Rethinking ‘the personal is political:’ Enacting agency in the narrative of sexual harassment experiences in China

Luwei Rose Luqiu, Sara Xueting Liao

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

16 Scopus citations

Abstract

Through a close reading of 1904 individual stories of sexual harassment collected through an online survey, the study investigates how storytelling constitutes a feminist media practice that (re)defines sexual harassment, exposes the power relations at play in the situations described in the stories, and opens up space for discursive politics in everyday life. In focusing on the active production of identities through discourse, we demonstrate how women themselves make sense of their experience. Most of the storytellers struggled to define what sexual harassment meant to them in their first-person narrations of their experiences. Guided by feminist standpoint methodology and narrative analysis, the study recognizes the narratives as powerful sites of knowledge production from a marginalized group of people who rarely speak out about their sexual harassment experiences, and it reconsiders the importance of the personal in digital space, evaluating how varied narratives can be cooperative and participatory to enact agency in contentious politics.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)708-727
Number of pages20
JournalDiscourse and Society
Volume32
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2021

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Communication
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Sociology and Political Science
  • Linguistics and Language

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