Browsing by Subject "sexual harassment"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Having Responsible Power Leads to Sexual Harassment? The Explanatory Role of Moral Licensing
    (2020-10) Dinh, Tuyen K.; Stockdale, Margaret S.; Ashburn-Nardo, Leslie; Salyers, Michelle P.
    Feeling powerful or possessing power over someone is often shown in the sexual harassment literature as an antecedent. Indeed, power can be construed in a self-focused manner or in a responsibility-focused manner. Tost (2015) theorized that powerholders who construe their power as responsibility should then act for the benefit of others. However, a recent study by Stockdale, Gilmer, and Dinh (2019) found the opposite effect. Specifically, they found that priming responsibility-focused power increased the intention to sexually harass, speculating that priming such powers may have created a “moral license” (Miller & Effron, 2010) to engage in sexual harassment. The purpose of the present study is to extend their findings by examining the role of moral licensing. I hypothesize that participants who are in the responsibility-focused power priming condition will engage in sexual harassment proclivities through a serial mediation of communal feelings and moral licensing (moral crediting and moral credentialing). Results confirm that communal feelings and moral crediting serially mediate the relationship between responsibility-focused power and sexual harassment proclivities. The hypothesized role of moral credentialing was not supported. Findings in this study provides a potential explanation for the paradoxical findings of responsibility-focused power in Stockdale et al. (2019)’s study. This study also emphasizes the importance of understanding responsibility-focused power in sexual harassment indices and the potential the ironic effects of having such power via moral crediting.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "Seduced and Abandoned Over and Over and Over": A Feminist Semiotic Narrative Analysis of the Films of James Toback
    (2018) Davis, Stefanie Leigh; Dobris, Catherine A.; Hoffmann-Longtin, Krista; White-Mills, Kim D.
    In this thesis, feminist semiotic narrative methodology is applied to James Toback’s films Love & Money, Exposed, Tyson, and Seduced and Abandoned, in order to illuminate his construction of womanhood and women’s sexuality. In each film, Toback served as writer, director, and producer, giving him total creative and business control. Due to this lack of outside oversight, these four specific films are most likely to directly reflect Toback’s perspective as a filmmaker. This study employs narrative-based semiotic criticism, expanding the work of Walter Fisher and Teresa de Lauretis, to identify how Toback’s creation of world, gaze, object/subject, and desire, construct womanhood and women’s sexuality. Toback’s creation of illusory worlds emphasizes that while superficial beauty qualifies a woman as a sexual commodity for men, sex will ultimately be women’s downfall.