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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes how, just before EU accession, Polish media discourses criticized sexual harassment legislation aimed at preventing a hostile workplace atmosphere, paradoxically accusing these regulations of destroying the atmosphere at work.

Paper long abstract

In the wake of Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004, the Polish labor code was amended to include a definition of sexual harassment. According to this definition, it is illegal to create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive atmosphere of a sexual nature or related to an employee's sex. However, in the Polish press discourse, the anti-sexual harassment laws were often blamed for ruining the atmosphere at work. This paper combines historical anthropology, discourse analysis, affect theory, and studies on postsocialist transformation in East Central Europe to describe how the legislation against sexual harassment was criticized for creating an unnatural or paranoid atmosphere in the workplace. It examines how differences in sensitivity to sexual harassment were constructed through the intersecting processes of psychologization, gendering, and nationalization. American and feminist hypersensitivity was blamed for triggering a moral panic and paranoid fears of unfounded accusations – an affect that did not align with hegemonic masculinity and was therefore projected onto women or objectified as an atmosphere. By examining paranoia as both an epistemological practice and an atmosphere, the paper describes the politics of sensibilities within the discourse on sexual harassment that emerged from translating the EU directive on equal treatment for men and women into local law, as well as the accompanying fear that anti-discrimination policies would threaten national autonomy.