This article is about the 'why' question of sexual harassment, that is, why are the interactions that legal doctrine defines as 'sexual harassment' wrong or harmful. Why should we consider sexually harassing conduct to be a form of discrimination because of sex? What does it mean to discriminate because of sex?
Author addresses the vast body of gender scholarship that continues to rely, either implicitly or explicitly, on the conceptual distinction between sex and gender. While her analysis draws predominantly – though not exclusively – on social scientific scholarship, the trends she outlines apply equally to humanistic scholarship that is organized conceptually by the sex/gender distinction.