The Institutional Dimension of Sexual Violence in Academia

This presentation explores the experience of doing activism against sexual violence in universities. I examine how academic institutions resist feminist demands for inclusion, despite formal commitments to equality. I introduce the case of Quebec, where the government recently introduced legislation requiring all universities to adopt policies against sexual violence, following a feminist mobilization addressing the issue. The Quebec context thus provides an opportunity to examine how activists experience the process of institutionalization of their struggle. I draw on an institutional ethnography approach (Smith, 2005), which privileges actors’ situated experiential knowledge of the institutional regime under study, to analyze the institutionalized social relations that shape their activities and interactions. In addition, I draw on Sara Ahmed’s "ethnography of the text" (2012), which examines the experiences of members of academia who are trying to bring about institutional change. An ethnographic approach makes it possible to interrogate the institutional context in which sexual violence occurs, exploring the gaps and contradictions between universities’ official commitments to addressing sexual violence and the experiences of feminist activists involved in the struggle. More specifically, it allows for the identification of forms of symbolic violence that prevent activists from making gender-based violence visible as an institutional problem within universities.