Understanding Sexual Harassment in the Ivory Tower in China: A Personal Journey over Two Decades

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Selves as Methods: Reflexive Dialogue and Praxis in Global Knowledge Production

Proposal

This paper seeks to unpack the cultural and power dynamics undergirding my evolving research on sexual harassment in higher education as a Chinese scholar trained in the U.S. First trained in a law school in China, I tended to view social relationships from the perspective of rights and duties. It was the period when China opened itself to the world and was very engaged in “learning from the West.” The media exposure of Anita Hill’s congressional testament in the 1990s and spotlights of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing introduced the concept of sexual harassment to China. Not surprisingly, my initial understanding of sexual harassment in the early 2000s was from a human right perspective, and my initial readings were mostly from the West.

I also tried to locate and understand related concepts in the Chinese tradition, for example hooliganism (shua liumang), flirt (tiaoxi), and courtesy (li), which were more from a perspective of appropriate norms carried within a series of social relationships. In the first ten years of my emerging interest in this topic, I understood the “difference” between Chinese conceptions and those dominant in the West and in the law profession through the lens of universalism and relativism (Bell, 2000; De Bary, 2004; Hunt, 2007; Nathan, 2001; Perry, 2008; Sen et al., 1997; Taylor, 1999). Sexual harassment results in physical and emotional harm and negatively influences victims’ school engagement, level of satisfaction with their studies, and educational performance (Collinsworth et al., 2009; Hill & Silva, 2005; Huerta et al., 2006; Lindquist et al., 2013). Its negative impact has been proved cross-culturally (Mirsky, 2003; Paludi et al., 2006; Tang et al., 1996). From a human right perspective, the need to be respected and be freed from sexual harassment is universal, while the manifestation of sexual harassment can vary in different cultural contexts (Tang et al., 1995). Based on my empirical research in Chinese universities in the past ten years, contemporary Chinese students’ understanding of sexual harassment is converging with those in the West, thanks to deepening globalization and the Me-too movement. For example, telling dirty jokes, which was often not regarded as sexual harassment by Chinese students in 1990s, is well recognized nowadays.

Nonetheless, academic discourse about sexual harassment in China and the West remain profoundly divided. My research on sexual harassment in Chinese higher education is regarded by the Chinese audience and reviewers as “too trivial” in terms of topic or “too westernized” in terms of content. At the same time, readers in the West often question that my study is not critical enough about the narrower understanding of power expressed by my Chinese interview participants in China, compared the taken-for-granted norms in the West (MacKinnon, 1979, 2017). In this presentation, I reflect on this journey of understanding sexual harassment in Chinese higher education through the lens of “selves as methods,” in search of possibilities of transformative dialogues.

Author

• Ran Zhang, Peking University