Silencing Of Women Research Articles

Domestic Violence and Silence of Women with Reference to the Broadway Drama by Tennessee Williams “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947)

Domestic Violence and Silence of Women with Reference to the Broadway Drama by Tennessee Williams “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947)

Comparing Polish and Iranian Women’s Silence in a University Setting

The silencing of women in academia is associated with a range of employment inequities. In societies where gender inequality is high women are more likely to experience a range of gender issues at work. This research note provides insights on a comparative study investigating women’s silence in Poland and Iran. The study offers novel insight into the significance of the sociocultural and political context as a factor impacting the silence of academic women. By analysing two different countries in terms of politics, religion and culture we bring new insights into the implications of silence for women.

The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction and the Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s) by Robyn Cope

Reviewed by: The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction and the Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s) by Robyn Cope Viviana Pezzullo Cope, Robyn. The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction and the Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s). U of the West Indies P, 2021. Pp 277. ISBN 978-9-766408-60-2. $45 (paper). The Pen and the Pan by Robyn Cope is a compelling comparative reading revolving around the role that food plays in Caribbean society through the fiction of Gisèle Pineau, Edwidge Danticat, Lakshmi Persaud, Shani Mootoo, and Maryse Condé. Cope's analysis focuses both on the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean and provides a cross section of the cultural value of food imagery as a means to discover identity and renegotiate gender dynamics. The importance of food is grounded in colonial and neocolonial appetite (reminiscent of the sugar plantations) that confines women to a state of marginality. For this reason, to the paternal conteur, Cope counterposes the maternal grandmother, whose kitchen talk becomes the center of a new narrative aiming to shed light on women's oppression and "homegrown" feminist responses—a term that Danticat coins to describe how women in her family embraced feminism as a form of resistance in their everyday lives. [End Page 184] In Chapter 1, food evokes the French Antillean diaspora (1960-1980) through Gisèle Pineau's fiction. Culinary memories recall the importance of roots; in Un papillon dans la cité, Man Ya packs Félicie's suitcase with yams and sweet potatoes when she leaves to go to France. However, in addition to a way of maintaining a connection with the native land, food is also the remedy to the sense of displacement that Negropolitan women feel in their attempt to assimilate, offering the chance to discover Metropolitan France through culinary traditions. The same correlation between food and immigration that Pineau lays out occurs in the work of Edwidge Danticat, which Cope analyzes in Chapter 2. Here, culinary imagery assumes a revolutionary charge denouncing violence, terror, and autocratic regimes, proving how the ghosts of Rafael Trujillo and François "Papa Doc" Duvalier still haunt the Dominican Republic and Haiti up to today. According to Danticat, the sugarcane trope exemplifies the transgenerational trauma of the violence perpetrated against Caribbean women living in a society so inherently tied to the plantation system. In this context, food becomes a form of resilience and a way to fight against silence. Chapter 3 focuses on Lakshmi Persaud's exploration of Indo-Trinidadian identity dealing with the difficult reconciliation of Afro-Caribbean food traditions with Hindu Indian cultural preservation. In Sastra, for instance, Persaud's description of the dishes served at a Hindu wedding reveals how changes in traditional ways of cooking reflect an evolution of values and morals, reinforcing the parallelism between food and religion. Cope continues to investigate Indo-Trinidadian culture in Chapter 4 through Shani Mootoo who informs about gender oppression. Through discussing issues of homosexuality and non-binary gender discrimination, Mootoo denounces the homophobia of post-colonial Commonwealth Caribbean states, like Trinidad and Tobago, which in 2000 passed the Sexual Offences Act outlawing homosexuality. Domination is also expressed through cultural appropriation which greatly connects to food, as the protagonist of "The Upside-downness of the World as It Unfolds" experiences with her white friends, who try to force Indian food upon her. In the last chapter, Cope discusses the work of Maryse Condé, according to whom writing has very much in common with cooking, both being acts of pleasure. Nevertheless, cooking also implies for Condé self-sacrifice and resilience. Like Condé's grandmother Victoire in Victoire, les saveurs et les mots, many women in the Caribbean did not have access to education and therefore, entrusted their memories to the kitchen, the space where they gathered and shared knowledge. Acknowledging their culinary labor means granting a voice to silenced women. For that purpose, Cope underscores already in the title of the volume how for writers like Condé, the main point of contact between cuisine and literature is how both permit a deeper understanding of the world. Cope's study gives much food for thought, using culinary imagery to provide an intersectional reading of the historical...

Resisting Silence towards Women

The research provided a descriptive analysis of six articles published by Magdalene, an Indonesian publication that resonated with feminists, pluralists, and progressive voices, to identify the subtle tactics men used to silence women. The idea of neutrality in language endured a long-standing debate between scholars in the communication field. In the perspective of feminist thinkers, language served a function of sexual division, placing men in domination and women in oppression. Women were constrained by a social system governed and communicated through a language that did not represent their experience and perspective. Men’s language denied and negated women’s authenticity. Women were only authentic when their voice was narrated by the language unfamiliar to the scream of their anguish and struggles. The language was not only a medium of expression but also a method of silence. In order to resist oppression, one must be critical of the technique men use in silencing women. Using silence methods from Muted Group Theory provided by Cheris Kramare, the research finds that silence dominantly occurs in the form of violence. The overlap of silence methods is mostly followed by censorship towards women. In one case of sexual harassment towards a female university student, the educational institution is considered the embodiment of patriarchal social construction for coercing silence to victims and doubling its function as sources of knowledge and sexual harassment perpetrators. Lastly, another finding suggests that men who strongly associate with feminist traits and whose sexual identification is against the dominant masculine norm are also disempowered.

“You just stood there and watched”: The Transformative Power of a Woman’s Withholding in Edith Wharton’s Sanctuary

Abstract Edith Wharton’s Sanctuary was long dismissed for want of a convincing plot and heroine, but the novella has been shown to reward focused inquiry. It may be read, among other things, as a revealing, early example of Wharton’s uses of secrets and silences to portray women’s lives. Withholding would become a central feature of her writing, and the topic of women, one of her enduring artistic interests. This article examines Sanctuary’s fictional and textual secrets, as well as the roles of silences with reference to the numerous instances of vigil-keeping in the novella. It finds Wharton exploring acts of withholding by a woman and imbuing them with a significant power to transform others, so subverting the historical silences and silencing of women.

Speaking in stitch: the Keiskamma Altarpiece as testimony to women’s experience of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa

ABSTRACT Black women in South Africa (SA) face multiple and interlocking systems of oppression every-day; among them gender-based violence, economic marginalization, and the legacy of racialized and gendered subjugation under centuries of colonization, followed by the apartheid regime. On the heels of South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994, the HIV/AIDS pandemic quickly overwhelmed health and social support systems, resulting in the highest AIDS incidence in the world, to this day. This article engages with a monumental artwork called the Keiskamma Altarpiece, which was created by a group of (mainly) women in a rural area of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. I “read” the Altarpiece as testimony and storytelling against the shaming and silencing of women’s lives and experiences in South Africa, and argue that it calls us to become response-able to its witness. Using discourse and esthetic analysis, informed by post-colonial memory studies, I argue for better memory practices and increased awareness of the legacies of disease, and engage with Roger Simon’s concept of remembering otherwise.

“Hush, Girl! Don’t Share Your Family Troubles with the Outside World”

Domestic abuse is a significant problem in Sri Lanka with government statistics showing that 17% of ever-married women between the ages of 15 to 49 have experienced some form of domestic abuse. However, this number could be higher in reality, given the prevalence of physical and emotional abuse in situations where partners live together without being married, in situations where the woman is under 15 years of age (Sri Lanka has a 2% child marriage rate), and due to low self-reportage. Although Sri Lankans can only be married after they reach 18 years of age, the war and economic conditions have resulted in a high number of child marriages in recent times. In this paper, I look at two main questions: What is the correlation between child marriage and the beginning of abuse? What is the correlation between pregnancy and the beginning of abuse? The paper draws from desk research. The paper looks only at physical abuse: It is acknowledged that the arena of emotional abuse was recognized only in 2005 after the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act was introduced in 2005 and that even now, such abuse is not given the prominence it deserves in conversations on domestic abuse. However, it was not possible in this research to examine emotional abuse due to time and resource constraints and also because even today the aspect of domestic physical abuse is also not accepted as a problem in Sri Lanka. Keywords: Domestic abuse; intimate partner violence; silencing women in intimate partnerships, child marriages, marital rape

I’m More Than a Farmer’s Wife

Women have always contributed to family farming operations; however, their labor was largely positioned as “women’s work” and ignored as contributing to the economics of the farming enterprise. Through examining the stories of farmers’ wives, this essay examined how the gender division of work and the ideology of domesticity silenced women’s contributions to family farming operations. Through oral history interviews and thematic analysis, this research project presents stories from two farmers’ wives (Annie and Belle) from western Illinois. The resultant analysis reveals that Annie and Belle labored on their family farming operations for most of their lives.

Socio-Cultural Trauma and Gender Objectification in Haider's How It Happened: A Cultural Feminist Study

The research aims to pinpoint the socio-cultural suppressive crisis faced by the Pakistani women and tends to evaluate the standards through which Pakistani women are (mis)recognized through Shazaf Fatima Haider's How It Happened (2012). It focuses upon the internalized social norms regarding women's conduct to achieve perfection and a state of acceptability which have terrifyingly placed a question mark upon women's existence. Zeba, being the protagonist of How It Happened, undergoes anunnerving situation, being continuously displayed as an object for her marriage. Simone de Beauvoir's cultural feminist ideologies in her work, The Second Sex(1997), tend to deconstruct falsely existing cultural archetypes. She illustrates in her work the transformative stages of women's life beginning from the oppressive state towards the protesting state. Consequently, celebrating women's strength by acknowledging biological differences. Through the methodological application of a Textual analytical apparatus, this research tends to reverse the suppressive patriarchal patterns, bringing women from the periphery to the center, also providing a voice to silenced women entangled in the fabricated culture.

Silenced Voices

In this article I examine from a legal point of view some of the consequences for women, and hence for society in general, of online sexist and misogynist abuse in a Swedish context. I argue that one effect is that women’s living space online is demarcated and ultimately, that it threatens women’s possibilities to participate in public debate online. An everyday life perspective and the continuum of sexual violence, both part of a feminist legal perspective, are used as a theoretical framework to show how online abuse is silencing women. The situation demands action from the state, in order to safeguard freedom of expression and, consequently, democracy. I argue that in this particular situation, two basic aspects of freedom of expression collide: the one most emphasised, the prohibition of censorship, and the less acknowledged aspect, i.e. a diversity of voices. Deficient ways to handle sexist and misogynist online abuse leads to indirect censorship where women’s voices are silenced. Hence, the state must take action not to fail to guarantee justice for all. There are many initiatives addressing problems of online abuse, both internationally and nationally. In this article I seek to capture and examine the Swedish policy and legal regulation (criminal law and freedom of expression) in this area to sketch the legal situation, to highlight ongoing initiatives and pointing out lacunas and obstacles that needs to be dealt with to guarantee a diversity of voices.

“A certaine whorish brauery”: Silenced Women in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

This paper proposes an exploration of the medieval aspects of the early modern period with a particular focus on the lives of medieval female saints and the relevance of the accounts of their martyrdoms to early Shakespearean tragedy. The most distinguished hagiography collection in the Middle Ages (in Continental Europe and in England alike) was the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), which reflected the spiritual, religious, socio-political, and cultural landscape of medieval Europe. It remained influential in the sixteenth century, and various elements of it seeped into Protestant martyrologies like John Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes (Book of Martyrs) and John Bale’s 1546 account of Anne Askew’s interrogation and execution (The first examinacio[n] of Anne Askewe latelye martired in Smythfelde—The Examinations). I offer an interdisciplinary discussion of the impact of medieval hagiographies in early modern England, a subject frequently overlooked by scholars of Renaissance studies. The focus falls on the saints in The Golden Legend who represent a strong female voice and who are silenced violently. I also examine pre-and post-Reformation voyeuristic tendencies in (for instance) Foxe’s and Bale’s accounts and in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

Look at her, it’s the same old story

ABSTRACT The silencing of women’s voices and the objectification of women’s bodies have long been identified as ways in which society can facilitate men’s use of violence against them. The purpose of this article is to further this argument using salient examples and analyses from two different media forms exploring ways they might reinforce rape culture and thus violence against women in New Zealand. Drawing from two separate studies, this article looks at newspaper representations of rape and women on magazine covers; critically examining the depiction of women in these two distinct media forms across the same 40-year period (1975–2015). Both studies show silencing and objectification within the media forms in both obvious and abstract ways. Taken together, the findings provide insights into the pervasive nature of silencing and objectification of women in New Zealand media.

Editors' Introduction: Women's Health and Reproductive Justice in Ireland

Editors' Introduction:Women's Health and Reproductive Justice in Ireland Cara Delay (bio) and Claire Bracken (bio) We began conceiving of this special issue in the heady weeks and months following the May 2018 vote to repeal the republic's antiabortion Eighth Amendment (1983). For just a moment all things seemed possible in terms of Irish women's health-care rights and realities. Even then, however, our training in reproductive justice—a framework created by American Black women encouraging us to move beyond a rights-based or legalistic framework to instead focus on intersectional access to women's bodily autonomy and the real-world contexts of reproduction (Ross, Radical Reproductive Justice; Ross, "What Is Reproductive Justice?"; Sister Song; Silliman et al.)—cautioned us against being overly optimistic. In working and living in the United States, we knew firsthand that legality often is less important to abortion access than a person's race or ethnicity, region, immigration status, and/or socioeconomic status.1 In late 2018, despite the referendum in the republic, the actual abortion legislation that would emerge was unclear. Moreover, Ireland's healthcare system, especially for women, had long been, as Jo Murphy-Lawless's work both here and previously has exposed, particularly dismal (Murphy-Lawless, "The Silencing of Women in Childbirth"; Murphy-Lawless, Reading Birth and Death). When limited legal abortion was introduced in the republic in early 2019, and, later that year, Northern Ireland took steps to decriminalize abortion, it became evident that actually providing abortion services island-wide would be a [End Page 5] complicated endeavor, one that necessitated a careful examination of the entire health-care system (Bloomer et al.). Thus a more general context of women's health in Ireland helps to elucidate and unpack the complexities and impact of the postrepeal moment. This is just one of the reasons that this special issue's substantial charting of the repeal campaign, momentum, and moment is placed alongside work that explores women's health in Ireland more generally, both past and present. Reproductive Justice and the Politics of Women's Health The legacies of the past—the shame conjoined with female sexuality, the "architecture of containment" (Smith), and "shame-industrial complex" (Hogan, Republic of Shame) that placed the "deviant" in institutions, and the reality that the state consistently "has protected its institutions rather than women themselves" (Murphy-Lawless in this issue)—not only troubled Irish women's access to legal abortion but also affected the health care that they received more generally, North and South. As several essays in this issue suggest, the island's history of institutionalization in Magdalen laundries, asylums, and mother-and-baby homes should also be read alongside the realities of inadequate health care for women and their oppressions by and through the medical establishment. Biopower, writes Abby Bender in this issue, "seeps into the other spaces of the nation." More specifically, the essays collated here encourage us to expand the notion of Smith's "architecture of containment" to include hospitals and indeed all health-care systems on the island.2 Murphy-Lawless's essay, for example, explains how the maternity-care system's neoliberal, "consumer-choice" worldviews and policies have resulted in not only deficient care but in some cases tragic and unnecessary maternal deaths. The Irish health-care system's neglect of and negligence toward women is also a key focus of Beth Sundstrom's article in this issue on the cervical-cancer prevention crisis in Ireland. So too is Luz Mar Gonzalez-Arias's analysis of Celia de Fréine's poetry collection Blood Debt, an important work that stages a powerful reckoning of the medical establishment with respect to the hepatitis C scandal, which saw 1,600 women contract the virus through infected Anti-D [End Page 6] immunoglobulin in the 1970s and 1990s. Through the voice of a poetic speaker who was infected with hepatitis C, de Fréine's collection hauntingly explores the politics of women's embodiment, health, and trauma. This special issue of Éire-Ireland contains one of de Fréine's poems, "scéal scéil"/"hearsay," from Fiacha Fola (2004) and Blood Debts (2014), which...

Gendered Silence and Misdiagnosis in the Clinical Encounter: Celia de Fréine's Blood Debts and the Hepatitis C Scandal in Ireland

Gendered Silence and Misdiagnosis in the Clinical Encounter:Celia de Fréine's Blood Debts and the Hepatitis C Scandal in Ireland* Luz Mar González-Arias (bio) … a blood disorder is a whole body issue.Unanchored, migrant—blood is its own diaspora. sinÉad gleeson, constellations (37) The history of women's health care is characterized by silenced or heavily edited episodes that have contributed to the neglect of women's bodies and minds and accordingly prevented them from receiving the best possible treatments. As Hannah Devlin has contended, this prevailing attitude toward women's health has triggered "a string of health-care scandals over several decades" in which the voices of the patients have been consistently ignored. Ireland is no exception in this respect, and its history, both past and present, is punctuated by the silencing of women's voices and bodies in the clinical encounter. The death of Savita Halappanavar in October 2012 at Galway University Hospital—where, in spite of her physical distress and severe complications in the midst of a miscarriage, she was refused a termination of her pregnancy because there was still a fetal heartbeat—stands out among the recent failures of the Irish medical, religious, and political systems with respect to women, and it has left an indelible impact on the campaigns for reproductive justice in the [End Page 264] country (Holland). The CervicalCheck cancer controversy, which first emerged in 2018 and involved scores of women who received incorrect smear-test results; the brutal procedure of symphysiotomy, performed as an alternative to caesarean sections; and the hepatitis C scandal that will be the focus of this essay have also become paradigmatic examples of obstetric violence and gender imbalances in the medical history of Ireland. Celia de Fréine's collection Blood Debts, originally published in Irish as Fiacha Fola in 2004,1 and rendered into English by the author herself in 2014, is to date the only poetic articulation of the so-called hepatitis C scandal (also known as the Anti-D scandal) in Ireland. In the late 1970s about 1,600 Irish citizens, most of them women, were infected with a contaminated blood product: Anti-D immunoglobulin, also known as the Anti-D agent. The product was given to women with rhesus-negative blood who had given birth to rhesuspositive babies in order to prevent damage to the fetus in any subsequent pregnancies. This blood product was revolutionary in the prevention of rhesus disease, but it proved disastrous for the patients who received a batch manufactured in 1976 by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB) from a donor who had infective hepatitis. A number of women were diagnosed with lupus, jaundice, fatigue, and a rash, but no connection between their illnesses and the toxic agent was initially established. The scandal, which has been referred to as "Ireland's greatest medical disaster" (Keane), was made public only in 1994 when evidence was provided that the BTSB had been alerted to the possibility of contamination yet had ignored the warning.2 De Fréine is "an inhabitant of liminal spaces" (Palacios-González and González-Arias 103), and her "creative force is to be found in the rich terrain between languages, genres, geographies, and literary [End Page 265] traditions" (González-Arias, "Afterword" 102). Although mainly known as a poet, she has also published numerous essays, worked successfully in opera and filmmaking, and published and produced numerous plays. Originally from Northern Ireland, she now divides her time between Dublin and Connemara; she has been inspired and influenced by English, Irish, French, and Eastern European literary traditions; she translates her own work from Irish into English, and most of her collections have appeared in dual-language format. De Fréine is a poet who upsets traditional boundaries, a characteristic that not only flavors the formal aspects of her work but also leaves its mark on the varied themes she has worked on, the volatile relationship between health and gender featuring prominently among them. In several of her collections, for instance, de Fréine has explored posttraumatic stress disorder and the demonstrations of extreme violence against women on the part of soldiers that...

Media, Gender, Politics and Evolving Mentalities: A Discursive Construction of Female Emergence in Cameroonian Newspapers

Many feminist media studies tend to show that media’s contribution to the relegation of women to second position. Some even present the media play role in silencing women in the society. Contrary those publications, this paper demonstrates that, despite the patriarchal pressure, Cameroonian newspapers have enhanced female gender visibility in 2013. Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) as theory helps us to examine how speakers use language to represent, construct and/or negotiate meanings and values on gender. As method of data analysis, we have used the Socio cognitive Approach of Critical Discourse Analysis; it posits that our discourses reflect mental constructs to analyse discursive strategies used on articles. Essentially qualitative, the analysis centres on three main arguments supporting the idea of discursive progressive feminist visibility in politics in Cameroonian media. Firstly the reproduction of international discourses imposing women in politics; secondly, the necessity of women to fight for equity in political context is presented using linguistic strategies; and thirdly, the construction of female participation in public life as a source of hope for change. We concluded that these discursive strategies have contributed to the numerical increase of women in the political sphere during the 2013 senatorial, parliamentary and municipal elections. Although these changes are not yet strong enough, what has been achieved is a step forward to implement gender sensitivity in news reported to citizens. Women are discursively better constructed in media, and the visible effect of the said construction is that more opportunities are given to them as decision-makers.

Severed Tongues: Silencing Intellectual Women

In her essay “Silence,” in the original cluster, “Reading The Waste Land with the #MeToo Generation,” Nancy K. Gish adroitly theorizes the habit of silencing women, noting that “women are not simply individual images from many ancient texts but a series of the silenced.” This reminder of collective silencing resounded for me in profound ways—I am part of this series of the

The invaded narrator in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

ABSTRACT In Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, point of view is generally focalised through the protagonist-narrator, yet the free indirect discourse of her environment overtakes her narration frequently. This style produces an “invaded narrator” who cannot overcome or process her abuse. The protagonist-narrator is consistently bombarded by the discourse of the culture that surrounds and overtakes her. Furthermore, since the protagonist has no means of asking for help or protection from her abusers, the repeated traumas she suffers go unaddressed and untreated. In this way, Girl is a novel about the conditions which allow abuse to proliferate and trauma to remain unacknowledged and therefore unresolved, both for individuals and their wider cultures. While the novel as a form can show a chronology of development leading towards understanding and recovery, it can equally show the process whereby the discourse that created the traumatic event subsumes the victim, restricting the ways in which she can speak. The novel’s discourse silences the narrator as Irish cultural discourse has so often silenced women.

Recuperando las voces de las escritoras: una aplicación didáctica en las clases de literatura

El feminismo, gracias a su carácter interdisciplinar, posibilita la aparición de la crítica literaria feminista cuyos objetivos principales son visibilizar a las escritoras silenciadas a lo largo de la historia de la literatura, sistematizarlas en el devenir histórico y analizar sus textos para descubrir la subjetividad en el proceso creativo y las diferencias sexuales desde la perspectiva de género. La literatura, como agente de transmisión cultural, más allá de su valor estético y artístico, debe contemplar también la visión social, las interpretaciones y los valores que esconden los textos. Teniendo en cuenta estas contribuciones, planteamos una serie de propuestas didácticas que haga posible que estas aportaciones lleguen a las aulas de 4º ESO con el fin de ofrecer una visión completa de la cultura literaria y dar a conocer el papel y la visión que ofrecen las escritoras en sus obras. Considerando la flexibilidad y el carácter abierto del currículum, la educación, en este caso a través de la literatura, debe fomentar la igualdad de género y formar a ciudadanos y ciudadanas libres e iguales para crear un mundo más justo e igualitario.

Cartography of damages and resistance: Migratory route of young women from West Africa to Europe

The West African overland route to Europe has been linked to human trafficking. Along the migratory journey (which can last for years) young women experience serious episodes of violence, coercion, sale, and disappearance. Once at destination, they have to pay a very high debt (between 25,000 and 60,000 euros according to our field data) in conditions of exploitation, mainly sexual, but also labor. The silencing of women (narrative and bodily) is essential for this to take place. A fundamental objective of the project presented here is to support the young women’s processes of breaking silences without exposing them to risks or revictimization. Making use of the diverse tools offered by aesthetics, adopting the ethics of care, or recognizing the value of life experiences has been part of our work. Through this choral text, we assembled narrative remnants of women that represent their experience at different territories of the route. We have worked with them, we have followed their transits and tried to create discursive bridges. The continuous dialogue has sought to shed light on the damage of the road, but also on the resistance. This article collects some examples of the young migrant women’s confrontation with the imposed silences.

“I Would Have Taken This to My Grave, Like Most Women”: Reporting Sexual Harassment during the #MeToo movement in India

AbstractOne core concern of workplace sexual harassment is the low rate of reporting, which arguably adds to its suppression and consequent individualization of harassment. The recent #MeToo movements across the globe have been focal points for women to report incidents of sexual harassment. I examined what it has meant for women in India to speak about their experiences of sexual harassment in broadcast media news interviews during the #MeToo movement. Discursive psychological examination showed that interviewers and interviewees (women who were reporting) attended to and managed issues with the perceived legitimacy of reporting sexual harassment. Interviewees had to account for their reporting in the context of the #MeToo movement while managing not to be seen as being swept up by it. Women treated these concerns as gendered phenomena rather than merely interpersonal in justifying their reporting and the #MeToo movement. These findings are discussed in relation to research on silencing of women's voices in reporting, the role of media, and broadly addressing sexism and sexual harassment at the workplace.