April 20, 2018

Feminist Studies

Cecilia MacDowell Santos e Maria Irene Ramalho

The aim of this doctoral dissertation is to analyze the legal expression of harassment by means of a critical incursion in its description, regulation, and invocation in different sources of law. Harassment is a category that has gained increasing ground in the contemporary normative debate by appearing in political-governmental agendas, in the repertoire of social activism, and in academic-scientific literature. Both the movement and the argumentation of feminist inspiration have been one of the great promoters of its public projection, thus contributing to fit it into a societal worldview and economy of meaning with special regulatory implications in the labor sphere and the criminal sphere. Through this research, I consider harassment as a tool to observe the limits, potentialities, and epistemological contradictions that cross the feminist intellectual field, highlighting the cultural consensus and conflicts that the legal function (labor and criminal), the presumption about the subject (man and woman) and the (oppressive and constituent) status of sexuality posit on feminist theory and on social studies of law.
This dissertation is structured in three parts. In Part I, I try to essay the socio-legal lineage of harassment through a genealogical approach to the legal history of labor subordination and criminal protection of sexuality regimes, debating the roots of the normative grammar of harassment and its problematic connection with emerging labor and criminal claims in the Portuguese sociopolitical scene.

This reflection on the legal doctrine and dogma that structure the regulation and imagination of harassment dialogues in Part II with the analysis of its expression in the domain of governmental policies and institutions. This path goes through the emergence and institutionalization of a field on women's studies to public statement of powers and knowledge based on an epidemiological matrix directed to sexual violence and inequality. Confronting different institutional models of observation and intervention in harassment (pre or para-legal entities, such as CITE, Ombudsman and Authority for Working Conditions), I sought to situate and to interpret the variability of the semantics lent to harassment according to the purpose, the competence, and the policy domain that bind the different actors.

The critical analysis of the theoretical-normative framework and the governmental web that regulates and establishes the nature and borders of harassment is triangulated, in Part III, with the immersion in the legal domain and casuistry of harassment, rendering the narratives and argumentation on labor and crime my privileged object of study. In this last part, I wonder what and how the Portuguese courts are judging when the harassment category is evoked, in light of labor subordination and criminal protection of sexuality.

The ambivalence of the nexus between the legal conception and interpretation of sexuality and the feminist critique of the patriarchal nature of law represents one of the main guiding threads of the intellectual disquietude imprinted in this research. By pursuing to expose and map this ambivalence from the normative expression of harassment, this dissertation aims to demonstrate to what extent and in what terms the increasing legal densification of harassment, driven or seconded by different critical and feminist origins, instead of endorsing a progressive, cumulative, and expansive logic of the anti-patriarchal aspiration, mainly highlights the political-epistemological vices and paradoxes that run through the way sexuality is thought, prescribed, and protected, thus forcing a critical return to the subject, the structure, and law as unfinished and constituents objects of social life.

Key words: harassment; sexuality; law; feminism