Word.ws English Dictionary

textual harassment

textual harassment noun: sexual harassment in writing.

Noun

textual harassment (uncountable)

  1. Sexual harassment in writing.
    • She places the textual harassment experienced by all women writers at her own disposal as evidence of her grace, and hence her authority.1991, Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, page 113
    • Moneypenny reminding Bond of his responsibilities and limitations curtails the textual harassment of the character.2002, Tara Brabazon, Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women, page 104
  2. Aggressive, distorting literary or textual criticism.
    • Iraneus contrasts the unity and integrity of these writings with the distorted, contextless citations of the Gnostics. He describes the code of textual harassment that allows these heretics to chip away at the Scriptures, […].1991, Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea, page 24
    • The process is one of systematic misconstruction, a kind of textual harassment.1998, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of, page 149
  3. Sexual harassment by means of explicit text messages.

Origin of textual harassment

Blend of textual + sexual harassment. The term textual harassment is from Mary Jacobus, 'Is There a Woman in This Text?' New Literary History 14 (Fall 1982): 117-41."

Questions about textual harassment

What does textual harassment mean?
Textual harassment means sexual harassment in writing.
What part of speech is textual harassment?
Textual harassment is a noun.

Words near textual harassment in the dictionary

  1. textspeak
  2. textual
  3. textual critic
  4. textual criticism
  5. textual criticisms
  6. textual harassment
  7. textualisable
  8. textualisation
  9. textualisations
  10. textualise
  11. textualised

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: textual harassment (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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