top of page

My thesis work was inspired by several podcasts on the sexual harassment before and after the #MeToo movement. Building on these podcasts I read a variety of feminist scholarship on restaurants, food production, consumption, and service. I then connected this theoretical material with a bevy of recent articles on sexual harassment and assault in the restaurant industry to build an outline for my analysis. Ultimately my participant interviews drove the content for the piece but these sources and inspirations were vital to my planning and writing process.

​

The Heart Podcast series No tells the stories of how several women including the podcast’s creator Kaitlin Prest learn about consent from youth to adulthood. The piece weaves together somber narratives when boundaries were crossed with moments of sexual reclamation and empowerment. Listening to the series in the wake of the #MeToo moment inspired me to create a piece with the same capacity for empathy with my own participants and hopefully with the listener. The second piece that inspired me is from This American Life entitled Five Women. In the hour long podcast reporter Chana Joffe Walt tells the story of five women abused by the same man. Their narratives spill out into other instances of harassment in their lives and paint a picture of the shocking normalization of sexual harassment in the workplace. Finally a recent piece entitled The Callout by the Invisibilia podcast on the hardcore scene in Richmond, VA was an important resource in developing the music, mood, and sonic identity of the piece. I admired the combination of serious discussion, moments of levity, and space for reflection in the piece and wanted to incorporate that feeling into my own work.

​

Two journal articles that laid the foundation for my work were Chloë Taylor’s Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes, which to little surprise makes a feminist critique of Foucault’s position on sex offenders and offers alternative means of justice. This piece pushed me to look towards restorative justice solutions and imagine how restaurants could push towards community responsibility instead of relying on punitive measures. Elaine J. Hall’s piece Waitering/waitressing: Engendering the work of table servers, questions the narrative of gendered roles in service positions and pushes for a new model of gendered work, which considers gender in a structural model that is performed through labor. This model was helpful in looking at how the toxic masculine structures of the industry not only effect women, trans and non-binary folks in service positions, but also cis-men. I think this angle only strengthens the necessity for the #MeToo moment by taking into account how performances of gendered work creates vulnerable workplace conditions.

​

Finally, I parsed through the deluge of recent articles on #MeToo in the restaurant industry. Two notable pieces informed my writing. Rebecca Traister’s piece This Moment Isn’t (Just) About Sex. It’s Really About Work. in The Cut frames sexual harassment in terms of discrimination as well as sexual trauma. This framework pushes us to not discount larger structures of disempowerment by making the #MeToo moment exclusively about men’s sexualities run amok. In putting together my podcast this helped me investigate other instances of discrimination concerning race, class, ability, nationality, and sexuality and how these injustices were inextricably tied to sexual harassment. A second influential piece was The Tipping Equation by Catrin Einhorn and Rachel Abrams for The New York Times. This expose delved into the economics of tipping and how server’s reliance on customer’s to pay their bills leads to precarious working conditions where harassment frequently occurs.

bottom of page