Carol Harrington

• Victoria University of Wellington

This chapter analyses how professional, trade, business, and managerial publications covered #MeToo. Many such publications published reflective pieces and offered advice on the significance of #MeToo and appropriate responses to it. The chapter shows that commentators represented #MeToo as a problem of men’s conduct, specifically senior men sexual...

This chapter analyses how discourses of toxic masculinity and associated terms such as wounded masculinity and father hunger arose in the context of neoliberal economic and social transformations. The chapter explores the origins of such discourse in late twentieth-century mythopoetic men’s movements and shows how it influenced therapeutic and soci...

This chapter synthesizes themes from the previous chapters to argue that neoliberal political rationality is a thoroughly gendered and produces a characteristic politics of sexual violence. Neoliberal sexual violence politics constructs traditional femininity and masculinity as produced by cultural norms that may disrupt the proper functioning of g...

This chapter introduces governmental and elites’ apparent embrace of feminist anti-sexual violence politics, most recently with the extraordinary traction gained by #MeToo, as a puzzle worthy of further analysis. The chapter explains how key concepts of “problematization,” “neoliberal rationality,” “post-feminism,” and “popular feminism” throw ligh...

This chapter analyses how neoliberal political rationality has put gender equality and sexual violence on governmental agendas in a new way. The chapter argues that governmental and corporate support for gender equality emerged as much from neoliberal political rationality as from feminist campaigns. Neoliberal policy intellectuals recommend drawin...

The United Nations’(UN) response to reports of UN personnel perpetrating sexual violence proclaims “zero-tolerance for sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA).” Drawing on Carol Bacchi's “what's the problem represented to be (WPR)?” framework, this article unpacks how UN policy solutions represent the problem of SEA. It explores the discursive effects...

Coined in late 20th-century men’s movements, “toxic masculinity” spread to therapeutic and social policy settings in the early 21st century. Since 2013, feminists began attributing misogyny, homophobia, and men’s violence to toxic masculinity. Around the same time, feminism enjoyed renewed popularization. While some feminist scholars use the concep...

John Roberton’s Kalogynomia (1821) and Alexander Walker’s Beauty (1836) claimed to be scientific works teaching readers to appreciate female beauty. The books present explicit sexual content in technical anatomical prose. We situate these books in the context of late-Georgian radical publishing. We argue that they occupy an interesting intersection...

Review of Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood. A case for the enduring relevance of Shulamith Firestone.

This article presents a qualitative analysis of conversations about rape in the comments sections of two popular feminist websites: Jezebel and xoJane. Focussing on comment threads about first-hand experiences of sexual violence and problematic heterosex, I show that commenters produced an analysis of rape as on a continuum with less extreme forms...

Why have proposals to “tackle demand” for sex workers by criminalizing their clients gained political traction in the UK? This article treats sex work policy debates as a site of contested norms concerning gender, sexuality, individual agency and the market. I argue that recent shifts away from a male breadwinner/female homemaker model of family li...

This article considers the YouTube ‘My Rape Story’ genre in light of critical feminist analyses of rape survivor stories. The feminist mobilization that developed out of the political ferment of 1968 told a ‘rape story’ of male power and women’s oppression. However, as first-hand rape stories proliferated in late 20th-century popular media, psychol...

This article examines digital media debate over sexual violence by analyzing news reports and reader comments on the rape allegations against WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. Through analysis of the Guardian and New York Times, the article shows how this case became a flash-point for debate about feminist constructions of sexual violence. News re...

Feminists have celebrated success in gendering security discourse and practice since the end of the Cold War. Scholars have adapted theories of contentious politics to analyze how transnational feminist networks achieved this. I argue that such theories would be enhanced by richer conceptualizations of how transnational feminist networks produce an...

This article analyses expert discourse on prostitution in New Zealand and Sweden using governmentality theory. The article shows that in both cases, experts adopted research methodologies based in criticism of past research as supporting heterosexual male hegemony. New Zealand experts emphasized giving voice to prostitutes as a marginalized, predom...

Social movement scholars credit feminist transnational advocacy networks with putting violence against women on the United Nations (UN) security agenda, as evidenced by Resolution 1325 and numerous other UN Security Council statements on gender, peace and security. Such accounts neglect the significance of superpower politics for shaping the aims o...

This paper argues that international security forces in Timor Leste depend upon civilian partners in HIV/AIDs "knowledge networks" to monitor prostitutes' disease status. These networks produce mobile expertise, techniques of government and forms of personhood that facilitate international government of distant populations without overt coercion. H...

In the 1990s, feminist scholars on the politics of rape experienced a sudden surge of interest in their, until then, marginal field. Why was the 1990s the right time for rape to become an international security problem? Furthermore, why suddenly in the 1990s did rape become problematized as an international issue not just by the feminist fringes of...

The surprising authority of gender expertise on sexual violence within post-Cold War peacekeeping can be understood by tracing how sexual violence became linked with political torture and combat violence in peacekeeping security rationality. The linkage emerged from the development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) theory within anti-Vietnam...

In December 2002 the UN adopted a definition of ‘trafficking’ that critics worry discounts female agency in commercial sex and migration. This definition was already being used in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) and Kosovo to tackle the violent sex industry that had developed alongside peacekeeping. This paper analyses official assumptions about female ag...

This paper is based in analysis of texts of interviews with 21 urban Pakeha mothers of young children. It argues that the Pakeha mother identity, understood as the point of suture between subjectivity and social processes of representation [Hall, Stuart (1996a). Who needs identity? In: Stuart Hall & Paul du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identit...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Victoria University of Wellington, 1996. Includes bibliography.