Although many women experience harmful behaviors that fit the legal definition of sexual harassment, very few ever label their experiences as such. I explore how psychological ambivalence expressed as sadomasochism may account for some of this gap. Following Lynn Chancer, I argue that certain structural circumstances characteristic of highly stratified bureaucratic organizations may promote these psychological responses. After discussing two illustrations of this dynamic, I draw out the implications for sexual harassment theory and policy.

ZusammenfassungDieser Artikel beleuchtet die tragende Rolle, die Umweltdenken und Umgebungswissen für die Legitimation traditioneller Geschlechterrollen im 20. Jahrhundert spielten. Gezeigt wird, auf welche Weise einflussreiche psychologische und psychoanalytische Konzepte der Kindes- und Persönlichkeitsentwicklung Frauen dazu anhielten, sozio-naturale Umwelten herzustellen, ja, selbst Umwelt zu sein. Expertinnen und Experten verschiedener Denkrichtungen und Generationen propagierten ein ganz ähnliches Bild femininer „Environmentalität“, das heißt: der Disposition und Bestimmung der Frau, Umwelten zu erzeugen und zu verkörpern, die eine gesunde Kindesentwicklung ermöglichen und das Wohlbefinden und (...) den Erfolg des Mannes, gar den Erhalt der gesellschaftlichen Ordnung begünstigen sollten. Dieses Konstrukt weiblichen Umwelt-Seins verpflichtete Frauen auf Ehe und Vollzeitmutterschaft und fixierte sie in Raum und Zeit. Sein reaktionärer Gebrauch in Auseinandersetzungen über alternative weibliche Lebensentwürfe demonstriert, dass leitende Konzeptionen von Entwicklung, Wohlergehen und Identität nicht nur androzentrisch, sondern antifeministisch waren. (shrink)

Using an analysis of child care books and parenting Web sites, this article asks if second-wave feminism’s vision of gender-neutral child rearing has been incorporated into contemporary advice on child rearing. The data suggest that while feminist understandings of gender have made significant inroads into popular advice, especially with regard to the social construction of gender, something akin to “a stalled revolution” has taken place. Children’s gender nonconformity is still viewed as problematic because it is linked implicitly and explicitly to (...) homosexuality. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the emergence of Female Sexual Dysfunction within American psychiatry and beyond in the postwar period, setting out what I believe to be important and suggestive questions neglected in existing scholarship. Tracing the nomenclature within successive editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, I consider the reification of the term ‘FSD’, and the activism and scholarship that the rise of the category has occasioned. I suggest that analysis of FSD benefits from scrutiny of (...) a wider range of sources. I explore the multiplicity of FSD that emerges when one examines this wider range, but I also underscore a reinscribing of anxieties about psychogenic aetiologies. I then argue that what makes the FSD case additionally interesting, over and above other conditions with a contested status, is the historically complex relationship between psychiatry and feminism that is at work in contemporary debates. I suggest that existing literature on FSD has not yet posed some of the most important and salient questions at stake in writing about women’s sexual problems in this period, and can only do this when the relationship between ‘second-wave’ feminism, ‘post-feminism’, psychiatry and psychoanalysis becomes part of the terrain to be analysed, rather than the medium through which analysis is conducted. (shrink)