Abstract:
Since MacKinnon’s (1979) ground-breaking work in which she coined the term sexual harassment, there has been very little consensus as to what it actually is. Using callers’ stories of male sexual harassment taken from Kenyan talk radio, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the in situ production of the anemic definition of (male) sexual harassment. Further, using positioning theory as a methodology, this paper aims (1) to make visible the gendered identity work that defining, or not defining, an event as male sexual harassment occasions and (2) to show how hegemonic masculinity is achieved through stories and their evaluation by the radio host and other callers who talk certain masculinities into being as normative and others as deviant.
