Show Them a Good Time: Organizing the Intersections of Sexual Violence
Kate Lockwood Harris1
AbstractEngaging with calls from organization scholars, I analyze the communicative mechanisms through which individuals, rather than organizations, become the focus in discussions of violence. Reading a legal decision regarding rape at the University of Colorado, I argue that organizational conceptualizations of sexual violence are marginalized as (a) noncommunicative, container models of organization are prioritized and (b) violence is understood as an action rather than one element in a system of meaning. On the basis of this analysis, I offer a feminist rereading of the case that identifies the organization as a participant in sexual violence. To recognize not only individual, but also organizational sexual violence, I suggest that scholars problematize the racialized gendering of organization. Further, I show that a communicative approach that articulates complex relationships between meaning and action is central for highlighting the intersectionality of sexual violence and for unmooring sexually violent agency from individuated physicality.
Keywordsfeminism, intersectionality, masculinity, organizational violence, race, Title IX
1University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Corresponding Author:Kate Lockwood Harris, Department of Communication, University of Colorado, 270 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309, USA. Email: [email protected]
506519 MCQ27410.1177/0893318913506519Management Communication QuarterlyHarrisresearch-article2013
In the summer of 2012, Jerry Sandusky’s sexual assaults on boys created controversy around Pennsylvania State University, and the public focused blame on Sandusky and a few other key university personnel. Scholars have noted that both popular and academic accounts of violence—like those con-cerning Penn State—often start and end with an individual’s actions (e.g., Presser, 2005; !i"ek, 2008), making an organization’s role in violence diffi-cult to discern. Given these dominant understandings of violence, Catley and Jones (2002) suggested that researchers “consider, in concrete practical situ-ations, how decisions come to be made on violence and to see how certain representations come to be systematically ‘disposed of’ in the process” (p. 33). In other words, Catley and Jones invite scholars to examine how discussions of violence focus so wholly on single human perpetrators that concepts of organizational violence are marginalized or altogether absent. In this piece, I take up this call. Through an analysis of a legal decision regard-ing sexual violence at the University of Colorado, I argue that, in this case, the disposal of organizational representations of sexual violence occurred as gendered and raced, noncommunicative approaches to organization were adopted. As I draw out the analysis, I develop an organizational understand-ing of sexual violence that is both intersectional and communicative, one that accounts for whiteness in organizational scholarship and is sensitive to the consequences of a division between physical and verbal action. To begin, I offer brief definitions of key terms and a discussion of relevant organiza-tional research to identify existing academic assumptions about the connec-tions between organization and violence.
Sexual Violence, Intersectionality, and OrganizationIn this article, sexual violence refers to rape, other forms of sexual assault, and intimate partner violence. Sexual harassment is also a form of sexual violence, although it is less central for this piece. Working from a gender-based violence frame, scholars call important attention to how power operates in sexual violence. A gender-only approach, however, is prob-lematic because it works in the service of White privilege (e.g., Smith, 2005; P. J. Williams, 2009). Thus, I approach sexual violence through the lens of intersectionality.
Intersectionality is “the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axis [sic] of differentiation—economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective, and experiential—intersect in historically spe-cific contexts” (Brah & Phoenix, 2004, p. 76). Developed primarily among critical race theorists and feminists, intersectionality grapples with the
570 Management Communication Quarterly 27(4)
relationships among gender, race, class, sexuality, and other differences. Crenshaw (1991), for example, argued that the law, social services, and jus-tice movements tend to focus on a single category, either gender or race, neglecting violent experiences at the intersections of gender and race. Intersectionality has become increasingly important in organizational schol-arship (e.g., Acker, 2006; Baines, 2010), and in this piece, I prioritize a dis-cursive approach to intersectionality (e.g., Dill, McLaughlin, & Nieves, 2007; Flores, 2006), one that departs from a pure identity politics tradition. This work attends less to the specific identity markers with which an indi-vidual or a group of individuals is affiliated. Instead, it focuses on the ways in which discourses of race, gender, and other differences depend upon one another for their meaning.1
Working primarily without intersectional frameworks, organizational scholars tend to cast the relationship between violence and organization in one of two (sometimes overlapping) ways: Violence is an inherent property of organization, or violence occurs in an organization. Scholars who discuss violence of organization argue that violence is present anytime order is imposed on a (naturally) more chaotic state (e.g., Bergin & Westwood, 2003; Pelzer, 2003). Further, this scholarship tends to view violence as inevitable and ever-present, thus, not eradicable. Scholars who discuss violence in orga-nizations tend to conceptualize violence in interpersonal terms (e.g., Chamberlain, Crowley, Tope, & Hodson, 2008; Salin, 2003). That is, vio-lence is located in moments where one person injures another, and it is only incidentally organizational because of the work context in which it occurs. Neither approach to violence develops a robust sense of organizational agency or complicity in the perpetration of violence. In the first case, although organizations can be violent, that violence can be excused because an organi-zation cannot exist without being violent: Organizational nonviolence is impossible. In the second case, a distinction between violence and nonvio-lence is present; however, individuals alone perpetrate violence.
In organizational scholarship, studies of sexual violence have focused almost exclusively on sexual harassment, not rape (e.g., Scarduzio & Geist-Martin, 2010). These studies offer some threads for developing an organiza-tional (rather than individual) understanding of sexual violence. For example, Dougherty and Smythe (2004) argued that sexual harassment exceeds inter-actions between any two people, and Taylor and Conrad (1992) argued that communicative organizational features make sexual harassment likely. Although this literature moves away from individual understandings of per-petration, it locates violence almost exclusively in the realm of verbal inter-action. To date, few studies explicate the organization’s role in forms of sexual violence, such as sexual assault, that cannot be located only in
Harris 571
discourse. Further, like organizational communication literature as a whole (Ashcraft & Allen, 2003; Nkomo, 1992), scholarship on sexual harassment has rarely been intersectional. With two notable exceptions (Forbes, 2009; Richardson & Taylor, 2009), sexual harassment has been framed as an exclu-sively gender-based form of violence. Even Hearn and Parkin’s (2001) excel-lent work on organizational violation has not attended to the racial dynamics of sexuality.
In the following analysis, I work in conversation with this existing litera-ture. I draw upon elements of both a violence of and a violence in organiza-tion approach. I position organization as a participant in the perpetration of sexual violence but do not suggest that organization is inherently or inevita-bly a site of violence. Further, I show that it is useful to think of sexual vio-lence in organizations when coupled with agency located beyond individuals. Working in these directions, I push toward more fully intersectional accounts of the relationship between sexual violence and organization, ones that use communication to center the relationship between violent physicality and meaning.
Context and BackgroundIn the early 2000s, seven students at The University of Colorado Boulder (CU), brought allegations of rape and other sexual assaults against CU foot-ball players and recruits. Two women pressed charges under the U.S. civil rights law, Title IX, arguing that the use of alcohol and sex during recruitment of football players led to an unequal and discriminatory educational environ-ment for females. District court ruled in favor of the university, but an appeals court reversed the decision and awarded $2.5 million in damages to the plaintiffs.
During recruitment, potential team members were assigned female “Ambassadors” to guide them during campus visits. One recruit reported that he was taken to a strip club (Simpson v. University of Colorado, 2007). The athletic program paid for exotic dancers for recruits, and a member of the football training staff made calls to an escort service before a recruitment party (Conyers, 2004). One recruit who was present when the plaintiffs were assaulted said that other recruits had sex with female students at a local hotel and that the players promised him similar access to sex during his visit. The players also promised the recruit that he could expect sex every weekend if he joined the team (Simpson v. University of Colorado, 2007).
The cases of rape at CU occur within a broader context in which sexual violence is prevalent on U.S. college campuses. Fisher, Cullen, and Turner (2000) established that nearly one in four U.S. college women experience
572 Management Communication Quarterly 27(4)
rape by graduation. Indeed, the highly visible Penn State scandal is only one of many cases of sexual violence in U.S. institutions of higher education. Since 2012 alone, Amherst, Berkeley, Dartmouth, Occidental, Otterbein, Swarthmore, University of Montana, University of North Carolina, University of Southern California, and Yale have all been criticized, investigated, or found liable for sexual violence on campus. Public attention to this problem has brought questions about violent agency to the fore. In other words, pars-ing the relationship between sexual violence and organization has been the tacit theoretical work of administrators, legislators, and laypeople alike. As I detail in the next section outlining my analytic approach for this article, these questions were central in the CU case.
Methodology and Analytic StrategyIn the following analysis, I offer a close reading of The U.S. District Court decision in Simpson v. University of Colorado (2005). Unlike many other Title IX cases, this one involves violence perpetrated by more than one indi-vidual. The judge considers (and ultimately rejects) arguments about a gener-alized, organizational risk of sexual violence and the university’s deliberate indifference to that risk. Thus, the case provides an opportunity to examine how individual conceptualizations of violence prevail in discourse, even given arguments about organizational violence. Following an interdisciplin-ary community of scholars, I assume that legal discourse is constitutive and that social and legal concepts shape one another (Burman, 2010; Hengehold, 2000; Niemi-Kiesiläinen, Honkatukia, & Ruuskanen, 2007). I evaluate nei-ther the legal merit of the judge’s claims nor his individual intentions. Rather, I assume that the decision both deploys and draws upon gender and race in ways that further figure these and other differences (Cuklanz, 1996; Harris, 1993; Hasian, 2004). As McGee (1990) did, I assume that what seems to be an independent, single-authored text is really “a dense reconstruction of all the bits of other discourses from which it was made” (p. 279).
My approach to analysis is critical: I am concerned with unmarked accu-mulations of power and obfuscated intersections of privilege. My critical affiliations are rooted primarily through feminist theory, and my analysis shares some of the tensions associated with critical rhetoric (Ono & Sloop, 1992). Part of my reading is grounded in what I can point to in the text itself, but I also look for what is missing. As McKerrow (1989) said, “absence is as important as presence” (p. 107, emphasis in original) in critical rhetoric and other projects designed to unmask normalized privilege (e.g., Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Carrillo Rowe, 2000). In organizational communication, proj-ects like these often approach textual absence through deconstruction (e.g.,
Harris 573
Calás & Smircich, 1991; Mumby & Stohl, 1991). My analytic strategy reso-nates with the critical impulse of this work, however, because of my intersec-tional commitments, I move away from deconstruction’s emphasis on binaries.
To mark absence and develop alternative readings, I draw together what, for some, may seem to be distinct levels of analysis. I take the judge’s deci-sion as a nondiscrete unit and tack back and forth between a close reading of the text itself and the larger social contexts in which that text was generated. This poststructuralist impulse draws upon Ashcraft and Mumby’s (2004) “fourth frame,” which problematizes and expands appropriate objects of study for organizational research. This analytic approach focuses on “the organizing function of texts designed for public or popular consumption . . . In this sense, it has the capacity to reveal intertextuality across institutional messages, exposing discursive affiliations and tensions ordinarily outside the scope of organization analysis” (p. 22). Rather than looking at texts gen-erated within a single, discrete organization, I work from a tradition that fuses organizations and social worlds (e.g., Brummans, 2007; Taylor & Carlone, 2001). As I draw together that which is present in the text and bits of discourse from the larger social context, I position myself, as McKerrow (1989) suggested, as “an arguer or advocate for an interpretation of the col-lected fragments” (p. 108).
To weave together these fragments of text and context, I read and ana-lyze proceeding through four phases. First, I mark the ways in which the judge argues for an individualized understanding of violence and against an organizational conceptualization. Second, I identify theoretical resources that could be used to counter those arguments. Third, I return to the judge’s argument and ask, “What is missing from this discussion of sexual vio-lence?” Finally, I offer an alternative reading of the case, sensitive to the absences in the decision and grounded in the theoretical resources I iden-tify. As I proceed, theory and method fold together, as is often the case for rhetorical analyses (Jasinski, 2001). The theory is the critical reading prac-tice, one that seeks to interrupt the dominant, individualized understandings of violence in Simpson v. University of Colorado. The burdens associated with this method are not subsumed under generalizability and validity. Instead, the quality of a critical reading rests in what Misgeld called “the possibility of the incorporation of its insights into practically consequential interpretations of social situations” (as cited in McKerrow, 1989, p. 92). To illustrate the ways in which my analysis meets this standard, I conclude the analysis by discussing how this critical reading offers an interpretive appa-ratus for other contexts.
574 Management Communication Quarterly 27(4)
Dismissing Organizational Conceptualizations of ViolenceTo argue that the university was not deliberately indifferent to the risk of sexual assault, the judge relied on two ideas. First, in a line of reasoning I call “It’s a private problem,” the judge conceptualized the institution as a con-tainer. Second, in a line of reasoning I label “He did it,” the judge assumed that causes of violence are noncommunicative. Together, these two elements of the decision deny the organization’s role in sexual violence. In the two fol-lowing sections, I detail the ways in which this denial was accomplished, and I point toward theoretical resources that begin to disrupt these moves.
It’s a Private Problem: Assuming Organizations Are ContainersIn this section, I examine the ways in which a racialized gendering of the organization is secured through recourse to a container metaphor. Arguments regarding formal membership in the university and the privacy of sexuality reinforce the notion that the university has discrete boundaries and, in so doing, distance the organization from involvement in sexual violence.
For the district court judge, formal membership at CU is a key criterion for evaluating harassment charges, one that reinforces the idea of an inside and outside to the organization. The judge argues, “Harassment of nonstudents does not deprive a CU student of access to educational benefits or opportuni-ties” (Simpson v. University of Colorado, 2005, p. 1237). Thus, if a group of students are at a party, and a CU student harasses or assaults a young woman who is not a student, this does not constitute interference with education. When considering violence, one is either in or out of the organization.
The judge later extends this argument about formal membership such that the notion of a clearly demarcated inside and outside to the university is rein-forced. In 1999 and 2000, one football team trainer and one football team member were convicted of assaulting their wives. The judge argues that these episodes “involved spouses, not students, and occurred in a private context” (Simpson v. University of Colorado, 2005, pp. 1238-1239, emphasis added). In this rationale, the judge repeats the earlier argument about formal member-ship and suggests that “spouses” (not formal members) and “students” (for-mal members) are mutually exclusive categories. This distinction evokes identifiable, rigid boundaries for the university. The judge reinforces these boundaries when he uses the word “private,” thereby positioning the univer-sity as a public space and suggesting that intimate partner violence is outside the university’s purview. Combined with the judge’s use of the word spouse, this statement implies a (heteronormative) division between the
Harris 575
organizational sphere (of university, work, and publicity) and the home sphere (of domesticity, life, and privacy). If events at home do not have an impact on educational opportunity at the university, then the two must be insulated from one another. Both spheres are contained such that they do not overlap and can be meaningfully distinguished.
To disrupt this argument, I pursue an alternative line of reasoning: Whether violence is inside or outside an organization should be considered as a matter of degree, not as an absolute. Although students and nonstudent spouses of university employees have different relationships to the organization, a rela-tionship exists in both cases. For students who live and learn on campus, the “public” university is part of the “private” home. Further, because nonstudent spouses are frequently present at university social and sporting events, are likely to perform labor (paid or unpaid) in support of their spouses’ employ-ment, and are likely to be financially interdependent with if not dependent on the university, some spouses are arguably more fully inside the organization than students. This line of reasoning requires that violence committed against nonstudents and nonstudent spouses be considered in some cases. I next trace available theoretical resources that help to support this alternative argument.
Feminists have long argued that sexual assaults are not private issues and that claims to privacy excuse perpetrators for this social (and thus, public) problem (e.g., Pateman, 1989; Schneider, 1991). Clair (1993) argued that when episodes of sexual violence are framed as personal and private, the organization is “relieved of its accountability/responsibility in the matter” (p. 131). Yet assertions that this problem should be understood as public tend to preserve a problematic public/private dichotomy, one that has racialized consequences.2 Bograd (2005), for example, argued that framing intimate partner violence as public erases attention to pervasive violence against peo-ple of color at the hands of nonintimates in public institutional spaces. In concert with this argument, Pearson (2007) argued that “violence and victim-age become intelligible” (p. 257) through reference to “white familial inti-macy” (p. 258, emphasis added). That is, available understandings of violence are not only already rooted in notions of privacy, but are also racialized. Consequently, to disrupt the judge’s argument about the privacy of violence by insisting that violence is really (and solely) a public problem risks rein-forcing the antiviolence movement’s prioritized concern for violence against White women. Instead, an alternative argument should work to disrupt the public–private bifurcation and draw attention to the racialization of sexual violence. Next, I turn to resources for disrupting the public–private bifurcation.
An organizational conceptualization of sexual violence, in which violence is both public and private, might draw on three useful strands of thought.
576 Management Communication Quarterly 27(4)
First, some feminist organizational scholarship has directly challenged an easy division between public and private (e.g., Ashcraft, 2005). Scholars who focus on work–life research have discussed a perceived distinction between the sites of paid and unpaid labor that does not match a reality in which the two sites and forms of work are intricately interwoven (e.g., Golden, Kirby, & Jorgenson, 2006; Linstead, 1997). In contrast to popular understandings of campus life, this research helps to build an argument that students labor to become educated, and living (and working) in affiliation with a university is part of that labor.3
Research on organizational sexuality provides a second strand of scholar-ship useful for troubling the public–private distinction in the service of an organizational conceptualization of sexual violence (e.g., Brewis & Linstead, 2000; Fleming, 2007; Gherardi, 1995). This scholarship suggests that orga-nizations will, at times, actively disavow sexuality in organizational life. This disavowal supports the dominance of technical rationality and dis-courses of efficiency and renders “passion” and “emotion” separate from work. The organization is thus cast as a masculinized space. Consequently, what appears to be a desirable absence of sexuality in workplaces is really the hegemony of hetero-masculine (“rational”) versions of sexuality and organization. This research usefully draws out the ways in which organiza-tions, under the guise of being asexual spaces, depend upon and appropriate dominant, normative sexualities to organize. It does not, however, develop a discussion of the racialized sexualities affiliated with organizations.
The organizational sexuality scholarship, developed primarily during the 1990s, when critical gender analytics were increasingly popular, rarely artic-ulates a claim available through feminist and critical race scholarship outside the subdiscipline: “Rationalized” sexuality is not only associated with mas-culinity, but also with whiteness. This racialization is a missing part of claims about the “public” space of organization that, in this case, works against an organizational conceptualization of sexual violence. Because private spaces are usually cast as sites of violence, a full disruption of the public/private dichotomy around organizations must attend to the ways in which “public” becomes code for nonviolence, and simultaneously, for whiteness. In subse-quent sections I return to this idea and weave it together with troubling ste-reotypes about Black masculinities.
A more porous understanding of organization, threaded through feminist, organizational, and intersectional scholarship, draws attention to the broad cultural discourses in which organizations are embedded. In this case, atten-tion to the racialized sexualization of organization is of particular importance. For purposes of an organizational conceptualization of sexual violence, epi-sodes that occur apparently outside the organization and people who seem to
Harris 577
be outside the organization exist in some kind of relationship to the organiza-tion. The task for moving toward an organizational conceptualization of sex-ual violence, then, is to articulate and analyze these relationships. I take up this task in the next two sections.
He Did It: Assuming Violence Has Discrete CausesIn the previous section, I noted that the judge considers violence to be orga-nizational only in cases where both perpetrator and victim are formal organi-zational members and where violence occurs in public contexts. In this section of analysis, I show how the judge also renders events that meet these criteria to be outside the purview of organizational involvement in violence. This move is accomplished when the causes of violence are evaluated through a behaviorist framework, one that reinforces an individual conceptualization of sexual violence.
These tacit assumptions appear when the judge discusses a series of events: the rape of former CU football player Katie Hnida, the team’s hiring of a former student onto the coaching staff after that person had been banned from campus for assaulting a woman, and the rape of a student at a 1997 recruitment party. The judge says,
I conclude that these events have little relevance to the issue of . . . the risk in question: the risk that CU football players and recruits would sexually assault female university students as part of the recruiting program, and that those assaults would be aided by excessive alcohol use. (Simpson v. University of Colorado, 2005, p. 1238)
Applying the judge’s criteria, the rape of the student in 1997 is perhaps of “little relevance” because she was in high school, not a formal member of the university. The other two events, however, appear to fit the judge’s criteria, so he must rely on other assumptions to conclude that these two events “have little relevance.” The judge implies that prior assaults are not a good predictor of future assaults. This argument makes sense if the judge starts by assuming that individuals cause violence. Lisak and Miller (2002), however, have dem-onstrated that although the majority of men do not sexually assault women, those who do often do so repeatedly. This research implies that an individual who has committed sexual assault in the past is more likely to commit sexual assault in the future. The risk of an individual committing assault, however, is not the question in this district court decision. Instead, the question is whether the university was deliberately indifferent to a generalized risk of sexual assault. The rationale used to answer this question is circular:
578 Management Communication Quarterly 27(4)
Organizations are not responsible for violence because individuals are responsible for violence.
The judge makes this assumption explicit elsewhere. He rehearses (and positions himself as sympathetic to) the university’s argument that legal prec-edent for Title IX claims require that harassment (including sexual assault) be “undertaken by a particular individual” and that “both the risk and the poten-tial remedies [be] focused on one individual” (Simpson v. University of Colorado, 2005, p. 1235). It follows that multiple prior incidents of sexual assault were not relevant because the “risk at hand” was already defined as the risk of individual violent perpetration. According to this logic, organiza-tions can be considered complicit in sexual violence if they know that an individual is likely to perpetrate sexual violence, but organizations cannot be considered culpable for organizational practices or processes that may enhance the general risk of violence in that organizational context.
Where a generalized risk of violence might be reasonably perceived, the judge sets aside these moments by making claims about the causes of vio-lence. Discussing the use of alcohol and marijuana and the employment of strippers and escorts as part of the recruitment program, the judge argues,
Although many people find some or all of these activities offensive, especially when they perceive that they are sanctioned by the University, participation in any or all of these activities does not inexorably lead to sexual assault—a fortiori, of female CU students. (Simpson v. University of Colorado, 2005, p. 1242)
In other words, these activities are not to be considered in questions about organizational involvement in sexual assault because they do not cause sex-ual violence. The assertion that drinking, smoking pot, watching strippers, and hiring escorts do not cause sexual violence is unarguable. To my knowl-edge, no discrete cause of sexual violence has been (or can be) identified. If causality is the grounds upon which a generalized organizational involve-ment in the risk of sexual assault is evaluated, can an organization ever be complicit when sexual violence happens?
An alternative argument is available, one that is concerned not primarily with causality but with communication and its relationship to sexual vio-lence. Consider this line of reasoning: The preponderance of cases of sexual violence that had already occurred suggests to university members that vio-lence is normal or even expected. Moreover, organizational events suggest that men affiliated with the university may commit violence against women with impunity. This suggestion is most pronounced when, so that he can work for the football program, a former student’s ban from campus for assaulting a woman is lifted. Perhaps the most important space in which to consider
Harris 579
communication about sexual violence is around the team’s employment of strippers, escorts, alcohol, marijuana, and female student “Ambassadors” as part of the recruitment program. None of these activities cause sexual vio-lence, but together they support a system of meaning around women’s value and role in university life. Through its appropriation of those systems of meaning for purposes of athletic recruitment, the university can be consid-ered indifferent to the risk of sexual violence. Below I draw upon existing scholarship that helps to ground the theoretical impetus for this argument.
Feminist scholarship on rape myths provides one useful conceptual thread for countering the judge’s framework (see Edwards, Turchik, Dardis, Reynolds, & Gidycz, 2011). This body of research suggests that communica-tion about sexual violence normalizes and legitimates that violence. Rape myths make sexual violence seem less severe, blame victims for their own violation, and vilify men of color through reference to hypersexualized and violent stereotypes. This work is useful not because rape myths are explicitly operating in the district court decision, but because it establishes that systems of meaning are important to consider when evaluating sexually violent perpe-tration. This link between meaning and action is especially clear in empirical studies that establish a correlation between subscription to rape myths and the perpetration of gendered violence (e.g., Abbey, 2005). Drawing upon this area of scholarship, one can argue that the university was complicit in sexual violence because officially sanctioned university activities were associated with the objectified sexualization of women, and objectified sexualization enables sexual violence.
Communication scholarship offers a second strand to develop this alterna-tive argument, one that resonates with the feminist work I outline. The rape myth literature establishes that an individual is more likely to perpetrate vio-lence if he or she subscribes to attitudes and beliefs that reflect heteronorma-tive and racialized social values. A communicative approach helps to trouble this individualized conceptualization of violence by complicating under-standings of agency and by linking meaning and action. In what follows, I outline a general discussion of these communicative resources and then illus-trate their application with a reading of the case through poststructuralist feminist approaches to discourse.
First, a communicative approach complicates dominant, individual notions of agency, ones that animate the judge’s argument about violence. The discipline of communication studies problematizes a bounded, autono-mous actor. Craig (1999) stated that the “focus, central intellectual role, and . . . cultural mission” of the field is to critique a transmissive approach to communication (p. 125). If communication is not (merely) a go-between for two distinct parties, then it must always involve historical, cultural, and
580 Management Communication Quarterly 27(4)
interactional elements. From this approach, communication cannot be understood to emanate from any discrete origin. Thus, the notion of an iso-lated actor (whether a person or bounded organization) is no longer useful as an assertion of ontological fact. Although “individuated entity” may be a useful heuristic and pragmatic device, especially in continuing to hold per-petrators of violence accountable for their actions, a communicative, organi-zational theory of sexual violence would disrupt “many commonplace assumptions, especially our tendencies to . . . overattribute moral responsi-bility to individuals for problems . . . that are largely societal in origin” (Craig, 1999, p. 146). Second, a communicative approach links meaning with action, and this link would transform the judge’s rendering of the facts of this case. Where the judge’s approach suggests that actions cause other actions, communicative approaches suggest that action always involves hermeneutics. Craig (1999) argued that these constitutive claims are central for the field: communication makes things.4 In this communicative approach, meaning is centrally important because it generates the world. Explanations of events in the world, then, must involve communication.
Feminist poststructuralist approaches to discourse offer one way to work through these communicative claims. Like the general communicative prin-ciples I outline, these approaches to discourse (located in both communication and interdisciplinary scholarly communities) trouble the notion of an individ-uated subject and assign some force to discourse (Gavey & Schmidt, 2011). In the section that follows, I illustrate the ways in which a poststructuralist, femi-nist, discursive reading of the case—informed by moves to (a) complicate container models of organization, (b) disrupt solely individual conceptualiza-tions of agency, and (c) highlight constitutive claims—produces a more orga-nizational conceptualization of sexual violence.
Show Them a Good Time: Organizing the Intersections of Sexual ViolenceAttending to that which is missing from discourse, in this section I pursue an absence in the judge’s decision: an analysis of what it means to show recruits a “good time” and do a “good job of entertaining [them]” (Simpson v. University of Colorado, 2007, p. 20). The CU football program lured recruits by intimating that new athletes would have access to alcohol, drugs, parties, and women. Joining the team promised enhanced social, sexual, and material capital, and that promise was secured by positioning women as sexual objects (as “Ambassadors,” exotic dancers, escorts, and as providers of sex for poten-tial team members). I argue that, in these recruitment practices, a classed
Harris 581
version of heterosexuality was being sold, one that afforded members of the Buffs football team the benefits of hegemonic masculinity and the power to consume.
Successful recruitment depended on the idea that accrued privileges for athletes at CU would be greater than those at other schools. Barnett, head coach at the time, stated that CU’s strategies were consistent with peer insti-tutions’ practices, and that CU’s football team would be at a “competitive disadvantage” if recruitment did not include parties and women (Simpson v. University of Colorado, 2007, p. 31).5 That is, unless the university football team could convince recruits that CU would give them better access to women, hetero-sex, parties, drugs, and alcohol, the success of the team would be at stake. An important element of the recruitment process was to promote the identities and privileges membership would enable.
In the practices described here, CU relied not only upon already existing discourses about status afforded to particular identity positions, but actively worked to pattern the organization as a guarantor of that status. Access to privilege depended on others, in this case women as well as other nonteam member men. Davies (1996) argued that professionalization is linked to mas-culinity such that it depends upon the inclusion—not the exclusion—of femi-ninity. Although student athletes may not be the type of professionals to which Davies referred, the construction of CU football players’ masculinity depended, in part, on the presence of women as accessories: as a site at which men could assert their heterosexuality and dominance over women through sex. Thus, the athletic identity that CU football constructed did not exclude, but included women as an extension of men’s athletic bodies—an extension used to satisfy the players’ (presumed to be straight) desires.
To sell this version of masculinity to recruits may not have been a difficult task given the ways in which athletics are attached to masculinity in a broader U.S. context. Messner (2002) argued that, “Far from being an aberration per-petrated by some marginal deviants, male athletes’ off-the-field violence is generated from the normal, everyday dynamics at the center of male athletic culture” (p. 28). He also pointed out that because some sports teams generate significant revenue and visibility for universities, they may be somewhat immune to the formal and informal structures that work to disrupt, prevent, and respond to violence elsewhere in academic institutions. Gage (2008) established an association between participation in center sports—those most visible and financially lucrative for a college—and negative attitudes toward women and sexual aggression. U.S. sports teams are one place where a valo-rized and hegemonic version of masculinity is organized, and this argument is well rehearsed elsewhere.
582 Management Communication Quarterly 27(4)
Yet to read this case only through gender leaves out something important. When athletes perpetrate sexual violence, they often receive extensive public and media attention; however Crosset, Benedict, and McDonald (1995) found that the only statistically significant difference in sexual assault perpe-tration on college campuses between athletes and nonathletes is the number of incidents reported to the police. I argue that the intense public focus around athletics and violence is partly rooted in sexualized racialization. McKay, Rowe, and Miller (2001) suggested that cultural readings of sports assume that athletic participation either (a) keeps Black men out of trouble (i.e., it “harnesses” some assumed propensity for violence while providing an oppor-tunity for class advancement) or (b) cultivates the excesses of hyper-mascu-linity, including sexual violence. In the first reading, athletics is cast as a “savior” for blackness, as a site where Black men can be “whitened.” In the second (contradictory) reading, athletics culture enhances and produces the very violence that, in the first reading, it is said to combat. An explicit men-tion of race is noticeably absent in the second reading wherein racist assump-tions about the inherent violence of blackness have come to be associated with athletics in general. Thus, attention to violent masculinity associated with athletics often operates from covert racialized codes that subtly rein-force an association between whiteness and nonviolence, whereas the vio-lence of blackness is presumed to be so uncontainable that it spills beyond the tight regulations of the sports field.
Associations between race and violence in athletics become more trou-bling when read in light of cultural connections between race and violence in sexuality. In the United States, sanctioned access to women and hetero-sex has historically been associated with White masculinity (e.g., Hartman, 1997; Kitch, 2009). This aspect of White privilege has been maintained through reference to racist stereotypes that associate Black masculinity with violent hypersexuality (hooks, 1994). Scholars have argued that the vilification of Black masculinity works to re-secure White men’s access to White women and women of color and ability to engage in violence with impunity. In an analysis of media coverage of athletes who commit intimate partner violence, Enck-Wazner (2009) argued,
Shifting blame from masculinity writ large to black athletes more specifically functions to distance the accountability for domestic violence away from (white) masculinity and, thus, maintains broader investments in masculinity and whiteness as interlocking systems of control. These systems, in turn, hurt both women and black men. (p. 3)
Harris 583
Where Enck-Wazner argued that attention to specific, individual male ath-letes preserves the privileges of whiteness, I am arguing that arguments about athletics and masculinity writ large risk the same troubling move. Discussions about violent athletic masculinity are often really discussions of cultural anx-ieties about Black masculinity, although the racialization of this discourse tends to go unmarked.
In its recruitment process, the CU team was selling not only classed status, but also White masculinity through a promise of legitimate, unquestioned access to sex. Given that some men are better able to access hegemonic mas-culinity than others (Connell, 2002), the team’s implicit promises secured men’s power over other men. Further, that promise was secured, in part, through race. Just as the recruitment program used women to promise athletes the privileges of heterosexuality, the program also deployed White privilege and associated racist discourses to promise sanctioned, unchecked access to women’s bodies. I do not argue that the program prioritized recruitment of individuals of a particular race. Rather, I suggest that the recruitment pro-gram’s promises included access to the symbolic, sexual capital associated with whiteness, capital that depends upon the vilification of Black masculin-ity. Given the aggressive masculine (hetero)sexuality embedded in sporting cultures, the dominant racialized and racist readings of that culture, CU’s deployment of classed privilege as a recruitment tool, and the ways in which women and hetero-sex were cast as rewards for team membership, to argue that the incidents at CU were only the misdeeds of individuals is untenable.
On the surface, this case hinges on questions of gender discrimination in educational settings. Yet what is missing in this decision (and, indeed, in the subsequent appeals decision) is a sense for how this gender-only approach could reinforce whiteness in relationship to masculinities. The events in this case involve not simply a gender-based sexual violation, but a violation that involves the circulation of Black masculinities in the service of White, male privilege. I read deliberate indifference on the part of the university when I analyze the ways in which the organization depends on the utilization of intersectional privileges associated with identities to secure its status and suc-cess. “Showing them a good time,” far from being simply entertainment or recruitment, means activating an organizational capacity to deploy privi-leged, hierarchical positions that depend upon access to hegemonic masculin-ity as it intersects with whiteness.
Other CasesReading this case, I have engaged Catley and Jones’ (2002) call to evaluate decisions about representations of violence. In “Dismissing Organizational
584 Management Communication Quarterly 27(4)
Conceptualizations of Violence,” I suggested that the judge articulates the relationship between organization and sexual violence by (a) advancing a container model associated with a problematic gendered and racialized pub-lic/private dichotomy and (b) prioritizing a cause–effect understanding of violence that turned attention away from communicative processes. Both aspects of the decision re-center individuals as the sole agents of sexual vio-lence and disconnect analyses of sexual violence from the systems in which it occurs. To intervene in this dominant way of understanding sexual vio-lence, I argue that an organizational theory of sexual violence should do three things: (a) adopt understandings of organization that problematize the White masculinity of the container model, (b) use a communicative approach to theorize the relationship between meaning and action around sexual violence, and (c) center the intersectionality associated with sexual violence.
Earlier, I mentioned that a criterion for evaluating the poststructuralist, critical analytic I engage is the ability of that analysis to generate insights in concrete social situations. The section titled “Show Them a Good Time” is one, partial fulfillment of this obligation. There, I argued that the recruitment program was able to sell White, masculine (hetero)sexuality by drawing upon readily available discourses already attached to athletics in the United States. I also argued that popular readings of these discourses reinforce the vilifica-tion of Black masculinities through reference to ideas about sexual deviance and violence. Through its deployment of a White, heterosexual, monied ver-sion of masculinity, its intentional enhancement of power imbalances, and promise of rewards attached to privileged identities, CU created and repro-duced discourses that support sexual violence. To demonstrate how this anal-ysis of sexual violence is consequential in other contexts, I explicate how it may transfer to a few other cases.
First, I explore insights this method can generate at other universities where sexual assault occurs. In a University of Georgia (UGA) case, a student athlete was kicked off a community college team in connection to sexual assault alle-gations and was later involved in the rape of a female student once he enrolled at UGA. A court found the university liable. In response, Barbara Lee, a pro-fessor in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers said, “The presumption by courts that institutions can predict future bad behavior is frightening” (Kelderman, 2009, para. 12). Lee’s concern is understandable: That organizations can and should be responsible for monitoring and assess-ing the likelihood that every individual organizational member will perpetrate sexual violence is untenable. Lee’s comments reflect the persistence—in both legal and popular discourse—of conceptualizing sexual violence as only an individual phenomenon. The reading I propose does not assume that organiza-tions can predict the actions of individuals. Instead, it attends to how
Harris 585
organizations engage intersectional discourses attached to sexual violence. The sexual assault charges against Jerry Sandusky offer one way to illustrate this focus. First, problematizing the contained organization draws attention to the ways in which discussions of public/private converge around discourses of childhood. In this case, the university was expected to be a guardian for young boys, an expectation attached to the in loco parentis doctrine. Thus associated with some parental responsibility, the university is connected to logics of domesticity, in which childhood, private space, and the protection of inno-cence are conflated (J. Williams, 2000). This innocence is secured, in part, through an assumed absence of sexuality, especially “deviant” sexualities. Yet paradoxically, the private home is often cast as the site of sexuality and the public organization a space of closeted desire. Reading this case through the lens I propose highlights false bifurcations between public and private as they map onto expectations about childhood in contradictory ways.
The second strand in my reading, the communicative approach, troubles the idea that the Penn State scandal had to do primarily with failed reports. The Freeh Report and media coverage reflect optimism embedded in trans-missive ideas about communication: Both suggest that if key individuals had appropriately reported the allegations against Sandusky, the violence would not have been so long-lasting and egregious. Although reporting is one important response to violence, discussions of it hinge together the hope that speech reflects reality with an investment in individual agency. If the issue is merely sending, receiving, and responding to messages, individual failures are cause for concern. The communicative approach I advocate, however, shifts attention to larger systemic and intersectional discourses that neither originate from, nor impact any one organizational member. In this case, an intersectional lens focuses on discourses of age, sexuality, and masculinity, in which silence and shame surround male desire for other males in a heteronor-mative athletics culture. Both Penn State’s protection of Sandusky as well as public characterizations of Sandusky as a monster can be read through a rubric in which athletics requires a hypersexual performance of masculinity, one that can acknowledge neither consensual nor nonconsensual violent sex that deviates from heterosexual standards.
Next, to pursue the transferability of this theory to other organizational contexts, I consider the plethora of sexual assault cases at Lackland Airforce Base that came to public attention in 2012. The persistence of individualized conceptualizations of sexual violence is evidenced in Air Force Chief of Staff General Welsh’s lament in response to the issue: “The one thing none of us have figured out how to do is stop the perpetrator before the crime” (Blansett & Hoffman, 2012, para. 4). Welsh suggests that preventing organizational sexual violence means stopping individual perpetrators, an echo of Lee’s
586 Management Communication Quarterly 27(4)
comments about UGA. Again, the theory I propose shifts the focus. Instead of asking how to screen individuals who may commit violence, an organiza-tional understanding of sexual violence focuses on how the organization itself participates in the perpetration of violence. One of the purposes of the military is to use violence in particular contexts, namely, against outsiders. Yet if the case is read through the blurry distinctions between those who are in and out of the organization, the difficult task of bracketing “appropriate” uses of violence is highlighted. The intersectional lens focuses on the ways in which arguments about the “legitimate” uses of violence, as well as their slip-page into everyday organizational life, are predicated upon gender, race, sexuality, and nation (Holland, 2009). Finally, the communicative lens sug-gests that these intersectional discourses generate meaning attached to vio-lent action in relationship to this illusion of inside and outside. In each of the three cases I have discussed, the communicative and intersectional frame-work I develop shows how links between meaning and action, ideas about contained organizations, and intersectional discourses work together to posi-tion individuals, rather than organizations, as violent agents. In the next and final section, I articulate some of the conceptual and theoretical contributions of this work.
ConclusionTo conclude, I place this work in relationship to other literature that considers violence and organization. Unlike the organizational literature on sexual harassment, which has focused mostly on verbal interactions, the approach I outline grapples with physical forms of violence including rape and other sexual assaults. The connections between the physical and the verbal are important for theorizing organizational violence because, in the CU case, an assumed bifurcation between meaning and action was used to frame violence as nonorganizational. Without theorizing the nuanced interconnections between discourse and materiality, organizational research is unlikely to intervene in already dominant understandings of violence in which individu-als alone are perpetrators. The communicative approach I outlined builds upon the sexual harassment literature to push past a dyadic understanding of violence, but does so in ways that locate not only statements, but also actions, in a system of meaning that exceeds any one person. Thus conceptualized, this approach to sexual violence engages current theoretical discussions regarding a material turn in organizational scholarship (e.g., Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009). As an object of study, sexual violence invites theory that considers the meaningful connections between the physical and the verbal
Harris 587
and, through the intersectional lens developed here, attends to the gendered, raced, and classed consequences and antecedents of those connections.
Departing from existing organizational literature on bullying and sexual harassment, the approach detailed in this article outlines how discourse is used to excuse organizations from complicity with violence. Liefooghe and Mackenzie Davey (2001) asserted that organizations (in addition to individu-als) can bully, though their approach retains a disconnection between the con-tained organization, where bullying occurs and sociocultural systems of meaning, in which the organization is embedded. In my approach, I detail how that disconnection, so often an element of violence in organization approach, is part of a discourse that retains a focus solely on individuals. Elsewhere, Dougherty (2009), whose work exemplifies a discursive approach to sexual harassment, linked what happens in an organization with gendered discourses that exceed an organization. She did not, however, as this piece does, show the ways in which those gendered discourses are deployed to shift blame and responsibility for violence away from organizations, nor did she examine how the intersections of those gendered discourses with race further support the marginalization of organizational notions of violence.
This approach to sexual violence further asserts that violence is inherently patterned by intersectionality. Feminist and critical race theorists routinely make this claim, but it has not been central in organizational scholarship on violence. Much of the existing scholarship assumes either that destructive communication is identity-neutral or that violence is best understood through a gender-only lens. These approaches risk reinforcing the privileges and power that create systems of meaning in which violence is enfolded. To illus-trate the difference in my approach, I consider Tracy, Lutgen-Sandvik, and Alberts’ (2006) piece on bullying in the workplace. They claimed that bully-ing is not an inherently gendered phenomenon. Contrary to this assertion, however, the authors argued that scholarship on bullying often ignores emo-tion in the interest of a purely functional emphasis on increasing productivity and worker retention. Thus, Tracy et al. relied on a critique of technical ratio-nality to justify a focus on emotion; however, they did not mark the gendering of this rationale. In other areas of organizational communication, researchers often highlight the ways in which hegemonic masculinity underpins a pre-sumed divide between emotion and reason. As I have argued, this divide allows organizations to appear not only rational (and thus, masculine), but also asexual (thus, problematically whitened). I read the absence of work on emotion in bullying literature as not only inherently gendered, but also, as implicated in racialized sexualities.
As this manuscript moved through various prepublication stages, I noted how behind-the-scenes conversations signaled several projects that could
588 Management Communication Quarterly 27(4)
continue to develop this work. In the final round of peer reviews, one reviewer asked for a more thorough and specific analysis of class in the manuscript, and the editor suggested that I note this as an avenue for future research. I agree that more explication of the classed dynamics of this problem is war-ranted, particularly given a national conversation around sexual violence that tends to focus on those who are not only monied enough to go to college, but also to attend institutions that historically have educated majority White stu-dent bodies. Classed aspects of organizing sexual violence are further impor-tant because, as Presser (2005) noted, the violence associated with organizations that have significant financial influence is often overlooked. The insulating effect of money, it seems, enhances the focus on (racialized) individual violence that I have problematized in this manuscript.
Although detailing the classed elements of organizing sexual violence may be one important direction for future work, other intersections not men-tioned in this piece merit attention. For instance, the links I have drawn among sexual violence, athleticism, masculinity, and race point toward the able-bodiedness of the discourse around sexual violence in U.S. universities. Questions like these follow from the tacit connections I have drawn in this analysis: To what extent do racist ideas of sexually violent Black men depend upon hyper-ability? If ability, sexuality, violence, and Black masculinities are problematically linked, then how do those links reinforce and/or dismantle White privilege? How are whiteness, organizing, heteronormativity, vio-lence, and ability related? This line of inquiry could draw upon and develop Lindemann’s (2010) work on ability, athleticism, masculinity, and sexuality.
In addition to developing specificity regarding intersections of particular differences in organizing sexual violence, additional work should continue a conversation regarding the overall status of intersectionality in organizational scholarship. During the development of this article, the reviewers, editor, and I engaged in extensive conversation and debate about what constitutes inter-sectional scholarship, whether this analysis was intersectional, differences between additive and intersectional models of difference, and appropriate criteria for evaluating intersectional work. These conversations signal to me the need for a disciplinary engagement with and effort to develop more robust intersectional theory and method for organizational communication. Methodological questions around intersectionality are also central for current feminist and critical race scholarship (McCall, 2005). As intersectional work develops in disciplines associated with organization and communication, I hope that it will continue to center race, not only because race has been nota-bly absent from the mainstream of organizational communication and organi-zational studies, but also because intersectional theory has been developed in
Harris 589
concert with critical race theory and primarily through scholarship that women of color have produced.
To be clear, arguing that organizations play a role in instances of campus sexual violence does not preclude holding individuals accountable for rape. Although violence does occur at the hands of individuals in organizations, to understand it only through this lens misses the racialized gendering of the violence–organization relationship. Specifically, the imbrication of organiza-tion and assault can be overlooked or ignored when attention is not given to ways in which organizations are patterned via intersections that devalue fem-ininity, queerness, and color. By developing a communicative approach to organizational sexual violence, I hope to make the organization’s role in assault—accomplished through invisible reference to whiteness and hetero-normativity—less subject to dismissal.
Author’s NoteThe contributor was a graduate student at the University of Colorado during the time this manuscript was prepared. The manuscript analyzes a U.S. District Court case involving University of Colorado that was decided before the contributor was affili-ated with the university.
AcknowledgmentsI thank Karen Ashcraft for her suggestions at multiple stages of this project. I also thank Eric Freedman, Shawna Malvini Redden, and Kristina Ruiz-Mesa.
Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
FundingThe author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-cation of this article.
Notes1. For example, Collins (2005) argued that blackness can be decoupled from Black
bodies such that a discourse about blackness, as it intersects with poverty, circu-lates around marginalized groups of many colors (including White).
2. The same public/private divide renders queerness legible neither publicly (when all sexuality is presumed to be a private matter), nor privately (when sexuality is marked by the heteronormative institution of domesticity).
3. This idea differs from popular and legal understandings of campus life. Brake (2007) noted that Title IX’s legal protections against sexual harassment and
590 Management Communication Quarterly 27(4)
sexual violence are weaker than those in Title VII, and consequently, universities and colleges are held to a lesser standard than (traditional) employers.
4. Though constitutive claims have been critiqued for preserving a bifurcation between the discursive and the material, and in so doing, rendering communica-tion overly symbolic (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009), my purpose for focus-ing on constitutive claims here is to produce an alternative argument to the one in the legal decision.
5. That the coach is not concerned about failing to offer recruits parties and men reveals the unspoken assumption that all recruits are heterosexual.
ReferencesAbbey, A. (2005). Lessons learned and unanswered questions about sex-
ual assault perpetration. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 20, 39-42. doi:10.1177/0886260504268117
Acker, J. (2006). Inequality regimes: Gender, class, and race in organizations. Gender & Society, 20, 441-464. doi:10.1177/0891243206289499
Ashcraft, K. L. (2005). Feminist organizational communication studies: Engaging gender in public and private. In D. K. Mumby, & S. K. May (Eds.), Engaging organizational communication theory & research: Multiple perspectives (pp. 141-169). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Ashcraft, K. L., & Allen, B. J. (2003). The racial foundation of organizational com-munication. Communication Theory, 13, 5-38. doi:10.1093/ct/13.1.5
Ashcraft, K. L., Kuhn, T. R., & Cooren, F. (2009). Constitutional amendments: “Materializing” organizational communication. Academy of Management Annals, 3, 1-64. doi:10.1080/19416520903047186
Ashcraft, K. L., & Mumby, D. K. (2004). Reworking gender: A feminist communicol-ogy of organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Baines, D. (2010). Gender mainstreaming in a development project: Intersectionality in a post-colonial un-doing? Gender, Work & Organization, 17, 119-149. doi:10.1111/j/1468-0432.2009.00454.x
Bergin, J., & Westwood, R. I. (2003). The necessities of violence. Culture and Organization, 9, 211-223. doi:10.1080/1475955042000195454
Blansett, S., & Hoffman, M. (2012, August 13). Sexual assault cases flood military courts. Military.com News, Retrieved from http://www.military.com/daily-news/2012/08/13/sex-assault-cases-flood-military-courts.html
Bograd, M. (2005). Strengthening domestic violence theories: Intersections of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender. In N. J. Sokoloff, & C. Pratt (Eds.), Domestic violence at the margins: Readings on race, class, gender, and culture (pp. 25-38). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Brah, A., & Phoenix, A. (2004). Ain’t I a woman? Revisiting intersectionality. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 5, 75-86.
Brake, D. L. (2007). Title IX as pragmatic feminism. Cleveland State Law Review, 55, 513-546.
Brewis, J., & Linstead, S. (2000). Sex, work, and sex work. New York, NY: Routledge.
Brummans, B. H. J. M. (2007). Death by document: Tracing the agency of a text. Qualitative Inquiry, 13, 711-727. doi:10.1177/1077800407301185
Burman, M. (2010). The ability of criminal law to produce gender equality: Judicial discourses in the Swedish criminal legal system. Violence Against Women, 16, 173-188. doi:10.1177/1077801209355515
Calás, M. B., & Smircich, L. (1991). Voicing seduction to silence leadership. Organization Studies, 12, 567-601. doi:10.1177/017084069101200406
Carrillo Rowe, A. M. (2000). Locating feminism’s subject: The paradox of White femininity and the paradox to forge feminist alliances. Communication Theory, 10, 64-80. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2000.tb00179.x
Catley, B., & Jones, C. (2002). Deciding on violence. Philosophy of Management, 2, 25-34. doi:10.5840/pom20022120
Chamberlain, L. J., Crowley, M., Tope, D., & Hodson, R. (2008). Sexual harass-ment in organizational context. Work and Occupation, 35, 262-295. doi:10.1177/0730888408322008
Clair, R. P. (1993). The bureaucratization, commodification, and privatization of sexual harassment through institutional discourse. Management Communication Quarterly, 7, 123-157. doi:10.1177/0893318993007002001
Collins, P. H. (2005). Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the new racism. New York, NY: Routledge.
Connell, R. W. (2002). On hegemonic masculinity and violence: Response to Jefferson and Hall. Theoretical Criminology, 6, 89-99. doi:10.1177/136248060200600104
Conyers, J. Jr. (2004). Rep. John Conyers’ letter requesting Congressional CU probe. Retrieved from http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/rep-john-conyers-letter-requesting-congressional-cu-probe
Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9, 119-161. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.1999.tb00355.x
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43, 1241-1299. doi:10.2307/1229039
Crosset, T. W., Benedict, J. R., & McDonald, M. A. (1995). Male student–ath-letes reported for sexual assault: A survey of campus police departments and judicial affairs offices. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 19, 126-140. doi:10.1177/019372395019002002
Cuklanz, L. M. (1996). Rape on trial: How the mass media construct legal reform and social change. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Davies, C. (1996). The sociology of professions and the profession of gender. Sociology, 30, 661-678. doi:10.1177/0038038596030004003
Dill, B. T., McLaughlin, A. E., & Nieves, A. D. (2007). Future directions of feminist research: Intersectionality. In S. Nagy Hesse-Biber (Ed.), Handbook of feminist research: Theory and practice (pp. 629-637). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Dougherty, D. S. (2009). Sexual harassment as destructive organizational process. In P. Lutgen-Sandvik, & B. D. Sypher (Eds.), Destructive organizational com-munication: Processes, consequences, and constructive ways of organizing (pp. 203-225). New York, NY: Routledge.
Dougherty, D. S., & Smythe, M. J. (2004). Sensemaking, organizational culture, and sexual harassment. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 32, 293-317. doi:10.1080/0090988042000275998
Edwards, K. M., Turchik, J. A., Dardis, C. M., Reynolds, N., & Gidycz, C. A. (2011). Rape myths: History, individual and institutional-level presence, and implica-tions for change. Sex Roles, 65, 761-773. doi:10.1007/s11199-011-9943-2
Enck-Wazner, S. M. (2009). All’s fair in love and sport: Black masculinity and domestic violence in the news. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 6, 1-18. doi:10.1080/14791420802632087
Fisher, B. S., Cullen, F. T., & Turner, M. G. (2000). The sexual victimization of col-lege women. United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice. Retrieved from http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/182369.pdf
Fleming, P. (2007). Sexuality, power and resistance in the workplace. Organization Studies, 28, 239-256. doi:10.1177/0170840606068307
Flores, L. (2006). Gender with/out borders: Discursive dynamics of gender, race, and culture. In B. J. Dow, & J. T. Wood (Eds.), The Sage handbook of gender and communication (pp. 379-396). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Forbes, D. A. (2009). Commodification and co-modification: Explicating Black female sexuality in organizations. Management Communication Quarterly, 22, 577-613. doi:10.1177/0893318908331322
Gage, E. A. (2008). Gender attitudes and sexual behaviors: Comparing center and marginal athletes and nonathletes in a collegiate setting. Violence Against Women, 14, 1014-1032. doi:10.1177/1077801208321987
Gavey, N., & Schmidt, J. (2011). “Trauma of rape” discourse: A double-edged template for everyday understandings of the impact of rape? Violence Against Women, 17, 433-456. doi:10.1177/1077801211404194
Gherardi, S. (1995). Gender, symbolism and organizational cultures. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Golden, A. G., Kirby, E. L., & Jorgenson, J. (2006). Work–life research from both sides now: An integrative perspective for organizational and family communica-tion. Communication Yearbook, 30, 143-195. doi:10.1207/x15567419cy3001_4
Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106, 1707-1791. doi:10.2307/1341787
Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery and self-making in nine-teenth century America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Hasian, M. (2004). Critical legal theorizing, rhetorical intersectionalities, and the multiple transgressions of the “tragic mullata,” Anastasie Desarzant. Women’s Studies in Communication, 27, 119-148. doi:10.1080/07491409.2004.10162470
Hearn, J., & Parkin, W. (2001). Gender, sexuality and violence in organizations: The unspoken forces of organization violations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Hengehold, L. (2000). Remapping the event: Institutional discourses and the trauma of rape. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26, 189-214. doi:10.1086/495571
Holland, S. (2009). The enigmatic Lynndie England: Gendered explanations for the crisis at Abu Ghraib. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 6, 246-264. doi:10.1080/14791420903049744
hooks, b. (1994). Feminism inside: Toward a Black body politic. T. Golden (Ed.), Black male representations of masculinity in contemporary American art (pp. 127-140). New York, NY: Whitney Museum of American Art.
Jasinski, J. (2001). The status of theory and method in rhetorical criticism. Western Journal of Communication, 65, 249-270. doi:10.1080/10570310109374705
Kelderman, E. (2009, June 26). Sexual-harassment cases may now hinge on what col-leges could have prevented. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Harassment-Cases-May/47340/
Kitch, S. (2009). The specter of sex: Gendered foundations of racial formation in the United States. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Liefooghe, A. P. D., & Mackenzie Davey, K. (2001). Accounts of workplace bully-ing: The role of the organization. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 10, 375-392. doi:10.1080/13594320143000762
Lindemann, K. (2010). Masculinity, disability, and access-ability: Ethnography as alternative practice in the study of disabled sexualities. Southern Communication Journal, 75, 433-451. doi:10.1080/1041794x.2010.504454
Linstead, S. (1997). Abjection and organization: Men, violence, and management. Human Relations, 50, 1115-1145. doi:10.1177/001872679705000904
Lisak, D., & Miller, P. M. (2002). Repeat rape and multiple offending among unde-tected rapists. Violence and Victims, 17, 73-84. doi:10.1891/vivi.17.1.73.33638
McCall, L. (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30, 1771-1800. doi:10.1086/426800
McGee, M. C. (1990). Text, context, and the fragmentation of contemporary culture. Western Journal of Communication, 54, 274-289. doi:10.1080/ 10570319009374343
McKay, J., Rowe, D., & Miller, T. (2001). Panic sports and the racialized male body. In T. Miller (Ed.), Sportsex (pp. 79-102). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
McKerrow, R. E. (1989). Critical rhetoric: Theory and praxis. Communication Monographs, 56, 91-111. doi:10.1080/03637758909390253
Messner, M. A. (2002). Taking the field: Women, men, and sports. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mumby, D. K., & Stohl, C. (1991). Power and discourse in organization stud-ies: Absence and the dialectic of control. Discourse & Society, 2, 313-332. doi:10.1177/0957926591002003004
Nakayama, T. K., & Krizek, R. L. (1995). Whiteness: A strategic rhetoric. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81, 291-309. doi:10.1080/00335639509384117
Niemi-Kiesiläinen, J., Honkatukia, P., & Ruuskanen, M. (2007). Legal texts as dis-courses. In Å. Gunnarsson, E. Svensson, & M. Davies (Eds.), Exploiting the limits of law: Swedish feminism and the challenge to pessimism (pp. 69-87). Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Nkomo, S. M. (1992). The emperor has no clothes: Rewriting “race in organizations.” Academy of Management Review, 17, 487-513. doi:10.5465/AMR.1992.4281987
Ono, K. A., & Sloop, J. M. (1992). Commitment to telos—A sustained critical rheto-ric. Communication Monographs, 59, 48-60. doi:10.1080/03637759209376248
Pateman, C. (1989). Feminist critiques of the public/private dichotomy. In C. Pateman (Ed.), The disorder of women (pp. 118-140.). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Pearson, K. (2007). The trouble with Aileen Wuornos, feminism’s “first serial killer.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 4, 256-275. doi:10.1080/ 14791420701472791
Pelzer, P. (2003). The dinner party of silent gentlemen: The intrinsic violence of organisa-tions. Culture and Organization, 9, 225-237. doi:10.1080/1475955042000195445
Presser, L. (2005). Negotiating power and narrative in research: Implications for feminist methodology. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30, 2067-2090. doi:10.1086/428424
Richardson, B. K., & Taylor, J. (2009). Sexual harassment at the intersection of race and gender: A theoretical model of the sexual harassment experi-ences of women of color. Western Journal of Communication, 73, 248-272. doi:10.1080/10570310903082065
Salin, D. (2003). Ways of explaining workplace bullying: A review of enabling, motivating, and precipitating structures and processes in the work environment. Human Relations, 56, 1213-1232. doi:10.1177/00187267035610003
Scarduzio, J. A., & Geist-Martin, P. (2010). Accounting for victimization: Male pro-fessors’ ideological positioning in stories of sexual harassment. Management Communication Quarterly, 24, 419-445. doi:10.1177/0893318909358746
Schneider, E. (1991). The violence of privacy. Connecticut Law Review, 23, 973-984.Simpson v. University of Colorado, 372 F. Supp. 2d 1229 (District Court, D. Colorado
2005).Simpson v. University of Colorado, 500 F. 3d 1170 (10th Cir. 2007).Smith, A. (2005). Conquest: Sexual violence and American Indian genocide.
Cambridge, MA: South End Press.Taylor, B. C., & Carlone, D. (2001). Silicon communication: A reply and case
study. Management Communication Quarterly, 15, 289-300. doi:10.1177/ 0893318901152008
Taylor, B. C., & Conrad, C. (1992). Narratives of sexual harassment: Organizational dimensions. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 20, 401-418. doi:10.1080/00909889209365346
Tracy, S. J., Lutgen-Sandvik, P., & Alberts, J. (2006). Nightmares, demons, and slaves: Exploring painful metaphors of workplace bullying. Management Communication Quarterly, 20, 148-185. doi:10.1177/0893318906291980
Williams, J. (2000). Unbending gender: Why family and work conflict and what to do about it. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Harris 595
Williams, P. J. (2009). Race and rights. In L. Back, & J. Solomon (Eds.), Theories of race and racism: A reader (2nd ed., pp. 493-502). New York, NY: Routledge.
!i"ek, S. (2008). Violence: Six sideways reflections. New York, NY: Picador.
Author BiographyKate Lockwood Harris (PhD, University of Colorado Boulder) researches gender, intersectionality, and violence in interpersonal and organizational contexts. Previous work appears in Discourse & Society, thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory and culture, Women & Language, and Women’s Studies in Communication.
