Taking a Stand in a Postfeminist World: Toward an Engaged Cultural Criticism

11. Interpreting Charges of Sexual Harassment: Competing Discourses and Claims

167 11 Interpreting Charges of Sexual Harassment: Competing Discourses and Claims A Professor You are a lanky, energetic social science professor, a white male in your early fifties, a sophisticated but rebellious product of British public school education. You enjoy intellectual give and take, as well as a fast game of squash. You value good talk, are amused and pleased by challenge and originality in others, and hence have a high tolerance for students eager to sound out their ideas with you. You consider yourself fortunate to have found a job at a selective liberal arts college where your talent for conducting stimulating seminars and engaging students is valued. Your wife, who also teaches social science, but at a more hide-bound and well-heeled institution, recognizes the greater emotional and personal demands of your job, but envies the feistiness of your students and like-mindedness of your colleagues, many of whom share your leftist critique of contemporary society. Drawing on Gramsci, you are committed to analyzing how prevalent convictions and views function as part of a political power system. How do you react when, one afternoon, a group of ten or so students silently encircles you outside your office without looking you in the eye? A series of rehearsed lines comes at you from one side, then another, then behind: “We represent a larger organization of students on campus concerned with fighting sexual harassment.” “It has come to our attention that you have been sexually harassing students on this campus.” “Sexual harassment is a crime.” “It will not be tolerated.” “It has to stop,” and then in chorus they chant: “It will stop.” They leave, refusing to respond to your protests and questions or to name any specific charges. Introduction We use portraits in our analysis of this event, in which about twenty students calling themselves the Defense Guard confronted four faculty members and one student at Simon’s Rock College of Bard, a very small and isolated college for gifted high school age students. We call for your imaginative engagement in a situation we found deeply challenging to us as feminists and as professors, one which made visible the contradictions between traditional humanist rationales grounding higher education, and postmodern and feminist challenges to them being taught within our universities and colleges. It also made visible the tensions these contradictions place on students. Because the academy has justified itself as a “free marketplace of ideas,” it has paradoxically, if sometimes grudgingly, felt compelled to accommodate a feminism which insists on the connections between bodies and ideas and a deconstruction which denies the essential tie between word and thing, even though these movements challenge, what Bourdieu has called, the non-instrumental “scholastic point of view” of humanism and its project of discovering truth.1 In constructing our ethnography of this event, we aim to model the sort of creative mutual interrogation of perspectives where each helps us discover the limits and values of the other that is essential in the broader academy today. We hope to avoid both the search for disinterestedness which unites some postmodernists and humanists and the tendency to essentialize experience which some feminism shares with humanism. Our use of novelistic characters in dramatic situations, rather than a more expository analysis, is intended to delay the drawing of conclusions about a situation in which there was great pressure for immediate and univocal resolution: accused professors called on their colleagues and their institution for support , demanding apologies and vindication, at the same time as feminists , both members of the Defense Guard and spokespeople for local women’s groups, called for swift and unquestioning judgments about the facts of harassment without standard evidentiary procedures with the chant, “always believe the victim.” While our conflicting loyalties, both personal and philosophical, made it impossible for us to follow this precept unquestioningly, our approach is feminist. Wary of the reason and common sense that underlie traditional views of justice because they leave out gender and the body, we describe events through situated characters in order to express our skepticism about the possibility of a disinterested or un168 Taking a Stand in a Postfeminist World situated response.2 But in delaying conclusions, we do not intend to deny that they will or must be drawn. The event itself revealed the inadequacy of the postmodern ideal of holding contradictions endlessly in tension, an ideal we ourselves have found appealing and useful in...