https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508419838697 Organization 1–20 © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1350508419838697 journals.sagepub.com/home/org The promise and peril of agency as motion: A feminist new materialist approach to sexual violence and sexual harassment Kate Lockwood Harris University of Minnesota Twin Cities, USA Megan McFarlane Marymount University, USA Valerie Wieskamp Appalachian State University, USA Abstract Organizational scholars have established that sexual harassment, the most studied kind of sexual violence, is an organizational problem. Extending this work, we analyze two critical events regarding sexual violence in the United States—one in the military and another at a university—in which discourse detracts from understanding the problem in this way. We draw upon feminist new materialism and its primary method—diffraction—to track ‘cuts’, the practices that simplify and pause agency’s complex, perpetual motions. Our analysis shows that agency moves in discussions about the aftermath of violence. That momentum highlights the organization’s capacity to respond to rape. Even so, during discussions about enacting violence, the perpetual motion of agency congeals around discrete humans, thereby maintaining assault as an individual act. These cuts, whereby agency pauses on individual perpetrators, obscure how organizational dynamics make sexual violence more or less likely to occur. We suggest that a focus on agency’s kinetic qualities can help feminist scholars continue to highlight how the systemic aspects of harassment and other forms of violence become hard to notice. Keywords Agency, boundary-making practices, cuts, feminist new materialism, sexual harassment, sexual violence Corresponding author: Kate Lockwood Harris, Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 225 Ford Hall, 224 Church Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. Email: kharris@umn.edu Article 838697ORG 0 0 10.1177/1350508419838697OrganizationHarris et al. research-article 2019