ways. There are obvious conflicts, contradictions,
Re-imaginations in the Nordic region
During the time when the institutionalisation of gender studies was at its most intense during the late 1990s and the first part of the 2000s, two important shifts occurred. The first one is related to the institutionalisation of gender studies. This meant academic autonomy, and a distancing from the organised practice of politics and the demands for ‘implementable’ research results that are implicit in this relationship. The second shift was theoretical currents, such as poststructuralism, queer studies and intersectionality, that turned the research field’s interest away from radical feminism and its stable account of the category ‘woman’. Intersectionality showed how feminist research had implicitly modelled ‘woman’ on White, heterosexual middle-class women. Given that most research on sexual harassment builds on a realist, gender-binary conception of men and women as categories that are ontologically stable (although in stages involving historical and social change) the notion of gender as multifaceted, intersectionally scattered, moulded in the complex interaction of social structures, institutions, practices, and cultural and symbolic representations, did not fit the research tradition of sexual harassment studies. But this is a false dichotomy. We need more accounts of violence, not fewer, including the ones that poststructuralist theories taught us, in order to grasp for instance discursive violence, the violence of silenc(ing) and marginalisation, the violence of organisational powers, of dehumanisation, and of economic and corporeal exploitation. We need to follow the entanglements of multiple power structures and resistance in order to facilitate the necessary re-imaginations needed to more fully make sense of sexual harassment.
For this book, we invited scholars who for the most part would not self-identify as sexual harassment researchers. What they bring to the understanding of sexual harassment are concepts, perspectives, knowledge, and stories that have been developed in the broad field of gender studies research in the Nordic region. We also invited writers of fiction to contribute essays and short stories, contributing voices that are not easily captured within the framework of research methods. We need these voices that can show the brutality of the mundane and the micro-resistance that sometimes occurs out of pure coincidence. We owe it to many feminist researchers who have insisted that ‘academic language’ can be a form of violence in itself with its claim that objectivity is the result of a distanced position.
Lodahl’s ‘At the AGM’ (Chapter 2) opens the book’s first part, titled ‘Cartography of everyday violence in the Nordic region’. It continues with ‘Depleted bodies: Intersectional perspectives on workplace violence’ by Paulina de los Reyes (Chapter 3). This chapter aims to advance the conceptualisation of workplace violence beyond individual actions to address the structural conditions that make harassment, threats and abuse part of workplace normality. As context, she uses the neoliberalisation of the Nordic labour market and the stratification of the labour market along intersecting lines of power relations that leave immigrant women’s bodies and labour in states of depletion. This important contribution to exposing the continuum of depletions as a way to reconceptualise sexual harassment is followed by a theoretical discussion by Sofia Strid, Anne Laure Humbert and Jeff Hearn (Chapter 4). Their chapter, ‘The violently gender-equal Nordic welfare states’, elaborates on violence as autotelic – the organising principle as a distinct regime of the Nordic welfare states – and as such continues the development of an account of sexual harassment as integrated into regimes of violence.
Following this, we present two chapters with an ethnographic focus on the intersection of gender and age: ‘Negotiating sexual harassment and young urban femininities in Helsinki’ by Heta Mulari (Chapter 6) and ‘Men run academic track; women jump sexist hurdles’ by Lea Skewes (Chapter 7). Both chapters map traditionally masculine sites: the urban space and a university department of physics. Mulari’s chapter analyses girls’ and non-binary youths’ experiences not only of sexual harassment and sexual violence but also of empowerment and solidarity on public transport and in urban spaces. Skewes’ chapter focuses on student experiences of gender-stereotypical attitudes and sexual harassment in an educational setting where a specific form of masculinity – coined as a ‘Hercules’ masculinity – is dominant. Normative assumptions in the department about an inherent relation between physics and masculinities lead to the individualisation of women’s difficulties in integrating into the department’s environment and when exposed to sexual harassment.
The novelist Sigbjørn Skåden’s chapter ‘Some ten years ago I started writing a novel’ (Chapter 8) is a reflection on the social and cultural mechanisms of racist oppression of the Sámi populations in Norway, with
The second part of the book, titled ‘Violence, knowledge and imagining justice’, takes on different aspects of what we call the juridification of sexual harassment. Juridification is both the notion that sexual harassment can and should be contained, defined, and solved within the juridical system, but also encompasses a specific effect of the close connections between sexual harassment research and the juridical system in the US. One example of how juridical definitions fail is when a changing social situation creates new vulnerabilities to assaults that – for lack of an adequate juridical concept – cannot be condemned. Such is the situation that is analysed in ‘Sextortion: Linking sexual violence and corruption in a Nordic context’ written by Silje Lundgren, Åsa Eldén, Dolores Calvo and Elin Bjarnegård (Chapter 10). That chapter analyses and discusses two recent and publicly known legal cases that include elements of quid pro quo as sextortion in Norway and Sweden and advocates the need for a framework of sextortion as an answer to practices of Nordic exceptionalism.
Another strand of feminist thinking addresses alternative ways of perceiving and doing justice, sometimes called transformative justice. Two chapters take on these perspectives, from different standpoints and with different methods. Silas Aliki works as a lawyer and publishes opinion pieces regularly in daily newspapers. Their chapter ‘I have always thought a lot about the nature of violence: Carceral feminism – sexual violence in the neoliberal state’ (Chapter 11) is a powerful confrontation with discourses of ‘law and order’ and the withdrawal of the state from the responsibility for securing justice and democratic rights. Sexual violence and women’s bodies become the battlefield where the marginalisation of the racialised man takes place. Aliki reminds us that feminisms can be politically relevant beyond the cry for longer prison sentences, if they constitute movements for social and economic rights for all women. They propose transformative justice as an alternative to repression. Hildur Fjóla Antonsdóttir on the other hand has interviewed people who have been sexually assaulted, harassed and raped about their views on alternative justice practices. In ‘Beyond restorative justice: Survivors’ calls for innovative practices in Iceland’ (Chapter 12), Antonsdóttir offers a feminist analysis of restorative justice practices, focusing on empirical accounts from sexual violence survivors in Iceland. This ethnographic account captures the ambivalence of the respondents, as restorative justice ultimately means re-exposure for individuals who have already been (made) vulnerable.
Anne Hellum’s ‘One step forward and one step back: Sexual harassment in Norwegian equality and non-discrimination law’ (Chapter 14) is an historical account of the unfolding of the legal context in the Nordic countries, its different political influences, and its shortcomings and possibilities when it comes to convictions in current sexual harassment cases.
In the concluding chapter (Chapter 16), we draw together knowledge from all the chapters, and place them in dialogue with each other, discussing both their similarities and tensions. We discuss in depth not only the consequences of placing sexual harassment on a continuum of violence but also the normalisation of different forms of violence. The effects and limits of the juridification of sexual harassment as well as the limitations of the Nordic gender equality discourse are also discussed. But we also try to summarise some lessons that we think are important for readers of this book to take with them in further dialogues on sexual violence and harassment in the Nordic region, and beyond.
Fifty years of research, lifetimes of experience, and a global #MeToo movement show that sexual harassment is still a persistent problem in society. Through this book we aim to contribute to research and knowledge-building guided by curiosity, exploration, and re-imagination: trying to take responsibility for the difficult questions of power, inequality, and sexuality in our social environments, and confronting the urge to do something with a firm belief that seeking knowledge is not a matter of presenting quick fixes, but rather an expression of a joint commitment to move the world.
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