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Discourse & Society
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`When Shall We Go for a Ride?' a Case of the Sexual Harassment of a Young Girl

LIISA TAINIO

UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI liisa.tainio{at}Helsinki.fi

In this article, I explore the benefits and limits of conversation analysis for the analysis of a conversation that has been labelled (post-hoc) as an instance of `sexual harassment'. The data analysed is a phone call between a 15-year-old girl and a male Member of Parliament. I explore how `harassment-in-action' may be embedded in the mundane procedures of talk. Analysis of the MP's strategies to pursue the girl's acceptance of his invitation to `come for a ride' revealed a number of patterns: recurrent invitations, personal knowledge displays, an orientation to secrecy and confidentiality and implicit and explicit threats. The girl's strategies to resist the MP's suggestions were formulated according to the norms of preference organization, by doing dispreferred activities, using repair initiators and standard responses. I argue that although no single feature of the talk could directly index sexual harassment, the `formal analysis' of (recurrent) patterns of interaction, combined with the cultural knowledge about the identity of the interactants, forms a basis to construct also a feminist-informed explication of `sexual harassment'.

Key Words: conversation analysis • gender • invitations • sexual harassment

Discourse & Society, Vol. 14, No. 2, 173-190 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0957926503014002754
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