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Contribution to Book
Harassment of Female Farmworkers - Can the Legal System Help?
Women's Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices (2007)
  • Maria L. Ontiveros
Abstract

This paper provides an in depth and highly textured description of "sexual harassment" as experienced by female farmworkers in California. It explains how the harassment is affected by the extremity of the consequences she faces if she does not comply with the harassment; the structural difficulties in the reporting of and response to these incidents of sexual harassment; the sexualization of migrant women; the cultural factors that influence the harassment; and the fluidity of her workplace. It then critiques both current legal doctrine and current feminist theories of sexual harassment as inadequate to address these workers' concerns. It suggests an alternative, contextual approach to "sexual harassment" that would better help female farmworkers, as well as provide a more satisfactory theoretical framework for all female workers. This paper appears as a chapter in the book Women's Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices (http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Women_s_Labor_in_the_Global_Economy_2896.html), edited by Sharon Harley and Lynne Bolles, and published by Rutgers University Press.

Keywords
  • sexual harassment,
  • farmworkers,
  • immigrant women,
  • intersectionality,
  • immigrant workers
Publication Date
2007
Editor
Sharon Harley
Publisher
Rutgers University Press
ISBN
0-8135-4044-5
Citation Information
Maria L. Ontiveros. "Harassment of Female Farmworkers - Can the Legal System Help?" New Brunswick, N.J.Women's Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices (2007)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/maria_ontiveros/4/