“A Spider on Your Shoulder”: Workplace Sexual Harassment Through a Narrative Lens

We theorize workplace sexual harassment in terms of narrative. Two case studies – one at Ford Motor Company plants, the other involving former New York State governor Andrew Cuomo – ground thematic analysis of victims’ accounts of experiences of harassment and commentary on their capacity to give accounts. We identify six challenges - features of workplace harassment and its social context - that victims face in narrating harassment, which facilitate abuse and undermine redress: (1) ambiguity of meaning; (2) stepwise harassment; (3) coerced co-participation; (4) admonitions/mechanisms against telling; (5) competing narrative constructions; and (6) storyteller marginalization. Anti-harassment efforts should target these challenges.