An affective politics of sexual harassment at school in the 21st century: Schooling and Sexualities twenty years later

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. <div><br></div><div>Building on work on sexual harassment in schools, this article continues one of the threads from the first Schooling and Sexualities conference held, in 1995. In so doing, it offers a contemporary account of a teacher’s sexual harassment by one of her students, through a sexually violent comment posted about her on the Rate My Teacher website. Throughout, I explore the affective politics of sexual harassment. In developing an understanding of affective politics as it plays out through an online review, a teacher, a classroom and students, I draw on the concepts of affects and assemblages, and the capacity of a sexual harassment assemblage to constitute (and de-constitute) identities. I consider how power is both increased and also diminished between student and teacher in an assemblage of gendered, sexual and neoliberal identities; and how she and her student are re-situated through the sexual harassment. Attending to the affective politics of a teacher’s sexual harassment by her student offers a way to understand violence and identities as social, material and discursive assemblages, and contributes to understanding sexual harassment in schools, particularly where teachers are targeted.</div>