This article examines sexual harassment in the context of the new economy and highlights the manner in which the changing nature of work — and in particular the acknowledged rise of sexualized ‘body work’ — troubles conventional understandings of what constitutes sexual harassment in the workplace and the means to address it. Using data from a small‐scale qualitative study of service workers and professional employees, we explore the ways in which those definitions of sexual harassment now fail to match participants' accounts of their working lives. We examine sexual harassment in the context of the rise of service roles that require forms of increasingly sexualized ‘body work’ from employees, increased demands for workers to ‘self‐manage’, and new flexible modes of employment that blur the boundaries between being ‘on’ and ‘off’ the job. We conclude that these ‘new’ modes of work may provide the conditions for the revival of ‘old’ stories which limit the capacity of individuals to recognize and label behaviours as ‘sexual harassment’.

No abstract

No abstract

Archives retain a sustained gravitational pull on feminist researchers. We experience them as sites of promise and desire, even as we recognise they are also sites of power and privilege that have long been implicated in acts of violence and erasure. We celebrate the growth in online social and cultural data and the new questions, methods and debates that this proliferation supports, at the same time as we ask what feminist archival research looks like in an era when the metaphor of the archive is invoked to cover almost any kind of memory, collection or accumulation. Importantly, we also acknowledge that our work as feminists is conditioned by the toolsepistemological and technicalavailable to us at any given point in time. For this reason, contributors here are keen to mark out what may be novel and what is enduring in the ways in which feminist thought and feminist practice frame archives. What follows are some initial provocations along these lines. If, as Susan Howe has observed, 'the nature of archival research is in flux' (2014, 9), it is critical to ask what this means for feminist researchers. Howe was pointing to the impact of digital technologies on the experience of being in the archive and there is no question that largescale digitisation projects have brought about monumental changes in our understanding of what an archive is and in the 'what' and 'how' of archival research. If archival research was previously synonymous with the 'need to see and touch objects and documents' (Howe 2014, 9), that experience is increasingly digitally mediated. Digital technologies have transformed archival access for researchers in ways that offer degrees of democratisation for what was once an elite practice available principally to the privileged few with time, money and credentials. Further, as Deborah Withers observes, 'the digital has enabled greater immediate access to feminism's already-there, as well as emergent proximities to archival materialities existing under the digital skin-screen' (2015, 27). Yet mass digitisation and the affordances of web 2.0 technologies are not without their challenges. The cost of developing and maintaining digital archival environments has seen major shifts in budget priorities within and across collecting institutions, frequently against a background of widespread and sustained budget cuts. How then might feminist researchers begin to talk about these new and emerging political economies of archiving and the various forms of labourold and newthat they demand? After all, as Stacie Williams has pointedly observed, 'there is a cultural expectation that archivists will work without complaint, for very little and if we are lacking resources, we will hire volunteers or unpaid interns to do the work' (2016). Can we, for example, acknowledge archiving as an historically highly feminised profession at the same time as pointing to the ways in which archival labourlike academic labour-'is often times unequal, rooted historically in sexism, racism, ableism, and classism' (Williams 2016)? Ho...

No abstract

Digital formats are often popularly imagined to spell the 'end' of paper. In this essay I pose a series of questions about the importance of materiality for how researchers understand and work with archived paper documents. Drawing examples from research among literary papers and personal correspondence, I highlight the ways in which paper traditionally 'disappears' from the researcher's view and ask whether the conditions of the digital turn may in fact provide for a return to 'thinking through paper'.

No abstract

No abstract