Sexual Harassment at Work in the Media Discourses in Postsocialist Poland. Negotiating Social Norms Sensitivity to Sexual Violence

By analysing case studies from Polish press discourse on sexual harassment at work from 1990s and 2000s, I will describe how social imaginaries and sensitivities to sexual violence were constructed during postsocialist transformation. Sexual harassment was frequently portrayed as an allegedly new problem that appeared at the time, hence media discourses on this issue may be treated as useful indicators of cultural and political shifts in gender order that affected the understanding and framing of gender-related violence. The fact that discourses on sexual harassment at work described a range of behaviors, many of them deemed normal/natural/ordinary in patriarchal culture, affected the social construction of violence and discrimination. In this paper, I will present how the development of labour law influenced the way sexual harassment was constructed as a form of sexual violence and how these changes were reflected in the media reporting on selected cases. I will conclude by arguing that an analysis of the discourses in question can be helpful in explaining the genealogy of contemporary culture wars around gender in Poland, as well as how these conflicts relate to changes in the understanding of sexual violence.