The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of the #MeToo Movement [1 ed.] 0367408473, 9780367408473

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword • Cynthia Enloe
Introduction: Rebellion, revolution, reformation • Giti Chandra and Irma Erlingsdóttir
Part I: Theories
1 Struggle, solidarity, and social change • Angela Y. Davis
2 #MeToo as a revolutionary cascade • Cass R. Sunstein
3 Global #MeToo • Catharine A. MacKinnon
4 Subject of desire / subject of feminism: Some notes on the split subject(s) of #MeToo • Anne-Emmanuelle Berger
5 #MeToo as a variegated phenomenon against men’s violences and violations: Implications for men and masculinities • Jeff Hearn
6 #MeToo: beyond invulnerability: Towards a new ontological paradigm • Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir
7 The anonymous feminist: Agency, trauma, personhood, and the #MeToo movement • Giti Chandra
8 Silencing resistance to the patriarchy • Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir
9 #MeToo, African feminisms, and the scourge of stereotypes • Nkiru Balonwu
Part II: Contexts
10 Narrating #MeToo: Calling our organisations to action • Pamela L. Runestad
11 On tambourines, hashtags, and rerooting / rerouting survivor voice in Caribbean feminist movement building • Rochelle McFee
12 Moving from theory to praxis: Sexual violence and the #MeToo movement • Vinita Chandra
13 Wieners, whiners, Weinsteins, and worse • Jack Halberstam
14 Of moguls, monsters, and men • Karen Boyle
15 Many new solutions to workplace sexual harassment in a post #MeToo era, but will they do the trick? • Audrey Roofeh
16 Being a disabled feminist killjoy in a feminist movement • Freyja Haraldsdóttir
17 Black women, #MeToo and resisting plantation feminism • Marai Larasi
Part III: Global perspectives
18 #MeToo: Anger, denouncement, and hope • Purna Sen
19 #MeToo in France, a feminist revolution? A sociohistorical approach • Bibia Pavard, Florence Rochefort, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel
20 Polish #MeToo: When concern for men’s rights derails the women’s revolution • Magdalena Grabowska and Marta Rawłuszko
21 #яНеБоюсьСказать (#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak), #MeToo, and the Russian media: Public discourse around violence against women in Russia • Anna Sedysheva
22 #MeToo in post- socialist countries: A comparative analysis of Romanian and Chinese feminist activism against sexual violence • Mirela Violeta David
23 In the name of #RiceBunny: Legacy, strategy, and efficiency of the Chinese #MeToo movement • Li Jun
24 The #MeToo movement in Japan: Tentative steps towards transformation • Robert O’Mochain
25 #AnaKaman — MeToo in the Arab world: A journalist’s account • Rym Tina Ghazal
26 #MeToo, the law, and anti- sexual violence activism in Kenya • K. Kanyali Mwikya, Judy Gitau, and Esther Waweru
27 Critical reflections on #MeToo in contemporary South Africa through an African feminist lens • Tamara Shefer and Tigist Shewarega Hussen
28 #MeToo Argentina: A protest movement in progress • Marifran Carlson
29 Mexico and Latin America: From #MeToo to #NiUnaMenos • Edmé Domínguez R.
30 #Akademiuppropet: Social media as a tool for shaping a counter-public space in Swedish academia • Lisa Salmonsson
31 Fighting structural inequalities: Feminist activism and the #MeToo movement in Iceland • Irma Erlingsdóttir
Index

Citation preview

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE POLITICS OF THE #METOO MOVEMENT

Since the MeToo hashtag went viral in 2017, the movement has burgeoned across social media, moving beyond Twitter and into living rooms and courtrooms. It has spread unevenly across the globe, with some countries and societies more impacted than others, interacting with existing feminist movements, struggles, and resistances. This interdisciplinary handbook identifies thematic and theoretical areas that require attention and interrogation, inviting the reader to make connections between the ways in which the #MeToo movement has panned out in different parts of the world, seeing it in the context of the many feminist and gendered struggles already in place, as well as the solidarities with similar movements across countries and cultures. With contributions from gender experts spanning a wide range of disciplines including political science, history, sociology, law, literature, and philosophy, this groundbreaking book will have contemporary relevance for activists, scholars, feminists, gender researchers, and policy-​makers across the globe. Giti Chandra is Research Specialist at the UNESCO-​affiliated Gender Equality Studies and Training programme (GRÓ-​GEST) at the University of Iceland. She has a PhD from Rutgers University, NJ, USA. She has been Associate Professor at the Department of English at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, India, and has taught and been a Fellow at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA. She has served as Focal Person for the Sexual Harassment Complaints Committee at GRÓ-​ GEST, as Chairperson of the College Complaints Committee Against Sexual Harassment at St Stephen’s College, and as the External Expert on the Sexual Harassment Complaints Committee at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication. Irma Erlingsdóttir is Professor of French Contemporary Literature at the University of Iceland and Director of the UNESCO-​affiliated Gender Equality Studies and Training Programme (GRÓ-​GEST); RIKK —​Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference; and EDDA Center in Contemporary Critical Research at the University of Iceland. She has a PhD from Sorbonne, Paris III, France. She has led several large-​scale academic projects in the fields of gender studies, globalisation, contemporary politics, and critical theory. Her current research focuses on transformative politics and contemporary literature, and on the reification of Icelandic gender equality imaginaries.

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE POLITICS OF THE #METOO MOVEMENT

Edited by Giti Chandra and Irma Erlingsdóttir

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First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Giti Chandra and Irma Erlingsdóttir; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Giti Chandra and Irma Erlingsdóttir to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Irma Erlingsdóttir, editor. | Chandra, Giti, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of the politics of the #MeToo movement/ edited by Irma Erlingsdóttir and Giti Chandra. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020027500 (print) | LCCN 2020027501 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367408473 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367809263 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: MeToo movement. | Sexual abuse victims. | Sexual harassment. | Sex crimes. | Feminism. Classification: LCC HV6556 .R68 2021 (print) | LCC HV6556 (ebook) | DDC 362.883–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027500 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027501 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​40847-​3  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​80926-​3  (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

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We dedicate this book to our mothers Jóhanna Guðnadóttir and Kumud Chandra and to our daughters Gríma and Svanhildur Irmudóttir, and Arshia Eyrún and Ashali Ásrún Gunnarsdóttir

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CONTENTS

Notes on contributors  Acknowledgements  Foreword 

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Introduction: Rebellion, revolution, reformation  Giti Chandra and Irma Erlingsdóttir PA RT  I

1

Theories 

25

1 Struggle, solidarity, and social change  Angela Y. Davis

27

2 #MeToo as a revolutionary cascade  Cass R. Sunstein

34

3 Global #MeToo  Catharine A. MacKinnon

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4 Subject of desire /​subject of feminism: Some notes on the split subject(s) of #MeToo  Anne-​Emmanuelle  Berger

55

5 #MeToo as a variegated phenomenon against men’s violences and violations: Implications for men and masculinities  Jeff Hearn

65

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Contents

6 #MeToo: beyond invulnerability: Towards a new ontological paradigm  Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir 7 The anonymous feminist: Agency, trauma, personhood, and the #MeToo movement  Giti Chandra

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8 Silencing resistance to the patriarchy  Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir

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9 #MeToo, African feminisms, and the scourge of stereotypes  Nkiru Balonwu

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PA RT   I I  

Contexts 

139

10 Narrating #MeToo: Calling our organisations to action  Pamela L. Runestad

141

11 On tambourines, hashtags, and rerooting /​rerouting survivor voice in Caribbean feminist movement building  Rochelle McFee

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12 Moving from theory to praxis: Sexual violence and the #MeToo movement  Vinita Chandra

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13 Wieners, whiners, Weinsteins, and worse  Jack Halberstam

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14 Of moguls, monsters, and men  Karen Boyle

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15 Many new solutions to workplace sexual harassment in a post #MeToo era, but will they do the trick?  Audrey Roofeh

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16 Being a disabled feminist killjoy in a feminist movement  Freyja Haraldsdóttir

221

17 Black women, #MeToo and resisting plantation feminism  Marai Larasi

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Contents PA RT I I I  

Global perspectives 

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18 #MeToo: Anger, denouncement, and hope  Purna Sen

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19 #MeToo in France, a feminist revolution? A sociohistorical approach  Bibia Pavard, Florence Rochefort, and Michelle Zancarini-​Fournel

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20 Polish #MeToo: When concern for men’s rights derails the women’s revolution  Magdalena Grabowska and Marta Rawłuszko

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21 #яНеБоюсьСказать (#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak), #MeToo, and the Russian media: Public discourse around violence against women in Russia  303 Anna Sedysheva 22 #MeToo in post-​socialist countries: A comparative analysis of Romanian and Chinese feminist activism against sexual violence  Mirela Violeta David

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23 In the name of #RiceBunny: Legacy, strategy, and efficiency of the Chinese #MeToo movement  Li Jun

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24 The #MeToo movement in Japan: Tentative steps towards transformation 360 Robert O’Mochain 25 #AnaKaman —​MeToo in the Arab world: A journalist’s account  Rym Tina Ghazal

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26 #MeToo, the law, and anti-​sexual violence activism in Kenya  K. Kanyali Mwikya, Judy Gitau, and Esther Waweru

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27 Critical reflections on #MeToo in contemporary South Africa through an African feminist lens  Tamara Shefer and Tigist Shewarega Hussen

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28 #MeToo Argentina: A protest movement in progress  Marifran Carlson

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29 Mexico and Latin America: From #MeToo to #NiUnaMenos  Edmé Domínguez R.

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Contents

30 #Akademiuppropet: Social media as a tool for shaping a counter-​public space in Swedish academia  Lisa Salmonsson

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31 Fighting structural inequalities: Feminist activism and the #MeToo movement in Iceland  Irma Erlingsdóttir

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Index 

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CONTRIBUTORS

Nkiru Balonwu is Founder and Chair of African Women on Board, an independent non-​ profit dedicated to advancing narratives to improve realities for women and girls of African heritage. She is also Founder and Managing Partner of RDF Strategies, a strategic communication consultancy committed to redefining the stories from and about the continent. Anne-​Emmanuelle Berger is Distinguished Professor of French Literature and Gender Studies at the University Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-​Denis, France. She is Co-​founder of the research institute LEGS (Laboratoire d’études de genre et de sexualité, CNRS /​Université Paris Lumière (Paris 8 /​Paris Nanterre)), which she currently heads. Karen Boyle is Professor of Feminist Media Studies at the University of Strathclyde, UK, where she runs the Applied Gender Studies programme. Her research focuses on questions of violence, gender, and representation, and she has published widely in this area. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Women’s Support Project, a feminist anti-​violence organisation. Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir is Professor of Philosophy and Applied Ethics at the Faculty of History and Philosophy at the University of Iceland. She works mainly in social metaphysics and epistemology, applied ethics, and feminist philosophy. She was part of the Feminist Philosophy Transforming Philosophy project at the University of Iceland from 2015 to 2017. Marifran Carlson is a feminist, human rights activist, and Chicago businesswoman. She is a historian of Latin America. She has taught at Northwestern and Roosevelt Universities, USA. Giti Chandra is Research Specialist at the UNESCO-​affiliated Gender Equality Studies and Training programme (GRÓ-​GEST) at the University of Iceland. She also teaches comparative literature at the School of Humanities at the University of Iceland and is one of two coordinators of GRÓ-​GEST’s edX online courses on gender.

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Contributors

Vinita Chandra is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ramjas College at Delhi University, India. She is a founding member of the Gender Forum, Chairperson of the Sexual Harassment Complaints Committee, and the Presiding Officer of the Internal Complaints Committee for Sexual Harassment at the College. Mirela Violeta David is an Assistant Professor in Modern Chinese History /​Women and Gender Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Her research is situated at the intersection of modern Chinese history, gender history, intellectual and cultural history, and medical history. Angela Y. Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, USA. For the past 25 years she has lectured all over the world, been published in numerous anthologies and journals, and written at least ten books. Edmé Domínguez R. is Associate Professor at the School of Global Studies at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her fields are international relations, gender, IPE and Latin America. She has written extensively on gender and labour organising in export zones in Mexico and El Salvador, as well as on women politicians in Bolivia. Cynthia Enloe is Research Professor and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Clark University, USA. She has had guest professorships and held lectures all over the world. She serves on the editorial advisory boards of six major journals and has written books on the topics of interactions of feminism, women, militarised culture, war, politics, and globalised economics. Irma Erlingsdóttir is Professor of French Contemporary Literature at the University of Iceland and Director of the UNESCO-​ affiliated Gender Equality Studies and Training Programme (GRÓ-​GEST); RIKK  —​Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference; and EDDA Center in Contemporary Critical Research at the University of Iceland at the University of Iceland. Rym Tina Ghazal is a journalist, author, and activist. In 2003 she was one of few women of Arab heritage to cover different war zones in the Middle East. Her investigative journalism includes stories on mass graves, child brides, and human trafficking. She is a co-​founder of The Hidden Beauty Project, a monthly gathering dedicated to empowering women and youth. Judy Gitau is an International Human Rights Lawyer and the Regional Coordinator in Africa for the NGO Equality Now. She has worked in post-​conflict Somaliland specialising in access to justice for victims of sexual and gender-​based violence. She has also worked as a Programme Officer with the Kenyan Section of the International Commission of Jurists. Magdalena Grabowska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is a co-​founder of the Foundation for Equality and Emancipation STER and a board member of the Feminist Fund and collaborates with several national and international institutions on issues related to violence against women.

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Contributors

Jack Halberstam is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University, USA. Places Journal awarded him its Arcus/​Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir is a sessional teacher and a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Iceland. She has written scholarly articles and for the general public on vulnerability, critical thinking, chronic illness, and the intersections between Marxism and feminism. Freyja Haraldsdóttir is a feminist disability activist, and a Doctoral Candidate in Educational Science and sessional teacher at the University of Iceland. She is the co-​founder of Tabú, an intersectional feminist space for disabled women. She has extensive experience in educating people about disability rights and activism. Jeff Hearn is Senior Professor of Gender Studies at Örebro University, Sweden; Professor of Sociology at the University of Huddersfield, UK; Professor Emeritus at Hanken School of Economics, Finland; and Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa. He has published widely on gender, sexuality, violence, men, masculinities, ICTs, organisations, policy, and transnationalisations. Li Jun is Associate Professor at the Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication at Shantou University, China. She is an established feminist activist and journalist writing under the penname Li Sipan. Her research focus includes feminism in China and academic sexual harassment. Marai Larasi is an organiser, consultant, and educator, whose work deliberately centres the journeys, narratives, knowledge and expertise of Black /​minoritised women and girls. For over 25 years, her practice and activism has focused primarily on ending violence against women and girls. Catharine A.  MacKinnon is Elizabeth A.  Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, USA, and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard University, USA. She pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment as sex discrimination as it has been accepted by courts. Rochelle McFee is a Doctoral Candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California San Diego, USA. One of her main research interests is sexual violence against queer women in Jamaica. She was a founding executive member of WE-​Change (Women’s Empowerment for Change). K. Kanyali Mwikya is a public policy specialist with experience in equality and non-​ discrimination law, international cooperation on human rights, and social and economic rights in Africa. He has published on social movements in eastern Africa. Robert O’Mochain is Associate Professor in the College of International Relations at Ritsumeikan University, Japan. His research interests include the implications of homophobia in the lives of teachers and students in Japan, the implications of sexual harassment in educational contexts, and sexual harassment themes within a Critical Pedagogy approach. xiii

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Contributors

Bibia Pavard is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Paris 2, France. She has written on the history of feminism in France, including on contraception and abortion. Marta Rawłuszko is Assistant Professor of Social Science at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and co-​founder of Feminist Fund in Poland. Her research focuses on discursive politics, gender and political analysis, and feminist solidarities. Florence Rochefort is a Researcher at the GSRL (Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités) of the CNRS (Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique), France. She specialises in the history of feminism, gender, and secularisation. Audrey Roofeh is an employment attorney and the CEO of Mariana Strategies LLC, a workplace culture consulting firm. She has focused on issues of workplace abuses including forced labor and workplace sexual abuse and currently works with businesses to build inclusive workplace cultures. Pamela L.  Runestad is Assistant Professor of Global Health at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, USA. She is a medical anthropologist who specialises in infectious diseases, food and nutrition, and illness narratives in general, and with regional expertise in Japan and Asia-​Pacific. Lisa Salmonsson is Senior Lecturer at Örebro University, Sweden. Her research interests include the sociology of work and the sociology of migration, the Swedish MeToo Movement, labour market integration, segregation, skilled immigration, and unaccompanied youth. Anna Sedysheva is a Doctoral Candidate at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her main research interests are gender politics, feminist movements, and digital activism. Purna Sen is UN Women’s Executive Coordinator and Spokesperson on Addressing Sexual Harassment and Other Forms of Discrimination. She focuses on placing women’s experiences at the heart of work on sexual harassment and bringing survivor-​focused approaches to the fore. Tamara Shefer is Senior Professor and Head of Department of Women’s and Gender Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She predominantly works on youth, gender, and sexualities, with current emphasis on feminist pedagogies and activism, in local and transnational contexts. Tigist Shewarega Hussen is a Black feminist researcher specialising in Feminist Internet Research, and a Doctoral Candidate in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her research focuses on the #FeesMustFall student movement and the complexity of feminist digital activism as postcolonial public participation among the youth in South Africa. Cass R. Sunstein is Robert Walmsley University Professor of Law, and Founder and Director of the Program on Behavioural Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School, USA. He is the author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books.

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Contributors

Esther Waweru is an activist, and an advocate of the High Court of Kenya. She is the Legal Advisor in Legal Equality at Equality Now. For over 12 years, she has advocated for the human rights of women, ethnic minorities, sexual and gender minorities, and people with disabilities. Michelle Zancarini-​Fournel is Professor Emerita of History of Gender Studies at the University of Lyon, France. She has published on the history of French feminism.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Perhaps the greatest acknowledgement in present times has been of the ubiquity and severity of sexual harassment and abuse. This Handbook has emerged in response to the movement that has put the range and depth of this systemic malaise front and centre in public discourse. We committed ourselves to documenting the impact of the #MeToo movement around the world, across genders, sexualities, abilities, nationalities, and classes, and analysing the cultural, political, religious, and other forces that have worked with, for, or against it. The voices in these chapters speak from different positions and in various modes of speech and writing, demonstrating connections and disconnections across a vast collectivity. In bringing these voices to the printed page, we would like to thank the several organisations that have supported us. From our initial conversations with Andrew Humphrys and Andrew Taylor, who first invited us to create a Handbook, to Jessica Holmes, Emily Ross, and Hannah Rich, the editorial team at Routledge has been warm, supportive, encouraging, incredibly hard working and all that we could have wanted or needed in this very demanding enterprise. We thank you with all our hearts. Our especial thanks to Nicole Abbott. We wish to thank the Icelandic Gender Equality Fund that first considered a book on the #MeToo movement a worthy project and gave us the initial funds to set the project in motion. We are grateful also to the University of Iceland institutions RIKK, EDDA, GRÓ-​GEST and The Center for Research in the Humanities for their financial and infrastructural support. Our colleagues at GRÓ-​ GEST, Thomas Brorsen Smidt, Randi Stebbins, Guðrún Eysteinsdóttir, Védís Ólafsdóttir, Elín Björk Jóhannsdóttir, Nikkita Hamar Patterson, and Milica Minić have provided us with unconditional support, strength, good cheer, willing ears, and their help when we needed it most, and we would not have had the courage to proceed with such a project without them. Our special thanks go also to the office of the Prime Minister of Iceland, in particular, Halla Gunnarsdóttir and Rósa Erlingsdóttir who organised, in collaboration with RIKK, the first international conference on the #MeToo movement, “#MeToo: Moving Forward”, in September 2019. It provided much energy and optimism to this momentous enterprise. We could never have completed such a project without a good deal of assistance, and we gratefully acknowledge the invaluable efforts of Arnór Gunnar Gunnarsson, as well as the notable contributions of Margrét Ann Thors, Meg Matich, Sarah Dearne, Hafdís Erla Hafsteinsdóttir,

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Acknowledgements

Jóhann Gísli Ólafsson, and of the many reviewers who gave their time and expertise to putting together and polishing the manuscript. To our contributors from all around the world, our deepest gratitude: their wisdom and words apart, they have worked through holidays and breaks, in spite of demanding schedules and lives, especially when the COVID-​19 crisis made everything harder in unexpected and unprecedented ways personally and professionally. Their unfailing courtesy and understanding of our many and unceasing demands are truly remarkable, and we would like to applaud each and every one of them. The unflinching support of our families and friends has been a bedrock that we could rely on. Our obsession and commitment have been their burden to carry and they have put up with our craziness with good cheer and endless support. Thank you. And finally, to the millions of voices raised in the last few years that have joined with others and given courage to yet more —​you have started a revolution that will leave an indelible mark on our times. We cannot thank you, but we hope this Handbook will help others raise their voices with yours.

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FOREWORD Cynthia Enloe

Most of us will be reading this provocative, valuable book in the midst of a pandemic or in what is certain to be a prolonged post-​pandemic era, an era still defined by that health crisis. As I read each of these mind-​stretching chapters, I found myself wondering what the world-​spanning coronavirus infections and the myriad local responses to it have meant for efforts to get an intellectual grip, a feminist grip, on the globalised #MeToo movement. The first image that came to mind was of a strangely quiet, empty Bangladesh garment factory floor. Global brand companies had cancelled their apparel orders. The factory owners in Dhaka had had to send home their mostly female employees —​without pay. There would be no workplace sexual harassment on those factory floors during the pandemic; but would those laid off women face rising domestic violence from male partners at home, where economic insecurity was intensifying household stress? If so, it seemed likely that any domestic violence shelters these threatened women might otherwise have access to would be closed amid the government-​ordered shut down. The second image that came to mind was a frantic scene in a Milan city hospital. Ambulance sirens wailed, red lights flashed, (hopefully) masked and gloved nurses and doctors rushed forward as paramedics wheeled in gurneys on which ill patients were gasping for breath. We now are more aware than ever that, worldwide, up and down medicine’s hierarchical pyramid, two-​ thirds of all health care workers are women. We also know that hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes are not only care facilities; they are workplaces, workplaces in which the daily dynamics of racism, sexism, and class inequality play out. Has the pandemic era’s atmosphere of urgency and intensified professional responsibility lessened the incidence of sexual harassment against women in these healthcare workplaces at the height of the pandemic, only to return as the immediate danger recedes? The contributors to Giti Chandra’s and Irma Erlingsdóttir’s #MeToo Handbook have pushed me to ask these questions. Among the attributes of this book that make it a genuine “handbook” is their helpful double-​message: there are bright threads of similarity that run through diverse sites, yet multi-​dimensional context matters. It is this push and pull between the generalisable and the particular that presents the analytical challenge for doing research on, and making useful sense of the #MeToo movement —​and the potential theoretical reward that comes with resisting the temptation to choose between only zooming out or only zooming in.

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Foreword

Once I  finished reading this book front to back, I  realised that, to gain the full benefits from these chapters, I needed to start over again, this time reading the chapters back to front. Starting with theoretical insights and then moving to gritty country case studies mapped my initial journey, keeping my lens wide open as I set off, and then zooming in as I tried to apply or refine those global insights into relationships between violence against women and workplace rights, into masculinities and misogyny, into social media and movement building. But then, I slowly realised, I would only be able to absorb the intellectual feminist lessons offered by these contributors if I repeated the journey, this time travelling from particular to general. On this second journey I would be enabled to appreciate more fully what Chinese, Argentinian, Polish and Egyptian feminist anti-​violence activists have to teach us about patriarchy. Enjoy both journeys. Bon voyage.

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INTRODUCTION Rebellion, revolution, reformation Giti Chandra and Irma Erlingsdóttir

The word “pandemic” was used no less than three times by Angela Y. Davis —​in her keynote address at the #MeToo: Moving Forward conference in Reykjavik in September 2019 —​to refer to the gender-​based violence that kills or threatens the well-​being and lives of millions of women and the vulnerable all over the world. When a systemic malaise is no longer a metaphor in the difficult times of a medical pandemic, language speaks to the power of the horror inflicted upon millions. The #MeToo movement is testimony to the universality of this power. These are the two words that Tarana Burke regretted not having said to a 13-​year-​old girl, who confided that she had been repeatedly raped by her stepfather. Several years later, when Burke initiated a project to raise awareness of the victims of sexual abuse, she decided to call it “Me Too” with the aim of promoting solidarity and support amongst marginalised Black women. In 2006, she could not have imagined that a decade later these words would be a clarion call for millions. The sentencing of American film producer Harvey Weinstein took place in March 2020. It is worth remembering that it was on 5 October 2017 that the silence on his sexual assaults was broken. For several months, a group of New York Times reporters had worked hard to expose cases of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse, which Weinstein had engaged in over a period of at least 30 years. There were supposedly dozens of victims.1 Ten days later, American actress Alyssa Milano, one of Weinstein’s fiercest opponents, used her Twitter account to encourage female victims of sexual harassment, abuse, or violence to post the statement “MeToo” on Twitter. At the time, she was unaware of the connection between the phrase and Burke’s movement. Within 24 hours, about half a million women had either endorsed the challenge or added their own story. The hashtag #MeToo had taken over social media, proving for those who needed to see the evidence that sexual harassment and violence are ubiquitous and deadly in every stratum of every society. In its own way, this disjunction in class and race, represented by a privileged white woman within Hollywood and a Black social worker from Brooklyn fighting for the rights of working women, brackets the vast sweep of gender-​based violence, as well as the resistance to it. Since then, Alyssa Milano’s acknowledgement of the origins of the phrase and her own ignorance of it have led her and Tarana Burke to work together for the #MeToo movement, bringing the idea of collective and connective collaboration to the centre of the movement.2

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Despite the very specific context of its initiation, the movement cannot be said to suffer from a sense of presentism; it is no-​one’s case that the #MeToo movement is new or that it comes out of nowhere, is original and self-​created or even self-​perpetuated. Indeed, in tracking how and why the movement started, what its contribution has been to already existing movements, and what it has brought to the global struggle against sexual harassment, the question often asked is why such a movement has emerged at this point in time, when most societies have actively struggled against gender-​based violence for decades. Was there a kind of tipping point that made a tweet go viral across nations, and a viral tweet transform itself into a movement on the ground? Cynthia Enloe points to flashpoints like the Anita Hill and Dominique Strauss-​Kahn scandals, and Donald Trump’s particular brand of sexism amidst the general hardening of patriarchal hierarchies concomitant upon right-​wing governments and cultures that the past decade has seen around the world, in the creating of a generalised atmosphere of crisis.3 The women’s protest organised against the Trump administration in January 2017 was aimed at all kinds of discrimination, including Trump’s hate speech regarding women and minorities. Women around the world saw this hate-​speech as a sign of the times in alignment with the ethos created by other populist, radical, right-​wing parties, ethno-​nationalism, and religious conservative movements that seek to roll back women’s rights and limit those of LGBTQI+ people and other minority groups. In India, the igniting of the #MeToo movement in 2018 gained momentum alongside mass student and women-​led protests against policies of the right-​wing government amid a growing sense of its discrimination against women, minorities, and the vulnerable.4 It can persuasively be argued that the #MeToo movement rode in on the shoulders of waves of protests like these.5 This Handbook brings together 31 essays that consider the #MeToo movement from theoretical and contextual perspectives, analysing events, issues, and ideas using multiple and inter-​ disciplinary tools. The authors contribute different and varied responses  —​from academia and activism to survivor voices and silence-​breakers, and many other professional spaces  —​ and include not only the most foregrounded and often-​heard debates but also the sometimes unexpected and contentious aspects of this latest phase in the universal struggle against sexual violence.

The cascading nature of revolutions In response to the question of “why now?” Cass Sunstein’s chapter focuses on how revolutions happen, and why they are so hard to anticipate, seeming to arise out of nowhere. Noting that revolutions often appear to come in waves, spreading rapidly within and across countries, he frames these phenomena in terms of demonstration and contagion effects. Certainly, one of the most encouraging features of the #MeToo movement has been the “contagious” nature of courage, with every story told in the public sphere inspiring hundreds if not thousands of other survivors with the courage to speak out their experiences as well.6 This is how a protest swells into a movement. Indeed, the contagion effect present here is perhaps the most potent force behind a single outcry of rage becoming a concerted effort towards lasting change, a progression that bespeaks the utopian desire of all revolutions. As such, #MeToo inscribes itself into the political and historical present as the realisation of a quasi-​poetical impossibility, where each new voice and story makes tangible the desire for a global transformation. The hashtag echoes a larger whole beyond the individual. It is an “I with countless others”  —​a “we” of solidarity and shared experience, allowing women and people of all genders across social, ethnic, political, or sexual divides to understand that they are not alone and that the nature of sexual harassment and abuse transcends these boundaries. 2

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This is not to say, of course, that the term “we” should be conflated with some assumed unified women’s identity that functions by demolishing all differences. Instead, the “we” needs to engage with, and be affected by, the fact that the space created by the #MeToo movement has not yet provided the security or the support for all women and people of all genders to voice their stories and articulate their lived experiences. Solidarity does not imply homogeneity; alliances can and should be made across differences, making heterogeneity a constructive and productive agent for change.7 Given the initial impetus provided by prominent personalities, this injunction of support applies especially to the more vulnerable communities facing the multiple and intersectional discriminations of class, race, caste, sexuality, precarity, and other hierarchies of oppression. A  movement begun on and largely channelled by social media platforms has, in some specific ways, proved a bulwark against some of these vulnerabilities. It has allowed, as Vinita Chandra argues in her chapter, access to the disembodiment of a virtual space that transgresses material, geographical, and political borders, where women and other vulnerable people can claim agency over bodies that are systemically violated in the real world.

The survivor and her narrative Even amidst concerns about the fetishising, and capitalising on, of personal stories, one way to describe the #MeToo movement is to frame it in terms of an archive of lived counter-​ memories that militate against what is deemed to matter in hegemonic historical narratives, highlighting its exclusions.8 It is a call for resistance and for breaking silences, and some national iterations of the #MeToo movement have carved out a separate space for the voices of those silenced through the testimonies of those who chose to stand witness to these absences. Of such voices are archives being built around the world. For Hélène Cixous, this breaking of silences and creating of archives is also what the act of writing is —​an injunction to remember. As she put it, “To write is (or should be) … to remember what might disappear, what might be banned, killed, despised, faraway things”.9 Cixous called for a feminist revolution through writing, which would allow women to put themselves into the text “as into the world and into history —​by [their] own movement”.10 If the #MeToo movement is to come close to reflecting a revolution of this sort, these personal narratives that straddle various mediums of writing from the essay to the newspaper report, and from the terse tweet to the emotion-​laden Facebook post, must be both protected and catalysed. In this Handbook, Pamela L. Runestad painstakingly lays out the story behind the story, positioning the reader as survivor and exposing the fraught space of the trauma that silences, delays, refracts, and erases narratives of the violence perpetrated. In answer to the questions that have plagued the silence-​breaker since time immemorial, but which the #MeToo movement has thrown into painful relief, Runestad follows each standard response question of “why”, “to whom”, “how”, etc., to expose the multiple compulsions in the contested space that such stories have become between speakers and listeners. Speaking as survivor, activist, and theorist, Rochelle McFee explores here the possibility of reproducing harm in the process of work that facilitates healing. She questions the efficacy of a transformative approach to justice, situating the work of the survivor within the larger revolution as complex and coming from a position beleaguered by many tensions.

The power of stories Concerns regarding the legality and propriety of public accusations, the rights of the individuals named, especially with the emergence of lists of predators, were voiced early and loudly.11 3

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Divisions opened up between older generation feminists and younger women, disputing the desirability of the strategies of triage or guerrilla warfare resorted to by the vulnerable who felt disenfranchised by the systems of due process already in place. In a 2018 article, Moira Donegan identified this rift as one between social and individualist feminists —​between the recognition that the system needs to be reformed and the demand that the individual re-​form herself as strong and rebellious.12 Judith Butler’s redefinition of vulnerability can be situated within this fissure, a way of understanding how women and the precariat may position themselves so as not to fall into either of these traps.13 Complicated as this space may be, it is indisputable that the movement has been fuelled by the power of stories and personal narrative. The courage of survivors in putting personal stories out into the public sphere has had a snowballing effect, giving thousands of other survivors a platform from which to speak for the first time. Journalism, its politics and its moments of courage, have helped amplify these voices, urging its own self-​reflection in the process.14 But if fear is contagious, so is courage —​each story has inspired others to come out into the public sphere, and each community, disrupted by accusations and exposés of sexual assault within it, has inspired other communities to wonder when their “#MeToo moment” would happen. The momentum of these ruptures is so inexorable that the question is always when and not if. In so doing, the cumulative energy has sparked, not just a consciousness raising of the old-​fashioned feminist kind but also a sense of community that replaces the isolation of the victim/​survivor with the community of other victim/​survivors, and encourages them to join the ranks of voices. As Bennett and Segerberg point out, social media allows such “collective action” to become “connective action”, enabling transformation outside itself.15 In her chapter on the #RiceBunny (phonetically “me too”) movement in China, Li Jun analyses the intricate collaborations between student protests, women’s organisations, the justice system, and social media, detailing the advances in anti-​sexual harassment cases that were made possible through this process. Giti Chandra argues that these anonymous solidarities offer alternative modes of healing and understanding trauma, relegating the importance of naming oneself to specific acts of story-​telling that do not implicate the Self in the event of assault or its aftermath. Her analysis offers a constructive perspective on what she considers to be the essentially anti-​feminist but always-​new argument that women who speak out about the violence done to them necessarily position themselves as victims, where anonymity reinforces this victimhood to the point of effacing their claim to agential selfhood altogether.

From celebrity women to the marginalised Since the viral tweet of 2017, the #MeToo movement has moved beyond its initial focus on celebrities and women;16 people of different sexual orientations have made the movement their own, taking off from the original focus of sexual harassment of cisgendered women by men, to include other genders and other forms of harassment. The movement has been neither a static thing nor stuck in its initial form; it has been interrogated, appropriated, and adapted by different cultures, genders, and classes.17 Pointing out that “something is rotten in the state of heterosexuality”, Jack Halberstam calls out the movement, in his chapter, for being ultra-​hetero in its focus on powerful men and their young, female victims, and asks whether a completely reorganised understanding of sexuality and desire is not essential to a more inclusive vision of freedom. And speaking from the similarly tangential perspective of women with disabilities, Freyja Haraldsdóttir identifies herself and people in her position as the “killjoy” within feminist circles. In her chapter, she recounts the various fault lines that run through this feminist uprising, which cast women with disabilities into the awkward role of the outsider forced into silence if they wish to continue 4

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to support the movement. She speaks of the many ways in which the needs of the woman with disabilities are formulated almost as a point of rupture for a feminist movement that is blind to its own ableist privilege, and coopts disabled women without including them. Indeed, the positioning of women with disabilities with regard to the movement has been called the “Cripping of #MeToo”. Women with disabilities represent one in five women worldwide, and experience sexual assault at a rate of four times higher than women without disabilities. Despite the fact that women and girls with disabilities continue to experience disproportionate levels of discrimination and violence, their voices and experiences are continually kept on the periphery of feminist activism and the current #MeToo movement. The experiences and voices of women and girls with disabilities facing gender-​based violence and discrimination are often seen as an unwelcome distraction from, or deemed unrelatable to, the “collective” core voice of the #MeToo movement. As a result, the particular ways in which women and girls with disabilities experience violence, discrimination, and violations to their bodily autonomy have neither been recognised nor comprehensively explored. Perhaps the most incisive critique of the movement remains that, rooted in national #MeToo movements, the voices of women with intersectional identities have not been added to the currently limited, but growing, body of work highlighting the unique and shared experiences of women and girls with disabilities from around the world in the #MeToo movement.18 Haraldsdóttir cites the strategic silence of her group of women with disabilities as a way of voicing their discomfort with and dissent from a feminism that included their womanhood but not their disability, and anchors her own feminist praxis in the struggles of Black feminists. Here lies a line of possible suture, a stitching together of ideologies, practices, strategies, and emotional resonances, in the common marginalisation of two communities of feminists. The #MeToo movement can and should be dynamic and dialogic, allowing for ruptures and dissonances to be sealed over and fresh ground broken through solidarities of action and alliances of ideologies. In a similar act of allegiance, in several of the chapters in this Handbook, contributors have consciously invoked the names and words of those who have fought and resisted, building a vast network of voices from the known and individual to the only-​heard and public/​collective. As a praxis it is both an instinctive, cultural, and a learnt, political act of orality-​in-​print.

Local versus global With such lacunae as women with disabilities daily being foregrounded by those marginalised by the juggernaut of this global movement, what will be the “voice” of the struggle —​local and particular, or global and non-​individual? To think about this question is to consider all movements, local as well as global, disadvantaged as well as privileged, as dynamic forces that are constantly in a state of becoming, changing, evolving; to see local, grassroots movements, and transnational movements in dialectical and dialogic relationships rather than in relationships of hierarchical power. Do both benefit from each other? As Indian journalist and writer Rana Ayyub puts it, “What started as a foreign import has become a moment of reckoning at home”.19 Even while hashtags —​such as #Pinjratod: Break the locks, #Nirbhaya, #StopThisShame, and #WhyLoiter in India with its Pakistani companion movement #GirlsAtDhabas —​are strong grassroots movements that predate the #MeToo movement on the sub-​continent, this “foreign import” into local resistance movements has had a catalysing effect. Time will tell whether the local has fed the global more than the global the local, and this is something that gestures towards the necessary work of future scholarship on the subject. In her chapter, Anna Sedysheva explores the impact of the MeToo hashtag on existing Russian language hashtags and anti-​sexual harassment movements in Russia to understand 5

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more fully the complex interconnections between local, vernacular, and grassroots struggles and English-​based movements operating from anglophone cultures. In her analysis, in societies where feminism and women’s rights are often tagged as “Western” and therefore seen as a conspiracy against the local culture, the #MeToo movement has done as much harm as good. In a similar vein, Magda Grabowska and Marta Rawłuszko examine, in their chapter, the ambiguous effects of the movement on the course of feminist, anti-​violence movements in Poland, calling it an unfinished revolution. They point to the fact that, while the global movement brings visibility to issues of sexual harassment and mainstream debates on them, the consequences for local movements are often dubious, reproducing the generational and ideological divisions from global politics to local gender relationships. The political is often repurposed as the parochial and the protecting of patriarchal structures presented as a defence of nationalist pride. In many ways, countries and cultures outside the anglophone centre of the United States, United Kingdom, and Western Europe continue to struggle with a top-​down view of knowledge transfer as well as prescriptive and normative modes of action, seeing the globalisation of ideologies and organisational strategies as hegemonic rather than democratic. Indeed, for many women of colour, histories of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery continue to impact their multiply marginalised status even in movements built on alliances and solidarities, such as the #MeToo movement. Critiques from decolonial contexts cite the “Global North” and “Western” feminism as being imposed upon and overtly influential in the activism and academic understandings of the “Global South”.20 The terminology itself is debatable, casting a complex world within the easy oppositionality of geo-​political binaries where “North–​South” is reminiscent of the now outmoded “East–​West” formulation; but these critiques do urge the use of a finer lens to look at how global knowledge transfer happens and its effects on grassroots movements in cultures across the world. Is it useful to see the very specific origin of the birth of the movement and its spread to the rest of the world as one of “Global North vs Global South” or has it evolved beyond those theoretical, geographical, and hierarchical boundaries? What is the interface between the global #MeToo movement and local, grassroots ones? Is the movement being adapted by various communities to their own ends and agendas, or are they disappearing and/​or morphing into new modes of struggle? Where there are new modes, are they more effective, or are they becoming less attentive to grassroots concerns? These are all questions that have been asked in decolonial work and are now being adapted to understanding the #MeToo movement. Even as research is underway, as is in evidence in many of the chapters here, an emphasis on colonial history and its ongoing impact has resurfaced with new urgency. Tamara Shefer and Tigist Shewarega Hussen address these and other questions in their discussion of the limited impact of the #MeToo movement in South Africa, detailing the influence of local social media and activism on the ground and their relationship to the more globally recognised movement. They situate their critique of the movement’s gaps and concerns within the larger context of Global Southern feminist theory.

Decolonisation and women’s resistance This research brings home the critical importance of a movement like #MeToo being grounded in the continuing history of the resistance of women of colour (in both national and transnational contexts) and of being understood as part of a global uprising and recomposition of women’s struggles. Its unprecedented spatial reach goes hand in hand with the need in women’s movements and feminist scholarship to take a more radical stance:  to adopt intersectional perspectives —​decolonial, anti-​racist, non-​binary, and ecological —​at the expense of narrow, neo-​liberal, capitalist, market-​oriented, and culturalist visions of equality.21 In her chapter, Marai Larasi examines the colonial foundations of sexual discrimination, situating 6

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anti-​sexual harassment movements within a colonial and necessarily raced history of women. Tracing the independence of British and white women from other European countries to the labour and enslavement of Black women and men, Larasi details the colonial foundations of the language and materialisation of their emancipation, showing the differential weightage given to ideas of freedom, financial independence, and notions of liberty and loss when applied to white women, and the Black women whose bodies and labour they owned. She asks, finally, how equitable, democratic, and inclusive the #MeToo movement can be when such histories are every day perpetrated on women of colour, and provides some provisional answers. The impact on local movements has been encouraging in various contexts. As Irma Erlingsdóttir confirms in her chapter on the impact of the movement on feminism in Iceland, local organisations and struggles have gained strength and confidence, and often, a renewed invigoration, from the powerful sense of being part of a larger, global, active, resistance, even while retaining, as most local movements have, their own identity and logical momentum. Importantly, Erlingsdóttir argues that the #MeToo movement has been successful in creating cross-​sectional and intergenerational platforms for women’s activism through social media and other venues. It is abundantly apparent that there is no simple, global, consensus around the #MeToo movement. It has encountered criticism from within for not being inclusive enough, but it also faces continued hostility from reactionary political forces. Almost three years later, the situation in many countries shows that the issue of sexual rights and sexuality is an ongoing and open battle front. Sexual and sexist violence continues to be sidelined or condoned by the courts. While debates over abortion rights are often a flashpoint, different religious authorities and political movements advocating what they see as a restoration of a “natural” order find more and more channels of expression. Far-​r ight parties, hostile to women’s rights, have used the recent nationalist populist surge to influence government policies, and in recent years, this disturbing trend has been accompanied by growing Islamophobia. This instrumentalisation of gender and sexual issues to suit racist, fundamentalist, and sexist purposes requires a modification of political strategies of sexual liberation and emancipation movements. The #MeToo movement can be seen as just such a modification and has, indeed, provided the gender equality struggle with political momentum, which, if sustained, could have a lasting impact on common conceptions of sex, gender identity, sexual rights, and notions of gender equality equal to, or perhaps even greater than, the changes in laws and attitudes achieved by previous waves of women’s rights movements. It is as well to note, when judging the achievements of the #MeToo movement, that there are no comparable historical examples of social recognition and awareness of sexual discrimination on this global scale. Even as one immediately discernible influence of the movement has been the degree of public empathy and compassion for those victimised by predatory sexual practices, the movement can be seen as a reaction, not to the individual, but to a system designed to fail those who have been subject to sexual harassment and violence. One of its greatest strengths is that it has focused on social systems rather than on individuals or singular crimes. The common response of “NotAllMen” to any individual account of sexual harassment indicates the need to see each victim in isolation, each perpetrator as a unique aberration, rather than face the acknowledgement of a systemic malaise that impacts “all men”. The sustaining of a patriarchal control over women’s bodies is precisely what is under attack in this movement.

The master’s tools? Social media and feminist resistance Despite its global impact, the #MeToo movement has spread unevenly, and in many ways, the nature of social media is key to how the movement has taken in different contexts; it both frees 7

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and is free, polices and is policed.22 In the context of China, Li Jun points out in her chapter how hashtags such as #RiceBunny, #AnYeYiYang, and #WoYeShi were developed in order to sidestep the political censorship and policing that banned references to #MeToo. This creativity is indicative, she argues, of Chinese society adapting the movement to its own agendas and needs, exploiting its relative anonymity as a mobilisation mechanism to drum up victim support, provide legal aid, and organise fact-​based debates. Li sees the feminist movement as being so deeply entwined with social media that it is impossible to say which is more responsible for the #MeToo movement in China. Mirela Violeta David’s chapter extends this analysis of the role of social media in the movement as she looks at the mixed impact the #MeToo movement has had on local movements in the post-​socialist societies of Romania and China. David argues that while the global #MeToo movement has galvanised public opinion around the world and led to more public interest in the work of feminist organising in these countries, Romanian feminist organisers cooperate with the local police and legislators, whereas in China, feminist organisations have been tracked through social media and censored, and feminist activists imprisoned, harassed, and displaced.

Global reach That we can consider the movement in terms of its comparative impact in countries as geographically and otherwise distinct as Romania and China underlines a force of global impact that cannot be overstated. As contributions for this Handbook flew in from around the world, it was repeatedly brought home to us that if gender-​based violence is a universal phenomenon, then the struggle, too, is universal. Few societies or cultures have been able to ignore the #MeToo movement entirely, however differently they may have responded to it. From Kenya, K. Kanyali Mwikya, Judy Gitau, and Esther Waweru write, in their chapter detailing local anti-​sexual harassment movements, that while the #MeToo movement has not been as influential there as it has been in other regions, it has not been totally ignored by African feminists and women’s rights activists. Indeed, in many cases, it has catalysed action by African feminists and women’s rights activists to continue ongoing work or establish new approaches in eliminating sexual violence in their communities. In Mexico, Argentina, and other South American countries, on the other hand, the #MeToo movement has strengthened the impact of the #NiUnaMenos movement, intertwining, as Edmé Domínguez and Marifran Carlson show in their chapters, in a shared process that has generated an enormous rise in awareness and mobilisation around the problem of gender-​based violence and the deeply entrenched machista culture. The volatile economic and political situation in different regions continues to keep the struggle against gender-​based violence at bay, a casualty to the shifting grounds of state support. In spite of all this, Carlson and Domínguez demonstrate the power of local movements and the growing popular awareness that is slowly gaining support online and offline. Robert O’Mochain evaluates, in his chapter, the extent to which anti-​sexual harassment initiatives like #MeToo can be seen as the beginning of a significant transformation of gender relations in Japanese society or whether it is yet another failed attempt to eliminate practices and structures of gender inequality. The positive results of one of the foremost cases of a #MeToo accusation in Japan, he writes, must give us hope.

Justice: Law and due process, restorative and reformative The landmark case in Japan is, indeed, a harbinger of hope, and a good example of the impact of the #MeToo movement on legal approaches and judicial processes. Some of the most 8

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entrenched criticism of the public nature of the social media driven face of the #MeToo movement has been what many have called its “mob trials” or trial by media, or more hyperbolically, its “public lynchings”. The confluence of the emotional call for justice, the case made for believing the accuser/​survivor, and the hyper-​publicised judicial processes for those cases that actually went to court, is undeniable. How has this interface between the law and social media influenced —​and been influenced by —​the #MeToo movement? In her chapter, Karen Boyle examines the recently concluded case against Harvey Weinstein to explore the extent to which feminist insights about male violence have been mobilised in mainstream reporting. Through a discussion of what she calls “the cultural value of abuse”, Boyle analyses the mobilisation of the “monster” narrative by both prosecution and defence in his 2020 trial resulting in a collective emphasis on Weinstein as an exceptional individual, and limiting the potential structural analysis and institutional change. For workplaces beyond Hollywood, binding contracts, Non-​Disclosure Agreements, and Complaints Committees regulate victim’s voices and curtail their need for justice. As Audrey Roofeh lays out in detail in her chapter, it has been almost forty years since the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued its first guidelines on the prevention of sexual harassment in the workplace, and yet, this harassment continues to be a routine part of the lives of millions of men and women in US offices and professional spaces. Roofeh asks how it is possible that so much discussion on the issue has led to very little change on the ground and offers an analysis of the contexts and solutions. For many feminists, it is clear that the law and judicial debates have had important but limited effects on social discussions of sexual violence. Catharine A. MacKinnon traces the origins of the term “sexual harassment” as a legal category, identifying its position as the first opening of the butterfly-​wings that set into motion the legal, political, and conceptual cascades that have resulted in a movement that she calls “tectonic”. Noting that this tectonic shift has been propelled by social and cultural ideas rather than litigation, she emphasises the interrelatedness of social and legislative change that is necessary to overcome sexual harassment. For a vast majority of survivors, legal recourse is not economically affordable, professionally feasible, personally possible, socially acceptable, or emotionally viable. A certain kind of carceral feminism is not, therefore, a desirable resolution in far too many cases; indeed, the justice or closure that many survivors seek lies outside the judicial system. In the messy area between sexual harassment and abuse as a law and order problem and gender-​based violence as a systemic, social, and cultural malaise, the answer to what approach would be most effective in its correction or eradication is not easy to identify. Perhaps one of the most optimistic ventures that the #MeToo movement has prompted and brought to the fore is the idea of alternative justice systems that lie outside the carceral and address the system and the individual together. Adapted from truth and reconciliation processes, the term “transitional justice” involves the political and legal change process after societies emerge from a major crisis. The process is based on both punitive and restorative means with the aim of rectifying the previous moral structure by condemning it and atoning for any harm suffering, and damage that have resulted from human rights violations. It focuses on the shouldering of responsibility by the perpetrator, and the paths that several countries have chosen are mainly concerned with criminal prosecutions, truth and reconciliation commissions and reports, and reparations and lustration. The #MeToo movement has opened up this path for perpetrators and survivors to follow an alternative route to resolution in its demand that the shame be shifted from survivors to those responsible for the violence. “Restorative justice” provides a mechanism to deal with violence committed through truth-​seeking, taking responsibility, and reconciliation. Insofar as the main objective of restorative justice is to regain political stability after a societal trauma, the 9

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reconciliation process may sometimes be more beneficial to perpetrators than victims. Indeed, one of the lasting legacies of the #MeToo movement has, so far, been the interest and investment in alternate forms and notions of justice, including reformative and transitional justice, that root themselves in an understanding of masculinities studies, and seek to find reparation for both perpetrators and their victims.23 In his chapter, Jeff Hearn unpacks the many-​sided discussion that looks at the place of ideas and practices of masculinities within the #MeToo movement. His formulation of the place of men as one of “Absence-​Presence” is particularly useful in thinking through the ways in which men are, and can be, and should be, part of the struggle to eradicate sexual harassment and gender-​based violence. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said that true reconciliation meant pardoning those who had committed crimes during the Apartheid regime, provided they showed remorse and took public responsibility for their crimes.24 The desire for recognition or a request for forgiveness is often an important claim for the victim. A perpetrator’s request for forgiveness allows the victim to explain to the accused the consequences of their wrongdoings, and this, in and of itself, is often seen as a form of empowerment for the victim. For this process to lead to actual change in the perpetrator, a common narrative of the event of violence needs to be agreed upon by both the perpetrator and the victim. If both parties accept their roles, the ability to forgive and to receive forgiveness can provide redemption for the accused and reclamation of self-​esteem for the victim. Even in theory this process is not a universal panacea, and recent attempts in this direction have been undertaken with the utmost precaution and care for the comfort, safety, and well-​being of the victim in particular.25 The case of Þórdís Elva, a survivor who chose to forgive her rapist, and Tom Stranger, the rapist in question who asked to be forgiven, is possibly the most visible of such cases and is, as an instance of this process, extremely rare.26 Responses to this case have ranged across the spectrum from hailing it as commendable to decrying it as dangerous. For many feminists, the idea that the burden of forgiveness (which often means shouldering the guilt and shame of the perpetrator) being placed on the survivor is, in itself, anathema to the idea of empowerment.27 In addition, the discourse of forgiveness is historically and culturally imbricated with patriarchal demands upon women to forego any claims to justice and to accept crimes committed upon them, especially their bodies, without complaint. The demand for the survivor to forgive her perpetrator is often presented, also, within the more insidious trappings of self-​care and healing, where a refusal or an inability to forgive is seen as harmful to the survivor herself. As a means of defanging the rightful anger of the survivor, the compulsion to let go this rage and return the female body from its aberrant, passionate, state back to its natural, calm, one is as ancient and universal as it is current and contemporary.

Rage and radical rudeness: The disruptive language of revolution Among the #MeToo movement’s achievements has been, perhaps, the creation of a forum where survivors —​mostly women to begin with —​could express their emotions in their own words and be heard. Female grief and mourning, anger and rage, their irrational and passionate overflow of emotions, has been regarded with distaste and dismay throughout recorded history, and has even been recorded by the ancient Greeks as a threat to the city-​state.28 The power of female anger and the patriarchy’s discomfort with it are tellingly brought together in Stella Nyanzi’s powerful phrase, “radical rudeness”.29 Following a Ugandan tradition of holding the powerful responsible for their actions by calling them out in public through insult and abuse, Dr Nyanzi is currently in jail for having used colourful language for the Ugandan president. 10

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A scholar and feminist queer rights activist, she adapts a strategy for the disruption of colonial bonds of “friendship and mutual benefit” through public commotion and disarray, to the feminist purpose of confronting the patriarchy with a refusal to abide by its assumptions of similar bonds. Mona Eltahawy’s forceful formulation, “fuck forgiveness”, can be seen as the same strain of confrontational feminism in its refusal to be polite.30 Indeed, Eltahawy put up her #MosqueMeToo hashtag in 2018 as a call for the channelling of the anger of Muslim women assaulted in mosques and during pilgrimages, and also as a means of correcting the #MeToo movement’s over-​emphasis on rich, white —​and, at the time, famous —​women; to return the movement, as she said, to the marginalised women of colour for whom Burke had initially meant it to be. As legal and other means of resolution respond to the #MeToo movement, attention has been focused firmly on the needs of the survivor and their right to speak or not to speak, in their own voice and on their own terms. “Believe the survivor” has become a battle-​cry that seeks to rectify the imbalance of reliability that has plagued women’s words for millennia. Buttressed by law and social patriarchal attitudes that grant a greater degree of veracity to men than to women, women’s voices have been granted a kind of sanctorum of belief in the #MeToo movement. Will this translate into legal practices or regulations? It is perhaps too early to say; if the Kavanaugh-​Blasey Ford confirmation hearings confirmed one thing, it is the degree to which the male narrative is granted authenticity even when subjective, and the female narrative discredited, even when objective. On display on TV screens around the world was the manner in which emotion, in particular, is validated when attached to men and delegitimised when expressed by women. In a series of interviews conducted by PBS through the various stages of the hearings, one US senator described Kavanaugh’s emotional defence as a “tour de force … in terms of indignation”, adding: And to some of us, made us wince. It did me. But … I tried to put myself in his position and say, “How would I feel if I felt that I was wrongly accused?” … [T]‌hat’s the kind of reaction I would probably have … Did he go overboard? Yes.31 Proving once again that empathy with regard to men and women is usually a matter of what Kate Manne calls “himpathy”:  “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior” —​a concept she uses to analyse the Kavanaugh-​Blasey Ford case in a now famous New York Times opinion piece.32 In fact, the range and intensity of Kavanaugh’s emotional response to Blasey Ford’s testimony were remarkable, especially in contrast with Blasey Ford’s careful control and calm. Yet, once the senators had decided which way they were going to vote, another senator justified her own vote in favour of Kavanaugh by citing the importance of objectivity in the context of justice. Clarifying that she believed that Blasey Ford had indeed undergone some form of sexual assault that had overturned her life, the senator went on: But we have a presumption of innocence in this country, and we cannot dispense with fairness the presumption of innocence and due process just because passions are inflamed. In fact, it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.33 Interestingly, the passions that were seen to be inflamed here were ascribed to Blasey Ford rather than Kavanaugh, thus making it possible to position her as jeopardising justice and fairness. 11

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Outside the hearings, the #MeToo movement was fuelled by granting women’s emotion an authentic space in the telling of their stories, placing it on the same level as calm and collected accounts, even silences. The dictum that there is no correct way to respond to assault or to speak about it or to deal with it over time has established itself so firmly perhaps for the first time in the long and global struggle against gender-​based violence. In this context, at least, the movement can be called historic.

A different battle: Consent and sex The nature and necessity of consent has become central to the conversations that the #MeToo movement has engendered. Even while some bemoan the loss of romance and spontaneity, the fault lines between those feminists who wondered whatever happened to just saying no to a pushy date and those women who feel betrayed into non-​consensual sexual acts during consensual sex, it is clear that the idea of consent has “come a long way”. In her essay questioning what consent actually means for the “liberated” woman today, Kamayani Sharma points out the central conundrum: “there is something deeply wrong with an idea of sex-​positivity premised on saying “yes” that ignores the truths about the way women, through childhood and adolescence into adulthood, are never actually empowered to say “no” on their own terms”.34 The 2018 Aziz Ansari incident broke this conversation wide open, taking the discussion beyond explaining the difference between flirtation and harassment, into areas that Anne-Emmanuelle Berger lays out in her chapter on the disturbing opposition and overlap between seduction and consent.35 In her analysis of the overlap of domination and seduction where sexuality is concerned, she posits the splitting of the subject of desire and the MacKinnonian “subject of feminism”. Berger calls for a new theory and practice of seduction in order to bridge the gap between the two “subjects”.

The future of the movement A major movie award in France has recently prompted a fresh surge of protest and rage against the lack of acknowledgement of the unaccountability of powerful men for crimes of sexual harassment and assault.36 Publishers are pulling books written by celebrity men accused of sexual assault as their employees walk out in protest.37 So in many ways, the answer to what the impact of the movement has been is evident in many positive ways, as well as less positive, more ambiguous ways.38 The uproar in France, for instance, was inspired by Roman Polanski, a convicted sexual predator, being given one of the highest honours of the film world while living a free life outside of the United States. The movement in different countries has resulted in changes in laws and the ways in which custodians of the law are sensitised to the issues involved in sexual harassment; in law suits whose outcomes may well have been influenced by the movement; unprecedented visibility and acknowledgement of the ubiquity of sexual harassment in all spheres of life, not just the workplace, its presence acknowledged as a systemic malaise rather than an aberration; and a change in the language and terminology used and the level and tenor of debates and conversations about sexual harassment.39 There remains much to be done if the movement is to achieve real and lasting change in the systems we put into place, and to make them effective on the ground. Is it too early to call the #MeToo movement a revolution? The initial protest mode seems clearly to have passed its tipping point and become a movement, but when does a movement become a revolution? If we consider the #MeToo movement as having created a platform where victim/​survivors could tell their own story, a right they felt they had been denied within 12

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the legal system or through other processes that should ensure justice, then it is possible to see the movement as a forum where anger and sorrow could be expressed in survivors’ own words and be heard.40 This is what makes it possible, even at this early stage, to define the #MeToo movement as a revolution. It has provided some victims of sexual violence with the survivor’s absolute right to speak up (or not to speak up) in her own voice and on their own terms. In this sense also, the #MeToo movement can be called an unprecedented and historic event. In her chapter, Purna Sen tracks statistics from social media and crimes of gender-​based violence from around the world to reveal a powerful, global, show of solidarity with far reaching consequences for discourse, policies, laws, and institutional change. In support of these findings, Sen cites the comfort and strength that women and the vulnerable have found in the collective naming of their abuse, calls for accountability, and changes in practice. The chapter gives a comprehensive sense of what changes this revolution has wrought, and how international efforts have connected with social media and local organisations. What is the connecting thread or the over-​riding narrative, then, of this revolution? Is it necessary that there be a single narrative or is this a revolutionary inevitability, constructing a static or stagnant pool of ideologies out of what is essentially a tool? We see different narratives of the movement emerging from the initial protest which has expanded into a dynamic movement. In some contexts, the movement is conflated with the “Global North” and from there into “Western feminism” and finally into “patriarchy”. In such a narrativising, the movement becomes a static ideological force, and is made to bear the burden of the histories and oppressive strategies of all of these categories. Other narratives cast the movement in more energising ways, seeing it as a shot in the arm for movements which may have lost momentum. In some cases, localised hashtags gain visibility through a wider based, better known hashtag such as the #MeToo one. The movement has lent itself to multiple narratives and this book includes several of these, paving the way for an interrogation of the kinds of narratives that it might be constructed into in the future. Transnational knowledge transfer is often negotiated at the individual and local level in the case of social media platforms. In the absence of the standard academic modes of knowledge collaborations which are industry-​run on the level of publications, readership, conferences, authority, etc., the #MeToo movement has created a knowledge base from the millions of individual stories which are functionally anonymous (in that the names are of unknown people) and structurally without authority. The revolution has no leaders, no theoretical boundaries, and no effective hierarchy. It does not accord with any single, dominant, language, having local expression wherever necessary, and no gatekeepers or arbiters, however many the critiques may be. Unlike many feminist movements, therefore, the #MeToo movement is fuelled by individual appropriations of the hashtag rather than by an ideology or theory or authorised principles. This has made it more malleable than local grassroots movements as well as other feminist movements emanating from what is usually called Western academia. The #MeToo movement has revived feminist struggles and produced a sense of achievement, making the movement a source of relief and hope among activists and scholars. Of course, there is widespread realisation that unbridled optimism is uncalled for. There is no such thing as an automatic or self-​sustaining momentum, when faced with a patriarchal system that continually finds new ways of reproducing itself and resisting change.41 One way to maintain the momentum of the #MeToo movement may be to think of it in terms of a temporal break. Such reframing echoes Virginia Woolf ’s famous words from another era when she declared that “in or about December 1910, human character changed”.42 She was, of course, as Angeliki Spiropoulou has noted, mocking the arbitrariness of the exact dating of long-​term processes, practiced by traditional historiography, but, more importantly, she was seeing its subversive 13

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potential and registering her engagement with exploring the specificity of her times. She noted that in this specific year, dramatic changes occurred in people’s relations with each other, in the physical environment, in government, in entertainment, movement, and sensory perceptions. Memory and experience were affected by these changes as were the terms on which human subjectivity was premised and conceptualised. Through systemic denunciation of patriarchy and conservative politics, Woolf developed an alternative historiography which would overcome the silencing effects of traditional historical narratives, and do justice to the oppressed and the defeated, mainly women and other outsiders to authority.43 With a view to understanding and revolutionising the present, this rescripting of the past is an attempt to intervene in the manner in which history is perceived and recorded, and reactivate unfulfilled or lost potentialities. In other words, we need to revisit and rewrite the traumas of the past in a more just way, including our voices and understanding in the silencing shame of past harms, and find, in a Benjaminian sense, the conditions for justice in the past, for the impossible to become possible in the future. This is also the promise of the #MeToo movement, in which millions are confronting and rethinking the crimes they have been subjected to. In the process, the movement needs to be sustained by the voices and visions of feminists who went before us, and by a clear focus on structural societal changes and through solidarities across multiple axes of differences and national boundaries. So perhaps the more important question is, where do we go from here? Where we go from here depends a great deal on the momentum and ongoing activism both on social media as well as in the changes in attitudes, knowledge base, understanding of the general public, and the laws and policies that are needed to implement these changes.44 Academia and activism are not opposites or even mutually exclusive ways of approaching these issues; they feed off of each other, each protest and intervention proceeding from and leading to changes in theoretical understandings of the forces at play. Part of the answer lies, perhaps, in what we have learnt from the movement about our strengths. But a revolution demands fundamental change, and in this sense, Eyja Brynjarsdóttir’s argument in her chapter positions the #MeToo movement as a struggle for epistemic justice, an epistemic resistance movement. If we are to see it as a revolution rather than a movement, then Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir’s perspective is also key. In her chapter, she sees listening to and believing women to be the revolutionary act, an endorsing and authenticating of the importance of people’s own sense of vulnerability.45 Neither positive nor negative, Halldórsdóttir considers vulnerability an ontological level on which one can be vulnerable in various ways and manage this essential state of one’s being. Reports have already started coming in, detailing the impact of the COVID-​19 crisis on women and vulnerable populations. While we wait for the statistics and surveys that will most surely be in the public domain when this Handbook hits the stands, we would not be wrong in attributing this swift and public understanding of the nature and culture of gender-​ based violence to the #MeToo movement. In presentations at the online conference hosted by Georgetown University and others since, the specific impact of the COVID-​19 crisis on women’s health, professional productivity, vulnerability to violence and abuse, care-​g iving responsibilities, and access to services was laid out in detail with available data.46 Even as reliable studies show that women are less susceptible to the virus than men, it is already clear that they are disproportionately affected by the crisis in negative ways.47 It is not an overstatement, nor an overestimation to consider that the swiftness, certainty, and public pronouncement of these studies and their findings owe something to the reverberations of the #MeToo movement and its irreversible foregrounding of the ubiquity and severity of gender-​based violence. 14

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While we work towards practical changes to systems predicated on discrimination that enable gender-​based violence, the #MeToo movement has shown us, powerfully, that our strengths lie in deeper reservoirs of solidarity and empathy, that the justice we seek goes beyond the legal to the epistemic and the emotional, and that our only chance lies in collaboration and alliance. As Marai Larasi puts it in her chapter: “as we have experienced with #MeToo, the ‘ownership’ of movement is complex, and indeed social justice work should be collaborative, collective work”. This Handbook sees itself as part of this “collaborative, collective work”.

Theories —​ contexts —​ perspectives Recognising that any discussion of such an area needs to be approached from several directions and perspective in terms of subjects, themes, debates, and discussion, the chapters have been divided into three broad sections. In Part I, there are nine chapters that are primarily ­theoretical. Angela Y. Davis reflects on the nature and needs of the feminist struggle; Cass Sunstein interrogates the nature of revolutions; Catharine A. MacKinnon analyses the global and legal forces active in the movement; Anne-Emmanuelle Berger discusses the many-​faceted meanings of consent; Jeff Hearn explores the place of masculinity in the movement; Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir focuses on the concept of vulnerability; Giti Chandra examines the relationship between anonymity and personhood; Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir takes on the silencing of resistance to patriarchy, and Nkiru Balonwu analyses the strengths and dichotomies of African feminisms. Part II contains eight chapters that look at theoretical frameworks within distinct contexts:  Pamela L. Runestad’s on the psychology and trauma attendant on the naming of crimes and perpetrators in the #MeToo movement; Rochelle McFee’s on the place of the survivor in revolution politics in postcolonial and church contexts; Vinita Chandra’s tracking of the movement from theory to praxis; Jack Halberstam’s blogpost reproduced here as chapter on the heteronormativity of the movement in specific SOGIE contexts; Karen Boyle’s on the perpetrator question with particular reference to the Harvey Weinstein trial; Audrey Roofeh’s work on solutions to workplace harassment in a post-​#MeToo era; Freyja Haraldsdóttir’s account and understanding of a woman with disabilities being a troublemaker amongst trouble makers; and Marai Larasi’s discussion of race and sexuality in the postcolonial subject situated in the United Kingdom. The third and longest section (Part III) reflects the global reach of the movement. While each of the 14 chapters delineates the specifics of a particular country or region, they all have larger theoretical approaches and frameworks that define them and connect them to the other chapters. Part III begins with Purna Sen’s sweeping survey of the ways in which the movement has travelled globally, and goes on to chapters on France, Poland, and Russia by Bibia Pavard, Florence Rochefort, and Michelle Zancarini-​ Fournel, Magdalena Grabowska, and Marta Rawłuszko, and Anna Sedysheva, respectively. It continues with Mirela Violeta David’s chapter on a comparative study of Romania and China, followed by Li Jun on China, and moves on to Robert O’Mochain’s chapter on the movement in Japan. Rym Tina Ghazal’s chapter on Egypt and MENA countries is followed by K.  Kanyali Mwikya, Judy Gitau, and Esther Waweru’s chapter on Kenya and other countries in Africa, as well as Tamara Shefer and Tigist Shewarega Hussen’s chapter on South Africa. Marifran Carlson’s chapter on Argentina and other countries in South America, and Edmé Domínguez’s chapter on Mexico and South America follow, and finally Lisa Salmonsson’s chapter on Sweden leads into Irma Erlingsdóttir’s concluding chapter on Iceland and the importance of solidarities. We have tried to include diverse formats of writing, from speeches, blogposts, and survivor narratives to journalist’s accounts, as well as, of course, the academic essay. We have tried to find 15

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a place even for silences, both deliberate and enforced. We feel this is in keeping with the nature of a movement that expresses itself in any shape or form that it finds necessary and effective at any given point of time or situational juncture, and which is fuelled by modes of speech and writing which are also forms of activism. We recognise also that for the vast majority of people of all genders who have created the #MeToo movement with their voices, written and spoken and performed, and their activism and support in so many different ways, the bulk of their knowledge base has come from non-​print, non-​academic sources. We have tried to put together this resource in acknowledgment of these disparate ways of producing and disseminating knowledge. It has been said that it is impossible to dam a stream in order to study its motion, but we feel that in opening the gates to different modes of expression we have gone a small way towards achieving that impossibility. We see this Handbook as a work in progress, much like the #MeToo movement itself, looking back on solidified ideas and realised events, considering where we are in an ever-​shifting present, and looking forward to the extension of current discourses into more concretised forms, and the emergence of fresh, unforeseen debates. In spite of all this, there is much that has not been covered here: the fiery energy of the music, poetry, and art that the movement has inspired and which has inspired the movement; especially poignantly, perhaps, the fact that so much of this movement has been fuelled and propelled by the spoken word, impossible to adequately capture in print. In recognition of the work-​in-​progress nature of this Handbook, these chapters provide a provisional roadmap for further research and work on areas touched upon. The Handbook points to work that needs to be done on similar fronts —​comparative studies such as David’s, survivor positioning and voices such as McFee’s, first person journalist accounts such as Rym Tina Ghazal’s, the particularity and nature of revolutions such as Sunstein’s, and evolving mechanisms to combat sexual harassment in various contexts as Roofeh’s has done. We look forward to studies that address a developing comprehension of a trauma-​informed listening to narratives as laid out by Runestad, to interventionist writing like Halberstam’s, to work locating other silences and recognising them as necessity and strategy as Haraldsdóttir’s chapter does, and to the writing of specific histories into the general future of the movement as Larasi does. The dispersal of the movement into several distinct and individual trajectories will need ongoing attention, tracking the global picture as Sen does even while deepening insights and understandings of local contexts as Sedysheva, Grabowska and Rawłuszko, Mwikya, Gitau, and Waweru, Domínguez, Salmonsson, O’Mochain, Erlingsdóttir, and Carlson have done, and mapping the pathways the movement takes including social and news media —​as Li and Boyle do. In all, these chapters chart the ground we stand on now, and also point forward to work that needs to be done on and beyond the movement, shifting context and specificities to other geographical sites and cultural locations. Finally, feminist struggles have always been an extended conversation, forging ahead through dialogue or not at all. In these chapters themselves, the reader will find many ongoing conversations: Jeff Hearn’s concerns regarding the positioning of trans and non-​binary genders is taken up in Jack Halberstam’s blogpost, while Rochefort et  al. gesture towards the place of romance and seduction in French culture  —​an idea that is explored in detail in AnneEmmanuelle Berger’s analysis of seduction and consent; similarly, Nkiru Balonwu’s careful placing of the contradictions within African feminisms extends this notion into a discussion of the feminist controversy surrounding “erotic capital”. Karen Boyle’s investigation into the importance of the Weinstein case follows from Catharine A. MacKinnon’s exposition of the legislations that underpin a contemporary understanding of sexual harassment and speaks directly to Audrey Roofeh’s interrogation of the efficacy or lack thereof of workplace harassment complaint mechanisms. Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir’s discussion of neoliberal uses of invulnerability provides 16

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an interesting perspective on Giti Chandra’s consideration of the vulnerability and anonymity of the construction of personhood, while Lisa Salmonsson’s and Vinita Chandra’s accounts of feminist resistance to gender-​based violence in the context of the university meet in theory and praxis from quite different parts of the world. In many of the chapters, socio-​cultural spaces offer points of contact and departure, allowing for an interpretive and multifaceted reading of the movement: Mirela Violeta David’s comparative study of Romania and China as post-​socialist societies provides context and framing for Li Jun’s study of student creativity and perseverance in the face of stringent political control. Robert O’Mochain’s examination of Japanese ethos and its tentative steps towards confronting sexual harassment find an unexpected echo in Magdala Grabowska and Marta Rawłuszko’s account of the Polish context and Anna Sedysheva’s reservations regarding the future of the movement in Russia. First person narratives seem almost to be in actual conversation with each other, and with good reason: Rym Tina Ghazal’s stories of being a woman journalist in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Rochelle McFee’s testimony as a survivor, and Marai Larasi’s standing witness to the oppressions of women of colour in the United Kingdom all carry the inflections and poignancy of the personal while communicating the urgency of the collective as only the spoken word can do. Perhaps one of the most animated conversations the movement has created is between grassroots, local movements and received, global ones: for K. Kanyali Mwikya, Judy Gitau, Esther Waweru, and Tamara Shefer and Tigist Shewarega Hussen from different parts of Africa to Marifran Carlson and Edmé Domínguez in South America, the lively debate of how and to what extent local hashtags and struggles gain from movements like the #MeToo movement is a fascinating dialogue. And finally, from the general to the particular, the chapters by Angela Y. Davis, Cass Sunstein, Purna Sen, and Irma Erlingsdóttir encourage the reader to constantly think dialectically. In that spirit, this Handbook is an invitation to engagements, discussions, and debates, furthering our understanding of the movement, and the movement itself, which we look forward to.

Notes 1 Eric Levenson, Lauren del Valle, and Sonia Moghe, “Harvey Weinstein Sentenced to 23 Years in Prison After Addressing His Accusers in Court”, CNN, 11 March 2020, https://​edition.cnn.com/​2020/​03/​ 11/​us/​harvey-​weinstein-​sentence/​index.html. 2 Abby Ohlheiser, “The Woman Behind ‘Me Too’ Knew the Power of the Phrase When She Created It —​ 10 Years Ago”, Washington Post, 19 October 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​ wp/​2017/​10/​19/​the-​woman-​behind-​me-​too-​knew-​the-​power-​of-​the-​phrase-​when-​she-​created-​it-​ 10-​years-​ago. 3 Laura Bates, “ ‘Never be the Most Feminist Person You Know’  —​Laura Bates Meets Cynthia Enloe”, Guardian, 6 November 2017, www.theguardian.com/​lifeandstyle/​2017/​nov/​06/​feminist-​ laura-​bates-​cynthia-​enloe. 4 Mehroonisa Raiva and Salla Sariola, “#Metoo & Feminist Activism in India”, EASST Review 37, no. 3 (2018), https://​easst.net/​article/​metoo-​feminist-​activism-​in-​india; Srila Roy, “#MeToo Is A Crucial Moment to Revisit the History of Indian Feminism”, Economic & Political Weekly 53, no. 42 (2018), www.epw.in/​node/​152923/​pdf. 5 Luke Charter, “Rhodes Students Protest Half-​Naked Against Rape”, Daily Dispatch Live, 20 April 2016,  https://​web.archive.org/​web/​20160820103451/​www.dispatchlive.co.za/​rhodes-​students-​ protest-​half-​naked-​against-​rape; Tigist Shewarega Hussen, “ICTs, Social Media and Feminist Activism:  #RapeMustFall, #NakedProtest, and #RUReferenceList Movements in South Africa”, in Engaging Youth in Activism, Research and Pedagogical Praxis: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race, ed. Tamara Shefer et  al. (New  York/​London:  Routledge, 2018), 199–​214; Guobin Yang, “Narrative Agency In Hashtag Activism: The Case of #BlackLivesMatter”, Media and Communication 4, no.  4 (2016):  13–​17; Rachel Loney-​Howes, “The Politics of the Personal:  The Evolution of Anti-​Rape Activism from Second-​Wave Feminism to #MeToo”, in #MeToo and the

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Giti Chandra and Irma Erlingsdóttir Politics of Social Change, ed. Bianca Fileborn and Rachel Loney-​Howes (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019),  21–​35. 6 Abby Ohlheiser, “How #MeToo Really Was Different, According to Data”, Washington Post, 22 January 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​wp/​2018/​01/​22/​how-​metoo-​really-​ was-​different-​according-​to-​data; Andrea Park, “#MeToo Reaches 85 Countries With 1.7M Tweets”, CBS News, 24 October 2017, www.cbsnews.com/​news/​metoo-​reaches-​85-​countries-​ with-​1-​7-​million-​tweets; Claire Zillman, “A New Poll on Sexual Harassment Suggests Why ‘Me Too’ Went So Insanely Viral”, Fortune, 17 October 2017, https://​fortune.com/​2017/​10/​17/​ me-​too-​hashtag-​sexual-​harassment-​at-​work-​stats. 7 Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 8 Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller, “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture Through Digital Feminist Activism”, European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 236–​246; Dubravka Zarkov and Kathy Davis, “Ambiguities and Dilemmas Around #MeToo: #ForHow Long and #WhereTo?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 1 (2018): 3–​9; Bianca Fileborn and Nickie Phillips, “From ‘Me Too’ to ‘Too Far’? Contesting the Boundaries of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Activism”, in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 99–​115. 9 Hélène Cixous, “De la scène de l’inconscient à la scène de l’Histoire:  Chemins d’une écriture” [From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History] in Hélène Cixous, chemins d’une écriture, [Hélène Cixous, Paths of Writing], ed. Françoise van Rossum-​Guyon and Myriam Díocaretez (Saint-​ Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), 22 (our translation). 10 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (1976): 875. 11 Lauren Rosewarne, “#MeToo and the Reasons to Be Cautious”, in Fileborn and Loney-​ Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 171–​ 184; Heidi Matthews, “#MeToo as Sex Panic”, in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 267–​283; Doreen McCallister, “#MeToo Movement Has Gone Too Far, Catherine Deneuve Says”, NPR  —​ The Two-​Way, 10 January 2018, www.npr.org/​sections/​thetwo-​way/​2018/​01/​10/​576986585/​-​metoo-​ movement-​has-​gone-​too-​far-​catherine-​deneuve-​says?t=1591281899164. 12 Moira Donegan, “How #MeToo Revealed the Central Rift Within Feminism Today”, Guardian, 11 May 2018, www.theguardian.com/​news/​2018/​may/​11/​how-​metoo-​revealed-​the-​central-​rift-​within​feminism-​social-​individualist. 13 Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance”, in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 12–​27. 14 Bridget Haire, Christy E. Newman and Bianca Fileborn, “Shitty Media Men”, in Fileborn and Loney-​ Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 201–​216; Kathryn Royal, “Journalist Guidelines and Media Reporting in the Wake of #MeToo”, in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 217–​234; Adam Blampied, “My Life and Career Were Ruined When I was Called Out for Sexual Harassment. I’m Glad —​I Deserved It”, Independent, 19 January 2018, www. independent.co.uk/​voices/​sexual-​harassment-​women-​life-​career-​r uined-​deserved-​adam-​blampied- ​ youtube-​a8167751.html. 15 W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and The Personalization of Contentious Politics”, Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2013): 739–​ 768, https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​1369118X.2012.670661. 16 Katie Rife, “An Incomplete, Depressingly Long List of Celebrities’ Sexual Assault and Harassment Stories”, A.V. Club, 22 November 2017, www.avclub.com/​an-​incomplete-​depressingly-​long-​list-​of-​ celebrities-​se-​1819628519. 17 Neha Kagal, Leah Cowan, and Huda Jawad, “Beyond the Bright Lights:  Are Minoritized Women Outside the Spotlight Able to Say #MeToo?” in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 133–​149; Jess Ison, “ ‘It’s Not Just Men and Women’: LGBTQIA People and #MeToo”, in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 151–​167; Casey Quackenbush, “The Religious Community Is Speaking Out Against Sexual Violence With #ChurchToo”, Time, 22 November 2017, https://​time.com/​5034546/​me-​too-​church-​too-​sexual-​abuse/​; Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualization of Culture’ to #MeToo”, Sexualities 21, no. 8 (2018): 1313–​1324, https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​1363460718794647.

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Rebellion, revolution, reformation 18 Emily Flores, “The #MeToo Movement Hasn’t Been Inclusive of the Disability Community”, Teen Vogue, 24 April 2018, www.teenvogue.com/​story/​the-​metoo-​movement-​hasnt-​been-​inclusive-​of-​ the-​disability-​community; Carly Gieseler, The Voices of #MeToo:  From Grassroots Activism to a Viral Roar (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). We are also grateful to Megan Smith and Eva Þórdís Ebenezersdóttir of the University of Iceland, Reykjavik for contributing to our understanding of this issue. 19 Rana Ayyub, “In India, Women Are No Longer Prepared to Stay Silent”, Guardian, 21 October 2018, www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2018/​oct/​21/​india-​women-​silent-​metoo-​movement-​battle. 20 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Theory From the South: Or, How Euro-​America is Evolving Toward Africa”, Anthropological Forum 22, no.  2 (2012):  113–​ 131; Ritty Lukose, “Decolonizing Feminism in the #MeToo Era”, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36, no. 2 (2018): 34–​52. 21 Crunktastic, “Pussy Don’t Fail Me Now:  The Place of Vaginas in Black Feminist Theory & Organizing”, Crunk Feminist Collective, 23 January 2017, www.crunkfeministcollective.com/​2017/​01/​ 23/​pussy-​dont-​fail-​me-​now-​theplace-​of-​vaginas-​in-​black-​feminist-​theory-​organizing; Tess Ryan, “This Black Body Is Not Yours for the Taking”, in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 117–​132; Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States”, American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (2015): 4–​17; Angela Onwuachi-​Willig, “What About #UsToo?: The Invisibility of Race in the #MeToo Movement”, Yale Law Journal Forum 128 (2018): 105–​120. 22 Jing Zeng, “You Say #MeToo, I Say #MiTu: China’s Online Campaigns Against Sexual Abuse”, in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change,  71–​83. 23 Jeff Hearn, “You, Them, Us, We, Too? … Online–​ Offline, Individual–​ Collective, Forgotten–​ Remembered, Harassment–​Violence”, European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 228–​235. 24 Desmond Tutu, “Truth and Reconciliation”, Greater Good Magazine, 1 September 2004, https://​ greatergood.berkeley.edu/​article/​item/​truth_​and_​reconciliation. 25 “New Treatment for People Convicted of Domestic Violence Reduced Subsequent Arrests for All Types of Crimes, Study Finds”, New  York University, 24 September 2019, www.nyu.edu/​about/​ news-​publications/​news/​2019/​september/​DomesticViolneceStudy.html. 26 Þórdís Elva and Tom Stranger, South of Forgiveness (London: Scribe, 2017). 27 We owe much of our understanding of this issue to conversations with Kristín I. Pálsdóttir, spokeswoman of Rótin, Association for Women, Trauma and Substance Use. 28 Mary Anne Franks, “A Thousand and One Stories: Myth and the #MeToo Movement”, in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change,  85–​95. 29 Carol Summers, “Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s”, Journal of Social History 39, no. 3 (2006): 741–​770, www.jstor.org/​stable/​3790288. 30 Leila Ettachfini, “Mona Eltahawy Would Like You to Fuck Right Off with Your Civility Politics”, Vice, 27 December 2019, www.vice.com/​en_​us/​article/​xgq8nz/​mona-​eltahawy-​would-​like-​you-​to-​fuck​r ight-​off-​with-​your-​civility-​politics. 31 Catherine Trautwein, “Inside the Kavanaugh Hearings: An Oral History”, PBS, 21 May 2019, www. pbs.org/​wgbh/​frontline/​article/​supreme-​court-​kavanaugh-​collins-​flake-​heitkamp-​blasey-​ford. 32 Manne, “Brett Kavanaugh and America’s ‘Himpathy’ Reckoning”, New  York Times, 26 September 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​09/​26/​opinion/​brett-​kavanaugh-​hearing-​himpathy.html. 33 Trautwein, “Inside the Kavanaugh Hearings”. 34 Kamayani Sharma, “#MeToo: Understanding Consent and Sex-​Positivity in a Patriarchal Society”, Firstpost, accessed 8 June 2020, www.firstpost.com/​long-​reads/​metoo-​understanding-​consent-​and-​ sex-​positivity-​in-​a-​patriarchal-​society-​5535191.html. 35 Katie Way, “I Went on a Date with Aziz Ansari. It Turned into the Worst Night of My Life”, Babe, 13 January, 2018, https://​babe.net/​2018/​01/​13/​aziz-​ansari-​28355; Christy E. Newman and Bridget Haire, “ ‘A Reckoning That Is Long Overdue’: Reconfiguring the Work of Progressive Sex Advice Post #MeToo”, in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 235–​250; Cyndi Darnell, “Consent Lies Destroy Lives: Pleasure as the Sweetest Taboo”, in Fileborn and Loney-​ Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 253–​266. 36 Kim Willsher, “Polanski’s ‘Oscar’Divides Elite World of French Cinema”, Guardian, 1 March 2020, www. theguardian.com/​film/​2020/​mar/​01/​roman-​polanski-​cesar-​award-​jaccuse-​divides-​french-​cinema. 37 John Williams, “Hachette Says It Won’t Publish Woody Allen’s Book”, New  York Times, 6 March 2020, www.nytimes.com/​2020/​03/​06/​books/​hachette-​woody-​allen-​apropos-​nothing.html.

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Giti Chandra and Irma Erlingsdóttir 38 María Cecilia Garibotti and Cecilia Marcela Hopp, “Substitution Activism: The Impact of #MeToo in Argentina”, in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 185–​199. 39 Reshma Jagsi, “Sexual Harassment in Medicine —​#MeToo”, New England Journal of Medicine 378, no.  2 (2018), www.sonesp.com.br/​wp-​content/​uploads/​Sexual_​Harassment_​Medicine_​NEJM2018. pdf. 40 Nina M. Lozano-​Reich and Dana L. Cloud, “The Uncivil Tongue: Invitational Rhetoric and the Problem of Inequality”, Western Journal of Communication 73, no.  2 (2009):  220–​226; Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action”, 739–​768; Amy Shields Dobson, Postfeminist Digital Cultures: Femininity, Social Media, and Self-​Representation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Katherine E.  Wolfe, “Narrative Form and Agency in #MeToo”, Metamorphosis, 16 July 2018, https://​metamorphosis.coplac.org/​index.php/​metamorphosis/​article/​view/​208/​198; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean”, Communication and Critical/​Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 1–​19. 41 Lori Perkins, #MeToo: Essays About How and Why This Happened, What It Means and How to Make Sure it Never Happens Again (New  York:  Riverdale Avenue Books, 2017); Laila Risgallah Wahba, What Happens After #MeToo: Tackling the Iceberg (Independently published, 2017); Fileborn and Loney-​ Howes, eds, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change. 42 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”, Common Reader 1 (1925): 146–​154. 43 Angeliki Spiropoulou, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History:  Constellations with Walter Benjamin (Hampshire: Palgrave McMillan, 2010), 3, 8. 44 Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2015); Kaitlynn Mendes and Jessica Ringrose, “Digital Feminist Activism: #MeToo and the Everyday Experiences of Challenging Rape Culture”, in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 37–​51; Jessamy Gleeson and Breanan Turner, “Online Feminist Activism as Performative Consciousness-​Raising:  A #MeToo Case Study”, in Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change,  53–​69. 45 Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrola and Ingrid Ryberg, “Vulnerability as a Political Language”, in The Power of Vulnerability:  Mobilising Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-​Racist Media Cultures, eds Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrola and Ingrid Ryberg (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2018),  1–​26. 46 “COVID-​19: A Gender Perspective on the Growing Humanitarian Crisis”. Online conference hosted by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security on 8 April 2020. 47 Daníel F. Guðbjartsson et al., “Spread of SARS-​CoV-​2 In the Icelandic Population April 14, 2020”, New England Journal of Medicine, 14 April 2020, DOI: 10.1056/​NEJMoa2006100.

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Rebellion, revolution, reformation Charter, Luke. “Rhodes Students Protest Half-​naked against Rape”. Daily Dispatch Live, 20 April 2016. https://​web.archive.org/​web/​20160820103451/​www.dispatchlive.co.za/​rhodes-​students-​protest-​ half-​naked-​against-​rape. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–​893. Cixous, Hélène. “De la scène de l’Inconsicent à la scène de l’Histoire: Chemins d’une écriture” [From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History] in Hélène Cixous, chemins d’une écriture, [Hélène Cixous, Paths of Writing], ed. Françoise van Rossum-​Guyon and Myriam Díocaretez. Sain-​ Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. “Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-​America is Evolving Toward Africa”. Anthropological Forum 22, no. 2 (2012): 113–​131. Crunktastic. “Pussy Don’t Fail Me Now: The Place of Vaginas in Black Feminist Theory & Organizing”. Crunk Feminist Collective, 23 January 2017. www.crunkfeministcollective.com/​2017/​01/​23/​ pussy-​dont-​fail-​me-​now-​theplace-​of-​vaginas-​in-​black-​feminist-​theory-​organizing. Davis, Angela Y. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle:  Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. Darnell, Cyndi. “Consent Lies Destroy Lives: Pleasure as the Sweetest Taboo”. In Fileborn and Loney-​ Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 253–​266. Dobson, Amy Shields. Postfeminist Digital Cultures:  Femininity, Social Media, and Self-​ Representation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Donegan, Moira. “How #MeToo Revealed the Central Rift within Feminism Today”. Guardian, 11 May 2018. www.theguardian.com/​news/​2018/​may/​11/​how-​metoo-​revealed-​the-​central-​r ift-​within-​ feminism-​social-​individualist. Elva, Þórdís, and Tom Stranger. South of Forgiveness. London: Scribe, 2017. Ettachfini, Leila. “Mona Eltahawy Would Like You to Fuck Right Off with Your Civility Politics”. Vice, 27 December 2019. www.vice.com/​en_​us/​article/​xgq8nz/​mona-​eltahawy-​would-​like-​you-​to​fuck-​r ight-​off-​with-​your-​civility Fileborn, Bianca, and Rachel Loney-​Howes, eds. #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Fileborn, Bianca, and Nickie Phillips. “From ‘Me Too’ to ‘Too Far’? Contesting the Boundaries of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Activism”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 99–​115. Flores, Emily. “The #MeToo Movement Hasn’t Been Inclusive of the Disability Community”. Teen Vogue, 24 April 2018. www.teenvogue.com/​story/​the-​metoo-​movement-​hasnt-​been-​inclusive-​ of-​the-​disability-​community. Franks, Mary Anne. “A Thousand and One Stories: Myth and the #MeToo Movement”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change,  85–​95. Garibotti, María Cecilia, and Cecilia Marcela Hopp. “Substitution Activism: The Impact of #MeToo in Argentina”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 185–​199. Georgetown Institute for Woman, Peace, and Security. “COVID-​19:  A Gender Perspective on the Growing Humanitarian Crisis”. Online conference on 8 April 2020. Gieseler, Carly. The Voices of #MeToo:  From Grassroots Activism to a Viral Roar. Lanham:  Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualization of Culture’ to #MeToo”. Sexualities 21, no. 8 (2018):  1313–​1324. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​13634607 18794647. Gleeson, Jessamy, and Breanan Turner. “Online Feminist Activism as Performative Consciousness-​ Raising: A #MeToo Case Study”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 53–​69. Guðbjartsson, Daníel F., Agnar Helgason, Hákon Jónsson, Ólafur T. Magnússon, Páll Melsted, Guðmundur L. Norðdahl, Jóna Sæmundsdóttir, et al. “Spread of SARS-​CoV-​2 in the Icelandic Population”. New England Journal of Medicine, 14 April 2020. DOI: 10.1056/​NEJMoa2006100. Haire, Bridget, Christy E. Newman, and Bianca Fileborn. “Shitty Media Men”. In Fileborn and Loney-​ Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 201–​216. Hearn, Jeff. “You, Them, Us, We, Too? … Online–​ Offline, Individual–​ Collective, Forgotten–​ Remembered, Harassment–​Violence”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 228–​235.

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Giti Chandra and Irma Erlingsdóttir Hussen, Tigist Shewarega. “ICTs, Social Media and Feminist Activism: #RapeMustFall, #NakedProtest, and #RUReferenceList Movements in South Africa”. In Engaging Youth in Activism, Research and Pedagogical Praxis:  Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race. Edited by Tamara Shefer, Jeff Hearn, Kopano Ratele, and Floretta Boonzaier, 199–​ 214. New  York/​ London: Routledge, 2018. Ison, Jess. “ ‘It’s Not Just Men and Women’: LGBTQIA People and# MeToo”. In Fileborn and Loney-​ Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 151–​167. Jagsi, Reshma. “Sexual Harassment in Medicine  —​#MeToo”. New England Journal of Medicine 378, no. 2 (January 2018). www.sonesp.com.br/​wp-​content/​uploads/​Sexual_​Harassment_​Medicine_​ NEJM2018.pdf. Kagal, Neha, Leah Cowan, and Huda Jawad. “Beyond the Bright Lights: Are Minoritized Women Outside the Spotlight Able to Say #MeToo?” In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 133–​149. Koivunen, Anu, Katariina Kyrola, and Ingrid Ryberg. “Vulnerability as a Political Language”. In the Power of Vulnerability:  Mobilising Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-​Racist Media Cultures. Edited by Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrola, and Ingrid Ryberg, 1–​26. Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2018. Levenson, Eric, Lauren del Valle, and Sonia Moghe. “Harvey Weinstein Sentenced to 23 Years in Prison after Addressing His Accusers in Court”. CNN¸ 11 March 2020. https://​edition.cnn.com/​2020/​03/​ 11/​us/​harvey-​weinstein-​sentence/​index.html. Loney-​ Howes, Rachel. “The Politics of the Personal:  The Evolution of Anti-​ rape Activism from Second-​Wave Feminism to #MeToo”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change,  21–​35. Lozano-​Reich, Nina M., and Dana L. Cloud. “The Uncivil Tongue:  Invitational Rhetoric and the Problem of Inequality”. Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 2 (2009): 220–​226. Lukose, Ritty. “Decolonizing Feminism in the #MeToo Era”. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36, no. 2 (2018): 34–​52. Manne, Kate. “Brett Kavanaugh and America’s ‘Himpathy’ Reckoning”. New York Times, 26 September 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​09/​26/​opinion/​brett-​kavanaugh-​hearing-​himpathy.html. Matthews, Heidi. “#MeToo as Sex Panic”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 267–​283. McCallister, Doreen. “#MeToo Movement Has Gone Too Far, Catherine Deneuve Says”. NPR  —​ The Two-​Way, 10 January 2018. www.npr.org/​sections/​thetwo-​way/​2018/​01/​10/​576986585/​ -​metoo-​movement-​has-​gone-​too-​far-​catherine-​deneuve-​says?t=1591281899164. Mendes, Kaitlynn, and Jessica Ringrose. “Digital Feminist Activism:  #MeToo and the Everyday Experiences of Challenging Rape Culture”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change,  37–​51. Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller. “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 236–​246. New York University. “New Treatment for People Convicted of Domestic Violence Reduced Subsequent Arrests for All Types of Crimes, Study Finds”. 24 September 2019. www.nyu.edu/​about/​news-​ publications/​news/​2019/​september/​DomesticViolneceStudy.html. Newman, Christy E., and Bridget Haire. “ ‘A Reckoning That Is Long Overdue’:  Reconfiguring the Work of Progressive Sex Advice Post #MeToo”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 235–​250. Ohlheiser, Abby. “The Woman Behind ‘Me Too’Knew the Power of the Phrase When She Created It —​10 Years Ago”. Washington Post, 19 October 2017. www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​wp/​2017/​10/​ 19/​the-​woman-​behind-​me-​too-​knew-​the-​power-​of-​the-​phrase-​when-​she-​created-​it-​10-​years-​ago. Ohlheiser, Abby. “How #MeToo Really Was Different, According to Data”. Washington Post, 22 January 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​wp/​2018/​01/​22/​how-​metoo-​really-​ was-​different-​according-​to-​data. Onwuachi-​Willig, Angela. “What About #UsToo? The Invisibility of Race in the #MeToo Movement”. Yale Law Journal Forum 128 (2018): 105–​120. Park, Andrea. “#MeToo Reaches 85 Countries With 1.7M Tweets”. CBS News, 24 October 2017. www. cbsnews.com/​news/​metoo-​reaches-​85-​countries-​with-​1-​7-​million-​tweets.

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Rebellion, revolution, reformation Perkins, Lori. #MeToo: Essays About How and Why This Happened, What It Means and How to Make Sure it Never Happens Again. New York: Riverdale Avenue Books, 2017. Quackenbush, Casey. “The Religious Community Is Speaking Out Against Sexual Violence With #ChurchToo”. Time, 22 November 2017. https://​time.com/​5034546/​me-​too-​church-​too-​sexual-​ abuse/​. Raiva, Mehroonisa, and Salla Sariola. “#Metoo & Feminist Activism in India”. EASST Review 37, no. 3 (2018). https://​easst.net/​article/​metoo-​feminist-​activism-​in-​india. Rife, Katie. “An Incomplete, Depressingly Long List of Celebrities’ Sexual Assault and Harassment Stories”. A.V. Club, 22 November 2017. www.avclub.com/​an-​incomplete-​depressingly-​long-​list​of-​celebrities-​se-​1819628519. Rosewarne, Lauren. “#MeToo and the Reasons to Be Cautious”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 171–​184. Roy, Srila. “#MeToo Is A  Crucial Moment to Revisit the History of Indian Feminism”. Economic & Political Weekly 53, no. 42 (2018). www.epw.in/​node/​152923/​pdf. Royal, Kathryn. “Journalist Guidelines and Media Reporting in the Wake of #MeToo”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 217–​234. Ryan, Tess. “This Black Body Is Not Yours for the Taking”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, 117–​132. Sharma, Kamayani. “#MeToo:  Understanding Consent and Sex-​Positivity in a Patriarchal Society”. Firstpost. Accessed 8 June 2020. www.firstpost.com/​long-​reads/​metoo-​understanding-​consent-​and-​ sex-​positivity-​in-​a-​patriarchal-​society-​5535191.html. Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History:  Constellations with Walter Benjamin. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Summers, Carol. “Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s”. Journal of Social History 39, no. 3 (2006): 741–​770. www.jstor.org/​stable/​3790288. Trautwein, Catherine. “Inside the Kavanaugh Hearings: An Oral History”. PBS, 21 May 2019. www.pbs. org/​wgbh/​frontline/​article/​supreme-​court-​kavanaugh-​ collins-​flake-​heitkamp-​blasey-​ford. Tutu, Desmond. “Truth and Reconciliation”. Greater Good Magazine, 1 September 2004. https://​ greatergood.berkeley.edu/​article/​item/​truth_​and_​reconciliation. Wahba, Laila Risgallah. What Happens After #MeToo: Tackling the Iceberg. Independently published, 2017. Way, Katie. “I Went on a Date with Aziz Ansari. It Turned into the Worst Night of My Life”. Babe, 13 January 2018. https://​babe.net/​2018/​01/​13/​aziz-​ansari-​28355. Williams, John. “Hachette Says It Won’t Publish Woody Allen’s Book”. New York Times, 6 March 2020. www.nytimes.com/​2020/​03/​06/​books/​hachette-​woody-​allen-​apropos-​nothing.html. Willsher, Kim. “Polanski’s ‘Oscar’ Divides Elite World of French Cinema”. Guardian, 1 March 2020. www. theguardian.com/​film/​2020/​mar/​01/​roman-​polanski-​cesar-​award-​jaccuse-​divides-​french-​cinema. Wolfe, Katherine E. “Narrative Form and Agency in #MeToo”. Metamorphosis, 16 July 2018. https://​ metamorphosis.coplac.org/​index.php/​metamorphosis/​article/​view/​208/​198. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction”. Common Reader 1 (1925): 146–​154. Yang, Guobin. “Narrative Agency in Hashtag Activism:  The Case of #BlackLivesMatter”. Media and Communication 4, no. 4 (2016): 13–​17. Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. “Ambiguities and Dilemmas Around #MeToo: #ForHow Long and #WhereTo?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 1 (2018): 3–​9. Zeng, Jing. “You Say #MeToo, I  Say #MiTu:  China’s Online Campaigns against Sexual Abuse”. In Fileborn and Loney-​Howes, #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change,  71–​83. Zillman, Claire. “A New Poll on Sexual Harassment Suggests Why ‘Me Too’Went So Insanely Viral”. Fortune, 17 October 2017. https://​fortune.com/​2017/​10/​17/​me-​too-​hashtag-​sexual-​harassment-​at-​work-​stats.

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PART I

Theories

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1 STRUGGLE, SOLIDARITY, AND SOCIAL CHANGE Angela Y. Davis

Women have been saying “me too” for a very long time, so long that we should have recognised decades ago that gender violence and sexual harassment are structural, thus deeply embedded in cultures, traditions, and institutions. But it was not until 2017 that sexual assault began to be taken seriously within the mainstream. In the 1970s when we began to speak out, forcefully, against the physical and sexual abuse of women, we did not know that it would be fifty years before this ideological struggle against gender violence would begin to yield material results —​fifty years of anti-​rape hotlines, battered women’s shelters, and activist commitments, protests, marches, demonstrations. We also did not realise that it would take just as long before racist police violence would be publicly acknowledged. Nevertheless, it is important today to acknowledge the fact that solidarity and struggle eventually lead to change as the #MeToo movement has dramatically shown.1 By adopting intersectional feminist approaches, we recognise the connection between different social problems, such as gender violence in intimate and more public relationships, and state violence in institutions such as the police and prisons. When looking back to the United Nations Decade for Women, which culminated in the 1985 non-​governmental World Conference on Women),2 one realises that it was just a beginning. Perhaps the UN should have declared a Century for Women. While many changes have taken place —​and I think it is extremely important to acknowledge those changes because solidarity and struggles do eventually make a difference3 —​gender violence remains a world-​ wide pandemic. The failure to move towards gender equality reveals other disparities as well. In the United States, we have witnessed the collapse of social services that was a direct result of the impact of global capitalism. Beginning in the 1980s, we witnessed the rise of neoliberal assumptions consigning what ought to be social responsibilities to the realm of the individual. As has been repeatedly emphasised in the Nordic countries, the insistence on subsidised childcare and parental leave has gone a long way towards enabling women’s economic and political participation. Incarceration rates in the Nordic countries are also low. The United States, in contrast, has the highest rate of incarceration, with almost one third of all women who are incarcerated in the world being locked up in jails and prison there.4 The example of the Nordic countries is important because it helps us understand connections and interrelationalities, but also because it warns us of the dangers of reductionism. We cannot assume that closing economic, educational, and political gender gaps will necessarily and automatically lead to a diminution in the level of sexual harassment and gender violence. In the 27

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context of significant economic political and educational advances by women, how does one move towards minimising the consequences of long cultural traditions of male superiority that most dramatically express themselves in terms of violence? Not only physical, but also verbal and psychological violence. As important as it may be to dismantle economic and political structures that promote gender inequality, it is also equally important to break down ideological and cultural structures that legitimise gender violence and sexual harassment in intimate, as well as in economic and other public or quasi-​public, relationships. Violence is, for example, as deeply embedded in domestic work as it is in the institution of marriage. If we neglect this ideological struggle, putative advances for women may serve to strengthen the very structures that promote male supremacy, which so often also promote white supremacy. As Dean Spade and Sarah Lazare have pointed out, women now run four out of the five largest US corporations associated with the military-​industrial complex: Northrop Grumman, Boeing Defense, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics.5 They are also, of course, in key positions in the governmental defence hierarchy. This raises the question of whether women’s empowerment, regardless of context, is always a cause for celebration. Simply incorporating women into positions of power does not guarantee gender equality or justice in the largest sense. Because we are often primed to celebrate the individual advancements of women or people of colour without taking into consideration that diversity by itself may simply mean that previously marginalised individuals have been recruited to guarantee a more efficient operation of oppressive systems. As Cynthia Enloe observed, “there is no evidence that I’ve seen of the CIA Defense Department or other institutions where only a few women are rising to the top, that they challenge the mission of the company or the organization”.6 Placing women in control of institutions of state violence has certainly not helped to reduce the incidence of gender violence, neither within the military nor within the larger world. Usual conceptions simply ask: how to achieve diversity and inclusion without attending to the transformations that would be necessary in order to achieve justice. Should Black people be included in a society that remains just as racist as it was before we were invited to join? Should women be invited into a world that remains as sexist and misogynist as before? Should disabled people be embraced by a society that continues to perpetrate its ableist ideologies and practices? Gender violence is the most pandemic form of violence in the world. It raises the question of why advances have occurred in other realms while gender violence has remained unchanged. One of the answers to this question resides in the tendency to individualise the problem. Because we are led to focus primary attention on individual perpetrators as if they themselves are the beginning and end of these violences, we are rarely called upon to reflect on the structural and institutional underpinnings of these violences. This is an instance where we might learn from struggles against racism that remaining at the level of the individual will condemn us to endless repetitions of legal and other proceedings on the individual level that are actually predicated on the impossibility of purging our societies of sexual harassment and assault. I would like to suggest that we need to forge ways of thinking and talking about these modes of violence —​verbal, physical, psychological forms of violence —​ that do not unintentionally affirm their permanence. These violences can be ended. We should not have to assume that racist violence, which has such a long history in North America, in every place that has been touched by colonialism and slavery, is a future inevitability. We should not have to assume that women —​including Black women, indigenous women, disabled women, trans women, and all the identities that might be embraced by the category “women” —​will forever be the targets of gender-​based violence. We should not have to assume that intimate violence, child abuse, or incest, will forever be associated with the form of collectivity we call the family. In the United States, we should not 28

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have to assume that the proliferation of guns —​over 300 million guns in the hands of civilians along with police violence, gang violence, school shootings, community violence —​will forever serve as defining features of our communities. Racist, gender, family, community violences are deeply connected to the violence of the state, to repressive apparatuses, such as structures of policing, institutions of punishment, and machineries of intelligence and war. I have evoked the period of the last fifty years, during which anti-​violence activism has been a significant dimension of women’s movements. In the United States, the anti-​violence movement is most frequently periodised in connection with the 1966 founding of the National Organization for Women and of the creation within that context of a task force on rape.7 Without wanting to minimise the important work that the National Organization for Women (NOW) has done over the years or to undermine the eventual emergence of a very strong anti-​rape and anti-​violence movement, I do want to trouble this genealogy, just as we have had to trouble the more recent genealogy of #MeToo. As you know, Tarana Burke began using the phrase in 2006 to emphasise the pandemic dimensions of sexual violence within Black communities, but it was Alyssa Milano who was initially credited with the creation of the slogan.8 Unfortunately, many contemporary images associated with #MeToo are overwhelmingly white. Genealogies should always be questioned because there is always an unacknowledged reason for beginning at a certain moment in history as opposed to another. Much of the early work of Black feminism and radical women-​of-​colour feminism consisted of attempts to correct the historical record, pointing out that white women were not the only women who challenged misogyny and patriarchy, and that oftentimes women of colour engaged these challenges in a more complex, intersectional way. Looking at the genealogy of the anti-​violence movement, one should question why the work against rape and sexual violence within the US Southern Black freedom movement came to be so marginalised, so much so that it required years of research and activism to recognise, for example, Rosa Parks for the role that she played in anti-​ rape activism. Many people only know her as the figure who refused to move to the back of the bus, but she had already accumulated a very long history of involvement in important antiracist activism linked to sexual assault. Beginning with the case of the Scottsboro Nine, then the case of Recy Taylor in 1944 in which a Black woman, in a town called Abbeville, Alabama, was gang-​raped by a group of young, white men. A decade later there was the case of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, who was accused of making sexual comments to a white woman, and who was killed as a result. What is interesting is that during that period explicit connections were made between the defence of Black women against rape and the protest of the racist use of the rape charge in cases like the Scottsboro Nine, for example. As many scholars and activists have observed, the struggle to defend Black men from fraudulent rape charges was directly linked to the defence of Black women who were targets of rape. Rape and the racist manipulation of the rape charge were directly connected.9 When second-​wave women’s movements emerged during the late 1960s in the United States, the catalyst was precisely the recognition of the ubiquity of the physical and sexual abuse of women. This form of violence has always crossed borders of race and class. But the speak-​ outs and consciousness-​raising sessions that attempted to break the silence regarding rape and domestic violence were primarily associated with white feminism. The strategy consisted of encouraging women to reveal violence within intimate relationships that they had previously kept secret. These new efforts to break the silence were absolutely necessary. However, it was also true that Black women had forged modes of revealing this violence and creating communities within which one could acknowledge the existence of gender violence. This can be found for example throughout women’s blues. In my book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, I  argue that the 29

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second-​wave feminist insistence on naming intimate violence and abuse, as against maintaining the silence that legitimised gender violence, is preceded historically by blues women’s fearless acknowledgement of domestic abuse. Here I  am referring to women blues singers like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.10 This naming of abuse within blues songs may not have led to a political change or change in real life. Nevertheless, it did help to create a terrain on which present-​day political consciousness around gender violence could grow and develop. How does our view of gender violence change if we look at it from the vantage point of Black women or indigenous women, or working-​class and poor women of all racial backgrounds? By way of beginning to formulate an answer, I would say that we would have to be critical of the way in which middle-​class white women have come to stand in for all survivors of violence. Because of the assumed privatisation of the lives of middle-​class white women and because the private sphere is imagined as a haven of freedom, repressive apparatuses can be called upon to secure that freedom. Catharine A. MacKinnon and other feminist scholars have examined these contradictions.11 Thus, gender violence comes to be represented as a problem to be solved by state violence, by police and prisons. This does not work for those who are not acknowledged as subjects of freedom in the private sphere. We have already experienced the contradictions of guaranteeing abortion rights to women by virtue of protecting their privacy and the private relationship between them and their doctors. What about those women who have no doctors, who have no privacy to protect? An analysis that does not explore the structural basis of violence can very easily rely on carceral methods to address gender violence. This is why those of us who identify with “abolition feminism”, that is, the abolition and transformation of institutions of incarceration and policing, refer to the strategies of reliance on these institutions to solve the problem of gender violence as “carceral feminism”. It is a term that has emerged to refer to a feminism that relies on criminalisation, thereby assisting in the build-​up of prisons and that —​even if inadvertently —​bolsters the structural racism, which is most dramatically seen in the prisons of the world, holding a disproportionate number of Black and Latinx people, of indigenous people, people from the Global South, and migrants. When we first raised the call for abolition many decades ago there were those who argued that precisely at a time when we had just succeeded in having domestic violence and sexual assault recognised as crimes, we were calling for an abolition of the system that would make male purveyors of violence against women accountable. But isn’t it now time to think about more effective ways of ridding the world of gender violence and other products of what we have come to call toxic masculinities? Is it not now time that men began to take the leadership in campaigns to redefine masculinity and to disarticulate it from violence and subjection? It is true that women are on the rise throughout the world and I think we are all very happy about that. When women rise up it means that the world can change. But women cannot simply aspire to take the places of men. Let us remember that if we embrace this simple substitution, more than likely the structures responsible for misogyny and gender violence will remain intact. We cannot merely place women in positions previously occupied by men and let the surrounding conditions remain the same. Instead of changing, the world will remain exactly the same as before. If we simply want to become what white, straight, cis, powerful men have been in the past, we are replicating the heteropatriarchal structures that will continue to perpetrate the violence we think we are challenging. This is the dilemma of glass ceiling feminism. If we do not challenge the structures and very meaning of hierarchies of power, we will find ourselves in a position where it might be said that women are fighting for the right to be as violent as men. That would make no sense at all. This is why campaigns demanding the equality 30

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of women in the military should always be combined with a deep critique of the military itself, for radical approaches to justice would require the dismantling of militarism altogether. Similarly, marriage equality, with respect to LGBTQ communities, should always be combined with a radical critique of the institution of marriage, which is grounded in capitalist notions of property inheritance. It also structurally harbors the very violence we oppose when we say we are standing up against gender violence. Our work for reproductive rights needs not only to emphasise the defence of abortion rights, but also freedom from sterilisation abuse and many other aspects of reproductive justice. Our critique of gender violence is most effective when it is linked to a critique of racist violence, even in communities that think of themselves as racially homogeneous. The legacies of the violences that enable slavery and colonialism are sedimented in heteropatriarchal violence today whether the perpetrators are white or Black or brown. In her book on Dutch racism entitled White Innocence:  Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, Gloria Wekker has this to say about the Netherlands: “we are a small nation, innocent; we are inherently antiracist”. Moreover, “we do not have bad intentions”.12 As she emphasises, this sense of the national self in the Netherlands is generated by a society that “that has managed to convince itself that nearly four hundred years of colonialism have, miraculously, not left any traces of racism, either in the culture, history, language, representations of the self and the other, or in institutions”.13 What characterises the progress we have made in the last decades with respect to racism is an understanding of its structural nature and its intersectional relation to misogyny and heteropatriarchy. We have learned that we cannot simply call for the prosecution of individual police officers, while leaving the institution of policing intact. Thus, the individual perpetrators of harassment in the workplace, for example, cannot simply be called to task as individuals, leaving the enabling dimensions of the workplace intact. While perpetrators certainly need to be held accountable, punitive approaches will not solve the structural problem. The question is how we engage in massive projects of what we might call ideological critique and critical education–​critical mass education. I have given some thought to how it was possible to eliminate smoking in public places and the fact that when we first began to protest gender violence, many of us were serious smokers. I always cringe when I see myself in documentaries chain smoking, but it is interesting that within a relatively short period of time, as a result of coordinated campaigns, media campaigns, peer-​ driven campaigns, governmental campaigns, smoking has become very rare in many countries. What if the same efforts were exerted in relation to verbal and physical violence against women? Feminist approaches that move us forward recognise that punitive approaches rarely work. More jails and prisons have led to the greater permanence of these carceral modes of punishment and to the spread of carcerality in everyday life, from Palestine to the United States. As a matter of fact, in the United States, we have learned a great deal from Palestinian resistors, intellectuals, and activists about how to challenge racism. In fact, Black Lives Matter and the larger Movement for Black Lives, which seeks also to dismantle gender violence,14 have learned a great deal from their solidarity relations with Palestine.15 I also want to mention the Rohingya in Myanmar and the systematic use of rape against the Rohingya people.16 I do not think we sufficiently question the structural character of gender violence and I wonder whether we truly believe that we can eradicate these misogynist abuses, particularly since they are so deeply embedded in our histories, cultures, and traditions. Personally, I am convinced that we can contribute to the eradication of sexual harassment and violence, but there are no instant solutions. We are often influenced by capitalism in our search for immediate answers. We live in a fast food culture and it seems that our expectations are governed by the fast food model. We have to recognise that this campaign against sexual violence and harassment 31

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will be a protracted struggle. At the same time I also believe that we need to engage in the kind of research and activism that generates an urgency and a conviction, that we can, indeed, purge our worlds of these violences. Perhaps we should look to members of the younger generations that are making and will make a difference. Young people have already organised the Global Climate Strike. They know that saving the planet is the very precondition of their future. Girls, trans children, boys want a different gender environment as well. This is a precondition of their future and it is our responsibility to follow their lead.

Notes 1 This chapter is based on a keynote paper delivered at the international conference #MeToo: Moving Forward in Reykjavík, Iceland, on 17 September 2019. See the conference webpage, https://​metoo.is. 2 United Nations, Report of the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, (New York: United Nations, 1986), www. un.org/​womenwatch/​daw/​beijing/​otherconferences/​Nairobi/​Nairobi Full Optimized.pdf. 3 We rejoiced around the world having learned that Icelandic women showed how we should have observed the United Nations International Women’s Year (IWY) in 1975 when the majority of women in the country went out on strike demonstrating to the world that movements could initiate processes of structural transformation. While Icelandic women began quickly to demand increased economic, political and educational access, the UN had to extend the year of women to the decade of women. 4 Niall McCarthy, “Nearly a Third of All Female Prisoners Worldwide Are Incarcerated in The United States”, Forbes, 23 September 2014, www.forbes.com/​sites/​niallmccarthy/​2014/​09/​23/​nearly-​ a-​ t hird-​o f-​all-​ female- ​prisoners-​worldwide-​are-​i ncarcerated- ​i n-​ the-​ u nited-​states- ​ i nfographic/​ #7bbbc89310af. 5 Dean Spade and Sarah Lazare, “Women Now Run the Military-​ Industrial Complex. That’s Nothing to Celebrate”, In These Times, 12 January 2019, http://​inthesetimes.com/​article/​21682/​ women-​military-​industrial-​complex-​gina-​haspel-​trump-​feminism-​lockheed-​marti. 6 Spade and Lazare, “Women Now Run the Military-​Industrial Complex”. 7 “Founding: Setting the Stage”, National Organization for Women, last updated July 2011, accessed 27 April 2020, https://​now.org/​about/​history/​founding-​2. 8 “Meet Tarana Burke, Activist Who Started ‘Me Too’ Campaign to Ignite Conversation on Sexual Assault”, Democracy Now, 17 October 2017, www.democracynow.org/​2017/​10/​17/​meet_​tarana_​ burke_​the_​activist_​who. 9 Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2011). 10 Angela Y.  Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism:  Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage Books, 1999). 11 Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Harvard University Press, 1989. 12 Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 78. 13 Wekker, White Innocence, 166. 14 Kaavya Asoka, “Women and Black Lives Matter: An Interview with Marcia Chatelain”, Dissent 62, no. 3 (2015): 54–​61. 15 Hamid Dabashi, “Black Lives Matter and Palestine:  A Historic Alliance”, Al Jazeera, 6 September 2016, www.aljazeera.com/​indepth/​opinion/​2016/​09/​black-​lives-​matter-​palestine-​historic-​alliance-​ 160906074912307.html. 16 Chris Beyrer and Adeeba Kamarulzaman, “Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar: The Rohingya Crisis and Human Rights”, Lancet 390, no. 10102 (2017): 1570–​1573.

Bibliography Asoka, Kaavya. “Women and Black Lives Matter: An Interview with Marcia Chatelain”. Dissent 62, no. 3 (2015): 54–​61.

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Struggle, solidarity, and social change Beyrer, Chris, and Adeeba Kamarulzaman. “Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar:  The Rohingya Crisis and Human Rights”. Lancet 390, no. 10102 (2017): 1570–​1573. Dabashi, Hamid. “Black Lives Matter and Palestine:  A Historic Alliance”. Al Jazeera, 6 September 2016. www.aljazeera.com/​indepth/​opinion/​2016/​09/​black-​lives-​matter-​palestine-​historic-​alliance-​ 160906074912307.html. Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Davis, Angela Y. “Keynote Address”. Paper presented at the #MeToo:  Moving Forward conference. Reykjavík, 17 September 2019. Democracy Now. “Meet Tarana Burke, Activist Who Started ‘Me Too’ Campaign to Ignite Conversation on Sexual Assault”. 17 October 2017. www.democracynow.org/​2017/​10/​17/​meet_​tarana_​burke_​the_​ activist_​who. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. McCarthy, Niall. “Nearly A Third of All Female Prisoners Worldwide Are Incarcerated in The United States”. Forbes, 23 September 2014. www.forbes.com/​sites/​niallmccarthy/​2014/​09/​23/​nearly-​ a- ​ t hird- ​ o f- ​ a ll- ​ f emale-​ p risoners-​ worldwide-​ a re-​ i ncarcerated-​ i n-​ t he-​ u nited-​ s tates-​ i nfographic/​ #7bbbc89310af. McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. National Organization for Women. “Founding: Setting the Stage”. Last updated July 2011. Accessed 27 April 2020. https://​now.org/​about/​history/​founding-​2. Spade, Dean, and Sarah Lazare. “Women Now Run the Military-​ Industrial Complex. That’s Nothing to Celebrate”. In These Times, 12 January 2019. http://​inthesetimes.com/​article/​21682/​ women-​military-​industrial-​complex-​gina-​haspel-​trump-​feminism-​lockheed-​marti. United Nations. Report of the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace. New York: United Nations, 1986. www.un.org/​ womenwatch/​daw/​beijing/​otherconferences/​Nairobi/​NairobiFull Optimized.pdf. Wekker, Gloria, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

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2 #METOO AS A REVOLUTIONARY CASCADE Cass R. Sunstein

Unpredictable revolutions Why do revolutions happen? Why are they so hard to anticipate? Why do they seem to come out of nowhere? My aim here is to cast some light on these questions and, in the process, to help explain #MeToo. I shall begin with some general remarks on revolutions and their genesis and then turn to #MeToo —​which is not quite a revolution, of course, but which has something in common with one. To vindicate the premise of my opening questions: Lenin was stunned by the success and speed of the Russian Revolution.1 Tocqueville reported that no one foresaw the French Revolution.2 The Iranian Revolution of 1789 was unanticipated.3 More recently, the Arab Spring was unanticipated by many of the best analysts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.4 Puzzlingly, revolutions seem to come in waves; they spread rapidly within countries and across countries, for reasons that remain unclear.5 It is tempting, and not unhelpful, to speak of demonstration and contagion effects. But what exactly do those terms mean? In what sense is revolution, or some kind of revolt, “contagious”?

Three factors Some of the most illuminating explanatory work on this subject points to three factors: (a) preference falsification, (b) diverse thresholds, and (c) interdependencies.6 When the three are taken together, the difficulty of anticipating such movements, or revolutions in particular, becomes less puzzling. I will introduce complications in due course, but these three factors tell us much that we need to know.

Preference falsification Preference falsification exists when people conceal, or do not reveal, what they actually prefer.7 They might say they like the existing regime when they despise it. They might silence themselves. Their friends and neighbours might have no idea what they actually think. To that extent, people live in a world of pluralistic ignorance, in which they do not know about the preferences of

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others. Under regimes that are oppressive (in one or another respect), preference falsification is common. Because of oppression, it is difficult to learn what people actually think. For those who want to predict revolution or revolt, the problem is that the law, or social norms, can draw a wedge between private preferences and public preferences. The law matters if citizens lack freedom of speech and if dissent is punished. Social norms matter if people will be ostracised, in some sense, if they reveal their distress, anger, indignation, or dissatisfaction. Perhaps they will be shunned; perhaps powerful people will punish them in one or another way; perhaps their employment prospects will be compromised. In any of these cases, people might not merely silence themselves; they might say that they are happy with the status quo when they are not. Consider some chilling words from a computer programmer from Syria: When you meet somebody coming out of Syria for the first time, you start to hear the same sentences. That everything is okay inside Syria, Syria is a great country, the economy is doing great … It’ll take him like six months, up to one year, to become a normal human being, to say what he thinks, what he feels. Then they might start … whispering. They won’t speak loudly. That is too scary. After all that time, even outside Syria you feel that someone is listening, someone is recording.8

Diverse thresholds Different people will require different levels of social support before they will rebel or say what they actually think.9 Some people might require no support at all; they are rebels by nature. They might be courageous, committed, or foolhardy. Call them the “zeroes”. They might well turn out to be isolated; no one may join them, in which case they might look radical, foolhardy, or even crazy. Other people might require a little support; they will not move unless someone else does, but if someone does, they are prepared to rebel as well. Call them the “ones”. Others might require more than a little; they are the “twos”. The twos will do nothing unless they see the zeroes and the ones, but if they do, they will rebel as well. The twos are followed by the threes, and the fours, and the tens, and the hundreds, and the thousands, all the way up to the infinites (defined as people who will not oppose the regime, no matter what). Outside of science fiction, it is not possible to see people’s thresholds. People may not quite know whether they themselves are threes, fours, or tens. They might turn out to be surprised. Consider the relevant words of John Adams, writing with evident amazement about the American Revolution: “Idolatry to Monarchs, and servility to Aristocratical Pride … was never so totally eradicated from so many Minds in so short a Time.”10

Interdependencies Interdependencies point to the fact that the behaviour of the ones, the twos, the threes, and so forth will depend crucially on who, if anyone, is seen to have done what. Suppose that the various citizens are in a kind of temporal queue. The zeroes go first, then the ones, then the twos, then the threes, and so forth. (Or perhaps vice-​versa. Or perhaps it is all random.) Under imaginable assumptions, a rebellion will occur, but only given the right distribution of thresholds and the right kind of visibility. If the ones see the zeroes, they will rebel, and if the twos see the ones, they, too, will rebel, and if the threes see the twos, they will join them. If the conditions are just right, almost everyone will rebel. But it is important to see that the conditions have to be just right. Suppose that there are no zeroes, or that no one sees any zeroes. If so, no rebellion will occur. If there are few ones, the 35

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regime is likely to be safe. If most people are tens or hundreds or thousands, the same is true, even if there are some ones, twos, three, fours, and so forth.

Unpredictability We should now be able to see three reasons why revolutions may be impossible to predict. First, we do not know what people’s preferences are. By hypothesis, they cannot be observed. Second, we do not know what people’s thresholds are. They too are unobservable. Third, we cannot anticipate social interactions  —​who will say or do what and exactly when. It is important to emphasise the third point. Even if we could identify people’s preferences and specify their thresholds, we would not be able to know, in advance, the nature of social interactions. The point bears on revolutions in general and on #MeToo in particular. In the case of oppressive societies, it may be possible to know that people are widely miserable or dissatisfied. In the context of sexual assault and sexual harassment, it is reasonable to assume that dissatisfaction is widespread. But that is not enough. These points suggest that even if new technologies make it increasingly possible to identify private preferences —​for example, by exploring people’s online behaviour —​we will still not be able to predict revolutions. To be sure, we would know something important: a revolution is more likely if people secretly hate the regime. We could certainly learn from that fact. Secret opposition may be necessary for revolution, but it is not sufficient. To know what will happen, we would need to know about people’s thresholds as well. As I have noted, obtaining that knowledge will inevitably be difficult; it might be impossible. And even if we overcome that challenge, we would need to know who interacts with whom, and who sees whom, and when. No one has that kind of prescience. But the answers to those questions may well determine outcomes. These points help explain not only why revolutions are unpredictable but also why they are often a product of seemingly small, random, or serendipitous factors —​of who did what when, or who heard what when, or whether some kind of butterfly flapped its wings at the right moment. We might think that Regime “A” was bound to fall, but it really was not. It happened to fall. The same is true if it does not fall. It happened not to fall. Counterfactual histories can be illuminating insofar as they illustrate this point.

Complications This is a very simple account, of course, and it needs to be complicated in multiple ways. For present purposes, consider these points. First, people’s preferences may be adaptive to the status quo.11 People might not have to work hard to shut themselves up. They might not even think that the status quo is bad. Consider these words from a woman in North Korea: “It never occurred to me that I could or would want to do anything about it. It was just how things are.”12 The most important word here is “want”. To be sure, fully adaptive preferences are an extreme case, even under conditions of real fear.13 It might be better to speak of partially adaptive preferences, in which people are aware that something is wrong, or bad, or horrific, but the awareness takes the form of a small voice in the head, to which people do not pay a great deal of attention. But the idea of preference falsification is too simple when people’s preferences are an artifact of the status quo. Whether we are dealing with preference falsification, adaptive preferences, or partially adaptive preferences cannot be answered in the abstract. Second, the very word “preferences” is under-​descriptive or perhaps misleading. It might be better to speak of people’s beliefs, experiences, or values. Under an oppressive regime, people 36

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might believe that terrible injustices are committed or that their values are being violated. To be sure, they are also concealing or falsifying what they prefer, but that is hardly an adequate account of what is happening. They are concealing or falsifying their deepest convictions. They are concealing or falsifying what actually happened to them. (Talk about fake news.) Third, and crucially, rebels are not doing a full analysis of the costs and benefits of rebellion. They rely on mental shortcuts, or heuristics, in deciding what to do and when.14 For that reason, available incidents or outcomes might affect probability judgments. If a town suddenly falls to rebels, or if a government collapses, other rebels might believe that the probability of success is high. The availability heuristic, as it is called, works with emphatically social forces, producing availability cascades, as specific incidents or results move rapidly from one person to another, altering judgments about what is likely to happen.15 A revolutionary movement might be fuelled or halted by an availability cascade. Fourth, fate is not only in the hands of revolutionaries. There is also the regime, and there are also counterrevolutionaries, and there may well be counterrevolution. As a revolutionary cascade starts to develop, the regime is likely to do something. For example, it might try to entrench pluralistic ignorance by hiding or preventing visible rebellion or mass demonstrations.16 It might allow dissent and disagreement  —​until they become too visible. It might make concessions, hoping to retain power. It might try to dissuade the hundreds and the thousands. It might bring out its guns. It might kill people. If the goal of the regime is to maintain power, the choice among these options can be very difficult. For example, violence might be effective in quelling revolution, but it might also foment more of it. Turn to #MeToo in this light. All three conditions are met. The qualifications are relevant as well.

#MeToo First, with respect to sexual assault and sexual harassment, preference falsification has run rampant. Victims have silenced themselves. In some cases, they have said that all is or was well, when it is or was anything but that. These points are true and important, but they are inadequate and under-​descriptive. What many women (and many, but fewer, men) did not reveal —​what they kept private —​was a set of experiences, alongside evaluative judgments about those experiences. We might want to speak, in the case of #MeToo, of experience falsification. Self-​silencing has been important, of course, but actual falsification of experience —​with an employer, for ­example —​might be more searing. Experience falsification or self-​silencing can be a product of many different factors. With respect to sexual violence or sexual harassment, it may be a product of a rational calculation of likely costs and benefits, given the risks of disclosure. Some women who did come forward with accusations of assault and harassment pre-​#MeToo have been ridiculed or disparaged, or worse, providing a signal to other victims about what might happen if they spoke out and thus tilting the cost–​benefit analysis in favour of staying silent. If cases of this kind were highly visible and thus cognitively “available”, the availability heuristic would lead people to think that probability of damage or harm from disclosure could be quite high. But we need not invoke the availability heuristic. A 2003 study, cited by the EEOC in 2016, indicated that 75% of employees who spoke out against workplace mistreatment faced some form of retaliation.17 To the extent that victims of sexual harassment were aware of the risk of retaliation, that awareness provided a reason to falsify their experiences or at least not to speak about them. Second, different women had and have different thresholds for disclosing their experiences and their judgments. Some women are ones, others are twos, others are tens, and others are 37

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hundreds or thousands. For one reason or another, some may be infinites. (They might be frightened; they might have some kind of loyalty to the perpetrator; they might not want their lives to be disrupted; they might cherish their privacy.) Some might not have clarity on what their thresholds are. They, and we, learn about that only ex post. Consider the following words from Beverly Young Nelson, who accused Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of having sexually assaulted her in 1977: I thought that I was Mr. Moore’s only victim. I would probably have taken what Mr. Moore did to me to my grave, had it not been for the courage of four other women that were willing to speak out… Their courage has inspired me to overcome my fear.18 Third, social interactions are, and continue to be, crucial to #MeToo. Under certain conditions, the threes and the fours would silence themselves, because the ones and the twos were silent too. But #MeToo has benefited from the visibility of those who spoke out and the multiple interactions made possible by social media. Within 24 hours of Alyssa Milano’s initial tweet, 45% of all US Facebook users had friends in their networks who had posted with #MeToo.19 Once the ones and the twos spoke out, the threes and the fours felt safer or emboldened. It is important to say that this account is barebones and highly stylised, and that it misses a great deal. I emphasise five points here. First, the #MeToo movement is not opposing a regime, at least not in the usual sense. Rather than rebelling against a government, the women (and men) of #MeToo are uniting around a similar or common experience and rebelling against a practice and also against institutions (some of which may be in government). While cascading accusations against individual perpetrators have been crucial —​for example, more than two dozen women spoke out against Roger Ailes before he was ousted at Fox News —​the larger movement might be understood as a challenge to a system of sex discrimination and to institutions that engage in or perpetuate it. To the extent that we are speaking of institutions, it is not so much of a stretch to say that regime change, at least of a sort, is involved. Second, there is the question of granularity —​of exactly what happened, and when, and why. Answering that question would reveal not only informative detail but also conceptual surprises. Third, there is the crucial role of salience in the #MeToo movement. Some twos are different from other twos, and the same is true for threes and fours, for one reason: their own statements and actions are especially salient. In the context of #MeToo, Ashley Judd might have made all the difference. Catharine A. MacKinnon has suggested that Judd’s celebrity and salience were not the only things that made her an ideal first-​mover; she was also, importantly, “somebody whose credibility is not readily attackable and who wasn’t suing at the time”.20 In revolutionary movements in general, what is salient, and what is cognitively available, greatly matters. As I have suggested, rebels do not make elaborate cost–​benefit analyses. They use mental short-​ cuts, and availability is especially important. Fourth, descriptive social norms, which capture what people actually do, greatly matter. Other things being equal, people are more likely to change their behaviour to comply with a norm if they believe that most other people are compliant, and less likely to do so if they believe that most other people are noncompliant. A prominent study found that visitors to a national park who saw signs informing them that many past visitors had stolen petrified wood from the park became more likely to steal petrified wood —​and that visitors who saw signs informing them that the vast majority of visitors had left the wood in the park became less likely to steal petrified wood.21 The #MeToo movement appears to have benefited from a shift in descriptive norms, suggesting that speaking out or objecting is not inconsistent with usual behaviour. 38

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While it seems highly unlikely, we cannot rule out the possibility that attention to widespread harassment will serve to inform (some) male perpetrators that they are simply behaving like many other men, thus reducing their incentive to behave differently. But it is also true that to the extent #MeToo succeeds in changing norms, a new (and beneficial) wave of preference falsification may lead potential harassers to condemn the behaviour rather than to support it. There is much to be learned about this topic. Finally, #MeToo is not simply about the revelation of preferences, experiences, beliefs, and values. It is also about the transformation of preferences, beliefs, and values —​most obviously on the part of perpetrators, but equally relevantly on the part of victims. Any social movement helps to alter preferences, beliefs, and values. It casts a new light on past experiences. It does not merely elicit preexisting judgments. It produces fresh ones. Part of the point of #MeToo, and one of its achievements, is to turn a sense of embarrassment and shame into a sense of dignity. Recall the statement from a computer programmer from Syria: When you meet somebody coming out of Syria for the first time, you start to hear the same sentences. That everything is okay … It’ll take like six months, up to one year, to become a normal human being, to say what he thinks, what he feels. Then they might start … whispering. They won’t speak loudly.22 But eventually they might.

Notes 1 Asef Bayat, “The Arab Spring and its Surprises”, Development and Change 44, no. 3 (2013): 587–​588. 2 Bayat, “The Arab Spring and its Surprises”, 587. 3 Bayat, “The Arab Spring and its Surprises”, 588. 4 Bayat, “The Arab Spring and its Surprises”, 587. 5 Kurt Gerhard Weyland, Making Waves:  Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America Since the Revolutions of 1848, 1st Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–​7. 6 See generally Timur Kuran, “The Inevitability of Future Revolutionary Surprises”, American Journal of Sociology 100, no. 6 (1995): 1528–​1551; Kuran and Diego Romero. “The Logic of Revolutions”, in The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice 2, ed. Roger D. Congleton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018):  345–​362; Merouan Mekouar, Protest and Mass Mobilization:  Authoritarian Collapse and Political Change in North Africa, 1st Edition (Oxford: Routledge, 2016); Hussain, Muzammil M., and Philip N. Howard. “What Best Explains Successful Protest Cascades? ICTs and the Fuzzy Causes of the Arab Spring”. International Studies Review 15, no.  1 (2013):  48 (emphasising the importance of communications technologies). 7 Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). 8 Wendy Pearlman, “Narratives of Fear in Syria”, Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1 (2016): 25. 9 See, e.g., Mark Granovetter, “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior”, American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 6 (May 1978): 1420; see also Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies, 60–​83 (providing a classic account). 10 Gordon S.  Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Reprint Edition (New  York:  Vintage Books, 1993), 169. 11 See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes:  Studies in Subversion of Rationality, 1st ed. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1983), 25. 12 Choe Sang-​Hun, “North Korea #MeToo Voices:  ‘They Consider Us Toys’ ”, New  York Times, 31 October 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​10/​31/​world/​asia/​north-​korea-​women-​metoo.html. 13 Cf. Serene J. Khader, Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment, Studies in Feminist Philosophy, 1st ed. (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011), discussing the complexity of the idea of adaptive preferences in the face of personal agency. 14 Weyland, Making Waves,  35–​38.

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Cass R. Sunstein 15 See Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein, “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation”, Stanford Law Review 51, no. 4 (1999): 685. 16 Gary King, Jennnifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument”, American Political Science Review 11, no. 3 (2017): 496. 17 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace: Report of Co-​Chairs Chai R. Feldblum & Victoria A. Lipnic, June 2016, 16 , www.eeoc.gov/​ eeoc/​task_​force/​harassment/​upload/​report.pdf. 18 See “Text of Beverly Young Nelson’s Accusation against Roy Moore”, New York Times, 13 November 2017, www.nytimes.com/​2017/​11/​13/​us/​politics/​text-​beverly-​young-​nelson-​statement.html. 19 See “More than 12M ‘Me Too’ Facebook Posts, Comments, Reactions in 24 Hours”, CBS News, 17 October 2017, www.cbsnews.com/​news/​metoo-​more-​than-​12-​million-​facebook-​posts-​comments-​ reactions-​24-​hours. Note also that it might be easier to use Twitter, to reveal an experience or to state agreement, than to speak offline, or to attempt to show support or to attract attention that way. 20 Brock Colyar, “The Ms. Q&A: Catharine MacKinnon Weighs in on the #MeToo Movement”, Ms. Magazine, 30 July 2018, http://​msmagazine.com/​blog/​2018/​07/​30/​ms-​qa-​catharine-​mackinnon-​ weighs-​metoo-​movement/​. 21 See Robert B. Cialdini et al., “Managing Social Norms for Persuasive Impact”, Social Influence 1, no. 1 (2006): 7–​8. 22 Pearlman, “Narratives of Fear in Syria”, 25.

Bibliography Bayat, Asef. “The Arab Spring and its Surprises”. Development and Change 44, no. 3 (2013): 587–​601. CBS News. “More than 12M ‘Me Too’ Facebook Posts, Comments, Reactions in 24 Hours”. 17 October 2017. www.cbsnews.com/​news/​metoo-​more-​than-​12-​million-​facebook-​posts-​comments-​reactions-​ 24-​hours. Cialdini, Robert B., Linda J. Demaine, Brad J. Sagarin, Daniel W. Barrett, Kelton Rhoads, and Patricia L. Winter. “Managing Social Norms for Persuasive Impact”. Social Influence 1, no. 1 (2006): 3–​15. Colyar, Brock. “The Ms. Q&A:  Catharine MacKinnon Weighs in on the #MeToo Movement”. Ms. Magazine. 30 July 2018. http://​msmagazine.com/​blog/​2018/​07/​30/​ms-​qa-​catharine-​mackinnon-​ weighs-​metoo-​movement/​. Elster, Jon. Sour Grapes: Studies in Subversion of Rationality. 1st Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Granovetter, Mark. “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior”. American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 6 (May 1978): 489–​515. Hussain, Muzammil M., and Philip N. Howard. “What Best Explains Successful Protest Cascades? ICTs and the Fuzzy Causes of the Arab Spring”. International Studies Review 15, no. 1 (2013): 1420–​1443. Khader, Serene J. Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment. Studies in Feminist Philosophy. 1st Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. King, Gary, Jennnifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument”. American Political Science Review 11, no. 3 (2017): 484–​501. Kuran, Timur. “The Inevitability of Future Revolutionary Surprises”. American Journal of Sociology 100, no. 6 (1995): 1528–​1551. Kuran, Timur. Private Truths, Public Lies:  the Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. 1st Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Kuran, Timur, and Diego Romero. “The Logic of Revolutions”. In The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice 2. Edited by Roger D. Congleton, 345–​362 New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Kuran, Timur, and Cass R. Sunstein. “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation”. Stanford Law Review 51, no. 4 (1999): 685. Mekouar, Merouan. Protest and Mass Mobilization: Authoritarian Collapse and Political Change in North Africa. 1st Edition. Oxford: Routledge, 2016. New York Times. “Text of Beverly Young Nelson’s Accusation against Roy Moore”. 13 November 2017. www.nytimes.com/​2017/​11/​13/​us/​politics/​text-​beverly-​young-​nelson-​statement.html. Pearlman, Wendy. “Narratives of Fear in Syria”. Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1 (2016): 21–​37.

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#MeToo as a revolutionary cascade Sang-​Hun, Choe. “North Korea #MeToo Voices: ‘They Consider Us Toys.’ ” New York Times, 31 October 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​10/​31/​world/​asia/​north-​korea-​women-​metoo.html. US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace: Report of Co-​Chairs Chai R. Feldblum & Victoria A. Lipnic. June 2016. www.eeoc.gov/​eeoc/​ task_​force/​harassment/​upload/​report.pdf. Weyland, Kurt Gerhard. Making Waves:  Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America Since the Revolutions of 1848. 1st Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Reprint Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

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3 GLOBAL #METOO Catharine A. MacKinnon

We are in the middle of the first mass movement against sexual abuse in the history of the world. Global #MeToo sprang from the law of sexual harassment, quickly overtook it, and is shifting law, cultures, and politics everywhere. It also electrifyingly demonstrates in action what I’m calling “butterfly politics”.1 In 1972, the scientist Edward Lorenz, trying to grasp how small, seemingly insignificant things become cataclysmically big, asked, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”2 Considering this, he conceived the “butterfly effect”,3 which charmingly models how some tiny simple actions, properly targeted within structural dynamics under the right conditions, can come to have complex large effects.4 Butterfly politics, applied to change in the gender system, including through law, means that the right, small intervention in the structure of an unstable political system can ultimately produce systemic change. It proposes a theory of social change in power relations through activist law.5 The early openings of the butterflies’ wings on sexual harassment were the legal, political, and conceptual innovations of the 1970s,6 setting the stage for the collective social intervention of the #MeToo movement that is shifting gender hierarchy’s tectonic plates. To start with the “why now” question —​to ask what made #MeToo possible —​is to ask what, for the first time, made it harder to keep the sexual abuse inside than to put it out. The reverse has always been the case. It is also to look into #MeToo’s elements, what will extend it, what will keep it going. One beginning point was the legal breakthrough that defined sexual harassment as sex discrimination, calling the experience and violation what it is: a vector and dynamic of structural inequality, specifically gender, with major white supremacist and class-​based (poverty, economic vulnerability) dimensions. Sex inequality is both complex and unstable. Complex due to its multiple interacting unequal variables: race, ethnicity, religion, class, disability, sexuality, and age. These do a lot of their work through gender, and gender does a lot of its work through them. Unstable because it is based on a lie: that women are men’s natural inferiors, men women’s natural superiors, commonly termed “difference”. Life refutes the lie of inferiority every day, which means it takes a lot of force to hold it together. This hierarchical system —​superiority being above inferiority in value, worth, status, resources, power, despite some acknowledgment of its injustice, the human and civil right to equality supposedly makes it illegal —​has proven extraordinarily tenacious. Framed as inequality, sexual harassment stopped being something women (or anyone) just had to live through, breaking the age-​old rule of impunity that the more power a man has, 42

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the more sex he can exact from those with less power. In this system, because sexual abuse is about power, it is about sex. If all the sexual abuse reported in the #MeToo movement starting in late 2016 had remained effectively legal for the past forty-​some years —​as without sexual harassment law, most of it would have —​this explosive movement against it would have been unthinkable, nor could it have been so volcanically effective. Without law delegitimising sexual harassment, calling it out for what it is in law  —​this is how law actually works in life —​powerful men (and men have power) would not be losing their jobs, political and academic positions, deals, and reputations today.7 The #MeToo moment also, obviously, built on decades of collective work against sexual abuse by groups and individuals, the leading ones being African American women: all the early legal cases, Professor Anita Hill’s testimony in 1991 against Clarence Thomas,8 Tarana Burke’s 2006 use of the phrase “me too” to call out the abuse of African American women and girls in particular;9 and the #SayHerName campaign.10 The “campus sexual assault” movement of the last decade or two is also a forerunner of #MeToo, combining legal initiatives with social media intervention, inspiring the investigation by the Obama administration of several hundred schools for inadequate response to sexual abuse on campuses.11 Another crucial moving part in the United States’s awakening was the 2016 presidential election. Claims of sexual harassment by President Bill Clinton had, for many, previously identified the issue of sexual harassment with the Right’s use of it for political gain: a morality crusade rather than a matter of coercion and exploitation. The election of Donald Trump reversed the relation of sexual harassment to conventional political alignments, redefining the democratic and liberatory potential of publicly claiming sexual victimisation. Instead of interfering with a respected president’s desired policies and leadership,12 exposing these violations in one’s own life became a means of resisting the forces of darkness —​misogyny, racism, authoritarianism, lies, stupidity, you name it. Even as the movement revealed that perpetrators of sexual abuse were not just those ugly men over there, but our nice men right here, this reversal of the conventional politics of the issue released a tsunami of enraged women. This history placed Hillary Clinton in an awkward position as a presidential candidate. Who even knows what confronting sexual abuse on behalf of violated women, what Michele Dauber in this context calls “electoral kryptonite”, could have mobilised for her campaign? But what contributed to creating Trump as president —​indifference to reports of sexual abuse —​fuelled #MeToo in no small part because of its role in creating Trump as president. The point here is, for myriad reasons, if Hillary Clinton had been elected President, #MeToo would not have occurred. In other words, we are the backlash. The allegations against Harvey Weinstein threw a match into this tinderbox. Ashley Judd’s willingness to be named, as reported by the New York Times,13 then the further reports in the New Yorker,14 set off the butterfly effect that is #MeToo, transnational in scope and showing no signs of slowing. High-​quality journalism touched off this movement, followed by survivors in the millions taking to social media airwaves. Sexual abuse was finally being reported in the established media, and still is, as pervasive and endemic rather than sensational and exceptional.15 This makes it real. Women have been talking with each other about this outrage for millennia. Social media could have become just a digital echo chamber in which a million whispers of sexual abuse went to die. A major part of the response, including the cultural and legal changes that are occurring, is because the legacy media —​the reality and consciousness machine, whose reports have not been confined to privileged women or to prominent men —​ is continuing its ethical, sometimes inspired, reporting.16 Notice:  #MeToo is cultural, driven principally by forces other than litigation, and is surpassing law in changing norms and providing relief for human rights violations that the law 43

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did not —​in some ways in current form could not, although law is embedded in culture and can and will change with it. Over the past couple of years, survivors in numbers and gorgeous diversity, perfectly displaying the kaleidoscope that a collectivity of butterflies is called, have begun to erode the two biggest cultural barriers to ending sexual harassment (and all forms of sexual abuse) in law and in life: the disbelief and trivialisation of its victims. Before, even when she was believed, nothing he did to her mattered so much as what would be done to him if his actions were taken seriously. In some ways, it is even worse to be believed and to have what he did not matter. It means you don’t matter. This precise choreography was retraced in the final Senate hearing for Judge Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. Dr Christine Blasey Ford provided remembered facts of a sexual attack by him: he did this. When questioned on those facts, Judge Kavanaugh repeatedly provided … his resumé: I matter.17 These exact dynamics of inequality drive the system of sexual politics in which the more power a man has, the more sexual access he can get away with compelling. It used to be that women accusing men of sexual abuse were the ones thrown overboard. Women’s voices recounting sexual abuse being heard, believed, and acted on —​and some men being thrown overboard, despite setbacks like the Kavanaugh confirmation18 —​is real change. Don’t ask me what’s next. This is it, this right here. It has arrived. The alchemy of #MeToo is beginning to transform what has been a privilege of power into a disgrace so despicable that not even many white upper-​class men feel they can afford it around them. While it’s a miracle when anyone claiming sexual violation is believed, the odds have long been irrelevantly improved by any form of privilege  —​dominant race, ethnicity, religion, class, celebrity, nationality, caste, sexuality, age, gender, or combinations, although they did not keep it from happening. Harasser prominence and celebrity accuser stoked some of the media fire initially but have not confined the movement. An attack on these hierarchies, including by white women celebrities, is also an attack on the fact that women’s work, like the rest of women’s lives, is often denigratingly sexualised. Working for tips in a restaurant to make anything close to a living wage, for example, largely requires women in effect to sell themselves sexually. The entertainment industry outright commodifies the sexuality of the women in it. It’s no coincidence that so many of the exposed harassers in entertainment reportedly subjected their victims to a pornographic spectator sexuality, masturbating over them in real life like consumers do over women in pornography. This also partly explains why Time’s Up women —​ actors frequently used and abused to create the sexualised culture in which we are buried, and who as working women, almost no matter how well-​known or successful, must please powerful men to continue to get that work —​are so perfectly positioned to attack it. If the same cultural inequalities are permitted to operate in law as operate in the behaviour the law prohibits —​as exemplified by the rape myth that women who have had sex are inherently not credible, for instance, having apparently lost our credibility along with our virginity —​equalising attempts such as sexual harassment law encounter systemic drag. This logjam is finally being broken, or starting to be, by the #MeToo movement, by survivors being believed and valued as the law seldom has. Again, women have been saying these things forever. It is the response to them that is changing. As #MeToo moves the culture beneath the law of sexual abuse to make it potentially a far more effective tool than it has ever been, some conventional systemic legal processes are shifting. Examples are Bill Cosby’s conviction in his second trial, Judge Aaron Persky being recalled by the voters, Larry Nassar’s conviction and sentencing.19 The surfacing of allegations against Catholic priests and bishops by adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, many of them men,20 which began before #MeToo, increasingly including complaints of official cover-​ ups as well as direct acts of sexual aggression,21 has arguably taken inspiration and heart, and 44

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derived potency and momentum, from adding its voices to a rising MeToo.22 And so much legal change is needed. #MeToo is exposing the lack of freedom, including sexual freedom, that prevails under conditions of inequality. In the United States and elsewhere, rape law continues to be infused with rape myths. Critical light has been shed on criminal law’s burden of proof and standards for due process rights of the accused, for instance, confrontation and cross-​examination, which are inappropriately often imported, tacitly or explicitly, into civil and administrative processes without putting them into inequality contexts or exhibiting any awareness that sex equality standards have never been applied to these areas. Processes for investigating and interrogating sexual violation in most settings remain within the chain of command of the institution that is, in essence, or sees itself as, being investigated, rather than being independent. In any other setting, this would be called corruption. Transparency is not the usual rule here. Secrecy is, protecting organisational brand. In any other context this would be understood as a cover-​up. Liability standards for employers and educational institutions remain unrealistically stacked against sexual harassment survivors. Standards for retaliation —​one of the biggest fears behind nonreporting —​are not realistic in this context. Even before a case can get started in the United States, the federal law of discrimination has a statute of limitations of mere months, the shortest in law, which expires before almost any victim of sexual violation is past trauma, far less post-​ traumatic stress. What does this mean, if not that legislators know discrimination is rampant and want to make complaints of it disappear? The damage caps for harassment only minimise the extent of its harm by suppressing its measure and can discourage contingent representation.23 No motion to change any of this exists in the US Congress or anywhere else to my knowledge, although some of it is better under California law.24 Practical steps to capture the movement’s insights could include limits on various forms of secrecy and nontransparency that hide the extent of sexual abuse and enforce survivor isolation, such as forced arbitration, silencing nondisclosure agreements, especially in cases of physical attacks and multiple perpetration, and settlements forcibly made confidential. Being able to sue individual perpetrators and their enablers, jointly with institutions, as California allows,25 could shift perceived incentives when it comes to the actual abuse. Legal standards for reasonableness and unwelcomeness, which themselves refer to social standards, need to shift and are shifting. But the only legal change in US law that matches the movement’s scale would be the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment and application of substantive equality standards to its interpretation. It would expand the congressional power to legislate against sexual abuse. It could and should renovate constitutional interpretation in a more substantive, including intersectional, direction, reconfiguring legal equality itself. Supported by law, sincere revulsion against sexually harassing behaviour, as opposed to revulsion at reports of it, could change workplaces and schools, even streets. It could restrain repeat predators as well as the occasional and casual exploiters, as the law so far has not. Shunning perpetrators as sex bigots who take advantage of the vulnerabilities of inequality could transform societies. Many social sectors could recognise their obligation to foster environments free from sexual objectification, pressure, or aggression, in which reporting of sexual abuse is welcomed rather than punished, accountability not impunity prevails for individuals and institutions that engage in or enable such abuse, and excellence and inclusion rather than hierarchy and fear —​imagine that —​operate as real rather than rhetorical standards. Sexual harassment’s links to other issues are becoming increasingly visible during this explosive time. For one, sexual harassment is an especially appropriate vehicle for a worldwide movement not only because it affects women of all cultures, groups, and classes, but also because it encompasses, builds in, parallels, or evokes so many other abuses of women and 45

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children, from simple discrimination to other abuses of authority or trust or power. It often includes rape and raises all the issues of undesired sexual interactions that are acquiesced to under conditions of unequal power. #MeToo has opened a wider discussion of the place of power in coercing sexual interactions that links with developing international legal understandings. The international definition of rape in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s (ICTR) Akayesu case is based on coercion, consent being so irrelevant as not to require mention.26 Domestic laws of rape in many jurisdictions, and sexual harassment trainings in schools, typically turn on “consent”, the legal meaning of which ranges from actual desire affirmatively expressed to lost fights to despair to passive acquiescence to frozen fright to coma to death. Making “consent” central to rape law is what puts the victim on trial. It is why the British conviction rate (with its all-​consent law) is an appalling 5.7% of cases reported, itself a small fraction of the total perpetrated.27 Consent as a concept is rooted in the active/​passive model of sex as something someone with more power does to someone with less, who lets it happen or tries not to. If sex happened, non-​consent has to be proven, meaning the assumption was that it was consensual unless proven otherwise. “Yes” can be coerced. Consent is thoroughly sex stereotyped. As a concept, it is given its fullest expression in the British political theory that justifies rulers in ruling the ruled. It means acquiescence whether or not a choice is real, it is what is attributed to you when you are rolled by power. It is an intrinsically unequal concept, including when it works the way it is supposed to work, riding under the cover of desire but virtually never invoked when desire is real. In the international law of sex trafficking, which prohibits sexual exploitation in circumstances of vulnerability or abuse of power, among others, consent is, by statute, no defense.28 Sexual harassment law in the United States, for all its inadequacies, has grasped from the outset that inequality is not consented to. Accepting unequal pay, for instance, doesn’t make it equal. Sexual harassment law does not use consent and never has; it uses unwelcomeness.29 Sexual assault is a crime of inequality. One potential insight of #MeToo is that consent needs to come out of rape law as well. Domestic laws of rape should be based on coercion, reconfiguring definitions of force to extend beyond physical force to encompass all the forms of inequality, meaning vulnerability, that make rape possible, including race, class, and poverty, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability in a major way, immigration status, state power, military occupation, colonialism, and the consequences of climate change, with age as well as gender stereotypes, when actively deployed to force sexual interactions. Deterrence, not incarceration, is the goal, which is why this concept is focused on those with the most power, as opposed to existing law, which targets those perpetrators who have the least. A second link rising in visibility is the fact that sexual harassment makes women’s real work into a form of prostitution:  forced trading of sexual access for economic survival, which is what prostitution is. In its fundamental dynamics, sexual harassment turns real work into an arm of the sex trade, termed “serial rape” by its survivors. The imperative to exchange sex for survival, or its possibility held out whether the survival is real or not, governs women’s inequality, hence women’s lives, worldwide. In prostitution, virtually all of women’s and girls’ options are precluded by individuals or social forces —​for instance, white supremacy, poverty, misogyny —​except for this one, making her so-​called consent to it, or so-​called choice of it, almost always fraudulent and illusory, as is “sleeping her way to the top”. Women who supposedly have rights, including equality rights in employment and education, are reduced to this floor of women’s status when tolerance of sexual harassment, or sexual delivery in any form from objectification to rape, is made a requirement of the paid labor force, including in paid housework, where sexual predation is widespread. The same applies to educational or career advancement. As a formerly prostituted woman colleague once cogently observed to me, “and 46

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you have to do all that other work, too”. Precisely this —​sexual harassment in its pure form, meaning prostitution —​is what is being widely rejected by women and some men in the international #MeToo movements today. The way butterfly politics seemingly comes out of nowhere to suddenly be everywhere is illustrated by the Nordic model on prostitution, which penalises the buyers (johns) and sellers (pimps and traffickers) of sex, eliminating any penalties for the bought and sold, the prostituted people.30 In Sweden, where it was passed first in 1999, it has virtually eliminated sex trafficking and reduced prostitution by massive percentages by supporting prostituted people who want to leave prostitution, which by international measures is 89% of them.31 This equality model on prostitution is now embraced in many countries (Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Canada, France, the Republic of Ireland, and Israel), despite well-​funded sex industry opposition. Like all good human rights work, and everything I  have ever done, it is directly based on the experiences, needs, and insistent demands of survivors. Prostituted people are not the criminals. Those who buy and sell them are. If requiring sexual use as the price of survival is a human rights violation when combined with a real job or as with education, another entitlement, it certainly violates human rights when imposed all by itself, when it is the only thing a woman is permitted to be valued or paid for, even if her value approximates pond slime and the lion’s share of the payment of the approximately 84% who are, on average, under the control of third parties goes to others.32 Yet it is not effectively illegal to buy a person for sexual use in most places. When buyers call forth revulsion and rejection when sexual harassment’s dynamic in its pure form —​prostitution —​is exposed; when those who report it —​women and girls, men and boys, transgender persons, disproportionately women of colour and indigenous women  —​are no longer stigmatised, shamed, and blamed as their violators are vaunted and defended and kept invisible; when this form of unequal predation is seen as the opposite of freedom, and those who outright buy others for sexual use are unmasked as the predators they are —​let’s call #MeToo prostitution and trafficking maybe #NotSexNotWork —​this will be the transformation the present one has prepared. A third link reveals lessons in #MeToo for gender as an inequality per se in its conceptual and practical links to sexual abuse of children. Sexual harassment is like sexual abuse in childhood in manipulating trust and dependency and institutionally betraying those who report. Sexual abuse of children is arguably the foundational practice of the whole gender system, ground zero of sex inequality. Andrea Dworkin called incest “boot camp”.33 Sexual abuse in childhood is the practical foundation of prostitution and sex trafficking, in that most people used in prostitution, the destination of sex trafficking, were sexually abused as children and entered prostitution as children. Pimps, who know what they are doing, select formerly sexually abused children on purpose. Both children and prostituted people are barely surviving through serial rape and molestation under circumstances in which they have no realistic options and from which they have few possibilities of escape. Sexual abuse in childhood is about what rape and sexual harassment and prostitution are about: sex forced on those with less power by those with more, made definitive of masculinity and femininity. This is also the dynamic pornography sexualises. And many if not most rapists were sexually abused as children. To escape this being done to them, a choice they are given, many men become masculine, sexualising power over others. To survive under it, girls are taught to acquiesce in femininity, sexualising power over us, sometimes calling it “empowerment”. Sexual abuse in childhood explains more about the gender system, that is, more about male violence, meaning violence, and more about sexual politics, meaning politics, than any other single thing does. If you put the best studies together, it affects about half of all girls in the United States in contact forms before we reach the age of majority,34 and 47

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likely at least a quarter of all boys.35 Data varies by country so we don’t even know its real incidence and pervasiveness around the world —​based on data we do have, rates in South Africa are by far the highest for both men (60.9%) and women (43.7%), next are Jordan and Tanzania, with prevalence rates of 27% and 25% respectively, for men, they are followed by Israel, Spain, Australia, and Costa Rica, and for women, Australia (37.8%), Costa Rica (32.2%), Tanzania (31%), Israel (30%), Sweden (28.1%), the United States (25.3%), and Switzerland (24.2%)36 —​ only that there doesn’t seem to be any place it certainly doesn’t happen. And although some valiant steps have been made against some institutions (churches, residential schools, schools, period), virtually nothing is being done about it, despite laws against it. Blackstone said better ten perpetrators go free than one innocent accused suffer,37 as if these were alternatives. With sexual assault, we have both. And this starts before one even grows up enough to have one’s sexual abuse recognised as harassment or exposed through #MeToo. Until we figure out how to address sexual abuse of children for real, we will not have done what we need to do. With all this to be concerned about, women frequently shift our attention to “backlash”: their response to our response to their abuse of us. Often neglected is that there is no backlash without a frontlash. Whenever we stand up, whenever we are found in other than supine or prone positions, any bit of power we gain will be called “too much”, “going too far”. Any time abusers don’t get away with violating us without consequences, it will be called “bias” or “lack of due process”. Any time we say what he did, making perpetrators look like who and what they are, it will be called “defamatory”. Any sanction we win will be likened to the death penalty. Any time we insist on being treated as equals, including going to lunch with the boss, we will find they are incapable of seeing women as other than sexual objects. Yes, they intend to keep their sexual access to us. Yes, their access is established by power and entrenched in institutions and doctrines to support them. All this means is, yes, we haven’t won yet. But we are winning. To continue the frontlash, for agents of social change for human rights, acting consciously, knowing that extremely small initial conditions can be amplified exponentially over time through systemic repetition to ultimately radically shift the way a system behaves —​this presents the risk, the caution, and the hope of the butterfly effect. It supports the activist mantra: what you do matters. You are all butterflies. The #MeToo mobilisation, this uprising of the formerly disregarded, has made increasingly untenable the assumption that the one who reports sexual abuse is a lying slut. That already is changing everything. With #MeToo, we have our tornado, and not only in Texas. And a lot of the sexual harassment that has been a constant condition of women’s lives is probably not being inflicted at this very moment. As butterflies take flight from beneath the shadow of the law, we are living through the first systemic uplift in women’s status since the vote. Imagine a revolution without violence against domination and aggression. Envision a moment of truth and a movement of transformation for the sexually violated towards a more equal, therefore more peaceful and just world. It is happening all around the world, all around us, right now.

Notes 1 Some of the themes and locations included in this chapter have previously appeared in op-​eds published in the Guardian and the New York Times. Catharine A. MacKinnon,“How Litigation Laid the Ground for Accountability After #MeToo”, Guardian, 23 December 2017, www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​ 2017/​dec/​23/​how-​litigation-​laid-​the-​ground-​for-​accountability-​after-​metoo; MacKinnon, “#MeToo Has Done What the Law Could Not”, New York Times, 4 February 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​02/​ 04/​opinion/​metoo-​law-​legal-​system.html. Aspects of this material are also discussed in MacKinnon,

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Global #MeToo Introduction to Butterfly Politics (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2017), 1 [hereinafter MacKinnon, Introduction]; MacKinnon, Preface to Butterfly Politics: Changing the World for Women, paperback edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019), ix [hereinafter MacKinnon, Preface]; and MacKinnon et al., “ ‘This Moment Turned Out to Be Fleeting’: Nine Reflections on #MeToo, One Year On”, New York Times, 6 October 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​10/​06/​opinion/​me-​too-​ weinstein-​one-​year.html; and in an interview conducted by Brock Colyar, “The Ms. Q&A: Catharine MacKinnon Weighs in on the #MeToo Movement”, Ms. Magazine, 30 July 2018, http://​msmagazine. com/​blog/​2018/​07/​30/​ms-​qa-​catharine-​mackinnon-​weighs-​metoo-​movement/​. 2 Edward N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 14, quoted in Robert C. Hilborn, “Sea Gulls, Butterflies, and Grasshoppers: A Brief History of the Butterfly Effect in Nonlinear Dynamics”, American Journal of Physics, 72, no. 4 (2004): 425. 3 See “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?” Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos, 14. The original talk appears as Appendix 1 in Lorenz, The Butterfly Effect, id. at 181. 4 Robert E. Scott, “Chaos Theory and the Justice Paradox”, William and Mary Law Review 35, no. 1 (1993): 329 and 348. 5 This analysis is further developed in MacKinnon, Introduction. 6 See MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) (laying the foundation for and chronicling the early stages of these developments). 7 According to the New York Times,“at least 200 prominent men have lost their jobs after public allegations of sexual harassment” since the #MeToo movement began in 2017. Audrey Carlsen et al., “#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women”, New York Times, 29 October 2018, www.nytimes.com/​interactive/​2018/​10/​23/​us/​metoo-​replacements.html. 8 For discussion, see MacKinnon, “Speaking Truth to Power”, in Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 277. 9 See “#MeToo:  A Timeline of Events”, Chicago Tribune, 13 June 2019, www.chicagotribune.com/​ lifestyles/​ct-​me-​too-​timeline-​20171208-​htmlstory.html; Tarana Burke, “The Inception”, Just Be Inc., last visited 18 June 2019, http://​justbeinc.wixsite.com/​justbeinc/​the-​me-​too-​movement-​cmml. Burke describes creating a MySpace page for the nascent “Me Too” movement, but recent attempts to locate it have been unsuccessful. See Abby Ohlheiser, “The Woman Behind ‘Me Too’ Knew the Power of the Phrase When She Created It —​10 Years Ago”, Washington Post, 19 October 2017, www. washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​wp/​2017/​10/​19/​the-​woman-​behind-​me-​too-​knew-​the-​ power-​of-​the-​phrase-​when-​she-​created-​it-​10-​years-​ago/​?utm_​term=.21a2452bb83c. 10 #SayHerName is a movement organised since 2014 by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) to lift up Black women and girl victims of police brutality and other anti-​Black misogynist aggression, historical and contemporary. Among other actions, it organises vigils, demonstrations, meetings, and marches, issues reports, and features a Mothers Network for survivors of murdered Black women and girls. See Homa Khaleeli, “#SayHerName: Why Kimberlé Crenshaw Is Fighting for Forgotten Women”, Guardian, 30 May 2016, www.theguardian.com/​lifeandstyle/​2016/​may/​30/​ sayhername-​why-​kimberle-​crenshaw-​is-​fighting-​for-​forgotten-​women…r 11 Although the campus sexual assault numbers are a moving target, as investigations are closed upon their completion, as of 22 September 2017, there were 360 open investigations. Sarah Brown, “What Does the End of Obama’s Title IX Guidance Mean for Colleges?” Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 September 2017, www.chronicle.com/​article/​What-​Does-​the-​End-​of-​Obama-​s/​241281. See also Nick Anderson, “At First, 55 Schools Faced Sexual Violence Investigations. Now the List Has Quadrupled”, Washington Post, 18 January 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​grade-​point/​wp/​ 2017/​01/​18/​at-​first-​55-​schools-​f aced-​sexual-​violence-​investigations-​now-​the-​list-​has-​quadrupled/​ ?utm_​term=.15977fc8d3a1. 12 The presidency of Bill Clinton was derailed by sexual harassment charges that culminated in impeachment. The cases of Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones are considered in MacKinnon, afterword to Directions in Sexual Harassment Law, ed. MacKinnon and Reva B. Siegel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 687. 13 Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey, “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades”, New York Times, 5 October 2017, www.nytimes.com/​2017/​10/​05/​us/​harvey-​weinstein-​harassment-​ allegations.html. 14 Ronan Farrow, “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault:  Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories”, New  Yorker, 10 October 2017, www.newyorker.com/​news/​news-​desk/​from-​ aggressive-​overtures-​to-​sexual-​assault-​harvey-​weinsteins-​accusers-​tell-​their-​stories.

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Catharine A. MacKinnon 15 I tried to get journalists to do this over twenty years ago in a Keynote Address at the Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS) (13 September 1998). For the published version, see MacKinnon, “Mediating Reality”, in Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws, 289 and 293: What women in the media can do, and sometimes win the fight to do, is place their stories of men’s sexual mistreatment of women in real context. Sexual abuse is an everyday event —​ common, systematic, nonexceptional. Talk about it as if you know what you are talking about. Women in the press have been abused just as vast numbers of women in every profession have. Report and analyse events as if you live in the world we know we live in, in which sexual use, manipulation, and abuse can be believed to happen because they do happen. Talk about it as if it hurts and as if it matters because it does hurt and it does matter. 16 Large-​scale surveys of working women estimate that approximately one in every two women will be harassed during their academic or working lives. See Louise F. Fitzgerald, “Sexual Harassment: Violence Against Women in the Workplace”, American Psychologist 48, no. 10 (1993): 1070 and 1073. When asked whether they have been “sexually harassed”, fewer respondents answer affirmatively than when asked about specific sexual behaviours and experiences. Fitzgerald et  al., “Measuring Sexual Harassment: Theoretical and Psychometric Advances”, Basic and Applied Social Psychology 17, no. 4 (1995): 425. Women who are harassed, but do not label their experiences as such, evidence “similar negative psychological, work, and health consequences” as those who do label them correctly. Vickie J. Magley et al., “Outcomes of Self-​Labeling Sexual Harassment”, Journal of Applied Psychology 84, no. 3 (1999): 39 0 , 39 9. For further information on sexual harassment, see generally MacKinnon, Sex Equality, 3rd ed. (St Paul: Foundation Press, 2016), 10 02–​1207. 17 “Nomination of the Honorable Brett M. Kavanaugh to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Day 5)”, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, accessed 21 April 2020, www. judiciary.senate.gov/​meetings/​nomination-​of-​the-​honorable-​brett-​m-​kavanaugh-​to-​be-​an-​associate-​ justice-​of-​the-​supreme-​court-​of-​the-​united-​states-​day-​5. 18 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Kavanaugh Is Sworn In After Close Confirmation Vote in Senate”, New York Times, 6 October 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​10/​06/​us/​politics/​brett-​kavanaugh-​supreme-​ court.html. 19 On the conviction of Bill Cosby, see Tray Connor, “Cosby Trial: Juror Says it was a ‘True Deadlock’ ”, NBC News, 22 June 2017, www.nbcnews.com/​storyline/​bill-​cosby-​scandal/​cosby-​trial-​juror-​says-​it-​ was-​true-​deadlock-​n775666; and Jen Kirby, “Cosby Defense Attorneys Used Personal Attacks to Try to Discredit Witnesses”, Vox, 13 April 2018, www.vox.com/​2018/​4/​13/​17234172/​bill-​cosby-​trial-​ accusers-​janice-​dickinson-​testimony. For discussion of the Persky recall, see Maggie Astor, “California Voters Remove Judge Aaron Persky, Who Gave a 6-​Month Sentence for Sexual Assault”, New York Times, 6 June 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​06/​06/​us/​politics/​judge-​persky-​brock-​turner-​recall. html; and Katie J.M. Baker, “Here’s the Powerful Letter the Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker”, Buzzfeed News, 3 June 2016, www.buzzfeednews.com/​article/​katiejmbaker/​heres-​the-​powerful-​ letter-​the-​stanford-​victim-​read-​to-​her-​ra. Information on the conviction of Larry Nassar may be found in Christine Hauser, “Larry Nassar is Sentenced to Another 40 to 125 Years in Prison”, New  York Times, 5 February 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​02/​05/​sports/​larry-​nassar-​sentencing-​ hearing.html. 20 See, e.g., “Catholic Church Child Sexual Abuse Scandal”, BBC News, 26 February 2019, www. bbc.com/​news/​world-​44209971 (referencing a Church-​commissioned report concluding that “more than 4,000 US Roman Catholic priests had faced sexual abuse allegations in the last 50  years, in cases involving more than 10,000 children —​mostly boys”). Needless to say, the numbers have only increased in the intervening years, the total victimised worldwide almost certainly unknowable. 21 For a survey of the problem as of early 2019, see Nicole Winfield, “A Global Look at the Catholic Church’s Sex Abuse Problem”, Associated Press, 21 February 2019, www.apnews.com/​8cb4daf50946 4bad8c13ef35d44a0fc5. Of the many contributions to the global conversation regarding child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, see, e.g., Paul Elie, “What Do the Church’s Victims Deserve?” New  Yorker, 8 April 2019, www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​2019/​04/​15/​what-​do-​the-​churchs-​ victims-​deserve, and Emma Green, “Why Does the Catholic Church Keep Failing on Sexual Abuse?” Atlantic Magazine, 14 February 2019, www.theatlantic.com/​politics/​archive/​2019/​02/​sean-​omalley-​ pope-​francis-​catholic-​church-​sex-​abuse/​582658. See also “Roman Catholic Church Sex Abuse Cases”, Times Topics, New York Times, last visited 19 June 2019, www.nytimes.com/​topic/​organization/​roman-​catholic-​church-​sex-​abuse-​cases. See, e.g., Pascale Bonnefoy and Austin Ramzy, “Pope’s

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Global #MeToo Defense of Chilean Bishop in Sex Abuse Scandal Causes Outrage”, New York Times, 19 January 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​01/​19/​world/​americas/​pope-​sex-​abuse-​chile.html. 22 This is especially evident in the case of Catholic nuns and other women who have adopted the hashtag #NunsToo. See, e.g., Kathleen McPhillips, “The Catholic Church Is Headed for Another Sex Abuse Scandal as #NunsToo Speak Up”, Conversation, 14 February 2019 (reporting that women theologians “influenced by the success of the #MeToo movement” … convened a meeting —​called Voices of Faith —​in Rome to share their stories of sexual harassment and abuse at the hands of male clerics, and decry the patriarchy of the Catholic hierarchy”), http://​theconversation.com/​the-​catholic-​church-​is-​ headed-​for-​another-​sex-​abuse-​scandal-​as-​nunstoo-​speak-​up-​111539; Sylvia Poggioli, “After Years of Abuse by Priests, #NunsToo Are Speaking Out”, NPR, 18 March 2019 (quoting a Belgian expert on the sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable adults who opined that “the movement of #MeToo has absolutely [had] an influence” on the willingness of Catholic nuns to speak out), www.npr.org/​2019/​ 03/​18/​703067602/​after-​years-​of-​abuse-​by-​priests-​nunstoo-​are-​speaking-​out. 23 “The Unintended Consequences of State Tort Limits: Caps on Damages and Statutes of Limitations in Sexual Assault Cases”, Center for Justice & Democracy, Fact Sheet, 14 February 2019, http://​ centerjd.org/​system/​files/​CAPSSOLSEXASSAULTF4.pdf. 24 Ramit Mizrahi, “Sexual Harassment Law After #MeToo: Looking to California as a Model”, Yale Law Journal Forum 128 (2018–​2019): 121–​151, www.yalelawjournal.org/​pdf/​Mizrahi_​fdk1ngup.pdf. 25 Harassment claims can be brought against individual defendants in California under the Fair Employment and Housing Act, Reno v. Baird, 18 Cal. 4th at 644, 76 Cal.Rptr. 2d 499, 957 P. 2d 1333 (Cal. 1998), although discrimination claims cannot. California separately legislated against discrimination and harassment, making harassment actionable “by an employer or any other person”. § 12940, subd. (h)(1), which liability can extend to nonsupervisory coworkers. Cal. Gov. Code § 12940(j)(3). 26 Prosecutor v. Akayesu, Case No. ICTR 96-​4-​T, Judgement, ¶¶ 688 (2 September 1998). 27 Liz Kelly et al., A Gap or a Chasm? Attrition in Reported Rape Cases, Home Office Research Study No. 293 (London: Home Office, 2005), 25. 28 UN General Assembly, Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, art. 3 (a)-​(b), 15 November 2000, TIAS 13127, 2237 U.N.T.S. 319, (“Palermo Protocol”). 29 Meritor Sav. Bank v. Vinson, 477 US 57 (1986). 30 For discussion, see MacKinnon, “Trafficking, Prostitution, and Inequality”, Harvard Civil Rights-​Civil Liberties Law Review 46, no. 2 (2011): 271. 31 Melissa Farley et al., “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, Journal of Trauma Practice 2, no. 3–​4 (2003): 33, 34, 51, 56, 65. 32 Farley et al., “Online Prostitution and Trafficking”, Albany Law Review 77, no. 3 (2014): 1039, 1042, 1042 n.14. 33 Andrea Dworkin, “Prostitution and Male Supremacy”, Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 1, no. 1 (1993): 1, 4. 34 This is a conservative extrapolation derived from combining Diana E.  H. Russell, The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 62 (finding that 38% of subjects in a study conducted in San Francisco in 1977 had been sexually abused by physical contact before the age of majority), with Linda Meyer Williams, “Recall of Childhood Trauma: A Prospective Study of Women’s Memories of Child Sexual Abuse”, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 62, no. 6 (1994):1167, 1170 (reporting that 38% of women studied did not recall “sexual abuse that they experienced in childhood and that had been documented in hospital records”). 35 See David Finkelhor, “Boys as Victims: Review of the Evidence”, in Child Sexual Abuse: New Theory and Research (New York: Free Press, 1984), 150 (presenting evidence showing that 2.5 to 8.7% of adult male subjects had been sexually victimised as children); Stefanie Doyle Peters et al., “Prevalence”, in A Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse, ed. Finkelhor (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1986), 15 (reviewing studies finding prevalence rates of child sexual abuse among boys ranging from 3 to 31%). For illuminating comparative data on the lifetime prevalence of sexual abuse in children of both sexes, see Amy Young et al., “Alcohol-​Related Sexual Assault Victimization Among Adolescents: Prevalence, Characteristics, and Correlates”, Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 69, no. 1 (2008): 39 (finding that 11.5% of women and 6.1% of men reported intercourse and other sexual violence as children; 46.2% of women and 26.2% of men reported other contact abuse such as fondling, touching, and kissing; 48.4% of women and 26.6% of men reported mixed abuse or an unspecified type of sexual

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Catharine A. MacKinnon abuse; and 67.3% of women and 40.9% of men reported sexual abuse that did not involve contact, such as indecent exposure and inappropriate sexual solicitation). 36 Noemí Pereda et al., “The Prevalence of Child Sexual Abuse in Community and Student Samples: a Meta-​Analysis”, Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 4 (2009): 328, 333, 334 tbl. 4. 37 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 4 (London: Sweet, Maxwell, Stevens & Norton, 1844), p. 358.

Bibliography Anderson, Nick. “At First, 55 Schools Faced Sexual Violence Investigations. Now the List Has Quadrupled”. Washington Post, 18 January 2017. www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​grade-​point/​wp/​ 2017/​01/​18/​at-​first-​55-​schools-​f aced-​sexual-​violence-​investigations-​now-​the-​list-​has-​quadrupled/ ​ ?utm_​term=.15977fc8d3a1. Astor, Maggie. “California Voters Remove Judge Aaron Persky, Who Gave a 6-​Month Sentence for Sexual Assault”. New  York Times, 6 June 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​06/​06/​us/​politics/​judge-​ persky-​brock-​turner-​recall.html. Baker, Katie J.M. “Here’s the Powerful Letter the Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker”. Buzzfeed News, 3 June 2016. www.buzzfeednews.com/​article/​katiejmbaker/​heres-​the-​powerful-​letter-​the-​stanford-​ victim-​read-​to-​her-​ra. BBC News. “Catholic Church Child Sexual Abuse Scandal”. 26 February 2019. www.bbc.com/​news/​ world-​44209971. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Vol. 4. London: Sweet, Maxwell, Stevens & Norton, 1844. Bonnefoy, Pascale and Austin Ramzy. “Pope’s Defense of Chilean Bishop in Sex Abuse Scandal Causes Outrage”. New York Times, 19 January 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​01/​19/​world/​americas/​pope-​ sex-​abuse-​chile.html. Brown, Sarah. “What Does the End of Obama’s Title IX Guidance Mean for Colleges?” Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 September 2017. www.chronicle.com/​article/​What-​Does-​the-​End-​of-​Obama-​s/​ 241281. Burke, Tarana. “The Inception”. Just Be Inc. Last visited 18 June 2019. http://​justbeinc.wixsite.com/​ justbeinc/​the-​me-​too-​movement-​cmml. Carlsen, Audrey, Maya Salam, Claire Cain Miller, Denise Lu, Ash Ngu, Jugal K. Patel, and Zach Wichter. “#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women”. New York Times, 29 October 2018. www.nytimes.com/​interactive/​2018/​10/​23/​us/​metoo-​ replacements.html. Center for Justice & Democracy. “The Unintended Consequences of State Tort Limits: Caps on Damages and Statutes of Limitations in Sexual Assault Cases”. Fact Sheet, 14 February 2019. http://​centerjd. org/​system/​files/​CAPSSOLSEXASSAULTF4.pdf. Chicago Tribune. “#MeToo: A Timeline of Events”, 13 June 2019. www.chicagotribune.com/​lifestyles/​ ct-​me-​too-​timeline-​20171208-​htmlstory.html. Colyar, Brock. “The Ms. Q&A:  Catharine MacKinnon Weighs in on the #MeToo Movement”. Ms. Magazine, 30 July 2018. http://​msmagazine.com/​blog/​2018/​07/​30/​ms-​qa-​catharine-​mackinnon-​ weighs-​metoo-​movement/​. Connor, Tray. “Cosby Trial:  Juror Says it was a ‘True Deadlock’”. NBC News, 22 June 2017. www. nbcnews.com/​storyline/​bill-​cosby-​scandal/​cosby-​trial-​juror-​says-​it-​was-​true-​deadlock-​n775666. Dworkin, Andrea. “Prostitution and Male Supremacy”. Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 1, no. 1 (1993): 4. Elie, Paul. “What Do the Church’s Victims Deserve?” New Yorker, 8 April 2019. www.newyorker.com/​ magazine/​2019/​04/​15/​what-​do-​the-​churchs-​victims-​deserve. Farley, Melissa, Maria E. Reyes, Ann Cotton, Sybille Zumbeck, Ufuk Sezgin, Frida Spiwak, Dinorah Alavarez, and Jacqueline Lynne. “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries:  An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”. Journal of Trauma Practice 2, no. 3–​4 (2003): 33–​74. Farley, Melissa, Kenneth Franzblau, and M. Alexis Kennedy. “Online Prostitution and Trafficking”. Albany Law Review 77, no. 3 (2014): 1039–​1094. Farrow, Ronan. “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories”. New Yorker, 10 October 2017. www.newyorker.com/​news/​news-​desk/​from-​aggressive-​ overtures-​to-​sexual-​assault-​harvey-​weinsteins-​accusers-​tell-​their-​stories.

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Global #MeToo Finkelhor, David. “Boys as Victims: Review of the Evidence”. In Child Sexual Abuse: New Theory and Research. New York: Free Press, 1984. Fitzgerald, Louise F. “Sexual Harassment:  Violence Against Women in the Workplace”. American Psychologist 48, no. 10 (1993): 1070–​1076. Fitzgerald, Louise F., Fritz Drasgow, Michele J. Gelfand. “Measuring Sexual Harassment: Theoretical and Psychometric Advances”. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 17, no. 4 (1995): 425–​445. Green, Emma. “Why Does the Catholic Church Keep Failing on Sexual Abuse?” Atlantic Magazine, 14 February 2019. www.theatlantic.com/​politics/​archive/​2019/​02/​sean-​omalley-​pope-​francis-​catholic-​ church-​sex-​abuse/​582658. Hauser, Christine. “Larry Nassar is Sentenced to Another 40 to 125 Years in Prison”. New York Times, 5 February 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​02/​05/​sports/​larry-​nassar-​sentencing-​hearing.html. Hilborn, Robert C. “Sea Gulls, Butterflies, and Grasshoppers: A Brief History of the Butterfly Effect in Nonlinear Dynamics”, American Journal of Physics 72, no. 4 (2004): 425. Kantor, Jodi and Megan Twohey. “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades”. New York Times, 5 October 2017. www.nytimes.com/​2017/​10/​05/​us/​harvey-​weinstein-​harassment-​ allegations.html. Kelly, Liz, Jo Lovett, and Linda Regan. A Gap or a Chasm? Attrition in Reported Rape Cases. Home Office Research Study No. 293. London: Home Office, 2005. Khaleeli, Homa. “#SayHerName: Why Kimberlé Crenshaw Is Fighting for Forgotten Women”. Guardian, 30 May 2016. www.theguardian.com/​lifeandstyle/​2016/​may/​30/​sayhername-​why-​kimberle-​crenshaw​is-​fighting-​for-​forgotten-​women. Kirby, Jen. “Cosby Defense Attorneys Used Personal Attacks to Try to Discredit Witnesses”. Vox, 13 April 2018. www.vox.com/​2018/​4/​13/​17234172/​bill-​cosby-​trial-​accusers-​janice-​dickinson-​testimony. Lorenz, Edward N. The Essence of Chaos. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Sexual Harassment of Working Women:  A Case of Sex Discrimination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. MacKinnon Catharine A. Afterword to Directions in Sexual Harassment Law. Edited by Catharine A. MacKinnon and Reva B. Siegel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. MacKinnon, Catharine A. “Trafficking, Prostitution, and Inequality”, Harvard Civil Rights-​Civil Liberties Law Review 46, no. 2 (2011): 271. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Sex Equality. 3rd ed. St Paul: Foundation Press, 2016. MacKinnon, Catharine A. “How Litigation Laid the Ground for Accountability After #MeToo”. Guardian, 23 December 2017. www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2017/​dec/​23/​how-​litigation-​laid-​the​g round-​for-​accountability-​after-​metoo. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Introduction to Butterfly Politics. Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2017. MacKinnon, Catharine A. “#MeToo Has Done What the Law Could Not”. New York Times, 4 February 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​02/​04/​opinion/​metoo-​law-​legal-​system.html. MacKinnon, Catharine A., et  al. “ ‘This Moment Turned Out to Be Fleeting’:  Nine Reflections on #MeToo, One Year On”. New York Times, 6 October 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​10/​06/​opinion/​ me-​too-​weinstein-​one-​year.html. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Preface to Butterfly Politics: Changing the World for Women. Paperback edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019. Magley, Vickie J., C. L. Hulin, L. F. Fitzgerald, and M. DeNardo. “Outcomes of Self-​Labeling Sexual Harassment”, Journal of Applied Psychology 84, no. 3 (1999): 390, 399. McPhillips, Kathleen. “The Catholic Church is Headed for Another Sex Abuse Scandal as #NunsToo Speak Up”. Conversation, 14 February 2019. http://​theconversation.com/​the-​catholic-​church-​is-​headed​for-​another-​sex-​abuse-​scandal-​as-​nunstoo-​speak-​up-​111539. Meritor Sav. Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986). Mizrahi, Ramit. “Sexual Harassment Law After #MeToo: Looking to California as a Model”. Yale Law Journal Forum 128 (2018–​ 2019):  121–​ 151. 18 June 2018. www.yalelawjournal.org/​pdf/​Mizrahi_​ fdk1ngup.pdf. New York Times. “Roman Catholic Church Sex Abuse Cases”. Times Topics. Last visited 19 June 2019. www.nytimes.com/​topic/​organization/​roman-​catholic-​church-​sex-​abuse-​cases.

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Catharine A. MacKinnon Ohlheiser, Abby. “The Woman Behind ‘Me Too’ Knew the Power of the Phrase When She Created It —​ 10 Years Ago”. Washington Post, 19 October 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​ wp/​2017/​10/​19/​the-​woman-​behind-​me-​too-​knew-​the-​power-​of-​the-​phrase-​when-​she-​created-​it-​ 10-​years-​ago/​?utm_​term=.21a2452bb83c. Pereda, Noemí, Georgina Guilera, Maria Frons Santacana, and Juana Gómez-​Benito. “The Prevalence of Child Sexual Abuse in Community and Student Samples: a Meta-​Analysis”. Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 4 (2009): 328–​338. Peters, Stefanie Doyle, et  al. “Prevalence”. In A Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse. Edited by David Finkelhor, 15. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1986. Poggioli, Sylvia. “After Years of Abuse by Priests, #NunsToo Are Speaking Out”. NPR, 18 March 2019. www.npr.org/​2019/​03/​18/​703067602/​after-​years-​of-​abuse-​by-​priests-​nunstoo-​are-​speaking-​out. Prosecutor v. Akayesu, Case No. ICTR 96-​4-​T, Judgement, ¶¶ 688 (2 September 1998). Reno v. Baird, 18 Cal. 4th at 644, 76 Cal.Rptr. 2d 499, 957 P. 2d 1333 (Cal. 1998). Russell, Diana E.H. The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Scott, Robert E. “Chaos Theory and the Justice Paradox”. William and Mary Law Review 35, no. 1 (1993), 329. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. “Nomination of the Honorable Brett M.  Kavanaugh to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Day 5)”. Accessed 21 April 2020. www. judiciary.senate.gov/​meetings/​nomination-​of-​the-​honorable-​brett-​m-​kavanaugh-​to-​be-​an-​associate-​ justice-​of-​the-​supreme-​court-​of-​the-​united-​states-​day-​5. Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. “Kavanaugh Is Sworn In After Close Confirmation Vote in Senate”. New York Times, 6 October 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​10/​06/​us/​politics/​brett-​kavanaugh-​supreme-​court.html. UN General Assembly. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Art. 3 (a)–​(b), 15 November 2000, TIAS 13127, 2237 U.N.T.S. 319, (“Palermo Protocol”). Williams, Linda Meyer. “Recall of Childhood Trauma: A Prospective Study of Women’s Memories of Child Sexual Abuse”. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 62, no. 6 (1994): 1167–​1176. Winfield, Nicole. “A Global Look at the Catholic Church’s Sex Abuse Problem”. Associated Press, 21 February 2019. www.apnews.com/​8cb4daf509464bad8c13ef35d44a0fc5. Young, Amy, Melissay Grey, Antonia Abbey, Carol Boyd, and Sean McCabe. “Alcohol-​Related Sexual Assault Victimization Among Adolescents:  Prevalence, Characteristics, and Correlates”. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 69, no. 1 (2008): 39–​48.

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4 SUBJECT OF DESIRE /​ SUBJECT OF FEMINISM Some notes on the split subject(s) of #MeToo Anne-​Emmanuelle  Berger Note 1: From maids to maidens In May 2011, a few days after French Presidential hopeful and International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-​Kahn was arrested by the New York Police Department for the alleged rape of Nafissatou Diallo, a hotel maid in New-​York, Jean-​François Kahn (also known as JFK), a well-​known French journalist and founder of the magazine Marianne, made light of the incident on the radio and called it a “troussage de domestique”, literally, “lifting the maid’s skirt”. This highbrow, euphemistic, and formulaic expression clothed the event in an easily recognisable garb and gave it the reassuring air of familiarity: It was just a case of (sexual) business as usual, immediately calling to the mind of cultured and historically attuned French citizens, say, the many skirt-​lifting attempts of Count Almaviva in Le Mariage de Figaro, beginning with his pursuit of Suzanne, the Countess’s maid and Figaro’s betrothed, and seemingly extending to every member of the female sex,1 or Guy de Maupassant’s innumerable short stories, recounting the sad destiny of maids abused and subsequently discarded (or sometimes, though seldom, “kept”) by their masters in the French countryside. In other words, if the outmoded ring of the chosen formula seemed to point to a pattern one might have thought or hoped to be outdated, this was, or should at any rate, hardly be news. “Lifting the maid’s skirt” was an old and familiar story told countless times over by men between themselves, and, when they were authors or journalists of any sort, to the general public as well, women readers included. And yet, it is as if, when women read or heard about it, time and again, they didn’t recognise a pattern of which they had, as men themselves observed and reported shamelessly, an intimate knowledge. Was this because what happened to maids elicited barely any sympathy from the class of their employers, male or female? Because, in other words, it couldn’t or wasn’t supposed to happen to higher-​class women? It took Freud’s early theory of seduction (Verführungstheorie) at the very end of the nineteenth century to start shedding light on the reasons why most women remained both deaf and silent in the face of an injury they in fact routinely sustained. Having uncovered the sexual aetiology of hysterical symptoms, Freud discovered  —​through proper psychoanalytic enquiry and to his amazement —​the extent of sexual abuse suffered not only by young maidservants, but by maidens  —​women of other and all classes in their early womanhood, or, sometimes, even childhood. At the time, the abuse mostly took place in the secrecy of their homes —​women’s 55

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designated place —​at the hands of their male relatives or their relatives’ friends. Young maidens’ unguarded powerlessness, their inability to recognise and name what was happening to them, made them incapable of defending themselves against an aggression that was often repeated. The psychic violence inflicted by the deed and the shame that bourgeois society attached to sexual acts led to repression, which in turn led to neurosis. Later on, though, Freud dropped his early seduction theory in favour of another theory, which deemed the painfully unearthed narrative of abuse to be a fantasy, namely the expression of an unconscious Oedipal wish aimed by hysterics at their male relatives. In Freud’s estimation, the complaints of sexual abuse by women in his cabinet were too frequent to be true. To acknowledge them would have meant to recognise the existence of a systemic sexual violence of women by men. The thought was unbearable to Freud, much as it was, for different reasons, to the women enduring the violence. From then on, Freud downplayed the role of men as “seducers”, and insisted that women, and especially mothers, were the primary seducers of children of both genders. The new theory certainly had an interesting edge to it:  it helped promote the idea that women, too, had sexual desire and could be active seducers. But it served to obscure for men and women alike the scenario and prevalence of the “skirt-​lifting”, so well documented by modern Western literature and its twentieth-​century cinematic renditions.

Note 2: The medium is the message The Strauss-​Kahn affair stunned the world and stupefied the French (myself included). Yet, as JFK’s remark implied, with a mixture of légèreté and cynicism, what was presumed to have happened in room 2806 could hardly have been new(s). What made the difference with the innumerable episodes of the kind that had occurred and continued to occur the world over between (powerful) men and (disempowered) women, was its telegenic dimension, given its almost instantaneous broadcast on American TV channels. Thanks to the latter’s repetitive pounding of 24 hour, round-​the-​clock “news” and the fact that English is the global lingua franca, this alleged instance of (ordinary) maid abuse had an unprecedented global reach. Perhaps the only other new element in that story was the outcry that followed in the weeks to come. Everywhere in Western media, on the radio or TV, in the newspapers and on the web, women reacted to the event and started to tell stories of abuse at the hands of men in power. In France, people witnessed and commented on what the media dubbed “la libération de la parole” (the “liberation of [women’s] speech”), in an obvious gesturing towards the heroic and still recent past of the Women’s Liberation Movement. This time, though, the “liberation” lasted only a month, or at best two months, that is, the time it usually takes for a single event to run its course in the media and to lose its appeal.2 The outpouring of stories and the nature of the event that had stirred it nonetheless provoked or helped precipitate the resurgence of a form of feminism, which had seemed exhausted, or had at least been discredited by the so-​called third wave of feminism: a feminism whose subject is “women”. I’ll return to this “subject” later. Women’s Lib had helped bring to consciousness the sexual harm that had been repressed and thereafter unconsciously suffered by the muffled hysterics to whom Freud had started listening. Thanks to the second popular “wave” of feminism, the complaint wasn’t kept any more in the secrecy of women’s heart or whispered into their analyst’s ear. But it went largely unheard nonetheless, addressed as it was for the most part to a female-​only audience of friends, sisters and sometimes mothers. The only exception was when the most egregious and damaging cases were taken to court. What “liberation of speech” meant here was that the grievance was made public, perhaps for the first time, thanks to its media presentation and impetus. As a result, men finally started getting the message. 56

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The #MeToo upheaval is the strongest aftershock of the initial earthquake I have briefly spoken of here. Indeed, with #MeToo what matters most —​and is made evident by the very name this epochal incident goes by —​is not the scene of the sexual crime itself; the details of Harvey Weinstein’s misconduct as well as his (harsh) punishment at the hands of the heavy-​ handed US Justice system have attracted comparatively little attention. What matters is the public scream women (any, and therefore potentially, every woman), have been able to release and are still uttering. Much has already been said on the famous hashtag and the site of its enunciation, Twitter. The World Wide Web has an unprecedented reach, as its name indicates. It is also the most democratic media outlet to date. Making it possible to bypass the “middleman”, namely, authorised sources of information and broadcasting, and requiring no particular mastery of the codes that govern public speech, the web, and its various technological forms and forums offer an unparalleled stage for individual expression, while expanding the latter’s rhetorical range (witness the unprecedented outpouring of disparaging and offensive speech). At the time of the Strauss-​Kahn affair, blogs and websites were still the main venue for the expression of opinions and the dissemination of stories. The so-​called social media (to start with Facebook and WhatsApp) have gone one step further in technologically erasing the border between the public and private spheres, between authorised and lay speech, between the intimate and the extimate, between the individual (it happened to me) and the general (to me too), and so between the “personal” and the “political”. Through these and their offspring, Twitter, the message, instantly delivered by the cellphones that are always to hand, cannot fail to reach its target. Their ringtones summon us ceaselessly, catch our attention through sound and sight, and prompt us, like any phone call, to respond in the first person: I hear you. #MeToo is just such a response. The phrase, in its doubly striking economy (two monosyllables spurted out like a blow), testifies to the illocutionary force of an utterance, its “message” lying not so much in its content (reduced to almost nothing), as in its highly perlocutionary effect: (since) you (any “you”) said it, I (any “I”) can say it. The first-​person performative has successfully replaced the third-​person narratives of abuse, to which I alluded in my first note. Enabled by today’s mass-​information teletechnologies, #MeToo has had a massive effect. If, as I said, the news as such was not really news for countless women and many men, its worldwide disclosure revealed both the frequency of the experience and the extent of the damage. Well-​meaning men in particular were struck by what suddenly appeared to be a rite of passage into womanhood that had long remained un-​avowed by the two parties concerned, that is, like the violent and repeated enforcement of gender asymmetry.3 As for those who were active participants in the harassment exposed, they discovered to their surprise that women, even when they don’t say it, even when they seem to “consent”, do not, in fact, like it.

Note 3: Behind the screen(s): A Hollywood story It all started in America. An African-​American social worker, Tarana Burke, coined the hashtag in 2006, but the phrase only became a star, as it were, once it was launched from Hollywood, that is, from an iconic cultural space, one that is saturated with erotic fantasy and awash with big money, that again has a global power of attraction and stirs powerful narcissistic projections as well as imaginary investments of all kinds. The primary cast of #MeToo —​a powerful movie mogul and various would-​be or established actresses —​is emblematic of the issues at stake. An actress, to begin with, is not any kind of “woman”. There is a long cultural history of the ambivalent social function and imaginary figure of the actress in the modern Western world. She is a hybrid of the emancipated female agent freed from the chains and conventions 57

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of bourgeois marriage and a figure prostituted to the voyeuristic pleasures of men.4 As for playacting, it is not simply one function among many in the social arena, but rather, as Erving Goffman or Jacques Lacan have taught us using different analytic vocabularies, the very stuff that social interaction, self-​presentation, and gender as masquerade, are made of. Given the capitalist nature of film production, the invention of the cinema studio, and the global reach already afforded to movies by industrial broadcasting technologies, a new figure emerged, that of the “star”. In her groundbreaking piece of feminist film analysis, “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey shed light on the unconscious sexual fantasy and the screening mechanisms at work in the Hollywoodian production of the (paradigmatically female) star.5 Uncovering the connection between cinematic visual pleasures and what she, like Freud, calls scopophilia (the eroticisation of the activity of looking and of its counterpart, the pleasure of being looked at) she attempted to show how Hollywood productions have insistently relied on the activation of a “male gaze”, a gaze that enforces (indeed, literally produces) the distinction between man as subject of desire and woman as object of desire in accordance with two main lines of unconscious sexual fantasy. It is both a sadistic voyeurism that responds to the alleged threat of castration posed by “woman” —​Mulvey sees it at work in the inquisitive scenarios of film noir showing detectives busy uncovering the shadowy dealings (hence the (de)fault) of the female protagonist —​and a fetishistic one, which clothes the female character in the shiny garment of the glamorous star. In his well-​known piece on fetishism, Freud had indeed hinted at the connection between fetishistic fantasy and what we could call the “shining” effect or lure.6 In both these instances, whether she is sadistically devalued or fetishised and overvalued, the woman pictured is, “essentially”, an effect of male fantasy or fears. In other words, the Hollywood production made visible (and enjoyable for all) the mechanisms by which women are promoted and recognised and therefore defined, exclusively as objects of male desire, according to the phallocentric economy of desire, which psychoanalysis helped to decipher. If Mulvey’s initial piece focused on the way men look(ed) at women and the way Hollywoodian cinema has traditionally activated and framed that look, the implicit corollary of her analysis is that women spectators are invited to take pleasure in either the humiliation or the fetishisation of the woman character; that is, to identify with the casting of women as objects of “male” desire, and to enjoy it. When would-​be actresses want the female role (i.e, the role of the star as Woman or of the woman as Star) in this context, this is the role they want and are ready to endorse. Is it surprising then that sexual harassment and sometimes rape at the hands of their Pygmalion-​like puppeteers (the film producers, and, sometimes, directors) have been the lot of countless aspiring (and established) stars, as if the making of the (imagined) star entailed the breaking of a (real) woman, her proper cut, to screen s(e)ize that is before and behind the screen(s)? No wonder that it is from this particular location that #MeToo started to make itself heard. It is probably easier, moreover, for both class and narcissistic reasons (and specifically at the juncture or these two orders of reasons) to publicly avow having shared the damaging experience of a star rather than that of a maid.

Note 4: “Sexuality”? Following on from Monique Wittig’s claim that “lesbians are not women”, Judith Butler has forcefully and permanently called into question the conceptual and political unity of the presumed “subject of feminism”: woman. If the feminism of the seventies had already largely done away with the idea that the concept of woman could be epistemologically grounded in a pre-​social nature, the critical retrieval of which would guarantee the political unity of the 58

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Women’s Liberation Movement, it was time to emphasise the heterogeneity of “women’s” experience: Black women’s specific experience, for instance, their social position and cultural definition, should not be obliterated by white women’s experience and white feminist discourse; the predominantly hetero-​centred discourse and concerns of second wave feminism was not making room for, or doing justice to, lesbian lives, and so on. This internal critique of Western feminism’s own biases or blind spots was obviously necessary, and has produced major conceptual and political breakthroughs, enabling the queer turn in feminism as well as the flourishing body of works around the notion of intersectionality. Yet, it is as if, with #MeToo, the old “subject of feminism” had returned to the front stage. After all, what #MeToo seems to say and show, is that whether you are, or I am, Black (Anita Hill) or white (Alyssa Milano), high on the social or celebrity scale (Gwyneth Paltrow) or low (Nafissatou Diallo), and possibly lesbian or queer (like a number of female actors in both Hollywood and the French cinema world), it happens or can happen to “me too”, at the hands of men who are white (Harvey Weinstein) or Black (Bill Cosby). As for transwomen, as long as they want or seem to want to play the part (Woman’s role), there is no reason why they should be spared the experience. The #MeToo global disclosure, in this sense, looks like a vindication of Catharine A. MacKinnon’s brand of feminism, one that is both radical and universalist in scope, one that relies on the notion that all women share the same defining experience, one, moreover, which takes “sexuality” as both the locus and matrix of the enforcement of gender asymmetry and the subordination of women. Thinking of the main stage of #MeToo (Hollywood) and watching the drama unfold easily bring to mind the famous chapter from Toward A Feminist Theory of the State in which MacKinnon defines “sexuality” as the paradigmatic form of male domination, the premises of which she articulates bluntly: How are the qualities we know as male and female socially created and enforced on an everyday level? Sexual objectification of women —​first in the world, then in the head, first in visual appropriation, then in forced sex, finally in sexual murder  —​ provides answers.7 True, the Hollywood drama hasn’t exactly stuck to the sexual script theorised by Mackinnon. Two episodes, at least, in the mediatic series created around #MeToo, have threatened to undermine its reading through MacKinnonian lenses:  the denunciation of the actor Kevin Spacey as a sexual harasser by other male actors; and the claim by a young actor with a short-​ lived career that he was forced by Asia Argento (one of the first actresses to publicly denounce Harvey Weinstein’s sexual aggression) to have sexual intercourse with her. If not all sexual predators are “male”, then, and not all sexual prey “female”, what does it say about #MeToo?8 The fact is that the two episodes I  have mentioned above haven’t carried much weight. #MeToo remains largely perceived as the expression of the general grievance women have with regard to men’s behaviour in the register of sexual conduct. MacKinnon has forcefully drawn the curtain on one of the major stages of “male domination” (“sexuality”), one that is all the more intractable, difficult to decipher and hard to treat, since it is hidden from public view and even in many ways from the protagonists themselves. She has devised or helped design policy and legal tools that have had an impact well beyond the borders of the United States. Yet, her grim view of sexuality at the time she wrote her major opus has been (rightly) criticised, including from within feminist precincts, as leaving too little room for women’s agency, and, which is worse in this case, for women’s desire. Indeed, in her piece on “sexuality”, MacKinnon comes close to describing desire as a foil, a construct imposed on women (by psychoanalysis in particular) to fool them into subjection to men’s sexuality, 59

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that is, to “sexuality” as “male”. Such a view of the scene of desire in the context of male domination can lead to a condemnation of “sexuality” per se, which is oddly resonant with its traditional and stern rejection in Christianity. Hence the unease with which some feminist circles have greeted the censorial dimension of the anti-​pornography campaigns, as well as the implementation of sexual harassment laws inspired by MacKinnon’s feminist legal work. They are wary of the unfortunate overlap between the understanding of sexuality that underlies these new legal provisions and the alleged “puritanism” of an American culture still heavily inflected by a conservative form of Protestantism. So what can we learn from #MeToo as far as sexuality (and its inextricably psychical and social workings) is concerned, or, let’s say, is still concerned today? Is #MeToo about gender enforcement and the subordination of women through “sexuality”? Is it about the perverse compulsion to repeat (and as far as the perpetrator is concerned, to reverse) the early seduction of the child by the adult, a traumatic yet systemic occurrence, which, according to the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (and to Freud’s early seduction theory), triggers the onset of human sexuality in the Freudian sense? Or should it perhaps be read as a blatant example of the aporias of consent, a notion which, as the French feminist sociologist Irène Théry shows in her enlightening piece on “the three revolutions of consent”, has become the cornerstone of the social regulation of sexuality in democratic settings? In that piece, Théry retraces the long European history of the ways in which consent, at once a philosophical concept, a long-​ standing legal category, and a political tool, has been used to define the boundaries of licit and illicit sexual acts and behaviours.9 Once consent was redefined in modern times as the legitimate expression of an autonomous and free subject, once its authorising power was relocated in the individual, it was indeed individuals, deemed equal under the law, who started to bear the burden of upholding the partition between the admissible and the inadmissible, and were called to testify to its observance. A  precious tool for both the defense of individual freedom and for the legal interpretation of possible infractions to the laws, both social and juridical, which regulate sexuality, consent has become crucial. But it also raises as many questions as it solves.

Note 5: Aporias of consent When Nafissatou Diallo was assaulted, she immediately complained. This was clearly not a consensual act. It left neither room nor time for the victim to either assent or refuse. What prompted the #MeToo outcry could also be recognised fairly easily as an instance of unwanted sexual aggression. It is hard to imagine that the many stars and would-​be stars who were faced with Harvey Weinstein’s obscene gestures and sexual pressures were seduced (and therefore attracted at any point). But something in the repetitive scenario of this Hollywood affair and the various stages of its unfolding remains disturbing and difficult to account for: namely, the belatedness of its denunciation, a belatedness that seems to indicate a reluctance to come forward, that is, perhaps, to come to terms with the event or its repeated occurrence, on the part of the women concerned. With regard to the Hollywoodian specifics of the #MeToo claim, such reluctance may be once again rather easy to explain, superficially at least. The “objects” of Weinstein’s lust may simply have been scared; some may have accepted the business deal, in advance or on the spot, out of a mixture of fatalism and complacency. Knowing that women are valued by men first and foremost as objects of desire, knowing moreover that their professional value still depends, in a place like Hollywood, on their ability to embody that role, they would play the part in order to win it. Whatever the degree of lucidity or calculation involved, the belatedness of the denunciation appears to signal the participation of women, however conflicted, in acts they will later disavow. At some point in time, in other words, they may have 60

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consented to the act, albeit fleetingly or half-​heartedly, perhaps even only half-​consciously. And it is this that allows a scene of sexual aggression to be reread by the court of law or opinion (and to some degree by women themselves) as a scene of seduction, a seduction to which they allegedly at one time or eventually “succumbed”, as the phrase tellingly goes. Indeed, the problem lies in both the limitations and the ambiguities of the notion of consent. Consent presupposes the ability to exercise one’s free will. This ability has more chance of being undermined within the framework of a sexual encounter than it does when signing a sales contract. Freud and later, Laplanche, have explored the unconscious traumatic structure and potential resonance of all sexual encounters inasmuch as they reactivate the child’s traumatic exposure to the enigmatic sexuality of the adult, the manifestations of which the child perceives, or is subjected to, without having the ability to fully comprehend them. The belatedness of the women’s reaction may testify in this respect to the traumatic dimension of the encounter, which always makes itself felt (well) after the fact. This particular type of belatedness is what Freud called Nachträglichkeit, in his attempt to define the peculiar temporality of trauma. It is linked, in part, as in the (often unrecognisable and unavowable) sexually loaded exchanges between adult and child, to the power differential between the participants. Consent, as one knows, presupposes (and therefore performatively constitutes) the formal equality of the players. It does not take into account, therefore, the power asymmetry between men and women, still largely at work when it is not mitigated by true love or mutual desire. Moreover, if, as the French feminist anthropologist Nicole-​Claude Mathieu once wrote, to yield is not to consent, to consent, I would add, is not to want. The very framing of a sexual encounter as one of consent, even mutual consent, suggests that desire is not necessarily involved and need not be. If “I” want “you”, and “you” want “me”, as happens when the sexual encounter is the result of love or mutual passion, however dissymmetrical (for the desiring “I” and the “you” never desire each other in identical ways), there is no need for consent on either part. But if I have to be led to agree, it is precisely because I do not really, do not fully, want what is about to occur. Note that, if the scene of love or desire does involve subjects of desire, such that indeed I want you, and you want me, and that my choosing you as the object of my desire doesn’t mean that I cease to recognise you as a subject, the scene of consent is about “what” I consent to, and not “who” I want. One consents to an act (hence the legal definition of consensual acts); one wants a person, perceived and desired as a singular subject.10 The result is that, if a “no” is a “no”, the “yes” or the “OK, I agree” is not always a true “yes”: it can contain or perhaps always contains a “no” that may be ignored or deactivated by the consenting subject at the time of the agreement, but that might return, in the form of remorse, hence self-​accusation, or in the form of a differed, belated accusation, levelled at the so-​called seducer. If the timing and mechanism of such a complaint is quite understandable, say, from a psychoanalytic point of view, it is much more difficult to plead such a case in court. This division of consent, or, rather, the division inherent to consent, has baffled and angered the parties, mostly men, who have enjoyed what they thought they knew was a “consenting” relation, and have found themselves belatedly accused, sometimes long after the fact or the relations involved, a timing typical, as we know, of many sexual harassment suits.

Note 6: Towards a new theory —​and practice —​of (heterosexual) seduction If what #MeToo points to can happen and has happened to virtually anybody identified by the perpetrator(s) as female, as I said earlier, it has not stirred much interest in queer circles. It has, on the other hand, attracted, just as the Strauss-​Kahn affair did earlier, the attention 61

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of people, women and men, who have  —​for libidinal as well as political and intellectual reasons —​an investment in (re)thinking what we might call the heterosexual scene of desire. For what #MeToo finally makes clear is that something has been going wrong for a long time in the (hetero)sexual encounter. As Eric Fassin insightfully noted in a piece written in the wake of the Strauss-​Kahn affair, a strange and somehow unnoticed shift of emphasis occurred with regard to the latter in the flurry of (acrimonious) commentaries the affair gave rise to on both sides of the Atlantic.11 The Strauss-​Kahn affair was clearly an instance of alleged (and later confirmed) sexual aggression. And yet, much of the debate that followed it centred, not on the fact(s) and social meaning of sexual aggression, a fairly easy question to sort out both intellectually and from a legal point of view (although not so easy to treat socially and politically), but on the much more ambiguous scene of (heterosexual) seduction, which has so often been represented and celebrated in the Western world, and, indeed, elevated to an art (as Ars Erotica), presumed to involve men and women differently but equally willingly. A number of French intellectual women, self-​ described as feminists, expressed publicly a reluctance at doing away with the pleasures and benefits afforded by “seduction”. A number of American feminists responded angrily to what they saw as a blindness to the power structure framing the socialisation of heterosexuality, a blindness all the more unconscionable given that the occasion of this pro-​seduction speech —​ the Strauss Kahn affair  —​had every appearance of a clear-cut instance of sexual violence aggravated by a context of heightened social inequality (a powerful, white, male, player on the world stage vs a Black maid). The phrase used by Irène Théry, who was one of the French feminists participating in the acrimonious debate, in her defense of seduction  —​“French feminism … wants both equal rights between the sexes and the asymmetrical pleasures of seduction, absolute respect of consent and the delightful surprise of stolen kisses”12 —​ seems to refer to an iconic movie by François Truffaut, Baisers volés. The movie recounts the sentimental education of a young petit bourgeois male. The cinematic reference testifies once again to the central place of film as a locus of activation of twentieth-​century sexual fantasies. And of course, the “stealer” of kisses, in this case, is the hero of the story, the active masculine subject of desire. In the picture of seduction that Théry, a major scholar of family and sexual relations in Europe, conjures up, albeit unwittingly, with her evocation of the delightful stolen kisses, it is “males” who steal and females who are stolen from, and the scene of rapture, however shared, is haunted by the ghost of what then looks like its close kin: rape. The polemic around seduction that followed the Strauss-​Kahn affair shows how difficult it is still for a number of women, even self-​declared feminists, to disentangle themselves from the traditional position of object of desire, which for so long has afforded them sexual value and benefits of a certain kind. Can seduction be rid of the violence, open or hidden, that threatens its operation and underlies its fantasy? Many of the terms we still commonly use to describe the heterosexual encounter prevent us from thinking anew, so worn out or reified have their meaning and frames of reference become. It is as if, even after the (unfinished) cultural revolution brought about in the Western world by the women’s liberation movements, a seducer remained paradigmatically male; it is as if an “object of desire”, phenomenologically speaking, couldn’t also be a subject of desire, and conversely; it is as if seducers were not always also seduced, as if indeed, they hadn’t been seduced to begin with, that is, lead “astray” and into sexuality (since human sexuality as such, as Freud surmised, is never straight). Yet, of course, women too can be and have been active seducers, and not only mothers with their children, as Freud declared. In fact, in Baisers volés, it is indeed a maternal figure, Madame Tabard, who initiates Antoine Doinel, the main protagonist, to the pleasures of love. Does this 62

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mean that seduction, in a heterosexual context, always involves a power differential and a power figure, whether that of the master or the mother? If Eric Fassin is right and there is no escape from the play of power —​which Fassin however carefully distinguishes from domination —​in sexual relations, no more than in any other social relations, the sexual scene, heterosexual or otherwise, can be one where women are not afraid to claim their desire, where roles can not only be infinitely exchanged, but blurred, at least when desire —​and not merely the will to power, and not only lust for “the act” —​is involved, in other words, when the libido, to use Freud’s vocabulary, is cathected and directed towards a specific “object”,13 granted the freedom and agency of both a subject of desire and a subject … of feminism.

Notes 1 In Beaumarchais’s play, it is actually the teenager page, Chérubin, who claims to desire anything female. But on the dramaturgical level, he functions as a double of the Count, chasing the same “females” the Count is after. He himself stirs the Count’s sexual interest at some point, when he is disguised as a young maid, a transvestite of sorts. 2 On this topic, see my contribution, Berger, “Le Dire” [To Say It], in Tout dire? Transparence ou secret [Say Everything? Exposure or Secrecy], ed. René Frydman and Muriel Flis-​Treves (Paris: PUF, 2011), 87–​106. 3 See for instance the philosopher Frédéric Worms’ op-​ed piece in the daily Libération, “Le temps du trouble”, in which he expresses sideration and a kind of shame, confessing to never have taken the measure of the problem revealed by #MeToo. Worms, “Harcèlement sexuel:  après la sidération, le temps du trouble, source de clarté” [Sexual Harassment:  After the Shock, the Time of Trouble as a Source of Enlightenment], Libération, 23 November 2017, www.liberation.fr/​debats/​2017/​11/​23/​ harcelement-​sexuel-​apres-​la-​sideration-​le-​temps-​du-​trouble-​source-​de-​clarte_​1612061. 4 There is, as one knows, a lexical connection between the Latinate word “prostitution” (from pro-​ statuere, to place on the front stage, to exhibit) and the very notion of display. 5 See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema”, in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 57–​68. 6 The first example of a fetishist fixation Freud gives in his small essay on Fetishism is that of a “glance at the nose”, meaning something shining on a nose that stirs the sexual interest of a fetishist patient. See Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism”, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works (1927–​1931), ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1961), 149–​157. The piece was first published in 1927. 7 See MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 127. 8 A most notable instance of the possible reversal of roles between predators and preys is the “coup monté” by Marcella Iacub against … Dominique Strauss-​Kahn himself in the wake of his indictment and global public shaming for having sexually assaulted Nafissatou Diallo. Iacub, a controversial feminist jurist and essayist and an important voice in the media scene in France, decided to launch an experiment, consisting in approaching Strauss-​Kahn and seducing him, in order to study the sexual case from the inside as it were. The ploy worked, she had an affair with him, and she subsequently published a book recounting it, entitled Belle et Bête [Beauty and Beast]. The book made a big albeit short-​lived splash. In the book, Strauss-​Kahn is consistently called “le porc” (the pig), an anticipation of the French version of the Me Too hashtag, “#Balance ton porc” (meaning, literally, denounce your pig). One could argue that, if Strauss-​Kahn is (indeed) a pig, Iacub didn’t hesitate to turn into a sow to frame him. Iacub, Belle et Bête [Beauty and Beast] (Paris: Stock, 2013). 9 See Irène Théry, “Les trois révolutions du consentement: pour une approche socio-​anthropologique de la sexualité” [The Three Revolutions of Consent: Toward a Socio-​Anthropological Approach of Sexuality], in Les soins obligés ou l’utopie de la triple entente:  Actes du XXXIIIe congrès de criminologie [Obligatory Treatment, or the Utopia of a Threefold Meaning: Proceedings from the 23rd Conference in Criminology Studies], ed. Pierre-​Victor Tournier (Paris: Dalloz, 2002), 29–​55. 10 On this topic, I am reminded of a complicated case that has recently shaken France, showcasing a number of women claiming to have been raped and violently assaulted in an embittered lawsuit against

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Anne-Emmanuelle Berger a powerful and glamourous Muslim theologian, Tarik Ramadan. In this case, the women accusers admitted to being genuinely seduced by their rapist, a seduction arising in part from his status as a charismatic predicator and their faith in “him” as Muslim women. Here, the structure I have just described is in some way reversed: the women wanted “him,” but they refused the violent and humiliating acts he subjected them to: they “wanted” the man (or what he stood for in their own eyes), but did not consent to his acts. 11 See Eric Fassin, “Au-​delà du consentement: Pour une politique féministe de la séduction” [Beyond Consent: Toward a Feminist Politics of Seduction], in “Consentement sexuel” [Sexual Consent], special issue, Raisons Politiques 2, no. 46 (2012), 47–​66. 12 “Le féminisme à la française […] veut les droits égaux des sexes et les plaisirs asymétriques de la séduction, le respect absolu du consentement et la surprise délicieuse des baisers volés”. See Irène Théry, “Un féminisme à la française” [Feminism in the French Way], Le Monde, 28 May 2011, www. lemonde.fr/​idees/​article/​2011/​05/​28/​un-​feminisme-​a-​la-​francaise_​1528802_​3232.html. There is much to say about this statement, which imprudently claims to represent “French” feminism as a whole, and which nationalises, as it were, the question of seduction in problematic ways. The model of seduction invoked, moreover, is a classist one, harking back, as the high language used by Théry suggests, to court society manners and their ideological hold on the French cultural imaginary. 13 I distinguish here the phenomenological meaning of the word “object” in the subject–​object dyad from the ideological (and relevant in many cases) notion of “objectification”, which implies the enforcement and fixity of the (passive) role assigned to whoever is thus “objectified”.

Bibliography Berger, Anne-Emmanuelle. “Le Dire” [To Say It]. In Tout dire? Transparence ou secret [Saying Everything? Exposure or Secrecy], edited by René Frydman and Muriel Flis-​Treves, 87–​106. Paris: PUF, 2011. Fassin, Eric. “Au-​ delà du consentement:  Pour une politique féministe de la séduction” [Beyond Consent:  Toward a Feminist Politics of Seduction]. In “Consentement sexuel [Sexual Consent]”. Special issue, Raisons Politiques 2, no. 46 (2012), 47–​66. Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism”. In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XXI, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works (1927–​1931), edited by James Strachey, 149–​157. London: Hogarth, 1961. Iacub, Marcella. Belle et Bête [Beauty and Beast]. Paris: Stock, 2013. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema”. In Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Edited by Patricia Erens, 57–​68. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Théry, Irène. “Les trois révolutions du consentement:  pour une approche socio-​anthropologique de la sexualité” [The Three Revolutions of Consent:  Toward a Socio-​Anthropological Approach of Sexuality]. In Les soins obligés ou l’utopie de la triple entente:  Actes du XXXIIIe congrès de criminology [Obligatory Treatment, or the Utopia of a Threefold Meaning: Proceedings from the 23rd Conference in Criminology Studies], edited by Pierre-​Victor Tournier, 29–​55. Paris, Dalloz, 2002. Théry, Irène. “Un féminisme à la française [Feminism in the French Way]”. Le Monde, 28 May 2011. www.lemonde.fr/​idees/​article/​2011/​05/​28/​un-​feminisme-​a-​la-​francaise_​1528802_​3232.html. Worms, Frédéric. “Harcèlement sexuel: après la sidération, le temps du trouble, source de clarté [Sexual Harassment:  After the Shock, the Time of Trouble as a Source of Enlightenment]”. Libération, 23 November 2017. www.liberation.fr/​debats/​2017/​11/​23/​harcelement-​sexuel-​apres-​la-​sideration-​le-​ temps-​du-​trouble-​source-​de-​clarte_​1612061.

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5 #METOO AS A VARIEGATED PHENOMENON AGAINST MEN’S VIOLENCES AND VIOLATIONS Implications for men and masculinities Jeff Hearn

In October 2017, following increasing public allegations, the US actor, activist, producer and singer, Alyssa Milano, initiated a new viral #MeToo campaign. In this, she aimed to gather support for women who had experienced violence and abuse, show solidarity with those who come forward and those who, for various reasons, do not feel able to do so, and highlight the extent of violence and abuse. Such personal  —​sometimes collective  —​testimonies are an established method in feminist and other consciousness-​raising movements, but now these are not only local and face-​to-​face, as in, say, CR groups, but speak across borders worldwide. Thus, #MeToo is all about women speaking out.1 At the same time, #MeToo has also become and is a long-​term, complex, expanding, transnational, and variegated phenomenon, metaphorically marked by different hues, that stems from men’s violences, abuse, and broader violations. To speak of variegation in this way is to seek to address the dynamic picture across political and spatial shifts, movements and interpretations than talking only of diversity or multiplicity. In this chapter, I focus on two main issues: first, what appears distinctive, and in some ways new, about #MeToo, by way of the metaphor of variegation; and, second, the implications of such variegation for critical analysis, politics, policy, and practice of men and masculinities. Before going further, there are two clarifications that I should make. First, in using the term, “men’s violences and violations”, in the title, I seek to recognise the wide range of different kinds of violence, abuse, and broader violation enacted by men, and the dangers of conflating their various forms and impacts with each other.2 Second, in speaking of “men” I refer to men as a social category, in terms of those who define themselves and are defined by others as such, not as a bio-​essentialised ontology. The social category of men is formed within gender hegemony, in concrete everyday life and institutional practices, in interplay with other social categories such as class, ethnicity, sexuality, within which men act, agentically, both individually and as collectivities. To analyse and engage politically with this means both naming the social category of men, as a social reality, and deconstructing that category, making the Ones the Others.3 65

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The variegated phenomenon of #MeToo In this section, I  outline five distinctive variegated features of the #MeToo phenomenon: cyberpolitics, online/​offline; celebrities and the significance of workplaces; the relations of individuals and collectivities; memory, forgetting and surprise; and shifts across sexual harassment, sexual violence, violences.

Cyberpolitics, online/​offline #MeToo is an example of contemporary cyberpolitics of sexuality and violence, made and facilitated through internet and other socio-​technological social relations and affordances. It parallels and builds on many interactive projects in many parts of the world, such as the UK “Everyday Sexism” operative since 20124 or the Swedish #prataomdet (#talkaboutit). The latter followed on from sexual allegations against Julian Assange and led onto vivid discussions of policy and practice on sexual consent.5 A significant aspect of such virtual politics is that they often seem to have both a (younger) generational profile as well as working across generations. #MeToo makes uses of the characteristic features and affordances of ICTs, including: time/​space compression of distance and physical separation, instantaneousness in real time, asynchronicity, reproducibility of images, creation of virtual bodies, blurring of the “real” and the “representational”, and “online/​offline”; wireless portability; globalised connectivity; and personalisation.6 Specifically, it is an example of what has been called crowd-​enabled connective action,7 whereby, arguably, the message is also the medium. Most importantly, the very technologies that may be used to harass, bully, and violate, to undermine gender/​sexual citizenship through a variety of internet-​based abuses, including sexual violences, cyberstalking, upskirting, and much more, can now also be used to enhance that citizenship.8 The wider, in some ways, contradictory context of cyberpolitics is one way of framing #MeToo. There is now a significant amount of research and informed (online) commentary on whether and how tweeting and online campaigns more generally bring social change. Such interventions appear to have been influential, at least at the margins, in some high-​profile national elections and referenda, and also in some single-​issue campaigns, such as around specific law reform and collective consumer actions. Having said that, this is not to isolate the online and the offline from each other. Indeed, it is often difficult, or even impossible, to distinguish clearly between online and offline politics and movements, as there is such significant blurring or convergence across the online–​offline boundary, through mobile phone culture and ICTs more generally.9 This position is, however, not so straightforward when it comes to how progressive political actors and movements relate to, and indeed at times experience, the matter of direct physical violence, its threat, and less directly physical forms of violation. Cyberpolitics can be a means to rapid, if uneven, transnational spreading of ideas, information, and interventions. With #MeToo, this has been amply illustrated. On Facebook, the hashtag was reported as used by more than 4.7 million people in 12 million posts during the first 24 hours.10 Joan Williams and colleagues report: Almost immediately, the percentage of Americans who believe that sexual harassment is a serious problem shot up to 64%.11 By late 2017, roughly 75% of Americans believed that sexual harassment and assault were “very important” issues for the country.12 That is a norm cascade.13 66

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A year later, by October 2018, “Pew Research Center found that the #MeToo hashtag was used more than 19 million times on Twitter since Milano’s initial tweet.”14 The initial launch of #MeToo spawned a whole range of other campaigns, and also policy initiatives, and strong examples of immediate collective awareness and action. In Sweden, where the movement grew rapidly, with 70,000 women signing by late November 2017, there is talk of a “social revolution”.15 In neighbouring Finland, the movement caught on more slowly, with initial significant responses in schools, the military, and the arts, but since having effects across society and generations. To use some immediate local examples: two universities where I work —​Örebro University, Sweden, and Hanken School of Economics, Finland —​quickly produced new, if very different, policy statements. The first used what was, to my mind, the rather strange and elusive frame being against “power language” within a long, convoluted statement from management, while the latter simply highlighted on 1 December 2017 zero tolerance with the public headline: “Hanken Has Zero Tolerance Policy Against Harassments”, with the clarification The social media campaigns #metoo and #dammenbrister [have] gained a lot of attention both in Finland and internationally. The aim with the campaigns is to draw attention to the problems with widespread sexual harassments. Hanken wants to ensure that the School is a safe place for both students and staff. There is a “zero tolerance” policy against harassments in all of Hanken. If a student or an employee experiences any kind of harassments at Hanken it is important to report it, followed by specified contact points for consultation and action.16

Celebrities and the significance of workplaces #MeToo seems, initially at least, to have been driven by reactions and responses to high profile individual cases of what has often been characterised as sexual harassment, confirmed or alleged, by specific individual men in the public eye. In particular, it appears to have been prompted by revelations about and against men celebrities, made sometimes by women celebrities, sometimes by less well-​known women. Thus, the hashtag can partly be seen as an offshoot of media and popular interest in, and perhaps antagonism to, celebrity culture, even whilst the initial focus on revelations of sexual harassment and assault from the “entertainment” industry has broadened to other male-​dominated sectors, notably politics and certain professions, but also, much more widely, across local and societal spaces, between countries and importantly in transnational cyberspace. Perhaps significantly, from the very beginning #MeToo became almost synonymous with Harvey Weinstein, the allegations against him, and in due course, the court case and his conviction and punishment were clear landmarks. This intensification also followed on from the emergence of his hypocrisy after his previous conspicuous public support for various progressive causes. #MeToo took off fast and with much wider impact than there was following the cases of, for example, Bill Cosby or the late Jimmy Savile (so vile), white British disc jockey and television personality. Cosby was represented on the Cosby Show and other television programmes as an advocate of family-​oriented humour, and a genial role model of middle-​class, fatherly masculinity, within a financially secure, Black, middle-​class, family, not least through the transfer of persona from television idol to assumed “real life”. In September 2018, he was convicted on three counts of aggravated indecent assault and sentenced to three to ten years in prison. Savile pursued 67

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multiple television activities and combined this with both a determinedly eccentric public persona, in both dress and behaviour, that seemed to facilitate bodily intrusions on others, especially women and even more so children, and a very high-​profile commitment to charitable causes, especially around work with children in hospitals. In all three cases, albeit in apparently very different ways, these three men cultivated a very positive image of “goodness” and “progressivism”, whilst apparently doing the obverse. The initial impulse of #MeToo can thus be seen, in part or as part of, an accumulation of reaction against celebrity cases. Seen in the UK context, it seems in some ways a follow-​up to earlier major allegations against a plethora of “show business” (a term now with new meanings) sexual abuse cases of children, young people and women by leading British men made public over recent years. Seen in the US context, it might have been, in part, a delayed, cumulative reaction to and anger against Trump’s blatant boasting of “grabbing pussy”, and for the accumulating (connective?) energy of Trump’s accusers, as well as the contradictory appeal of and repulsion against his televisual sadism, as exemplified in The Apprentice. Many of the initial reports in the #MeToo movement were derived from male-​dominated industries, with the focus on male actors, directors, producers, parliamentarians, lawyers, journalists, academics, technologists, and the like. More privileged, gendered, class, status, high visibility, and occupational sectors figured strongly. Studies of women entering male-​dominated sectors have long reported more harassment, perhaps part of the policing of occupational boundaries by men, whilst women in more stereotypical female jobs have sometimes under-​ reported, perhaps because of different gendered-​sexual expectations in such jobs.17 However, the #MeToo movement spread much more widely to non-​white collar and working-​class sectors such as the construction industry, and to arenas where women were numerically well-​ represented. More directly, gender-​sexual power, sexual harassment and other sexual violences and violations have long and often gone together.18 In the case of the UK Parliament: Young staff members who surround British lawmakers have no independent personnel body to appeal to if they have complaints. Instead, they are told to inform party whips, in-​house disciplinarians who were widely believed to stockpile compromising information for their own purposes.19 A key aspect in some workplace contexts has concerned protection given to certain high status, high performing employees, even if the benefit to an employer of retaining a very productive but “toxic” employee, such as a sexual harasser, may be far outweighed by the cost of keeping them.20 Indeed, such employees tend to drive out other employees, whilst being seen as minor local organisational “celebrities”. However, with new technologies, gig employment, neoliberal individualisation of value, and what might be called the “superstar economy” (in the local sense), whereby the successful can leverage much more, may mean: [T]‌he rest of the economy is becoming more like Hollywood, where a small group of stars have long reaped a huge portion of the rewards. That means more bosses and boards may soon face decisions about whether to stand up to harassers or to overlook their behavior.21 More broadly, some differences can be noted in the processes that may take place in and around #MeToo between celebrities (whether local, national or international) and non-​celebrities, which includes the great majority of us. For a start, allegations against celebrities are higher profile, attract (often prurient) interest from the wider local, national or international community 68

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or readership, may bring high risks for the alleger (as with whistleblowing), with possible retaliations and unforeseen consequences, even if those accused are punished in some way. Allegations against “non-​celebrities” are less noticed or may be hardly noticed, even where they have huge implications and effects for the immediate parties. Some cautious comparison can be made here with differential processes for celebrities and non-​celebrities who become targets of internet-​based sexual abuse, popularly called “revenge porn”, where the internet is used for opposite or inverse purposes.22 High profile cases of revenge porn directed against, for example, Jennifer Lawrence and the Duchess of Cambridge, have figured strongly in the mass media, and some “non-​celebrities” have been forced into public view, occasionally embracing that position to campaign against online and other abuses, for example, the Lebanese US American, Mia Khalifa. Her former work career in the pornography industry was short-​lived, with her most famous scene showing her performing sex acts whilst wearing a hijab. After leaving the industry, images of her became and remain widely circulated. She subsequently campaigned against their use and against pornography more generally.23 This process attracted condemnation, especially from women, and titillation, especially for some men, transnationally, in both Islamic and non-​Islamic regions. Meanwhile, there are millions subjected to online abuse that remain nameless. Change in harassment, violence and abuse in organisations and workplaces depends on fundamental change in hierarchical, gendered, aged, classed, ethnicised, and racialised workplaces.

The relations of individuals and collectivities There are a number of individualisms in play in the expansion of #MeToo, against celebrities, in allegations, responses, reactions, and experiences in the listing of individual incidents. By and large, it is individuals, rather than groups, collectives or organisations, who, at least initially, have tweeted, or have been or are, active in some other way online, whether regarding their own experience of violence, abuse or violation, supporting those who have had similar experiences. This is exemplified in the “me” of “metoo”. The highlighting of the “me” can be interpreted in many different ways, ranging from embodied claiming and the claiming of bodily integrity, through to the personal as political, onto resonances with neoliberal individualism. It may be seen as paralleling the current “I AM” campaign against modern slavery24 or going further back to the “I am a man” campaigns of the Black men sanitary workers in Memphis, 1968.25 This is speaking the I through pain. The status of the “me” and the “I” can be various, contradictory, and indeed strongly gendered, especially within neoliberal culture and economy, as speaking (feminist) truth to power, taking/​owning personal responsibility, reduction to (male) ego or the avoidance of all or any of these. At the same time, the “too” of “metoo” suggests, or simply states, there are (many) others to be allied with. In this way, it links (the) one and the other(s), perhaps structure and agency. The “too” of “metoo” may also link the mostly unknown, perhaps anonymous, individual harassed or assaulted women with celebrities or proto-​celebrities. In keeping with reality shows and the rest, this may be understood as a democratisation, a solidarisation, of (unwanted) fame. While the “me” or the “I” is asserted, it is also, partially, transcended, anonymised in numbers, in solidarity, a form of optimistic, collective, democratisation.

Memory, forgetting, and surprise #MeToo has been associated, especially from beyond the movement, with some loss of memory and some element of surprise that “these things” still happen, in the film industry, theatre, 69

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media, law, even universities —​as if surely there are policies to deal this with kind of thing! Such expressions of surprise are especially interesting in societies with a relatively strong tradition of gender equality policies —​for example, the Nordic countries. However, such countries do not necessarily have a long tradition of well-​developed policies and practices to respond to and prevent sexual harassment. The recent discussions and disclosures on sexual harassment in the film industry and other arenas seem to have surprised some people, even with some claims in the media that there is little research on this. People should not be so surprised. There is a whole genre, or genres, of books on the “Casting Couch”, some fictional, some factional, some factual.26 More generally, sexual harassment is far from new; it is just that it was not always called that. There are many examples chronicled from the nineteenth century.27 Mary Bulzarik has shown how victims of sexual harassment during that time were in all occupational areas: … railway cashiers, union organizers, garment workers, whitegoods workers, home workers, doctors, dressmakers, shopgirls, laundry workers, models, office workers, cotton mill workers, cannery workers … broom factory workers, assistant foremen [sic], stenographers and typists, soap factory workers, hop-​pickers, shoe shine girls, barmaids, legal secretaries, actresses, sales demonstrators, art students, and would-​be workers at employment interviews.28 Such sexual harassment often went uncategorised and unpunished. A case of interest from 1891 to 1892 in Nelson, Lancashire, UK, concerned a mill overlooker, Houghton Greenwood, who was found guilty by an external enquiry of three clergymen of “making immoral proposals to a married woman”, and “using indecent language to other females”. Moreover, their report stated “the offences of which we have been compelled to adjudge Houghton Greenwood guilty, are not uncommon among men who have the oversight of the female operatives in other mills”.29 Whether he subsequently lost his job is not clear. This kind of framing contrasts with the nineteenth-​century legal categorisation of what would now be called sexual harassment as “outraging the modesty of women”. More to the contemporary point, research and policy on sexual harassment have become well, if unevenly, developed, since its explicit naming and categorisation as such in the 1970s. For example, over 30  years ago in 1987, the Finnish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs published a survey and bibliography detailing 341 publications and no less than ten bibliographies on sexual harassment.30 The same year, Wendy Parkin and I published ‘Sex’ at ‘Work’,31 and Liz Stanley and Sue Wise published Georgie Porgie: Sexual Harassment in Everyday Life, in which they argued against the “percentage of women who have experienced sexual harassment” approach, as all women have experienced it.32 A few years ago saw the “discovery” in Finland that sexual harassment actually occurs in the national parliament.33 Even though there had just been major harassment scandals earlier, for example, concerning the former parliamentary Speaker, Matti Ahde,34 this seemed to take much mainstream media by surprise. What is it that keeps it being rediscovered? Why is it surprising? Do people have bad memories? Is it a generational quirk that the older do not tell the younger? Or is it that the younger assume that the problem has been resolved until they experience it, and then maybe think it a “one-​off” individual problem? So, how can loss of (individual and collective) memory be overcome? To deal with these questions and articulate credible responses often requires much reframing. Long-​term political vigilance and institutional transformation are necessary; otherwise, there may well be more, repeated “surprise” rediscoveries and campaigns followed by gender business as usual. 70

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Shifts across sexual harassment, sexual violence, violences More critically, the movement has often been framed, especially from the outside and in public media, more in terms of sexual harassment, and much less in terms of the wider questions of sexual violence, sexual assault, rape and gender/​sexual domination, exploitation and oppression, or indeed further harassments by, for example, age, disability, and racialisation. Having said that, these further violences are recognised in some commentaries. For example, the Facebook group #allavi (#allofus), started by the Swedish parliamentarian Maria Robsham, soon gained over 30,000 members, with women posting their experiences under the explicit naming of sexual violence (sexualiserat våld), that is, not only sexual harassment,35 in keeping with the continuum of sexual violence. Many commentaries outside the movement focus on sexual harassment, yet #MeToo is much wider than that, and perhaps especially so when broadened from workplaces to all aspects of life including established personal, friendship, and sexual relationships. This moves the debate from being primarily about workplace harassment towards questions of, for example, coercive control,36 pressurised sex, coercive sex, and violences and abuse.37 Indeed, “distinctions between assaults later defined as rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, flashing, coercive sex, pressurised sex, incestuous abuse may slide into one another, and may be subject to differential experience, interpretation, and redefinition over time”.38 #MeToo brings women together across various kinds of borders —​national, class, or ethnic; women come to know of other women elsewhere with similar experiences of violation. What is less clear-​cut is how and whether such online movements necessarily change persistent gendered social structures. To cite a parallel: there can be online campaigns against poverty that bring progress, but inequality continues to grow globally and intra-​societally, if not necessarily inter-​ societally. Whether #MeToo leads to lasting collective action and solidarity and fundamental change in gender/​sexual power relations can only be answered in due course. It is possible that #MeToo and similar connective political activities raise women’s voices, consciousness, and solidarity, in the short term, leading, or not, to policy change, but that these are not enforced by what has been called feminist implementation,39 so that structural, unequal, gender power relations of gendered violence do not change so much. It is unlikely sexual violence will decrease significantly if societies and institutions remain fundamentally and structurally gender unequal. This perspective concerns how wider social change in one societal domain, namely violence, intersects with another domain, polity, as its context, as well as with economy and civil society.40 Seen thus, there would be hope for structural change since social revolutions may occur in multiple domains simultaneously, if unevenly, with potential to disrupt the hegemony of the gender regime increasing with changes in each domain. This directs attention to the complex form and structure of (gendered) violence regimes,41 including anti-​violence structures, as well as possible paradoxes between relatively high levels of gender equality on some measures remaining accompanied by relatively high levels of reported sexual violence.42 Indeed, #MeToo and the responses to it can be conceptualised as part of broader violence regimes and their change over time. This includes how violence is seen, framed, reacted to, and voiced,43 and linked to anti-​violence politics, policy and practice, which together make the conditions of gender-​sexual relations. Seen thus, #MeToo is about much more than the reporting of the specific experiences of women, as it is a key aspect of intersectional gender relations more generally. Framing #MeToo in terms of violence, specifically gender-​based violence, shifts understanding from framing it only or primarily in terms of sexual harassment, with the possibility, then, of some commentators also framing it explicitly or implicitly in part in relation to sexuality. 71

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The latter possibility of framing #MeToo in terms of sexuality raises some complex issues. On one hand, it might be seen as playing down the overriding issues of violences, abuse, and violations, as just noted; on the other, this perspective might suggest seeing #MeToo as part of historical shifts in social-​sexual relations, and what might be called (trans)societal sexual regimes. #MeToo both speaks out against sexual violence, abuse, and violation, and also contributes to problematising certain kinds of taken-​for-​g ranted (hetero)sexuality and patriarchal (hetero)sexual relations. Such questions also figure in, for example, different ways in which media report #MeToo in terms of what may be implicit assumptions of, for example, uncontrolled or uncontrollable male sexualities. Sexuality may be highlighted more explicitly on at least media agendas when speaking out in #MeToo mode moves onto same-​sex sexual harassment and sexual assault, as in some high-​profile cases, most notably that of the US actor, Kevin Spacey.

Implications of #MeToo for men and masculinities… The long-​term, variegated nature of #MeToo acts as a context for the more specific consideration of the positionings of men, with numerous implications for men as perpetrators, observers, commentators, and activists, and the critical analysis thereof. Here I focus on two main aspects  —​absence–​presence and causes–​positionings–​responses  —​before some concluding comments on changing men and masculinities.

Absence–​presence #MeToo is, in relation to men, an example of absent presence. It is clearly primarily about women’s speaking out against violence, sexual violence, and gender-​based violence, even whilst it has led onto similar initiatives in relation to same-​sex violence and abuse, and violence and abuse to LGBT*IQ+ people. So, how does this relate to what men have done, and are doing and experiencing? Men are an absence presence from #MeToo; generally absent from the speaking out, but all too present, in statements, allusions and effects. Men are the absent cause of #MeToo, who then become the object of talk, writing, allegation, accusation, and action:  #MeToo stems from men’s violences and abuse, from a collection of absent-​present superordinates.44 While #MeToo has successfully expanded, as well as bringing criticism for the onus being on women, and the shortcomings of one size fitting all,45 it still comes down, in short, to changing men and stopping men’s violences, abuse, and violations more generally. Men need to stop, change, and not get away with it. This problematic has raised some spinoff questions, that have at times become controversial amongst women and further genders, in terms of, first, to what extent women should bother with this question of men in relation to #MeToo or at all, and, second, what men should do about this. The Canadian activist and journalist, Meghan Murphy, wrote as early as October 2017: It might seem the worst time to ask the question that has become a joke in and of itself  —​ What about the men? … Who are the people who have caused legions of #MeToos to take over my Facebook feed? And what do we want from them? If anything? She continued to state she wanted not only men’s apology, better late than never, but also support for the work women are doing against violence, donations to women’s shelters, 72

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participation at anti-​prostitution rallies, fundraising, cooking and cleaning at feminist events, support for feminist media, a stop to watching pornography, and stepping in when woman are harassed or intimidated. While #MeToo is clearly for women, she concluded that she wanted something from men: to be accountable and to hold other men accountable, because #MeToo is also about men too.46 This led on to a very active set of reactions from women, articulating different positions of the questions raised of what, if anything, to do with or deal with men in the general or the specifics. So how to locate absent–​present superordinates?

Causes–​positionings–​responses Men are the cause of #MeToo, but also figure in a wide variety of ways in relation to the phenomenon and the movement. There is not space to present more than a brief overview of men’s relations to violences, abuse and violations, but some general comments may help to set the scene. •

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Men are members of a social category invested with relative power, including, in some contexts, power as violence, if only by association. Violence can be an accepted, if not always acceptable, way of being a man, and a reference point for being boys and men. Men enact most violence, especially planned, repeated, heavy, physically damaging, non-​ defensive, premeditated, non-​ retaliatory, sexual, forms of interpersonal violence, along with most economic, collective, institutional, organised, public, communal, gang, military, and paramilitary violence, which are themselves often interpersonal. Some men, or specific groupings of men, are expert specialists in violence to women, children, each other, animals, selves; such violences may reinforce each other. Men’s violences are done to those other than men, and by men to men, between men. Men, especially subordinated groupings of men, by, for example, class or race, may be expendable, sometimes in large numbers, whilst maintaining other men’s domination. Men’s violences can be a means to an end, enforcing and solidifying established power and control, maintaining patriarchal domination or routinely reaffirming power in intimate relationships; and can also be a reaction to loss of or perceived loss of or threat to power, or a way of resisting others’ power, whether subordinate or superordinate. In terms of identity, men’s violences can be a source of pride, be shameful, and/​or be ambiguous; constructions of men, masculinity, and violence may thus be quite contradictory.47

#MeToo results from various aspects of men’s perpetration and relation to violences, abuse, and violations. Men are located with different positionings on #MeToo, within the general context of societal, gendered, intersectional (and violent) relations, and violence regimes: doing, witnessing, supporting, opposing violence, and women’s speaking out on violence. This includes how men figure in:  what went before, the doing of violence, being the object of allegation and accusation, their own immediate and subsequent reaction to being accused, and wider responses, both to specific allegations and the movement generally, along with the emotions involved.48 These actions and positionings operate offline, online, and offline/​online. #MeToo is partly constructed around framing and sometimes reframing what has happened in the past, around specific events. But it is still instructive to ask: what went before? I certainly do not mean this in terms of “what provoked men’s actions?” but rather how unacceptable, violating actions came to be normalised before the remembered events and specific actions concerned were done. The point here is that many violations and potential violations build on earlier collusive actions between men, and indeed between boys and between young men. So, 73

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what happened arises not just from that moment in time and place, but from actions out of sight of women and girls. What may be experienced as a specific incident or a series of incidents or a lifetime series of events are the result of an accumulation of structural advantages of and “cultural” collusions between men, and not only in the immediate bodily enactments with women and girls. Some of this perspective fits with that which emphasises the importance of homosocial peer relations between men in explaining men’s violence to women.49 These background invisibilities construct what happened, and to what extent they are performed with or without consciousness of violence. Even without leaning on a socialisation perspective on the accumulation of violations, there may well be “open secrets” that certain men are serial predators, as was, and is now, clear with Weinstein. Next, there is the doing of the violence, abuse, and violation in all their very many forms and varieties, the violating events later recalled and written about by women. Their form, specifics, harm, and impact are given meaning, in part, by the context in which they take place. For example, are they done in a long-​established or trusting relationship, are they done one-​on-​one or along with or by a group of men? Doing the violence, abuse, and violation can refer to a particular action or set of actions or an accumulation of many actions over a longer period of time by the same perpetrator, or various violences perpetrated by different men:  these are what are recalled and written on by the women. Thus, related questions, in relation to men, are: how are the men concerned framed, and how do they frame their own actions? How conscious are or were they of their actions as violating, how normalised? My own and collaborative research suggests a high level of intentionality to harm with direct physical violence against women and some forms of online sexual abuse.50 However, intention to harm in some situations that may certainly be experienced as violation may for various reasons —​some more understandable, some not —​be less clear or more ambiguous. For example, some forms of hugging and cheek kissing have different meanings depending on context, and may (or may not) be experienced as violation, especially when repeated, depending on that context. Following this, there is the position of other men at the time of the violence, abuse and violation, and what happened in the immediate aftermath, and before recording within #MeToo. As with what happens before violation, there is the question of the extent to which friends and family, and especially male friend and family members, are direct or indirect supporters at the time or shortly after the violence. Are there more open secrets, more collusions, simply more silences, at this point? There may also be more ambiguous responses, that combine condemnation of violence, yet implicit or explicit support for the perpetrator, within a broader nexus of men’s homosocial support for men.51 Men’s own “other” problems, such as depression, health, employment, marital, alcohol, may be foregrounded over the violence itself. To some extent, this is a gendered commentary on the extensive, but often not so gendered, research on the witnessing of violence, and the associated bystander effect: “in which witnesses fail to intervene in emergency situations, often because they assume someone else will take action”.52 Moreover, the desire of harassers or violators, mainly if not only men, and their allies and passive bystanders, to obscure and cover up may be inspired by simple power, shame or taken-​ for-​g rantedness. At the same time, this may be accompanied by the pressure on the violated, mainly women, and sometimes constrained decision-​making, not to disclose violation. Is disclosing too risky or not worth mentioning? Fourth, what happened afterwards, specifically with the writings of #MeToo. Allegations and accusations are made, perhaps for first time or not? Understandings of violations may change over time and vary by place, for at least some people.53 The connectivity of reading others’ writing may facilitate reframing reports made in relation to men’s earlier actions —​but also, in another sense, with a separation from men, not to be constructed by men and men’s actions. 74

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Women likely do not want to make statements only or simply as a reaction or response to men. This is something difficult for some men to bear. As elsewhere, there is (almost) always a gap between feminism and men.54 For men, or some men, the effects of accusation via #MeToo may be dramatic and immediate. Foteini Kreatsoula suggests: Perpetrators faced the consequences of their behavior, by being fired, suspended or forced to resign in various fields. Movie stars stepped out of the flattering studio light, to reveal details about their experience and risked losing their careers in front of the whole world, encouraging regular people to expose and be exposed, to share uncomfortable truths and face the stigma that always accompanies them, by challenging the norms of dealing with sexual harassment and abuse.55 While this may be a somewhat positive overstatement for many, in terms of effects, it does capture the high intensity of the situation, for some. For others, nothing or very little may happen, depending on the severity of the claim, whether anonymised or not, and the specific work, community and social power and power networks that the man concerned inhabits, that in some cases may make them less vulnerable or invulnerable. One aspect of the aftermath is that the men mentioned, either by name or simply without name, may well not know of these statements by women  —​in distinction from when statements which are made public. At times, women’s own statements may be anonymised, but may remain fairly easy to identify. Sometimes, the women may make statements publicly, but in an anonymised way regarding the alleged violator. So, one question is: do the men not know about what women say and write? Some men do not know, perhaps will never know. Another is: does that matter? And with what effects and what responses following? So, some men may be openly accused and may be contrite, apologise, and try to change their behaviour, perhaps accepting, perhaps with the time lag, a reinterpretation of events, as an earlier normalisation of, for example, power abuse, sexual harassment, pressurised sex, sexual assault, or rape. When abuse is pointed out to men, some may consider themselves unfairly accused, simply deny or react not by asking how that could be, but by becoming victim, even fighting back, exerting revenge. Some may now fear more, with or without “good reason”, being accused or falsely accused. Women’s speaking out may be followed by obstruction and abuse. The aftermath, even the cover-​up, can be even more traumatic than the initial event. The targeting of women victim/​survivors, and sometimes men, may occur twice (or thrice) over, in the event and the cover-​up (as well as, sometimes, in legal proceedings). Finally, there is the question of what happens more broadly, not in relation to specific accusations. As before, other men may be supporters or not. There are plenty of examples of men defending men in general, even as victims. In the wider picture #MeToo brings out broader antagonisms not only between women and men, but also between men and different political positionings of men. As such, men can also position themselves/​ourselves for and against #MeToo as a generic phenomenon, regardless of the justice of individual claims or accusations. Anti-​#MeToo-​type statements from men abound on the manosphere, whether individual, homosocial or collective, overlapping with various anti-​feminist movements and communities, such as incels.56 More positively, some groups and alliances of men moved quickly to advocate for #MeToo, as part of a broadly (pro)feminist politics.57 Yet, caution needs to be exercised against the temptation of more progressive men to distance themselves from men perpetrators, sometimes as if there are two kinds of men: the “good men” and the “perpetrators” or the Ones and the Others. On the other hand, there are some 75

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men who routinely live my violence, and many who do not, so, at the same time, differentiation is accurate. Thus, engaging with the dangers of, on the hand, dissociation from men’s violence, and, on the other, homogenisation, and perhaps essentialisation, of men in relation to violence is a necessary task. Negotiating the tensions between these poles, and acting on them positively, are part of (pro)feminism. For men doing anti-​violence work, there are a series of challenges in addressing possible dissociation and distancing from, first, “other men”, second, men’s violence, and, third, patriarchy more broadly.58 These questions of differential relations to violence mirror debates on how political and policy work on anti-​violence intervention also needs to be directed to non-​violent men, not only men using violence.59 To put this another way, men’s violence is partly maintained by the silence of non-​violent men.

Concluding comments: Change/​ing men and masculinities Even if it is not the motivating force behind #MeToo, one clear political interest of the movement is to change men and masculinities  —​drastically. This applies whether confronting the matter of simple misogyny, “extreme version of masculinity”,60 different gendered (re) interpretations and re-​evaluations of what was done, or even ambiguities in certain intimate or social-​sexual relations, later recast by one or more of the parties. Such variegations may also apply across generations —​that is, without reifying generations. Boys and younger men are growing up with #MeToo —​and also #GirlsToo —​unlike older generations. In March 2018, the UK Guardian newspaper began the advice series “Dating After #MeToo:  Welcome to Our Newest Advice Column”, which ran at least until mid-​May that year.61 Both #MeToo and greater pornographisation of public/​cyberspace are part of normal life for many, especially younger generations, along with the blurring of offline/​online. Different generations are likely to be more or less familiar with these contradictions and the negotiations with them. Many younger people may be more “savvy” than others when living daily in this environment. Dealing with the combination of wall-​to-​wall social media, internet-​based abuse, widespread (wanted or unwanted) sexting, and sometimes ambiguous “hanging out” and “dating” can be very demanding for many, especially girls, young women and LGBT*IQ+ people, and lead to major suffering for some.62 Addressing such circumstances calls for creative interventions.63 But changing men and masculinities more broadly is very far from straightforward or linear, whether inspired by #MeToo or wider forces still. Changing men and masculinities does indeed demand drastic action not only by women, but also by men and boys, across all generations, across intersectionalities, individually, collectively, in private, in public, online, offline, and crucially across those binaries, and increasingly not only locally and societally, but also transsocietally, transnationally. Such action is needed against sexual harassment, violences and abuse to women, and to LGBT*IQ+ people, children and young people, and other men, along with intersectional, anti-​ageist, anti-​classist, anti-​(dis)ablist, and anti-​racist action. Key collective actors in changing men and masculinities, but not necessarily composed only of men include: MenEngage, a global alliance of many organisations and networks across several world-​regions, Promundo, a Brazilian-​originated non-​governmental organisation, now also based in the United States, working transnationally to engage men and boys in efforts towards gender equality and against sexual and gender-​based violence, the South African-​born NGO Sonke Gender Justice that works with men and boys across countries, the originally Canadian White Ribbon Campaign formed after the 1989  “École Polytechnique (or Montréal) massacre”, and Men’s Action to Stop Violence Against Women. These organised initiatives still leave very much to be done in stopping violence across the whole range of social spheres and institutions in economy, polity, and civil society. 76

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Finally, furthering the aims of #MeToo also demands action to change men and masculinities against war and armed conflict, and in post-​conflict times and places: matters that dominate in some parts of the world, often over a long time span.64 It is not that interpersonal violences and violations are in one place, and war and armed conflict are “somewhere else”, in some “other” place. Structural, collective and organised violences and violations also impact on interpersonal violences and violations, and are themselves often interpersonal. Moreover, post-​conflict times and places, and “return to peace”, can also often remain dangerous, especially for women and girls. Indeed, various links have been made between violence against women and armed conflict,65 control of women’s bodies, “honour cultures”, and interpersonal violence,66 and hate crimes and terrorism.67 Not surprisingly, women’s well-​being tends to link with societal peacefulness.68 Men and masculinities need to change for peace, gender equality; social equality and justice more generally. This is not possible with the presence and continuation of violence.69 Some men work long and actively for positive peace,70 personally and politically, in relation to (pro) feminism, gender equality, anti-​racism or social justice, however framed. Even with the mass of men’s violences and violations worldwide, men, masculinities, and violence are not equivalents; men and masculinities are not deterministically violent.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Liisa Husu, Sofia Strid and the editors for information and comments on earlier drafts.

Notes 1 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Unwin Hyman/​Routledge, 1990). 2 Issues of terminology and conceptualisation around the terms, the pluralising of “the violences of men”, and “violations”, are elaborated further elsewhere. Jeff Hearn, The Violences of Men (London:  Sage, 1998); Hearn and Wendy Parkin, Gender, Sexuality and Violence in Organizations: The Unspoken Forces of Organization Violations (London: Sage, 2001). 3 Jeff Hearn, “From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men”, Feminist Theory 5, no.  1 (2004):  49–​72; Hearn, Men of the World:  Genders, Globalizations, Transnational Times (London:  Sage, 2015); Nina Lykke, Feminist Studies:  A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing (New York: Routledge, 2010). 4 Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism (London: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 5 Sofia Strid, “#talkaboutit:  Talking About Consent and Coercion”, in Sylvia Walby et  al., Stopping Rape: Towards a Comprehensive Policy (Bristol: Policy Press, 2015). 6 Hearn and Parkin, Gender, Sexuality and Violence in Organizations; Brian Wellmann, “Physical Space and Cyberspace: The Rise of Personalized Networking”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25, no. 2 (2001): 227–​252; “Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net”, ed. Sas Mays and Nicholas Thoburn, New Formations 78 (2013). 7 W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action”, Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 739–​768. 8 Jeff Hearn, “The Implications of Information and Communication Technologies for Sexualities and Sexualised Violences:  Contradictions of Sexual Citizenships”, Political Geography 25, no.  8 (2006): 944–​963. 9 Chris Barker and Emma A. Jane, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 2016). 10 Cassandra Santiago and Doug Criss, “An Activist, a Little Girl and the Heartbreaking Origin of ‘Me Too’ ”, CNN, 17 October 2017, https://​edition.cnn.com/​2017/​10/​17/​us/​me-​too-​tarana-​burke-​ origin-​trnd/​index.html. 11 Gary Langer, “Unwanted Sexual Advances Not Just a Hollywood, Weinstein Story, Poll Finds”, ABC News, 17 October 2017, https://​abcnews.go.com/​ Politics/​unwanted-​sexual-​advances-​hollywood-​ weinstein-​story-​poll/​story?id= 50521721.

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Jeff Hearn 12 J. Baxter Oliphant, “Women and Men in Both Parties Say Sexual Harassment Allegations Reflect ‘Widespread Problems in Society’ ”, Pew Research Center, 7 December 2017, www.pewresearch.org/​ fact-​tank/​2017/​12/​07/​americans-​views-​of-​sexual-​harassment-​allegations. 13 Joan C. Williams et al., “What’s Reasonable Now? Sexual Harassment Law After the Norm Cascade”, Michigan State Law Review no. 1 (2019): 142. 14 Dalvin Brown, “19 Million Tweets Later: A Look at #MeToo a Year After the Hashtag Went Viral”, USA Today, 16 December 2019, https://​eu.usatoday.com/​story/​news/​2018/​10/​13/​metoo-​impact-​ hashtag-​made-​online/​1633570002. 15 Karin Eriksson and Sanna Torén Björling, “Därför blev Metoo-​uppropen så starka i Sverige” [Why the #MeToo Movement Was So Powerful in Sweden], Dagens Nyheter, 3 December 2017, www.dn.se/​ nyheter/​sverige/​darfor-​blev-​metoo-​uppropen-​sa-​starka-​i-​sverige. 16 “Hanken Has Zero Tolerance Policy Against Harassments”, Hanken School of Economics, 12 December 2017, www.hanken.fi/​en/​news/​hanken-​has-​zero-​tolerance-​policy-​against-​harassments. 17 E.g., Barbara Gutek and Bruce Morasch, “Sex Ratios, Sex-​Role Spillover, and Sexual Harassment of Women at Work”, Journal of Social Issues 38, no. 4 (1982): 55–​74; Leeds TUCRIC, Sexual Harassment of Women at Work (Leeds: Leeds TUCRIC, 1983). 18 Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin, ‘Sex’ at ‘Work’:  The Power and Paradox of Organization Sexuality (New York: St Martin’s, 1987/​1995). 19 Ellen Barry, “In U.K.’s Clubby Parliament, Abuse Complaints May Be Used as Weapons”, New York Times, 7 November 2017, www.nytimes.com/​2017/​11/​07/​world/​europe/​uk-​parliament-​misconduct. html. 20 Michael Housman and Dylan Minor, “Toxic Workers” (working paper no. 16–​057, Harvard Business School, November 2015). 21 Noam Scheiber, “In a Superstar Economy, a Bull Market in Superstar Harassers”, New York Times, 31 October 2017, www.nytimes.com/​2017/​10/​31/​business/​superstars-​sexual-​harassment.html. 22 Matthew Hall and Jeff Hearn, Revenge Pornography (London: Routledge, 2017). 23 “Mia Khalifa: Porn Contracts ‘Prey on Vulnerable Girls’ ”, BBC Newsbeat, 13 August 2019, www.bbc. com/​news/​newsbeat-​49330540. 24 I AM Campaign (website), accessed 9 June 2020, www.iamcampaign.com. 25 “I Am a Man:  Memphis Sanitation Strike 1968”, National Civil Rights Museum, www. civilrightsmuseum.org/​i-​am-​a-​man. 26 Ian Halperin, Hollywood Undercover: Revealing the Sordid Secrets of Tinseltown (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2008); Diana Beth Jaher, “ ‘Painting with Faces’:  The Casting Director in American Theatre, Cinema, and Television”, (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana, 2014); Ben Zimmer, “ ‘Casting Couch’: The Origins of a Pernicious Hollywood Cliché”, Atlantic, 17 October 2017, www.theatlantic. com/​entertainment/​archive/​2017/​10/​casting-​couch-​the-​origins-​of-​a-​pernicious-​hollywood-​cliche/​ 543000. 27 Catharine A. MacKinnon, The Sexual Harassment of Working Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Jan Lambertz, “Sexual Harassment in the Nineteenth Century English Cotton Industry”, History Workshop 19, Spring (1985): 29–​61; Elanor K. Bratton, “The Eye of the Beholder: An Interdisciplinary Examination of Law and Social Research on Sexual Harassment”, New Mexico Law Review 17, Winter (1987): 91–​114; Liisa Husu et al. eds, Lukukirja Suomen naisille (Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 1995). 28 Mary Bulzarik, “Sexual Harassment at the Workplace: Historical Notes”, Radical America 12, no. 4 (1978): 25. 29 Lesley Fowler, “Women and Work  —​Sexual Harassment, Patriarchy and the Labour Process” (master’s thesis, University of Bradford, 1985); Jeff Hearn, Men in the Public Eye (London: Routledge, 1992): 128–​129. 30 Riitta Högbacka et al., Sexual Harassment, Equality Publications —​Series E: Abstracts (Helsinki: Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, 1987). 31 Hearn and Parkin, ‘Sex’ at ‘Work’. 32 Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, Georgie Porgie: Sexual Harassment in Everyday Life (London: Pandora, 1987). 33 Hertta Niemi, “Managing in the ‘Golden Cage’: An Ethnographic Study of Work, Management and Gender in Parliamentary Administration” (PhD diss., Hanken School of Economics, 2010). 34 Liina Puustinen, “Tapaus Ahde ‘mediatuomioistuimessa,’ ” Journalismikritiikin vuosikirja 25, no. 1 (2002). 35 “ ‘Han har inga skivor men säger att han vill se mina fina bröst’ ” [He Has No Records but Says That He Wants to See My Nice Breasts], Dagens Nyheter, 1 December 2017, www.dn.se/​nyheter/​sverige/​ han-​har-​inga-​skivor-​men-​sager-​att-​han-​vill-​se-​mina-​fina-​brost.

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#MeToo and men’s violences and violations 36 Evan Stark, Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (London: Pandora, 2007). 37 Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence (London: Wiley, 1988). 38 Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin, “Child Abuse, Social Theory and Everyday State Practices”, in The State as Parent: International Research Perspectives on Interventions with Young Persons, ed. Joe Hudson and Burt Galaway (Dordecht: Kluwer, 1989): 230. 39 Anne-​Charlott Callerstig, “Making Equality Work:  Conflict, Ambiguities and Change Actors in the Implementation of Equality Policies in Public Sector Organisations”, (PhD diss., Linköping University, 2014). 40 Sylvia Walby, Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities (London: Sage, 2009). 41 Jeff Hearn et al., “From Gender Regimes to Violence Regimes: Re-​thinking the Position of Violence”, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxaa022. 42 The conceptualisation, measurement and comparative analysis of violence regimes is the focus of the Swedish Research Council project, “Regimes of Violence: Theorising and Explaining Variations in the Production of Violence in Welfare State Regimes”, project 2017-​01914, led by Sofia Strid. 43 Dag Balkmar et al., “Approaching Welfare Regimes Through Violence Policy: The Cases of Sweden, France and the UK” (under review 2020). 44 Jeff Hearn, “Theorizing Men and Men’s Theorizing:  Men’s Discursive Practices in Theorizing Men”, Theory and Society 27, no. 6 (1998): 781–​816; Hearn, “The Politics of Absent Men or Political Masculinities Without the Polis”, in Masculine Power and Gender Equality: Masculinities as Change Agents, ed. Russell Luyt and Kathleen Starck (Cham: Springer, 2020), 15–​34. 45 Anamika Chatterjee, “Why I  Didn’t Join the Hashtag ‘Me Too’ Bandwagon”, Khaleej Times Blogs, 19 October 2017, https://​blogs.khaleejtimes.com/​2017/​10/​19/​why-​i-​didnt-​join-​the-​hashtag-​ me-​too-​bandwagon. 46 Meghan Murphy, “Yes, You Too. And What About the Men?” Feminist Current, 16 October 2017, www.feministcurrent.com/​2017/​10/​16/​yes-​you-​too/​. 47 Jeff Hearn, “A Multi-​Faceted Power Analysis of Men’s Violence to Known Women: From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men”, Sociological Review 60, no. 4 (2012): 589–​610; Hearn, “The Sociological Significance of Domestic Violence:  Tensions, Paradoxes, and Implications”, Current Sociology 61, no. 2 (2013): 152–​170. 48 Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin, “The Emotionality of Organization Violations:  Gender Relations in Practice”, in Gendering Emotions in Organizations, ed. Ruth Simpson and Patricia Lewis (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), 161–​182. 49 Walter S.  DeKeseredy and Martin D.  Schwartz, Male Peer Support and Violence against Women (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 2013); DeKeseredy and Schwartz, “Thinking Sociologically About Image-​Based Sexual Abuse: The Contribution of Male Peer Support Theory”, Sexualization, Media, & Society 2, no. 4 (2016), https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​2374623816684692. 50 Hearn, The Violences of Men; Hall and Hearn, Revenge Pornography. 51 Jeff Hearn, “Men Will Be Men: The Ambiguity of Men’s Support for Men Who Have Been Violent to Known Momen”, in Men, Gender Divisions and Welfare, ed. Jennie Popay, Jeff Hearn and Jeanette Edwards (London: Routledge, 1998), 147–​180. 52 Heather Hensman Kettrey and Robert Marx, “ ‘Bystander Effect’ and Sexual Assault: What the Research Says”, Conversation, 5 October 2018, https://​theconversation.com/​bystander-​effect-​and-​sexual-​assault​what-​the-​research-​says-​104360. 53 The EU Report on Bullying and Sexual Harassment cites the 2017 YouGov survey of 8490 people in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Norway, and Sweden, that explored how definitions and boundaries of what is considered sexual harassment differ from country to country, and found that Danes and Germans were least likely to consider an action as sexual harassment. People in Great Britain, France and Finland shared a broad idea of what constitutes sexual harassment. For example, a man telling a ‘sex joke’ was more likely seen as sexual harassment in Great Britain (69%), and a man putting his arm around a woman’s waist was seen as sexual harassment more in France (72%) than elsewhere. Helge Hoel and Maarit Vartia, Bullying and Sexual Harassment at the Workplace, in Public Spaces, and in Political Life in the EU (Brussels: European Parliament, 2018), 14, www.europarl. europa.eu/​RegData/​etudes/​STUD/​2018/​604949/​IPOL_​STU(2018)604949_​EN.pdf. 54 Jeff Hearn, “The Personal, the Political, the Theoretical: The Case of Men’s Sexualities and Sexual Violences”, in Between Men and Feminism, ed. David Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 161–​181.

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Jeff Hearn 55 Foreini Kreatsoula, “The Duality of Hashtags: Identity and Space, a Study on the #MeToo Movement” (master’s thesis, Gothenburg University, 2018), 4. 56 Debbie Ging, “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere”, Men and Masculinities 22, no. 4 (2019): 638–​657. 57 E.g., “#MeToo —​Hear, Believe and Act: Time to Be Responsible, Boys and Men!” MenEngage Alliance, 2017, http://​menengage.org/​news/​hear-​believe-​and-​act/​; Catalina Ruiz-​Navarro, “Machos en rehabilitación” [Men in Rehabilitation], El Espectator, 18 October 2017, www.elespectador.com/​ opinion/​machos-​en-​rehabilitacion-​columna-​718698; Ruiz-​Navarro, “The Ugly Truths of Men Are Not Said Out Loud: That is the Pact of Patriarchy”, Kractivism, 29 October 2017, www.kractivist.org/​ the-​ugly-​truths-​of-​men-​are-​not-​said-​out-​loud-​that-​is-​the-​pact-​of-​patriarchy-​metoo. 58 Stephen R. Burrell, “Male Agents of Change and Disassociating from the Problem in the Prevention of Violence Against Women”, in Masculine Power and Gender Equality: Masculinities as Change Agents, ed. Russell Luyt and Kathleen Starck (Cham: Springer, 2020), 15–​34. 59 Bob Pease, “Engaging Men in Men’s Violence Prevention: Exploring the Tensions, Dilemmas and Possibilities”, Australian Domestic & Family Violence Clearinghouse, issues paper 17 (2008), www.academia.edu/​27056097/​Engaging_​Men_​in_​Mens_​Violence_​Prevention_​Exploring_​the_​Tensions_​ Dilemmas_​and_​Possibilities. 60 Ruth Solnit, “The Fall of Harvey Weinstein Should Be a Moment to Challenge Extreme Masculinity”, Guardian, 12 October 2017, www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2017/​oct/​12/​challenge-​extreme-​ masculinity-​harvey-​weinstein-​degrading-​women?CMP=share_​btn_​link. 61 Jean Hannah Edelstein, “Dating After #MeToo: Welcome to Our Newest Advice Column”, Guardian, 29 March 2018, www.theguardian.com/​lifeandstyle/​2018/​mar/​29/​dating-​after-​metoo-​advice​column. 62 Jessica Ringrose et al., A Qualitative Study of Children, Young People and ‘Sexting’ (London: NSPCC, 2012); Jessica Ringrose et  al., “Teen Girls, Sexual Double Standards and ‘Sexting’:  Gendered Value in Digital Image Exchange”, Feminist Theory 14, no.  3 (2013):  305–​323; Hall and Hearn, Revenge Pornography. 63 For example, in Finland, Yksittäistapaus [Isolated case] is a collectively created collection of short films, a feature film entitled Force of Habit, and a linked campaign, “that reveal the hidden way power is exercised on women in both private life and in society”. The project was begun late spring 2016, before #MeToo, by the film production company Tuffi Films and a group of 15 film industry professionals, artists, researchers and social influencers to make short films “to give a physical form for ‘that thing,’ the incidents that were regarded as a one-​off but that were, in reality, caused by power structures and our unconscious operating models”. “About the Campaign”, Yksittäistapaus, accessed 1 June 2020, www.yksittaistapaus.fi/​en/​about-​the-​campaign-​2. 64 In May 2020, The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Study, Armed Conflict Survey 2020 (ACS), reported that 60% of the active armed conflicts across the globe have continued for over ten years. “Over 60% of Armed Conflicts Ongoing for Over Ten Years Shows IISS’s Armed Conflict Survey”, IISS, 27 May 2020, www.iiss.org/​press/​2020/​acs-​2020. 65 Anna Cornelia Beyer, Inequality and Violence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 66 Ryan P. Brown, Lindsey L. Osterman, and Collin D. Barnes, “School Violence and the Culture of Honor”, Psychological Science 20, no. 11 (2009): 1400–​1405. 67 Colleen E.  Mills, Joshua D.  Freilich, and Steven M.  Chermak, “Extreme Hatred:  Revisiting the Hate Crime and Terrorism Relationship to Determine Whether They are ‘Close Cousins’ or ‘Distant Relatives’ ”, Crime & Delinquency 63, no 10 (2017): 1191–​1122; see Åsa Ekvall, “Gender Inequality, Homophobia and Violence: The Three Pillars of Patriarchal Norms and Attitudes and their Relations” (PhD diss., International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam/​University of Antwerp, 2019). 68 Valerie Hudson et al., Sex and World Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 69 Jeff Hearn et  al., “Men, Masculinities and Peace, Justice, Conflict and Violence:  A Multi-​ Level Overview”, in The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research, ed. Tanja Väyrynen et  al. (London: Routledge, 2021). 70 Kopano Ratele, Violence, Militarised Masculinity and Positive Peace, Series of Occasional Papers on Gender and Peacebuilding in Africa 6 (Pambazuka Press: Cape Town/​Dakar/​Nairobi/​Oxford, 2012), www.fahamu.org/​resources/​Ratele-​Violence-​Militarised-​Masculinity6.pdf.

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Bibliography Balkmar, Dag, Sofia Strid, Jeff Hearn, Anne Laure Humbert, and Marine Delaunay. “Approaching Welfare Regimes Through Violence Policy: The Cases of Sweden, France and the UK”. Under review, 2020. Barker, Chris, and Emma A. Jane. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage, 2016. Barry, Ellen. “In U.K.’s Clubby Parliament, Abuse Complaints May Be Used as Weapons”. New York Times, 7 November 2017. www.nytimes.com/​2017/​11/​07/​world/​europe/​uk-​parliament-​misconduct.html. Bates, Laura. Everyday Sexism. London: Simon and Schuster, 2014. BBC Newsbeat. “Mia Khalifa: Porn Contracts ‘Prey on Vulnerable Girls’ ”. 13 August 2019. www.bbc. com/​news/​newsbeat-​49330540. Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. “The Logic of Connective Action”. Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 739–​768. Beyer, Anna Cornelia. Inequality and Violence. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Bratton, Elanor K. “The Eye of the Beholder:  An Interdisciplinary Examination of Law and Social Research on Sexual Harassment”. New Mexico Law Review 17, Winter (1987): 91–​114. Brown, Dalvin. “19 Million Tweets Later: A Look at #MeToo a Year After the Hashtag Went Viral”. USA Today, 16 December 2019. https://​eu.usatoday.com/​story/​news/​2018/​10/​13/​metoo-​impact-​ hashtag-​made-​online/​1633570002. Brown, Ryan P., Lindsey L. Osterman, and Collin D. Barnes. “School Violence and the Culture of Honor”. Psychological Science 20, no. 11 (2009): 1400–​1405. Bulzarik, Mary. “Sexual Harassment at the Workplace:  Historical Notes”. Radical America 12, no. 4 (1978): 25–​43. Burrell, Stephen R. “Male Agents of Change and Disassociating from the Problem in the Prevention of Violence Against Women”. In Masculine Power and Gender Equality: Masculinities as Change Agents. Edited by Russell Luyt and Kathleen Starck, 15–​34. Cham: Springer, 2020. Callerstig, Anne-​ Charlott. “Making Equality Work:  Conflict, Ambiguities and Change Actors in the Implementation of Equality Policies in Public Sector Organisations”. PhD diss., Linköping University, 2014. Chatterjee, Anamika. “Why I Didn’t Join the Hashtag ‘Me Too’ Bandwagon”. Khaleej Times Blogs, 19 October 2017. https://​blogs.khaleejtimes.com/​2017/​10/​19/​why-​i-​didnt-​join-​the-​hashtag-​me​too-​bandwagon. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought:  Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Unwin Hyman/​Routledge, 1990. Dagens Nyheter. “ ‘Han har inga skivor men säger att han vill se mina fina bröst’” [He Has No Records but Says That He Wants to See My Nice Breasts]. 1 December 2017. www.dn.se/​nyheter/​sverige/​ han-​har-​inga-​skivor-​men-​sager-​att-​han-​vill-​se-​mina-​fina-​brost. DeKeseredy, Walter S., and Martin D. Schwartz. Male Peer Support and Violence against Women. Boston: Northwestern University Press, 2013. DeKeseredy, Walter S., and Martin D. Schwartz. “Thinking Sociologically About Image-​Based Sexual Abuse:  The Contribution of Male Peer Support Theory”. Sexualization, Media, & Society 2, no. 4 (2016). https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​2374623816684692. Edelstein, Jean Hannah. “Dating After #MeToo: Welcome to Our Newest Advice Column”. Guardian, 29 March 2018. www.theguardian.com/​lifeandstyle/​2018/​mar/​29/​dating-​after-​metoo-​advice-​column. Ekvall, Åsa. “Gender Inequality, Homophobia and Violence: The Three Pillars of Patriarchal Norms and Attitudes and their Relations”. PhD diss., International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam/​University of Antwerp, 2019. Eriksson, Karin, and Sanna Torén Björling. “Därför blev Metoo-​uppropen så starka i Sverige” [Why #MeToo Was So Powerful in Sweden]. Dagens Nyheter, 3 December 2017. www.dn.se/​nyheter/​ sverige/​darfor-​blev-​metoo-​uppropen-​sa-​starka-​i-​sverige. Fowler, Lesley. “Women and Work —​Sexual Harassment, Patriarchy and the Labour Process”. Master’s thesis, University of Bradford, 1985. Ging, Debbie. “Alphas, Betas, and Incels:  Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere”. Men and Masculinities 22, no. 4 (2019): 638–​657. Global Secretariat Team  —​MenEngage Alliance. “#MeToo  —​Hear, Believe and Act:  Time to Be Responsible, Boys and Men!” 2017. http://​menengage.org/​news/​hear-​believe-​and-​act/​. Gutek, Barbara, and Bruce Morasch. “Sex Ratios, Sex-​Role Spillover, and Sexual Harassment of Women at Work”. Journal of Social Issues 38, no. 4 (1982): 55–​74.

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#MeToo and men’s violences and violations Jaher, Diana Beth. “ ‘Painting with Faces’:  The Casting Director in American Theatre, Cinema, and Television”. PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana, 2014. Kelly, Liz. Surviving Sexual Violence. London: Wiley, 1988. Kettrey, Heather Hensman, and Robert Marx. “ ‘Bystander Effect’ and Sexual Assault: What the Research Says”. Conversation, 5 October 2018. https://​theconversation.com/​bystander-​effect-​and-​sexual​assault-​what-​the-​research-​says-​104360. Kreatsoula, Foteini. “The Duality of Hashtags: Identity and Space, a Study on the #MeToo Movement”. Master’s thesis, Gothenburg University, 2018. Lambertz, Jan. “Sexual Harassment in the Nineteenth Century English Cotton Industry”. History Workshop 19, Spring (1985): 29–​61. Langer, Gary. “Unwanted Sexual Advances Not Just a Hollywood, Weinstein Story, Poll Finds”. ABC News, 17 October 2017. https://​abcnews.go.com/​Politics/​unwanted-​sexual-​advances-​hollywood-​ weinstein-​story-​poll/​story?id= 50521721. Leeds TUCRIC. Sexual Harassment of Women at Work. Leeds: Leeds TUCRIC, 1983. Lykke, Nina. Feminist Studies:  A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing. New York: Routledge, 2010. MacKinnon, Catharine A. The Sexual Harassment of Working Women. New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1979. Mays, Sas, and Nicholas Thoburn, eds. “Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net”. New Formations 78 (2013). Mills, Colleen E., Joshua D. Freilich, and Steven M. Chermak. “Extreme Hatred: Revisiting the Hate Crime and Terrorism Relationship to Determine Whether They are ‘Close Cousins’ or ‘Distant Relatives’ ”. Crime & Delinquency 63, no 10 (2017): 1191–​1223. Murphy, Meghan. “Yes, You Too. And What About the Men?” Feminist Current, 16 October 2017. www. feministcurrent.com/​2017/​10/​16/​yes-​you-​too. National Civil Rights Museum. “I Am a Man: Memphis Sanitation Strike 1968”. Accessed 9 June 2020. www.civilrightsmuseum.org/​i-​am-​a-​man. Niemi, Hertta. “Managing in the ‘Golden Cage’: An Ethnographic Study of Work, Management and Gender in Parliamentary Administration”. PhD diss., Hanken School of Economics, 2010. Oliphant, J. Baxter. “Women and Men in Both Parties Say Sexual Harassment Allegations Reflect ‘Widespread Problems in Society’ ”. Pew Research Center, 7 December 2017. www.pewresearch.org/​ fact-​tank/​2017/​12/​07/​americans-​views-​of-​sexual-​harassment-​allegations/​. Pease, Bob. “Engaging Men in Men’s Violence Prevention:  Exploring the Tensions, Dilemmas and Possibilities”. Australian Domestic & Family Violence Clearinghouse, issues paper 17 (2008). www.academia.edu/​27056097/​Engaging_​Men_​in_​Mens_​Violence_​Prevention_​Exploring_​the_​Tensions_​ Dilemmas_​and_​Possibilities. Puustinen, Liina. “Tapaus Ahde ‘mediatuomioistuimessa’  ”. Journalismikritiikin vuosikirja 25, no. 1 (2002): 56–​63. Ratele, Kopano. Violence, Militarised Masculinity and Positive Peace. Series of Occasional Papers on Gender and Peacebuilding in Africa 6. Pambazuka Press: Cape Town/​Dakar/​Nairobi/​Oxford, 2012. www. fahamu.org/​resources/​Ratele-​Violence-​Militarised-​Masculinity6.pdf. Ringrose, Jessica, Rosalind Gill, Sonja Livingstone, and Laura Harvey. A Qualitative Study of Children, Young People and ‘Sexting’. London: NSPCC, 2012. Ringrose, Jessica, Laura Harvey, Rosalind Gill, and Sonja Livingstone. “Teen Girls, Sexual Double Standards and ‘Sexting’:  Gendered Value in Digital Image Exchange”. Feminist Theory 14, no. 3 (2013): 305–​323. Ruiz-​Navarro, Catalina. “Machos en rehabilitación” [Men in Rehabilitation]. El Espectator, 18 October 2017. www.elespectador.com/​opinion/​machos-​en-​rehabilitacion-​columna-​718698. Ruiz-​Navarro, Catalina. “The Ugly Truths of Men Are Not Said Out Loud: That is the Pact of Patriarchy”. Kractivism, 29 October 2017. www.kractivist.org/​the-​ugly-​truths-​of-​men-​are-​not-​said-​out-​loud-​that-​ is-​the-​pact-​of-​patriarchy-​metoo/​. Santiago, Cassandra, and Doug Criss. “An Activist, a Little Girl and the Heartbreaking Origin of ‘Me Too’ ”. CNN, 17 October 2017. https://​edition.cnn.com/​2017/​10/​17/​us/​me-​too-​tarana-​burke-​ origin-​trnd/​index.html. Scheiber, Noam. “In a Superstar Economy, a Bull Market in Superstar Harassers”. New York Times, 31 October 2017. www.nytimes.com/​2017/​10/​31/​business/​superstars-​sexual-​harassment.html.

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Jeff Hearn Solnit, Ruth. “The Fall of Harvey Weinstein Should Be a Moment to Challenge Extreme Masculinity”. Guardian, 12 October 2017. www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2017/​oct/​12/​challenge-​extreme-​ masculinity-​harvey-​weinstein-​degrading-​women?CMP=share_​btn_​link. Stanley, Liz, and Sue Wise. Georgie Porgie: Sexual Harassment in Everyday Life. London: Pandora, 1987. Stark, Evan. Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. London: Pandora, 2007. Strid, Sofia. “#talkaboutit: Talking about Consent and Coercion”. In Sylvia Walby, Philippa Olive, Jude Towers, Brian Francis, Sofia Strid, Andrea Krizsan, Emanuela Lombardo, et al. Stopping Rape: Towards a Comprehensive Policy, 205–​209. Bristol: Policy Press, 2015. Walby, Sylvia. Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities. London: Sage, 2009. Wellmann, Brian. “Physical Space and Cyberspace: The Rise of Personalized Networking”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25, no. 2 (2001): 227–​252. Williams, Joan C., Jodi Short, Margot Brooks, Hilary Hardcastle, Tiffanie Ellis, and Rayna Saron. “What’s Reasonable Now? Sexual Harassment Law After the Norm Cascade”. Michigan State Law Review, no. 1 (2019): 139–​224. Yksittäistapaus. “About the Campaign”. Accessed 1 June 2020. www.yksittaistapaus.fi/​en/​about-​the-​ campaign-​2. Zimmer, Ben. “ ‘Casting Couch’: The Origins of a Pernicious Hollywood Cliché”. Atlantic, 17 October 2017. www.theatlantic.com/​entertainment/​archive/​2017/​10/​casting-​couch-​the-​origins-​of-​a-​pernicious-​ hollywood-​cliche/​543000.

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6 #METOO: BEYOND INVULNERABILITY Towards a new ontological paradigm Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir Since 2018, degrading, pornographic jokes can be rebutted with one phrase: #MeToo. By contrast, just a few years ago, the same circumstances would most likely have provoked an awkward smile or laughter followed by an abrupt end to the conversation. Indeed, although columns, blogs, articles, and podcasts frequently appear online questioning the success of the #MeToo movement, I argue that something has indeed changed.1 The ability to silence sexually abusive talk with this one phrase can be experienced as a source of power and relief by those individuals trying to navigate a “normal” nine to five workday. #MeToo exposes the lived experiences of hierarchic and often violent labour relations within capitalism. In this chapter, I examine the possibilities of #MeToo to transform the intersecting systems of capitalism and patriarchy. I explore the changes happening within the context of political rationality, as well as at the level of everyday “common sense”, and consider whether such changes are likely to result in the proletariat (increasingly called “the precariat” or “the 99%”) gaining social hegemony. As a means to frame this chapter, I am asking the following questions. Why is #MeToo such a recent phenomenon? If it is true that many people remain highly uncomfortable in public spaces of work, experience harassment, and even feel troubled by everyday language, why has it taken this long for the resistance to earlier norms to gain widespread influence? This is an especially relevant query given that feminist movements have been opposing sexual abuse for decades. Why has it been so difficult for individuals to share their experiences of vulnerability, and why have women felt ashamed at being the recipients of abusive speech and sexual violations? I will strive to answer these questions within the context of liberalism’s historical ontology, tracing its roots in seventeenth-​century classical liberalism all the way to present-​day neoliberalism.2 In order to offer a new paradigm of vulnerability, I will incorporate Judith Butler’s philosophy of vulnerability, and examine how it presents a new form of ethics and political ontology. As it pertains to liberalism’s concept of “possessive individualism”, invulnerability is directly linked to our understanding of capitalist labour relations. Because the individual needs to sell her labour power (or enhance her human capital in neoliberal terms), she must convince her potential employer that she is an attractive, ideal worker, all the while knowing that she is competing against other workers who also want the job in question. With this in mind,

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an individual in need of a job is not at liberty to disclose vulnerabilities, such as the invisible disability of chronic illness, in a job interview for fear of being passed over for the position.3 Within such a labour system, an individual may very well find herself needing to laugh at abusive jokes even if she feels harmed by them. Although Tarana Burke, started using the phrase “Me Too” as a catch phrase to raise awareness about sexual abuse around 2006, it was not until wealthy, often white and cis Hollywood actresses at the top of the labour hierarchy took up this cause that so many different communities came under a single umbrella for the first time and gave that common hashtag the visibility we see now. This occurred despite the fact that feminist activists have been pointing at these matters for decades, if not centuries.4 At the same time, the groups of women who are most marginalised are often the last ones to be heard, as was the case in Iceland: one of the final group to receive attention were “women of foreign origin”, who shared some of the most brutal stories in the Icelandic #MeToo wave.5 Two kinds of interpretations could be offered to explain the #MeToo movement. First, one can argue that #MeToo concerns the reform of the public workplace to more adequately meet the needs of the women within it. Success in this context amounts to the liberal individual’s ability to adapt and compete in the allegedly fair game of work. Some feminists, fatigued by the slow alteration of social structures, might pessimistically claim that this was all that #MeToo accomplished. However, I think there is a second, equally valuable interpretation; it is important to emphasise the radical potential of this revolution, rather than to criticise it as yet another iteration of neoliberal individuation. #MeToo (despite its many backlashes and disputes) has changed the “common sense” surrounding sexual relations. One possible reason that #MeToo happened in 2017 rather than in 2007 or 1997 is because it took this long for the hegemonic status of neoliberal capitalism to reach a crisis state.6 The last decade witnessed the growth of a space of resistance in which people have explored vulnerability and rejected the demands of invulnerability, despite decreases in job security. The revolutionary wave of #MeToo now needs to use its visibility to alter labour relations by rejecting individualistic competition.

The contradictions of neoliberalism Ontological analyses attempt to capture trans-​historical and universal snapshots of our existence and our relationship with the broader world. As Stephen White claims, “gaining access to something universal about human being and world is always also a construction that cannot rid itself of a historical dimension”.7 According to this line of thought, the ontological enterprise is highly social and historical in nature. In her analysis of neoliberal subjectivation, Johanna Oksala notes that if “the constitution of the subject is a thoroughly historical and highly precarious process”, then it is possible to detect differences in subjectivity over the course of the past twenty or thirty years. Thus, our self-​definitions are subjected to rapid change, yet at the same time, this form of ontology rests upon a social architecture of decades, centuries, and millennia.8 Many post-​structural critical theories, such as that found in Butler’s Gender Trouble, commonly critique the concept of ontological givens, exposing how the assumptions we make about which matters qualify as natural and pre-​discursive might have been social and discursive all along.9 Butler frequently uses topological metaphors such as ontological horizon or ontological landscape to communicate the countless ideas pertaining to humans and the world available at a given time. Even though the ideas may appear at odds with one another, they still belong to this particular horizon and do not fall outside of this frame of thought.10 In “What is Critique?” Butler considers our chances of altering the ontological horizon, concluding that if we wish to do that, we must put our own ontological security at risk. One might argue that the countless 86

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cases of rape survivors seeking to alter societies in which rape has been normalised took such a risk, as they have often been ignored and marginalised as a result of their activism. Consider, for instance, the case of Guðný Jóna Kristjánsdóttir, who had to leave her small town of Húsavík in Iceland because the majority of the community sided with her convicted rapist.11 However, such an alteration of the ontological horizon is often beyond what most individuals can envision. Even as we attempt to alter our own horizons, we still reside within the patriarchal, as well as neoliberal, hegemony. Erinn Gilson illustrates this dilemma well with regard to the ethical transformation of neoliberalism: Ethical practice will require a transformation in our ontology, but such a transformation will have to be undertaken both at the level of thought and at the level of occasionally mundane practice. Indeed, as much as we theorize a relational ontology —​an ontology of vulnerability, precariousness, and interdependence  —​we still, for the most part, operate in accord with dominant liberal norms of personhood and individuality, norms that urge us to disregard the bonds that shared vulnerability forges among us.12 When we need to be competitive in order to survive, transforming our ethical practices to align with vulnerability is not an easy task. But in order to even consider such a path, it is important to trace the political rationality of neoliberalism back to its foundation in classical liberalism. It is not uncommon to see the ontology of liberalism criticised within feminist theory as establishing the dominant subjectivity. This critique is rendered in relation to both the Western philosophical tradition and the broader ideological-​hegemonic context of contemporary societies.13 The logic of liberalism continues to be important for emancipatory movements, such as feminism. One of the founding ideas of liberalism refers to the equal right of every individual to participate in public society. I do not think that this logic of formal equality should vanish with a new ontological paradigm. The question at hand is how to build concrete equality based on differences. There are two aspects I want to focus on, which explain the contradictions people face in their everyday lives:14 first, the need to appear invulnerable to others (peers, employers, etc.), and second, the phrase “possessive individualism” as coined by C. B. Macpherson.15 Possessive individualism developed in the emerging market society of seventeenth-​century England, and this notion relates to individual capacity as a form of property that one can own. In the following extract, Macpherson presents a political ontology of the human as a possessive individual: The assumptions of possessive individualism are peculiarly appropriate to a possessive market society, for they state certain essential facts that are peculiar to that society. The individual in a possessive market society is human in his capacity as proprietor of his own person; his humanity does depend on his freedom from any but self-​interest contractual relations with others; his society does consist of a series of market relations.16 Possessive individualism does not solely refer to the individual right to private property, but also relates to the individual sense of self: “property relations have come to structure and control our moral concepts of personhood, self-​belonging, agency and self-​identity” as Butler claims in Dispossession, the book she co-​authored with Athena Athanasiou.17 Possessive individualism posits not only an objectification of the self or of personhood, but also a commodification; one does not view oneself merely as an object, but as an object that can be sold and should be sold. 87

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Personhood as “property” means that one can participate in contractual exchange relations and therefore sell/​rent out one’s commodity. Athanasiou highlights the fact that, according to the “founding moment of liberalism”,18 it is always you yourself who owns your body —​no one else can own the whole of you; no one else can own all your time. What you can sell or rent out, according to this system of thinking, is your labour power. You can sell part of your time to an employer/​capitalist, who is not terribly concerned with who you are and what you do with the rest of your time —​as long as your work performance is at acceptable levels. Accordingly, we have private time or private life during which hours we are “free”. But in order to enjoy that freedom we need to sustain our lives, e.g. with food and sleep. Karl Marx described the great paradox of liberalism as being free in a double sense in the chapter “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation” in Capital.19 This “double freedom” is what makes labour power available in the market as a commodity. Workers have the freedom to enter into contracts to rent out their “labour power”, but they also possess the freedom to avail themselves of other avenues of sustaining themselves. The chapter on primitive accumulation in Capital further explains how European peasants lost the land they relied on to sustain their lives (such as with growing potatoes), which subsequently decreased their bargaining power as waged workers.20 What this means, especially if we take into account #MeToo’s focus on present-​day systems of labour, is that competition between possessive individuals trying to realise the value of their individual labour power is unavoidable. Furthermore, it moulds the individual’s sense of value as a person by arguing that this worth depends on the recognition and wealth acquired within the labour system. How does the need to appear invulnerable align with possessive individualism? If one is compelled to participate in this competitive labour system and if one’s sense of worth is based on doing well within this system, then the exposure of perceived personal flaws, weaknesses or vulnerabilities is not an option. Thus, one of the most important aspects of liberal ontology is the need to appear invulnerable in order to “win” the game of work. Since most of us do not excel at this effort we are confronted with the epidemic of anxiety and the fear of being a failure, especially given the precarious nature of the contemporary labour market.21 Despite this explanation, vulnerability does play a role in liberal ontology. The feminist critique of liberalism makes clear that although the ontology of liberalism officially applies to humanity in general it actually produces two subject positions: the official, public, position of the possessive and invulnerable individual, and a hidden second position which Wendy Brown calls the femina domestica and Carol Pateman refers to via the hidden story of the sexual contract necessary for social contract theories.22 This concealed second position can be found within what liberalism has defined as the private sphere, and supplies possessive individuals with a venue to hide away all their vulnerabilities.23 More importantly, this venue provides liberal subjects with the belief that they are independent as they manage to rid themselves of their own individual dependencies, while also enabling them to view more dependent humans as less human. Last but not least, this distinction is highly gendered: at least historically speaking, the possessive individual worker was seen as a masculine role, whereas caring for and reproducing life in the private sphere was seen as a naturally feminine role.24 The focus of this chapter has mostly been on the tenets of classical liberalism as they pertain to ontology, but in recent decades, we have experienced an intensified, and perhaps qualitatively different, version of liberalism, namely neoliberalism. While classical liberalism was mainly concerned with economic relations and the public sphere, neoliberalism extends that particular economic rationality to every dimension of life, encouraging us to think of not only our public lives, but also our most private and intimate ones  —​such as our romantic 88

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life, e.g. finding a partner —​within the parameters of enhancing our human capital.25 Brown argues that human capital replaces labour power in neoliberalism, as it is first and foremost the individual’s personal capital that needs to be enhanced.26 Is it possible to detect ontological differences between classical liberalism and neoliberalism? The transformation over the last decades implies that women now function as possessive individuals as well, as Oksala argues: I want to suggest that the spread and intensification of neoliberal governmentality has meant that women too have come to be seen, and to see themselves, increasingly as neoliberal subjects —​egoistical subjects of interest making free choices based in rational economic calculation. Women do not only want a happy home any more, they too want money, power and success. They are atomic, autonomous subjects of interest competing for the economic opportunities available.27 The feminist demand of the second wave to enter the job market turned out to be ambiguous in its effect: the movement, especially in North America and Europe, was driven by middle-​ class housewives who could afford to live solely on their partners’ incomes, while at the same time, most working-​class women could not afford not to work. Although entering the job market can enable women to acquire financial independence and freedom, it also increasingly requires them to adjust to the position of the possessive individual, and perhaps even to reject the value of “traditional feminine traits”, such as expressing vulnerability and/​or the need or desire to care for others. Instead, as possessive individuals, women are compelled to prove that they can compete with men as “human capital” for careers and success. This development has increasingly led to the “equal” interpellation of everyone, at least in highly competitive Western societies:  both male and female possessive individuals are seen as neoliberal subjects making “free choices based in rational economic calculation resulting in an intensification of a denial of vulnerabilities”, as Oksala points out.28 A system in which everyone is motivated by self-​interest is untenable in the long term. If humanity is to continue, either the ontological role of the femina domestica must be reproduced, or we need something else. Brown comments on the unsustainability of neoliberalism in Undoing the Demos: Either women align their own conduct with this truth, becoming homo economicus, in which case the world becomes uninhabitable, or women’s activities and bearing as femina domestica remain the unavowed glue for a world whose governing principle cannot hold it together, in which case women occupy their old place as unacknowledged props and supplements to masculinist liberal subjects.29 Although neoliberalism encourages people to aspire to its ideal of the possessive individualist, this philosophy assumes that the femina domestica is at work everywhere. As Oksala argues, economic gender equality —​where men and women compete at an equal level —​is a structural impossibility in capitalist societies. In truth, it is impossible to completely commodify childbirth and pregnancy, and even if it were possible, most people would oppose such commodification on moral, political and economic grounds.30 What this confirms is that the predominant ontology of liberalism in societies of the West —​with its ideal of the possessive individual —​ logically excludes some kinds of humans from its ontology, even today in the era of “post-​ feminism” and neoliberalism. Women are increasingly interpellated as invulnerable workers who are in competition with others. As a result of needing to extract as much value for their 89

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commodity as possible, their very gender impacts that value. The (often unacknowledged) communal aspects of maintaining workplace functionality more often than not falls on women’s shoulders; emotional labour is expected of them, yet not rewarded in a financial sense.31 And the prevalence of sexual harassment, which #MeToo exposes, works to “keep women in their place”. To truly lay the groundwork for a collective acknowledgement of the vulnerability and the interdependencies that have resided within the liberal ontology all along, these issues need to be addressed, and the hidden sphere of femina domestica needs to be seen as valuable.

Vulnerability and feminist revolutions In everyday use, vulnerability tends to be viewed as a negative trait, as if one can easily distinguish between a vulnerable group in need of protection (victims) and an invulnerable group in charge of carrying out a protective function. A  different perspective emerges however by departing from this dominant, negative, understanding of vulnerability and adopting an ontological approach. Accordingly, vulnerability is first and foremost a state of being open towards the world, and hence, it is understood as neither something negative nor positive (but sometimes both). Vulnerability describes a certain way of being affected and of affecting others in multiple ways.32 The most common understanding of vulnerability perceives it as a condition that limits us, but, as Butler argues, it can also be a condition that enables us. One of the defining aspects of Butler’s analysis of vulnerability in Giving an Account of Oneself is the emphasis on opacity.33 Opacity refers to the epistemic vulnerability that defines all of our lives. In other words, we cannot recall the first intensely dependent moments of our lives, and this opacity remains with us indefinitely.34 Acknowledging our own opacity opens up the possibility of another kind of ethical relationality, in which we focus on being responsive to others rather than defining universal ethical principles.35 Accordingly, vulnerability is an essential part of the human condition, but as Butler argues, that does not suffice for this new kind of ethics: So when we say that every infant is surely vulnerable, that is clearly true; but it is true, in part, precisely because our utterance enacts the very recognition of vulnerability and so shows the importance of recognition itself for sustaining vulnerability.36 Nonetheless vulnerability is not produced by recognition; if we misrecognise or deny vulnerability, it is not as if it just goes away. We cannot will it away.37 However it can be denied “through a fantasy of mastery” that can “fuel the instruments of war”.38 Various individuals and populations of people are dehumanised and thus lack a recognition of their situated vulnerabilities.39 In Precarious Life, Butler speaks of “insurrection at the level of ontology” when describing her own thought process.40 This insurrection would compel us to think about the ways in which the current ontological horizon has caused and can continue to cause violence by indifference and misrecognition. We need an ontological revolution in order to more effectively connect through our vulnerabilities and to embrace our various forms of interdependency as fundamental parts of life. This has not been the agenda of the socialist revolutions of recent centuries, but it has been the agenda of feminist revolutions, which trumpeted the motto “the personal is political”. These revolutions have not been “bloody”, and have thus lent the term “revolution” a broader meaning than its older militaristic connotation. Feminist revolutions are “militant” in a more subtle, nuanced, and even joyful way, yet they also possess the potential to move the hegemony of social ontology towards vulnerability.

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The year 2015 was marked by feminist revolutions in Iceland that locally went by the name “emotional revolutions” (tilfinningabyltingar). These revolutions were characterised by the widespread sharing of difficult experiences and by deliberate efforts to increase physical comfort in the virtual and female spaces of alliance and solidarity. “Free the nipple” and “Women speak out” (Konur tala) changed the political rationality of sexual relations, as well as the general approach to emotional life. A (mostly virtual) space was constructed in which support for being open and vulnerable was offered. The emphasis was on acknowledging each and every story and listening to each woman’s experience —​even (and especially) those who had been gaslighted in earlier attempts to share their stories. The feminist revolution based on the hashtag #MeToo bears a great resemblance to the 2015 Iceland revolutions, since all of these influenced what is normatively accepted in sexual relations. These revolutions can be viewed as experimental venues in which participants create other forms of relationality by designing spaces for simply being vulnerable and processing difficult experiences. These ideal spaces are distinguished by their lack of judgmental and dismissive attitudes. Through #MeToo and other feminist revolutions, a new common sense based on vulnerability is materialising, which could potentially replace the neoliberal paradigm. Coming together in female-​only (virtual) spaces and sharing difficult, traumatic and violating experiences generates an opportunity to talk about these experiences without others undermining them or suggesting that a woman herself is to blame. This does not necessarily mean that all such spaces have reached this perfect equilibrium or have a full consensus amongst all members. Indeed, discussions concerning what constitutes “victim blaming” or expressions of sympathy towards perpetrators are frequent. Disagreements about which social media strategies would be the most successful are ongoing, and many debates centre on determining what level of anonymity is appropriate. One post-​#MeToo example of such disagreements and debates involved an actor losing his job in a theatre based on accounts of sexual abuse that the head of theatre decided not to disclose.41 However, as the Guardian columnist Moira Donegan notes, it is possible to detect a common denominator within the movement, namely that sexual harassment and abuse is a systemic problem, not an individual one.42 Donegan also contends that the split between feminists over #MeToo should be viewed as a division between social and individualist feminists, rather than a generational divide. For instance, many individualist feminists believe that some of the complaints of sexual harassment within #MeToo were minor, and that women should “toughen up” and not be “frail”, as articulated in the 100 French Women’s Manifesto published in Le Monde.43 Donegan explained the sharp split between the #MeToo and anti-​ #MeToo strands as follows: This thinking partakes in a long moral tradition … [of] a feminism that posits that individual women have the power to make choices to diminish the negative impact of sexism, and to endure any sexist unpleasantness that can’t be avoided —​if only they have the grit to handle it.44 The new perspective which makes #MeToo so powerful rejects both “feminine victimhood” and “masculine strength”. Furthermore, the notion of vulnerability is neither depicted as a negative trait nor as a new ideal to aspire to, but rather lays out a (social) ontological dimension in which a woman can be vulnerable in various ways and manage this essential state of her existence. Nevertheless, the question remains as to whether this new ethics, this new common sense, will gain a footing in societies around the world.

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Future possibilities Even though the potential of a new paradigm of vulnerability is integrally tied to the #MeToo movement, more work needs to be done in order to fully replace the neoliberal paradigm. The countless rallies and demands in the name of #MeToo, such as those in Los Angeles and Hong Kong, have created new relationships between people who previously may have lacked a shared, international platform to speak about their difficulties.45 Together, women are defining what they believe to be a fair society and making claims based on that conversation. However, how are we to take such risks when paying the bills means being compliant and performing in accordance with a given system? Unequal, hierarchical power relations within labour systems (and between labour and life systems) will continue to reproduce some forms of violent sexual relations.46 The capitalist system of production and the division of labour does not provide a livelihood for all. In fact, as Marx famously argued in Capital, it relies on a disposable “industrial reserve army” and “creates a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital”, consisting of desperate people who can hardly sustain their lives.47 Marx knew all too well the multitude of people needed to cooperate in order to alter these stressful social structures, yet how exactly such alteration can successfully take place has eluded most social thinkers, activists, and movements. The spirit of acceptance and affective solidarity to be found in the emotional revolutions needs to seep into struggles concerning work, benefits, and means of subsistence. Interestingly, the #MeToo movement confronts the ways in which sexual abuse has been used as a power strategy to subordinate women in work structures with strict hierarchies, and it was given international visibility by one of the most prominent and glamorous work structures in the world: Hollywood. However, although the prevalence of sexual abuse is commonly associated with the structure of capitalist work relations —​such as in the Hollywood actress Brit Marlin’s reference to the “economics of consent”48 —​it would be difficult to claim that the movement directly opposes the hierarchical relations between an employer/​ capitalist and employees, although this certainly remains a strong implicit factor within many claims put forward in the name of #MeToo. “In a post-​feminist world, feminism is seen to have already achieved its goal and, therefore, to have made itself redundant.”49 As Annadís G. Rúdólfsdóttir and Ásta Jóhannesdóttir show, the young women participating in the #freethenipple revolution were typically raised during the neoliberal period and with the belief that gender equality had already been achieved. Yet now they are beginning to discover the many subtle, insidious forms of gender subordination.50 Questions have been raised about whether #MeToo might be just another example of neoliberal feminism.51 Although these revolutions are certainly directing younger women towards radical feminism, the neoliberal undercurrents that characterise the revolutions must be acknowledged. As Annadís and Ásta point out, there are frequent references to a liberal conception of choice and autonomy.52 Women are coming together in solidarity, but the neoliberal idea that the manner in which the individual fares in life is dependent on her choices alone remains a strong undercurrent in this movement. The current feminist wave challenges the individualistic rationality of the neoliberal paradigm but I would argue that it has not yet replaced the older framework.53 The question remains as to whether #MeToo will mainly serve as a liberal reform of the current ontological landscape, in which people will continue to need to perform as possessive individualists, or if the movement will herald the construction of a new paradigm. As long as neoliberal rationality remains prevalent and only slightly altered, individual (liberal) feminists seeking a certain career path may “play the feminist card”, using #MeToo 92

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for personal gain rather than fighting for systemic transformation. In such a framework, being a feminist will become an additional asset for the individual —​a way to maximise her labour power/​human capital in an increasingly competitive marketplace.54 That said, I  think it is important to emphasise the radical potential of these revolutions, rather than to criticise them as yet another aspect of neoliberal individuation. By coming together, accepting and being open to each other’s vulnerabilities, rather than labelling them as negative or positive, we are more likely to remember that each of us has been a femina domestica all along; all of us are vulnerable and interdependent, but some have been placed in more precarious positions than others. Over the last decade, a space of resistance has opened up in which people have been exploring vulnerability and rejecting the demand of invulnerability despite decreased job security. How can we, little by little, increase the security of subsistence so that the demands of #MeToo —​that no one should be forced to tolerate harassment and abuse at work —​can be realised? The revolutionary wave of #MeToo is in a position to move mountains, altering labour relations by rejecting individualising competition.

Conclusion Referring to Paulo Friere’s ideas of revolution, Audre Lorde points out that “the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us”.55 This quote captures why it is important to analyse something as intangible as social and political ontology, and it further encourages us to enquire into the possibility of altering the ontological landscape. We need to aim for wellness (with decreased stress and anxiety), collective responsibility and equality. And if we strive to create a society sensitive to individual abilities and needs, then we really require these emotional, feminist, revolutions to disclose and acknowledge vulnerabilities.56 The vulnerability that has been “put out there” by the #MeToo movement should continue to be used as a rallying point against the invulnerable, possessive, individuals who remain isolated, independent, and in competitive environments. Whether this takes the form of coming together and protesting slut shaming, as was the case in the various slut walks rallied since 2011, or whether this means finally breaking through the silencing of shared harassment experiences by telling stories and acknowledging feelings of shame in virtual #MeToo groups, people are reaching out to each other. From a foundation of allyship and solidarity, myriad possibilities exist to organise intersectional and multi-​dimensional supportive networks that transcend the dichotomy of the private sphere of the home and the public sphere of work. Vulnerability has the potential to offer supportive relationality, which could in turn cultivate another social system without the concepts of surplus populations and reserve armies of labour power for the capitalists to exploit. The question at hand involves the practical transition from highly competitive neoliberal labour  —​which is still tearing down the remnants of liberal welfare systems —​to radical and supportive systems of labour and life based on situated vulnerability. This question needs to be answered differently by different countries and communities.

Notes 1 I thank Giti Chandra, Irma Erlingsdóttir and anonymous reviewers for great suggestions for revising earlier versions of this article. 2 Reijer Hendrikse traces how the neoliberalist period in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis should in fact been called “Neo-​illiberalism”. Although neoliberalism’s global hegemonic status has appeared to be in crisis for the last ten years, it has cunningly preserved its free-​market economic practises, which has

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Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir resulted in increasing financial inequalities by playing on people’s general frustrations. Over time, neoliberalism has grown more authoritarian in character, as exemplified by the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump. The nationalistic manipulation of people’s frustrations towards “progressive” elites or foreign immigrants is fuelled by the invulnerability one ought to aspire to. Furthermore, the dominant forms of relationality separate individuals rather than building support between them. Hendrikse, “Neo-​ illiberalism”, Geoforum 95 (2018) 169–​172. 3 Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir,“Vulnerable in a Job Interview: Butler’s Relational Ontology ofVulnerability as a Response to (Neo)liberalism” (PhD dissertation, University of Iceland, 2018). 4 Anu Koivunen, Katarina Kyrölä, and Ingrid Ryberg, “Vulnerability as a Political Language”, in The Power of Vulnerability, ed. Anu Koivunen, Katarina Kyrölä and Ingrid, Ryberg (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2018), 1. 5 Catharine Fulton, “Women of Foreign Origin In Iceland Join #MeToo Movement”, Reykjavík Grapevine, 26 January 2018. https://​grapevine.is/​news/​2018/​01/​26/​women-​of-​foreign-​origin-​in-​ iceland-​join-​metoo-​movement/​, retrieved 6 February 2018. 6 Even international fiscal institutions such as the IMD, which once agreed with the neoliberal Washington consensus, now consider neoliberal policies outdated. Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, Davide Furceri, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” Finance & Development 53, No. 2 (June 2016), 38–​41. www.imf. org/​external/​pubs/​ft/​fandd/​2016/​06/​ostry.htm. 7 Stephen White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 9. 8 Johanna Oksala, “Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality”, Foucault Studies No. 16, (September 2013): 37. 9 Judith Butler,GenderTrouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge  2007). 10 Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 107. 11 Butler, “What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”, The Political, ed. David Ingram, (Malden and Oxford:  Blackwell Publishers 2002), 215; María Lilja Þrastardóttir, “Nauðgunin sem klauf bæjarfélag” [The Rape That Divided a Town], Vísir, 9 April 2013, www.visir.is/​g/​2013130409213. 12 Erinn Gilson, Ethics of Vulnerability:  A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 63. 13 Some of the noteworthy thinkers to mention are Wendy Brown and Carol Pateman, whose works I will engage with in this chapter, as well as Alison Jaggar and Anne Phillips. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1995); Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1983); Anne Phillips (ed.) Feminism and Equality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). 14 The liberal subject is arguably one of the main research objects of critical and feminist theories. This concept has been given many names, such as the sovereign subject, the invulnerable subject, the autonomous being, the possessive individual, the strong individual, the Man of reason, homo economicus, the masculine subject, and the able-​bodied person. Each of these distinct labels imply important subtleties that need their own space in different theoretical frameworks and disciplines, such as when the aim is to examine the cost of masculinity in a given society, or the difficulty and desperation that an ideal of able-​bodiedness can cause. Here, however, the aim is to utilise a form of ontology that interpellates all subjects, and thus I choose to place my emphasis on what these different concepts have in common, rather than what separates them. 15 Crawford Brough Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011). 16 Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 271. 17 Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 13 (JB). 18 Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 13 (AA). 19 Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 874. 20 Marx, Capital, 874; Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 25. 21 Isabel Lorey, States of Insecurity:  Government of the Precarious. Trans. Aileen Derieg (London:  Verso Books, 2015), 27–​28. 22 Brown, States of Injury, 162; Pateman, Sexual Contract, 112.

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#MeToo: beyond invulnerability 23 The division between the public and private spheres is essential to the construction of “social contract societies”, and in order for possessive individualism to be felt as “common sense” to people, it is vital that the private sphere is seen as falling outside of the scope of political discussion and hence naturalised. Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 3. 24 Linda Gordon and Nancy Fraser, “Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 318. 25 Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 33. 26 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 33. 27 Oksala, “Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality”, 37. 28 Oksala, “Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality”, 37. 29 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 104–​105. 30 Oksala, “Affective Labour and Feminist Politics”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 41, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 299. 31 Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart:  Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2012). 32 Gilson, “Vulnerability, Ignorance and Oppression”, Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 310. 33 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 39. 34 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 78. 35 Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York and London: Verso, 2004), 21; Gilson, Ethics of Vulnerability, 55. 36 Butler, Precarious Life, 43. 37 Butler, Precarious Life, 29. 38 Butler, Precarious Life, 29. 39 To theorise the different positions of human lives in terms of vulnerability, Butler introduces the sister concepts of precariousness and precarity. Precariousness is a generalised condition and a feature of all life, while precarity is the political apprehension of this “fact”. Precarity highlights the way precariousness is maximised for some populations and minimised for others. Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2010) 23–​26. 40 Butler, Precarious Life, 33. 41 “Fékk ekki að vita hver ásökunin væri” [Was Not Told What Consisted in the Accusations], Viðskiptablaðið, 20 December 2017, www.vb.is/​frettir/​fekk-​ekki-​ad-​vita-​hver-​asokunin-​vaeri/​143728/​ ?q=Innlent; Lovísa Arnardóttir, “Steinunn Ólína: ‘Metoo byltingunni til háðungar’ stígi konurnar ekki fram” [A Disgrace to #Metoo If the Women Do Not Come Forward], Fréttablaðið, 26 September 2019, www.frettabladid.is/​frettir/​steinunn-​olina-​metoo-​byltingu-​til-​hadungar-​stigi-​konurnar-​ekki-​fram/​. 42 Moira Donegan, “How #MeToo Revealed the Central Rift Within Feminism Today”, Guardian, 11 May 2018, www.theguardian.com/​news/​2018/​may/​11/​how-​metoo-​revealed-​the-​ central-​r ift-​within-​feminism-​social-​individualist. 43 Donegan, “How #MeToo”; “Nous défendons une liberté d’importuner, indispensable à la liberté sexuelle” [We Defend the Liberty to Annoy, Indispensable to Sexual Freedom], Le Monde, 9 January 2018, www. lemonde.fr/​idees/​article/​2018/​01/​09/​nous-​defendons-​une-​liberte-​d-​importuner-​indispensable​a-​la-​liberte-​sexuelle_​5239134_​3232.html. 44 Donegan, “How #MeToo”. 45 Martin Pengelly, “#MeToo: Thousands March in LA as Sexual Misconduct Allegations Continue”, Guardian, 12 November 2017, www.theguardian.com/​world/​2017/​nov/​12/​metoo-​march-​ hollywood-​sexual-​assault-​harassment; Raquel Carvahlo, “Thousands Gather at #Metoo Rally to Demand Hong Kong Police Answer Accusations of Sexual Violence against Protesters”, South China Morning Post, 28 August 2019, www.scmp.com/​news/​hong-​kong/​politics/​article/​3024789/​ thousands-​gather-​metoo-​rally-​demand-​hong-​kong-​police-​answer. 46 Kathi Weeks claims in her book Problem with Work that we ought to reclaim life (not work) for ourselves. According to this line of thought, we would have all-​inclusive life systems with labour being an integrated part of it. However, the contemporary capitalist societies in which we find ourselves currently divide our lives into labour and leisure. Weeks, Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 231–​232. 47 Marx, Capital, 784. 48 Brit Marling, “Harvey Weinstein and the Economics of Consent”, Atlantic, 23 October 2017, www. theatlantic.com/​entertainment/​archive/​2017/​10/​harvey-​weinstein-​and-​the-​economics-​of-​consent/​ 543618/​.

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Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir 49 Annadís G. Rúdólfsdóttir and Ásta Jóhannesdóttir, “Fuck Patriarchy!: An Analysis of Online Social and Mainstream Media Discussion of the #FreeTheNipple Activites in Iceland in March 2015”, Feminism and Psychology, 28, no. 1 (2018): 135. 50 Rúdólfsdóttir and Jóhannesdóttir, “Fuck patriarchy”, 135. 51 Farnush Ghadery, “#MeToo —​Has the ‘Sisterhood’ Finally Become Global or Just Another Product of Neoliberal Feminism?” Transnational Legal Theory 10 (2019): 252–​274; Catherine Rottenberg, “Can #MeToo Go beyond White Neoliberal Feminism?” Aljazeera, 13 December 2017, www.aljazeera. com/​indepth/​opinion/​metoo-​white-​neoliberal-​feminism-​171213064156855.html. 52 According to Icelandic naming traditions, a person should be identified by her given name, such as “Ásta”, since “Jóhannesdóttir” is strictly speaking not her name, but refers to her paternity. Although this confuses systems of reference within the English language, I  do think it is more important to honour different naming traditions as English has become the language of international discourses and debates, both theoretically and more generally. Therefore, international discourses in English should aim at including and honouring different naming-​traditions around the globe rather than to subsume most of them under English/​American traditions. 53 The fourth wave of feminism might be said to be a phenomenon of the post-​2008 global recession although later events such as the first slut walks in 2011 and the head of IMF Dominique Strauss-​ Kahn’s arrest for sexual misconduct in the same year (and the rallies after that event) might be early signs of the emphasis on sexual abuse within this wave. In a sense, this wave is perhaps still happening, although such a demarcation of periods is more commonly put forth after a period reaches its conclusion. For more on the fourth wave, see Prudence Chamberlain, The Feminist Fourth Wave: Affective Temporality (London: Palgrave, 2017). 54 It is important to acknowledge that “having a career” is not on offer for all workers. It is mostly educated middle-​class workers that have careers, whilst “unskilled” workers often transition from one job to another. Those of us reading a text such as this one are probably rather career-​oriented people that have invested greatly in our education. Thus, uprooting our unconscious careerism might be as important as not using the feminist card. 55 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex:  Women redefining Difference”, in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 123. 56 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, Marx/​Engels Internet Archive, retrieved 16 April 2018, www.marxists.org/​archive/​marx/​works/​1875/​gotha/​ch01.htm.

Bibliography Arnardóttir, Lovísa. “Steinunn Ólína:  “Metoo byltingunni til háðungar” stígi konurnar ekki fram” [A Disgrace to #Metoo If the Women Do Not Come Forward]. Fréttablaðið, 26 September 2019. www. frettabladid.is/​frettir/​steinunn-​olina-​metoo-​byltingu-​til-​hadungar-​stigi-​konurnar-​ekki-​fram/​. Brown, Wendy. States of Injury:  Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1995. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Butler, Judith. “What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”. In The Political, edited by David Ingram, 212–​228. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York and London: Verso, 2004. Butler. Judith. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble:  Feminism and Subversion of Identity. New  York and London:  Routledge, 2007. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2010. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Carvahlo, Raquel. “Thousands Gather at #Metoo Rally to Demand Hong Kong Police Answer Accusations of Sexual Violence against Protesters”. South China Morning Post, 28 August 2019. www.scmp.com/​ n ews/​ h ong-​ kong/​ p olitics/​ a rticle/​ 3 024789/​ t housands-​ g ather-​ m etoo-​ r ally​demand-​hong-​kong-​police-​answer. Castel, Robert. From Manual Workers to Wage Labourers: Transformation of the Social Question. Translated by Richard Boyd. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2014.

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#MeToo: beyond invulnerability Chamberlain, Prudence. The Feminist Fourth Wave: Affective Temporality. London: Palgrave, 2017. Donegan, Moira. “How #MeToo Revealed the Central Rift within Feminism Today”. Guardian, 11 May 2018. www.theguardian.com/​news/​2018/​may/​11/​how-​metoo-​revealed-​the-​central-​r ift-​within​feminism-​social-​individualist. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia, 2004. Ferrarese, Estelle. “Vulnerability: A Concept with Which to Undo the World as It Is?” Critical Horizons 17, no. 2 (2016): 149–​59. Foucault, Michael. “What Is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 32–​50. London: Penguin, 1991. Fulton, Catharine. “Women of Foreign Origin in Iceland Join #MeToo Movement”. Reykjavík Grapevine, 26 January 2018. https://​grapevine.is/​news/​2018/​01/​26/​women-​of-​foreign-​origin-​in-​iceland-​join-​ metoo-​movement/​, retrieved 6 February 2018. Ghadery, Farnush. “#MeToo —​Has the ‘Sisterhood’ Finally Become Global or Just Another Product of Neoliberal Feminism?” Transnational Legal Theory 10 (2019): 252–​274. Gilson, Erinn. “Vulnerability, Ignorance and Oppression”. Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 308–​332. Gilson, Erinn. Ethics of Vulnerability:  A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Gordon, Linda, and Nancy Fraser. “Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 309–​336. Halldórsdóttir, Nanna Hlín. “Vulnerable in a Job Interview: Butler’s Relational Ontology of Vulnerability as a Response to (Neo)liberalism”. PhD dissertation, University of Iceland, 2018. Hartmann, Heidi. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism”. In Women and Revolution:  A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, edited by Lydia Sargent, 1–​41. Cambridge: South End Press, 1981. Hendrikse, Reijer. “Neo-​illiberalism”. Geoforum 95 (2018): 169–​172. Hochschild, Arlie. The Managed Heart:  Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2012. Jaggar, Alison. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1983. Koivunen, Anu, Katarina Kyrölä, and Ingrid Ryberg. “Vulnerability as a Political Language”. In The Power of Vulnerability, edited by Koivunen, Kyrölä and Ryberg, 1–​26. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Le Monde. “Nous défendons une liberté d’importuner, indispensable a la liberté sexuelle” [We Defend the Liberty to Annoy, Indispensable to Sexual Freedom]. Le Monde, 9 January 2018. www.lemonde. fr/idees/article/2018/01/09/nous-defendons-une-liberte-d-importuner-indispensable-a-la-libertesexuelle_5239134_3232.html. Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women redefining Difference”. In Sister Outsider, 114–​123. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007. Lorey, Isabel. States of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Translated by Aileen Derieg. London: Verso Books, 2015. Macpherson, J. B. The Political Theory of Political Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. María Lilja Þrastardóttir. “Nauðgunin sem klauf bæjarfélag” [The Rape That Divided a Town]. Vísir, 9 April 2013. www.visir.is/​g/​2013130409213. Marling, Brit. “Harvey Weinstein and the Economics of Consent”. Atlantic, 23 October 2017. www. theatlantic.com/​entertainment/​archive/​2017/​10/​harvey-​weinstein-​and-​the-​economics-​of-​consent/​ 543618/​. Marx, Karl. Capital:  Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Vol. 1.  London:  Penguin Books, 1990. Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Programme”. Marx/​Engels Internet Archive. Retrieved 16 April 2018. www.marxists.org/​archive/​marx/​works/​1875/​gotha/​ch01.htm. Oksala, Johanna. “Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality”. Foucault Studies No. 16 (September 2013): 32–​53. Oksala, Johanna, “Affective Labour and Feminist Politics”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 2 (Winter, 2016): 281–​301. Ostry, Jonathan D., Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri. “Neoliberalism:  Oversold?” Finance & Development 53, No. 2 (June 2016): 38–​41. www.imf.org/​external/​pubs/​ft/​fandd/​2016/​06/​ostry.htm. Pateman, Carol. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.

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Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir Pengelly, Martin. “#MeToo:  Thousands March in La as Sexual Misconduct Allegations Continue”. Guardian, 12 November 2017. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2017/​nov/​12/​metoo-​march-​hollywood​sexual-​assault-​harassment. Phillips, Anne (ed.). Feminism and Equality. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Rottenberg, Catherine, “Can #MeToo Go beyond White Neoliberal Feminism?” Aljazeera, 13 December 2017. www.aljazeera.com/​indepth/​opinion/​metoo-​white-​neoliberal-​feminism-​171213064156855. html. Rúdólfsdóttir, Annadís G., and Ásta Jóhannesdóttir. “Fuck Patriarchy!:  An Analysis of Online Social and Mainstream Media Discussion of the #FreeTheNipple Activites in Iceland in March 2015”. Feminism and Psychology 28, no. 1 (2018):  135. http://​journals.sagepub.com/​doi/​full/​10.1177/​ 0959353517715876#.WnxBjqY-​KNY.facebook, retrieved 03.02.2019. Schippers, Birgit. The Political Philosophy of Judith Butler. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Viðskiptablaðið, “Fékk ekki a. vita hver ásökunin vari” [Was Not Told What Consisted in the Accusations]. Vi. skiptabla. i.,20 December 2017. www.vb.is/frettir/fekk-ekki-ad-vita-hver-asokunin-vaeri/ 143728/ ?q=Innlent. Weeks, Kathi. Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. White, Stephen. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.

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7 THE ANONYMOUS FEMINIST Agency, trauma, personhood, and the #MeToo movement Giti Chandra

If, like me, you put up a MeToo hashtag on social media (Twitter or Facebook, mainly), you might have noticed how it was met with waves of unconditional support. From heart emojis to fists of solidarity to short messages of love and encouragement, the MeToo hashtagger was surrounded with assurances of belief, expressions of regret and anger, offers of help. It is probably true to say that no-​one was asked to name the harasser, detail the specifics, and allow the public to judge the case on its merits, to decide whether you really had been sexually harassed or assaulted, and if so, how much sympathy you actually deserved. In other words, when you named yourself but not your perpetrator, everyone believed you and supported you. This response extended beyond your personal family and friends to social media acquaintances and complete strangers. People who did not know you nevertheless believed that you had been sexually harassed or assaulted, and sympathised with you. Of course, Tarana Burke, in 2006, initially intended the phrase to function as an expression of support and solidarity; as she said in a tweet, it was about “empowerment through empathy … to not only show the world how widespread and pervasive sexual violence is, but also to let other survivors know they are not alone … It’s beyond a hashtag. It’s the start of a larger conversation and a movement for radical community healing. Join us. #metoo”.1 Eleven years later, when Alyssa Milano’s exhortation took on viral proportions, the goal remained relatively simple: to convey to the world at large the magnitude of the problem and in this, as we know, it was spectacularly successful.2 Almost immediately, however, the victim/​perpetrator-​named/​unnamed dynamic changed, inverting itself in lists of named perpetrators assembled by anonymous victims. Moira Donegan’s “Shitty Media Men” list, a shared Google spreadsheet, was up for all of twelve hours before she took it down amidst news that Buzzfeed was going to publish it. By then, it had already produced various versions of itself that were available online.3 Referring to it in her article in the Guardian, Jessica Valenti pointed out the obvious: “Why have a list of victims when a list of perpetrators could be so much more useful?”4 That question signaled a shift in the movement, anticipating the various lists that would emerge in countries around the world. When four women co-​authored an article in Feminist Daily, a Polish publication, naming three men and mapping out what they called the “Cartoon Feminists” amongst Left-​wing men, one of the men immediately sued them, while C. Christine Fair’s article listing all the men in academia who had sexually harassed her was taken down from the Huffington Post. 99

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In India, Raya Sarkar’s list of men in academia came out as a response to this taking down of Fair’s article, beginning, like Donegan’s, as a Google spreadsheet. In what has come to be called “Whisper Sheets” the point was to alert women in the field to men at whose hands other women had experienced varying degrees of sexual harassment and assault. (In Donegan’s spreadsheet, actual physical assault, including rape or attempt to rape, was signified separately from harassment.) The reactions to these lists —​in which the victim was anonymous and the perpetrator named  —​were far less unanimous in their unconditional belief and support of the victims than was evident in the response to the MeToo hashtag. Indeed, the predominant reaction, initially, was one of disbelief, distrust, and disdain. The inference seemed to be that by not naming themselves, the victims were indulging in vendettas, and/​or a frivolous desire for fame, and/​or a reckless disregard for the reputations and well-​being of the men whom they were naming as perpetrators, by denying them the due process of the law. The anonymous accusers, through the women who chose to put their names to the list (such as Raya Sarkar) or who admitted to being the authors of the lists (such as Moira Donegan) were considered to be disregarding the law in general, and the long fight of feminists in making due process available to them, in particular. In her own defense, Moira Donegan wrote: “I’ve learned that protecting women is a position that comes with few protections itself.”5 Constance Grady commented that the one lesson to be learnt from “our great reckoning with systemic, entrenched misogyny and sexual violence” was that “every new accusation against a powerful man feels like such a seismic and monumental shift in the status quo that critics cry out that we are denying these men their due process”6 in spite of the fact that most of these men received their due process and more. While some men whose names featured on these lists did, indeed, face some consequences, the vast majority of them have not been formally charged with anything. The women, however, have been seen as puritanical sex panickers, as witch hunters, and as ruiners of innocent men who have been denied their rights. The issue of the need for, and advantages of, anonymity to those who had faced sexual harassment and assault was lost in the heat of the debates that opened up between feminists themselves. In the wake of the shock of many of the men named being fellow feminists, women  —​who came to be defined as “senior feminists” or “feminist authorities”  —​were divided from the mostly younger women on the issue of legality, the rights of the named men, and the propriety of such an action. Letters and articles were published in which the disapproval of these senior feminists was made amply clear, their own struggles seen as delegitimised, and demands made to take the lists down. As the Manifesto by Feministyczna Zmiana Warty put it, Counting among those who reacted to #MeToo were the so-​called feminist authority figures. Women, whose writings have traditionally been a source of inspiration for us … Allies, who used their prominence to fight for women’s rights. Unfortunately, their reactions were not what we would have expected from such figures.7 Published in its English translation in an article titled “The changing of the feminist guard! Time for true solidarity”, the disappointment outlined here echoed that of the occasionally less courteously phrased objections of the younger women in India where charges of ageism and casteism were among the many that flew back and forth. Elsewhere, in what has since come to be known as the “scolding” from senior feminists, French women, including Catherine Deneuve, signed a letter worrying whether the movement was not becoming a “puritanical witch hunt;”8 the women on the TV show, The View, wondered why young women today could not just say no, and Whoopi Goldberg recounted how her mamma had told her that if she didn’t want something to happen, she should just not go home with the man after a date.9 Women 100

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and feminists demanded substantiation from victims and cast doubt on the genuineness of the accusations. The divide between “senior” feminists and young women soon became deep and wide, with younger feminists expressing frustration over having their methods dismissed, their ideological perspectives belittled, and their political positions questioned. They observed  —​ largely accurately —​that the concern for the following of due process translated into a concern for the reputation and rights of powerful men and an inability to see beyond their own legacies; that women who had broken rules in their own struggles now looked askance at the less-​than-​ proper methods of younger women; that in their demand that the accusers reveal their identities and take their chances in a system that was seen as broken, and in being told what to do (take back /​take down the lists, for instance), these feminist authorities were displaying archetypical patriarchal behaviour. The community of senior feminists, the “we”, was thus set up against the anonymous younger women, whose feminism, was, therefore, cast in question, and who had not formed a political coalition and solidarity over many years. My own purpose, in this chapter, is not to argue in favour of either side or to adjudicate between them, but rather to try to understand the impact of the uses of anonymity on the issues and debates that inform this divide, and to offer constructive ways of thinking about these issues that do not fall into the various feminist traps that have plagued these discussions. The first and most obvious question addresses the psychology of belief and suspicion with regard to anonymity in this context. Why is it that when the anonymity attaches to the perpetrator rather than the victim, the standard response is to believe and support the victim; however, if the anonymity attaches to the victim rather than the perpetrator, this belief is withdrawn and replaced with suspicion, disbelief, and even accusation? The significant factor here is not, as might be assumed, a personal knowledge of the accuser/​victim; as J. Searle points out, a name is often nothing more than a nail on which to hang descriptors.10 In other words, on social media and in the context of lists that become public, the accuser is not necessarily known personally to the social media public. It is important to note that anonymous lists in general, and the “Shitty Media Men” and the Raya Sarkar lists in particular, were not originally meant for public consumption; Donegan’s list was very specifically circulated only among a given set of women in the field before it went public, and Sarkar’s list, as she clarified, was “primarily for students to be wary of their professors, because in [her] opinion, knowing how college administrations function, harassers will continue to hold their positions of power”.11 In other words, the contributors to the list were a trusted peer group, even though they had chosen to remain anonymous. The blurred lines between public and private spaces are significant in the context of sexual harassment and support or solidarity structures because the vulnerable body becomes a shared experience and always-​present fear even among complete strangers. As Simran, a student of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, says, “[our] lives are both public and private, much like the list itself. The list is honestly us as our social existence”.12 Indeed, the list functions as an expose of what Michael Taussig calls “a public secret” in which private conversations, whispered in dorm rooms and around water coolers, often happen between strangers, erasing the boundaries between the intimate and personal, and professional or public relationships.13 In this space, anonymity detaches itself from the usual context of the stranger/​unknown person, and the lack of trust or distrust that attaches to that trope, and participates, instead, in the secret structures of solidarity and support that have been part of the sexually vulnerable body in, arguably, all societies through history, but certainly in contemporary society. Anonymity, thus, does not function in the same way in different spheres, and the response to these lists from both men and women, feminists and others, is a forceful reminder that the general public outside these peer groups of solidarity sees anonymity as a sign of unreliability, 101

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outside the designated and approved systems of legality and propriety. Adele Reinhartz investigates the effect of “the absence of the proper name on a mimetic reading of [a]‌narrative … In doing so, [he] assume[s] the interdependence of plot and character within the narrative, in accordance with Henry James’s famous formulation: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”14 This interdependency of character and plot or incident in the mind of the reader is germane to the very public nature of the social media-​driven #MeToo movement and the ways in which names, naming, and not naming operate. This often self-​evident but overlooked relationship between the public’s desire to determine for itself what happened (the plot or incident) and its knowledge of the narrator and the perpetrator (characters) is, nevertheless, key to the responses and reactions to the issue of anonymity. However, as Searle reminds us, when we attach a name to an object or a person, the name does not describe that object or person: it merely becomes a peg on which to hang descriptions. Thus, when the onlooker demands a name for the anonymous survivor, it is not to be able to see the person as a person in their entirety, it is to be able to hang a descriptor on that name, which is, more often than not, that of an accuser of malintent. The psychology of suspicion towards the anonymous namer of perpetrators is eloquently laid out by Jackson Katz in his description of how “language holds victims accountable, rather than their perpetrators”. Pointing to the way in which the term “accuser” replaces the term “alleged victim”, Katz identifies this as constituting a significant shift in how we think about sexual violence. People tend to respond sympathetically to accounts of abuse even “alleged”, but Katz points out that using the term “accuser” reverses the process, because it turns the victim into an accuser. So we as a public are now positioned to identify sympathetically with him as the victim of her accusation, rather than with her as the victim of his alleged perpetration.15 In “The Other Side of Agency”, Soran Reader points out that the direct relationship between not knowing a person’s proper name and perceiving them as being only an agent, performing a singular function or fulfilling a unitary role.16 The suspicion of malintent is buttressed by the assumption that the accuser takes on the cloak of anonymity to hide behind, and that the desire to conceal oneself must necessarily conceal, also, subterfuge and deception. Hence, the deception lies in the narrative or story, and the motive can only be malign. In this sense, the anonymous person falls into the category of what Natanson calls “a kind of hiddenness”.17 Even if the person is named, Natanson argues, in general, unless that person is a personal acquaintance, public circulation of that person’s name and identity is limited to a single reference point or role; in other words, most such people are accessible to the general public only through the singular roles of their choosing.18 Hence, when millions of women put the MeToo hashtag on social media, they chose to peel off a single role from their multiply rounded identities and present it to the public; in one action, both revealing this one typified aspect of themselves and concealing (or choosing not to reveal) and protecting the rest of their identities from the public sphere. In this sense, Natanson claims, the opposite of anonymity is recognition, where recognition implies taking the whole person into account.19 As an act of agency, therefore, these people gave permission to hang one and only one descriptor on the peg of their names: that of the person to whom violence had been done. Their names functioned as nothing more. Naming themselves was not an invitation to the general public to inquire into their characters or the specifics of the plot/​incident, and, such is the power and inherent understanding of public discourse that, in response to the hashtag, no such inquiries were made. 102

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No suspicion of malintent was cast, no details of person or perpetrator or incident were sought. Natanson sees this kind of anonymity, in fact, as pure agency, in which a person abstracts this typified role as fulfilling only one function, one action. Importantly, for our purposes, to be thus faceless or anonymous when foregrounding your Self as only victim/​recipient of violence, is not to erase your Selfhood. Rather, it is to separate that part of your Self from the rest, so that the two are not elided. Doing so allows the anonymous person to always remember/​maintain that she is more —​and other —​than this victim/​person to whom violence has been done. A critical aspect of the issue of anonymity and sexual harassment is its implication in the erasure of selfhood in the process of claiming victimhood. The danger of claiming the suffering of an assault or other violence lies in being reduced to victimhood, where victimhood is seen as a state without agency, a passive condition in which the victim becomes object-​like, less of a person, through the loss of the ability to act in her own defense, survival, or cause. As Soran Reader reminds us in “The Other Side of Agency”, The agential bias is … a vast invisible structure which pervades our culture. It says: when I am an agent, I am, I count. But when I am passive, incapable, constrained, dependent, I am less a person, I count less.20 So implicit is this in social, psychological, and cultural attitudes that the discourse of taking charge of their own lives, of making decisions and taking actions that are discernible and tangible, pervades the theory and praxis of support systems and organisations. Reader argues that [I]‌n our philosophical tradition and our wider culture, we tend to think of persons as agents … [but while] this agential conception is flattering, … it conceals a more complex truth about what persons are. … [F]our features commonly presented as fundamental to personhood in versions of the agential conception [are] action, capability, choice and independence. [Yet] each of these agential features presupposes a non-​agential feature: agency presupposes patiency, capability presupposes incapability, choice presupposes necessity and independence presupposes dependency. … [S]uch non-​agential features, as well as being implicit within the agential conception, are as apt to be constitutive of personhood as agential features.21 The fact that suffering, pain, and trauma are all consequences of assault, and that sexual assault further implicates the vulnerable in shame, guilt, and inadequacy, makes this discourse of personhood as agent that much more dangerous and damaging in the context of anonymity. But Reader argues that these Patiency characteristics are as constitutive of personhood as Agency characteristics, and suggests that “we should broaden our conception to include patiential features, and modify our claims about the agential features to offer an account of personhood that is more balanced and realistic, less of a fantasy”.22 This plea for the expanding of our notions of what constitutes personhood, and the need to complicate our understanding of agency, is especially critical to the #MeToo movement and the many support structures it has necessitated and inspired. As Emma Hyndman discovered while creating The Amplify Project for anonymous accounts of sexual assault in her university, erasure of personhood can be performed in many ways: “not attaching a name to that story is not erasure —​not telling your story, suffering alone, is”. Anonymity as a way of protecting personhood, of safeguarding privacy, she found, “does not require silence, which can stigmatise survivors and engender shame and loneliness. ‘Invisible’ sexual violence is normalised. It ‘erases’ 103

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the individuals affected, who must carry and work through their pain alone.”23 People writing anonymously in The Amplify Project found that anonymous writing made their stories at once personal and universal. Anonymity works as a barrier against erasure of personhood, making visible a pain and trauma that are prevented from becoming stigma, an imposition of a false identity suffered in silence. Indeed, if Cathy Caruth’s dictum —​“Silence marks the site of trauma”24 —​is accurate, then anonymity is one of the few safe ways of breaking that silence. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, the possibility of anonymity has allowed spaces of support and solidarity to emerge, creating a means of dealing with the stories, memories, and experiences of sexual harassment and violence suffered by people of all genders. Anonymity allows those who have had violence done to them to have a means of breaking the silence in a safe space; to be part of a community of fellow sufferers; to find a language that legitimises emotion instead of having it delegitimised by a demand for rationality that trauma cannot always deliver; to have access to a form of catharsis through sharing and listening; to have a means of authenticating one’s experience; to be able to name the experience, to understand it for what it was; to regain a sense of empowerment; to create solidarities of empathy; and to keep the focus on the stories and the system that produced them, rather than on individuals. A trauma-​informed perspective opens up ways of thinking beyond a certain legal notion of “due process” to other notions of the rights of the survivor, and reveals the ways in which anonymity allows for empathy, solidarity, and authentication of pain and suffering. Ranging from confidentiality and privacy through the peer group of a shared oppression, not naming oneself allows those to whom violence has been done to name their experience, their emotions, and their irrational fears. In a politics of inarticulacy, the ability to give voice to a violence that is sometimes unspeakable in its very nature is an invaluable step towards coping and healing.25 The act of naming is often as intimate as the naming of oneself; in current usage, the term “survivor” is, by and large, preferred to the term “victim”. This is one of the fallouts of the issue of agency and the person to whom violence has been done as agent. Whereas “victim” is perceived as indicating a passiveness that implies that the person is less of a person (that is, “just a victim”), the idea of the “survivor” gestures towards a more active, agential, role played by the person to whom violence has been done, constructing from that sense of agency a kind of selfhood that is seen as more healthy, and less pejorative. Indeed, so prevalent is this view that some aid agencies will instruct their workers to only use the term “survivor”, and to avoid ever referring to the women they work with as “victims”. Yet, there are women who cannot see the point in pretending that they had any agency whatsoever in the violence that was done to them, and claim that, regardless of what they have done since, they were and are victims of sexual violence.26 The Bard may well have asked what is in a name, but in the absence of an individual’s given name, the self-​referential term determines the identity that is bestowed upon the person to whom violence has been done, and thereby determines the nature of the discourse in which they will participate. Consider, for instance, that while there are precisely two terms for the person to whom violence has been done —​victim and survivor —​the terms by which the perpetrator is referred to are many and nuanced. While the victim/​survivor binary reduces the person to an event, the terms with which we struggle to define the perpetrator take into account a full range of complexities. Depending on the nature of the harassment or assault, age, circumstances, context, etc., the perpetrator is assigned a specific term from among a long list: Harasser, Assaulter, Rapist, Bad Date, Sexist, Misogynist, Old-​fashioned, Only Human, Well Meaning but…, Misunderstood, Culturally Determined, Traditionalist, Conservative, Drunk, Patriarchal, Dirty Old Man, That Uncle, Touchy Feely, Hormone-​fuelled, Misguided, 104

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Reckless Athlete, and so on. There is a term specifically tailored to every perpetrator according to his complex humanity, and it refers only to the one action that is of relevance: not to his selfhood, his many-​sided identity. The person to whom the violence is done, on the other hand, is a person whose complex, multi-​faceted identity is reduced to the event of violence, whether she is “victim” or “survivor”. The labels attached to the person to whom violence has been done define who she is, confining her to a single event, while those ascribed to the predator describe what he did, opening up the vast world of socio-​cultural, political, human, and individual circumstances within which to situate him. Language determines the terms of the debate, and, of course, the language of choice is often determined by the medium in which it functions. Thus, whether it is for the purpose of brevity, of sharpening an argument, of developing a shorthand that facilitates communication, or of adhering to a certain kind of academic jargon or terminology, single-​word terms for complex phenomena are often preferred over longer, more complex, descriptors. In this, we are all culpable: to say “victim” or “survivor” in conversation, interviews, presentations, etc. as well as to write it in newspapers, magazine articles, or academic journal essays, is easier, simpler, less cumbersome than the longer but more accurate and less reductive “the person to whom violence has been done” or some such similar phrase. How would the conversation change if we were to take the time to make our writing more accurate, more appropriate, more respectful of the people whom we research and publish about? Much of the heat in the debates surrounding the anonymous lists has had to do with the ways in which these lists have been characterised —​as lynch lists, posse justice, mob mentality, hit lists, vigilante approach, etc.27 Even if these terms are metaphorical, it is imperative that we see them for what they and their histories represent: toxic masculinity, machismo, power, weaponisation, and violence. To apply these to women too vulnerable to even say their own names is to ally the terms of the debate with patriarchal, weaponised, power. Indeed, the anonymity of the people to whom violence has been done is turned against them with the force of terminology. To name the lists in the absence of being able to name the anonymous contributors to that list, is an act of power, of agency, that is wrested from the anonymous. What would the debate look like if the terms were different, other than these weaponised names for the lists? Perhaps the single greatest achievement of the #MeToo movement is to turn the spotlight on systems rather than individuals, exposing the enablement, empowerment, and complicity of structures and processes that make sexual harassment and assault the epidemic that they are. Rephrased thus, it is possible to think of the anonymity of the contributors to these lists as the disenfranchised wresting agency from paralysis; anonymity can be seen as an expression of the invisibility of the sexually harassed and assaulted that is imposed upon them by these systems. Such exposure of the process of invisibilisation has been seen as a protest against institutional systems that protect the powerful —​what Rebecca Solnit calls “an insurrectionary moment”,28 shifting the metaphorical emphasis away from a terminology of aggression towards a language of resistance. What does this mean for feminist theories and praxis? In thinking through these issues surrounding anonymity in the #MeToo movement, it is clear to me that resisting easy binaries of named and nameless is difficult but imperative. It is possible to see the named hashtagger and the anonymous namer of perpetrators as a composite person trapped in a system that has failed them. I have learnt that disassociating naming from personhood, agency, or authenticity must become my feminist practice and that I must bring any and all fields of knowledge to bear upon my understanding of these discussions, from trauma studies to philosophy, decolonisation to legality. I have discovered that the only way forward together is to expand my feminism to 105

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include all who resist, to constantly redefine and rephrase ideas, to build solidarities, and to recognise that a person can be silent and a feminist, suffering and a feminist, passive and a feminist, vulnerable and a feminist, anonymous and a feminist.

Notes 1 Tarana Burke (@TaranaBurke), “It Made My Heart Swell to See Women Using This Idea —​One That We Call ‘Empowerment Through Empathy’ ”, Twitter, 15 October 2017, https://​twitter.com/​ TaranaBurke/​status/​919704166515335174; Burke, “It’s Beyond a Hashtag. It’s the Start of a Larger Conversation and a Movement for Radical Community Healing. Join Us”, Twitter, 15 October 2017, https://​twitter.com/​TaranaBurke/​status/​919704393934614528; Burke, “To Not Only Show the World How Widespread and Pervasive Sexual Violence Is, But Also to Let Other Survivors Know They Are Not Alone. #MeToo.” Twitter, 15 October 2017, https://​twitter.com/​TaranaBurke/​status/​ 919704393934614528. 2 Abby Ohlheiser, “The Woman Behind ‘Me Too’ Knew the Power of the Phrase When She Created It —​ 10 Years Ago”, Washington Post, 19 October 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​ wp/​2017/​10/​19/​the-​woman-​behind-​me-​too-​knew-​the-​power-​of-​the-​phrase-​when-​she-​created-​it-​ 10-​years-​ago/​. 3 Moira Donegan, “I Started the Media Men List: My name is Moira Donegan”, Cut, 10 January 2018, www.thecut.com/​2018/​01/​moira-​donegan-​i-​started-​the-​media-​men-​list.html. 4 JessicaValenti,“#MeToo Named theVictims.Now,Let’s List the Perpetrators”, Guardian,17 October 2017, www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2017/​oct/​16/​me-​too-​victims-​perpetrators-​sexual-​assault. 5 Donegan, “I Started the Media Men List: My Name Is Moira Donegan”. 6 Constance Grady, “The ‘Shitty Media Men’ List, Explained”, Vox, 11 January 2018, www.vox.com/​ culture/​2018/​1/​11/​16877966/​shitty-​media-​men-​list-​explained. 7 Feministyczna Zmiana Warty, “The Changing of the Feminist Guard! Time for True Solidarity”, Ark Review/​Manifesto, 1 March 2018, http://​arkbooks.dk/​the-​changing-​of-​the-​feminist-​guard-​time​for-​true-​solidarity. 8 Grady, “The Waves of Feminism, and Why People Keep Fighting Over Them, Explained”, Vox, 20 July 2018, www.vox.com/​2018/​3/​20/​16955588/​feminism-​waves-​explained-​first-​second-​third-​fourth. 9 Jacob Stolworthy, “Whoopi Goldberg Criticizes Aziz Ansari Accuser”, Independent, 17 January 2018, www.independent.co.uk/​arts-​ entertainment/​tv/​news/​whoopi-​goldberg-​aziz-​ansari-​criticises-​ accuser-​the-​view-​non-​verbal-​clue-​babe-​sunny-​hostin-​a8163366.html. 10 John R. Searle, “Proper Names”, Mind 67, no. 266 (1958): 166–​173. 11 Karthik Shankar, “Why I  Published a List of Sexual Predators in Academia”, Interview with Raya Sarkar, Buzzfeed, 25 October 2017, www.buzzfeed.com/​karthikshankar/​why-​i-​published-​ a-​list-​of-​sexual-​predators-​in-​academia?bffbdialogue. 12 Ishita Tiwari and Tarangini Sriraman, “How Young Women in Indian Academia Feel About the List”, Buzzfeed, 22 November 2017, www.buzzfeed.com/​ishitatiwary/​how-​young-​women-​in-​indian-​ academia-​feel-​about-​the-​list?utm_​term=.nc3QRy8Zd&ref=mobile_​share#.rbRkBa4yP. 13 Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 14 Adele Reinhartz, “Anonymity and Character in the Books of Samuel”, Semeia 63 (1993): 118. 15 Robert Keren, “The Language of Gender Violence”, Jackson Katz (website), accessed 13 May 2020, www.jacksonkatz.com/​news/​language-​gender-​violence/​. 16 Soran Reader, “The Other Side of Agency”, Philosophy 82, vol. 4 (2007): 579–​604. 17 Maurice Natanson, “Phenomenology, Anonymity, and Alienation”, New Literary History 10, no.  3 (Spring 1979): 533–​546. 18 Natanson, “Solipsism and Sociality”, New Literary History 5, no. 2 (1974): 237–​244. 19 Natanson, “Phenomenology, Anonymity, and Alienation”. 20 Reader, “The Other Side of Agency”, 580. 21 Reader, “The Other Side of Agency”, 579. 22 Reader, “The Other Side of Agency”, 580. 23 Emma Hyndman, “The Invisible #MeToo:  How Anonymous Testimony Can Help Survivors of Sexual Abuse”, Open Democracy, 16 November 2017, www.opendemocracy.net/​en/​5050/​invisible​metoo-​anonymous-​testimony-​sexual-​abuse.

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The anonymous feminist 24 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 25 Giti Chandra, Narrating Violence, Constructing Collective Identities: To Witness These Wrongs Unspeakable (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 26 Zilka Spahić-​Šiljak, “Victim or Survivor? Choosing Identity and Being Acknowledged after Wartime Sexual Violence in Bosnia” (Lecture, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, 7 February 2019), https://​r ikk. hi.is/​fornarlamb-​eda-​tholandi/​. 27 Amrit Dhillon, “Metoo Campaign Morphs into ‘Vigilante’ List of Academics Accused of Harassment”, Sydney Morning Herald, updated 27 October 2017, www.smh.com.au/​world/​metoo-​campaign-​ morphs-​into-​vigilante-​list-​of-​academics-​accused-​of-​harassment-​20171027-​gz9ep3.html 28 Rebecca Solnit, “Feminists Have Slowly Shifted Power. There’s No Going Back”, Common Dreams, 8 March 2018, www.commondreams.org/​views/​2018/​03/​08/​feminists-​have-​slowly-​shifted-​power-​ theres-​no-​going-​back.

Bibliography Burke, Tarana (@TaranaBurke), “It’s Beyond a Hashtag. It’s the Start of a Larger Conversation and a Movement for Radical Community Healing. Join Us”. Twitter, 15 October 2017. https://​twitter.com/​ TaranaBurke/​status/​919704393934614528. Burke, Tarana (@TaranaBurke), “It Made My Heart Swell to See Women Using This Idea  —​One That We Call ‘Empowerment through Empathy’ ”. Twitter, 15 October 2017. https://​twitter.com/​ TaranaBurke/​status/​919704166515335174. Burke, Tarana (@TaranaBurke), “To Not Only Show the World How Widespread and Pervasive Sexual Violence Is, But Also to Let Other Survivors Know They Are Not Alone. #MeToo”. Twitter, 15 October 2017. https://​twitter.com/​TaranaBurke/​status/​919704393934614528. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Chandra, Giti. Narrating Violence, Constructing Collective Identities:  To Witness These Wrongs Unspeakable. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Chaudhary, Manira. “India’s #MeToo Movement Explodes, but This Is Just the Beginning”. TRT World, 10 October 2018. www.trtworld.com/​opinion/​india-​s-​metoo-​movement-​explodes-​but​this-​is-​just-​the-​beginning-​20793. Dasani, Neerja. “Raya Sarkar’s List, and How It Empowered Me to Tell My Story”. News Minute, 8 January 2018. www.thenewsminute.com/​article/​raya-​sarkar-​s-​list-​and-​how-​it-​empowered-​me-​tell​my-​story-​74357. Dhillon, Amrit. “Metoo Campaign Morphs into ‘Vigilante’ List of Academics Accused of Harassment”. Sydney Morning Herald, updated 27 October 2017. www.smh.com.au/​world/​metoo-​campaign-​ morphs-​into-​vigilante-​list-​of-​academics-​accused-​of-​harassment-​20171027-​gz9ep3.html Donegan, Moira. “I Started the Media Men List: My name is Moira Donegan”. Cut, 10 January 2018. www.thecut.com/​2018/​01/​moira-​donegan-​i-​started-​the-​media-​men-​list.html. Economic Times. “Anonymous Posts Weaken #MeToo”. Editorial, 23 October 2018. https://​ economictimes.indiatimes.com/​blogs/​et-​editorials/​anonymous-​posts-​weaken-​metoo. Firstpost. “Raya Sarkar Faces Death, Rape Threats after Sexual Predators’ List Takes Academia by Storm”. 28 October 2017. www.firstpost.com/​india/​raya-​sarkar-​faces-​death-​rape-​threats-​after-​sexual-​ predators-​list-​takes-​academia-​by-​storm-​4181659.html. Foss, Sonja K., and Cindy L. Griffin. “Beyond Persuasion:  A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric”. Communications Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 2–​18. Goldman, Florencia. “The dilemmas facing #MeToo: Anonymity is Necessary”. Take Back the Tech, accessed 14 May 2020. www.takebackthetech.net/​blog/​dilemmas-​facing-​metoo-​anonymity-​necessary. Grady, Constance. “The ‘Shitty Media Men’ List, Explained”. Vox, 11 January 2018. www.vox.com/​culture/​2018/​1/​11/​16877966/​shitty-​media-​men-​list-​explained. Grady, Constance. “The Waves of Feminism, and Why People Keep Fighting over Them, Explained”. Vox, 20 July 2018. www.vox.com/​2018/​3/​20/​16955588/​feminism-​waves-​explained-​first-​second-​third-​fourth. Hyndman, Emma. “The Invisible #MeToo:  How Anonymous Testimony Can Help Survivors of Sexual Abuse”. Open Democracy, 16 November 2017. www.opendemocracy.net/​en/​5050/​invisible-​ metoo-​anonymous-​testimony-​sexual-​abuse.

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Giti Chandra Jayawardane, M. Neelika. “Anonymity Is a Necessary Tool for India’s #MeToo Movement”. Al Jazeera, 14 October 2019. www.aljazeera.com/​indepth/​opinion/​anonymity-​tool-​india-​metoo-​movement-​ 191014112350666.html. Keren, Robert. “The Language of Gender Violence”. Jackson Katz (website). Accessed 13 May 2020. www.jacksonkatz.com/​news/​language-​gender-​violence. Lakhani, Somya. “Me Too”. Indian Express, updated 19 February 2018. http://​indianexpress.com/​article/​ opinion/​columns/​me-​too-​campaign-​sexual-​harassment-​sexism-​5069071/​. Lozano-​Reich, Nina M., and Dana L. Cloud. “The Uncivil Tongue:  Invitational Rhetoric and the Problem of Inequality”. Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 2 (2009): 220–​226. Mulvaney, Erin, and Hassan A. Kanu. “Anonymous Workplace Harassment Suits Double in #MeToo Era”. Bloomberg Law, 29 July 2019. https://​biglawbusiness.com/​anonymous-​workplace-​harassment​suits-​double-​in-​metoo-​era. Natanson, Maurice. “Phenomenology, Anonymity, and Alienation”. New Literary History 10, no. 3, (Spring 1979): 533–​546. Natanson, Maurice. “Solipsism and Sociality”. New Literary History 5, no. 2 (1974): 237–​244. Ohlheiser, Abby. “The Woman behind ‘Me Too’ Knew the Power of the Phrase When She Created It —​ 10 Years Ago”. Washington Post, 19 October 2017. www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​ wp/​2017/​10/​19/​the-​woman-​behind-​me-​too-​knew-​the-​power-​of-​the-​phrase-​when-​she-​created-​it-​ 10-​years-​ago/​. Press Trust of India. “#MeToo: Can’t Permit Guerilla Warfare by Allowing Anonymity to Accusers, Says HC”. India Today, 21 November 2019. www.indiatoday.in/​india/​story/​me-​too-​accuser-​anonymous​anonymity-​persmssion-​delhi-​high-​court-​1621376-​2019-​11-​21. Reader, Soran. “The Other Side of Agency”. Philosophy 82, vol. 4 (2007): 579–​604. Reinhartz, Adele. “Anonymity and Character in the Books of Samuel”. Semeia 63 (1993): 117–​141. Reynolds, Molly. “#MeToo Victims Are Finding a Safe Haven in an Anonymous Social Network”. Thrive Global, 11 October 2018. https://​thriveglobal.com/​stories/​metoo-​victims-​are-​finding-​a-​safe-​ haven-​in-​an-​anonymous-​social-​network/​. Roiphe, Katie. “The Other Whisper Network:  How Twitter Feminism Is Bad for Women”. Harper’s Magazine, March 2018. https://​harpers.org/​archive/​2018/​03/​the-​other-​whisper-​network-​2. Rosenfeld, Jordana. “What Moira Donegan Did for Young Women Writers”. Nation, 12 January 2018. www.thenation.com/​article/​archive/​what-​moira-​donegan-​did-​for-​young-​women-​writers/​. Searle, John R. “Proper Names”. Mind 67, no. 266 (1958): 166–​173. Shankar, Karthik. “Why I  Published A  List of Sexual Predators in Academia”. Interview with Raya Sarkar. Buzzfeed, 25 October 2017. www.buzzfeed.com/​karthikshankar/​why-​i-​published-​a​list-​of-​sexual-​predators-​in-​academia?bffbdialogue. Smith, Mike. “Soldiers Turn to Anonymous App to Share PTSD Struggles”. Channel 4 News, 8 September 2014. www.channel4.com/​news/​soldiers-​ptsd-​apps-​whisper-​secret-​post-​traumatic-​stress. Solnit, Rebecca. “Feminists Have Slowly Shifted Power. There’s No Going Back”. Common Dreams, 8 March 2018. www.commondreams.org/​views/​2018/​03/​08/​feminists-​have-​slowly-​shifted​power-​theres-​no-​going-​back. Spahić-​Šiljak, Zilka. “Victim or Survivor? Choosing Identity and Being Acknowledged after Wartime Sexual Violence in Bosnia”. Lecture, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, 7 February 2019. https://​r ikk. hi.is/​fornarlamb-​eda-​tholandi/​. Stolworthy, Jacob. “Whoopi Goldberg Criticizes Aziz Ansari Accuser”. Independent, 17 January 2018. www.independent.co.uk/ ​ arts- ​ entertainment/ ​tv/ ​ n ews/​whoopi-​goldberg- ​a ziz-​a nsari-​ criticises-​ accuser-​the-​view-​non-​verbal-​clue-​babe-​sunny-​hostin-​a8163366.html. Taussig, Michael. Defacement:  Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1999. Tiwari, Ishita, and Tarangini Sriraman. “How Young Women in Indian Academia Feel About the List”. Buzzfeed News, 22 November 2017. www.buzzfeed.com/​ishitatiwary/​how-​young-​women-​in-​indian-​ academia-​feel-​about-​the-​list?utm_​term=.nc3QRy8Zd&ref=mobile_​share#.rbRkBa4yP. Valenti, Jessica. “#MeToo Named the Victims. Now, Let’s List the Perpetrators”. Guardian, 17 October 2017. www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2017/​oct/​16/​me-​too-​victims-​perpetrators-​sexual-​assault. Warty, Feministyczna Zmiana. “The Changing of the Feminist Guard! Time for True Solidarity”. Ark Review/​Manifesto, 1 March 2018. http://​arkbooks.dk/​the-​changing-​of-​the-​feminist-​guard-​ time-​for-​true-​solidarity.

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8 SILENCING RESISTANCE TO THE PATRIARCHY Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir

The #MeToo movement successfully united women in breaking the long silence surrounding the culture of sexual violence. Given that the movement challenges the status quo, it comes as no surprise that it has also been met with resistance. After all, the #MeToo movement is pitted against the very foundations of an enormous century-​old social system dedicated to keeping women down. Our society has been conditioned to stay silent about sexual abuse and harassment, ensuring the continued social dominance of men over women. Any movement fighting against that system will be deemed suspect in many ways and subjected to all manner of critiques. I will consider some of the attempts made to dampen the success of the #MeToo movement, particularly via misrepresentation of the movement’s message, purpose, and actions. I put this tactic of misrepresentation in the context of so-​called benevolent sexism and show how women resisting this kind of treatment tend to be vilified. The chapter is divided into five main sections. In the first, I introduce the notion of epistemic injustice and present as an example the silencing of discussions about sexual violence, accompanied by a failure to acknowledge its ubiquity in our culture. In the next section, I argue that the #MeToo movement can be seen as a movement fighting for epistemic justice, or an epistemic resistance movement. The two subsequent sections are dedicated to a discussion of two examples of misrepresentation of the #MeToo movement, followed by a section explaining the connection to benevolent sexism. The main claim is that the #MeToo movement is perceived as resistance to benevolent sexism, and is therefore met with punishment and damage control in the form of misrepresentation.

Sexual violence and epistemic injustice When women’s #MeToo-​announcements flooded social media platforms, many men voiced their surprise at how common it was for women to have been harassed or violated. It seemed as if literally every woman they knew had experienced a sexual assault or sexual harassment of some kind. Many women, on the other hand, were baffled by men’s surprise. Experiencing sexual harassment, if not abuse, is something to which women become accustomed. Women

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learn at a very early age that sexual harassment and abuse are ever-​present threats, and they expect to spend their lives trying to avoid these dehumanising experiences. Harassment often takes place in public, performed as a matter of fact, and the dark threat of sexual violence weighs heavily on women, not only in their discussions amongst themselves but also in literature and other forms of art and communication. Given the unremitting presence of these threats in women’s lives, one must ask how it could possibly have escaped any human being’s attention that sexual harassment and at least the threat of sexual violence taint the lives of all women. We can infer from men’s shock at #MeToo that there existed (and still exists) a widespread habit among men of failing to take women’s accounts of harassment and abuse seriously, or of discounting such testimonies as uninteresting and unworthy of attention. Further, many men have failed to notice harassment occurring right in front of them or failed to register incidents of harassment taking place in their presence. This disregard is an example of what has been called epistemic injustice.1 Epistemic injustice exists when members of marginalised or subordinated groups are not heard, believed or respected, and are thus in some way silenced. As a result, members of these groups do not get a chance to participate fully in the production of knowledge, or are not considered credible sources of knowledge. The concept of “epistemic injustice” has gained increasing attention within social epistemology in recent years, and is often traced back to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 1988 article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”2 Spivak elucidates how subordinated people are prevented from being knowing agents about matters that concern their own interests, and she uses the concept “epistemic violence” to describe this phenomenon. Miranda Fricker’s 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing has been very influential.3 Other philosophers have been working on related issues, including Kristie Dotson, who has written on epistemic oppression, and José Medina, who works on ways to fight for epistemic justice, or what he calls epistemic resistance.4 Ignoring or denying credibility to women’s accounts is an example of what Fricker calls testimonial injustice: the prejudice of the intended listener prevents them from deeming the speaker believable. Women’s accounts of sexual violence have frequently been disbelieved, their charges of rape have been found to lack credibility and they have been accused of making up sexual abuse allegations in order to gain attention or because of ill-​will towards the alleged perpetrator. These judgments all contribute to the environment of epistemic injustice that women have endured, in particular concerning matters of sexual violence. Lack of credibility can present in various ways. For example, a speaker’s testimony may be openly doubted, and the speaker may be punished. But often the reaction is indirect: the speaker and her words are simply ignored. We are all familiar with this tactic when it comes to dealing with young children who are misbehaving:  when we wish to discourage some undesired behaviour, we ignore it rather than reward it with attention. Indeed, we use this method precisely because we do not think of small children as fully accountable or credible, and we think of ourselves as adults, wiser and in charge of determining what should be taken seriously. The normal expectation, at least in a society that we take to be egalitarian, is that all adults should be considered epistemic equals; we like to think that everyone has an equal right to be heard. However, in a society in which people are unequally positioned when it comes to power, various forms of epistemic injustice may thrive and testimonial injustice may occur. Here is an example: suppose that a person with little social power expresses an idea or opinion that is considered undesirable or uncomfortable by those with more social power; those in power could, of course, spend time and energy responding to the words of this person, meticulously searching for flaws in the argument and picking them apart one by one. People in power sometimes take this approach. But more often than not, it is easier and more convenient for the 110

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powerful to pretend as if nothing was said at all, and to just wait until the boat-​rocking rebel gets tired and shuts up. As a matter of fact, ignoring or shunning is a highly effective method of conveying that an account is not credible or that the person behind it is not credible. Responding to an account implies that the message was worth listening to, worth attempting to comprehend, and ultimately worth attempting to refute. But shunning or ignoring implies that the speaker has so little credibility and is so unworthy of respect that the intended recipient of the message cannot be bothered to waste time listening. The speaker’s words are treated as worthless. As a result, speakers will often stop trying to speak or express themselves. This is why shunning is such a powerful silencing method; it renders words ineffective, such that those trying to get a message across will cease their attempts because they find them futile. Sexual abuse and harassment of women that fails to be acknowledged as abuse or harassment, or even fails to be acknowledged as a notable event at all, is an example of what Fricker calls hermeneutical injustice.5 Prejudice prevents those interpreting the society and environment from having what it takes to understand a certain kind of experience belonging to a particular social group. For example, occurrences such as sexual and humiliating talk towards women, or men being sexually aggressive in spite of repeated rejections and no signs of interest, seem to be aspects of many cultures that people tend not to question. The rules of interpretation are determined by those who have more power and who have never had to think of themselves as in the other position. According to these implicit rules, women as a group do not deserve full respect, nor are they credible interlocutors. They do not really know what they want, or do not know how to express it. To draw an example from the vast sea of old Icelandic sayings, “Nei er meyjar já” translates to “No is a maiden’s yes”. Katharine Jenkins has argued that rape myths and domestic abuse myths, in which the blame is placed on the victim and in which both rape and domestic abuse are very narrowly defined, constitute hermeneutical injustice. She argues that because of the prevalence of such myths in their social environment, victims of rape or domestic violence may fail to identify their own experiences as such.6 In her paper “ ‘Me Too’:  Epistemic Injustice and the Struggle for Recognition”, Debra L. Jackson describes the enormous, horrendous effects that various forms of epistemic injustice have on victims of sexual assault and harassment when their experiences go unacknowledged, when their stories are not believed, or when their accounts are discredited. For example, when victims of sexual assault and harassment are silenced, they suffer from testimonial injustice, which Jackson describes as follows: Instead of receiving sympathy, hearers respond to victims with hostility, which can be particularly painful when coming from loved ones to whom one typically turns to for support. Instead of receiving social support, victims become socially isolated and ostracized. They are left to attempt to cope with the harm they endure on their own, or to try to locate limited services from organizations such as rape crisis centers. Instead of being able to access medical care or legal recourse, victims are rejected by those professionals sworn to advocate on the behalf of the vulnerable.7

#MeToo as epistemic resistance In José Medina’s account, those in positions of power are often oblivious to the day-​to-​day realities of the less powerful, which again results in epistemic injustice in the form of both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. According to Medina, this constitutes ignorance of social conditions and context, or social ignorance, as well as ignorance of one’s own position in 111

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the world. Thus, a person in a position of power who would like to improve social realities needs to become better informed on two levels: first, on general social conditions and the context surrounding them, and second, on their own position in the world. Persons in positions of power have the privilege of “not needing to know” about various facets of life that may cause them discomfort or inconvenience them. By contrast, those in subordinate positions have no choice: they are aware of the conditions of their lives, but are trained to think these conditions are unremarkable and unworthy of discussion. A possible answer to this predicament, says Medina, is for the underprivileged groups to resist “epistemic regimes” through solidarity movements. This is what he calls “epistemic resistance”.8 The #MeToo movement can be interpreted as an act of mass resistance against the silencing of women’s voices around sexual violence. By joining forces en masse, women made it impossible, or at least much more difficult, to silence accounts of sexual abuse and sexual harassment. As soon as one woman had spoken, the next took over, saying “Me too”. While people in positions of social power can easily dismiss the credibility of singular voices, dismissing the credibility of a chorus of voices sharing similar stories is much more difficult. As the movement grows, so does its credibility. Medina describes this kind of phenomenon as “echoing”, whereby an act of resistance becomes particularly significant and powerful because it is repeated or re-​described in a social network of resistance.9 Circumstances and historical context dictate whether an act will be echoed. We might say that Alyssa Milano’s request on Twitter, in the fall of 2017, that all women who had experienced sexual assault or harassment write “MeToo” was very successfully echoed, precisely because it occurred at the right time, under the right circumstances. A similar request a few years prior might have been unsuccessful because the environment was not yet conducive to such action. Debra Jackson argues that the “Me Too” response is especially powerful as an act of epistemic resistance, for, among other things, its recognition effect. A person responding with “Me too” indicates that they believe that the speaker’s description of an experience of sexual assault is true and that the speaker is knowledgeable about the topic. Also at work is the recognition of a shared experience: The “too” in the response is the central feature of the moment of mutual recognition. When I respond “me too”, I not only recognise her as reliable testifier, I also expose myself as a victim and make myself vulnerable to her judgment about my testimony. Our mutual vulnerability empowers each other as both epistemic and moral agents.10 Jackson’s focus is on the power of simultaneous mutual recognition and mutual vulnerability. The acknowledgement of the experience becomes almost self-​ evident in that process. If I respond to your testimony with “Me too”, it goes without saying that I believe you; I do not even need to explicitly say so. In addition to the resistance to testimonial injustice, I believe #MeToo also provides resistance to hermeneutical injustice. Listening to, witnessing, and participating in discussions around various accounts of sexual assault and harassment has been eye-​opening for many. What’s more, the enormous public attention garnered by the movement and its thousands upon thousands of participants helped to further establish women’s experiences of sexual harassment and abuse as an important topic. The #MeToo movement can also be viewed as a way to undermine the ruling ideology. Hilkje Hänel describes sexual violence as a social practice within a sexist ideological framework. Within that ideological framework, violence is a tool of male dominance, and those thoroughly entrenched in the system may fail to recognise some acts of sexual violence for what they are, as their interpretation of the events is shaped by an ideology 112

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that assumes women are naturally submissive.11 In this sense, the #MeToo movement worked against sexist ideology by exposing systemic sexual violence.

Out for revenge? The #MeToo movement witnessed women finding ways to gather, often in online forums, and share personal stories of being disrespected or violated sexually. These accounts varied greatly and involved everything from inappropriate comments to violent rape. In some cases, accounts centred on a specific perpetrator and aimed at finding a way to prevent him from inflicting further harm, but the vast majority of accounts involved anonymous perpetrators and had nothing to do with trying to expose specific individuals. Nevertheless, news of specific, high-​profile perpetrators gained by far the greatest media attention, resulting in massive scandals. This is unsurprising, given the tendency of mainstream media to focus on news of celebrity “clickbait” stories as opposed to the more “mundane” stories of average people. As a result, the attention paid to a handful of cases of powerful men who were named and as a result lost their jobs, such as Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K., far outmeasured the attention received by the movement writ large, in which thousands upon thousands of women shared stories of abuse and an unwillingness to tolerate it any longer. In Iceland, for example, 815 anonymous stories were published in the media by 15 December 2017, accompanied by the signatures of 5650 women.12 In the months to follow, two stories of men who were named as perpetrators and lost their jobs gained national media attention: one, an actor at Reykjavík City Theatre and the other, an executive at Reykjavik Energy. The third case, of a retired politician being outed in the media by several women after what appeared to be a 50-​year long history of harassment and abuse of women, gained national attention in January 2019. In fact, some of the information about him had been revealed some years earlier, but had sparked far less public interest. In other words, very few perpetrators were named during and after the Icelandic #MeToo campaign, and in some cases, those perpetrators did not face any consequences. And yet, the #MeToo movement has repeatedly been criticised as being all about vengeful bloodlust, with a focus on hunting down and shaming men guilty of sexual violence. In fact, some have claimed that finding men guilty of sexual harassment and getting them fired from their jobs is one of the main goals of the #MeToo movement. As a result, many critics now position men as constantly under attack, afraid that even the most innocuous remarks may be misunderstood, taken as sexual harassment, and cost them their jobs; they argue that “nothing is allowed anymore”. According to such complaints, men can no longer offer friendly hugs to their female coworkers, or friendly gestures of any kind, lest these gestures be misread as sexual. Taken to the extreme, this line of reasoning leads to the worry that humankind might even go extinct, as men are no longer allowed to make the first move on a woman they are romantically interested in (apparently some law of nature prohibits women from making the first move). Women in the #MeToo movement are frequently mischaracterised as being unduly angry at men in general, which, if true, would be unfair given that most men are not guilty of the actions criticised by the movement. Thus, critics argue, the movement unfairly generalises about men and demonises them as part of a widespread witch-​hunt.13 In response to these accusations, women in the #MeToo movement have had to spend precious time defending themselves, the movement, and its goals. While in some cases women have reason to focus on catching and punishing a specific perpetrator of sexual abuse or exposing a serial harasser who ruins the workplace experience for a number of coworkers, it is nonetheless a gross misrepresentation to claim that the overarching goal of the #MeToo movement is to shame and punish not only male perpetrators, but men in general. In truth, the ultimate goal 113

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of #MeToo is to expose and eradicate sexual violence as a tool to keep women down. Women should have the opportunity, in work and leisure, to thrive free of fear of sexual harassment, abuse, and other forms of injustice. The more immediate goal of the movement is to use solidarity to break the silence surrounding these issues. Misrepresentation of #MeToo serves to undermine the credibility of the movement and its cause. Instead of being positioned as fighters for justice, members of the #MeToo movement are cast as angry and vindictive. There is, of course, nothing new in this type of representation of feminist causes. The image of feminists as angry man-​haters with no sense of humor is an old and much-​used trope that has often proven very effective. And yet, social trends indicate that men have hardly any reason to fear this supposed feminist rage: violent acts against men, performed by women, citing hatred of men, and motivated by feminism, are all but unheard of. No such trend exists. By contrast, male violence against women is an obvious and well-​ documented problem: women are murdered by their husbands, boyfriends, former partners; they are beaten and raped. While women can, of course, be perpetrators of violence, male violence against women is far more common. Even when female violence does occur, feminism is not a known motivation —​but hatred of women is frequently cited as an explicit motive for all kinds of violence against women performed by men, including mass murders.14 Hence, trying to make it look as if feminism has a man-​hating problem is a gross misrepresentation. There is no such problem. We —​as scholars, as people —​do, on the other hand, have reason to worry about the hatred and apparent lack of empathy that many men feel towards women. We also have reason to worry about our culture’s structural contempt for women and the countless ways in which they are systematically disrespected and silenced.

The case of the paintings in the Central Bank, Iceland An interesting example of the misrepresentation of the #MeToo movement concerns a case that arose in Iceland in January 2019. In the spring of 2018, a staff member at the Central Bank of Iceland lodged a complaint about two paintings of nude women by the artist Gunnlaugur Blöndal (1893–​1962) that were hanging on the walls of their workplace. The staff member’s complaint, an act of protest, was presented to the public as having been inspired by the #MeToo movement.15 According to descriptions in the media, one of the paintings was hanging such that it was surrounded by paintings of fully clothed men, and the other was hanging in a prominent spot in the office of a male staff member in a position of authority; several female staff members had, when visiting the office, mentioned that the painting made them uncomfortable.16 The Central Bank sought consultation from the Directorate of Equality, and in January 2019 (seven months later) decided to remove the paintings and put them in storage. It is worth mentioning that the Central Bank owns a sizable art collection, much larger than the walls of its building can display, so most of its collection is kept in storage. When the first news stories about the removal of the paintings surfaced, considerable outrage ensued. Many complained about censorship, puritanism, and prudishness, and accused those asking for the removal of the paintings of being easily-​offended representatives of the petit bourgeoisie, incapable of comprehending progressive, provocative art.17 The discussion was somewhat muddled by the fact that the media revealed the artist and basic content of the pictures (nude women), but did not name the specific pieces. A  news story in Fréttablaðið newspaper on 19 January was accompanied by a painting by the same artist, Gunnlaugur Blöndal, of a serene-​looking nude girl combing her hair, which many people assumed was the painting in question.18 The Central Bank does not own that particular painting, so this could not possibly be one of the paintings that was removed. However, that fact did not prevent a 114

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number of people from holding onto that belief for quite some time and going on at length about how sad it was that people were so judgmental about the lovely painting of the innocent girl with the comb.19 This is by no means the first time that feminists have been accused of puritanism or prudishness. In fact, women —​feminists or not —​face these accusations when, for instance, they express discomfort at being pressured to expose their bodies or perform sexual acts, when they feel inappropriately objectified or sexualised, or when they voice discomfort at the ways in which women around them are being treated. Meanwhile, at the same time as these women are being criticised for being too conservative, men who demand displays of naked women are praised for their courage in going against traditional values. In essence, women speaking up against the objectification of women are accused of being easily shocked prudes and watchdogs of traditional values. In the debate about the paintings, a connection was made to a related campaign: #freethenipple.20 In 2015, young women in Iceland campaigned for the right to expose their breasts on their own terms, when and where they wanted to. They took to the streets wearing no shirts, went to swimming pools with no tops on, and so on. While somewhat contested, even among feminists, the fundamental idea was clearly that the women involved wanted to assert ownership over their own bodies.21 A  great motivator for this action was revenge porn: rather than have someone else post pictures of their breasts without their consent, women would expose their own breasts and make it a non-​issue. In the discussion of the paintings at the Central Bank, people repeatedly made references to #freethenipple along the lines of “Evidently, those complaining about those nude pictures must never have heard of #freethenipple.” However, as Nanna Hermannsdóttir, one of the #freethenipple activists, pointed out, this is a complete misrepresentation of the intended message of the campaign. Indeed, #freethenipple activists were most certainly not fighting for the freedom of men to hang paintings of nude women on the walls of their workplace. They were instead affirming the agency of women in relation to their own bodies, i.e., women’s right to control when and where and in what context their breasts are exposed.22 The inability to distinguish between a woman’s right to expose her own breasts and a man’s right to expose a woman’s breasts is quite disconcerting; if anything, it suggests that the message of #freethenipple was misunderstood and mischaracterised. This raises questions about how women’s agency is generally perceived and represented. In an interview with Morgunblaðið, Harpa Þórsdóttir, the director of the Icelandic Museum of Art, said: “A certain warning light goes off when we find that people are offended by what we would call classical imagery. Then we begin to feel that we are moving in the direction of what could be called censorship.”23 Shortly thereafter, Þórsdóttir, who authored a book about the artist of the disputed paintings, is quoted in another newspaper interview as saying, “there is nothing indecent about Gunnlaugur Blöndal’s work; there is no immorality to be found there”.24 Ostensibly, a request to remove paintings that made certain women uncomfortable in their workplace was reduced to an accusation of their being easily offended, moralising prudes. Let us recall that, according to news reports, the request for removal was prompted by the #MeToo movement, and that the Directorate of Equality had advised the removal of the paintings. The implication of Þórsdóttir’s observations is that the #MeToo movement is overly concerned with seeing indecency, immorality, and causes for offence where there are in reality none to be found, and demanding undue censorship. However, to be absolutely clear:  the paintings in the Central Bank were not banned (censored) by Icelandic authorities; they were, at the request of an employee, voluntarily moved into storage by an employer, where they are kept along with a number of other paintings. 115

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The classical feminist term “sexual objectification” can be somewhat obscure. It may not always be obvious what exactly constitutes objectification, and debates continue around whether objectification is necessarily a negative phenomenon in all scenarios. In the case of the Central Bank paintings, it is worth noting that both the paintings displayed young women in passive reclining positions, clearly featuring their breasts. In addition to the images depicted in the paintings, there was also the matter of where the paintings were displayed: one was surrounded by paintings of fully clothed men, and the other was located in the office of a male authority figure who sometimes held meetings with female employees, many of whom said they felt uncomfortable looking at the painting while talking to their boss. The workplace is a financial institution in which men traditionally wield the power and women may feel like intruders. It seems quite plausible that many women would feel uneasy working in an environment with paintings like this, because consciously or unconsciously, they would identify with the naked females in the paintings and feel exposed and out of place, “objectified”, as it were —​almost as if they were being given hints about their proper place. As employees in an already male-​dominated sector, many women would feel all the more unwelcome and disrespected in the presence of such paintings. Martha Nussbaum’s influential philosophical analysis of objectification argues that objectification can in some cases be harmless. Nussbaum describes seven different features potentially involved in objectification and claims that the presence of some of them appears to be more sinister than the presence of others; still, the context must always be considered.25 Nancy Bauer criticises Nussbaum’s analysis from the point of view that her methodology and conceptual analysis, “empties the concept of political oomph”.26 Bauer’s point is not that harmless objectification does not exist, but rather that Nussbaum’s analysis seems to overlook the social reality of women, including the way they are socialised to objectify themselves. Bauer derives her discussion of women’s self-​objectification from Simone de Beauvoir,27 and her point is important to keep in mind when we think of the history of men painting nude women, of what we have come to call the “male gaze”, or even of what we might call “classical imagery”. There is an established history of women being taught to desire, and be flattered by, the male gaze, and to measure their own worth by their desirability to the male eye. This celebration of the male gaze is an inevitable component of the longstanding objectification of women through the enormous focus on their sex appeal and physical appearance. Because people tend to be heavily influenced by predominant social norms and values, it is no wonder that in a society that appraises women via their appearance to the male gaze, many women end up objectifying themselves. Further, such a society reinforces male ownership of women’s bodies by, among other things, displaying nude women’s bodies on the walls of a workplace, thereby supporting the widespread conception that men are entitled to women’s bodies at all times, in any and all forms of violation.

#MeToo vs benevolent sexism What characterises the two misrepresentations of the #MeToo movement discussed above is that they seem perturbed by the refusal of #MeToo women to give in to what has been called benevolent sexism. In 2001, Peter Glick and Susan T. Fiske performed a psychological study on the effects of two kinds of sexism: hostile and benevolent. They describe the difference between the two kinds as follows: Hostile sexism is an adversarial view of gender relations in which women are perceived as seeking to control men, whether through sexuality or feminist ideology. Although 116

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benevolent sexism may sound oxymoronic, this term recognizes that some forms of sexism are, for the perpetrator, subjectively benevolent, characterizing women as pure creatures who ought to be protected, supported, and adored and whose love is necessary to make a man complete.28 Thus, while hostile sexism displays a negative and even combative attitude towards women, benevolent sexism puts women on a pedestal and seeks to protect them. The worry arises that the benevolent attitude may turn hostile when a real-​life woman fails to resemble the idealised woman on the pedestal. Glick and Fiske found in their study that benevolent sexism had a pacifying effect and played a role in justifying gender injustice. Benevolent sexism is more likely than hostile sexism to be accepted, and often rewards women who conform to gender stereotypes. A classical example of a critique of benevolent sexism can be found in Mary Wollstonecraft’s warning to women about praise they receive for their beauty or other female virtues. This worry about how women are lured into complacency by generous praise for displaying frivolous skills is a topic Wollstonecraft returns to several times in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. […] Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex; and that secondary views should be brought to this simple touchstone.29 In this passage, Wollstonecraft seems to be warning women against falling prey to men’s flattery for trivialities such as their looks. Wollstonecraft’s warning, along with her emphasis on rationality and virtue and rejection of superficialities, can be perceived as resistance to benevolent sexism, which, she believes, undermines women’s freedom and dignity. Sandrine Berges has argued that we should interpret the chapter from which the passage above is drawn as Wollstonecraft’s contribution to showing how men have traditionally degraded and dehumanised women and made them unable to stand up to oppression.30 Even though Wollstonecraft issued this warning two centuries ago, her words still ring true today, especially when interpreted as a warning against benevolent sexism. As Glick and Fiske found in their study, benevolent sexism has a pacifying effect, and can be used to justify discrimination against women. It helps keep women docile and encourages them to stay within the parameters of their assigned social roles. In another study, Julia C. Becker et al. found that women were put in a double bind when it came to responding to benevolent sexism: If they accepted a patronising offer (i.e. a benevolently sexist offer) of help with a relatively simple task, they were perceived as warm but incompetent. If they declined the offer, they were perceived as more competent but cold and less likeable.31 The #MeToo movement can be seen as a rejection of benevolent sexism. According to the ideology of benevolent sexism, a man’s sexual advances are always flattering for a woman, and she should always be grateful for such attention. Men show their appreciation of women by praising their beauty and making advances at them. Sexual harassment often involves making 117

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remarks about a woman’s appearance that are positive on the surface. There are even some who justify rape through the lens of benevolent sexism: “He was overcome by lust because she was so hot” or “Men are unable to control themselves around beautiful women”. Thus, the #MeToo movement’s forceful declarations of non-​tolerance of any kind of sexual harassment have been rightly understood as a threat to benevolent sexism. This understanding seems consistent with the idea that women who refuse to conform to social expectations tend to be punished. In her book Trainwreck, Sady Doyle discusses how society keeps women in check by condemning those who behave in a “scandalous” manner.32 One of the “trainwrecks” covered in Doyle’s book happens to be Mary Wollstonecraft, who led a life of unusual independence for a woman in England in the eighteenth century. Among other things, she was sexually active, cohabited with a man, and had a daughter long before she got married, which she only did a few months before her death. After this information was made public in the biography published by her grieving husband, William Godwin, shortly after her death,33 Wollstonecraft was vilified and made a pariah. While her writings had been fairly widely read during her lifetime, her work was relegated to the margins for the next century or so. In a review of Godwin’s biography of Wollstonecraft published in the Anti-​Jacobin Review and Magazine in 1798, Wollstonecraft’s theories are called “extravagant, absurd, and destructive”.34 The same review alludes to her sexual adventures being far more extensive than is even accounted for in the biography: She became the concubine of Mr. Imlay, an American. The biographer does not mention many of her amours. Indeed it was unnecessary: two or three instances of action often decide a character as well as a thousand. Juvenal, by reciting the adventures of one night, makes us as thoroughly acquainted with the character of Messalina, as if he had enumerated all the amorous exploits of that feeling lady. Besides such recitals are often very difficult —​“Promptius expediam quot amaverit Hippia mæchos” —​Here We must observe, that Mary’s theory, that it is the right of women to indulge their inclinations with every man they like, is so far from being new, that it is as old as prostitution.35 Among the other “trainwrecks” included in Doyle’s book are Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Aniston, and Charlotte Brontë. Trainwrecks are women who party hard, are seen as too emotionally needy, or are too frank; these are women who make others uncomfortable and are very harshly judged for breaking social mores or taboos. Questioning or acting out against benevolent sexism is seen as distinct from questioning or acting out against sexism. At best, a woman who undermines benevolent sexism is considered to be overreacting; the social critique implied in her objection to the (benevolently) sexist act goes unacknowledged, and her actions are susceptible to the kind of misrepresentations that have been discussed above, ranging from complaints about unfriendliness to accusations of man-​hating.

Conclusion In her book The Wrong of Injustice, Mari Mikkola describes gender injustice as essentially dehumanising.36 This description is consistent with the claims I have made above about the silencing of women and sexual harassment and violence being used as tools of oppression. I have described how the culture of silence surrounding sexual violence constitutes epistemic injustice against its victims, and that disrespect for women and failure to take their claims seriously further feeds into this silence. This is a culture in which women are denied the status of fully valid interlocutors, which constitutes a form of dehumanisation. 118

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The #MeToo movement directly resists and rallies against this silencing culture; it is what I have called an epistemic resistance movement. Women in the movement affirm their agency and refuse to “play nice” any more, with a particular focus on insisting that society writ large acknowledge the hardships and injustices women face through sexual assault and harassment. It does not come as a surprise that such a movement is met with resistance or backlash, as in the cases of misrepresentation I discussed above. When someone poses a threat to a ruling system, discrediting that person is often a more successful means of undermining their message than is responding directly. In the examples I detailed above, some of the attempts to discredit the movement include representing #MeToo as a revenge-​focused movement filled with conservative prudes who cannot tolerate even artistic nudity. The example from the Central Bank in Iceland also reflects the ways in which art in public spaces and workplaces can reinforce the traditional power discrepancy in the gender hierarchy by reminding women that their role is first and foremost to be an object of the male gaze. The sly tool of benevolent sexism bolsters this hierarchy and is often a more successful  —​and more insidious  —​patriarchal tool than is direct, hostile sexism. The #MeToo movement’s challenges have drawn attention to and critiqued forms of benevolent sexism, which has been met with a hostile response from watchdogs of the status quo. Given that sexual violence, harassment, and objectification of women are all a part of the ruling ideology that serves the dominant patriarchal culture, it is unsurprising that the #MeToo movement is perceived as a threat, even though it may not be openly acknowledged as such. Misconstruction or misrepresentation of criticism can often be convenient tools of deflection and marginalisation.

Notes 1 Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (London/​ New York: Routledge, 2017). 2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). 3 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice:  Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007). 4 Kristie Dotson, “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression”, Social Epistemology 28, no. 2 (2014): 115–​ 138; José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance. Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford/​New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 5 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice. 6 Katharine Jenkins, “Rape Myths and Domestic Abuse Myths as Hermeneutical Injustices”, Journal of Applied Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2017): 191–​205. 7 Debra L. Jackson,“ ‘Me Too’: Epistemic Injustice and the Struggle for Recognition”, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4, no. 4 (2018): 7. 8 Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: 48–​49. 9 Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: 225–​229. 10 Jackson, “ ‘Me Too’: Epistemic Injustice and the Struggle for Recognition”, 9. 11 Hilkje Hänel, “What Is a Sexist Ideology? Or: Why Grace Didn’t Leave”, Ergo 5, no. 34 (2018): 913. 12 Bára Huld Beck, “Tími þagnarinnar liðinn —​sögurnar allar”, [The Time of Silence is Over —​All the Stories], Kjarninn, 15 December 2017, https://​kjarninn.is/​skyring/​2017-​12-​11-​konur-​islandi-​segja-​ fra-​kynferdisofbeldi-​areitni-​og-​kynbundinni-​mismunun-​sogurnar-​allar. 13 Johanne Dalgaard, “Medierne får #Metoo til at handle om hævngerrige kvinder”, Altinget, 2 February 2019, www.altinget.dk/​artikel/​johanne-​dalgaard-​medierne-​faar-​metoo-​til-​at-​handle-​om-​ haevngerrige-​kvinder; Andy Sullivan, “It’s Time to Resist the Excesses of #MeToo”, New  York Magazine. Intelligencer, 12 January 2018, http://​nymag.com/​intelligencer/​2018/​01/​andrew-​sullivan-​ time-​to-​resist-​excesses-​of-​metoo.html. 14 Kate Manne, Down Girl. The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018): 34–​41; 280–​282.

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Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir 15 Sigurður Mikael Jónsson, “Nektarlist veldur usla innan Seðlabankans”, [Nude Art Causes Uproar in the Central Bank], Fréttablaðið, 6 June 2018, www.frettabladid.is/​frettir/​nektarlist-​veldur-​usla​innan-​selabankans. 16 Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir, “Seðlabankinn flutti málverk þrisvar”, [The Central Bank Moved a Painting Three Times], RÚV, 21 January 2019, www.ruv.is/​frett/​sedlabankinn-​flutti-​malverk-​thrisvar. 17 Jakob Bjarnar, “Tepruskapur og púrítanismi sagður ráða ríkjum í Seðlabankanum”, [Prudery and Puritanism Said to Dominate the Central Bank], Visir, 21 January 2019, www.visir.is/​g/​ 2019190129831/​tepruskapur-​og-​puritanismi-​sagdur-​rada-​r ikjum-​i-​sedlabankanum. 18 Sigurður Mikael Jónsson, “Nektarlist í Seðlabanka komið fyrir í geymslu”, [Nude Art in the Central Bank Placed In Storage], Visir, 19 January 2019, www.visir.is/​g/​2019190118719. 19 Þórarinn Þórarinsson, “Listamenn segja Seðlabankann vanvirða listina með púritanisma”, [Artists Say the Central Bank Disrespect Art with Puritanism], Fréttablaðið, 21 January 2019, www.frettabladid.is/​ frettir/​listamenn-​segja-​selabankann-​vanvira-​listina-​me-​puritanisma. 20 Valur Grettisson, “Central Bank Removes Nude Art”, Reykjavik Grapevine, 21 January 2019, https://​ grapevine.is/​news/​2019/​01/​21/​central-​bank-​removes-​nude-​art. 21 Annadís G Rúdólfsdóttir and Ásta Jóhannsdóttir, “Fuck patriarchy! An analysis of digital mainstream media discussion of the #freethenipple activities in Iceland in March 2015”, Feminism and Psychology 28, no. 1 (2018), https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​0959353517715876. 22 Nútíminn, “Segir sorglegt að fólk noti #freethenipple vegna málverkanna sem voru fjarlægð: ‘Snýst um að rétt kvenna til að stjórna því hvernig brjóst þeirra eru sýnd og skilgreind’ ” [Sad to See People Use #freethenipple in the Context of the Paintings That Were Removed. ‘It Is about the Right of Women to Control How Their Breasts Are Shown and Defined’],Nútíminn, 22 January 2019, www. nutiminn.is/​segir-​sorglegt-​ad-​folk-​noti-​freethenipple-​vegna-​malverkanna-​sem-​voru-​fjarlaegd-​snyst-​ um-​ad-​rett-​kvenna-​til-​ad-​stjorna-​thvi-​hvernig-​brjost-​theirra-​eru-​synd-​og-​skilgreind. 23 “Verða sýndar á Safnanótt” [Will Be Exhibited at Museum Night], Morgunblaðið, 22 January 2019, www.mbl.is/​frettir/​innlent/​2019/​01/​22/​verda_​syndar_​a_​safnanott. 24 Kolbrún Bergþórsdóttir, “Ekkert siðleysi í gangi hjá Gunnlaugi”, [Nothing Obscene with Gunnlaugur], Fréttablaðið, 26 January 2019, www.frettabladid.is/​lifid/​heimslist-​og-​nlunda-​gunnlaugs. 25 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Objectification”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 24, no. 4 (Autumn 1995): 257; 265. 26 Nancy Bauer, How to Do Things with Pornography (Cambridge (Mass.)/​London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 36. 27 This discussion is strongly echoed by the discussion of the sexist ideology in Hänel’s “What is a Sexist Ideology?”. 28 Peter Glick and Susan T.  Fiske, “An Ambivalent Alliance:  Hostile and Benevolent Sexism as Complementary Justifications for Gender Inequality”, American Psychologist 56 (2001): 109. 29 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of The Rights of Men, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 73. 30 Sandrine Berges, The Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft’s A  Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: Routledge, 2013), 86–​88. 31 Julia Becker, Peter Glick, Marie Ilic, and Gerd Bohner, “Damned If She Does, Damned If She Doesn’t: Consequences of Accepting versus Confronting Patronizing Help for the Female Target and Male Actor”, European Journal of Social Psychology 41 (2011): 761. 32 Sadie Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love To Hate, Mock, and Fear…and Why (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016). 33 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: J. Johnson, 1798). 34 Anti-​Jacobin Review and Magazine, vol. 1 (July–​December 1798): 95. 35 Anti-​Jacobin Review and Magazine (July–​December 1798): 96. 36 Mari Mikkola, The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and Its Role in Feminist Philosophy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Bibliography Anti-​Jacobin Review and Magazine, vol. 1 (July–​December 1798). Bauer, Nancy. How to Do Things with Pornography. Cambridge, Mass./​ London:  Harvard University Press, 2015.

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Silencing resistance to the patriarchy Beck, Bára Huld. “Tími þagnarinnar liðinn —​sögurnar allar” [The Time of Silence is Over —​All the Stories]. Kjarninn, 15 December 2017. https://​kjarninn.is/​skyring/​2017-​12-​11-​konur-​islandi-​segja-​ fra-​kynferdisofbeldi-​areitni-​og-​kynbundinni-​mismunun-​sogurnar-​allar. Becker, Julia, Peter Glick, Marie Ilic, and Gerd Bohner. “Damned If She Does, Damned If She Doesn’t: Consequences of Accepting versus Confronting Patronizing Help for the Female Target and Male Actor”. European Journal of Social Psychology 41 (2011): 761–​773. Berges, Sandrine. The Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft’s A  Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: Routledge, 2013. Bergþórsdóttir, Kolbrún. “Ekkert siðleysi í gangi hjá Gunnlaugi” [Nothing Obscene with Gunnlaugur]. Fréttablaðið, 26 January 2019. www.frettabladid.is/​lifid/​heimslist-​og-​nlunda-​gunnlaugs. Bjarnar, Jakob. “Tepruskapur og púrítanismi sagður ráða ríkjum í Seðlabankanum” [Prudery and Puritanism Said to Dominate the Central Bank]. Visir, 21 January 2019. www.visir.is/​g/​2019190129831/​ tepruskapur-​og-​puritanismi-​sagdur-​rada-​r ikjum-​i-​sedlabankanum. Björnsdóttir, Sigríður Hagalín. “Seðlabankinn flutti málverk þrisvar” [The Central Bank Moved a Painting Three Times]. RÚV, 21 January 2019. www.ruv.is/​frett/​sedlabankinn-​flutti-​malverk-​thrisvar. Dalgaard, Johanne. “Medierne får #Metoo til at handle om hævngerrige kvinder” [The Media Make It Seem That #MeToo Is All about Vengeful Women]. Altinget, 2 February 2019. www.altinget.dk/​ artikel/​johanne-​dalgaard-​medierne-​faar-​metoo-​til-​at-​handle-​om-​haevngerrige-​kvinder. Dotson, Kristie. “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression”. Social Epistemology 28, no. 2 (2014): 115–​138. Doyle, Sadie. Trainwreck:  The Women We Love To Hate, Mock, and Fear…and Why. Brooklyn:  Melville House, 2016. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Glick, Peter, and Susan T. Fiske. “An Ambivalent Alliance:  Hostile and Benevolent Sexism as Complementary Justifications for Gender Inequality”. American Psychologist 56 (2001): 109–​118. Godwin, William. Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: J. Johnson, 1798. Grettisson, Valur. “Central Bank Removes Nude Art”. Reykjavik Grapevine, 21 January 2019. https://​ grapevine.is/​news/​2019/​01/​21/​central-​bank-​removes-​nude-​art. Hänel, Hilkje. “What Is a Sexist Ideology? Or: Why Grace Didn’t Leave”. Ergo 5, no. 34 (2018). Jackson, Debra L. “ ‘Me Too’: Epistemic Injustice and the Struggle for Recognition”. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4, no. 4 (2018): article 7. Jenkins, Katharine. “Rape Myths and Domestic Abuse Myths as Hermeneutical Injustices”. Journal of Applied Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2017): 191–​205. Jónsson, Sigurður Mikael. “Nektarlist veldur usla innan Seðlabankans”[Nude Art Causes Uproar in the Central Bank]. Fréttablaðið, 6 June 2018. www.frettabladid.is/​frettir/​nektarlist-​veldur-​usla-​innan-​selabankans. Jónsson, Sigurður Mikael. “Nektarlist í Seðlabanka komið fyrir í geymslu”.” [Nude Art in the Central Bank Placed In Storage]. Visir, 19 January 2019. www.visir.is/​g/​2019190118719. Kidd, Ian James, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. London/​ New York: Routledge, 2017. Manne, Kate. Down Girl. The Logic of Misogyny. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance. Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford/​New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Mikkola, Mari. The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and Its Role in Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Morgunblaðið. “Verða sýndar á Safnanótt” [Will Be Exhibited at Museum Night]. Morgunblaðið, 22 January 2019. www.mbl.is/​frettir/​innlent/​2019/​01/​22/​verda_​syndar_​a_​safnanott. Nussbaum, Martha C. “Objectification”. Philosophy & Public Affairs 24, no. 4 (Autumn 1995): 249–​291. Nútíminn. “Segir sorglegt að fólk noti #freethenipple vegna málverkanna sem voru fjarlægð: ‘Snýst um að rétt kvenna til að stjórna því hvernig brjóst þeirra eru sýnd og skilgreind’ ” [Sad to See People Use #freethenipple in the Context of the Paintings That Were Removed. ‘It Is about the Right of Women to Control How Their Breasts Are Shown and Defined’]. Nútíminn, 22 January 2019. www.nutiminn. is/​segir-​sorglegt-​ad-​folk-​noti-​freethenipple-​vegna-​malverkanna-​sem-​voru-​fjarlaegd-​snyst-​um-​ad-​ rett-​kvenna-​til-​ad-​stjorna-​thvi-​hvernig-​brjost-​theirra-​eru-​synd-​og-​skilgreind. Rúdólfsdóttir, Annadís G, and Ásta Jóhannsdóttir. “Fuck Patriarchy! An Analysis of Digital Mainstream Media Discussion of the #freethenipple Activities in Iceland in March 2015”. Feminism and Psychology 28, no. 1 (2018): 133–​151. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​0959353517715876. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.

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Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir Sullivan, Andy. “It’s Time to Resist the Excesses of #MeToo”. New York Magazine. Intelligencer, 12 January 2018. http://​nymag.com/​intelligencer/​2018/​01/​andrew-​sullivan-​time-​to-​resist-​excesses-​of-​metoo. html. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of The Rights of Men, ed. Janet Todd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Þórarinsson, Þórarinn. “Listamenn segja Seðlabankann vanvirða listina með púritanisma” [Artists Say the Central Bank Disrespect Art with Puritanism]. Fréttablaðið, 21 January 2019. www.frettabladid.is/​ frettir/​listamenn-​segja-​selabankann-​vanvira-​listina-​me-​puritanisma.

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9 #METOO, AFRICAN FEMINISMS, AND THE SCOURGE OF STEREOTYPES Nkiru Balonwu #MeToo in Africa and the lack of traction Originally founded by Tarana Burke in the United States in 2006,1 the #MeToo movement did not enter into mainstream consciousness until 2017, when sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein began to emerge. It is yet to make any real inroads onto the African continent. This short timeline not only captures the fragmented nature of global feminism, but also reminds us that while all forms of feminist movements are in some way geared towards the advancement of women, not all parts of the world adopt them equally. In Africa, ideas around female empowerment are viewed very differently from the way they are in the West, and even from those of diaspora communities. Three years after the #MeToo movement began to revolutionise gender discourse in other areas of the world, African women are still being left out of the conversation: “Their relative silence is both a lesson in the movement’s failure to become a truly inclusive network and a reminder of where power resides in patriarchal societies”, wrote South African journalist, Lynsey Chutel, in December 2018.2 Since then, while there have been pockets of dialogue around #MeToo in Africa, the conversation has struggled to move forward much further. One reason for its lack of traction on the continent, home to 54 different countries, each with different attitudes towards gender, is the enduring prominence of traditional African stereotypes. At a leadership event in London in 2019, the barrister and women’s rights campaigner, Cherie Blair, stood in front of a hundred people, many of them school children, and told them that “most African ladies’ first sexual experience is rape”.3 Such comments, coming from the wife of a former British Prime Minister, cut much deeper than a mere assault on the effectiveness of the #MeToo movement. They reflect a more troubling and deep-​seated psychological infestation that still exists even within today’s “enlightened” global society. In many ways, African stereotypes have become so entrenched around the world, that many people no longer even realise they are seeing them. A cursory Google search for images of African women brings up images of women carrying things on their heads, with a baby on their back, in “traditional” dress. Conversely, common images of the United States are associated with visions of economic freedom and the “American dream”, even as we are all too aware of some of the serious issues that the country faces that give the lie to this vision.

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This distinction is itself a useful one, when considering the influence that traditional African female stereotypes are having on the impact of the #MeToo movement on the continent. In a 2013 paper for the Journal of Pan African Studies, Georgia State University academic Sarita Davis examines the impact that the “Jezebel” stereotype has on the perception of the African American woman: The Jezebel image perpetuates misguided messages about the sexuality of African American women that persists today. Stephens and Phillips (2003) highlight the contemporary Jezebel mutations seen in popular culture, including freaks, gold diggers, divas, and baby mamas. This image is depicted in music videos, movies, Internet, and gaming … As mass media promotes negative female stereotypes that dominate the portrayal of African American females, society’s bias becomes commonplace and internalized by both society and the object of desire … Consequently, these representations seem real and foster a narrow view of African American women.4 The sheer number of citations embedded within that passage highlight the wealth of literature that has been written over the years around the cultural identity of the African-​American woman. What we must remember is that while branches of African feminism do extend to incorporate the identities of African-​American women, and Black women throughout the diaspora community around the world, the stereotypes applied to African women on the continent reflect a unique demographic, and therefore are, in themselves, unique. Far from promulgating ideas of the African woman as sexually aggressive, diva, or exotic object of desire, Cherie Blair’s words instantly cut to the core of much of the stereotyping that is directed towards African women: that of victim. The incongruity lies in the fact that the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women does amazing work for equality around the world. It helps bring investment, mentoring and development to communities, including countries in Africa. But so, of course, did the colonial missionaries. And therein lies the issue. If every African woman is intrinsically a victim, and every African man, in turn, a sexually aggressive predator, then how can we possibly challenge a predetermined set of pseudoscientific outcomes? By reinforcing traditional stereotypes about the continent in this manner, we go some way towards normalising the idea of such behaviour across a population of 1.2 billion people —​and that makes it more difficult to challenge. Such visions create a narrow landscape through which the African feminist is then asked to navigate on a global scale. They also serve to create a depressingly low starting point from which African women’s empowerment can build. Caricatures drawn from historic stereotyping serve to dilute the surprise and shock that the community feels when acts of violence or abuse are committed against women on the ground, and this can, in turn, serve to reduce the impact of movements like #MeToo on the continent. The reality is that traditionally reinforced African stereotypes of victim and predator, produced by a powerful and globally influential Western discourse, only serve to perpetuate them even within Africa itself.

The consequences of no consequences In Africa and, as is still unfortunately the case to varying degrees all around the world, physical and sexual violence towards women constitutes a very real crisis. In July 2019, Nigerian Senator, Elisha Abbo, was caught on camera assaulting a woman in a sex toy shop.5 The footage, which shows him violently beating the woman, is simultaneously shocking and for many (African) women, far too familiar. While women’s groups and activists at the time called for 124

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the immediate removal of Senator Abbo,6 he faced no consequences for his actions. Around the same period, Nigerian’s were agonisingly disheartened by an interview given by Nigerian celebrity photographer Busola Dakolo, wherein she shares in detail an account of being raped by Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo.7 Despite a temporary leave of absence, the pastor was back at his pulpit a month later, again facing no consequences for his actions.8 However, the consequences faced by Dakolo for speaking out make the story even more disheartening. Shortly after the interview, the photographer spoke of being visited at her home by two men. One was holding a gun, the other a letter containing accusations of criminal conspiracy, falsehood, mischief, and threat to life, brought against her and her husband, the musician Timi Dakolo. Along with much public support, Busola was subsequently subjected to a hate campaign on social media, with supporters of the Pastor —​a particularly revered position of prominence in Nigeria —​publicly accusing her of lying. The United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper ran an article titled “How ‘Nigeria’s #MeToo Moment’ Turned Against Rape Accuser”, writing that Dakolo had been hailed as a brave survivor whose speaking out, women’s rights activists hoped, could set off a #MeToo movement in the West African country where patriarchal traditions continue to stigmatise survivors. Now she found herself hounded in a seemingly orchestrated social media campaign.9 A similar piece in the New  York Times highlighted the issue even more starkly:  “Nigerian Women Say ‘MeToo.’ Critics Say ‘Prove It’ ” ran the title of the article, which went on to say that the personal cost (of coming out against such crimes) had been high, and had included telephone threats, internet harassment and an extremely difficult discussion about rape with her three children. The New York Times quotes Dakolo as asking herself whether she had done the right thing in speaking out.10 Social injustice against women is not solely the preserve of those wishing to silence historic cases, but feeds into a very real modern-​day environment in which the Harvey Weinsteins of Africa have the power to abuse women as they see fit. For instance, a year-​long investigation of the “sex-​for-​grades” scandal which hit the global headlines at the beginning of 2020, found that lecturers in Nigeria and Ghana had sexually harassed undercover reporters posing as students. One man tells the camera that if a girl is subsequently looked upon favourably after having sexual relations, she is “paying for it with her body”.11 Would anybody viewing these accounts —​in any country of the world —​be shocked or even surprised to learn that such practices go on in academic institutions? Or indeed that the suspensions subsequently dealt out to some of the lecturers for entering into such misconduct stretched to only a matter of months? These malpractices exist in all corners of the world today, but in Africa, the traditional stereotypes of women as victims and men as sexual predators, are taken as universal truths, and these longstanding and globally reinforced gender portrayals are not helpful. We also know that gender issues impact African society far more broadly than through individual cases of sexual violence, physical violence, and sexual abuse. Wider misogyny and oppression of women is systemic within our corporate, commercial, governmental, and societal institutions, as indeed, it is elsewhere in the world. “I have two of you at home, so mind yourself ”, is a saying acknowledged amongst Nigerian feminist circles to refer to what a building doorman says to the female CEO who doesn’t “know her place”. In many parts of Africa, a local bus conductor will feel himself superior to the CEO of an international company, simply because the latter is a woman. Whether or not bus conductors should consider themselves as being lesser than an international CEO is perhaps 125

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another chapter for another day, but this intrinsic patriarchy reaches down to the very root of much African identity. “Egbon” is a Yoruba word used to denote Nigerian elders. In business, it can generally be interchanged with the Western term “mentor”, referring to an older worker giving a younger member of staff the benefit of their experience. However, Egbons very rarely choose to mentor female workers, and when they do it is often to preach the virtues of more submissive qualities like “listening”, “observing”, or “being useful”. Worse still, such relationships can feed into a systemic culture of workplace sexual harassment. We now know that in the case of Harvey Weinstein, many of his crimes escalated far further in their physical nature. Nonetheless, the former film producer’s general behaviour and, indeed, the subsequent growth of the #MeToo movement at large, has come to represent the universal position of vulnerability that women to this day find themselves in at the workplace. When older men hold all the power, and women  —​particularly young women who are just starting out in their career —​have none, the opportunities for abuse continually present themselves. How can African women find shelter from the patriarchal structure, when it is literally being used to build the foundations of their future career? Even when we shift focus away from the business and into the consumer world, a lack of understanding about the real needs of females is apparent.12 Women drive approximately 70 per cent of consumer spend (because they are often primary care givers, responsible for purchasing goods for others).13 This demographic represents the continent’s largest growth opportunity, and yet there remains very little data available on female spending habits.14 A key solution to Africa’s challenges lies in fully engaging and mobilising its women and understanding that promoting the careers of women does not hinder the careers of men. On the contrary, by doubling the number of people in our countries that we truly invest in, we double the productivity pool upon which we are able to draw and create greater prosperity for all. Women are leaders, entrepreneurs, consumers, and yet at the moment the economy is turning its back on this hugely important demographic. While there is a pressing need for more female voices in the mainstream of African business and commerce, it is accurate to say that the continent has an opportunity to demonstrate real leadership in this area. Recent reports show that Africa leads the world in its proportion of female board members, at 25%. This is followed by Europe with 23%, the United States (22%), Asia-​Pacific (13%), Middle East (11%), and Latin America (7%).15 Of course, “1 in 4” is still nowhere near 50/​50, and a closer look at the report reveals huge disparities by country as well, in terms of the types of roles that women in senior positions occupy. In spite of this, we do see green shoots of potential emanating from what is slowly, though increasingly, viewed on the world stage as a continent of innovation and investment. The emergence of African feminism and the new perspectives being forged on, and about, the continent by African women is one of the key cultural driving forces behind this change.

African feminism: Sugar Dem vs. Pepper Dem Like all theoretical doctrine that sits within the global umbrella of the feminist movement, feminism in Africa also contains myriad strains. First and foremost, in discussions surrounding the socio-​political makeup of Africans, attitudes towards gender, race, and sexuality, can differ from region to region as well as country to country and culture to culture from Egypt to Nigeria to South Africa, as they do between any other parts of the world. African feminist theories range from Womanism to Motherism and Nego-​feminism, and beyond to various forms of Islamic feminism particularly in North Africa. As we have already seen, these dichotomies run even 126

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further when we take diaspora communities into consideration, including Black feminism, African American feminism, and remembering again that the #MeToo movement was itself originally started by an African American woman in New York. What we do know universally about the African feminist movement is that just as the limitations of #MeToo on the continent present a problem, so too a more localised form of African feminism has the potential to provide solutions. In pidgin English, we have a common saying: “Sugar Dem and Pepper Dem”. Just like taking a “carrot and stick” approach, “Sugar Dem vs. Pepper Dem” can refer to a strand of African feminism  —​what is considered a balanced approach towards relations with men, operating with equal amounts of softness and strength. In attempting to achieve our gender equality goals, women give men some sugar, and some pepper. So strong is the understanding of “Sugar Dem vs. Pepper Dem” in West Africa, that the notion has given birth to two socio-​political institutions. Afia Pokua aka Vim Lady is a Ghanaian media journalist and founder of the SugarDem Ministry, a gender parity activist group set up to parallel the PepperDem Ministry that advocates for women to uphold stricter relationships with men. She argues that while combative feminism has undoubtedly achieved some progress, both on the continent and around the world, it has fallen short of achieving a truly equal gender balance.16 To arrive at this, the theory advocates taking a more centrist, non “Us vs Them” approach to our relationships with men. In the book Africa Wo/​Man Palava, renowned Professor of literature and womanist author Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi views the concept of African feminism through the work of eight Nigerian female writers.17 Through this discourse, female resistance shifts from the idea of palava —​or trouble —​to a focus on consensus, compromise, and cooperation, dialling the conversation back from combative absolutism towards a stance of inclusiveness. Such views are not only representative of African feminism, but the very core of the African feminine psyche from which it emanates. In many African cultures, matriarchy retains a strong grip on the family unit, arguably echoing a more distant pagan era that predates the global march of Christianity and Islam (mainstream religions that largely champion patriarchal structures), not to mention the more modern forms of state-​driven politics that have been built on their foundations. A good example of this comes in the form of the traditional African kitchen. Far removed from Western images of women slaving tirelessly over a hot stove, the African kitchen itself is a scene of power, in which the African woman is the main protagonist. Here, she is in control of all output, and supported by all of the family and community hands upon which she needs to draw. Instead of liberating African women from behind the stove, its removal could represent a loss of power. These ideas are explored by Jean Lau Chin, an American psychologist and professor of gender and ethnicity, in her review of Bahira Sherif Trask’s book, Women, Work, and Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities: Trask uses the breadwinner/​ homemaker dichotomy to reflect different conceptualizations of public versus private space that then extend to the social and cultural values of corporations and businesses as they develop work-​family policies. When viewed from a global perspective, western feminists highlight women’s subordination as a result of their interaction with men; they view home as private space and, by default, caregiving as a private responsibility. Non-​western feminists argue differently —​home to them is not private space. According to Trask, many communist states, for example, sought to suppress private spaces and encouraged women to enter the labor force by providing access to child care, health care, abortion, and paid maternity leaves —​making the home a public space and blurring the boundaries between breadwinner and homemaker.18 127

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In this respect, the African kitchen becomes a community, in which the matriarch leads the other members, not through a patriarchal structure of rank, but by example. All around her are drawn in to collaborate on the central task of feeding that community. At first glance, it may appear difficult to reconcile this notion with the wider tenets of the contemporary feminist movement. However, we are not saying that African women are in favour of being told that their place is in the kitchen, rather that the choice should be their own. Identity, and traditional gender roles, and the stereotypes that accompany them can become a prison in which to lock women. This is also, incidentally, why the largely aesthetically driven modern-​day feminism of social media and erotic capital comes not without its potential pitfalls. What is used to empower one day, can become a prison the next. What African feminism does tell us is that the central goal is not about deconstructing and reforming our understanding of the female gender, but reforming the society around both men and women to make it a safer and more open place in which the feminine can be allowed to operate. It’s at this point that the more positive African interpretation of #MeToo comes to light. We are not only using the hashtag to say that we have also been victims, but to demonstrate that femininity and the women who carry it also have a part to play in the new egalitarian world. In its endorsement of traditional female roles, African feminism differs slightly from its sister-​strains in the West. It places greater emphasis on achieving successful cohabitation between two very distinct genders, than it does on attempting to stamp-​out gender disparity. Indeed in Africa, men may well find themselves more welcome in the bedroom than they are in the kitchen. This last point winks at the fact that African feminism is a discourse not without its own controversies. In promoting a philosophy that celebrates gender polarity, rather than condemning gender disparity, we are intrinsically saying that women and men are equal, but not the same. And if the female gender —​and feminine qualities —​are viewed as something to celebrate, then do not be surprised if that celebration extends into advocacy. In her 2012 article, “How to Succeed in Business: Be a Feminist and a Flirt”, writer Hannah Betts claims that “Feminine wiles can bring economic benefits even if the sisterhood disapproves.”19 The article cites studies from University of California, Berkeley, and the London School of Economics and explains that “a management technique available to women combining warmth, friendliness and affiliation with flirtation, including playfulness, flattery and a certain sex appeal” can bring about increased business success.20 British sociologist Catherine Hakim takes this line of thinking a step further. She defines “erotic capital” as the concept that an individual’s beauty, sexual attractiveness, enhanced social interaction, liveliness, social presentation, sexuality, and fertility can provide opportunities to advance in life. Conversely, an “unholy alliance” of wannabe patriarchs, religious fundamentalists and radical feminists have —​in Anglo-​Saxon countries especially —​acted to devalue erotic capital. As Hakim sees it, for all young women, and in particular those who are without other benefits —​financial, intellectual, situational —​an entirely legitimate form of self-​advancement should consist in their getting the best out of their assets.21 Such notions can make some activists squeamish when compared with the wholesome feminist narrative of the twentieth century enfranchisement movement. They are also potentially problematic when viewed within the context of the workplace Egbons and the intrinsic outsider status granted to women outside of their kitchens or bedrooms. But they are also a reality. Ideas around bottom power, erotic capital, or the new waves of social media influence that are being pioneered by celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner,22 suggest a new writing of feminism that is more open to the use of traditional female “assets”, inclusive of the

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aesthetic and the physical. Where the Kardashians and Jenners exercise their choice regarding their “erotic capital” there are certainly those less privileged for whom this is the only capital they have control over. An intersectional approach reveals how muddied these waters have become in terms of class privilege and cultural locations, and alerts feminists around the world to the dangers of polarising the debate on the performance of female sexuality in the public sphere. Where the extremities of this way of thinking eventually lead us in terms of breaking the chain versus perpetuating the cycle of female objectification, is again probably another debate for another day. But certainly, it is true that African women have always understood the importance of sexuality as a performance, and African feminism incorporates aspects of this today. There is a Sugar ministry and a Pepper ministry, make of this what we may. In 2016 in Nigeria, we were reminded just how important an ingredient pepper is in the recipe for gender equality. Aisha Buhari, the wife of President Muhammadu Buhari and First Lady of Nigeria, publicly criticised her husband’s government, telling the press that her husband’s government had been hijacked by only a “few people”, who were behind presidential appointments before going on to say that if things didn’t change she would have no further part in any future re-​election movements. In response, President Buhari told reporters during a trip to Germany (while standing directly beside German Chancellor Angela Merkel): “I don’t know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room.”23 This episode tells us a couple of things. First, that the concept of a kitchen as a prison for women is alive and well in the psyche of African men, right up to the highest offices. The idea that a wife should automatically be “indoors” and away from the public spotlight, seeks to silence her voice and return the kitchen to a male-​dominated private space. It also highlights the lack of African representation within the feminist movement on the world stage. The act of a First Lady —​and a Muslim one at that —​speaking so candidly, and so publicly, about her husband’s and her government’s failings shows significant strength. Would we be so likely to see Melania Trump, wife of current US President Donald Trump for example, speaking in such a way? Or even Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton? Had Aisha Buhari been from the West, she might have made the cover of Time and been lauded by the press. But being an African woman, her contributions to the global feminist discourse have largely gone unnoticed but for a few mentions, mostly relating to her husband’s attitude to the role of women in society. We need to pepper our way into African discourse, as well as that of the wider world.24

Men as allies: #YouToo Equally controversial within the discussion around #MeToo in Africa, is the concept of men as allies. Feminism in Africa can often be more geared towards consensus than conflict, but of course in order to achieve this we need African men to play their part too. Even the most militant of feminist minds would agree that if the battle of the sexes really is a war, then the advice of Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu still rings true today: attack by stratagem, strength as unity, forge alliances.25 Alliances forged should include those between parents and sons, for instance. As women, we must ask ourselves who is raising these “horrible” men in the first place, and perpetuating the cycle of toxic masculinity? Alliances also need to be forged between our menfolk and their women in the fight for gender equality, and ask what does the world inhabited by Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, currently look like? It is in this respect that

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the conversation shifts from #MeToo to #YouToo, and the African’s tendency to look towards tangible solutions —​rather than historic problems —​becomes relevant. Of course, this shift is not limited to an African way of thinking. Masculinities studies and movements like HeForShe have advocated the idea of men as feminists and feminist allies around the world. In 2015, Michael Kimmel, a leading scholar on masculinity and the director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, helped start the United States’s first master’s degree program in Masculinities Studies. The program, at Stony Brook University, explores what it means to be male in today’s world.26 Kimmel looks at aspects of forgiveness and redemption needing to be part of the feminist process. According to Kimmel, when it comes to dealing with the issue of troubled pasts, feminists should be “wary but ultimately accepting” of men who are doing this work.27 It is probably worth noting that Professor Kimmel was, in 2018, himself accused of sexual harassment (although again, whether this affects the integrity of his scholarship or makes his work self-​serving is a different conversation).28 The discussion surrounding the place of forgiveness and reformative and transformative justice is in its early stages yet in the context of the #MeToo movement, but it has its place in African feminism as well. Of course, red lines must still be drawn. Sexual, physical, or emotional abuse must not be tolerated in any form. But by beginning with the assumption that all men have the capacity to treat women with respect and as equals, we set a higher minimum expectation of our male counterparts. Just as Africa cannot progress as a continent without playing the female half of its team, so too feminism cannot progress on the continent without the male half in play as well. Only by approaching the situation in this way, can we together begin to diffuse toxic masculinity, the traditional gender stereotypes that still cling to it, and the life-​threatening situations that the promulgation of such outdated thinking can all too often lead to. Pragmatically speaking, constructing this ladder requires a three-​ stepped approach. “Education, Education, Education” was the mantra used by Tony Blair when he first came to power as the British Prime Minister back in 1997.29 It reminds us that you can throw all the money in the world at a problem, but if society does not learn to better itself at large, that problem will continue to perpetuate itself, no matter what you do. The first front is fought in the battle for hearts and minds. Nelson Mandela, a powerful advocate of the policy of peace and reconciliation, viewed education as the most powerful weapon you could use to change the world. He said: No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.30 We may need to cultivate an image of men as champions, allies of their mothers, sisters, and daughters, and raise our boys on the teachings of feminist doctrine. As Afia Pokua says, it is not necessarily the fault of men that they were born into the current mindset. Second, tangible reform must occur throughout African legal systems  —​including those legal systems that operate within predominantly Islamic countries. We need proper laws to enshrine proper rights. In addition to the enduring prominence of matriarchal societies in Africa, thanks in part to the societal structures of individual communities predating the introduction of the patriarchal institutions of Christianity and Islam, the emergence of patriarchal laws has also eroded these traditions in the past few centuries. In an article titled “Africa’s Women Are Still Waiting for 130

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Equal Inheritance Rights” for the global women’s advocacy group Women Deliver, Godfrey Massay writes that in terms of inheritance rights women continue to experience discrimination in both law and practice. According to Tanzania’s National Land Policy, inheritance of clan or family land is to be governed by custom … In reality, the … laws —​even codified ones —​are based on patriarchal notions and do not favour women’s inheritance of land.31 Notably, in 2015 Nigeria’s highest court, the Supreme Court held that Igbo customary law that excludes women from inheritance violated the country’s 1999 Constitution.32 However, the studied disregard of the law by the Umunna (kinsmen) combined with a general ignorance of it in the local populace, means that women are still being excluded despite the ruling. In other words, it is not enough to simply educate people about gender equality, nor is it enough to just make laws on paper, these must also be made good in reality. Law —​and legal procedure —​is what facilitates practice on the ground. Advancements in the legal and political spheres have a tangible impact not only in areas such as inheritance law, but also around issues of sexual health, sexual rights, and the wider access to justice. We can see the very tangible need for greater rights for women even over their own bodies, when it comes to female genital mutilation (FGM). According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) “More than 200 million girls and women alive today have been cut in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where FGM is concentrated.”33 It is important to understand that while these acts may be carried out by men and in patriarchal societies, they are just as likely to be committed or at least encouraged by mothers and grandmothers.34 The cultural, social, and (lack of) legal factors that still influence parts of the continent and sadly other parts of the world, mean that women themselves can end up becoming facilitators in the perpetuation of abuse. In instances such as this, stronger legal practices are needed to set properly enforced rules. Issues of identity make this a complex and complicated path to tread; in many cases, FGM is cited as a traditional practice embedded in cultural and societal identity. In the context of this discussion, it is as well to note that the demonisation of this practice in the West is encoded within a wider racial discourse that furthers the othering of African cultures. In turn, this othering hardens traditional stances so that FGM is seen as a cultural marker rather than a form of oppression. Third  —​and this is where the true extent of the controversy surrounding men as allies appears —​some version of an amnesty on past crimes is perhaps one path to take. This does not mean forgiving the Harvey Weinstein’s of this world for the horrific crimes they have committed, or denying contemporary justice for past misdemeanours. However, we do  —​ thankfully —​live in a very different world today than we did 50 years ago, and it is already clear that what many men see as the accusational tone of much of the #MeToo movement, has resulted in their being reluctant to show public support for it, in case it is subsequently weaponised against their own previous behaviour. The argument goes that if a wolf-​whistle, or a sexist comment, or even a misplaced nightclub grope that took place in 1970 prevents some men from standing up and joining in the fight to protect women against rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, sex trafficking, physical violence and so on today, then is that dogmatic approach to historic male behaviour still helpful in the pursuit of a better future? As the Kavanaugh hearings have shown, the question is certainly not a simple one whichever side one is on. Holding a man accountable when he is up for such a consequential post, when the crime committed is so grave, and when the connection of the crime to the post is so clear, is one thing. 131

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The other discussion that perhaps needs to happen is the one where the context of time, place, socialisation, and public discourse regarding sexual behaviour are taken into account when bringing past actions into present reckonings. These are, again, not the most palatable questions to ask, but they are ones which Africa is in prime position to address head-​on. Truth, reconciliation, forgiveness, and redemption are all very much part of the African story. When we look at macro experiences like Rwanda and South Africa, we see a continent that is in one way or another determined to overcome the horrors of past atrocities and rebuild. “Reconciliation is about restoring relationships between wounded people and communities”, says Cori Wielenga, Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation, University of Pretoria. Reconciliation does not begin or end with commissions or trials. It requires change and transformation at the systemic level. Governments must commit to policies and strategies that bring about greater freedom and equality. And individuals and communities must commit to the hard work of building —​and rebuilding —​relationships every day.35 African feminism understands the need to rebuild relationships between men and women, and to do so in the right way, so that the mistakes of the past do not repeat themselves in the future. If we do not acknowledge our mistakes, and the mistakes of our men, then we cannot learn from them, and “Education, Education, Education” goes out of the window.

African stories: As told by the West and as told by ourselves At the start of this chapter, we looked at the example of Cherie Blair, a well-​meaning white woman who told a room full of people that the first sexual experience of most African women was rape. The stereotyping of Africans in this way —​both male and female —​is not helpful, as it serves only to perpetuate traditional gender stereotypes, which in turn helps to facilitate the victim-​predator narrative in playing itself out by way of real-​world incidents on the ground. The reality, however, is that the African story, or even the “Black” story at global diaspora level, is still all too often being told through white eyes. Consider the 2018 movie Green Book, inspired by the story of jazz pianist, Don Shirley, and his Italian American bodyguard/​driver Frank Vallelonga, embarking on a tour of America’s Deep South during the early sixties. Amid widespread acclaim, including an Oscar for Best Picture, came a backlash against a “white saviour narrative” that shows the story of a Black historical figure through a white lens. Teen Vogue’s entertainment editor, Claire Dodson, went so far as to say that this depiction directly fed into its Oscars win because it “made white people feel good about themselves”.36 Whether that is true or not, the one thing we know is that African stories (or in this case an African American story) are all too frequently told through the prism of a white Western lens. And what do prisms do? They distort white light. As the actor, playwright and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, Danai Gurira, lamented: “The stories about Africans always miraculously have a western protagonist. Do we not merit our ability to tell our own stories?”37 For all the (mostly) good intentions of narrators in the West, African women cannot continue to allow our narrative to be hijacked by Western voices. All too often, we are portrayed as monolithic by distant observers and placed into a convenient category: beast of burden, oppressed woman, exotic creature, domestic worker.

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Just as the silencing of African women hinders African progress, so too the omission of African feminism from the world stage hinders #MeToo and the wider global feminist movement at large. If we keep in mind the fact that sexual corruption and criminality will flourish wherever in the world this sort of behaviour is left to go unchecked, then we can begin to take tangible steps towards building solutions. Conversely, when these reports are taken as inevitabilities, based on caricatured perceptions of the timid and the terror-​inducing, our task becomes infinitely more difficult. In order to make African feminism work, we need to communicate it directly from mouths on the continent, into the ears of the rest of the world. However, before we are able to do this successfully, African feminism still has a domestic issue to take care of: the depiction of African women within Africa leaves much to be desired as well, and that goes not only for the way men depict women, but also the way in which women depict themselves. From Hollywood, cut to Nollywood, and the influence of Nigerian cinema across the African continent. Women have traditionally been portrayed as unreliable objects throughout the history of Nollywood film, affiliated with witchcraft, the occult, and often meeting an unfortunate end. In 1992, the popular two-​part film Living in Bondage was released, depicting an African woman who is murdered by her husband in a satanic ritual killing in exchange for enormous wealth.38 At that time, which was just when Nollywood was beginning to become a global phenomenon, almost all of its films portrayed women in some sort of negative way: as witches, no-​gooders, materialistic, diabolic, and so on. When we consider that 75% of Nollywood’s audience has traditionally fallen between 15 and 35 years old, with girls and women making up 81% of this population, the true impact of this mass media format becomes apparent.39 With such negative self-​images being so nonchalantly beamed into the minds of African women, and Black women around the world, one wonders how their personal knowledge and consciousness is to be strengthened and their maturation and empowerment achieved. In our social media age, we are now all too aware that the influence of media cuts far more deeply than mere theory and shapes the very pragmacies of our day-​to-​day lives. John Denvir said in 1996 that Movies often uncover aspects of law that traditional legal sources deny; but film not only “reveals” law, it often creates the social reality to which legal systems adapt. Therefore, film must be more than a tool of critique; sometimes it must also be its object.40 In other words, when we think back to African feminism’s approach to fostering a culture of greater gender equality on the continent, the stories we tell, and the way we educate those around us, play a significant part in shaping what becomes the written legislation. Consequently, those seeking to advance the prominence of #MeToo in Africa must begin with the telling of accurate and appropriate narratives about African women. It is fair to say that Nollywood has come a long way since its beginnings in the early nineties, and the wider media’s portrayal of women across Africa —​as one might expect in such a space of time —​has also evolved significantly over the past three decades. Nonetheless, as the New York Times article cited earlier reminds us, we still have a long way to go: “Nigerian Women Say ‘MeToo.’ Critics Say ‘Prove It.’ ” And in how many other countries around the world, do women still feel that this is the more broadly held attitude towards the movement? One way to improve the accuracy of the African female narrative is to improve its visibility. Indeed, the very reason that non-​profit organisation, African Women on Board (AWB) was created, was to place the spotlight onto the stories of real-​life African women. By communicating

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transparent narratives and portraying accurate depictions, and amplifying this voice across the globe, we can begin to influence, and consequently in-​turn improve the realities of African women on the ground.41 Truth creates trust, which in turn leads to change. In the United Kingdom and around the world, the BBC 50:50 Project seeks to attain an equal balance of male and female guests on-​screen during news and current affairs programming.42 Following initial success, the initiative has now been extended to monitor disability and ethnicity. With international partner organisations now signing up to the scheme all over the world, including the likes of WFM Radio in Nigeria and the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, it exemplifies how one single simple idea can gain momentum to inspire pragmatic change; just as the #MeToo movement has done. As film, media, and technology investor, Dayo Ogunyemi stated in his 2017 Visions of Africa’s Future, Ted Talk, “Films can serve as a conveyor belt for hope. And films can change perspectives faster than we can build roads.”43 A 2017 study on “The Effect of Prime Time Television Ethnic/​Racial Stereotypes on Latino and Black Americans” tells us: “Much is known about the negative consequences of exposure to ethnic/​racial stereotypes in the media, on white audiences. However, there is substantially less research addressing the effects of such media content on members of racial/​ethnic minority groups.”44 What we do know is that pioneers, role-​models, and real world examples give women and girls at least some semblance of a blueprint that lets them know that they can achieve success. Representation is crucially important in tackling racial and gender stereotypes, because it allows people to see past the caricatures that mask the real stories and real lives behind them. But it is also critical in communicating self-​worth and self-​understanding amongst our young girls, and allowing them to see that they do not need to be pigeonholed into one specific identity, or career, or stereotype. This shift in focus will create avenues for men and women to work together to dismantle unhealthy norms that have been passed down through generations. If education really is the most powerful tool that one can use to change the world, then it is just as important to pass across contemporary stories as it is historic ones. As African women —​and men —​we know that we have more nuanced stories to tell.

Notes 1 “History & Vision”, Me Too (website), accessed 8 June 2020, https://​metoomvmt.org. 2 Lynsey Chutel, “The #MeToo Movement Should Listen to the Silence of African Women”, Quartz Africa, 22 December 2018, https://​qz.com/​africa/​1501088/​the-​metoo-​movement-​should-​listen-​to-​ the-​silence-​of-​african-​women/​. 3 Sarah Marsh, “Cherie Blair Claims ‘Most African Women’s First Sexual Experience is Rape,’ ” Guardian, 26 March 2019, www.theguardian.com/​politics/​2019/​mar/​26/​cherie-​blair-​accused-​of​reinforcing-​stereotypes-​of-​african-​women. 4 Davis and Aisha Tucker-​Brown, “Effects of Black Sexual Stereotypes on Sexual Decision Making Among African American Women”, Journal of Pan African Studies 5, no. 9 (2013): 111–​128. 5 Genius Radio TV, “How a Nigerian Senator Elisha Abbo Assaulted Two Women in an Abuja Shop”, YouTube, 2 July 2019, video, https://​youtu.be/​FK5lhXthxT4. 6 Tunde Ososanya, “Senator Elisha Abbo: Women Group Rejects Apology, Demands UN Intervention”, Legit, 7 July 2019, www.legit.ng/​1247457-​senator-​elisha-​abbo-​women-​group-​rejects-​apology-​ demands-​un-​intervention.html. 7 YNaija, “How I  Met Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo and the First Rape  —​Busola Dakolo:  Part  1 #WithChude”,YouTube, 27 June 2019, video, https://​youtu.be/​suNr64V4edg. 8 “Busola Dakolo to Appeal Case After Court Throws Out Suit Against Fatoyinbo, Fines Her N1m”, Sahara Reporters, 14 November 2019, http://​saharareporters.com/​2019/​11/​14/​busola-​dakolo-​appeal-​ case-​after-​court-​throws-​out-​suit-​against-​fatoyinbo-​fines-​her-​n1m. According to the presiding judge,

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Why not #MeToo? Justice Oathman Musa, bringing the suit was an abuse of judicial process, adding that the case was empty and purely sentimental, aimed more at cruelty than obtaining justice. 9 Ruth Maclean and Eromo Egbejule, “How ‘Nigeria’s #MeToo Moment’ Turned Against Rape Accuser”, Guardian, 6 August 2019, www.theguardian.com/​global-​development/​2019/​aug/​06/​ nigeria-​metoo-​moment-​accuser-​busola-​dakolo. 10 Julie Turkewitz, “Nigerian Women Say ‘MeToo.’ Critics Say ‘Prove It,’ ” New York Times, 2 November 2019,  www.nytimes.com/​ 2 019/​ 1 1/​ 0 2/​ world/​ a frica/​ n igerian-​ women-​ m e-​ t oo-​ s exual-​ a buse-​ harassment.html. 11 “University of Ghana Lecturers Suspended after ‘Sex-​for-​grades’ Exposé”, BBC News, 18 February 2020, www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​africa-​51546271. 12 Michael J. Silverstein and Kate Sayre, “The Female Economy”, Harvard Business Review (September 2009): 46–​53, https://​hbr.org/​2009/​09/​the-​female-​economy. 13 “Women Wield the Bulk of South African Spending Power”, Nielsen, 6 July 2019, www.nielsen. com/​ssa/​en/​insights/​article/​2019/​women-​wield-​the-​bulk-​of-​south-​african-​spending-​power/​. 14 Nkiru Balonwu, “Women Drive Consumer Spend. So Why Don’t We Know What They Want?” Africa Report, 5 February 2020, www.theafricareport.com/​22974/​women-​drive-​consumer-​spend-​so-​ why-​dont-​we-​know-​what-​they-​want/​. 15 Antony Sguazzin, “Female Board Representation’s Surprising Champion Is Africa”, Bloomberg, 26 November 2019, www.bloomberg.com/​news/​articles/​2019-​11-​26/​female-​board-​representation-​s​surprising-​champion-​is-​africa. 16 Ghana Web TV, “Sugar Dem GH to Achieve Women Empowerment Through Dialogue with Men”, YouTube, 14 February 2018, video, https://​youtu.be/​vtcDrJHmQy. 17 Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Africa Wo/​Man Palava:  The Nigerian Novel by Women, Women in Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 18 Jean Lau Chin, “Global Feminism and the World of Work”, PsycCRITIQUES 59, no.  29 (2014), www.researchgate.net/​publication/​274987235. Chin is reviewing Bahira Sherif Trask, Women, Work, and Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities (New York: Routledge, 2013). 19 Hannah Betts, “How to Succeed in Business: Be a Feminist and a Flirt”, Sunday Morning Herald, 1 August 2012, www.smh.com.au/​politics/​federal/​how-​to-​succeed-​in-​business-​be-​a-​feminist-​and-​a-​ flirt-​20120731-​23ct8.html. 20 Betts, “How to Succeed in Business”. Betts cites Laura J. Kray, Connson C. Locke, and Alex Bryant Van Zant, “Feminine Charm: An Experimental Analysis of its Costs and Benefits in Negotiations”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38, no. 10 (2012): 1343–​1357, https://​journals.sagepub.com/​ doi/​pdf/​10.1177/​0146167212453074. 21 Will Self, “Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital by Catherine Hakim —​Review”, Guardian, 19 August 2019, www.theguardian.com/​books/​2011/​aug/​19/​honey-​money-​catherine-​hakim-​ review; Catherine Hakim, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital (London: Allen Lane, 2011). 22 Kelly-​Leigh Cooper, “Kim Kardashian: Feminist Icon or Emoji Opportunist?” BBC News, 8 March 2018, www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​us-​canada-​43330016. 23 Naziru Mikailu, “Nigeria’s President Buhari: My Wife Belongs in Kitchen”, BBC News, 14 October 2016, www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​africa-​37659863. 24 Nkiru Balonwu, “Speaking up About Harassment in the Workplace”, LinkedIn, 4 July 2017, www. linkedin.com/​pulse/​speaking-​up-​harassment-​workplace-​nkiru-​balonwu. 25 Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Sunzi”, 14 March 2019, www.britannica.com/​biography/​Sunzi. 26 Caroline Crosson Gilpin and Natalie Proulx, “Boys to Men: Teaching and Learning About Masculinity in an Age of Change”, New York Times, 12 April 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​04/​12/​learning/​ lesson-​plans/​boys-​to-​men-​teaching-​and-​learning-​about-​masculinity-​in-​an-​age-​of-​change.html. 27 Hugo Schwyzer, “Raising Feminist Sons: A Conversation with Michael and Zachary Kimmel”, Role Reboot, 12 September 2012, www.rolereboot.org/​family/​details/​2012-​09-​raising-​feminist-​sons-​a-​ conversation-​with-​michael-​an/​. 28 Rebecca Ratcliffe, “US Women’s Rights Campaigner Accused of Sexual Harassment”, Guardian, 15 August 2018, www.theguardian.com/​global-​development/​2018/​aug/​15/​us-​womens-​r ights-​ campaigner-​accused-​of-​sexual-​harassment. 29 Sean Coughlan, “Education, Education, Education”, BBC News, 14 May 2007, http://​news.bbc. co.uk/​2/​hi/​uk_​news/​education/​6564933.stm. 30 “Nelson Mandela’s Most Inspirational Quotes”, ABC News, 5 December 2013, https://​abcnews. go.com/​International/​nelson-​mandelas-​inspirational-​quotes/​story?id=8879848.

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Nkiru Balonwu 31 Godfrey Massay, “Africa’s Women are Still Waiting for Equal Inheritance Rights”, Women Deliver, 21 June 2017, https://​womendeliver.org/​2017/​africas-​women-​still-​waiting-​equal-​inheritance-​r ights/​. 32 Hanibal Goitom, “Nigeria:  Supreme Court Invalidates Igbo Customary Law Denying Female Descendants the Right to Inherit”, Library of Congress —​Global Legal Monitor, 6 May 2014, https://​ loc.gov/​law/​foreign-​news/​article/​nigeria-​supreme-​court-​invalidates-​igbo-​customary-​law-​denying-​ female-​descendants-​the-​r ight-​to-​inherit/​. 33 “Female Genital Mutilation”, World Health Organisation, 3 February 2020, www.who.int/​news-​ room/​fact-​sheets/​detail/​female-​genital-​mutilation. 34 Omaima El-​Gibaly, Mirette Aziz, and Salma Abou Hussein, “Health Care Providers’ and Mothers’ Perceptions About the Medicalization of Female Genital Mutilation or Cutting in Egypt: A Cross-​ sectional Qualitative Study”, BMC International Health and Human Rights 19, no. 26 (2019), https://​ doi.org/​10.1186/​s12914-​019-​0202-​x. 35 Cori Wielenga, “Rwanda & South Africa:  A Long Road from Truth to Reconciliation”, Conversation, 6 April 2017, https://​theconversation.com/​rwanda-​and-​south-​africa-​a-​long-​road-​from-​ truth-​to-​reconciliation-​75628. 36 Claire Dodson, “Green Book Won Best Picture at the Oscars Because it Made White People Feel Good About Themselves”, Teen Vogue, 25 February 2019, www.teenvogue.com/​story/​ green-​book-​best-​picture-​oscars-​2019-​made-​white-​people-​feel-​good-​about-​themselves. 37 “When Danai Gurira Couldn’t Find Stories about African Women She Wrote Her Own”, PBS News Hour, 18 February 2016, www.pbs.org/​newshour/​show/​when-​danai-​gurira-​couldnt-​find-​ complex-​stories-​about-​african-​women-​she-​wrote-​her-​own. 38 Chris Obi Rapu, dir., Living in Bondage (Nigeria: Kenneth Nnebue, 1992). 39 Hyginus Ekwuazi, “Nollywood: The Audience as Merchandise”, in African Film: Looking Back and Looking Forward, ed. Foluke Ogunleye (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). 40 John Denvir, ed., Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996). 41 Nkiru Balonwu, “Why Not #MeToo? How Stereotypes Hinder African Women’s Progress”, Al Jazeera, 9 October 2019, www.aljazeera.com/​indepth/​opinion/​metoo-​stereotypes-​hinder-​african-​ women-​progress-​191009065336487.html. 42 “50:50 The Equality Project”, BBC, accessed 1 June 2020, www.bbc.co.uk/​5050. 43 Dayo Ogunyemi, “Visions of Africa’s Future, from African Filmmakers”, filmed August 2017 at TedGlobal, Arusha, Tanzania, video, 11:46, www.ted.com/​talks/​dayo_​ogunyemi_​visions_​of_​africa_​ s_​future_​from_​african_​filmmakers?language=en. 44 Riva Tukachinsky, Dana Mastro, and Moran Yarchi, “The Effect of Prime Time Television Ethnic/​ Racial Stereotypes on Latino and Black Americans: A Longitudinal National Level Study, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media”, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 61, no. 3 (2017), https://​ doi.org/​10.1080/​08838151.2017.1344669.

Bibliography ABC News. “Nelson Mandela’s Most Inspirational Quotes”. 5 December 2013. https://​abcnews.go.com/​ International/​nelson-​mandelas-​inspirational-​quotes/​story?id=8879848. Balonwu, Nkiru. “Speaking up About Harassment in the Workplace”. LinkedIn, 4 July 2017. www. linkedin.com/​pulse/​speaking-​up-​harassment-​workplace-​nkiru-​balonwu. Balonwu, Nkiru. “Why not #MeToo? How Stereotypes Hinder African Women’s Progress”. Al Jazeera, 9 October 2019. www.aljazeera.com/​indepth/​opinion/​metoo-​stereotypes-​hinder-​african-​women-​ progress-​191009065336487.html. Balonwu, Nkiru. “Women Drive Consumer Spend. So Why Don’t We Know What They Want?” Africa Report, 5 February 2020. www.theafricareport.com/​22974/​women-​drive-​consumer-​spend-​so-​why-​ dont-​we-​know-​what-​they-​want/​. BBC. “50:50 The Equality Project”. Accessed 1 June 2020. www.bbc.co.uk/​5050. BBC News. “University of Ghana lecturers suspended after ‘sex-​for-​grades’ exposé“. 18 February 2020. www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​africa-​51546271. Betts, Hannah. “How to Succeed in Business:  Be a Feminist and a Flirt”. Sunday Morning Herald, 1 August 2012. www.smh.com.au/​politics/​federal/​how-​to-​succeed-​in-​business-​be-​a-​feminist-​and-​a-​ flirt-​20120731-​23ct8.html.

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Why not #MeToo? Chin, Jean Lau. “Global Feminism and the World of Work”. PsycCRITIQUES 59, no. 29 (2014). www. researchgate.net/​publication/​274987235. Chutel, Lynsey. “The #MeToo Movement Should Listen to the Silence of African Women”. Quartz Africa, 22 December 2018. https://​qz.com/​africa/​1501088/​the-​metoo-​movement-​should-​listen-​to-​ the-​silence-​of-​african-​women/​. Cooper, Kelly-​Leigh. “Kim Kardashian:  Feminist Icon or Emoji Opportunist?” BBC News, 8 March 2018. www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​us-​canada-​43330016. Coughlan, Sean. “Education, Education, Education”. BBC News, 14 May 2007. http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​ 2/​hi/​uk_​news/​education/​6564933.stm. Davis, Sarita, and Aisha Tucker-​Brown. “Effects of Black Sexual Stereotypes on Sexual Decision Making Among African American Women”. Journal of Pan African Studies 5, no. 9 (2013): 111–​128. Denvir, John. ed., Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Dodson, Claire. “Green Book Won Best Picture at the Oscars Because It Made White People Feel Good About Themselves”. Teen Vogue, 25 February 2019. www.teenvogue.com/​story/​ green-​book-​best-​picture-​oscars-​2019-​made-​white-​people-​feel-​good-​about-​themselves. Ekwuazi, Hyginus. “Nollywood: The Audience as Merchandise”. In African Film: Looking Back and Looking Forward, edited by Foluke Ogunleye, 35–​45. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. El-​Gibaly, Omaima, Mirette Aziz, and Salma Abou Hussein. “Health Care Providers’ and Mothers’ Perceptions About the Medicalization of Female Genital Mutilation or Cutting in Egypt: A Cross-​ sectional Qualitative Study”. BMC International Health and Human Rights 19, no. 26 (2019). https://​ doi.org/​10.1186/​s12914-​019-​0202-​x. Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Sunzi”, 14 March 2019, www.britannica.com/​biography/​Sunzi. Genius Radio TV. “How a Nigerian Senator Elisha Abbo Assaulted Two Women in an Abuja Shop”. YouTube, 2 July 2019. Video. https://​youtu.be/​FK5lhXthxT4. Ghana Web TV. “Sugar Dem GH to Achieve Women Empowerment Through Dialogue with Men”. YouTube, 14 February 2018. Video. https://​youtu.be/​vtcDrJHmQy. Gilpin, Caroline Crosson, and Natalie Proulx. “Boys to Men: Teaching and Learning About Masculinity in an Age of Change”. New  York Times, 12 April 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​04/​12/​learning/​ lesson-​plans/​boys-​to-​men-​teaching-​and-​learning-​about-​masculinity-​in-​an-​age-​of-​change.html. Goitom, Hanibal. “Nigeria:  Supreme Court Invalidates Igbo Customary Law Denying Female Descendants the Right to Inherit”. Library of Congress —​Global Legal Monitor, 6 May 2014. https://​ loc.gov/​law/​foreign-​news/​article/​nigeria-​supreme-​court-​invalidates-​igbo-​customary-​law-​denying-​ female-​descendants-​the-​r ight-​to-​inherit/​. Hakim, Catherine. Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. London: Allen Lane, 2011. Kray, Laura J., Connson C. Locke, and Alex Bryant Van Zant. “Feminine Charm:  An Experimental Analysis of its Costs and Benefits in Negotiations”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38, no. 10 (2012): 1343–​1357. https://​journals.sagepub.com/​doi/​pdf/​10.1177/​0146167212453074. Maclean, Ruth, and Eromo Egbejule. “How ‘Nigeria’s #MeToo Moment’ Turned Against Rape Accuser”. Guardian, 6 August 2019. www.theguardian.com/​global-​development/​2019/​aug/​06/​ nigeria-​metoo-​moment-​accuser-​busola-​dakolo. Marsh, Sarah. “Cherie Blair Claims ‘Most African Women’s First Sexual Experience is Rape.’ ” Guardian, 26 March 2019. www.theguardian.com/​politics/​2019/​mar/​26/​cherie-​blair-​accused​of-​reinforcing-​stereotypes-​of-​african-​women. Massay, Godfrey. “Africa’s Women are Still Waiting for Equal Inheritance Rights”. Women Deliver, 21 June 2017. https://​womendeliver.org/​2017/​africas-​women-​still-​waiting-​equal-​inheritance-​r ights/​. Me Too (website). “History & Vision”. Accessed 8 June 2020. https://​metoomvmt.org. Mikailu, Naziru. “Nigeria’s President Buhari: My Wife Belongs in Kitchen”. BBC News, 14 October 2016. www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​africa-​37659863. Nielsen Insights. “Women Wield the Bulk of South African Spending Power”. 6 July 2019. www.nielsen. com/​ssa/​en/​insights/​article/​2019/​women-​wield-​the-​bulk-​of-​south-​african-​spending-​power/​. Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. Africa Wo/​Man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women. Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Ogunyemi, Dayo. “Visions of Africa’s Future, from African Filmmakers”. Filmed August 2017 at TedGlobal, Arusha, Tanzania. Video. www.ted.com/​talks/​dayo_​ogunyemi_​visions_​of_​africa_​s_​ future_​from_​african_​filmmakers?language=en.

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Nkiru Balonwu Ososanya, Tunde. “Senator Elisha Abbo: Women Group Rejects Apology, Demands UN Intervention”. Legit, 7 July 2019. www.legit.ng/​1247457-​senator-​elisha-​abbo-​women-​group-​rejects-​apology-​ demands-​un-​intervention.html. PBS News Hour. “When Danai Gurira Couldn’t Find Stories About African Women She Wrote Her Own”. 18 February 2016. www.pbs.org/​newshour/​show/​when-​danai-​gurira-​couldnt-​find-​complex-​ stories-​about-​african-​women-​she-​wrote-​her-​own. Rapu, Chris Obi, dir. Living in Bondage. Nigeria: Kenneth Nnebue, 1992. Ratcliffe, Rebecca. “US Women’s Rights Campaigner Accused of Sexual Harassment”. Guardian, 15 August 2018. www.theguardian.com/​global-​development/​2018/​aug/​15/​us-​womens-​r ights-​campaigner-​ accused-​of-​sexual-​harassment. Sahara Reporters. “Busola Dakolo to Appeal Case after Court Throws Out Suit against Fatoyinbo, Fines Her N1m”. 14 November 2019, http://​saharareporters.com/​2019/​11/​14/​busola-​dakolo-​ appeal-​case-​after-​court-​throws-​out-​suit-​against-​fatoyinbo-​fines-​her-​n1m Schwyzer, Hugo. “Raising Feminist Sons:  A Conversation with Michael and Zachary Kimmel”. Role Reboot, 12 September 2012. www.rolereboot.org/​family/​details/​2012-​09-​raising-​feminist-​sons-​a-​ conversation-​with-​michael-​an/​. Self, Will. “Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital by Catherine Hakim —​Review”. Guardian, 19 August 2019. www.theguardian.com/​books/​2011/​aug/​19/​honey-​money-​catherine-​hakim-​review. Sguazzin, Antony. “Female Board Representation’s Surprising Champion Is Africa”. Bloomberg, 26 November 2019. www.bloomberg.com/​news/​articles/​2019-​11-​26/​female-​board-​representation-​s​surprising-​champion-​is-​africa. Sherif Trask, Bahira. Women, Work, and Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities. New York: Routledge, 2013. Silverstein, Michael J., and Kate Sayre. “The Female Economy”. Harvard Business Review (September 2009): 46–​53. https://​hbr.org/​2009/​09/​the-​female-​economy. Tukachinsky, Riva, Dana Mastro, and Moran Yarchi. “The Effect of Prime Time Television Ethnic/​ Racial Stereotypes on Latino and Black Americans: A Longitudinal National Level Study, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media”. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 61, no. 3 (2017): 538–​556. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​08838151.2017.1344669. Turkewitz, Julie. “Nigerian Women Say ‘MeToo.’ Critics Say ‘Prove It.’ ” New York Times, 2 November 2019. www.nytimes.com/​2019/​11/​02/​world/​africa/​nigerian-​women-​me-​too-​sexual-​abuse-​harassment.html. Wielenga, Cori. “Rwanda & South Africa: A Long Road from Truth to Reconciliation”. Conversation, 6 April 2017. https://​theconversation.com/​rwanda-​and-​south-​africa-​a-​long-​road-​from-​truth-​to-​ reconciliation-​75628. World Health Organisation. “Female Genital Mutilation”. 3 February 2020. www.who.int/​news-​room/​ fact-​sheets/​detail/​female-​genital-​mutilation. YNaija. “How I Met Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo and The First Rape —​Busola Dakolo: Part 1 #WithChude”. YouTube, 27 June 2019. Video. https://​youtu.be/​suNr64V4edg.

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PART II

Contexts

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10 NARRATING #METOO Calling our organisations to action Pamela L. Runestad

Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein are in prison, and Matt Lauer has been fired. Donald Trump got into office despite his own admission that he has grabbed women “by the pussy”. Roy Moore lost his race, but Brett Kavanaugh sits on the SCOTUS despite accusations of sexual assault.1 Academics have been in the news, too: Avital Ronell, Marcus Anthony, Ric Curtis, Barry Spunt, and Leonardo Domínguez have all been publicly accused. Regardless of how the Ronell or CUNY cases play out, we are now firmly in the age of #MeToo with no end in sight. After all, one in six American women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape.2 Let’s consider this statistic from the perspective of a professional academic organisation. I’ll use the American Anthropological Association (AAA) because I’m a medical anthropologist. If AAA has 10,000 members and we assume that half are women, then according to the math about 850 of female members alone have been victimised. The ballroom of the San Jose Marriott where we’ll have our annual meeting in November only holds 700, so that ballroom would be overflowing. Are we academics, particularly those of us who study people, listening? I’d like to think so. But more importantly: are we going to accept stories of abuse as valid, recognise injustice, and vow to hold ourselves responsible for preventing future injustice —​over and over again? In other words, are we going to commit to change by confronting the power and privilege that perpetuates this kind of violence? I hope that organisations like AAA are listening to victims and willing to face the fact that sexual assault has been a part of our world, and that “our world” includes disciplines like anthropology. I hope that professional organisations can agree that to do nothing about abuse in our disciplines is to be complicit in the abuse of our students and colleagues. I hope that as individual members of such organisations, each of us is willing to think about when and how we can support victims. Confronting anthropology’s racist, sexist, and heteronormative history is an ongoing battle and we still don’t have equity in our own discipline despite the research we carry out on power and privilege. I’d wager that other disciplines have similar problems. Maybe the #MeToo moment can be used to fuel more substantive changes in the landscape of academia in particular and US society in general. To that end, I consider the narratives of sexual assault (the #MeToo stories) and counter-​ narratives (responses to #MeToo stories) as cultural anthropologists have done for other narratives.3 I frame common criticisms or rejections of #MeToo narratives in terms of structural, symbolic, and everyday violence in response to intimate violence.4 In this chapter, I have 141

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couched the counter-​narratives as denials because, once someone comes forward, the American “innocent until proven guilty” strategy requires that we don’t believe the victim at the outset. I write about narratives as making sense out of nonsense, about the burdens placed on victims to tell their stories, and the rationale for disbelief over acceptance while also exploring the factors that underpin the counter-​narratives. I close with a discussion of why taking concrete, organisation-​level steps keep our democracy healthy even when we are faced with injustice. About the text that follows: I use they/​them because not all victims are women, and not all perpetrators are men. Moreover, non-​binary individuals are at higher risk of being assaulted than cis-​gendered individuals. I use “you” to encourage readers to walk in the shoes of victims and to consider their own positionality. I describe common instances of sexual assault because too often we gloss over the raw details that are the root of victims’ trauma and pain in “polite company”. But this is no time for polite talk. Americans engaged in such polite talk in the 1980s when talking about how HIV spreads —​“bodily fluids” as the gloss for blood, breastmilk, vaginal fluid, and seminal fluid —​which only served to fan the flames of fear that led to stigma, blame, and increased human suffering. I will not repeat that mistake by eliding the horrors of sexual assault. If you yourself are a victim, please consider this a trigger warning.

Denial, Part 1: What is happening?! You’re walking home or to your car, talking to someone at a party, riding public transport, at a family event, out for a run, or out on a date. Things are normal. Until suddenly, they’re not.

What is happening? Whether you’re grabbed by the breast, the butt, or the vagina; whether your mouth, your anus, or your vagina is penetrated with a penis, fingers, or an object; whether you’re held down, beaten, woken from sleep, or incapacitated in some way —​none of this makes sense to you. None of it. How are you supposed to make sense of going from sitting on a chair at a party to having a penis thrust in your face? Or from walking to having your pants ripped down and someone’s penis thrust into your vagina? Or from being at a fun family gathering to having a supposedly safe person shove your hands down their pants when you’re taken to the bathroom to pee? None of it makes sense. The only thing that makes sense is that this is nonsense. So much so that maybe you have no words. Panic, fear, adrenaline, anger, shock, disgust, pain. That is what you have. Too many emotions, sensations, feelings, just —​too much. You shut down or black out. Or maybe you find superhuman powers and fight back. You are rescued. Or maybe you are left alone in shock. Breaking away, cowering away, being left… When the abuser is done, your mind swims with emotion, your body feels (or goes numb) in ways it hasn’t before, and your brain works to make sense of memories in an effort to move away from the disorientation caused by the abrupt changes between before, during, after. There may be a hodgepodge of things that aren’t that clear punctuated by intense memories of sounds like music or a seemingly faraway party chatter, smells like body odor or cologne or breath or wet pavement, the face or voice of the aggressor, or the way their thick fingers clenched your throat. Some everyday details, depending on the experience, may be brought into relief (and serve as triggers later) or be forgotten entirely. In other words, you begin the work of narrative construction, which in this case is to make sense out of nonsense. You struggle to make sense of everything you feel (physically, emotionally, cognitively) to answer the questions: what happened to me and why? 142

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Cultural anthropologists know that narrative construction has everything to do with past experience and positionality: Does the victim have a voice? Where? With whom? What cultural frameworks exist to give shape to this story? These questions are fundamental to the interpretation of our data. So, indeed: who is the first audience? I would say that it is you, the victim. You are the first audience of your own story. When you put your memories, feelings, emotions, and physical brokenness together and realise the event that you experienced fits our society’s description of sexual assault, you are the first to affirm or deny it. In vetting your own story, you deny, blame, or believe yourself. This, too, is a process, and it might be more circular than linear. Moreover, this might come quickly for some, but more slowly for others depending on differences in positionality. You might be utterly confused because you are a child and you just don’t understand what someone did or does to you, or why it has to be a secret. (According to Rainn.org, 93% of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone the child knows.) You might live in denial forever because putting the experience in the framework of abuse might implicate a close friend or family member and is simply too painful. You might vacillate between denial, self-​blame, and acknowledgement over the course of several years. You might live in self-​blame because you don’t have the social or cultural safety net that would place the responsibility for your pain on the person who caused it. It is worth ruminating over the emotional and psychological work that it might take to go from being a five in the statistic that “One in six American women experience rape” to being that one.5 To become the imagined “other” —​someone who at best identifies as “a fellow victim” and at worst supposedly “deserved it” —​is not easy. It’s traumatic to find yourself thrust into a category that you never imagined you would occupy. Getting through self-​blame means grappling with questions like, am I “bad” like the people I thought occupied this category (did I do something wrong? is it my fault?); or, are the people in this category actually just like me and have been labelled “bad” as a sort of collective defense mechanism meant to rationalise why some people have been victimised while others haven’t? Making your way to self-​belief, then, can take time and energy. Social scientists likely recognise the internalisation of these assumptions to the point of self-​blame, coupled with the normalisation of victimisation, as symbolic violence a la Bourdieu. Making sense out of the nonsense starts with you, and you might seek out sympathetic audiences to help you as you “struggle along”.6 Telling someone about what happened to you requires that you are reasonably sure that the listener will believe you. You are faced with a new set of questions: Who can I tell? What will I say? How will I say it? What will happen when I  tell audience ABC about XYZ? After all, different audiences require different versions of your narrative. You might tell your best friend different things than you tell a nurse or a police officer; moreover, telling someone privately might make it easier to tell someone “officially”. In any case, the fact remains that if you want the perpetrator to be punished, you have to believe not only that someone else will believe you, but you have to be certain that they will agree that you have rights, that someone violated said rights, and that they will try to hold the abuser accountable for what they did to you. There are several places in the narrative construction thus far where you may feel that it’s impossible to tell someone that you’ve been assaulted. Each type of narrative presents its own hazards, obstacles, and possibility of further pain. Is it really a mystery why only 43% of women and 10% of men who have been assaulted say that they have reported their assaults to authorities?7

Denial, Part 2: Why did they wait until now to say anything? The “Why did they wait?” question suggests that you’re somehow obligated to disclose to an “official” audience according to that audience’s timeframe in order for your story to be 143

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real —​that there is a “right way” and “right time” to tell. This assumption fails to consider that when and who you tell depends on your relationship with the person you’re telling and your motivations for telling them. While telling a trusted friend privately might alleviate some of your pain, relating your story in some sort of official way that may become public rarely has that effect. The second assumption is that “official” accounts told immediately to become part of a report are more credible than private accounts corroborated by friends and family when you get the courage to seek justice. But this assumption fails to consider that telling immediately might make you vulnerable to further violence, particularly if the perpetrator is someone close to you. Why tell immediately if the perpetrator can strike you again? There are plenty more of reasons why someone would choose not to tell their story right away. It takes time for you to put together what happened to you because time itself is warped and twisted by the trauma you experienced. It takes time to come to the conclusion that your experience fits the description of assault. And it takes time to decide to come forward because you have to think about who you are going to tell. Moreover, these timeframes are variable for individuals. It is also possible that the assaults are ongoing and haven’t stopped. There’s also the fact that the trauma you experience when you’re assaulted is not limited to that singular event. The horror often replays in your mind, over and over, like a bad song that you can’t get rid of. In addition, the fashioning and re-​fashioning of the narrative(s), which is required when telling the story to multiple, different audiences, is also traumatic because re-​telling it is re-​living it. In other words, in order to hold someone accountable for the horrible thing(s) they have done to you, you have to re-​experience the trauma through narrative. In fact, some people do not report assaults right after they happen because of this factor alone. And then there’s the possibility that you’ve been assaulted multiple times, either by the same person or by multiple people. There is also the trauma that comes from hearing the stories of others because it reminds you of your own. In some cases, you might have told someone close to you only to have your experience denied (see “They would never do that” below). Perhaps you want to spare others the pain of knowing what has happened to you. Or you might “read the writing on the wall” and keep the narrative to yourself because your local police department, school, church, workplace, or other environment has a history of protecting the futures of the perpetrators of violence and the public image of an institution they belong to (say, a university) at the expense of victims like you. Maybe you have seen the credibility of other victims destroyed as they sought justice, and instead of closure they suffered new injustices. Trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma. So the question for you isn’t why did you wait, it is why would you tell at all? Part of your narrative becomes, “I clearly have more to lose than gain by coming forward when the likelihood of being treated as a liar at best and a whore at worst is far greater than the perpetrator being disciplined.” After all, out of 1,000 sexual assaults in the United States, only 310 will be reported, and of those only six perpetrators will serve time.8 With these odds stacked against you, what often happens is that you tell when you just can’t take it anymore. You tell when that person is being nominated as a Supreme Court justice, is becoming a bishop, is going on the ballot for president, is up for an award, or is taking on a new graduate student. You tell not to get justice for yourself (because you’ve already been through hell and maybe the statute of limitations has run out), but to save others. In the case of Professor Blasey Ford, you go public because you cannot bear the thought of allowing the person who sexually assaulted you to set legal precedence for our nation’s most pressing issues. You persist, and you resist.

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Denial, Part 3: There’s no way they could have done this This is a particularly nasty version of denial that circulates when people who are known and liked are accused of something that their friends and associates (or even family members) find unimaginable. It’s a classic knee-​jerk reaction: it’s not possible! Surely my friend, my advisor, my priest, my neighbour couldn’t have done that. I know them to be of impeccable character. But what you the denier really know is that they have demonstrated “impeccable character” towards you. They could have done this to someone else and still have been perfectly nice to you. It is flawed logic to assume that because someone did not assault you, they didn’t assault someone else. Abuse is about using coercion, force, or a combination of the two. Victims are usually in a subordinate role of some sort, and while they may be able to muster some power by choosing who to tell what and when, it’s important to consider that abuse is about power. How power is wielded depends not just on who the abuser is, but also who the victim is. In other words, what can be done to another person is relational, too: your advisor does not necessarily use coercion (for example) with both you and “Tom” because you and Tom are different people who have different relationships with them. Moreover, perpetuation of abuse is supported by systems of privilege, whereby the rules are made by a certain group for everyone else, and members of the dominant group feel that they do not have to abide by them. They might be accused, but they won’t be found guilty because “boys will be boys” who just engage in “locker room talk”. In this case, this defense works only for wealthy, white boys/​men, because sexual assault without penalty is only normalised for them —​not for the rest of society. Out of the list I opened with, only Cosby and Weinstein are in prison. Perpetrators choose their victims, and victimisers with power are especially scary when they are intelligent —​or at least intelligent enough to know that the system is set up to afford them privilege when they abuse their power. They know how to emplot9 you the victim, to lure you in: “Here, I’ll help you with your paper, I’ll buy you a drink (or four), I’ll take you home/​to your car.” They know how to get you to revise your story so that you’re wrong about what happened once it has happened:  “You don’t remember it right, that wasn’t my intent, you imbibed all that substance, don’t you remember that you said yes?” They know how to tell their version to people in similar positions of power so that even scholars who should know better will defend them before any evidence is heard: “I’ll ruin your career, no one will believe you. It’s my word against yours. Oh, they would never…” And so you consider what evidence you have to make your case. But what counts as evidence? A rape kit, written communication, the testimony of witnesses. Even if you had the presence of mind not to shower after an assault, processing evidence from a rape kit costs time and money that a police department may be loath to spend. Maybe your assaulter was smart enough to be vague in their written communication. At the end of the day, you, like many other sexual assault victims, are not “lucky” enough to have these pieces of evidence, so your evidence is your story. The onus is on you to tell your assault story, in the way that you feel you are most likely to be believed. You have to prove the defendant guilty. So never mind the fractured way you feel or remember. Never mind that you may suffer from PTSD from being raped. You have to be able to tell your story in a sensible way and without emotion to be believed. But who is the official audience for this official narrative? The audience is most often made up of people who are statistically more likely to commit a similar offence than to have experienced one: 90% of all rape victims, for example, are women.10 57% of perpetrators of sexual assault are white.11 So in telling a white, male-​dominated court, team of investigators, or say, the US

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Senate, the audience that hears a story of sexual assault is much more likely to argue that your carefully crafted, heart-​wrenching, heartbreaking, narrative of sexual assault is “just a story” that “lacks evidence” to support it. You have to be unemotional, but they can cry and shout and scream and taunt. Because they have built the system, men, often privileged white men and the women who support them, are in a comfortable position to vent their outrage when someone like you dares to put words to their actions and identify them as perpetrators of violence. They are in a comfortable position to reject such a story as “just a political move” meant to block someone from a judgeship. Or political office. Or tenure.

Denial, Part 4: This just seems like a political move Social scientists have been saying the personal is political for decades now. When people rail against “fake” victims coming forward like in the Kavanaugh/​Blasey Ford example, you have to stop and think about what someone might gain from making such an accusation, as well as what can be gained from delegitimising an accusation. Again: power and privilege. As outlined above, the accuser stands to lose far more than gain when they tell their narratives publicly. So what do people in power gain by couching accusations as “just a political move”? Everything. They stand to preserve the status quo. In this case, it is a right to rape, grope, grab, and engage in any other manner of sexual offence. And what would they lose by giving credence to an accusation of sexual assault? Everything. They stand to lose everything. By admitting that perhaps someone like them committed sexual assault, they become vulnerable to similar accusations for similar behaviour. They could be denied the things they aspire to, or lose control completely. And there are so many who fit this bill. Just listen to the white men in the senate who say that they wouldn’t want to be asked what they did 30 years ago, and then dismiss the testimony of Dr Blasey Ford. And she had therapy records while Kavanaugh had a calendar and some sniffles. So, yes. Accusation this fall (2019) by Blasey Ford was a political move. Her motive in telling the Senate about how Kavanaugh victimised her was to prevent him from victimising other Americans through legislation. It’s personal and political: she has made herself personally vulnerable in an effort to exercise her civic duty to protect the rest of us from violence. While Blasey Ford chooses self-​sacrifice, Kavanaugh supporters are in self-​preservation mode. To suggest that Blasey Ford’s motives are political while those of Kavanaugh supporters are not is a farce. Denial of her narrative and the creation of the counter-​narrative of Blasey Ford as a false accuser are also political moves by predominantly rich, white men and the women who benefit from their relationships with those men. After all, only 2% of sexual assault claims are unfounded (the same as for other felonies) while only one third of sexual assaults are reported at all.12 So, let’s be clear that claims that “it’s a scary time to be a man in America”, are articulated by white men similarly accused, who are afraid of being punished for actual behaviour that before went unpunished because of their privilege. If they were really talking about all men in America, they would be talking about Black men being murdered in their own yards or cars because someone thought they were dangerous. If they were really afraid of facing false accusations, they would talk about Black men accused of rape by white women. But these aren’t part of the conversation because they don’t want to validate those very real problems. It doesn’t fit their aspirations to preserve the status quo. The reality is, people who support Kavanaugh are working to keep the privileges of assaulting women, not being punished for it, and remaining in power over women and other minorities. One way to do that is to enshrine someone who will support them as a member of the SCOTUS. It’s personal and political for them, too. This is why when asked why he made fun of Blasey Ford, President Trump responded, “It doesn’t matter. We won.”13 146

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The real fear then, is losing. Change that results in loss of power. Being held accountable for sexual assault. The possibility that the people you subordinated may come to dominate you. If they were not so afraid to lose, Kavanaugh and his supporters probably would not have been engaged in such a fervent battle to discredit #MeToo stories —​to split them apart, attempt to make them look internally inconsistent, or prevent them from being seen together as a large-​ scale snapshot of sexual assault in the United States. In other words, they would probably not be trying so hard to delegitimise story after story of sexual assault committed by wealthy white men. Victims who are coming forward in solidarity with Blasey Ford are scary to privileged white men because there is a chance that meeting systemic abuse with sustained evidence and energy could change the game.

Denial, Part 5: They wanted it, or it’s their fault because of what they wore/ where they were/what they drank While many denials are couched in the vagaries of maybe it happened and maybe it didn’t, this type of denial is different because no one is contesting that the action you describe happened. What they question is your consent. Maybe you have a rape kit result that unequivocally demonstrates that the defendant penetrated you. Because this is difficult to refute, the defense will argue that you in fact consented, you led the perpetrator on, you said no but meant yes. And again, if the people deciding your fate (and your perpetrator’s) are more like them than you, this is what your audience will believe. Some will believe it because believing makes them feel that they themselves and those they love are safe from sexual assault. Some will believe it because they don’t want to be in the position of reflecting on their own past behaviours, and/​ or they want to continue to feel free to act as they always have. And so again, your evidence doesn’t count. It’s in this moment that you realise no evidence will ever be enough when the person who assaulted you is a beneficiary of privilege. The sad state of affairs you realise is that even though we have codified ideals about consent as unambiguous, as something that cannot be given when one is incapacitated, and something that isn’t legitimate if given under duress, they only serve as actual rules for people who the privileged feel should be punished. This is what you realise when you see the student athlete is allowed to stay and play, the faculty member put on leave but allowed back, the priest transferred to another church, the President not just elected but on stage screaming “Imagine if your son were accused!” or a room of white, male senators defending Kavanaugh’s “right” to be on the Supreme Court.14

Denial, Part 6: What boy hasn’t done this in high school? Failed GOP candidate Gina Sosa made this comment in a group interview with Republican women who were asked about their thoughts on the possibility that 17-​year old Kavanaugh assaulted a 15-​year-​old girl by holding her down and covering her mouth.15 In one sentence, Sosa unwittingly showed us the extent of normalisation of assault in the United States, not just by men, but by women of privilege as well. In this statement, she effectively implies two things: first, that every 17-​year-​old American male committed sexual assault as a high schooler, and second, that that is acceptable. We know that not all men have done this, and that not all people think it is acceptable. But make no mistake: for her to say this, she has to believe on some level that everyone in her peer group has done it and/​or thinks it’s normal. It also follows that a number of her peers themselves have been victimised. We are back to normalisation and symbolic violence. So what would the implications be if Sosa and her peers were to admit that 147

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this is neither normal nor acceptable? All her male friends and family members (because who among them hasn’t done this?) could be accused. If we decided this wasn’t acceptable, they’d potentially lose everything. We are back to the reality that by admitting that assault happens and it’s wrong, it would upend the power and privilege structure —​and maybe uncover some more victims. You shake your head as you realise the whole system is set up to keep you silent, passive, traumatised, victimised, alone. But #MeToo has helped you realise that you are not alone.

Refusing their denials These are the denials that you face. You hear affirmations, too, but not from people like our senators. With every story on social media, the newspaper, or the news you think: there are so many. So many more than I  thought. Faces, stories, numbers:  the CDC reports 19% of American women experience rape, while another 44% experience another form of sexual assault.16 You watch Trump ask conservatives to “Think of your son” or Gina Sosa ask “What boy hasn’t done this?” and you think: No. Not any more. I can’t take any more. So maybe you fight for justice. Maybe you spiral into depression. Maybe you contemplate suicide. Maybe you self-​medicate. After all, the risks for the latter three are all elevated for victims of sexual assault. Maybe you have nightmares because your brain is trying to process at night what you have avoided all day long in a bid to be a “normal” worker, parent, friend, human. Maybe you book more time with your therapist. Maybe you have to stop watching the news. Maybe you bury your story because if people won’t listen and act now, when will they? After all, you don’t owe anyone any part or version of your story. In case you need to hear that again: you don’t.

Where do anthropology and other “humanising” disciplines go from here? To witness #MeToo is to witness how abuse of power and privilege is shaped by gender, class, race, and status such that sexual assault is normalised in the United States. We are witnessing resistance to the systems of oppression by which victims of sexual assault are assumed to be lying in the name of fairness to the accused, are obligated to tell public versions of their stories to prove otherwise, and are summarily dismissed as opportunists despite efforts to make sense out of the violence perpetrated against them. Despite Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and despite the appalling number and details of the #MeToo stories, this movement reminds me of Howard Zinn’s point that democracy doesn’t rest solely on the functioning of our courts. It lies in protests, in voting, in showing up, and demanding change.17 Survivors of sexual assault and those who support them are attempting to wrest control of the conversations on sexual assault from perpetrators and oppressors. In academic terms, intimate violence (sexual assault and the physical, emotional, psychological, and cognitive trauma that comes along with it) is happening in our disciplines and not just “out there” in the world or where we do fieldwork. When trying to make sense of sexual assault, victims experience structural violence because there is really no “safe” option for them to take when deciding who to tell what, when. They experience symbolic violence through self-​blame and normalisation. And we all commit everyday violence by not taking concrete steps to address this abuse at the institution level.18 So, what will we do? How will we, as academics, respond? Don’t forget that jam-​packed Marriott ballroom. A few weeks ago, I received a call for papers on anthropology in the last 50 years. Honestly, all I could think of was the next 50 years. So I close with a challenge: face the systems of power and privilege that have supported sexual assault in American society head on so that they are not reflected in our 148

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professional academic organisations. In other words, say no to sexual harassment, sexual assault, and discrimination of all types. Say no to all the forms of violence discussed here. Anthropology, for example, has a code of ethics and a statement against sexual harassment, but I have not seen language that allows us to ban someone found guilty by their institution or the court system of a violent crime (including but not limited to sexual assault) from membership, our meetings, or publications. Surely, we can have conversations about that. The bar for scholarship is high; why should the bar for professional conduct be so low as to allow offenders in our midst? I know that there are plenty of people who will say it is not possible. But this answer accepts that we are in the prison of Weber’s iron cage. It accepts that we will turn a blind eye to intimate violence as institutions, thereby committing everyday violence.19 Moreover, medical anthropologists Paul Farmer, Jim Kim, Arthur Kleinman, and Matthew Basilico have said that global health practitioners who claim change is too hard suffer from a “failure of imagination” and that we have to “reimagine” global health to face and ameliorate inequity.20 Surely we don’t want to be guilty of this “failure of imagination” in our own disciplines. We need continued conversation about how to make our disciplines safe places. It has been my experience at AAA annual meetings that when we have sessions on topics such as hierarchy in academia or decolonising our work and classroom pedagogies, the people in the highest positions of power and privilege are often absent. This leaves the people with the least social capital to bear the burden of this work. This cannot continue to be the case. This is about all of us, not some of us. Assaults on individual bodies are assault on our professional bodies because we limit the potential of both to contribute meaningfully to our bodies of knowledge. Anthropologists preach reflexivity in the field; I propose we use it to consider how we may be complicit in oppressing or abusing students and colleagues. Self-​examination, if it is going to result in cultural change, needs to be honest and ongoing. I will be the first to say that I am imperfect, I want to learn and be an ally, and I will try to put the burden of learning on myself and not people with less power than me. I will do my best to ensure that professional development and mentorship includes sustained efforts to train men in particular to recognise and reject toxic masculinity and face their privilege, and not just tell women how to “be careful”. If we cannot have these conversations here at “home” in our disciplines, and commit to sustained reflexivity, our outrage at current politics will be revealed as empty words. We all know that culture is dynamic and that systemic change is a process. Let’s commit, again and again, to the process of making our organisations better. The health and safety of both individuals and our society depend on it.

Post script #MeToo has been a powerful tool for introspection and activism in anthropology. In May 2018, Anthropology News published a special issue dedicated to presenting various perspectives on #MeToo. Cheryl Rodriguez provides historical context, noting not only that the term was coined by Tarana Burke, longtime advocate for victims of sexual violence, but that #MeToo was born out of centuries of violence against women of colour and subsequent Black activism. In effect, the hashtag version is an appropriation.21 Kathleen Fine-​Dare argued that the structural systems that allows sexual violence must be changed,22 and Sameena Mulla focuses on the medico-​legal system as an example.23 Gil Schmerler and Megan Steffan interrogate anthropologists and the previous iteration of Anthropology News for decades of victim blame in the case of Henrietta Schmerler, one of Ruth Benedict’s graduate students at Columbia. Schmerler was raped and murdered in her field site; rather than offer assistance in the investigation, her mentors (including Margaret Mead and Franz Boas) used her death as a cautionary 149

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example for how not to behave during field work for generations of anthropology graduate students.24 Mingwei Huang and colleagues continue in this vein, describing the gendered and raced realities of anthropological fieldwork and the problems that still persist in anthropological training in the face of those realities.25 Shan-​Estelle Brown writes about how students and faculty in her global health program are discussing issues such as reporting and consent and pondering whether #MeToo can bring about sustainable change.26 Anna Babel gives a linguistic explanation for what happens when private “whispers” about sexual assault become public through #MeToo and how that makes it harder for people to claim or feign innocence.27 Indeed, moving what are often private narratives into public, institutional domains is complicated and painful. Organisations like the American Anthropological Association (AAA) have tried to “walk the walk” —​to take seriously the experiences not only of assault, but of institutional blindness. In addition to the Anthropology News special issue, the Association offered a webinar on preventing and being aware of sexual harassment ahead of the 2019 AAA annual meeting in Vancouver. Two workshops on sexual assault took place at that conference, which was also was staffed by an ombudsperson. Anyone who had been or was being adjudicated for violence crimes was to be barred from the meeting. These are positive steps. And yet —​ over dinner the first night of the conference, a colleague cautioned me that someone from their university who had been served a restraining order had ignored the new rule and was in attendance. Their victim, also in attendance, was petrified. I asked my colleague to tell the Association, to hold the Association and the anthropologist in question accountable  —​to make that “whisper”, already made public through law enforcement, public to anthropologists (to borrow Babel’s language). I don’t know if they did. But here is what I did: I emailed the ombuds office and reported this conversation. I did not use names because I had no way of verifying what I was told, and no way of protecting the person who told me —​they were outranked by the supposed perpetrator. So rather than ask them to act on this particular case, I asked them a suite of questions based on the assumption that even if this case was not true, it easily could be given that sometimes assault happens at our meetings.28 The questions were these: when we create a rule like barring adjudicated violent offenders from participation, who is responsible for reporting disqualifying behaviours and violations of the rule, individuals or institutions or both? What is the procedure for reporting? How is AAA going to disseminate information about these procedures? The response was, basically, “it is on our website”. The AAA website has a special page that includes the definitions for sexual harassment and assault, and how to report it if it happens at an Annual Meeting. It reports the organisation’s stance to support victims and not tolerate criminal behaviour: people found to have committed these crimes at a meeting can be banned from meetings or barred from membership after two substantiated incidents. Members may now also report non-​meeting incidents to the AAA omsbuds office. But whether or not a member who is found guilty of harassment or assault outside the Annual Meeting can keep attending still seems unclear; and dissemination of policy is limited to calls to attend webinars or read the website. It would be more proactive to embed these and a pledge to follow these rules into the registration, but whether there are plans to do so is unclear. There seems to be progress moving from theory and policy to practice, but we are far from done. Just days before this piece went to press, The Harvard Crimson published a piece on accusations of sexual harassment by Theodore Bestor, John Comaroff, and Gary Urton —​men whose research has driven their respective fields. Noting that some of these accusations appear to date back decades, like those of other senior scholars, we need to shift the framing from the contributions of harassers and ask ourselves: what has academia lost through years of victimisation on one hand, and how will the decades of modelling sexual harassment as normal impact 150

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our progress on the other as junior scholars socialised in this milieu become senior scholars themselves? Years ago, anthropologist-​MD Paul Farmer invoked Rudolph Virchow to call physicians to go beyond the clinic and advocate for the improvement of living conditions that we know as the social determinants of health. It would be nice, he says, if it were someone else’s job —​but it isn’t.29 The same sentiment rings true here. If not us, then who?

Notes 1 This chapter was written during the confirmation of US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and in the wake of a number of cases of sexual assault and abuse within academia. It was written in the spirit of critical reflexivity —​of turning the lens inward and starting to make changes “at home” as a means of fostering social change at a larger scale. Originally published in the online publication Somatosphere, an academic website specialising in “the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics”, it is reproduced here with a post script with permission. 2 Shane Croucher,“Gay Graduate Student Files Sexual Harassment Suit against His Aging Lesbian NYU Professor”, Newsweek, 17 August 2018, www.newsweek.com/​avital-​ronell-​nyu-​nimrod-​reitman-​new-​ york-​lawsuit-​1078319; “Victims of Sexual Violence: Statistics”, RAINN. Nd., accessed 1 November 2018, www.rainn.org/​statistics/​victims-​sexual-​violence. 3 Linda Garro and Cheryl Mattingly, “Narrative as Construct and Construction”, in Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1–​49. 4 Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, Righteous Dopefiend (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 16–​17. 5 RAINN, “Victims of Sexual Violence: Statistics”. 6 Robert Desjarlais, Shelter Blues:  Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 17–​24. 7 RAINN, “Victims of Sexual Violence: Statistics”. 8 RAINN, “Victims of Sexual Violence: Statistics”. 9 Cheryl Mattingly, “The concept of therapeutic ‘emplotment’ ”, Social Science Medicine 38, no.  6 (1994): 811–​822. 10 RAINN, “Victims of Sexual Violence: Statistics”. 11 RAINN, “Victims of Sexual Violence: Statistics”. 12 RAINN, “Victims of Sexual Violence: Statistics”. 13 Emily Sullivan, “On ‘60 Minutes,’ Trump Talks Possible Mattis Exit, Climate Change and Kim Jong Un”, NPR, 15 October 2018, www.npr.org/​2018/​10/​15/​657407545/​on-​60-​minutes-​trump-​talks​possible-​mattis-​exit-​climate-​change-​and-​kim-​jong-​un. 14 Miles Parks, “Trump Mocks Ford’s Testimony at Rally, Begs Crowd to ‘Think of Your Son’ ”, NPR, 2 October 2018, www.npr.org/​2018/​10/​02/​653699004/​trump-​it-​s-​a-​very-​scary-​time​for-​young-​men-​in-​america. 15 Katie Reilly, “GOP Voter on Brett Kavanaugh Sex Assault Accusation: ‘What Boy Hasn’t Done This?’ ” Time, 23 September 2018, http://​time.com/​5404108/​brett-​kavanaugh-​sexual-​assault-​high-​school-​ gina-​sosa/​; Leonard Pitts, “ ‘What Boy Hasn’t Done This in High School?’ ” The Salt Lake Tribune, 26 September 2018, www.sltrib.com/​opinion/​commentary/​2018/​09/​26/​leonard-​pitts-​what-​boy/​. 16 “Violence Prevention”, Center for Disease Control. Nd., accessed 29 January 2020, www.cdc.gov/​ ViolencePrevention/​index.html. 17 Howard Zinn, “Beyond Voting”, 1976, available at HowardZinn.org, 19 October 2016, www. howardzinn.org/​beyond-​voting/​. 18 See the violence continuum in Bourgois and Schonberg, Righteous Dopefiend,  16–​17. 19 In Bourgois and Schonberg, Righteous Dopefiend, 17. In this formulation, Bourgois and Schonberg are using a term coined by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 20 Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, Arthur Kleinman, and Matthew Basilico, eds, Reimagining Global Health:  An Introduction (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2013). See also Farmer’s 13 May 2013 Time interview with Belinda Luscombe:  http://​content.time.com/​time/​magazine/​article/​ 0,9171,2142504,00.html.

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Pamela L. Runestad 21 Cheryl Rodriguez, “Black Women and the Fight against Sexual Violence”, Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 6–​8. 22 Kathleen Fine-​Dare, “The Long View on #MeToo”, Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 9. 23 Sameena Mulla, “Sexual Violence in the Clinics and Courts”, Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 3–​5. 24 Gill Schmerler and Megan Steffen, “The Disavowal of Henrietta Schmerler”, Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 17–​19. 25 Mingwei Huang, Vivian Lu, Susan MacDougall, and Megan Steffen. “Disciplinary Violence”. Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 20–​23. 26 Shan-​Estelle Brown, “#MeToo Conversations on Campus”, Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 24–​25. 27 Anna Babel, “The Invisible Walls of the Whisper Network”, Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 14–​16. 28 Scott Jaschik, “Harassment at the Annual Meeting”, Inside Higher Ed, 2 October 2018, www. insidehighered.com/​news/​2018/​10/​02/​american-​historical-​association-​report-​reveals-​harassment-​ and-​demeaning-​behavior-​its#.Xp7z0tAI5RA.link. 29 Farmer, Infections and Inequalities:  The Modern Plagues (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1999), 12.

Bibliography Babel, Anna. “The Invisible Walls of the Whisper Network”. Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 14–​16. Bikales, James S. “Protected by Decades-​old Power Structures, Three Renowned Harvard Anthropologists Face Allegations of Sexual Harassment”. The Harvard Crimson. 31 May 2020. www.thecrimson.com/​ article/​2020/​5/​29/​harvard-​anthropology-​gender-​issues/​ Bourgois, Philippe and Jeff Schonberg. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Brown, Shan-​Estelle. “#MeToo Conversations on Campus”. Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 24–​25. Center for Disease Control. Nd. “Violence Prevention”. Accessed 29 January 2020. www.cdc.gov/​ ViolencePrevention/​index.html. Croucher, Shane. “Gay Graduate Student Files Sexual Harassment Suit against His Aging Lesbian NYU Professor”. Newsweek, 17 August 2018. www.newsweek.com/​avital-​ronell-​nyu-​nimrod-​reitman-​ new-​york-​lawsuit-​1078319. Desjarlais, Robert. Shelter Blues:  Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless. Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Farmer, Paul. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Farmer, Paul. “Interview with Belinda Luscombe”. Time, 13 May 2013. http://​content.time.com/​time/​ magazine/​article/​0,9171,2142504,00.html Farmer, Paul, Jim Yong Kim, Arthur Kleinman, and Matthew Basilico, eds. Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Fine-​Dare, Kathleen. “The Long View on #MeToo”. Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 9. Garro, Linda and Cheryl Mattingly. “Narrative as Construct and Construction”. In Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing, 1–​49. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Gluckman, Nell. “How Henrietta Schmerler Was Lost, Then Found”. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 14 October 2018. www.chronicle.com/​article/​How-​Henrietta-​Schmerler-​Was/​244782? cid=wcontentgrid_​article_​bottom. Gordon, Mara. “Sexual Assault and Harassment May Have Lasting Health Repercussions for Women”. NPR, 3 October 2018. www.npr.org/​sections/​health-​shots/​2018/​10/​03/​653797374/​sexual-​assault-​and-​ harassment-​may-​have-​lasting-​health-​repercussions-​for-​women. Hesse, Monica. “Dear Dads: Your Daughters Told Me about Their Assaults. This Is Why They Never Told You”. The Washington Post, 2 October 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/​lifestyle/​style/​dear-​ dads-​your-​daughters-​told-​me-​about-​their-​assaults-​this-​is-​why-​they-​never-​told-​you/​2018/​10/​01/​ 0f69be46-​c587-​11e8-​b2b5-​79270f9cce17_​story.html?utm_​term=.9747aba23e6a. Huang, Mingwei, Vivian Lu, Susan MacDougall, and Megan Steffen. “Disciplinary Violence”. Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 20–​23. Jaschik, Scott. “Harassment at the Annual Meeting”. Inside Higher Ed, 2 October 2018. www. insidehighered.com/​news/​2018/​10/​02/​american-​historical-​association-​report-​reveals-​harassment-​ and-​demeaning-​behavior-​its#.Xp7z0tAI5RA.link. Mattingly, Cheryl. “The Concept of Therapeutic ‘Emplotment.’ ” Social Science Medicine 38, no. 6 (1994): 811–​22.

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Narrating #MeToo Mulla, Sameena. “Sexual Violence in the Clinics and Courts”. Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 3–​5. Parks, Miles. “Trump Mocks Ford’s Testimony at Rally, Begs Crowd to ‘Think of Your Son’”. NPR, 2 October 2018. www.npr.org/​2018/​10/​02/​653699004/​trump-​it-​s-​a-​very-​scary-​time-​for-​young-​men-​ in-​america. Pitts, Leonard. “ ‘What Boy Hasn’t Done This in High School?’ ” The Salt Lake Tribune, 26 September 2018. www.sltrib.com/​opinion/​commentary/​2018/​09/​26/​leonard-​pitts-​what-​boy/​. RAINN. Nd. “Victims of Sexual Violence:  Statistics”. Accessed 1 November 2018. www.rainn.org/​ statistics/​victims-​sexual-​violence. Raushbaum, William K. and David W. Chen. “John Jay Professors Face Allegations of Drug Sales and Sexual Misconduct”. New York Times, 22 September 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​09/​22/​nyregion/​ john-​jay-​professors-​allegations.html. Reilly, Katie. “GOP Voter on Brett Kavanaugh Sex Assault Accusation: ‘What Boy Hasn’t Done This?’ ” Time, 23 September 2018. http://​time.com/​5404108/​brett-​kavanaugh-​sexual-​assault-​high-​school-​ gina-​sosa/​. Rodriguez, Cheryl. “Black Women and the Fight against Sexual Violence”. Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 6–​8. Runestad, Pamela L. “Narrating #MeToo”. Somatosphere, 8 November 2018. http://​somatosphere.net/​ 2018/​narrating-​metoo.html/​. Schmerler, Gil and Megan Steffen. “The Disavowal of Henrietta Schmerler”. Anthropology News 59, no. 3 (2018): 17–​19. Schwartz, Deb. “How to Cope with the Current News Cycle as a Sexual Abuse Survivor”. Lifehacker, 5 December ™2017. https://​lifehacker.com/​how-​to-​cope-​with-​the-​current-​news-​cycle-​as-​a-​sexual-​ abu-​1820823444. Stanley, Amy. 2018. “Writing the History of Sexual Assault in the Age of #MeToo”. Slate, 1 October 2018. https://​slate.com/​news-​and-​politics/​2018/​10/​historians-​sexual-​assault-​research-​#MeToo.html. Steffen, Megan. “Doing Fieldwork after Henrietta Schmerler:  On Sexual Violence and Blame in Anthropology”. American Ethnologist, 13 November 2017. https://​americanethnologist.org/​features/​ reflections/​doing-​fieldwork-​after-​henrietta-​schmerler. Sullivan, Emily. “On ‘60 Minutes,’ Trump Talks Possible Mattis Exit, Climate Change and Kim Jong Un”. NPR, 15 October 2018. www.npr.org/​2018/​10/​15/​657407545/​on-​60-​minutes-​trump-​ talks-​possible-​mattis-​exit-​climate-​change-​and-​kim-​jong-​un. Zinn, Howard. “Beyond voting”. 1976. Available at HowardZinn.org, 19 October 2016. www.howardzinn. org/​beyond-​voting/​.

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11 ON TAMBOURINES, HASHTAGS, AND REROOTING /​ REROUTING SURVIVOR VOICE IN CARIBBEAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT BUILDING Rochelle McFee What does it mean for survivors of sexual violence to want an acknowledgment of harm but for the state to insist that such acknowledgment can only be made through the criminal justice system? What possibilities exist for women when the violence thrust upon us is structured by the social and religious narratives of our very being as pathological and an after-​the-​fact validation of our violation? This chapter examines the efforts of grassroots, social media movements in the Caribbean that predate the global #MeToo movement, but engaged with and continue to be in conversation with it. Here, I explore engagements among activists, survivors, and state institutions as they seek to create a just future. Indeed, the history of agitation towards justice often neglects the action of those most notably wronged by the prevailing racist, patriarchal, and misogynist system. This is reflected in the US academy, which has generally failed to incorporate Caribbean perspectives that hold explanatory power for a more comprehensive understanding of oppression wherever it exists. A core feature of Caribbean feminism is a critique of colonialism and legacies of the plantation system.1 Thus, in honour of the work done to record and explore the tension between gender freedom and the context within which it is being sought, this chapter also takes the opportunity to visibilise how Caribbean feminist and social justice movements have developed and are developing strategies for gender justice. In the move for transnational solidarity, this is a way to avoid the traps of invisibilisation and reproducing violence occurring at the intersection of nation, race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability. Although not the focus, this chapter is as much about solidarity at the site of knowledge production as it is about being in solidarity with those affected by gender-​based violence. I set the context for these movements first by foregrounding gender violence through exploration of reported statistics within a colonial history and national identity formation. Then, I recount the formation and experiences of two of the central gender justice movements in the Caribbean region, #LifeInLeggings and #SayTheirNames. I explore how they have differentially contended and/​or cooperated with neo-​colonial and imperial imperatives. Finally, in sharing the story of one survivor, I explore how our work facilitates healing but can also

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reproduce harm. I  question the possibility for a transformative justice approach within this framework, particularly in the era of social media.

The context In 2006, Tarana Burke began using the phrase “Me Too” on MySpace, acknowledging her regret at not simply empathising with a 13-​year-​old girl who had shared that she had been assaulted.2 In September 2012, four women and an 8-​year-​old girl were raped in the Parish of St James, Jamaica.3 The social and political importance of this case was compounded by a marked increase in sexual violence and the widespread circulation of news on the earlier murder of a 25-​year-​old pregnant woman at the hands of the police, the gang rape of a teenage girl, and the fact that, up to that point, there had already been 626 reported rapes, a more than 5% increase from the previous year.4 Although this was not a new phenomenon, since children had always made up a statistically significant proportion of rape demographics, this case sparked a national conversation and pressured both government and opposition to centralise sexual violence issues. There was a redoubling of efforts, evidenced by the finalisation of the National Strategic Action Plan to Eliminate Gender-​based Violence (NSPA-​GBV) and a baseline assessment of policing and prosecution of GBV by the Bureau of Women’s Affairs. Still, as recently as 2016, the clear-​up rate for rape cases in Jamaica was 52%.5 The Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) attributed the rise in gender-​based violence not to an actual increase in the incidence of violence itself, but to greater public trust in the improved capacity of first responders, medical practitioners, and the broader criminal justice system that leading to increased reporting of violence.6 There are similar trends of sexual violence in other parts of the region, and the general widespread acknowledgement of underreporting makes the UNODC assertion that three of the highest rates of sexual violation in the criminal justice system worldwide come from the Caribbean even more alarming.7 Gender-​based violence in the Caribbean is climbing, even with the adoption of many international conventions and declarations, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence Against Women (CEDAW) (1979), the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (1993), and the Convention of Belém do Pará (1994), and participation in conferences and meetings exploring GBV and its ramifications like the Beijing Platform for Action (1995), the UN Secretary General’s Campaign to End Violence Against Women, 16 Days of Activism against gender-​based violence, and the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. It is not difficult to find evidence of the various ways the Caribbean region has grappled with the questions posed at the beginning of this essay. Since the 1980s, significant human and financial resources have been invested both in offering a genealogy of gender-​based violence in the region  —​from conquest to the decolonial movement  —​and to mapping the entanglements of hegemonic masculinity, gender, race/​ethnicity, and class in overdetermining vulnerability to violence.8 Moreover, there has been a plethora of programs and initiatives that have relied on these and several other academic and otherwise commissioned research from the 1990s onward. These have been launched by the women’s movement, state institutions, and non-​governmental partners that strip away status quo power relations, raising public awareness of the pervasiveness of gender-​based violence. There is, however, a serious failure of the state to acknowledge the ways in which the low social and economic development in the region, as well as low rates of literacy and general issues

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with crime and violence that structure GBV, are shaped by relationships with, for example, the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF. We could follow Jamaican Scholar Louis Lindsay’s 1975 and 1976 essays on the “Myth of Independence” for traces of how the “benevolent” granting of independence to our “Black nations” had the added bonus of continued use of the anti-​Black, anti-​woman, and anti-​queer British constitution, a pre-​emptive strike that would guarantee that national values would continue to align with colonial imperatives of the West. That is, laws in the region, particularly those that produce and naturalise violence against women and sexual minorities, elaborate coloniality and imperialism. And while such laws no longer (at least by virtue of legislation) guide British (and American) society, they represent how otherness was discursively constructed and materially applied.9 Gender and sexuality-​based discrimination have their roots deeply embedded in hetero-​ patriarchal capitalist ideologies where gender, sexuality, and race have intersected and determined which bodies cohere with the nation-​ making project. Indeed, these systems continue to operate in the Global North, necessitating movements such as #MeToo, which contends with how bodies are produced as violable. Ironically, defenders of the current constitution in countries like Jamaica have been argued to be buckling under international pressure and allowing for the “importation of queerness” from spaces such as Britain and the United States as a way to maintain its relationship to the “superpower”.10 These claims present interesting contradictions, given that the laws governing sexuality in most parts of the region are inheritances of colonisation. Discursive formations, such as anti-​ LGBT legislation and the (re)positioning of the United States as a standard bearer, manifests even in the thrust for gender justice championed by #MeToo. This welcomed speaking of truth to power was happening in other parts of the globe, with some support from international agencies aligned with the North, albeit with little success. Movements in the Global South which started years before this hashtag went viral were now more visible only after celebrities in the North began using the hashtag. Even then, there were noticeable caveats placed on their speaking about their life that illustrated the power structure of the neo-​colonial system. The methodologies of the Global South were being compared with those of the North, as though the latter were the progenitor and standard. This is the terrain on which #LifeInLeggings and #SayTheirNames have emerged. Nation and region are an important axis of difference and power. It is important that we not only call attention to the epidemic levels of violence in the Caribbean but also to move against the invisibilisation of Caribbean scholarship within US academia and the Global North more generally. While this is not the focus of this chapter, I see this kind of centring as a way to bring in focus the labour of Caribbean scholars, activists, and state actors to unmask colonial formations and as moving with the calls to decolonise scholarship. I  create space for these perspectives, which are frequently obscured by the overreliance on scholarship produced in the Global North about, among other things, Indigenous and Black suffering. I assert that a truly transnational perspective must not only speak to how processes of violence and dispossession connect across geopolitical boundaries but must also take into account the scholarship produced beyond the borders of the United States and Canada which substantively interrogates slavery and its afterlives. I put this forward as a way to advance the aims of #MeToo towards a more decolonial approach to ending gender-​based violence.

#LifeInLeggings Life: noun 156

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1. The condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death. 2. […] 3. The period between the birth and death of a living thing, especially a human being. […] 3.2. A sentence of imprisonment for life. Leggings: noun 1. Tight-​fitting stretch trousers, typically worn by women or girls. 2. Strong protective overgarments for the legs.11 2016, Bridgetown Barbados. Ronelle King, on her usual commute to work, was offered a ride by an unknown man. She refused. The man attempted to force her into his car. She escaped. This was the moment of impact. This was not King’s first personal experience of violence; harassment was an almost daily occurrence. She had been raped and was all too familiar with the experience of violence thrust upon too many women. However, it was precisely this familiarity, the fact that this was not a unique experience, that made the moment so impactful. Despite the culture that normalises violence against women and girls, King felt it was important to make a report to the police and to include her experience of being stalked. In a Facebook post on 21 June 2016, King wrote: “#ReasonsWhyINeedFeminism going to a police station to report someone stalking me only to be met with complete disregard by male police officers.”12 A few women engaged with this post, sharing similar accounts of their experience with violence and a lack of appropriate support from the police. This was King’s first attempt at raising awareness using the Life in Leggings Framework.13 From King’s account of the genesis of this movement, evaluation, conversation, and collaboration were key to a redefined strategy.14 She was not new to using social media, particularly Facebook and her blog, Once Upon A  Dreamer, to create awareness around gender-​based violence, but felt her intended target audience —​men —​were often, and remained wilfully, ignorant. There were a set of key questions that guided the revision of King’s strategy. King asks how to make people who believe they are entitled to her body understand that this is not acceptable; how to convey the magnitude of a problem that many believe to be limited to isolated incidents —​that in fact, this is a “societal problem” that needs to be confronted. She asks what it would take to get men to engage with these issues to the point at which they would be persuaded to examine their own behaviour and to “call out” their men friends when they exhibited such behaviour —​to hold themselves and each other accountable. How could I create a discussion that would force actual cultural change? It needed to be something that they couldn’t easily ignore or dismiss, something that would show the pervasiveness of sexual harassment, assault and rape within Barbados and essentially the region.15 At the very moment at which King was deliberating on these questions, she was also engaged in heated online discussions with men who suggested that the way women dressed played a role in their violation, displacing culpability on women. Through conversations with other activists and survivors, specifically Allyson Benn, Luci Hammans, and Salama Patrick, the hashtag #LifeInLeggings was chosen. It underscored not just the everydayness of sexual violence but also that all women were vulnerable. As King put it herself, “every woman and little girl owns 157

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a pair of leggings … they’d be able to see that every single woman they know experiences this, from their mothers to their daughters, from the ‘bougie’ to the ‘urban’ ”.16 Interviewing King, correspondent Alicia Wallace commented that “women [can] put their names, faces, and stories next to [the] statistics, making them a visible reality for the people around them”.17 Life in leggings was the history and reality of countless women like King and me; violence was mapped onto our bodies. It had been our life sentence and clothes would not set us free. #LifeInLeggings would become a tool to name the violence we were experiencing and to mark the ways that violence had marked us. King recounts that, within hours of the first post made on Facebook using the hashtag, her timeline was flooded with similar posts and a direct message from a man apologising for not recognising how pervasive the issue is. The conversation had started! By day two, #LifeInLeggings was viral, and soon thereafter, activists from across the region, including Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, Guyana, Saint Vincent, Grenada, Saint Lucia, The Bahamas, Jamaica, and Belize, were joining the efforts. While some countries, like Haiti, still struggle with access to reliable internet,18 social media has allowed for widespread circulation of narratives and calls-​to-​action. Thus, this rather quotidian act of making a social media post —​the sensitivity of the content notwithstanding —​was doing something spectacular. What started as a conversation online had created opportunities for regional collaboration and mobilised countless numbers of women to take action on the ground.19 The traction from the online space also meant that state agencies and civil society organisations were expressing willingness to meet, partner, and collaborate.20 #LifeInLeggings was now a grassroots organisation that inspired the creation of others in the region, including the #LeveDomnik in Dominica and the #TambourineArmy in Jamaica.21 While it is true that hashtivism movements via the internet and social media are a double-​ edged sword turning pain into profit, this tool, so integral to the maintenance of the global hegemonic structure, has been used subversively in the struggle against ideologies characteristic of the status quo. Messages like #BlackLivesMatter, #LifeInLeggings, and later #TimesUp and #MeToo, had the opportunity to become viral and challenge the disposability of Black lives and the normalisation of GBV via the information infrastructure of neoliberal capitalism. The internet became a means to connect with allies, embolden and encourage activists, and support survivors. On the other hand, it has, and can, potentially placate dissenters into inactivity by invalidly equating virtual action with real action.22 They are given an opportunity to vent and bring light to the problems, but if organisers are not careful, this online catharsis reduces the likelihood of offline action. In light of this, the mobilisation of national marches, as well as other on-​the-​ground partnerships and collaborations with these movements, NGOs, and state institutions, is even more impressive. In 2017, to coincide with International Women’s Day on 11 March, seven national marches were organised across the region (Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, and The Bahamas) linked by the #LifeInLeggings Movement.23 It is important to note that, while not all countries took the same approach to awareness raising (for example, #SayTheirNames encouraged naming the perpetrators, but #LifeInLeggings explicitly did not), solidarity and collaboration remained possible. There was recognition that there are threads that bind the Caribbean as a region but that each country had different priorities, and it was important to allow space for domain specific approaches even as they were unified by the #LifeInLeggings movement. The approach underscored that solidarity did not mean, and does not require, blanket agreement and that difference is productive, enabling unity rather than exclusion.24 I reached out to King, being particularly interested in her 1 December 2016 post. The post expressed the support and gratitude for “all the brave individuals” who had made their 158

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voices heard by using the and clarified that LifeInLeggings did not endorse the “naming and shaming” of any one person. King said that they looked to the “legal system  —​despite its flaws —​to handle cases as best it can at the moment”, adding: We also look forward to working on changing attitudes of those who work within that system so that more women feel protected by its presence instead of constantly re-​traumatised as they try to get justice.25 It was obvious that #LifeInLeggings was in support of survivors, but there was evidence of the power of these movements to transform as well. The coming together of disparate groups (including Rasta Fari elders, Christians, members of the LGBT community, fathers and children who organisers felt are not typically involved in the same social justice cause) for the national marches across the Caribbean was marked by organisers as evidence of the (potential) transformation that could take place when women publicly talk about their experiences with violence.26 Life. It became clear to me that while the focus of #LifeInLeggings was undoubtedly about creating a different future for women and all persons affected by gender-​based violence, it took seriously the capacity of all human beings to change, to transform, and to grow. Human beings who were committing violent acts, bystanders, and the human beings who shape policy and laws, the human beings who invariably come into contact with persons who have experienced harm. That was the basis of the education being offered by #LifeInLeggings, allowing for the people closest to us to see how the violence has touched us. In the #LifeInLeggings framework, there is recognition of the inherent dignity of every person; the justice system does not just prosecute but works towards transformation. #LifeInLeggings shared this in common with Burke’s initial conceptualisation of #MeToo as “survivors supporting survivors … community healing and community action”.27 However, the visibility of the Weinstein trial shifted dominant discussions on sexual assault under the rubric of #MeToo towards a punitive approach rather than restorative justice. Soon, concerns grew that the movement was being weaponised to (sometimes erroneously) harm men.28 This resulted in suspicion and defensiveness instead of conversation and correction. One study recounted how male managers were less likely to hire women, especially for positions that necessitated close interaction; most women employees felt that the harassment would continue, but the perpetrators would work harder not to get caught.29 Burke believed that many survivors wanted a voice and some level of accountability, and that they must be allowed to define justice for themselves, but guidance and help through the process was equally necessary. Or, as she put it, “[w]‌hat do you do after you put #MeToo?”30

#SayTheirNames and the #Tambourine Army But WE named them.31 On 28 December 2016, 64-​year-​old Rupert Clarke, a minister of the Moravian Church of Jamaica, was arrested in the parish of St Elizabeth on charges of sexual assault against a 15-​year-​ old girl.32 As discussed previously, this was a period marred by widespread sexual violence and ongoing conversations in the public domain. #MeToo was not yet a global phenomenon, but #LifeInLeggings had already lit a fire in the Caribbean, and women, including myself, who had held their silence felt emboldened to speak. Because of my known affiliation with the Moravian Church as a child and teenager, I was contacted by a technical director at WE-​Change who was also a member of the church who asked whether I had heard the news.33 In our conversation, 159

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I shared that I had not been able to function since the news story broke, that it brought to the fore pain that I had tried hard to bury, and I shared with her my experience with two senior ministers of the Moravian church. Unlike my approach in my #LifeInLeggings post, in this private conversation, I named them. While my partner was aware that I had experienced sexual violence, I had never disclosed one of the names. She knew him, and in her role as Education and Training Manager in an LGBT organisation, had brokered a professional relationship with him for support on an anti-​discrimination campaign. It was hard. It was hard for me to explain why I had not told her and hard for her to come to terms with the fact that she had cultivated a relationship with him. It was hard. On 30 December 2016, in a Facebook post using the hashtag #SayTheirNames, Human Rights activist Latoya Nugent named both men along with Rupert Clarke and two other Moravian ministers who, she said, had also been implicated in sexual violence.34 On 8 January 2017, a group of mostly young and queer women with support from WE-​ Change, made the trip from the metropolitan capital of Kingston to Clarke’s congregation in Manchester to make clear our support for this young girl and to insist on the significance of the violation she had experienced. We anticipated the tension, anticipated that our presence, particularly as queer women, would be framed as our attempt to attach our “gay agenda” to “mainstream issues”, but we did not anticipate that I would have to come face-​to-​face with my own abuser.35 In his address to the congregation, he condemned the actions of his colleague, claiming it was an isolated case, in the way he had done in the local newspaper the previous week.36 He pleaded with the congregation to take action to prevent violence against women and girls. Unable to keep my composure, I went outside and, within about 15 minutes, was frightened by a commotion. Latoya Nugent, my partner and Executive Director of WE-​Change and Associate Director of J-​FLAG, in her frustration and anger had used a tambourine to, as described in the news report that followed, “clout the minister in his head”.37 She told him why she had done so and very soon thereafter he left the premises. We were left to deal with a very angry congregation who predominantly felt that we were “wicked”, “demon possessed” women who had no right to be on the church grounds. This moment marked the birth of the #TambourineArmy, a group of radical Black feminists committed to ending the scourge of sexual violence against women and girls. The following evening, I wrote a letter to the Moravian Church recounting my experiences and insisting that Clarke’s case was not an anomaly but an institutional problem that demanded attention. On 10 January 2017, I emailed my letter to the head of the church, copied to both men and three persons from our movement; I ended by telling them not to count on my silence and that the shame was theirs. As I write this chapter, I am struggling to piece together the timeline for the events that followed; suffice it to say that, between 30 December 2016, and 15 January 2017, Nugent’s post had made the rounds on social media and mainstream news stories, my letter had been leaked, and its contents published as the lead story on 15 January 2017.38 At least one of the named ministers, who at the time had shared with the press that he had knowledge of other claims of sexual impropriety against the arrested minister, was now vociferously defending himself against the claims made in the Facebook post, calling for a public apology and threatening a libel lawsuit.39 Although there was much public debate on the ethics, efficacy, and legality of the #SayTheirNames approach, other women began sharing their experiences or showing support for the movement using the hashtag #SayTheirNames.40 A series of stories in the media followed immediately: further allegations against the 64-​year-​ old minister for assaulting and impregnating the sister of the 15-​year-​old girl when she herself was a child;41 the [in]appropriateness of the principal of an all-​g irl school publicly supporting 160

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the arrested pastor;42 the resignation of the Moravian Church president and his vice president, the men I had named in my letter;43 their arrest and charge on sexual offences in respect of historic violence;44 and the arrest and charge of Latoya Nugent.45 The stories did not mention the six rifle-​bearing members of the Major Organised Crime and Anti-​Corruption Agency whom I witnessed coming for her after they had trailed me to her location on the University of the West Indies campus. She was treated as a criminal on the level of gangs and insurrectionists. Although they succeeded in silencing her, this show of force against one woman demanding accountability from those who abused their power was illustrative of the lengths to which the system would go to mark some bodies as disposable while sparing others. The criminal case against Nugent was eventually dismissed, but she was later sued and a default judgement of 16 million Jamaican dollars was awarded against her.46 Amidst the backlash, WE-​ Change and Tambourine Army, in collaboration with the #LifeInLeggings movement, mobilised hundreds of supporters for the March on 11 March. Support poured in from local, regional, and international feminists and activists. Local artists, including Tanya Stephens, became active members of the planning committee; support came from Caribbean Literary writers such as Kei Miller, Staceyann Chin, and Marlon James. Police officers, counsellors, lawyers, and other duty bearers added their names to databases to provide support for women. For the first time, a woman was elected as the President of the Moravian Church in Jamaica and the Cayman Island, and, in July 2017, the church passed its Child Care and Protection Policy.47 But, there were dissenting voices as well. In tones that reminded me of critiques of #MeToo, that is, that it is opportunistic, a platform to launch witch hunts, and that it is about a growing hatred for men, several senior activists and journalists criticised our approach as being too militant and violent.48 Interestingly, as the #MeToo movement gained momentum around October of that year and despite the criticism being levelled against it, some of the voices dissenting with #SayTheirNames nevertheless came out in support of that movement; the rationalisation for such support was that #MeToo was less confrontational in that the hashtag identified the victim instead of the perpetrator. These supporters seemed to ignore that fact that, in the US context, persons against whom mere claims were being made were, without being convicted in a court of law, being removed from companies, losing endorsements, losing wives, losing money, and losing the safety provided by the silence of their victims. In a Twitter post in November 2017, in response to discussions on Black Sauna Radio about the #MeToo and the #SayTheirNames movements,49 a local activist wrote:  “I find the response of Jamaicans to #MeToo vs their response to #SayTheirNames worrying.”50 This contradictory support for #MeToo without supporting #SayTheirNames points to the clear distinctions drawn between women who are given the right to grant or deny access to their bodies and those who are not; between women who can point to the ways they have been violated and those who cannot; and, more importantly, between the “right woman” who is protected against the predator and the “wrong” woman against whom the predator must be protected. In contrast to the #MeToo movement in November 2019, when, overwhelmingly, the women who were speaking out were famous and white, #SayTheirNames was advocating for women whose bodies have historically been marked with and for violence, that is, the Black woman, the poor woman, the queer woman. In my case, I was all three. Thus, the visibility of these cases and the #MeToo movement amplified what countless Black feminists have been advocating, the necessity of adopting an intersectional approach both to unmask and wrestle with relations of power. Indeed, there is culturally entrenched support for perpetrators of violence, but the violence brought to bear on different bodies occurs in different ways and on different scales. A significant part of our decision to travel to the minister’s 161

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church in Mandeville was due to the way in which the public ostracised and condemned the young girl’s working-​class family, suggesting that they were to be blamed for the violence she had experienced. We acknowledged how poverty increases vulnerability to gender-​based violence and that families exist within the same patriarchal culture that produces some bodies as more available to violence than others, and it was important to call attention to how these systems of power had produced her as available to violence. We needed to insist that the singularity she felt was not hers to bear, that she was neither culpable for the violence she had experienced nor alone and that she bore the mark of what Black and brown women, more than other women, have had to bear under structures of coloniality and heteropatriarchy. When examined, alongside the #MeToo movement, how the axes of difference might shift but the structural mechanisms remain. That is, movements must account for differences produced at the intersection of race, class, sexuality, ability, and nation(ality). These differences prevent recognition of being in the same fight but are grounds for collaboration and solidarity. Women who had come forward under the rubric of #MeToo, at least the ones who attracted the attention of mainstream media, were also being assessed based on the same framework as those in the Caribbean. Who is she? Who is she in relation to who he is? Does she embody credibility? Can her words be taken as “truth”? Answers to these questions are always already overdetermined by race, class, gender, and sexuality. In the Global North, the white women (and Tarana Burke, who was acknowledged and credited much too late for her use of #MeToo as a pathway for healing long before it was made popular, were named persons of the year for being silence breakers; in Jamaica, Nugent was first jailed and then sued, and in Barbados, Ronelle King, the founder of #LifeInLeggings, the campaign that was explicit about not naming and shaming, was presented with a Queen’s Young Leaders Award.

Witnessing self: A survivor’s perspective Name them and then what? I saw myself in that 15-​year-​old girl. I felt compelled to act. I needed her to know she was not alone. And perhaps unlike her, I felt I had some amount of social capital that would provide a cushion for what I knew would be a truly violent process. I had a strong support system that ensured that I had one of the best female detectives assigned to my case. I had access to lawyers and legal scholars and journalists and women who had worked with survivors. I had community. And, I had access to the tools WE were sharing with other survivors of sexual violence. Still, I was not prepared for the hours it would take for the police to capture all the details that would constitute a sufficient report. I was not prepared for the trips to the physical scenes of subjection, as Saidiya Hartman would call it.51 I was not prepared for the trauma of a medical exam that was now taking place 14 years after. I was not prepared for the lawyer who told me the case would not reach the courts soon “because it’s not like it’s a murder”. I was not prepared to be told that my sexuality could hurt my case. I was not prepared for the violent ways in which my body would shake the first time I encountered them in the court. I was not prepared to hear that my sin, my sexuality, was worse than the pastors’. I was not prepared for three years of delays. I was not prepared to be told that, if I did not go forward, I could be sued. I was not prepared. It’s hard to disentangle myself as a survivor from the work we did as a movement. I don’t know whether it would be possible and further whether it would be productive. Yet, here I try to centre myself as a survivor in an attempt to point to some of what gets missed in our organising and agitating against gender-​based violence. As I prepared to write this chapter, I am still writing. I have tried to come to terms with this feeling that sits uncomfortably in the pit of my stomach. It is not a new feeling, but the intensity of this writing process has undoubtedly 162

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made it more palpable. It is one of those feelings that you can’t always find language for and also a feeling that you worry about what it would mean to articulate. As I opened the many stories cited throughout this chapter and ones that are not included, I saw myself everywhere in them, and yet, I am nowhere. And while I acknowledge the complexity of being the survivor-​activist, particularly when the social context demands that you do not publicly identify yourself, as a self-​protection strategy, I wonder if there was a way for me to not have been rendered completely invisible. As the stories of the Moravian church occupied centre stage in the news, I continued to plan. As armed police officers bearing search warrants, entered our home in their first attempt to arrest Nugent, I continued to plan. As one of the officers reeled out my credentials making it clear he knew me and would arrest me for harbouring my now fugitive partner, my resolve to be part of the struggle did not change. I was a Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist, and so, it made sense that I was responsible for combing the media and recording all the stories related to my own case. I was one of the women who went to Clarke’s church that Sunday morning; the tambourine incident was a direct result of my disclosure; I was a founding member of the army. In the midst of making police reports and doing rape kits and managing the anxieties in my family, I was part of the planning committee for the national March on 11 March at the same time as I was working with USAID to train police officers and community members around GBV. I do not highlight these things because I think I deserve an award. I call attention to how the structures of violence against which we agitate can reproduce themselves in our movements. In February 2018, I made the decision to resign from all my grassroots organising work in Jamaica. This decision stemmed from our denial of the ways the movement had been fractured, wrought from failures to contend with how our work had further rendered violations illegible. That is, there was a failure to contend with the ways survivors were rendered voiceless, irrational, delegitimised, and systematically not heard. Between January 2017 and January 2018, my life as I knew it had become totally undone. Not only was I dealing with the traumatisation that my case had produced, I was now managing the public break-​up of a decade long relationship with the woman who was also my partner in the struggle and who now had legal battles that could not be disentangled from my own. Following Nugent’s arrest, our home address was published in the newspaper, exacerbating safety concerns and forcing me to relocate. As the attorneys supporting us discussed the likely ways our cases would be linked by defence attorneys and the negative impact of that and feeling completely overwhelmed, in a strategy meeting at work, I asked my fellow activists to be mindful of how they were using social media. I framed this request in the context that our posts were being surveilled by state officials and defence lawyers and would be weaponised in my case. To me, it didn’t seem like an unreasonable request but something, an unnameable thing, shifted. After a few weeks of going to work but feeling strangely isolated, I asked colleagues whether we could attempt to name this thing that was happening, the shifts in frequencies that my body was extremely attuned to. I was told that it was unprofessional for me to bring my personal life into the work space, that the media engagement was not just about me but had broader implications for our work, and it was felt that I was responding too viscerally to people’s public commentary on my separation from Nugent. To cut an extremely long story short, I reflected on my own experience as a survivor-​activist in an unpublished essay “The Long Hard Way”, which I shared with colleagues via email, and later read portions of at an event honouring survivors. I asked the following questions: 1. How do we, as Black queer feminists, build accountability at the level of our community and our intimate and political communion with each other? 163

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2. What does it mean to act, live, and relate as a feminist in relation to other women? More specifically, what is a Black queer feminist praxis of relating to other women, particularly Black queer women, when the political, social, and personal stakes of our work and relationships are so high? 3. Are we fully examining our positionality in relation to the issues we are organised around? Are we constantly interrogating if and how we are reproducing some of the same violations with the very women with whom we interact daily? 4. What is the feminist revolution about if it does not interrogate the way we treat women in our immediate circles? 5. How do we make deliberate decisions about how we construct our feminist organisations, and prioritise our feminist commitments to each other as Black queer women, as survivors of sexual violence, particularly when we may not relate to each other as confidants, friends, or loved ones? How do we act in ways that don’t violate those commitments even in the face of personal differences? What insights, commitments, and guidelines are we developing to be able to respond when our space of community becomes toxic, when our Black queer sisters feel isolated, ostracised, and violated? 6. What are our Black feminist strategies for managing our ego, individuality, and the messiness of simply being human when dealing with sexual violence survivors? 7. What tools of communication and ethical standards do we have to respond when leaders within our communities make survivors of sexual violence feel violated? 8. What are the ways we are de-​legitimising and silencing women’s voices because they do not reflect who we understand to be the “authentic” survivor? 9. And at the most fundamental level, how does power and powerlessness play out in our community in ways that reflect the very structures of power against which we agitate? That essay was a labour of love —​my move to give voice to my critical reflections. The response from specific women in the movement was swift and forceful. I watched as the shading and call-​out started to unfold online. I had court dates when people did not bother to call. Folks who were on the witness list to testify on my behalf were explicit about no longer being able to participate. I watched as my images were removed from the organisation’s pages. I noticed that I was blocked. And as I write, I have discovered, although not for the first time, that my presence, my labour, and my contributions to that space have been totally erased. This experience is not unique to me. I  tell my story on behalf of the many survivors, resisters, leaders, and contributors to the global struggle for gender justice who are constantly being erased. To quote Marai Larasi, “survivors are [often] reified in the movement space; instrumentalized and deployed as and when it feels right or completely silenced”.52 In the context of #MeToo, and even with #SayTheirNames, much of that erasure results from the privileging of certain voices: the white, the wealthy, the beautiful, and the charismatic. The arrest and charge of Nugent thrust her in the spotlight in Jamaica and the region. This is not inherently problematic, especially in the context of widespread silencing of women. However, her [in]famy had the consequence of rendering less visible other women who were there from the beginning. Further, the continued reference by media and activists alike to Nugent and her allies Taitu Heron and Nadeen Spence, women who are also widely known in the region, followed by “and other” women as founders of the army and leaders in the movement speaks precisely to how the mechanism of othering works. We worship the heroes, and the soldiers whose lives are already constructed as disposable become footnotes. As I must end this chapter, I want to do so gently, with awareness and acknowledgement of the complexity of this struggle and the hard work that my sisters in the struggle have done. 164

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Nevertheless, we can acknowledge strides and still hold the tensions around the things that disallow transformation and restoration. As I have said elsewhere, let us not forget the significance of a politics that can contend with the unacknowledged politics of conflict at the most intimate levels and that can hold itself accountable for the various ways in which our own work renders violations illegible, not only because of failures to attend to structural differences but because of our clumsiness with dealing with our most intimate differences. Let us find ways to hold ourselves rigorously committed to the ethics of our Black feminist praxis from our structural analysis, to our strategies of mobilisation, to the ways we speak to each other, to our willingness to feel when we have pained each other. Our Black feminist praxis informs our analysis, but it too forms our relationship to intimacy, integrity, accountability and ethics. These things we take to be about individual and personal character are also the terrain of structures of violence and domination, patriarchy, and colonialism that we need to be attentive to in our movements precisely because the structures of violence against which we agitate can reproduce themselves in the most intimate ways. I want to be in a movement where we constantly ask if we are asking the right questions. This, for me, is a labour of love.

Notes 1 In his 1972 text Persistent Poverty, Jamaican Sociologist George Beckford discussed legacies of the plantation system as a history of dispossession originating in the slave plantation experience, the internalisation of attitudes of inferiority and mimicry. Beckford, Persistent Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 2 Abby Ohlheiser, “The Woman Behind ‘Me Too’ Knew the Power of the Phrase When She Created It —​10 years ago”, Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​wp/​2017/​10/​19/​ the-​woman-​behind-​me-​too-​knew-​the-​power-​of-​the-​phrase-​when-​she-​created-​it-​10-​years-​ago/​. 3 Janet Silvera, “Two Brothers Being Questioned over St James Rapes”, Gleaner, 28 September 2012, http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​power/​40215. 4 “Pregnant Woman Shot Dead in Police Confrontation, Another Injured”, Gleaner, 1 September 2012, http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​power/​39618; Nedburn Thaffe, “One Rape, Multiple Murders Mean Rocky Start for 2012”, Gleaner, 2 January 2012, http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​gleaner/​20120102/​lead/​ lead4.html; Livern Barrett, “Rapes on the Rise, Cops Call for Sex Offenders Registry”, Gleaner, 28 September 2012, http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​gleaner/​20120928/​lead/​lead91.html. 5 Report produced by Jamaicans for Justice and The Faculty of Law the UWI Rights Advocacy Project (U-​RAP),The UWI Mona, Jamaica —​The Provision of Legal Services to Survivors of Sexual Violence in the Caribbean 6 This suggestion offers little to no comfort to women who continue to be vulnerable to and experience sexual and other forms of gender-​based violence and the view continues to be challenged by individual users and assessment frameworks as shown in a 2016 study, The Developmental Cost of Homophobia. Given the suggestion that the high incidence of rape is due to increased reporting of historical abuse and not new assaults, there is an added challenge for prosecution given little to no physical or forensic evidence. Rochelle McFee and Elroy Galbraith, eds, The Developmental Cost of Homophobia: The Case of Jamaica (January 2016), www.washingtonblade.com/​content/​files/​2016/​01/​The-​Developmental-​ Cost-​of-​Homophobia-​The-​Case-​of-​Jamaica_​2016-​1.pdf. 7 Stefan Harrendorf, Markku Heiskanen, and Steven Malby, eds, International Statistics on Crime and Justice (Helsinki:  HEUNI, 2010), www.unodc.org/​documents/​data-​and-​analysis/​Crime-​statistics/​ International_​Statistics_​on_​Crime_​and_​Justice.pdf. The Bahamian 2015 Strategic Plan to address Gender-​Based violence in the Caribbean, which utilised data from 2000–​2013, revealed that, while the worldwide average for rape was 15 per 100,000, The Bahamas had an average of 133, St Vincent and the Grenadines 112, Jamaica 51, Dominica 34, Barbados 25 and Trinidad and Tobago 18. 8 See Gordon in Women of the Caribbean, Woman Speak, no. 10, ed. Pat Ellis (London: Led Books, 1986); Carron Russell, Rape, Society and the Law with Special Reference to Barbados (Cave Hill, Barbados: Faculty of Law, UWI, 1984); Denise Eldermire, “Sexual Abuse of Children: Case Studies of Incest in an Urban

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Rochelle McFee Jamaican Population”, West Indian Medical Journal 35, no. 3 (1986): 175–​179; Stephanie Kamugisha, “Violence against Women”, in Ellis, Women of the Caribbean, 74–​79; Lindy-​Ann Lashley, Sexual Abuse and the Court (with Special Reference to Child Sexual Abuse) (St Augustine: UWI, 1988), Joan French, No to Sexual Violence (Kingston: Sistren Research, 1989); Christine Barrow and Rhoda Reddock, eds, Caribbean Sociology:  Introductory Readings (Kingston:  Ian Randle Publishers, 2001); Arlean Beckford-​ Johnson, Rape:  The Victim Goes on Trial (Cave Hill, Barbados:  Faculty of Law, UWI, 1995); Gaietry Pargass and Roberta Clarke, “Violence Against Women: A Human Rights Issue Post Beijing Five Year Review”, in Gender Equality in the Caribbean: Reality or Illusion, eds Gemma Tang Nain and Barbara Bailey (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999), 39–​72. 9 For varied discussions on different mechanisms of othering, see Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016); Leanne, B. Simpson, AsWe Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Lamonda Horton-​Stallings, A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). 10 J-​FLAG (Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-​Sexuals and Gays), “Country Report on Violence Against LGBT Persons”, unpublished, 2017. 11 Definitions from Oxfordify, accessed 31 May 2020, www.oxfordify.com. Strikethrough added by author. 12 Ronelle King, “#ReasonsWhyINeedFeminism”, Facebook, 21 June 2016, www.facebook.com/​ hashtag/​reasonswhyineedfeminism?source=feed_​text&epa=HASHTAG. 13 Ronelle King, Facebook message to author, 16 February 2020. 14 Xilomen [Ronelle King], “Starting a Revolution  —​#LifeInLegggings”, Once Upon A  Dreamer… (blog), WordPress, 29 December 2016, https://​iamxilomen.wordpress.com/​2016/​12/​29/​starting-​a-​ revolution-​lifeinleggings. 15 Xilomen, “Starting a Revolution”. 16 Xilomen, “Starting a Revolution”. 17 Ronelle King, “The Bahamas:  Interview with Founder of #LifeInLeggings”, interview by Alicia Wallace, Stop Street Harassment, 7 December 2016, www.stopstreetharassment.org/​author/​correspondent/​page/​11. 18 According to Internet World Stats, which collates data from the US Census Bureau, Nielsen Online, ITU, and Facebook, internet penetration and smartphone usage in the Caribbean was at 50.8% in 2019. Disaggregated data for 2016 from the same source showed the referenced countries Bahamas 85%, Dominica 69.6%, Grenada 63.6%, Haiti 17.8%, Jamaica 54.4%, St Lucia 79.2%, and Trinidad and Tobago 77.3%. “Internet Usage and Population in the Caribbean”, Internet World Stats, accessed 20 May 2020, www.internetworldstats.com/​stats11.htm. 19 See Partnership for a Prosperous Jamaica Working Group, Reduction of Violence Against Women and Children: How to Reduce Violence against Women and Children in Jamaica (2018). 20 In Jamaica, for example, the University of the West Indies through Mary Seacole Hall and Jamaica for Justice (JFJ) partnered with Tamborine Army (TA) to host a two day advocacy training on rape culture, the legislative framework and procedure for reporting and raising awareness on prevention. TA also partnered with other civil society organisations including WE-​Change, J-​FLAG, JYAN, CVC to submit recommendations to the joint select committee reviewing the Sexual Offences Act. Members of Parliament including Angela Brown Burke and Imani Dunkan Pryce publicly supported the work of the movement and were present at the #March11March. 21 #LeveDomnik was inspired by the #LifeInLeggings movement. “Leve Dominik” is Kweyol language and translates to “wake up Dominica” or “lift up Dominica”. Founder Delroy Williams says: Leve Dominik also seeks out stories from men as well, not just women and girls, because in Dominica 20% of reported cases are by men and GBV cases are grossly under-​reported. It was felt that it is important to address GBV in all its aspects. Latoyaa Roberts-​Thomas, “#LifeInLeggings:  the Caribbean perspective”, Your Commonwealth, 1 February 2017, www.yourcommonwealth.org/​social-​development/​gender-​equality-​lgbti/​lifeinleggings​the-​caribbean-​perspective/​. 22 Adrienne M. Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, Cal.: AK Press, 2017). 23 Nicky Highlander [Nicole Phillips], “Life in Leggings’ Women’s Solidarity March”, Nicky Highlander Photography (blog), 30 March 2017, www.nickyhighlanderphoto.com/​blog/​2017/​3/​28/​ life-​in-​leggings-​womens-​solidarity-​march.

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On tambourines, hashtags, and rerooting 24 See Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle; Robin Kelley, “ ‘When History Sleeps’: A Beginning”, in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 1–​12, for discussions on solidarities borne out of holding things in tension, that move towards creating worlds in which many worlds can exist. 25 Ronelle King, “#LiL”, Facebook, 1 December 2016, www.facebook.com/​photo.php?fbid=1015473 0034392433&set=a.478725462432&type=3, accessed 8 June 2020. 26 D. Alissa Trotz, “ ‘International Women’s Day in the Caribbean:  Marching in Solidarity with #LifeInLeggings to End Violence Against Women and Girls”,’ Starbroek News, 13 March 2017, www. stabroeknews.com/​2017/​03/​13/​features/​in-​the-​diaspora/​international-​womens-​day-​caribbean-​ marching-​solidarity-​lifeinleggings-​end-​violence-​women-​girls/​. 27 Tarana Burke, “Tarana Burke on Why She Created the #MeToo Movement  —​and Where It’s Headed”, Interview with Chris Snyder and Linette Lopez, Business Insider, 15 December 2017, www.businessinsider.com/​how-​the-​metoo-​movement-​started-​where-​its-​headed-​tarana-​burke-​time-​ person-​of-​year-​women-​2017-​12. 28 See Sady Doyle, “False Sexual Assault Allegations Have Officially Been Weaponized —​By Men”, Elle, 31 October 2018, www.elle.com/​culture/​career-​politics/​a24472435/​false-​assault-​allegations-​metoo-​ mueller/​; Lisa Booth, “Judge Kavanaugh and the Weaponisation of MeToo”, Hill, 25 September 2018, https://​thehill.com/​opinion/​judiciary/​408302-​judge-​kavanaugh-​and-​the-​weaponization-​of-​metoo; Karlyn Borysenko, “The Dark Side of #MeToo: What Happens When Men Are Falsely Accused”, Forbes, 12 February 2020, www.forbes.com/​sites/​karlynborysenko/​2020/​02/​12/​the-​dark-​side-​of-​ metoo-​what-​happens-​when-​men-​are-​falsely-​accused/​#334fbcf8864d. 29 Leanne E. Atwater, “Looking Ahead: How What We Know About Sexual Harassment Now Informs Us of the Future”, Organizational Dynamics 48, no. 4 (2019). 30 Tarana Burke, “Tarana Burke: What Happens After a Person Says ‘Me Too’ Is Fundamental”, interview with Georgie Dent, Women’s Agenda, 13 November 2019, https://​womensagenda.com.au/​ latest/​tarana-​burke-​what-​happens-​after-​a-​person-​says-​me-​too-​is-​fundamental/​. 31 WE is intentionally capitalised in homage to the organisation several of us founded in 2015, WE-​ Change (Women’s Empowerment for Change). 32 Damion Mitchell, “Moravian Pastor Rupert Clarke Gets Eight Years in Prison for Having Sex with a Minor”, Gleaner, 8 March 2018, http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​article/​news/​20180308/​moravian-​ pastor-​rupert-​clarke-​gets-​eight-​years-​prison-​having-​sex-​minor. 33 WE-​Change is a women-​led, women-​focused organisation that does that facilitates the empowerment of lesbian, bisexual and transgender women to participate in social justice advocacy. 34 In various conversations with Latoya Nugent, she said that the women who had disclosed to her, in relation to the other men she named, were not ready to do so publicly and she could not breach their trust by naming them. 35 While studies, including of attitudes and perception towards LGBT Jamaicans and of the developmental cost of homophobia, as well as numerous rights reports, show that LGBT Jamaicans experience high rates of sexual violence, this violence is seen as corrective and attempts to call attention to such violence is oft narrated as attempts to legalise same sex relationships, that is, the “gay agenda”. Ian Boxill et al., National Survey of Attitudes and Perceptions of Jamaicans Towards Same Sex Relationships (Mona, Jamaica: Department of Sociology, Psychology, and Social Work, UWI, 2012); McFee and Galbraith, The Developmental Cost of Homophobia. 36 Damion Mitchell, “Why the Moravian Pastor on Sex Charge Was Transferred Multiple Times”, Gleaner, 6 January 2017, http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​article/​news/​20170106/​why-​moravian-​pastor​sex-​charge-​was-​transferred-​multiple-​times. 37 Shanice Watson, “Moravian Pastor Battered with Tambourine … Activist Regrets Not Using a Block”, Star, 13 January 2017, http://​jamaica-​star.com/​article/​news/​20170113/​moravian-​pastor​battered-​tambourine-​activist-​regrets-​not-​using-​block. 38 Erica Virtue, “ ‘The Shame Is Yours’ —​Details of a Damning Email Which Has Rocked the Local Moravian Church to Its Core”, Gleaner, 15 January 2017, http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​article/​lead-​ stories/​20170115/​shame-​yours-​details-​damning-​email-​which-​has-​rocked-​local-​moravian. 39 Gleaner, “Sex Crime Allegations and Pastors’ Transfers in the Moravian Church”, recording on SoundCloud, 6 January 2017, audio, https://​soundcloud.com/​jamaicagleaner/​sex-​scandal-​wont-​ crumble-​moravian-​church-​says-​president; “Former Moravian Minister Sues JFLAG Exec for Defamation”, Nationwide Newsnet, 24 January 2017, https://​nationwideradiojm.com/​former-​ moravian-​minister-​sues-​jflag-​exec-​for-​defamation/​.

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Rochelle McFee 40 See Janine Mendes-​Franco, “Is Jamaica Preventing Cybercrime or Cyber Activism? The Tambourine Army Goes to Court”, Advox (blog), Global Voices, 23 March 2017, https://​advox.globalvoices.org/​2017/​ 03/​23/​is-​jamaica-​preventing-​cybercrime-​or-​cyber-​activism-​the-​tambourine-​army-​goes-t​ o-​court/​; Glenroy Murray, “Letter Of The Day: #SayTheirNames Is About Empowering Women”, Gleaner, 17 January 2017, http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​article/​letters/​20170119/​letter-​day-​saytheirnames-​about-​ empowering-​women; Annie Paul, “Annie Paul:  Yes, Let’s #SayTheirNames”, Gleaner, 1 February 2017, http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​article/​commentary/​20170131/​yes-​lets-​saytheirnames. 41 Damion Mitchell, “Moravian Women Allegedly Abused by Pastors Beginning to Speak Out”, Gleaner, 10 January 2017, http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​article/​news/​20170110/​moravian-​women-​allegedly​abused-​pastors-​beginning-​speak-​out. 42 “Hampton Principal Apologises, Admits Presence at Court ‘Inappropriate,’ ” Jamaica Observer, 11 January 2017, www.jamaicaobserver.com/​news/​Hampton-​principal-​apologises-​-​admits-​presence-​ at-​court-​-​inappropriate-​. 43 “Moravian Church President and Vice-​ President Resign amid Sex Scandal”, Gleaner, 12 January 2017, http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​article/​news/​20170112/​moravian-​church-​president​and-​vice-​president-​resign-​amid-​sex-​scandal. 44 “Former Moravian President and VP Arrested in Sex Scandal”, Jamaica Observer, 23 January 2017, www.jamaicaobserver.com/​news/​Former-​Moravian-​president-​and-​VP-​arrested-​in-​sex-​scandal. 45 “Tambourine Army Leader Arrested and Charged”, Gleaner, 15 March 2017, http://​jamaica-​gleaner. com/​article/​news/​20170315/​tambourine-​army-​leader-​arrested-​and-​charged. 46 “Former Moravian Minister Awarded $16m in Defamation Lawsuit”, Jamaica Observer, 31 January 2019, www.jamaicaobserver.com/​latestnews/​Former_​Moravian_​minister_​awarded_​$16m_​in_​defamation_​lawsuit. 47 “Moravian Church Elects Woman President”, Jamaica Observer, 27 July 2017, www.jamaicaobserver. com/​news/​moravian-​church_​106016?profile=1373. 48 Much care was being taken to ensure that predatory behaviour was only registered based on “evidence” to corroborate accusations. The men’s reputation was to remain unblemished until they had been proven guilty in a court of law. It did not seem to matter that in this specific case involving Clarke he was actually found by a police officer with the young girl; that countless women and girls had been raped and sometimes killed and the perpetrators never identified; that countless number of women who had decided not to file charges specifically because of how they are vilified by the system. It did not seem to matter that countless others who had in fact reported were pressured to drop charges, their cases dismissed on “lack of evidence”. Even as there is no Jamaican legislation barring women from naming their abusers, but those that exist to protect victims (see the Sexual Offences Act of 2009) —​ somehow there was a scrupulousness with which we were expected to act so as not to disturb the lives of the powerful and the privileged. 49 Black Sauna Radio is an online radio station started by WE-​Change in November 2017. See “Black Sauna”, WE-​ Change (website), accessed 24 May 2020, https://​wechangeja.org/​programs/​black-​ sauna/​. 50 Jonie Elle (@joni_​elle), “I find the response of Jamaicans”, Twitter, 20 November 2017, https://​ twitter.com/​joni_​elle/​status/​932403311243706368. 51 In Scenes of Subjection Saidiya Hartman explores racial subjugation and the shaping of Black identity during slavery and its aftermath. I cite her to bring into focus colonial formations, including justice that facilitates the re-​enactment and continued subjugation and violation of Black women’s bodies. While Scenes is written in the context of the United States, I read it as applicable to other temporalities and geographies —​in this case, the Caribbean where the “justice” system remains rooted in colonial laws post-​emancipation. Scenes offer useful insights for thinking through how survivors endure the reproduction of their violence vis-​à-​vis “redress” mechanisms, and why violence under this framework is inescapable. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-​Making in Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 52 Marai Larasi, personal communication with the author, 22 February 2020.

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Rochelle McFee Jamaica Observer. “Former Moravian Minister Awarded $16m in Defamation Lawsuit”. 31 January 2019. www.jamaicaobserver.com/​latestnews/​Former_​Moravian_​minister_​awarded_​$16m_​in_​defamation_​ lawsuit. Jamaica Observer. “Moravian Church Elects Woman President”. 27 July 2017. www.jamaicaobserver.com/​ news/​moravian-​church_​106016?profile=1373. J-​FLAG (Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-​Sexuals and Gays). “Country Report on Violence Against LGBT Persons”. Unpublished, 2017. Kamugisha, Stephanie. “Violence Against Women”. In Women of the Caribbean, edited by Pat Ellis, 74–​79. London: Zed Books, 1986. Kelley, Robin. “ ‘When History Sleeps’: A Beginning”. In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 1–​12. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. King, Ronelle. “#ReasonsWhyINeedFeminism”. Facebook, 21 June 2016, www.facebook.com/​hashtag/​ reasonswhyineedfeminism?source=feed_​text&epa=HASHTAG. King, Ronelle. “#LiL”. Facebook, 1 December 2016. www.facebook.com/​photo.php?fbid=10154730034 392433&set=a.478725462432&type=3, accessed 8 June 2020. King, Ronelle. “The Bahamas: Interview with Founder of #LifeInLeggings”. Interview by Alicia Wallace. Stop Street Harassment, 7 December 2016. www.stopstreetharassment.org/​author/​correspondent/​page/​ 11. Lashley, Lindy-​Ann. Sexual Abuse and the Court (with Special Reference to Child Sexual Abuse). St Augustine: UWI, 1988. Lindsey, Louis. The Myth of a Colonizing Mission: British Colonialism and the Politics of Symbolic Manipulation. Kingston: ISER, 1976. Lindsey, Louis. The Myth of Independence:  Middle Class Politics of and Non-​ Mobilization in Jamaica. Mona: University of the West Indies, 1976. McFee, Rochelle, and Elroy Galbraith, eds. The Developmental Cost of Homophobia: The Case of Jamaica. January 2016. www.washingtonblade.com/​content/​files/​2016/​01/​The-​Developmental-​Cost-​of-​ Homophobia-​The-​Case-​of-​Jamaica_​2016-​1.pdf. Mendes-​Franco, Janine. “Is Jamaica Preventing Cybercrime or Cyber Activism? The Tambourine Army Goes to Court”. Advox (blog). Global Voices, 23 March 2017. https://​advox.globalvoices.org/​2017/​03/​ 23/​is-​jamaica-​preventing-​cybercrime-​or-​cyber-​activism-​the-​tambourine-​army-​goes-​to-​court/​. Mitchell, Damion. “Moravian Women Allegedly Abused by Pastors Beginning to Speak Out”. Gleaner, 10 January 2017. http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​article/​news/​20170110/​moravian-​women-​allegedly​abused-​pastors-​beginning-​speak-​out. Mitchell, Damion. “Moravian Pastor Rupert Clarke Gets Eight Years in Prison for Having Sex with a Minor”. Gleaner, 8 March 2018. http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​article/​news/​20180308/​moravian-​ pastor-​rupert-​clarke-​gets-​eight-​years-​prison-​having-​sex-​minor. Mitchell, Damion. “Why the Moravian Pastor on Sex Charge Was Transferred Multiple Times”. Gleaner, 6 January 2017. http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​article/​news/​20170106/​why-​moravian-​pastor-​sex-​ charge-​was-​transferred-​multiple-​times. Modrek, Sepideh, and Bozhidar Chakalov. “The #MeToo Movement in the United States: Text Analysis of Early Twitter Conversations”. Journal of Medical Internet Research 21, no. 9 (2019). https://​dx.doi. org/​10.2196%2F13837. Murray, Glenroy. “Letter of The Day:  #SayTheirNames Is About Empowering Women”. Gleaner, 17 January 2017. http://​jamaica-​gleaner.com/​article/​letters/​20170119/​letter-​day-​saytheirnames-​about​empowering-​women. Nationwide Newsnet. “Former Moravian Minister Sues JFLAG Exec for Defamation”. 24 January 2017. http://​nationwideradiojm.com/​former-​moravian-​minister-​sues-​jflag-​exec-​for-​defamation/​. Ohlheiser, Abby. “The Woman behind ‘Me Too’ Knew the Power of the Phrase When She Created It —​ 10 Years Ago”. Washington Post, 19 October 2017. www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​ wp/​2017/​10/​19/​the-​woman-​behind-​me-​too-​knew-​the-​power-​of-​the-​phrase-​when-​she-​created-​it-​ 10-​years-​ago/​. Oxfordify. Accessed 31 May 2020. www.oxfordify.com. Pargass, Gaietry, and Roberta Clarke. “Violence Against Women: A Human Rights Issue Post Beijing Five Year Review”. In Gender Equality in the Caribbean: Reality or Illusion, edited by Gemma Tang Nain and Barbara Bailey, 39–​72. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999. Partnership for a Prosperous Jamaica Working Group. Reduction of Violence Against Women and Children: How to Reduce Violence against Women and Children in Jamaica (2018).

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12 MOVING FROM THEORY TO PRAXIS Sexual violence and the #MeToo movement Vinita Chandra Patriarchy functions seamlessly and infinitely through structural and foundational systems which are intrinsic to the language and grammar of any gender construct. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 that “females … are made women of when they are mere children”, and Simone de Beauvoir famously said that “[o]‌ne is not born a woman, but becomes one”.1 Over the last few decades, even as gender studies have deconstructed the fixed binaries of gender constructs and analysed the multi-​layered complexities of gendered identities, heteronormative patriarchy has continued to dominate, across the world, the borders that inscribe women’s bodies, their movement, their speech, their economic status, indeed, their very identities. The materiality of the border around women’s bodily existence retains its tenacious grip in theory and praxis. In this context, a study of the virtual, disembodied cyberspace that allows women to express themselves through keyboards becomes more momentous. This virtual space transgresses material, geographical, and political borders, and allows women to express themselves through keyboards. I would like to focus specifically on the sexual violence that is endemic to women’s lived experiences across the globe, from staring, stalking, and street harassment to assault and rape. On the one hand, this violence and its attendant trauma is normalised, and even naturalised, by women; and on the other, it is an expression of men’s entitlement to women’s bodies as objects. The #MeToo movements and Naming and Shaming Lists have, for the first time, allowed women to tell their stories in their own (disembodied) voices, while claiming agency over the borders —​which are systemically violated in the real world —​around their bodies as selves. I will argue that the #MeToo movement needs to be critically analysed by academia in order to write a women’s history because, in teaching and studying gender, the border separating academics and activism collapses. The discourse on gender must be founded upon the activism that brings about social and political change. The #MeToo movement has been engendered by the rapid digitalisation of information and ideas that has forced us to engage with knowledge and narratives in new ways. It emerged in the era of post-​truth, in which there seems to be a complete collapse of the boundaries between empirically verifiable truth and empirically verifiable falsehoods. The #MeToo movement has put on notice the oldest and most durable and flexible post-​truth that society has sustained; that of structural, systemic patriarchy and its knowledge, or “truth” about women. The turbulence created by women’s stories of their experiences of systemic sexual harassment and sexual assault

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through the #MeToo hashtag has forced their voices to be heard, even though it may not be empirically verifiable. Patriarchy, predictably, has responded with a sustained, powerful backlash. The carefully hidden, and inherently vulnerable, truth of sexual harassment, assault, and molestation, which is neither recognised nor acknowledged, has to face the brute strength of patriarchal foundationalism. Historically, women’s truths have not been allowed either space or audience. Canonical literary traditions, historical travelogues, epistolary archives, have all buried women’s voices and experiences under hegemonic male narratives. Indeed, as Virginia Woolf pointed out more than a hundred years ago, the history of the world is the history of men, recorded in male centred language, and disseminated through patriarchal structures that consolidate the erasure of women from any process of truth creation.2 Along with the silencing of their voices, women’s bodies are invisiblised literally —​within domestic spaces, under protective clothes, in demarcating public spaces inaccessible to them, and in schooling their bodies to make them as inconspicuous as possible in the public gaze. And finally, cultural practices make women’s identities always contingent: changing their names, uprooting them and moving them from one home to another, defining and recognising them only according to their reproductivity. The most dominant construction of accepted “truth” across a majority of societies globally is that of structural, systemic patriarchy. This constructed truth follows every trajectory traced in the newer formations of post truth; it is a flood of lies about the inequality of men’s and women’s abilities and intellects, and it is monumentally successful in gaslighting women so that they doubt their own credibility. It has perfected the tools of keeping women silent through trolling, threats, and actual violence, and it has falsified data and proof to deepen its foundation. Patriarchy and its attendant misogyny are the inherent, foundational “truths” on which all social, historical, economic, political, cultural, religious, and psychological knowledge is based, and values are formed. It is so intricately networked into every aspect of social life that there is nothing that it leaves untouched; this, in turn, makes it infinitely flexible so that it can mould itself to retaining its discursive leverage against any challenge to its power and authority. As Edward Said writes in Orientalism: There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental; it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Said goes on to say: “Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analysed.”3 The problem with critiquing structural patriarchy through anti-​foundationalist epistemology is that it has to be done through the encoded system of language, which only allows certain kinds of articulation and prohibits the rest. The challenge to authority must be framed in persuasive rhetoric, based in rational arguments, and corroborated by evidence that comes from empirically verifiable knowledge and information. It is an exercise designed to fail because all these structures of language and grammar have been designed around the centrality of patriarchy and are used in the service of bolstering its authority. This foundational “truth” is insulated with supporting images, propaganda, narratives, art, iconography, and consumerism. It is aggressively marketed in every generation through history. It is truly hegemonic, in the Gramscian sense. However, there has never been a time in the history of the world that women have not spoken, have not challenged this hegemonic patriarchal authority. Throughout history, women, both individually and collectively, have resisted in mythology and epics through speech and action, across all societies. But as with the present battle with post-​truth, presenting empirical 173

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data, or the “real truth” has been entirely ineffectual. The Mahabharat records Draupadi’s outrage at being a pawn in the dicing game and being dragged into court while menstruating, but her anger and resistance are subsumed in the larger male narrative of battle heroism and political exigencies. Recent analysis of Sita’s speech to Ram in Valmiki’s Ramayan —​when he asks her to go through another agni pariksha4 before returning from the forest to his kingdom with him —​reveal that she questions his wisdom and judgment. In effect, she turns her back on him in anger to go to her mother’s home, but the challenge to the concept of maryada purushottam on which Ram’s actions are legitimised is erased entirely in the narrative of the story of Ram, or the Ramayan.5 The myth of Cassandra details the boon of being able to foretell the future which is granted to her, and which is then coupled with Apollo’s curse of never being believed because she rejects his sexual advances, has passed into the iconography of feminist criticism. Florence Nightingale titled her 1852 autobiography Cassandra, in which she asks, “Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity —​these three —​and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?”6 But the image of Nightingale as the Lady with the Lamp, the gentle, kind, nurturing lady, annihilates the anguished cry of the furious woman. Five years earlier, in 1847, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre says, “Speak, I must!” while Bertha Mason rages in uncontrollable anger in the attic. Bertha Mason, as we know, must die in the fire she herself ignites to burn down patriarchy, and Jane Eyre must be domesticated through marriage. The delegitimisation of women, when they do speak, renders them without identities, corporeal bodies, and audible voices. Women have, therefore, always already been available to men for writing their truth. This epistemic violence on women has kept them out of the realm of truth creation: their narratives have always been “post-​truth”, outside the truth. Women’s testimonies have always been viewed as unreliable; their characters, fundamentally deceitful; their comprehension and grasp of facts, tenuous; and their narratives, therefore, incomplete, fragmentary. The main characteristic of post-​truth is that emotions and personal beliefs determine what is accepted as truth and not “objective fact”. Patriarchy’s tentacles are so widely spread that it is impossible for any individual’s personal beliefs to remain untouched by it, no matter which gender they belong to. What strategies are available to women, then, to register their voices, their experiences, their truth? Is it possible for them to break out of the bind of the hysteria creating, baby producing, uterus to shake the hold of patriarchy’s insanity? It is in this context that I want to examine the ongoing #MeToo movement. The movement was started to show how prevalent sexual harassment is, and that every woman faces sexual harassment, assault, molestation. The phrase “#MeToo” was tweeted by actress Alyssa Milano around noon on 15 October 2017, and was used more than 200,000 times by the end of the day, and tweeted more than 500,000 times by 16 October. On Facebook, the hashtag was used by more than 4.7 million people in 12 million posts during the first 24 hours. The platform reported that 45% of users in the United States had a friend who had posted using the term. The hashtag has trended in at least 85 countries, including India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. Direct translations of #MeToo have been shared by Spanish speakers in South America and Europe and by Arabic speakers in Africa and the Middle East, while activists in France and Italy have developed hashtags to express their response to the movement. We know that all of this is not even the tip of the iceberg. Women’s social inequality makes sexual harassment a part of the daily lives of all women, and it is naturalised to such an extent that even the most alert women are unsurprised when they find they have been at the receiving end of it without immediately recognising or reacting to it. Catharine A. MacKinnon writes: Sexual harassment is the unwanted imposition of sexual attention on someone who is not in a position to refuse it. Now ask:  In what circumstances do women tend 174

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to be in a position to refuse men’s sexual attentions? In the workplace? Not usually. Women are systemically the structural subordinates of men in the workplace; therefore, men can require pretty much anything, and hold women’s jobs as hostage. Educational institutions? Some women are teachers, some women are in positions of power, but on the whole, it is men who are at the upper reaches of that hierarchy too. Women students are not usually in a position to refuse men teachers’ sexual attentions. Employment and education have been litigated because there are laws against discrimination there. But what about areas in which there is no equality law —​say, the home? Women in the home are not necessarily in a position to refuse the sexual attention of their husbands either. The need to survive economically may make women who are beaten in their homes unable to leave or refuse the men who batter them. If women cannot avoid being beaten, then they are not in a position to resist sexual harassment —​pinching, leering, unwelcome sexual acts —​in the home either.7 Catharine A. MacKinnon’s influential work of legal scholarship, Sexual Harassment of Working Women, was published in 1979, and it offers the clearest possible illustration of the dynamics that MacKinnon believed were central to the American workplace, a system in which women were judged by the standards imposed on wives and concubines, and similarly used and discarded. “Women tend to be economically valued according to men’s perceptions of their potential to be sexually harassed”, MacKinnon argues. “They are, in effect, required to ‘ask for it’.”8 If female labour is subordinated to male desire, then coercion and compliance cannot be easily separated. MacKinnon pointed to the structural nature of sexual harassment; not the harassment of an individual who happened to be a woman, but of the systemic inequality and subordination of women in the workplace and home. It is a truth so inseparable from the way that men and women are meant to relate to each other that the inherent disbelief of the fact that women do not desire to be sexually harassed has to be tackled discursively, as well as in every individual case. Digital media proved to be a powerful tool in exposing sexual harassment for many reasons, the most important of which is the removal of the corporeal female body and voice from the sexual harassment charge. While in principle men and women are in agreement about the damage that sexual harassment causes, and the need for laws to prevent it, this supposedly shared belief is quite different in practice. When an actual woman makes an accusation, discourse centres around her age, her clothes, her make-​up, her hair, the way she walks, the way she smiles, her personal relationships, her career ambitions, her lifestyle, her sexuality —​the list is endless —​and the result is almost always the discrediting of her charge against the man because of any of these factors. Along with the physicality of the woman’s body and her appearance comes her voice: she can only be too emotional and hysterical, or too composed, too much in control, too aggressive, too tentative, too much anger, not enough anger, too frivolous, lacking a sense of humour, too loud, or too soft. And finally, there is the audience to which the woman must speak her truth. As all studies of rape and sexual harassment trials tell us, the process of narrating the events to a generally male audience in the legal space, and the questioning that the victim has to undergo, is a repetition of the original violence visited on her body. The digital media offers an aesthetico-​politics of hashtag stories without the physicality of women’s bodies or voices. It allows women to narrate their traumatic experiences to the neutral computer screen. It gives them the time and space to be masters of their narratives, without the pressure of the judgmental, hostile, or, at best, sceptical audience that needs never-​available proof to combat the inbuilt prejudice that a man should not be held accountable for any trauma that a woman may feel. It gives women the privilege to use the same keyboard as men to raise 175

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their voices. It levels the playing field in competing against the power of the Adam’s apple. Further, it indelibly imprints its trauma on countless computer screens; it can be read and reread infinitely; it cannot be erased or invisibilised; it cannot be silenced; and finally, it can be saved and reproduced/​replicated for further use. Digital media/​social media also makes available multiple audiences who are then able to react or respond to the narratives in a multitude of different ways. It allows women’s voices to traverse national and communal boundaries, to reach across different cultures and to address the commonalities of sexual harassment encoded into pervasive patriarchal structures. An analysis of #MeToo stories from across the globe shows the heterogeneity of the movement in different geographical spaces, even as the root of the narratives is systemic sexual harassment. Different cultural contexts give rise to experiencing, and then narrating, those experiences in diverse ways; the consequent mobilisation of women against sexual harassment, therefore, also takes on many different forms, allying itself to the particularities of the patriarchal forces intrinsic to the culture. In India, the hashtag #MeToo has a presence that is felt across the country, as can be seen from the #MeToo Rising web page. This is a web page in which Google Trends data is used to create a visualisation of Google Search interest in #MeToo over time.9 This data represents global trends of people searching for the movement from the top 300 searching cities every day. Those cities are indicated by a shining light. The subcontinent of India is lit up through its entire land mass; it is the country with the highest concentration of cities searching for #MeToo. The cities range from the large, cosmopolitan metropolis to small towns across the length and breadth of the country. The #MeToo movement has also made its presence felt in national media and national politics. M. J. Akbar, a junior minister in the government, had to resign from his post after several women made sexual harassment allegations against him, even while he claimed innocence. Bollywood actors, directors, men in the media, and artists have either resigned from high posts or have been blacklisted by their communities. There are many factors that have contributed to the surge of the movement in India. While the social media movement of exposing sexual harassment perpetrators is restricted to those with access to the internet and the English language, the judgment against sexual harassment in the workplace came into being because of a rural, grassroots worker, Bhanwari Devi. Bhanwari Devi was working as a “saathin” [female companion], an employee of the Women’s Development Project run by the Rajasthan government, when she was gang raped by five “upper” caste men in 1992. The task assigned to her by the District Women’s Development Agency was to convince villagers to reject child marriage. The saathins were required to inform the police in the event that anyone forcibly tried to marry off children. Bhanwari Devi informed the police about the plans of one of the men, who subsequently raped her, to marry off his nine-​month-​ old daughter. Bhanwari Devi took the courageous step to report the rape, but did not get justice from either the police or the courts. Moved by her plight, some women’s groups jointly filed a PIL in the Supreme Court, which resulted in the Supreme Court judgment in 1997 that laid down formal guidelines for dealing with sexual harassment at the workplace. These came to be known as the Vishakha Guidelines. Later, it would form the foundation of India’s law on the prevention of sexual harassment in the workplace. The Vishakha judgment, from which the Vishakha guidelines emerged, was delivered 20 years before the #MeToo movement came to India; that judgement demonstrated what the legal framework could make possible, even though it was clear that its implementation in full was an almost impossible ideal. It was a revolutionary judgment grounded in the fundamental rights of women. Vishakha et al. argued that Bhanwari Devi was raped because of her work, and thus the Vishakha guidelines were put in place to prevent and punish sexual harassment in the work place. The Vishakha guidelines stipulated that, 176

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It shall be the duty of the employer or other responsible persons in work places or other institutions to prevent or deter the commission of acts of sexual harassment and to provide the procedures for the resolution, settlement or prosecution of acts of sexual harassment by taking all steps required.10 The definition of sexual harassment given in the judgment went far beyond the physical: it encompassed the mental, the emotional, and the psychological. It was an extremely progressive definition of sexual harassment —​one that understood, and articulated, the all-​pervasiveness of sexual harassment women faced on a daily basis in their workplace. For this purpose, sexual harassment includes such unwelcome sexually determined behaviour (whether directly or by implication) as: (a) physical contact and advances; (b) a demand or request for sexual favours; (c) sexually coloured remarks; (d) showing pornography; (e) any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non-​verbal conduct of sexual nature.11 But, most significantly, the judgment put a complaint mechanism in place, mandated by law in all workplaces. Whether or not such conduct constitutes an offence under law or a breach of the service rules, an appropriate complaint mechanism should be created in the employer’s organisation for redress of the complaint made by the victim. Such a complaint mechanism should ensure time bound treatment of complaints.12 The Complaints Committee was to be headed by a woman, and more than half the members of the committee had to be women. Although the Vishakha guidelines were not implemented with any real seriousness or political will, their existence, and the consciousness of their existence, paved the way for an awareness of what constitutes sexual harassment. It took another brutal gang rape to create The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. The brutal gang rape, and subsequent death, of Jyoti Singh in a bus in Delhi in 2012 brought outraged citizens out on the streets in huge numbers over many days, finally forcing the government to enact legislation against sexual harassment. Since the 2013 Act is an Act of Parliament, it has been taken more seriously than the Vishakha guidelines, but the legislation and the due process that it has put in place have not effectively addressed the issue of sexual harassment. It is due to this failure of procedure to prevent systemic sexual harassment that the #MeToo movement has become a powerful tool for women in India. The #MeToo movement suddenly gained momentum in India a year after Alyssa Milano’s tweet on October 2018. In October 2019, Tanushree Dutta, a Bollywood actress who now lives in the United States, filed a new complaint with the police, reviving her ten-​year-​old case against a prominent actor, Nana Patekar, for allegedly ordering changes to a dance sequence in a movie so that he could grope her. In the next three weeks, men from politics, journalism, the film industry, the entertainment industry, comedians, musicians, artists, NGO employees, writers, lawyers, and employees of corporate and advertising companies from both sports and the education sector were named in an outpouring of #MeToo tweets and posts. Many of them had enquiries instituted against them in their place of work, and many resigned voluntarily from their posts, whether they accepted their guilt or not. In its report on the #MeToo movement in India dated 9 October 2018, the New York Times writes: “It’s almost like a wave has come”, said Vrinda Grover, a New Delhi lawyer and human rights activist who helped draft some of India’s laws on sexual harassment and child abuse. “Until now, we have seen consequences only on the women who complained. This time, the consequences are for those who have committed the misconduct.”13 177

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Taking inspiration from the courage of women speaking truth to power against men in high positions, the #MeToo movement has infiltrated almost every strata of women who have internet connections and some facility with the English language. In Delhi University, for instance, many of its constituent 90 colleges, its post graduate departments, and its extracurricular societies such as the debating circuit, have had #MeToo movements of their own in which they have not only called out individual men who have harassed/​assaulted them, but also exposed the casual sexism that underlies the basis of the relations between men and women. Similarly, the Indie music community, the slam poetry circuit, smaller art curations, and others have their own #MeToo exposures, many of which have resulted in some form of boycott of those accused. The accusations range from outright assault and predatory behaviour to not “reading” lack of consent correctly. As most commentators of the #MeToo movement in India have pointed out, it remains restricted to English-​ speaking, middle-​and upper-​ class educated women with internet connections and mobile phones. However, numerically this is a great number of women because of India’s sizable middle-​class population, and the significant number of people who speak, or can communicate in, English. The number of women in the workforce has increased steadily since the 1960s, and these economically independent women have used the #MeToo hashtag to amplify their voices and to influence public opinion through coverage in national print and electronic media. The social media movement has allowed them to solidarise with each other to push for action against those whom they accuse. This small percentage of women has, therefore, been able to bring about a shift in discourse around the naturalisation of sexual harassment that women are supposed to face silently in their daily lives. The effect of the movement has been that work places are instituting sexual harassment complaints committees and thinking about acceptable codes of behaviour. While many of these mechanisms may have been put in place only in letter, at least it’s a start. The #MeToo movement in India is unlikely to shake structural patriarchy, much less touch the brutal lived realities of the majority of women in the country. Systemic, naturalised sexual harassment cannot be overturned anywhere in the world by a digital social media movement. But #MeToo has enabled millions of women throughout the world to fight for their security and challenge the hegemonic discourse of male entitlement; it is a stride towards making privileged men feel that they are accountable in public, even if they are exonerated by the courts. In India, it has made educated young people question received ideas of how men and women should “naturally” relate to each other in their gender predetermined roles. Other movements will continue to exist alongside. On 23 February 2019, 5,000 women rape victims reached Delhi after marching over 10,000 kilometres for two months. Most of them are tribal Adivasis and the “lower” caste Dalits. They have the most horrific tales of atrocities to relate. But they gathered together in Delhi to make their voices heard; they say that first, they felt shame at telling their stories, then they wept while telling them. But through this collectivity, they can now tell their stories to each other and the world without shedding a tear. They are in Delhi to change the way that the police, the courts, and the male-​dominated village leaders treat victims of rape, and are there to make sure that systems change. The leading national daily, Times of India, published a news item titled “Walk of no shame: 10,000 km, 5,000 survivors.” It is buried on page 10. The most significant impact of the #MeToo hashtag movement enabled by digital media is that it has forged a community of women across the world. It has managed to bring together diverse voices, in their wide-​ranging experiences, under one rubric. The power of these hashtag stories of violence, which run the gamut from the verbal to the emotional to the physical, is still unfolding. But what is clear at the present moment is that these stories are rewriting the past and 178

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reworking the codes that govern the way men and women are expected to relate to each other. The #MeToo movement has allowed women to challenge the immunity that men take for granted in their feeling of entitlement to women’s bodies and their sexuality by returning the objectifying gaze on them and by redirecting the humiliating touch to the harasser. By detailing the encounter of sexual harassment soon after it took place and linking it to the emotions it evoked in the moment and in the trauma that may persist many years later, women are grasping agency and empowerment that, in small measure, compensates for that complete powerlessness they experienced. The resonance of each experience with an enormous number of women, which then translates into more and more women finding the courage to name the deeds perpetrated on them, if not the names of the perpetrators, is finally yielding action that the law against sexual harassment was not and is still not able to. Women’s voices are being heard, the individual harassed woman has now joined a virtual community of harassed women, and the realisation that every woman has a story to tell has finally turned attention to intrinsic gender roles rather than individual encounters. It is not surprising then that the #NotAllMen hashtag in response to #MeToo was exposed for its naïve denial and escapism: women’s patience with dominant male narratives seems to be finally running out. Being in the midst of the #MeToo movement, it is difficult to predict the course that it will eventually take. However, a re-​evaluation of sexuality and patriarchal privilege in all relationships is beginning to get underway. The short story “Cat Person”14 followed by the “Babe” article about Aziz Ansari15 has brought about a complete shift in the way that consent has been conceptualised until now. Huge disagreements notwithstanding, the 1960s and 1970s understanding of No Means No has now shifted to a much more complex understanding of consent, or lack of it, even if not verbalised. The conceptual and discursive shift is accompanied by the demand from many younger women, specifically, that consent be sought at every stage of intimacy, because the woman’s inability to say no even when she does not want it emerges from a social conditioning that runs so deep that it paralyses women. Bad sex is not simply intimacy with a man who is not an expert; it comes from encoded sexual roles in which women’s pleasure, their bodies’ responses, are simply of no consequence in the male entitled, unquestioned pursuit of gratification. The discussions that the #MeToo movement will hopefully lead to one step towards social change. Catharine A. MacKinnon says: The effect of law is not just when someone brings a case and someone goes to jail. That is the least important effect of it. The most important effect is that it changes the legitimacy of the act. For example, if marital rape was a crime then it is possible to think about the sex one has in marriage as something in which the most force that a man can exert on a person is not automatically allowed. So then in a marriage a woman can think that maybe the sex she has is something she actually wants to be having. It has nothing to do with putting your husband in jail.16 While the challenge to sexual harassment has brought in much needed optimism in women’s fight against sexual harassment, it is important to note that from its beginning the movement has been accompanied by a swift patriarchal backlash which is attempting to fold this movement back into its already available truth: that of women’s hysteria and their cunning and scheming characters on one side, and the deeply embedded discourse of boys will be boys, and the centrality of men’s careers which should not be jeopardised on the other. Women’s stories are systemically trolled, and historical epistemic violence is the mainstay of the attack against the new knowledge that is struggling to emerge from the collectivity of stories about consent and rape. Women are charged with a lack of understanding of their own sexuality, and their instability 179

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to testify truthfully, or even to articulate accurately what they claim to have experienced. These well-​entrenched patriarchal tools are used to challenge every individual story and the movement as a whole. MacKinnon points out that it takes three to four women relating similar experiences about the same man for it to be heard at all, which means that a woman’s worth is one fourth that of a man’s. And worse still, that even when she is believed, no action is taken, which reiterates the socialised truth women grow up with —​that they ultimately do not matter at all. To make it possible for a women’s truth to be constructed in a way that would take on the deluge of misinformation, lies, and structural prejudices against women, we need to establish a feminist epistemology where knowledge, and the language it is formulated in, centres on women and their life experiences. Virginia Woolf dreamt of someone writing a women’s history almost a century ago; a history which does not dismiss their lives as the “domestic” sphere while concentrating on men’s wars and politics. We need research about women’s bodies specifically. Articles written recently point to the fact that the problem with discussing issues related to menstruation are not that there are disagreements among doctors and specialists, but that there is no real research, and therefore no consolidated data on which to base any real, shared knowledge in the first place. The construction of knowledge about physical strength and weakness —​the foundation on which patriarchy establishes men’s inherent superiority —​has to change the very basis of the discussion by not simply evaluating strength by muscular power but on very different parameters, such as immunity and endurance. These are just a very few examples of what a feminist epistemology would engender. We cannot use patriarchal knowledge articulated through a phallocentric language to counter its truths. The fight against sexual harassment/​assault/​rape is one that has to be fought in practice, and creating empirical data sets based on women’s bodies and experiences is only the first step. Feminist theory has always been activist at heart, and the teaching of feminism, the basic fact that women should be equal to men, has always been a battle cry. Creating structural solidarities among women and feminist men to counter patriarchal order that functions by pitting women against each other is the real basis of hope. To quote the Times of India report on “Walk of no shame”: A 30 year old woman, the mother of a rape survivor from Jhansi, summed up the journey’s achievements, “When we started out, we could not narrate our stories without breaking down”, she began. “Today, we have found our voices and we will keep speaking until there is a substantial change in our system. The government will relent, obstacles will wither away and society will change.”17

Notes 1 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: Vintage Books, 2015), 46; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953), 273. 2 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929). 3 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 19–​20. 4 Trial by fire to prove her chastity. 5 “Maryada purshottam” translates roughly as the upright man, or the ideal man. 6 Florence Nightingale, Cassandra: Florence Nightingale’s Angry Outcry Against the Forced Idleness of Victorian Women (US: The Feminist Press, 1979), 25. 7 Catharine A. MacKinnon, Butterfly Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017), 17. 8 Ginia Bellafante, “Before #MeToo There Was Catharine A.  MacKinnon and Her Book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women”, New  York Times, 19 March 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​03/​19/​ books/​review/​#MeToo-​workplace-​sexual-​harassment-​catharine-​mackinnon.html.

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Moving from theory to praxis 9 Me Too Rising (website), accessed 8 May 2020, https://​metoorising.withgoogle.com. 10 Supreme Court of India, Vishakha Guidelines against Sexual Harassment at Workplace: Guidelines and Norms laid down by the Honourable Supreme Court in Vishakha and Others v. State of Rajasthan and Others (New Delhi, 1997), 1. 11 Supreme Court of India, Vishakha Guidelines, 1. 12 Supreme Court of India, Vishakha Guidelines, 2. 13 Vindu Goel, Ayesha Venkataraman, and Kai Schultz, “After a Long Wait, India’s #MeToo Movement Suddenly Takes Off”, New York Times, 9 October 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​10/​09/​world/​asia/​ india-​sexual-​harassment-​me-​too-​bollywood.html. 14 Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person”, New Yorker, 4 December 2017, www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​ 2017/​12/​11/​cat-​person. 15 Katie Way, “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life”. Babe.net, 14 January 2018. 16 Adrija Roychowdhury, “Butterfly politics and the culture of change:  #GenderAnd Catharine MacKinnon on institutional mechansims, social change, power politics”, Indian Express, 21 December 2017, https://​indianexpress.com/​article/​gender/​butterfly-​politics-​and-​the-​culture-​of-​change-​ 4992438/​. 17 “Walk of no shame: 10000 km, 5000 survivors”, Times of India, 23 February 2019, https://​timesofindia. indiatimes.com/​city/​delhi/​walk-​of-​no-​shame-​10000km-​5000-​survivors/​articleshow/​68119187.cms.

Bibliography Bellafante, Ginia. “Before #MeToo There Was Catharine A. MacKinnon and Her Book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women”. New York Times, 19 March 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​03/​19/​books/​review/​ #MeToo-​workplace-​sexual-​harassment-​catharine-​mackinnon.html. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley. London: Jonathan Cape, 1953. Goel, Vindu, Ayesha Venkataraman and Kai Schultz. “After a Long Wait, India’s #MeToo Movement Suddenly Takes Off”. New York Times, 9 October 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​10/​09/​world/​asia/​ india-​sexual-​harassment-​me-​too-​bollywood.html. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Butterfly Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Me Too Rising (website). Accessed 8 May 2020. https://​metoorising.withgoogle.com. Nightingale, Florence. Cassandra: Florence Nightingale’s Angry Outcry Against the Forced Idleness of Victorian Women. US: The Feminist Press, 1979. Roupenian, Kristen. “Cat Person”. New Yorker, December 2017. www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​2017/​ 12/​11/​cat-​person. Roychowdhury, Adrija. “Butterfly Politics and the Culture of Change: #GenderAnd Catharine MacKinnon on Institutional Mechansims, Social Change, Power Politics”, Indian Express, 21 December 2017, https://​indianexpress.com/​article/​gender/​butterfly-​politics-​and-​the-​culture-​of-​change-​4992438/​. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Supreme Court of India. Vishakha Guidelines against Sexual Harassment at Workplace: Guidelines and Norms laid down by the Honourable Supreme Court in Vishakha and Others v State of Rajasthan and Others. New Delhi, 1997. Times of India. “Walk of No Shame: 10000 km, 5000 Survivors”. 23 February 2019. https://​timesofindia. indiatimes.com/​city/​delhi/​walk-​of-​no-​shame-​10000km-​5000-​survivors/​articleshow/​68119187.cms. Way, Katie. “I Went on a Date with Aziz Ansari. It Turned into the Worst Night of My Life”. Babe, 14 January 2018. https://​babe.net/​2018/​01/​13/​aziz-​ansari-​28355. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929.

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13 WIENERS, WHINERS, WEINSTEINS, AND WORSE Jack Halberstam

Reading over the dirty details of the exploits of scumbag of the month, Harvey Weinstein, one thought occurred to me over and over: something is rotten in the state of heterosexuality. And yet, in all the masses of media coverage on Weinstein’s disgusting behaviours, I barely remember seeing the word! Believe me that I am not one to argue that gays are innocent by comparison, only that the “me too” Twitter campaigns and the national discussion of enforced blowjobs and massages seems, for the moment, to be focused upon powerful men forcing young women into compromising positions. Shouldn’t this be the beginning of a widespread conversation about men, women, and sex? Might future freedoms depend, to a certain extent, on a completely reorganised understanding of sexuality and desire? So, how would a national conversation on heterosexuality need to begin? Well, for once, we would need to name a power dynamic for what it is. Just as the popular press has tended, until very recently, to shy away from calling the racial context in which police officers beat and shoot Black men white supremacy, so they hesitate to call the sexual context in which powerful and famous men cajole, nudge, push, shove, forcibly manipulate often young and inexperienced women to sexually please them, hetero-​patriarchy. But this is what it is and this is the atmosphere in which many young men are trained to understand themselves as extremely desirable while young women struggle with their self-​image. Rather than wagging our collective fingers at a Wiener, a Weinstein, a wanker, or worse, we need to turn to the way we raise young men to believe that if they want it, she does too … or even, if they want it, it does not matter what she wants. But we should also be thinking about how we raise young women to comply. The current climate on college campuses across the country is one of confusion mixed with outrage, fear, paranoia, and anger. Students and professors launch sexual harassment charges at one another, and each other, and while some big name professors who are serial abusers have been caught pressuring their students, the latitude of the Title IX regulations have also been used for homophobic purposes. And so, in at least three cases that I know of personally, queer and trans faculty have been accused of “improper conduct”, or “inappropriate boundaries” with students. In one case, a queer/​trans couple of colour have been suspended with a reduction in pay! How is it that the fallout from rampant heterosexual abuse is the increased surveillance of queer and trans faculty?

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As shocked as we all may be about the stories about Weinstein, in their sheer repetitiveness and consistency, they must be read as totally normal. Weinstein, obviously, is only the tip of a very large and very nasty Hollywood iceberg. Despite Hollywood’s own thematisation of the sexual casting couch —​how many films are about feisty women who are asked to sexually compromise their integrity for a job but refuse to? —​it is a theme in Hollywood films because it is obviously one actual route to visibility and jobs. In fact, there is a kind of tautology to Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie coming out, long after the fact, and saying “me too”. Of course they were victims of the casting couch, their fame may tell us as much! And I am not saying that successful female stars only got where they are today because they succumbed to Weinstein or his equivalent at other studios, but I am saying that there are probably countless other actresses who never made it big precisely because they did say no. Weinstein implies as much in case after case reported by The New Yorker. When women pushed back or refused him what he felt was his sexual due, they were told, as Lupita Nyong’o bravely reported, that this would cost them in their careers. Newton’s third law states: for every action, there is an equal and opposition reaction. So, a bird can fly because its efforts to rise are met by the force of gravity pushing it down, its wing motions force air down and are met by the force of the air pushing it up —​flight depends upon the relations between actions and reactions. For every lewd guy who sidles up to a woman and whispers inane nothings in her ear in the hopes of seducing or forcing her into bed, there must be among all the women he approaches at least one who hears his spiel as seductive. Heterosexuality is like Newton’s third law —​it depends upon actions and reactions. If every woman who ever came into contact with the bulk and force of Weinstein’s body said, as Lupita Nyong’o did:  “With all due respect, I  would not be able to sleep at night if I did what you are asking, so I must pass”, presumably, Weinstein would have had to respect the concept of consent or grossly violate it in ways to lead to multiple charges of rape. As it is, the middle ground occupied by many of the charges against Weinstein lead into murky legal territory easily exploited by his overworked and well-​paid lawyers. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This could be a definition of heterosexuality. This is certainly one of the ways in which we have thought about heterosexuality —​as in “opposites attract”, or “women are from Venus and men are from Mars”, or, in the words of Paula Abdul: “Baby seems we never ever agree/​You like the movies/​And I like T.V./​I take things serious/​And you take ’em light/​I go to bed early/​And you party all night.”1 You say potato and I say potarto, let’s call the whole thing off. Heterosexuality has been cast in art and in science, for better or for worse, as a détente between different species. She wants monogamy and stability, he wants to spread his seed far and wide. He wants quantity, she wants quality. And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. But, here’s the rub for heterosexuality —​for a culture invested in the idea of men and women as “opposites”, it takes a major and continuous PR campaign to make heterosexuality seem natural, normal and even appealing. In her engaging book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, Hanne Blank explains how heterosexuality became synonymous with sexual normativity: Early in the history of the term, it was even used interchangeably with the term “normal-​sexual”. And there, as they say, is the rub. “Normal” is not a mode of eternal truth; it’s a way to describe commonness and conformity with expectations. But what

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is most common and expected, in terms of our sexual lives or any other aspect of the human condition, does not always remain the same.2 True enough, norms shift and change but for about the past 100 years, heterosexuality has maintained its hegemonic sway as the norm governing sexual interactions between all kinds of bodies with all kinds of different intentions with regard to pleasure and reproduction. Now, in this day and at this moment we should be clear about what norm heterosexuality names: what is normal apparently between particularly white men and women is for white men to see women as toys, accessories, playmates, and trophies. What is normal for women is to react to a range of behaviours from boyfriends, fathers, uncles and family friends that slide back and forth between flirtation, seduction, and abuse. The #MeToo hashtag that went viral on Twitter suggests that much of the attention directed at women by powerful white men slides quickly from seduction into abuse and that this has been so normalised that women have accepted that slide as part and parcel of heterosexuality. Heterosexuality is the normalisation of abuse. Obviously not all heterosexual relations are abusive. Not all powerful white men are abusers. Not all women have been sexually assaulted. And so on. But, as Jenny Holzer once wrote with admirable and characteristic economy, “abuse of power comes as no surprise”.3 We live in a world, as Sara Ahmed reminds us, built by and for white men.4 For this reason, she continues, white men fit well in the world they have built and all other bodies have to struggle to find their place. The winner takes all mentality of white supremacy has organised the expectations of generations of young men and women such that white men expect the world and women are expected to deliver it to them. When those deliveries halt or slow down or are interrupted, the white man feels that he has been deprived of something he was promised. In the world that the white man built, a world where he has authorised his own violent reactions to disappointments, he now legally buys a gun and legally walks through the streets with that gun and waits for the moment within which he will use that gun to remind everyone around him that this is his world and we will live and die in it. It is time to confront the normalisation of abuse under the heading of heterosexuality. It is time to think about the violence of the norm, the way in which norms are self-​perpetuating and the possibility that white male violence continues because some (white) women succumb to it, consent to it, extend it. Trump after all, after decades of Wiener/​Weinstein/​wanker like behaviour, after extended publicity on his violent rhetoric and actions towards women, was elected with considerable help from white women voters. And for every Lupita Nyong’o who says unequivocally no to a pig like Weinstein, there are ten others who either felt they could not say no or decided it was easier and more beneficial to their careers to say yes. Heterosexuality is a candle burning at both ends. For the casual violence that it masks to be confronted in a structural way and not in the piecemeal and potentially homophobic ways that Title IX regulations currently oversee, we need to confront heterosexuality head on. Heterosexuality promotes, depends upon, and perpetuates gendered hierarchies, sexual assault, and the suppression of feminine people. Heterosexuality, indeed, is not the other to homosexuality, it is the other to social justice, a politics of pleasure, a funky and open relation to sex in which we care whether our partners are awake and responsive versus drunk and inert, ready and willing versus resigned and submissive, excited and aroused versus disgusted and fleeing. To all the Wieners, Weinsteins, and Wankers out there: your days are numbered, your gig is up. Your disdain for women, people of colour and the many who work for you is building

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towards an inevitable reversal in which you will no longer be the predator out on the prowl; in the immortal words of Grace Jones, we are approaching the moment when the hunter gets captured by the game.5 Get ready!

Note 1 Paula Abdul, vocalist, “Opposites Attract”, featuring The Wild Pair, written by Oliver Leiber, MP3 audio, track 3 on Paula Abdul, Forever Your Girl, Virgin Records, 1988. 2 Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 7. 3 Jenny Holzer, “Jenny Holzer Made Good Things Out of Horror: ‘I don’t want to be looked at or dismissed, or even attract anybody, as a female’”, interview by Amanda Fortini, Cut, 18 October, 2018, https://www.thecut.com/2018/10/women-and-power-jenny-holzer.html. 4 See e.g. Sara Ahmed, interview by Katy P. Sian, in Conversations in Postcolonial Thought, edited by Sian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 15–33. 5 See Grace Jones, vocalist, “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game”, written by Smokey Robinson, MP3 audio, track 5 on Grace Jones, Warm Leatherette, Island, 1980.

Bibliography Abdul, Paula, vocalist. “Opposites Attract”. Featuring The Wild Pair. Written by Oliver Leiber. MP3 audio. Track 3 on Paula Abdul, Forever Your Girl. Virgin Records, 1988. Ahmed, Sara. Interview by Katy P. Sian. In Conversations in Postcolonial Thought, edited by Sian, 15–33. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Blank, Hanne. Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012. Holzer, Jenny. “Jenny Holzer Made Good Things Out of Horror: ‘I don’t want to be looked at or dismissed, or even attract anybody, as a female’”. Interview by Amanda Fortini. Cut, 18 October, 2018. https://www.thecut.com/2018/10/women-and-power-jenny-holzer.html. Jones, Grace, vocalist. “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game”. Written by Smokey Robinson. MP3 audio. Track 5 on Grace Jones, Warm Leatherette. Island, 1980.

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14 OF MOGULS, MONSTERS, AND MEN Karen Boyle

Since October 2017, #MeToo has been at the forefront of an increasingly public conversation about sexual harassment and violence.1 Speaking out about sexual violence is something women have been doing —​collectively and individually —​for decades.2 What has made the period since October 2017 relatively distinctive is the extent to which women’s speech —​some women’s speech —​has been heard. The Pulitzer Prize-​winning investigative journalism of Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, and Ronan Farrow is widely credited with having initiated this shift, placing the film producer and distributor Harvey Weinstein at the centre of an increasingly global story.3 Yet, whilst the work of Kantor, Twohey, Farrow, and many other journalists has demonstrated an understanding of sexual violence which has clearly been informed by feminist insights, media coverage of the #MeToo moment more broadly has been much more ambivalent in its attitudes to and engagement with feminism.4 In this chapter, I  use coverage of the Weinstein case  —​up to and including the mixed verdict in his New York criminal trial in January–​February 20205 —​to explore the extent to which feminist insights about male violence have been mobilised in mainstream reporting. First, I briefly outline some key points emerging from feminist theory about gender and violence, before moving on to think about Weinstein specifically. I discuss the cultural value of abuse in the portrayals of Weinstein pre-​October 2017, then consider how —​despite Weinstein’s own attempts to return to cultural value narratives —​media portrayals post-​October 2017 shifted to emphasise his monstrosity. I argue that both prosecution and defence in his 2020 trial mobilised the monster narrative to different ends, but that the impact of this collective emphasis was to focus on Weinstein as an exceptional individual, limiting the potential for the kind of structural analysis and institutional change needed to end men’s violence against women.

Continuum thinking One of the key contributions of feminist theory has been to understand the fundamentally gendered nature of violence.6 Specifically, feminists have highlighted the inextricable link between masculinity and violence. This is not to argue that men are innately more violent than women, nor is it to suggest that all men are violent (though it is sometimes misrepresented in these ways).

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Rather, feminists have highlighted the ways in which violence is —​in contexts both private and public —​a socially and culturally acceptable facet of masculinity, particularly for powerful white men. At the same time, feminism has placed women’s experiences of male violence at the centre of theory-​building. In her influential book Surviving Sexual Violence, Liz Kelly argues that women experience sexual violence not as an individual act but rather as a continuum of experiences across a lifetime.7 Two aspects of the continuum of sexual violence are particularly pertinent to #MeToo. First, the continuum allows us to see how pervasive sexual violence is as it connects recognisably criminal behaviours (such as rape) with more everyday and less easily categorisable behaviour (such as catcalling). Kelly’s point is not that these behaviours are equivalent but rather that they are linked: that is, how we make sense of, or experience, one is linked to the other. Thus, and this is the second aspect I want to stress, Kelly argues against creating a hierarchy of severity (with the important exception of sexual murder). Kelly demonstrates the complexity of women’s reactions to individual acts and the impossibility of completely disaggregating them. Her focus is on what sexual violence means in the lives of women: It is pointedly not about the criminal justice system (which depends on the kinds of distinctions and hierarchies Kelly eschews). This is important when we come to think about what Kelly’s continuum means for men. Kelly always envisaged the continuum model as applicable to men’s behaviour as well as female experience, to allow us to explore and expose the inter-​relationships between what is constructed as “normal” and “aberrant” for men.8 Thinking about men’s and women’s experiences can produce very different understandings of the same behaviours. The Harvey Weinstein case —​and here I refer to the 100 public allegations of sexual misconduct and assault against him rather than to the criminal cases specifically9 —​has demonstrated that sexual harassment does not need to involve physical assault (behaviour more likely to be recognised as “aberrant”) for it to have both material and psychological impacts on women. #MeToo has been highly effective in bringing to the fore these kinds of experiences, and the on-​going work this requires from women to continually make judgements about safety and risk in public and private interactions. This has involved a reorientation  —​often presented as catastrophically disorienting for men —​from a himpathetic10 discourse which centres men’s behaviour (these aren’t crimes but normal behaviour, women are destroying men’s lives by speaking out), to insist on understanding these actions in the context of women’s lives and their experiences of gendered inequality and power, including in the workplace. These experiences trouble easy categorisations:  in themselves they are not all acts of criminal violence (though, of course, many are), but cumulatively they produce effects which limit women’s capacity for action and undergird men’s power. Part of the reason this has been troubling for contemporary commentators trying to make sense of #MeToo in general, and of Weinstein specifically, is that sexual violation has become so embedded in a discourse of crime that linking normal and aberrant behaviours in this way is too easily assumed to be re-​positioning “normal” male behaviour (and, so, “normal” men) and male power as criminal. The concern here is what this means for men and Harvey Weinstein has become the standard against which other men are judged. As I  have noted elsewhere,11 variations on the phrase “he’s no Harvey Weinstein” permeate popular discussions of the reach of #MeToo as though being investigated for rape and sexual assault in multiple jurisdictions is the benchmark against which men’s behaviour should be judged. However, what I want to suggest in this chapter is that part of Weinstein’s and his legal team’s strategy in response to the criminal charges has been to suggest that he is no Harvey Weinstein either, that “Harvey

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Weinstein” has become a caricature divorced from a real person. Weinstein’s body and physical appearance is the terrain on which significant parts of this particular battle have been fought. What I want to untangle in this chapter, then, are the different ways in which Weinstein has been positioned on this continuum of male behaviour in media discourses both before and after the October 2017 revelations. As I will argue, there is a strongly moral dimension to this, but it is women’s morality which, is, too often, still at stake.

Moguls It may seem strange to argue that there has been a cultural value attached to the sexual abuse of women given Weinstein’s criminal convictions. However, certain aspects of Weinstein’s behaviour were public long before October 2017 with little cost —​and indeed potential benefit —​ to his reputation and business position. This is what I refer to as the cultural value of abuse.12 For this kind of abuse to carry a cultural value two things need to be in place. First, aggression and sexual entitlement need to be culturally valued expressions of masculinity. This is what we might call the absolute value of sexual abuse:  by expressing aggression and sexual entitlement, men’s status rises. Second, women and other victims of sexual violence (typically children or marginalised men) need to matter less, such that their stories of abuse cannot be heard as abuse. This is what we might call the relative value of sexual abuse: (some) men’s position and perspective is privileged over that of women, children and other marginalised men. In the film and television industries, this is compounded by the sexualised nature of women’s labour. This precludes the possibility of abuse, because women are always-​already-​sexualised and so denied the right to refuse. Rose McGowan, one of the first women to speak publicly about Weinstein, made this point early on, noting that she had been told by a (female) criminal attorney that she could never win a case against him because she’d done a sex scene in a film.13 Indeed, many of the women who have been heard in the last few years —​including McGowan —​have insisted that they began speaking out about Harvey as soon as he abused them. No one listened. This gendered construction of cultural value means that abuse can go on in plain sight without apparent accountability. Abusers are visible, but their abuse is recast to mean something else. Certain kinds of abusive behaviour, including sexually abusive behaviour, are unexceptional and indeed rewarded aspects of some contemporary constructions of masculinity. As such, abuse may even contribute positively to men’s public personae. In the film industry, for instance, stories of behavioural extremes contribute to narratives of artistic exceptionalism. Prior to October 2017, Weinstein was well-​known as a physically domineering bully, but, for a long time, this was popularly portrayed as being aligned with, if not a key contributing factor to, his commercial and critical success.14 That he was belligerent, refused to take no for an answer, and would not let anyone get in his way were all evidence of his single-​minded passion for movies, his ambition and good instincts about what worked commercially and critically. According to Matt Damon, he was “proud to be an a**hole”,15 and he was referred to appreciatively as “the Punisher” by other industry insiders, including Meryl Streep.16 At the same time, Weinstein was widely portrayed as a champion of women in film, a narrative he tried to resuscitate in a pre-​trial interview with the New York Post in December 2019.17 Whilst Weinstein’s self-​aggrandisement and lack of self-​awareness in that interview was widely pilloried, Weinstein’s complicated relationship with feminist issues and individuals was central to the way the story about Weinstein and women played out in October 2017. There are two aspects of this worth stressing here. 188

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First, Weinstein’s feminist credentials  —​along with those of his colleagues, friends, and lawyers (e.g., Meryl Streep, Hillary Clinton, Lisa Bloom, and later Donna Rotunno) —​were widely used to portray feminism as part of the problem of men’s violence against women, not its solution.18 In the October 2017 coverage, feminism featured largely as a site of suspicion because of the (in)actions of individual women.19 The subsequent solidarity of Weinstein survivors has gone some way to challenge this. During the trial, for instance, a number of Weinstein survivors have spoken collectively as “silence breakers” and as activists.20 However, the long and continuing history of feminist activism around sexual violence  —​particularly, but not exclusively, the work of Tarana Burke, founder of the Me Too movement —​has been consistently marginalised in mainstream coverage of #MeToo. In his New York Post interview, Weinstein tried to manoeuvre himself into the gap left by this mainstream marginalisation of feminist histories, claiming “he should be remembered for doing more professionally for women than anyone in history”.21 Second, Weinstein’s successful track record in promoting women’s careers was used against complainants to suggest that they acquiesced to a sexual contract. This was to be a key component of his defence strategy, but it is consistent with longer-​standing narratives about film in general, and Weinstein in particular. Although specific instances of sexual assault were not well known publicly before October 2017, “Weinstein was well-​known for trafficking in women.”22 What “everyone knew” was not just that Weinstein was abusive, but that his abuse worked: the women got the jobs, won the Oscars. In court, Weinstein’s lawyer Donna Rotunno repeatedly insisted that the women made a choice (a word she used repeatedly) to trade sex for access and advantage. In this claim, Weinstein’s power —​and ability to abuse that power —​was, somewhat bizarrely, taken for granted. Thus Rotunno could state, in an interview with Megan Twohey, that she herself had never been assaulted because she would never put herself in that position.23 In this version, it was not Weinstein’s guilt or innocence which was at stake, but the women’s sexual morality. This was echoed in some media coverage, including on The Harvey Weinstein Trial Unfiltered podcast when the presenter “reminded” listeners that the jury “will only be asked to judge the innocence or guilt of the two women”.24 Of course, the mythology of the sexual contract has a far longer history than the Weinstein case. This too is something his legal team, at times, sought to emphasise, suggesting Weinstein was behaving as other men in his position had done throughout film history. After all, he “didn’t invent the casting couch”.25 Whilst this should in no way exonerate Weinstein, there are connections here with a feminist analysis which understands that seeing the continuities between Weinstein’s behaviour and those of his contemporaries is essential to changing that culture for good. The difference, of course, is whether or not we think individual men can still be held accountable. The reporting of the Weinstein case has, in many ways, demonstrated just how far we are from holding individual men accountable whilst keeping in play the broader structures which enabled them. The example I want to give to demonstrate this is a “joke” made by Seth McFarlane when he announced the Academy Awards nominees for Best Actress in Supporting Role in January 2013. Addressing the nominees, McFarlane said: “Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” When this comment resurfaced in October 2017, MacFarlane tweeted that his joke “came from a place of loathing and anger” after his friend and colleague Jessica Barth had confided in him about “her encounter with Harvey Weinstein and his attempted advances”.26 Weinstein was famously litigious, and since October 2017 we’ve learned a lot about how he limited the opportunities of women who spoke out about him and sought to suppress their testimonies.27 So why did McFarlane get away with it? 189

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The fact that McFarlane’s comment was presented as a joke meant it had built-​in deniability, but more than that, the “joke” was allowed to stand because it didn’t necessarily paint Weinstein in a bad light at all. Instead, MacFarlane focused attention on women’s complicity. You didn’t have to have heard specific allegations about Weinstein for the joke to work because it referred to a much older story about women trading sexual favours for film fame. MacFarlane acknowledged Weinstein’s power, but in doing so reinforced it, upholding Weinstein’s logic in reducing the women’s Oscar nominations to a question of sexual contract. That this was also one of the key strategies deployed by Weinstein’s legal team during his trial is an acknowledgement that this need not be a narrative that damaged Weinstein. Indeed, McFarlane went on to host the Oscar ceremony in February 2013 and drew heavily on this sexual contract narrative for humour in a comedic song “We Saw Your Boobs”. In the song, he detailed the films in which “we” had seen the breasts of women in the audience, including in films produced by Weinstein. The song included at least two examples where the actor’s nudity was in a sexual assault scene as well as reference to the non-​consensual circulation of nude images of Scarlett Johansson stolen from her phone (itself a form of image-​based abuse28). Sexism remains so unremarkable, so embedded in cultural norms and practices, that it continues to accrue cultural value even in a context of allegedly trying to call out abuse. McFarlane cared about Barth because he knew her; Johansson was fair (sexualised) game. Notably, this aspect of McFarlane’s 2013 Oscar performance was barely remarked in the extensive October 2017 commentary on his “joke” which, instead, positioned him as a noble-​but-​ineffectual whistleblower.29 Meanwhile, the repetition of the “joke” focused attention on women’s behaviour and morality. Women do not have access to the same narratives of cultural value as men do in the film industry. Whilst Weinstein’s behaviour could become a nudge-​nudge wink-​wink joke, it was the women associated with him who were diminished by that joke. At a moment which should have focused on their craft as actors, their professional achievements were reduced to sexual contracts and Weinstein installed as the architect of their success: a narrative which Weinstein’s legal team also then seized upon. In contrast, even when there is some understanding that an individual man may have behaved “badly” his artistic exceptionalism can (literally) be his get-​out-​of-​jail-​free card. This is what Stefanie Marghitu calls “auteur apologism”: the idea that the art simply matters more, and the genius of the artist should be protected at all costs.30 This is an argument with which Weinstein was intimately familiar, having himself led a campaign for Roman Polanski’s release when Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in a failed extradition attempt relating to his statutory rape conviction.31 Weinstein’s attempt to mobilise this argument in his own favour in his New York Post interview may have been unsuccessful, but he is not alone in trying. Following reports about his abuse of boys and young men (which I  am bound to point out he denies), actor Kevin Spacey also drew on his previous successes to address the public.32 Spacey released two videos to his YouTube channel, a year apart, in which he reprised his celebrated role as Frank Underwood from Netflix’s House of Cards to (obliquely) address the assault stories.33 For my purposes here, it was Spacey’s gamble that the reports of sexual assault could be integrated into his star persona that is interesting. His videos highlighted and played upon both Underwood’s antiheroic “qualities” and the viewers’ enjoyment of them. Spacey attempted to recast reports of abuse in relation to morality in a context where immorality could be associated with the positive values of exceptionalism, risk-​taking, fearlessness and, indeed, pleasure. These same qualities had been associated with Weinstein in his heyday. Spacey’s gamble —​like Weinstein’s self-​aggrandising interview —​was by no means uniformly successful and his videos attracted considerable mainstream media criticism, as well as 190

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more supportive comments from fans. Whilst, for some fans, their continuing investment in Spacey seemed to depend on disbelieving those speaking out, victim/​survivors didn’t have to be disbelieved for them to be disregarded. Spacey, and his talent, just had to matter more. As I argue in a discussion of the Brett Kavanaugh case in #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism: The judgement is not did it happen? Rather, there is an earlier judgement about the relative importance of the alleged perpetrator and victim/​survivor, and the potential damage to the alleged perpetrator of the claim that it did.34 I write about this in relation to feminist philosopher Kate Manne’s notion of himpathy.35 Manne argues that we are so routinely encouraged to see the world from men’s point of view that, even when they commit —​or are accused of committing —​violent crimes, we are asked to think about what the allegation means for them. Thus, even in the aftermath of Weinstein’s criminal conviction, the question of his reputation and career could still be posed by mainstream news outlets, albeit not without significant push back.36 But this isn’t just about the individual. These powerful men rarely only represent themselves, and so for them to be accused, charged, or held accountable has repercussions for others, from their companies to the industries, sports teams, charities, or political parties they represent. The himpathetic response to men in power, then, asks not only that we consider the potential damage to the alleged perpetrator of the report against them, but also the potential damage to these companies, industries, sports teams, charities, or political parties. When what they represent is the focus of passionate investment on the part of consumers, viewers, fans, recipients of charity, or voters, the potential damage of the allegation extends the harm to us. In many of the cases of the #MeToo era —​and even those like Bill Cosby and Jimmy Savile which preceded it —​these judgements have been inextricably linked to our affective investments in the accused. There is an earlier judgement about the relative importance of the alleged perpetrator and victim/​survivor to us which shapes whether we even get to the judgement “did it happen?” The coincidence of the Weinstein verdict and Kobe Bryant memorial in newsfeeds on 24 February 2020 provided a stark reminder of this. Weinstein, of course, did get to that judgement, both culturally and in criminal court. As a behind-​the-​scenes player in the business of film (rather than a creative talent), he had not generally attracted affective investment on the part of viewers so it is perhaps not surprising that his downfall has not, on the whole, been seen as tragic. As I have argued in this section, the attempts by Weinstein and his legal team to rehabilitate his reputation have been largely unsuccessful (at least so far). However, the persistent —​though by no means uniform —​cultural devaluing of the women speaking out against him has made much of this coverage deeply ambivalent from a feminist point of view. Moreover, there is a danger that the tendency to present Weinstein as an individual monster leaves the kind of structural issues which this consideration of cultural value demands, largely unaddressed.

Monsters A himpathetic engagement depends on a certain fit between the reputation or potential of the individual and the priorities and values of the institution, community, or even nation he is taken to represent. Whilst, as I have demonstrated, Weinstein’s boorish, bullying behaviour was inextricable from his cultural value pre-​October 2017, by the time the New York Times and New Yorker stories were published, Weinstein’s value in and for the film industry had been in decline for some time making him a relatively straightforward target for “monsterisation”.37 191

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However, even at the height of his success, Weinstein was always constructed, and indeed often sought to construct himself, as a partial outsider to the industry that made him, and that he made. Weinstein’s self-​construction as an outsider could, at times, be a way of insisting on his exceptionalism (and so cultural value) in ways consistent with my arguments so far. So, for instance, to New Yorker writer Ken Auletta —​who came close to breaking the sexual harassment story in 200238 —​Weinstein presented himself as a cinephile whose passion for, and knowledge about, movies set him at odds with the crassly commercial imperatives of Hollywood.39 In an interview with CNN during the 2017 awards season,40 Weinstein’s self-​identification as an underdog was equally integral to his construction of discerning taste, creating affinities with the leading characters of some of his most successful films of recent years, from the closeted Alan Turing in The Imitation Game (dir. Morten Tyldum, 2014) to the boy searching for his lost family in Lion (dir. Garth Davis 2016) and even the stuttering British monarch in The King’s Speech (dir. Tom Hooper, 2010).41 Weinstein’s strategic self-​identification with these characters seems now to have been a means of disavowing or re-​interpreting his own problematic behaviour, positioning him as the underdog fighting for other underdogs within (or, perhaps more accurately, against) the Hollywood system. But this chimes with the story frequently told of Weinstein’s history in profiles and interviews throughout his career, a version of the American dream whereby a Jewish boy can “climb out of the Queens shtetl where he grew up”,42 learn to love foreign and independent film,43 and hence make his fortune and, equally importantly, his reputation. As these last examples suggest, Weinstein’s exceptionalism was not only marked by his artistic sensibilities, but also by his physical distance from Hollywood (as a New Yorker) and by his Jewish identity. Weinstein’s Jewish identity was repeatedly —​though often implicitly —​ marked in discussions of his critical and commercial success prior to October 2017, as well as in more recent coverage. The frequent description of Weinstein as a movie “mogul” (and, indeed, his own apparent embrace of the term) is worth noting in this respect. According to Vincent Brook, the term, coined specifically for the immigrant studio bosses of Hollywood’s Golden Age, referred pejoratively to their “alleged Asiatic [read:  alien] provenance and appearance, perceived boorish [read: uncivilised] behaviour, and admittedly aggressive [read: unscrupulous] business practices”.44 In relation to Weinstein, it thus suggests both his outsider status and control, his unscrupulous behaviour and his success. That the term is something of an anachronism, accords Weinstein a certain cultural value through association with this period of film history, and at the same time marks him as out-​of-​place and out-​of-​touch with the contemporary industry. This is, in turn, consistent with Weinstein’s own initial response to the New York Times sexual harassment story in which he sought to portray himself as a man who “came of age” in a different era when “all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different”.45 The double-​edged sword of exceptionalism starts to become apparent in these examples. Whilst the exceptional individual carries cultural value, Weinstein being so clearly marked (and, at times, sought to market himself) as an outsider made it easier to reconstruct him as a monstrous Other when the New York Times and New Yorker stories broke. It is Weinstein-​the-​ monster I want to focus on in this section. To see Weinstein as a monster was never going to be that much of a stretch, not least because his outsider status had always been underlined by his physical incongruity in the polished, glamorous world of Hollywood. This is best encapsulated in Auletta’s 2002 profile, entitled “Beauty and the Beast”. Auletta’s attention to Weinstein’s bulk (all “two hundred and fifty pounds” of it) and his description of him as a grotesque and fearsome figure (“his eyes dark and glowering, his fleshy face unshaved, his belly jutting forward half a foot or so ahead of his body”) is by no means unusual for coverage of Weinstein, even pre-​October 2017. The juxtaposition of the 192

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“beast” with women celebrated for their “beauty” may not be flattering to Weinstein, but neither is the beauty and the beast narrative helpful for victims/​survivors. In the fairy tale, after all, the beast is tamed by beauty who willingly sacrifices herself for another and falls in love with the man who imprisoned her. Prior to October 2017, beautiful women were arguably trophies representing Weinstein’s power and success, trophies he could wield against the women he abused. But the “trophy” women were tainted even by their physical proximity to the “beast.” The implicit (and sometimes explicit) question circulating in the beauty and the beast narratives is how could they not know just by looking at him? Indeed, this question spawned numerous memes before it became a key component of Weinstein’s victim-​blaming defence. Being in Weinstein’s presence whilst-​ beautiful was used in these contexts to cast doubt on the women’s morality. His “monstrosity” was reconstructed as their shame, based on the assumption that they could not have felt any genuine attraction to him and so must have been opportunistic and deceitful. Notably, Weinstein’s physical monstrosity was also a recurring theme in the prosecution case at his New York trial. Witnesses’ descriptions of Weinstein’s blackhead-​marked back, his apparently “deformed” genitals, the quality and consistency of his semen and his body odour all featured heavily in the trial and in reporting. My argument here is not that these factors are necessarily irrelevant —​either to understanding the complainants’ affective response to the man who abused them, or to establishing their intimate knowledge of his body —​but rather that they fit within an existing template of the rapist-​as-​monstrous-​Other which is problematic in the wider context of rape reporting. Indeed, both Weinstein and his defence attempted to argue that Weinstein’s physical appearance rendered him relatively powerless with beautiful women, and opened him up to victimisation. For instance, in a podcast interview for the Guardian, Zoë Brock recalls Weinstein breaking down after he tried to assault her, claiming that she didn’t like him because he was fat and recasting the scenario as one in which she caused harm for contesting his sexual entitlement.46 In interviews given to the press before and during the trial, Donna Rotunno also tried to recast her client as the victim: This 67-​year-​old man can’t undergo surgery without ridicule. He is attacked for his appearance and accused of faking his ailments. He is chastised in public and derided during meals.47 Note that in this quotation Weinstein is linguistically rendered passive:  ridiculed, attacked, accused, chastised, derided. He is the one who is vulnerable, this vulnerability emphasised by his age, ill-​health and appearance. Moreover, in the same article, Rotunno explicitly argued that media representations were preventing Weinstein from “getting the fair trial he deserves”. Rotunno’s opinion piece was published just after Weinstein’s widely-​criticised interview with the New York Post (discussed above) and echoes Weinstein’s own attempts to re-​orient the discourse of injury to centre his own experience.48 Over the course of Weinstein’s criminal trial, his use of a walker was particularly scrutinised in this respect. My concern here is not whether he needed the walker or not, but rather how this emphasis on his physicality at times eclipsed some of the broader questions his trial could have raised (such as those discussed in the previous section), and was in keeping with the individualising “beast” narrative. This is what we might call a “poor-​monster” version of himpathy. The verdict in Weinstein’s criminal trial suggests that neither the victim-​blaming, nor himpathetic discourses entirely won out. Nevertheless, the monster narrative has persisted in ways that have the potential to limit our understanding of male violence, allowing us to draw 193

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a line between the “good” and “bad” men. When a hierarchy, rather than a continuum, is in operation, men’s violence can be more easily normalised and excused: it wasn’t as bad as the next thing in the hierarchy. This is where monsters come in. Monsters work to (re)define the norm: instead of seeing different kinds of male violence as connected, the figure of the monstrous Other allows “normal” male behaviour to go unremarked.

Conclusion Despite the partial-​guilty verdict in New York, this chapter suggests that feminists should be cautious about the wider implications of the Weinstein case for survivors seeking recognition and/​or justice as it suggests a fairly narrow range of circumstances in which abuse (and abusers) can be recognised as such. As feminist scholars have consistently noted, allegations of sexual violence —​whether in criminal justice or media contexts —​are much more likely to “stick” to men who do not conform to hegemonic notions of masculinity.49 Weinstein was quintessentially of the establishment, and the investigative journalism of Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, and Ronan Farrow did much to expose exactly how far and for how long he was protected by his money and connections.50 However, in this respect it is important to reflect on how convenient the shift to the monster narrative might be for all those who were complicit in Weinstein’s abusive career for so long. If Weinstein is an immediately recognisable monster, to what extent are they off the hook? Writing in the aftermath of the New Delhi rape and murder case, Helen Benedict notes that “why the men do it” is only considered when the rapes take place in “other” cultures: “as soon as we look at rape among our own, whether civilian or military, this perspective is entirely neglected. Instead, we ask questions about the victim”.51 However, in the context of my discussion here, I would place the emphasis differently and note that “why the men do it” is the more challenging question, demanding an understanding of the role of gender inequality and hegemonic masculinity in perpetuating male violence against women. If men accused of rape or other forms of sexual violence are from minority communities or “other” cultures they are much more likely to be portrayed as representatives of those communities than as men. In contrast, when white men are the perpetrators, the work of “othering” which I have discussed in this chapter functions to keep them at a distance from categories of race and gender whilst focusing on questions of individual deviance. This demonstrates a marked reluctance to understand men’s violence against women structurally and consider what men (as a group) stand to gain from violence against women. Of course, there is a balance to be struck. Individual perpetrators should still be held accountable, and the Weinstein case has given some —​albeit limited —​cause for optimism that such reckonings are possible even for men who have wielded considerable power and money. But ultimately what is most frightening about Harvey Weinstein is not that he is a monster. It’s that he is not.

Notes 1 This chapter presents arguments first advanced in my book #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism (Cham:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), updated to take into account Weinstein’s criminal trial in New York in early 2020. 2 Boyle, #MeToo,  29–​50.

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Of moguls, monsters, and men 3 Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey,“Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers For Decades”, New York Times, 5 October 2017, www.nytimes.com/​2017/​10/​05/​us/​harvey-​weinstein-​harassment-​ allegations.html; Kantor and Twohey, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2019); Ronan Farrow, “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories”, New Yorker, 10 October 2017, www. newyorker.com/​news/​news-​desk/​from-​aggressive-​overtures-​to-​sexual-​assault-​harvey-​weinsteins-​ accusers-​tell-​their-​stories; Farrow, “Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies”, New Yorker, 6 November 2017, www.newyorker.com/​news/​news-​desk/​harvey-​weinsteins-​army-​of-​spies; Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (London: Fleet, 2019). 4 Boyle, #MeToo,  1–​8. 5 Weinstein faced five charges and was found guilty on two: a criminal sex act in the first degree, and rape in the third degree. He was acquitted on a charge of rape in the first degree and two charges of predatory sexual assault. At the time of writing (February 2020), he still has to face four criminal charges (of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, sexual penetration by use of force and sexual battery by restraint) in Los Angeles. 6 Karen Boyle,“What’s in a Name?: Theorising the Inter-​relationships of Gender and Violence”, Feminist Theory 20, no. 1 (2019): 19–​35. 7 Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence (Cambridge: Policy, 1988). 8 Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence, 75. 9 Amelia Schonbek, “The Complete List of Allegations Against Harvey Weinstein”, Cut, 6 January 2020, www.thecut.com/​2020/​01/​harvey-​weinstein-​complete-​list-​allegations.html. 10 Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 11 Boyle, #MeToo, 60. 12 Boyle, #MeToo,  75–​99. 13 Rose McGowan, Brave (London: HQ, 2018), 217. McGowan first made this statement on Twitter in 2016, at that point referring to Weinstein as “the studio head” (@rosemcgowan, 14 October 2016). 14 For examples, see: Ken Auletta, “Beauty and the Beast”, New Yorker, 16 December 2002; Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures:  Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film (New  York:  Simon & Schuster, 2004); Alisa Perren, Indie, Inc:  Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). 15 Chris Spargo. “Matt Damon Reveals He Knew Harvey Weinstein Harassed Gwyneth Paltrow from His ‘Buddy’ Ben Affleck While George Clooney Admits Mogul Was a Bully Who Bragged of Bedding Stars  —​but Says Every Industry Has This Issue”, Mail Online, 23 October 2017, www.dailymail. co.uk/​news/​article-​5008429/​Matt-​Damon-​KNEW-​Harvey-​Weinsten-​harassed-​Gwyneth-​Paltrow. html. 16 Matthew Garrahan, “Return of the Punisher”, Financial Times, 25 February 2012, www.ft.com/​content/​879d3722-​5e04-​11e1-​b1e9-​00144feabdc0. 17 Rebecca Rosenberg, “Harvey Weinstein:  I Deserve Pat on Back When it Comes to Women”, New York Post, 15 December 2019, p. 6. 18 Boyle, #MeToo,  33–​42. 19 Boyle, #MeToo, 36. 20 Ashley Cullins and Hilary Lewis, “Rose McGowan, Rosanna Arquette, Mira Sorvino and More Weinstein Accusers React to Guilty Verdict”, Hollywood Reporter, 24 February 2020. www. hollywoodreporter.com/​thr-​esq/​harvey-​weinstein-​convicted-​accusers-​react-​jurys-​verdict-​1280761 21 Rosenberg, “Harvey Weinstein”. 22 Dana Stevens. “The Harvey Weinstein Scandal is Changing How I  Look at the Movies”, Slate, 13 October 2017. https://​slate.com/​arts/​2017/​10/​harvey-​weinstein-​has-​changed-​how-​i-​look-​at-​ movies.html. 23 Michael Barbaro, “The Woman Defending Harvey Weinstein”, 7 February 2020, in The Daily, podcast, audio, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/podcasts/the-daily/weinstein-trial.html. 24 Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, “The Master of His Universe”, 15 February 2020, in The Harvey Weinstein Trial Unfiltered, podcast, audio. 25 Lia Eustachewich, “Harvey Weinstein Didn’t Invent the Casting Couch, His Lawyer Says”, New York Post, 25 May 2018, p.  6. https://​pagesix.com/​2018/​05/​25/​harvey-​weinstein-​didnt-​invent-​the-​ casting-​couch-​his-​lawyer-​says/​. 26 @SethMacFarlane, 11 October 2017. 27 Farrow, “Army of Spies”.

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Karen Boyle 28 Clare McGlynn and Erika Rackley, Image-​Based Sexual Abuse: More Than Just ‘Revenge Porn,’ Research Briefing:  University of Birmingham, 2016, https://​claremcglynn.files.wordpress.com/​2015/​10/​ imagebasedsexualabuse-​mcglynnrackley-​briefing.pdf. 29 For notable exceptions see: Dani Garavelli, “Faux Outrage Adds to Agony of Weinstein Revelations”, Scotsman, 14 October 2017, www.scotsman.com/​news/​dani-​garavelli-​faux-​outrage-​adds-​agony-​ weinstein-​revelations-​1437960; Pamela Hutchinson, “Moguls and Starlets: 100 years of Hollywood’s Corrosive, Systemic Sexism”, Guardian, 19 October 2017, www.theguardian.com/​film/​2017/​oct/​19/​ moguls-​and-​starlets-​100-​years-​of-​hollywoods-​corrosive-​systemic-​sexism. 30 Stefania Marghitu, “ ‘It’s Just Art’:  Auteur Apologism in the Post-​Weinstein Era”, Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 3 (2018): 491–​494. 31 Harvey Weinstein, “Polanski Has Served his Time and Must Be Freed”, Independent, 28 September 2009, www.independent.co.uk/​voices/​commentators/​harvey-​weinstein-​polanski-​has-​served-​his-​ time-​and-​must-​be-​freed-​1794699.html. 32 See Boyle, #MeToo, 88–​93 for a more detailed discussion of Spacey’s first video. 33 Kevin Spacey, “Let Me Be Frank”, YouTube, 24 December 2018, video, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JZveA-NAIDI; Spacey, “KTWK”, YouTube, 24 December 2019, video, www.youtube. com/watch?v=WCuuKhjLB0Q. 34 Boyle, #MeToo, 110. 35 Manne, Down Girl, 196–​204. 36 See, for example, “Harvey Weinstein: What’s Next for the Disgraced Movie Producer?” (@latimes, Twitter, 24 February 2020)  and Lucia Graves, “ ‘His Reputation Will Never Recover’:  The Rape Trial That Took Down Harvey Weinstein”, Guardian, 24 February 2020, www.theguardian.com/​ film/​2020/​feb/​24/​harvey-​weinstein-​rape-​trial-​brought-​down. 37 Boyle, #MeToo, 114–​119. 38 Farrow, Catch and Kill,  82–​84. 39 Auletta, “Beauty and the Beast”. 40 CNN, “Harvey Weinstein: `I’m Still the Underdog’”, YouTube, 17 January 2017, video, www. youtube.com/watch?v=yVUMeLsvzjw. 41 The Imitation Game (dir. Morten Tyldum, 2014); Lion (dir. Garth Davis, 2016); The King’s Speech (dir. Tom Hooper, 2010). 42 Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, 54. 43 Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, 61. 44 Vincent Brook, “Still an Empire of Their Own: How Jews Remain atop a Reinvented Hollywood”, in From Shtetl to Stardom:  Jews and Hollywood, ed. Michael Renov and Vincent Brook (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2017), 5. 45 Harvey Weinstein, “Statement”, New  York Times, 5 October 2017, www.nytimes.com/​interactive/​ 2017/​10/​05/​us/​statement-​from-​harvey-​weinstein. 46 Anushka Asthana, “Zoë Brock: My Case Against Harvey Weinstein”, 22 January 2020, in Today in Focus, podcast, video, www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/jan/22/zoe-brock-my-case-againstharvey-weinstein-podcast. 47 Donna Rotunno, “How the Media Is Keeping Harvey Weinstein from Getting the Fair Trial He Deserves”, Newsweek, 21 December 2019, www.newsweek.com/​harvey-​weinstein​sexual-​assault-​fair-​trial-​media-​bias-​1478579. 48 Rosenberg, “Harvey Weinstein”. 49 Karen Boyle, Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates (London: Sage, 2005): 68–​73. 50 Kantor and Twohey, “Harvey Weinstein”; Kantor and Twohey, She Said; Farrow, “Army of Spies”; Farrow, Catch and Kill. 51 Helen Benedict, “Covering Rape Responsibly”, Women’s Media Center:  Women Under Siege, 1 February 2013, www.womensmediacenter.com/​women-​under-​siege/​covering-​rape-​responsibly.

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Karen Boyle Rotunno, Donna. “How the Media Is Keeping Harvey Weinstein from Getting the Fair Trial He Deserves”. Newsweek, 21 December 2019. www.newsweek.com/​harvey-​weinstein-​sexual-​assault​fair-​trial-​media-​bias-​1478579. Schonbek, Amelia. “The Complete List of Allegations Against Harvey Weinstein”. The Cut, 6 January 2020. www.thecut.com/​2020/​01/​harvey-​weinstein-​complete-​list-​allegations.html. Spacey, Kevin. “KTWK”. YouTube, 24 December 2019. Video. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WCuuKhjLB0Q. Spacey, Kevin. “Let Me Be Frank”. YouTube, 24 December 2018. Video. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JZveA-NAIDI. Spargo, Chris. “Matt Damon Reveals He Knew Harvey Weinstein Harassed Gwyneth Paltrow from His “Buddy” Ben Affleck While George Clooney Admits Mogul Was a Bully Who Bragged of Bedding Stars —​but Says Every Industry Has This Issue”. Mail Online, 23 October 2017. www.dailymail.co.uk/​ news/​article-​5008429/​Matt-​Damon-​KNEW-​Harvey-​Weinsten-​harassed-​Gwyneth-​Paltrow.html. Stevens, Dana. “The Harvey Weinstein Scandal is Changing How I Look at the Movies”. Slate, 13 October 2017. https://​slate.com/​arts/​2017/​10/​harvey-​weinstein-​has-​changed-​how-​i-​look-​at-​movies.html. Stolworthy, Jacob. “30 Rock Joke Referenced Harvey Weinstein Allegations in 2012”, Independent, 11 October 2017. www.independent.co.uk/​arts-​entertainment/​films/​news/​harvey-​weinstein-​sexual-​ assault-​allegations-​30-​rock-​reference-​tina-​fey-​jenna-​entourage-​oscars-​a7995091.html. Weinstein, Harvey. “Polanski has Served his Time and Must Be Freed”. Independent, 28 September 2009. www.independent.co.uk/​voices/​commentators/​harvey-​weinstein-​polanski-​has-​served-​his-​time-​and- ​ must-​be-​freed-​1794699.html. Weinstein, Harvey. “Statement”. New York Times, 5 October 2017. www.nytimes.com/​interactive/​2017/​ 10/​05/​us/​statement-​from-​harvey-​weinstein.

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15 MANY NEW SOLUTIONS TO WORKPLACE SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN A POST #METOO ERA, BUT WILL THEY DO THE TRICK? Audrey Roofeh

Seemingly overnight in October 2017, the experience of sexual harassment went from a burden that millions carried with the sense that it wasn’t really of any interest, to the media, the government or society generally, to a reality that no one could look away from.1 Nearly four decades had passed since the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the US government agency responsible for interpreting and enforcing most federal laws on workplace discrimination, issued its first recommendations on preventing workplace sexual harassment, but for many, workplaces were still rife with discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex.2 How did we spend decades talking about workplace sexual harassment without observing major progress on the problem? This chapter will proceed in five sections. First, an examination of the legal changes that have structured corporate anti-​harassment programmes in the United States. Second, an analysis of why this approach has not worked. Third, legislative responses to the #MeToo movement: I will argue that the changes to the statute books, which will continue to evolve as the #MeToo culture takes hold, can be helpful in preventing harassment but will not be sufficient to solve the problem. Fourth, a look at lawsuits targeting the managers and directors of corporate boards and the successes (and struggles) of those lawsuits in changing corporate behaviour. Finally, I will describe a series of changes that forward-​leaning businesspeople are adopting on their own: a leadership-​driven shift away from a compliance and liability-​avoidance mindset towards a multifaceted, culture-​based response within businesses to create inclusive cultures that are inhospitable to harassment. Without discounting the importance of legislative-​and lawsuit-​driven responses to harassment, a focus on culture change is most likely to be effective in reducing the incidence of harassment the workplace.

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Bring in the lawyers For many businesses in the United States, the approach to sexual harassment prevention has been one focused on legal compliance, delegated to a human resources department, and when needed, bringing in the lawyers to address specific instances of inappropriate behaviour —​the whack-​a-​mole approach to harassment. For many organisations that approach meant, and still means, ticking the box to make sure the organisation has a policy that prohibits unlawful harassment and that its employees watch a training video detailing what behaviours to avoid. In many instances, American businesses adopted a compliance mindset rather than a holistic look at workplace culture, an approach that will not be changed easily even with sustained media or legislative attention. Sexual harassment was and, in many places, still is looked at as a legal problem, requiring a compliance solution, rather than one of a problematic professional environment that permits sexual misconduct in the workplace. According to Navex Global, a compliance software and services company, in 2017, approximately 76% of US companies provided some type of harassment training, with about a third of large firms budgeting $100,000 or more to pay for them.3 With all that money being spent, we still see stark statistical evidence that the experience of sexual harassment in the workplace continues to be rampant. In 2018, the number of charges filed with the EEOC that alleged sex-​based harassment rose to their highest level on record, with 13,055 charges.4 Given the commitment to training we might assume that training has been an effective deterrent to workplace harassment. Instead, in a 2016 report by the EEOC Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace, the co-​authors of the report, EEOC commissioners and co-​chairs of the task force, Chai Feldblum and Victoria Lipnic, noted that upon review of existing research, they could not conclude that training on its own was actually an effective tool in preventing harassment.5 Given the focus on workplace training as a core anti-​harassment tool, Commissioner Lipnic called that fact “jaw-​dropping”.6

How did we get here? In 1986, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Meritor Savings Bank v.  Vinson that there does not have to be a tangible workplace action (such as demoting an employee who rejects unwelcome advances) in order to claim actionable discrimination, as long as the plaintiff alleges actions that create a hostile work environment on the basis of sex.7 For the first time, an employee could bring a lawsuit alleging workplace sexual harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.8 The EEOC saw 9,354 sexual harassment charges filed in the first year following the Court’s decision.9 Workplace sexual harassment became a major media story five years later, with Professor Anita Hill’s testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, followed by the “year of the woman”, in which a total of 47 women, 24 for the first time, were elected to the United States Congress and brought about the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which allowed for punitive damages and jury trials in sex discrimination cases.10 Much changed in 1998, when the Supreme Court established an affirmative defence for employers who are accused of allowing a hostile work environment in Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth, 524 U.S. 742 (1998) and Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775 (1998). Those cases held that an employer can avoid liability for a supervisor’s harassment if it can prove both elements of the defence: “(a) that the employer exercised reasonable care to prevent and correct promptly any sexually harassing behaviour, and (b) that the plaintiff employee unreasonably failed to take advantage of any preventive or corrective opportunities provided by the 200

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employer or to avoid harm otherwise”.11 That standard only applies to a supervisor’s conduct. If the harasser is a co-​worker, a lower standard is applied: the employer will be liable only if it is shown to have been negligent, meaning that it knew or should have known of the harassing conduct and failed to take remedial action.12 The following year, in Kolstad v. American Dental Ass’n, 527 US 526 (1999), the Supreme Court created a path to avoid punitive damages in Title VII cases. Where good-​faith compliance efforts were taken (read: providing training to employees) punitive damages should not be assessed. This created incentives for businesses to avoid liability by creating, disseminating and enforcing an anti-​harassment policy and complaint reporting procedures,13 and implementing good faith efforts that would help businesses avoid punitive damages, including trainings. Attorneys writing at the time about the incentives created by Kolstad noted that businesses should expect scrutiny of the resources allocated to training, expertise of trainers, evaluation, and more, putting it thus:  “as training programs have become increasingly important, the quality of these programs has developed into the newest battlefield in the employment litigation wars”.14 As a result, a perverse set of incentives were created. Linda Seabrook, general counsel and director of legal programmes at the non-​profit Futures without Violence said of the business approach to harassment training programmes, “[t]‌he reason they do sexual harassment training is not prevention. It’s so they can avail themselves of a certain defence: Faragher-​Ellerth”.15 According to law professor Elizabeth Tippett, who has reviewed compliance training programmes in her research, “[i]‌t is a really strange market for services … in the market for these trainings, it’s not necessarily about the best [training], but what’s recognizable as a harassment training to the employer and to a court”.16

Maybe this hasn’t worked. OK, it definitely hasn’t worked On the 30th anniversary of Meritor v. Vinson —​and a year and a half before the world learned of the claims against Harvey Weinstein —​the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace issued its report, presenting a comprehensive view of harassment in American workplaces, as well as recommendations to tackle the problem. The co-​chairs identified the harassment problems facing American workplaces. While the findings on the experience of workplace harassment varied, a review found that nearly 60% of women report experiencing harassment that includes unwanted sexual attention or sexual coercion, and/​or sexist or crude/​offensive behaviour.17 In the past, a review of workplace sexual harassment might have been limited to asking what women (straight, white women) have experienced. The EEOC report notes that sexual harassment is not experienced exclusively by cisgender women (cisgender means that you feel aligned with the gender you were assigned at birth), or heterosexual women. The EEOC takes the position that harassment on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is also sexual harassment under Title VII,18 a position that is not consistently held across federal circuit courts. The Supreme Court is expected to make a final determination on this question at the end of this term.19 According to research cited in the report, LGBT respondents were asked whether they have heard derogatory comments about sexual orientation and gender identity in their workplaces; 58% of LGBT respondents said they had.20 The EEOC report also asks how the different elements of an individual’s identity affect how they experience harassment and applies an intersectional lens to the experience of harassment. 201

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As coined by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the concept of intersectionality recognises that individuals do not experience race and gender as exclusive categories.21 As researchers began to ask how individuals experience discrimination and harassment along multiple axes of their identities, the findings confirmed that women of colour experience harassment at a rate higher than minority men, majority women, and majority men when both ethnic and sexual harassment were combined into an overall measure of harassment.22 As noted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in their 2018 report on sexual harassment, “[i]‌t is important to prioritise the study of sexual harassment among non-​ cisgender, non-​straight, non-​white women when considering the impact of sexual harassment within an organisation”.23 Research has found that for women of colour, sexual harassment isn’t limited to gender discrimination, but rather when discrimination occurs a racial component is overlaid into the discriminatory words or acts. The co-​chairs of the EEOC report cite research that found only between 6% and 13% of people who experience harassment actually file a complaint.24 Individuals anticipate that they won’t be believed, a complaint won’t be acted on, and that they would be socially or professionally retaliated against or blamed for causing the harassment.25 Many victims of harassment expect retaliation, and many in fact experience it, with the result that reporting harassment is often viewed as an unwise course of action. As one researcher put it, “It is actually unreasonable for employees to report harassment to their companies because minimisation and retaliation were together about as common as remedies and created further damage to people who had already been harassed.”26 Individuals who choose not to report harassment have good reasons not to. Justice Souter writing for the majority in Faragher notes that the primary objective of Title VII is to avoid harm.27 There is a gap between creating the policies and procedures that are meant to prevent and address workplace harassment and workers actually feeling safe enough to utilise those tools. For many, these findings were eye-​opening. The incidence of harassment remains high generally, and especially high for LGBT employees. Researchers are only starting to apply an intersectional lens to harassment, so we are missing a full understanding of the experience of harassment. On top of that, a complaint may be as likely to provoke retaliation as to end the harassment. Given that background, some state legislatures started to tackle the problem of workplace sexual misconduct.

Cascading scandals and the legislative response When scandal after scandal broke and the #MeToo hashtag began trending in October 2017, many questions were asked about how, with all the harassment prevention efforts in existence, the scale of this problem could be so huge. Business leaders and lawmakers were not prepared with answers. State legislatures began to identify certain legal rules that stood in the way of effective harassment prevention and began changing them. Here are some of the problems and legislative responses seen in the two-​plus years since.

Non-​disclosure agreements One legal tool that has come under wide scrutiny since the #MeToo movement flared is non-​disclosure provisions. NDAs can be part of a settlement after an alleged incident of sexual misconduct, and they can also take the form of confidentiality provisions that are a requirement for new employees and contractors, prohibiting them from sharing confidential business information as well as information about unlawful conduct, including sexual harassment. The 202

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problem with non-​disclosure provisions in employment contracts was put this way by a group of Weinstein Company employees two weeks after the publication of stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker on Harvey Weinstein, demanding to be let out of the non-​disclosure agreements they had signed as part of their employment contracts: “[w]‌e all knew that we were working for a man with an infamous temper. We did not know we were working for a serial sexual predator”.28 In the context of settling a legal claim, non-​disclosure provisions are terms where both sides agree not to talk about the allegations, the settlement terms and possibly more. For Zelda Perkins, Harvey Weinstein’s former personal assistant, a non-​disclosure agreement as part of a settlement prohibited her from, among other things, keeping a copy of the document, and telling a medical, legal, financial, or tax professional about her experience (unless they signed their own NDA first), among other limitations.29 As Perkins testified in 2018, the intention of the NDA was clear —​neither she nor anyone else who signed one should speak about the experiences that led up to the NDA. Another example involves Wynn Resorts, Ltd., a Las Vegas-​based casino and hotel operator. A year-​long investigation by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission (MGC) of Wynn Resorts found evidence of numerous non-​disclosure agreements that sought to keep quiet allegations of sexual misconduct by the founder and then-​CEO, Steve Wynn, including one that accompanied a settlement of $7.5 million following a Wynn Resort employee’s allegation that Wynn raped her in his office. In this and other instances, Wynn Resorts failed to conduct investigations, and NDAs were entered into and structured such that casino regulators and the board of directors would not be aware of their existence.30 By keeping allegations of sexual harassment confidential, both parties maintain privacy, but it may come at a cost to the victim of harassment, as well as to others, a problem that has not gone unnoticed by either state legislatures and those with the power to influence them —​in a recent interview, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remarked that she hopes courts will not enforce confidentiality pledges based on sexual harassment allegations.31 One of the problems with a liability-​avoidance approach is that some of the tools in the harassment prevention toolbox may work well for individuals, but have a harmful impact on the public. Additionally, professionals who participate in the liability-​avoidance process can be wilfully blind to how tools such as NDAs can be used to enable perpetrators. The legal profession maintains a focus on delivering what’s best for the client and does not do enough to consider its role in bolstering systems that are historically weighted against victims of workplace sexual harassment. According to Elizabeth Tippett, writing for practitioners in the Dispute Resolution magazine for the American Bar Association, “[t]‌he #MeToo Movement has turned a spotlight on confidential settlement agreements and how they might prevent victims from speaking out. As dispute resolution professionals, however, we are not accustomed to thinking about the problem in these terms”.32 The focus on liability avoidance has brought us to a place that fails to consider the impact of NDAs in workplaces. A holistic cultural approach to workplace sexual misconduct would encourage attorneys to better understand the effects of failing to hold wrongdoers, especially powerful ones, accountable in workplaces. In the past two years the United States has seen ten states change their laws to limit the use of non-​disclosure agreements in employment contracts and workplace policies.33 Some states have chosen to limit the use of NDAs in employment contracts on the topic of sexual harassment, while others have prohibited their use with respect to any workplace discrimination or unlawful conduct. For example, New York now permits NDAs in employment contracts only so long as the NDA states that it does not prohibit speaking with the EEOC, law enforcement, an attorney, or the state or local human rights commission.34 203

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Eleven states have limited the use of NDAs in settlements and as part of settlement agreements.35 Some states now limit the use of NDAs in settlements when one of the parties entering into the agreement is a government agency (Tennessee), or public official (Nevada, California) or if there is use of public funds to settle a claim against a public official (Arizona).36 Some states limit the use of NDAs when they prevent someone from participating in a government action, such as an investigation by an agency (Vermont, Nevada, New York).37 In some of the new laws the limitation on NDAs is focused on proof that the plaintiff’s consent to the NDA is real and bargained-​for (New York, Illinois, Oregon).38 Most of the legislative responses to NDAs in the past two years have focused on the parties’ consent to the terms, and ensuring that consent is real, unhurried, and well-​advised by counsel. Another response is to look at what the costs of these agreements are to those individuals not bound by it, namely, whether NDAs should be curbed as a public policy matter. As law professor David Hoffman and law student Eric Lampmann argue in Hushing Contracts, non-​ disclosure agreements should be judged by their negative externalities.39 The authors critique NDAs in terms of private benefits and public costs of these contracts. When an individual who engages in workplace sexual harassment is able to buy the silence of a victim and continue to harass or assault other employees, rinse and repeat, there is an additional cost to silencing victims, even if those victims, after consulting with counsel, would like to take money in exchange for their silence. Individuals who engage in misconduct can continue to do so unabated, causing harm to more people, and ultimately to the companies they work for, employees, and shareholders. While most states that addressed NDAs in their post #MeToo legislation chose to create limitations based on the victim’s informed consent, California chose to limit NDAs through consideration of such contracts as a public harm. As Hoffman and Lampmann put it, “California’s statutory solution rests on the understanding that hush contracts engender third-​party harm and consequently require public responses”.40 In California, settlement agreements may not prevent disclosure of facts relating to filed claims of sexual assault, sexual harassment, or sex-​based harassment or discrimination or retaliation.41 A settlement agreement can keep the amount settled for secret, and include a provision that shields a claimant’s identity, but not if there is a government agency or public official who is party to the settlement.42 New Jersey’s new law rendered unenforceable NDAs in settlement agreements that prevent disclosure of facts on a claim of harassment, discrimination, or retaliation. It also says that if the employee releases information that is sufficient to identify the employer, the employee can’t have the employer’s obligations enforced.43 Strong arguments have been made in support of NDAs as a tool in the toolbox to help make victims whole. Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, attorneys with deep expertise in representing victims of sexual misconduct, point out that victims may want privacy and to not be associated with a perpetrator’s wrongdoing, and that NDAs can be the basis for recompense for the experience of sexual and other misconduct, while avoiding the strain and resource depletion of going to trial.44 One likely goal of legislatures in taking NDAs away from businesses is to prevent businesses from buying their way out of a scandal and using their disproportionate resources to silence victims who may wish to speak about their experiences. Legislatures are seeing and reacting to the antiseptic qualities of sunlight on businesses that have used NDAs to hide inappropriate behaviour, and are hoping that by removing this tool from the coverup toolbox, companies will have to reckon with fallout and will thereby effect change in workplace culture for the safety of workers.

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State legislative protests against mandatory arbitration Another employment-​law tool that state legislatures are seeking to adjust is mandatory arbitration, an alternative dispute resolution mechanism that has created barriers for employees to successfully challenge workplace sexual harassment. Mandatory arbitration in the United States is a practice whereby employers require that disputes be resolved in private arbitration and that employees waive recourse otherwise available in the courts. Mandatory arbitration is now very common and also protected by federal law, making these state law challenges likely symbolic, unless there is change on the horizon in Congress. In 1992, roughly 2% of workers in the United States were subject to mandatory arbitration. By 2018, 56.2% of non-​union private sector employees were subject to mandatory employment arbitration procedures, or 60.1 million people.45 Mandatory arbitration is attractive for businesses, as it is cheaper, faster, and more private than litigation, and there are no juries.46 Mandatory arbitration typically governs all claims, including employment discrimination and harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Research into mandatory arbitration has shown that such agreements are more likely to bind female workers and African American workers, and that employers with the lowest-​ paid workforces are the most likely to require mandatory arbitration from their employees.47 Damage awards are substantially lower in arbitration than in court, as is the likelihood that an employee will win.48 Consequently, these provisions have been successful in discouraging workers from bringing arbitration claims.49 Moreover, because arbitration is generally confidential, such clauses facilitate the suppression of information about harassment in the workplace.50 Mandatory arbitration therefore makes it more difficult for workers who have suffered harassment to find similarly situated co-​plaintiffs and lowers the likely amount of any potential settlement. The privacy of arbitration has other effects as well. In 2017, a Washington Post exposé revealed that for nearly ten years hundreds of employees pursued claims in confidential arbitration against Signet Jewelers, alleging that employees were “routinely groped, demeaned and urged to sexually cater to their bosses to stay employed”.51 Because these claims were pursued in private, shareholders were unaware of the extent of the claims. Following the Post’s exposé, shareholders were armed with information sufficient to bring a federal securities fraud class action claim —​ information that might otherwise have remained confidential for another decade.52 Even class actions have been undermined by mandatory arbitration clauses. In Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, 138 S. Ct. 1612 (2018), the Supreme Court found class action waivers in mandatory arbitration agreements to be enforceable, making it more difficult for workers to come together to challenge workplace discrimination of all kinds. Without litigation as a tool to fight workplace harassment, would businesses be incentivised to prevent it? This is a concern for states, and a number have drafted laws over the last two years, either prohibiting or limiting employers from requiring their employees to arbitrate discrimination and/​or harassment claims. As of 2019, New York, Washington, and New Jersey prohibit the mandatory arbitration requirement entirely for all discrimination claims,53 with a similar law coming into effect in California in 2020.54 Maryland and Vermont passed legislation that prohibits mandatory arbitration related to a sexual harassment claim or retaliation for reporting sexual harassment.55 Illinois’s legislation voids provisions that require, as a condition of employment or continued employment, a waiver of an individual’s right to go to court.56 However, state legislatures are not fully equipped to remedy the problems posed by mandatory arbitration clauses. One major hurdle faced by state governments is the Federal Arbitration

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Act (FAA),57 which limits states’ abilities to legislate on this topic. Indeed, New York’s law was found to be pre-​empted by the FAA and its ban was held unenforceable.58 The awareness that federal legislation occupies this area wasn’t lost on state legislators, who nonetheless sought to hold businesses to account in the absence of effective federal legislation. One possibility is that state action on limiting the use of mandatory arbitration in discrimination cases is used to drive momentum at the federal level for changes to the FAA. For now, federal legislation has failed workers, and state legislative action seeking to limit mandatory arbitration represents a push to build workplace cultures that are free from harassment.

Strengthening litigation options for victims of workplace sexual harassment State legislatures have also taken several different measures to shift the balance of power in litigation in favour of victims of sexual harassment who sue their employers. They have expanded the coverage of anti-discrimination laws that give people the right to sue, lengthened statutes of limitation, lowered the burden of proof that a victim needs to win in court, and incentivised litigation through fee-​shifting statutes. Some existing laws that are meant to protect workers are out of step with the reality of the gig economy, and a few states have sought to correct that. Under federal law and most state laws, anti-​discrimination laws protect employees only, leaving non-​employee workers unprotected. New laws in New York,59 Illinois,60 Maryland,61 Vermont,62 and Delaware63 expand coverage of sexual harassment laws (and in some cases, all workplace discrimination) to workers who were previously not protected. Newly covered workers include, in some states, independent contractors, job applicants, unpaid interns, joint employees, volunteers, vendors, consultants, and more. Some states have expanded the pool of employers that are subject to these laws to cover employers of all sizes.64 States have further sought to erode the obstacles to changing workplace culture by addressing, among other things, statutes of limitations and the degree of proof required to prevail on a claim. Connecticut, Maryland, New York, and Oregon have recently expanded the applicable statute of limitations for harassment claims.65 California and New York have gone further, amending the type of proof required to prevail on a hostile work environment claim. In California, for example, a single incident of harassing conduct is sufficient to try a claim for the existence of a hostile work environment if the harassing conduct has unreasonably interfered with the plaintiff’s work performance or created an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment. A plaintiff no longer has to show that the harassment caused their productivity to decline, just that it made it more difficult to do the job, and the legal standard for sexual harassment no longer varies by type of workplace. Whether there is a hostile work environment is determined by “the totality of the circumstances and a discriminatory remark, even if not made directly in the context of an employment decision or uttered by a non-​decisionmaker, may be relevant, circumstantial evidence of discrimination”.66 Similarly, New York has scrapped the “severe or pervasive” standard for proving a hostile work environment. The new standard is whether the actions subject someone to inferior terms, conditions, or privileges of employment because of the individual’s membership in one or more protected categories.67 It is also no longer determinative whether an individual complained about the harassment to their employer, and the employee doesn’t have to demonstrate the existence of an individual to whom the employee’s treatment must be compared.68 Other changes in the laws acknowledge the incentive structure that often governs whether such claims are brought in the first place. A significant barrier to bringing a lawsuit 206

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is attorneys’ fees. Under New  York’s new law, if a person brings a suit and substantially prevails, they will be awarded reasonable attorneys’ fees and can seek punitive damages. On the other side, the employer-​defendant can recover attorneys’ fees only if it shows that the claim was frivolous.69

States seek to legislate an improved workplace culture through training A number of states have created training requirements for employers where no requirement existed previously, while other states have expanded their requirements. Prior to 2017, only Connecticut,70 Maine,71 and California72 had any requirement for any businesses to train on harassment prevention. In the past two years an additional six states have created training requirements. Some states have required that businesses of a certain size or type provide training, some going as far as to mandate the substance of the trainings and provide sample versions to use. California now requires that employers with at least five employees provide training to all employees.73 Connecticut expanded its law, now mandating that employers with at least three employees provide sexual harassment training to all employees, and if there are fewer than three employees, the supervisors must receive training.74 Delaware has a new requirement that employers with at least 50 employees provide interactive sexual harassment training.75 Maryland now requires that lobbyists receive training that includes discrimination and harassment,76 and for professions that already have a continuing education requirement, Illinois now requires that their education include sexual harassment prevention. New York and Illinois now require that all employers train all employees on sexual harassment prevention and specify the topics required in their states, with each providing a model sexual harassment prevention training programme.77 While not a training requirement, the Vermont legislature gave the Attorney General and the Human Rights Commission the power to require that a specific employer provide annual training to all employees or conduct an anonymous climate survey for up to a period of three years.78 This drive towards requiring trainings poses some questions, given that many training requirements appear to be oriented towards providing information rather than culture change, and that current research on the efficacy of trainings is inconclusive. What are we expecting to see then, from these new requirements? As law professor Susan Bisom-​Rapp puts it, “[i]‌f training is an ineffective prophylactic, why should it be legally relevant?”79 If these are attempts at legislating changes to workplace culture, the effect of these changes remains to be seen. As explained in greater detail in the last section, businesses need to look beyond compliance to get to safe workplace cultures.

Changes being driven outside of legislatures Besides pressure from workers who have an individual right of action against their employers for violations of anti-​discrimination laws, shareholders bringing claims under securities law and corporate law on the fiduciary duty of officers and directors for alleged failures to prevent or address workplace sexual harassment are also driving change. Since 2017, shareholders have brought suits against corporate officers and directors at Signet Jewelers,80 Twenty-​First Century Fox,81 Liberty Tax,82 Wynn Resorts,83 National Beverage,84 CBS,85 Papa John’s,86 Nike,87 Google,88 and Lululemon Athletica,89 all publicly traded businesses, and all related to allegations of sexual misconduct and how individuals have been able to commit, cover up, and/​ or aid in its commission. 207

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In a review of lawsuits prior to #MeToo and many of those referenced here, law professors Daniel Hemel and Dorothy Lund examine how corporate and securities law can be used to prevent and remedy workplace sexual misconduct, considering four options for shareholder actions to address sexual misconduct within businesses.90 The first type of shareholder suit arises when a fiduciary, including officers (the high-​level managers of a corporation) and corporate directors (who make decisions for the corporation), is the one who engages in harassment. If this occurs, one claim will be that the fiduciary has violated the duty of loyalty, which has been described as a responsibility of fiduciaries to “protect the interests of the corporation … but also to refrain from doing anything that would work injury to the corporation”.91 Hemel and Lund point to Roger Ailes at Fox, Travis Kalanick at Uber, and Steve Wynn, among others, as examples falling under this theory of liability.92 Hemel and Lund suggest this fact pattern is the one in which liability is most likely. The second type of case is when fiduciaries fail to monitor harassment, and liability may arise under a duty of loyalty. Hemel and Lund point out that this type of suit is rarely successful; however, a successful claim could likely be made in the case of the Weinstein Company, where, as they point out, the allegations of sexual misconduct against the company’s CEO, Harvey Weinstein, was such an open secret that there had been a joke about it on the television show 30 Rock in 2012.93 In their estimation, the red flags of Weinstein’s behaviour were glaring for the board to see. The third type of case is when fiduciaries who know about harassment either enable the behaviour or fail to take action. In that case there may be liability for breach of duty of loyalty or the duty of care, which obliges fiduciaries to act “on an informed basis, in good faith, and in the honest belief that the action [is] in the best interests of the company”.94 Hemel and Lund note that such a theory faces various obstacles under corporate law, but that boards may expose themselves to liability if they, as the Weinstein Company appeared to do, sign off on provisions that protect corporate officers from consequences of harassment, or as alleged against Twenty-​ First Century Fox, corporate funds are used to settle claims of sexual harassment against Roger Ailes and others.95 Finally, Hemel and Lund review the routes for shareholders to take action against corporate failures to prevent or address sexual harassment under securities law, and see the likeliest route of success being an “attack [on] specific statements that a publicly traded company makes with regard to sexual harassment on the grounds that those statements are inaccurate or misleading”.96 In their opinion, Signet Jewelers may face liability for misrepresentations of material facts for noting in quarterly and annual filings that the ongoing arbitration claims address store-​level practices after the arbitrator overseeing the arbitration class action found that the plaintiffs alleged a culture of gender bias from the CEO down.97 While those questions are being worked out in the courts, influential actors are making recommendations for corporate directors and officers. Advice published from the Council on Institutional Investors (CII), a non-​profit association of pension funds and other institutional investors suggests that more work needs to be done by boards to embrace their role in overseeing a harassment-free culture. According to CII, “[m]‌any ethical failings in business result from individuals making poor choices. But the more extensive and expensive breakdowns usually occur due to failures of company culture, with governance structures either broken or never properly established”.98 CII calls for shareholders to exercise oversight and support sound governance practices, noting that “corporate culture oversight is by definition a key board responsibility”.99 CII’s recommendations go as far as creating a dedicated executive position focused on social and institutional culture (a chief diversity and inclusion officer), and the efforts that build cultures 208

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where individuals feel safe to speak up (e.g., ensuring that front-​line managers know how to handle reports, that resources for handling complaints are allocated, as well as policies and procedures and meaningful trainings are implemented), and that board oversight is robust on these topics, including creating an avenue for staff to report instances of harassment to the board.100 Hemel and Lund suggest getting reports from the organisation on instances of harassment (it is worth also asking for information on the number of allegations and investigations, in addition to substantiated findings of harassment.) In the area of non-​profit board governance, the organisation BoardSource recommends that boards use their power to ensure that actually effective (not just liability-​avoiding) policies and procedures are in place within the organisations they oversee. Also, within their oversight role is ensuring that the chief executive is not allowing abuse or mistreatment under their watch.101 Despite the lawsuits and recommendations, it is not clear that boards are taking action to address this issue. “Many boards believe that, in the absence of specific complaints, and in the absence of public allegations against firms in their industry, their company does not have a problem.”102 A 2017 survey by Boardlist and Qualtrics of private and public company directors “found that 77% of boards ‘had not discussed accusations of sexually inappropriate behaviour and/​or sexism in the workplace’ ”.103 In a similar vein, a report by the Investment Management Due Diligence Association (IMDDA), an association advancing the interests of institutional investors who conduct due diligence on investments in hedge funds, private equity funds, venture capital funds, found that 89% of professionals involved with allocating capital to investment management firms do not ask about sexual harassment in the workplace as part of their due diligence efforts.104 With unsettled corporate and securities law on the question of liability, for organisations such as the Council of Institutional Investors, BoardSource, and the Investment Management Due Diligence Association, making recommendations is an important call to action.

Bridging the gap between a compliance mindset and building an inclusive culture Are the changes that are either mandated by state laws, or recommended by influential actors such as the EEOC or CII, likely to influence the experience of harassment in the workplace? These efforts are only likely to work if there is a shift away from compliance and liability-​ avoidance and towards a multi-​faceted, culture-​based response within businesses. For organisations committed to driving change, the focus of preventing harassment is a holistic approach that centres workplace culture to both understand how well an organisation is performing on preventing harassment and pinpointing problems as they arise. Indeed, the EEOC noted “[t]‌he most important lesson we learned from our study is that employers must have a holistic approach for creating an organisational culture that will prevent harassment”.105 It is significantly more difficult for states to pass laws that force change within a business’s culture. Businesses may have sought to narrowly interpret their responsibility to prevent harassment (and avoid liability), and we see that more is needed to build cultures where sexual misconduct does not happen in the workplace. Research shows that workplace climate is a predictor of whether sexual harassment will happen. “Organisational cultures that tolerate harassment have more of it, and workplaces that are not tolerant of harassment have less of it. This common-​sense assumption has been demonstrated repeatedly in research studies.”106 How do businesses build climates that don’t tolerate harassment? That work begins by understanding the workplace culture, creating change that incentivises expected behaviour and chills bad behaviour, and monitoring the process to determine efficacy. 209

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Climate surveys and assessments. The holistic approach means asking questions that many businesses are afraid to get the answers to, like those that come with culture surveys.107 Some business leaders say that they do not want to perform a sexual harassment climate survey because they are afraid of what they will hear. Without asking the questions, it is not possible to know what the problems are or how to respond. Similarly, businesses should review whether the workplace has specific risk factors for harassment.108 Leadership. Leadership must be visibly committed to change, which includes what they allocate time and money to achieve. When leadership takes sexual harassment seriously, others do, too.109 Policies and procedures. Policies should be comprehensive, including all protected characteristics, and should be easy to understand, paired with procedures that make reporting harassment easy for anyone.110 Accountability. Businesses should implement systems of accountability at an organisation-​wide level (with an effective anti-​harassment programme that includes a safe and effective reporting system, a thorough workplace investigation system, proportionate corrective actions), for individuals who engage in harassment (holding them responsible for their actions, no matter their stature in the organisation), and for managers and supervisors (who are held responsible to ensure those they oversee are not engaging in harassment, and if they are, a stop is put to it right away).111 Training. Based on the recommendation from experts, workplace harassment training should continue to be a part of a holistic prevention approach, and part of a larger commitment from leadership and integrated into systems of accountability, particularly with features of bystander intervention and building respect in the workplace as well. Training should have specific goals and be evaluated for efficacy on those goals.112 Diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture. Research indicates that moving more women (and presumably more women of colour) into core jobs and management, is the best way to reduce harassment, as in workplaces where women have significant representation in core jobs, harassment is less likely to occur, and when women hold management positions their presence can change the culture of the workplace.113 Indeed, California now requires that public companies have at least one woman on the board, or face a fine.114 Centering the individuals who experience harassment. Innovations in responses to workplace harassment have come from workers who best understand the experience of harassment and can advise on what they would have needed for a workplace to be safe.115 Examples of this include the Fair Food Program to prevent sexual assault in agricultural work,116 legislative change to protect domestic workers through domestic worker bill of rights,117 and the pragmatic, on-​the-​spot changes that must be informed by those who experience sexual misconduct on the job, such as hotel workers calling for, among other solutions, panic buttons,118 and restaurants implementing colour-​coded responses for dealing with harassment by customers in the moment.119

Conclusion The incentives to build safer and more inclusive workplaces are changing, with some state legislatures seeking to limit the use of non-​disclosure provisions, bringing cases back into 210

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courts and away from private arbitration, giving workers more time to bring a suit, and in some cases, even changing the standards for proof in a discrimination claim. Shareholders are seeking to drive change, demanding that boards of directors and corporate officers are held responsible when they fail to prevent and address workplace sexual misconduct, through shareholder derivative suits and securities fraud claims. Those entities with power to make recommendations beyond the regulations of the state are making nuanced suggestions about leadership’s commitment, building systems of accountability, the policies, procedures and even trainings needed to drive a holistic approach towards safe workplace cultures. Building a culture where harassment doesn’t happen requires asking hard questions, and questions that a dominant culture may not feel used to asking. Do we value the individuals who experience workplace sexual misconduct? Do we presume they are telling the truth when they say they experienced sexual violence? What response does a manager or supervisor give when someone tells them harassment is happening at work? How would I respond were I told my behaviour violates the harassment policy? In order to create meaningful change in addressing workplace sexual misconduct, leaders must look at the problem holistically, and build a leadership-​driven culture of accountability and inclusion.

Notes 1 The author would like to thank Sarah Mensch Evans and William Mensch Evans for their thoughtful comments on this article, and Emeizmi Mandagi for her excellent research assistance. 2 1980 Guidelines at 29 C.F.R. § 1604.11(f) and Policy Guidance on Current Issues of Sexual Harassment. 3 Ingrid Fredeen, 2018 Ethics and Compliance Training Benchmark Report (NAVEX Global, 2018), www. navexglobal.com/​en-​us/​file-​download-​canonical?file=/​2018_​Compliance_​Training_​Benchmark_​ Report.pdf&file-​name=2018_​Compliance_​Training_​Benchmark_​Report.pdf. 4 “Charges Alleging Sex Based Harassment”, EEOC, accessed 12 May 2020, www1.eeoc.gov/​eeoc/​ statistics/​enforcement/​sexual_​harassment_​new.cfm?renderforprint=1. Per the EEOC, sex-​based harassment, broadly, is harassment because of a person’s sex. It includes sexual harassment, unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favours, and other verbal and physical acts of a sexual nature, but it also refers to verbal and physical acts that are offensive or denigrating on the basis of sex. It is plausible —​likely even —​that this record number of charges is a result of the cultural change sparked by the #MeToo movement.That more harassment has been captured by recent surveys is itself an indicator of how rampant the problem of workplace harassment has been in recent decades. 5 Chai Feldblum and Victoria Lipnic, Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace: Report of the Co-​Chairs of the EEOC (EEOC Report, June 2016), 45–​49. www.eeoc.gov/​ select-​task-​force-​study-​harassment-​workplace. 6 Christina Folz, “No Evidence That Training Prevents Harassment, Finds EEOC Task Force”, HR News (blog), 19 June 2016, www.shrm.org/​hr-​today/​news/​hr-​news/​pages/​eeoc-​harassment-​task-​force.aspx. 7 Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (19 June 1986). 8 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Pub. L. No. 88–​352, § 2000e, 42 U.S.C. (1964). 9 “Sexual Harassment Charges by State & Gender FY 1997 —​FY 2018”, EEOC, accessed 12 May 2020, www.eeoc.gov/​eeoc/​statistics/​enforcement/​sexual_​harassment_​eeoc_​only_​by_​state.cfm. 10 Michael X. Delli Carpini and Bruce Williams, “The Year of the Woman? Candidates Votes and the 1991 Election”, Political Science Quarterly 108 (January 1993): 29–​36; The Civil Rights Act of 1991, 42 U.S.C. § 102 (1991). 11 Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth, No. 97–​569 (United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, 26 June 1998). 12 See Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 524 US 775 (26 June 1998). Noting the negligence standard that lower courts have applied to coworker harassment. 13 “Enforcement Guidance on Vicarious Employer Liability for Unlawful Harassment by Supervisors”, Notice (US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 18 June 1999), www.eeoc.gov/​policy/​ docs/​harassment.html.

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Audrey Roofeh 14 Ellen McLaughlin and Carol Merchasin, “Training Becomes Important Step to Avoid Liability”, National Law Journal, 29 January 2001, www.seyfarth.com/​dir_​docs/​publications/​AttorneyPubs/​ McLaughlin.pdf. 15 Josh Israel, “This Is Why Workplace Harassment Training Is So Ineffective”, ThinkProgress (blog), 25 July 2018, https://​thinkprogress.org/​employers-​do-​ineffective-​workplace-​harassment-​trainings-​ 94719a49f911/​. 16 Kimberly Adams, “Companies Looking for Legal Cover Make Harassment Prevention Programs Big Business”, Marketplace (blog), 6 April 2017, www.marketplace.org/​2017/​04/​06/​business/​companies-​ seek-​legal-​cover-​attempts-​limit-​workplace-​harassment/​. 17 Feldblum and Lipnic, Select Task Force, 9. Citing Remus Ilies et al., “Reported Incidence Rates of Work-​Related Sexual Harassment in the United States:  Using Meta-​Analysis to Explain Reported Rate Disparities”, Personnel Psychology 56, no. 3 (2003): 607. 18 “What You Should Know: EEOC and Enforcement Protections for LGBT Workers”, EEOC, accessed 9 June 2020, www.eeoc.gov/​eeoc/​newsroom/​wysk/​enforcement_​protections_​lgbt_​workers.cfm. 19 Altitude Express Inc. v.  Zarda, No. 17–​1623 (Petition for Writ of Certiorari, filed 29 May 2018); R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, No. 18–​ 107 (United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Case, pending); Bostock v. Clayton County Georgia, No. 17–​13801 (United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit 10 May 2018). 20 Feldblum and Lipnic, Select Task Force, 10–​11. Citing Degrees of Equality: A National Study Examining Workplace Climate for LGBT Employees (Human Rights Campaign Foundation, 2009), https://​assets2. hrc.org/​files/​assets/​resources/​DegreesOfEquality_​2009.pdf. 21 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989), https://​chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/​uclf/​vol1989/​iss1/​8/​. 22 Jennifer L.  Berdahl and Celia Moore, “Workplace Harassment:  Double Jeopardy for Minority Women”, Journal of Applied Psychology 91, no. 2 (2006): 432. 23 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2018), doi: https://​doi.org/​10.17226/​24994. 24 Feldblum and Lipnic, Select Task Force, 16. 25 Feldblum and Lipnic, Select Task Force. Citing EEOC, “Written Testimony of Lilia M. Cortina, PhD, Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan”, Written Testimony of Lilia Cortina, 15 June 2015, www.eeoc.gov/​eeoc/​task_​force/​harassment/​testimony_​cortina.cfm. 26 EEOC, “Written Testimony of Mindy Bergman, Associate Professor of Psychology, Texas A&M University”, Written Testimony of Mindy Bergman, 15 June 2015, www.eeoc.gov/​eeoc/​task_​force/​ harassment/​testimony_​bergman.cfm. 27 Faragher, 524 U.S., 806. 28 The Weinstein Company, Statement from Members of the Weinstein Company Staff, 19 October 2017, https://​ a ssets.documentcloud.org/ ​ d ocuments/ ​ 4 112683/ ​ S tatement- ​ F rom- ​ M embers- ​ o f- ​ t he-​ Weinstein-​Company.pdf. 29 “Written Submission from Zelda Perkins SHW0058”, UK Parliament, March 2018. www.parliament. uk/​documents/​commons-​committees/​women-​and-​equalities/​Correspondence/​Zelda-​Perkins-​ SHW0058.pdf; “Written Evidence from Zelda Perkins (SHW0052)”, UK Parliament, March 2018, http://​data.parliament.uk/​writtenevidence/​committeeevidence.svc/​evidencedocument/​women-​ and-​equalities-​committee/​sexual-​harassment-​in-​the-​workplace/​written/​80725.html. See also testimony provided to Parliament, Oral evidence: Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, HC 725, § Women and Equalities Committee (2018), http://​data.parliament.uk/​writtenevidence/​committeeevidence. svc/​evidencedocument/​women-​and-​equalities-​committee/​sexual-​harassment-​in-​the-​workplace/​ oral/​80945.pdf. 30 In the Matter of Wynn MA, LLC, § Massachusetts Gaming Commission (2019), 17, https://​ massgaming.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​MGCDecisionandOrder4.30.19.pdf. 31 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Advice on How to Keep the #MeToo Movement Going Strong:  Book Excerpt”, interview by Jeffrey Rosen, Philadelphia Inquirer, 3 November 2019, www. inquirer.com/​opinion/​commentary/​ruth-​bader-​ginsburg-​rbg-​jeffrey-​rosen-​book-​20191103.html. 32 Elizabeth Tippet, “Non-​Disclosure Agreements and the #MeToo Movement”, ABA Dispute Resolution Magazine, 2019, www.americanbar.org/​groups/​dispute_​resolution/​publications/​dispute_​resolution_​ magazine/​2019/​winter-​2019-​me-​too/​non-​disclosure-​agreements-​and-​the-​metoo-​movement/​.

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Workplace sexual harassment 33 S.B. 1300, § 4, 2017–​2018 Reg. Sess. (Cal. 2018); S.B. 0075, 101st Gen. Assemb. (Ill. 2019); Disclosing Sexual Harassment in the Workplace Act of 2018, S.B. 1010, § 1, 2018 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Md. 2018); S.B. 726, § 2, 80th Leg., Reg. Sess. (Or. 2019); S. 121, § 2, 2018–​2019 Reg. Sess. (Nj. 2019); see also N.J. STAT. § 10:5–​12.8 (2019); A. 8421, § 7, 2019–​2020 Reg. Sess. (Ny. 2019); H.B. 2613, 110th Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Tenn. 2018); H.B. 1820, 2019 Reg. Sess. (Va. 2019); see also VA. CODE ANN. § 40.1-​28.01 (2019); VERMONT ACT 183, H.707, § 1, 2017–​2018 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Vt. 2018); S.B. 6068, 65th Leg., 2018 Reg. Sess. (Wash. 2018). 34 A. 8421, § 7, 2019–​2020 Reg. Sess. (Ny. 2019). 35 H.B. 2020, 53rd Leg., 2nd Reg. Sess. (Ariz. 2018); S.B. 820, 2017–​2018 Reg. Sess. (Cal. 2018); S.B. 0075, 101st Gen. Assemb. (Ill. 2019); H.B. 197, 2019 Reg. Sess. (La. 2019); see also LA. REV. STAT. § 13:5109.1 (to be enacted Aug. 2019); S.B. 726, § 2, 80th Leg., Reg. Sess. (Or. 2019); A.B. 248, 80th Leg. (Nv. 2019); S. 121, § 2, 2018–​2019 Reg. Sess. (Nj. 2019); see also § 10:5–​12.8; A. 8421, § 7, 2019–​2020 Reg. Sess. (Ny. 2019); H.B. 594, 111th Gen. Assemb. (Tn. 2019); VERMONT ACT 183, H.707, § 1(h), 2017–​2018 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Vt. 2018). 36 H.B. 594, 111th Gen. Assemb. (Tenn. 2019); A.B. 248, 80th Leg. (Nv. 2019); S.B. 820, 2017–​2018 Reg. Sess. (Cal. 2018); H.B. 2020, 53rd Leg., 2nd Reg. Sess. (Ariz. 2018). 37 VERMONT ACT 183, H. 707, § 1(h), 2017–​2018 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Vt. 2018); A.B. 248, 80th Leg. (Nv. 2019); A. 8421, § 7, 2019–​2020 Reg. Sess. (Ny. 2019). 38 N.Y. C.P.L.R. 5003-​b (McKinney); S.B. 0075, 101st Gen. Assemb. (Ill. 2019); S.B. 726, § 2, 80th Leg., Reg. Sess. (Or. 2019). 39 David A. Hoffman and Eric Lampmann, “Hushing Contracts”, Washington University Law Review 97, No. 1 (2019): 170, https://​scholarship.law.upenn.edu/​cgi/​viewcontent.cgi?article=3050&context=fa culty_​scholarship. 40 Hoffman and Lampmann, “Hushing Contracts”, 189. 41 Hoffman and Lampmann, “Hushing Contracts”, 189. In case that didn’t sink in:  NDAs that are entered into once a claim has been filed in a civil action or a complaint filed in an administrative action, are not enforceable in California. 42 S.B. 820, 2017–​2018 Reg. Sess. (CA 2018). 43 S. 121, § 2, 2018–​2019 Reg. Sess. (NJ 2019). See also § 10:5 —​ 12:8. 44 Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, “The Call to Ban NDAs Is Well-​Intentioned. But It Puts the Burden on Victims”, Washington Post, 10 December 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/​opinions/​banning-​ confidentiality-​agreements-​wont-​solve-​sexual-​harassment/​2019/​12/​10/​13edbeba-​1b74-​11ea-​8d58-​ 5ac3600967a1_​story.html. 45 Alexander J.S. Colvin, “The Growing Use of Mandatory Arbitration”, Economic Policy Institute, 6 April 2018, www.epi.org/​publication/​the-​growing-​use-​of-​mandatory-​arbitration-​access-​to-​the-​ courts-​is-​now-​barred-​for-​more-​than-​60-​million-​american-​workers/​. 46 David S.  Sherwyn, J.  Bruce Tracey, and Zev J.  Eigen, “In Defense of Mandatory Arbitration of Employment Disputes: Saving the Baby, Tossing Out the Bath Water, and Constructing a New Sink in the Process”, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment 2, no. 1 (1999): 73–​150. 47 Sherwyn et al., “In Defense of Mandatory Arbitration of Employment Disputes”. 48 Katherine V. W. Stone and Alexander J. S. Colvin, “The Arbitration Epidemic: Mandatory Arbitration Deprives Workers and Consumers of Their Rights”, EPI Briefing Paper, 4 (Economic Policy Institute, 5 December 2015). 49 Stone and Colvin, “The Arbitration Epidemic”, 11. 50 Stone and Colvin, “The Arbitration Epidemic”, 26. 51 Drew Harwell, “Hundreds Allege Sex Harassment, Discrimination at Kay and Jared Jewelry Company”, Washington Post, 27 February 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/​business/​economy/​hundreds-​allege-​ sex-​harassment-​discrimination-​at-​kay-​and-​jared-​jewelry-​company/​2017/​02/​27/​8dcc9574-​f6b7-​ 11e6-​bf01-​d47f8cf9b643_​story.html. 52 See Daniel Hemel and Dorothy S. Lund, “Sexual Harassment and Corporate Law”, Columbia Law Review 118, no. 6 (2018), https://​columbialawreview.org/​content/​sexual-​harassment-​and-​corporate-​ law/​for a review of the Signet shareholder litigation. 53 S.B. 7507C § 296-​d, sub-​part B, 2017–​2018 Leg. Sess. (N.Y. 2018); S.B. 6313, 65th Leg., 2018 Reg. Sess. (Wash. 2018); S. 121, § 1, 2018–​2019 Reg. Sess. (Nj. 2019); see also S.121, § 10:5–​12.7, 2018–​ 2019 Reg. Sess. (Nj. 2019). 54 “Employment Discrimination:  Enforcement”, A.B. 51, Gen. Assemb. (CA, 2019), http://​leginfo. legislature.ca.gov/​faces/​billTextClient.xhtml?bill_​id=201920200AB51.

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Audrey Roofeh 55 Disclosing Sexual Harassment in the Workplace Act of 2018, S.B. 1010, § 1(A), 2018 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Md. 2018); Vermont Act 183, H.  707, § 1(g), 2017–​2018 Gen Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Vt. 2018). 56 S.B. 0075, 101st Gen. Assemb. (Ill. 2019). 57 United States Arbitration Act, Ch. 213, 43 Stat. 883 (1925). Codified as amended at 9 U.S.C. § 1–​16 (2000). 58 Latif v.  Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC et  al., No. 1:18-​cv-​11528 (S.D.N.Y. 26 June 2019), https://​ cases.justia.com/ ​ f ederal/ ​ d istr ict- ​ c ourts/ ​ n ew-​ york/​ n ysdce/​ 1 :2018cv11528/​ 5 06253/​ 5 2/​ 0.pdf?ts=1561627336. 59 S.B. 7507C, §296-​d, sub-​part F, 2017–​2018 Leg. Sess. (NY 2018). New York enacted legislation that also protects contracts, subcontractors, vendors, consultants, and others providing contracted services from sexual harassment in the workplace. 60 S.B. 0075, 101st Gen. Assemb. (Ill. 2019). Illinois extended protections against all forms of harassment to contractors, consultants, and other individuals who are contracted to directly perform services for the employer. 61 H.B. 679, 2019 Reg. Sess. (Md. 2019). Maryland extended discrimination and harassment protections to independent contractors and the personal staff of elected officers. 62 Vermont Act 183, H.707, § 1, 2017–​2018 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Vt. 2018). Vermont passed legislation that expanded sexual harassment protections to independent contractors, volunteers, and interns. 63 H. Substitute No. 1 for H.B. 360, 149th Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Del. 2018). Delaware expanded sexual harassment protections to apprentices, state employees, unpaid interns, job applicants, and joint employees. 64 H.B. 679, 2019 Reg. Sess. (MD 2019). Maryland expanded coverage of harassment prohibitions to employers of all sizes. A. 8421, Sec. 1, 2019–​2020 Reg. Sess. (NY 2019). Amended by S.6594, 2019–​ 2020 Reg. Sess. (NY 2019). New York extended workplace discrimination prohibitions to employers of all sizes. 65 A. 8421, § 13, 2019–​2020 Reg. Sess. (NY 2019); S.B. 726, § 5, 80th Leg., Reg. Sess. (Or. 2019); H.B. 679, 2019 Reg. Sess. (Md. 2019); S.B. 3, § 6, 2019 Gen. Assemb. (Conn. 2019). 66 S.B. 1300 § 1 Reg. Sess. 2017–​2018 (CA 2018). 67 A. 8421 Sec 13, 2019–​2020 Reg. Sess. (NY 2019). 68 A. 8421, § 2, (NY 2019). 69 A. 8421, (NY 2019). 70 Title 46a. Human Rights, R.C.S.A. § 46a-​54–​200 through 207, inclusive (1993), www.ct.gov/​chro/​ cwp/​view.asp?a=2527&q=333112. As of 1993, employers with 50 or more employees were required to train their supervisors. 71 Title 26, Labor and Industry, M.R.S.A. § 807 (1991). Title 26 M.R.S.A. §807. As of 1991, Maine requires employers with 15 or more employees in the workplace to conduct an education and training programme for all new employees within one year, mandates content; supervisors are required to get additional training. 72 “Employment Discrimination or Harassment: Education and Training: Abusive Conduct”, A.B. 2053 (CA 2014), https://​leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/​faces/​billNavClient.xhtml?bill_​id=201320140AB2053. 73 S.B. 1300, § 3, 2017–​2018 Reg. Sess. (CA 2018). 74 S.B. 3, § 15, 2019 Gen. Assemb. (Conn. 2019). 75 H. Substitute No. 1 for H.B. 360, 149th Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Del. 2018). 76 H.B. 1342, 2018 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Md. 2018); H.B. 4953, 100th Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Ill. 2018). 77 S.B. 7507C § 296-​d, sub-​part E, 2017–​2018 Leg. Sess. (NY 2018); S.B. 0075, 101st Gen. Assemb. (Ill. 2019). 78 Vermont Act 183, H.707, § 1 (i)(2), 2017–​2018 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Vt. 2018). 79 Susan Bisom-​ Rapp, “Sex Harassment Training Must Change:  The Case for Legal Incentives for Transformative Education and Prevention”, Stanford Law Review 71 (June 2018), www. stanfordlawreview.org/​online/​sex-​harassment-​training-​must-​change-​the-​case-​for-​legal-​incentives-​ for-​transformative-​education-​and-​prevention/​. 80 Harwell, “Hundreds Allege Sex Harassment, Discrimination at Kay and Jared Jewelry Company”. 81 Jonathan Stempel, “21st Century Fox in $90 Million Settlement Tied to Sexual Harassment Scandal”, Reuters, 21 November 2017, www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​fox-​settlement-​idUSKBN1DK2NI.

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Workplace sexual harassment 82 Jeff Feeley, “Liberty Tax Board Agrees to Settle Lawsuit Over Sex Scandal”, Bloomberg, 15 March 2019, www.bloomberg.com/​news/​articles/​2019-​03-​15/​liberty-​tax-​directors-​agree-​to-​settle-​investors​claims-​over-​sex. 83 Khalon Richard, “After Sexual Misconduct Claims, Vegas Mogul Steve Wynn Fell Fast”, NPR, 15 March 2018, www.npr.org/​2018/​03/​15/​592318034/​after-​sexual-​misconduct-​claims-​vegas​mogul-​steve-​wynn-​fell-​fast. 84 Levi & Korinsky LLP, “Class Action Update for FIZZ, ACAD and REPH: Levi & Korsinsky, LLP Reminds Investors of Class Actions on Behalf of Shareholders”, Associated Press, 25 July 2018, https://​ apnews.com/​Globe%20Newswire/​9ce8c58dd9acfc94046510bb0fec6db6. 85 Joe Flint, “Suit Accuses Current, Former CBS Executives of Insider Trading”, Wall Street Journal, 13 February 2019, www.wsj.com/​articles/​suit-​accuses-​current-​former-​cbs-​executives-​of-​insider-​ trading-​11550016859. 86 Jessica DiNapoli, “Papa John’s Founder Accuses CEO’s Team of Misconduct:  Letter”, Reuters, 28 August 2018, www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​papajohns-​ceo-​idUSKCN1LD2MW. 87 Tiffany Hsu, “Ex-​Employees Sue Nike, Alleging Gender Discrimination”, New York Times, 10 August 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​08/​10/​business/​nike-​discrimination-​class-​action-​lawsuit.html. 88 Julia CarrieWong,“Google BoardTried to Cover up Sexual Misconduct, Shareholders Allege”, Guardian, 11 January 2019, www.theguardian.com/​technology/​2019/​jan/​10/​google-​sexual-​harassment​shareholder-​lawsuit-​alphabet. 89 Jacob Rund, “Lululemon Investor Sues Board,Top Execs Over Ex-​CEO’s Ouster”, Bloomberg Law, 21 November 2018, https://​news.bloomberglaw.com/​corporate-​law/​lululemon-​investor-​sues-​board​top-​execs-​over-​ex-​ceos-​ouster. 90 Hemel and Lund, “Sexual Harassment and Corporate Law”. 1583–​1680, 91 CertiSign Holding v.  Kulikovsky, No. C.A. No. 12055-​VCS (Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware, 7 June 2018). 92 Hemel and Lund, “Sexual Harassment and Corporate Law”, 1641. 93 Hemel and Lund, “Sexual Harassment and Corporate Law”, 1643 (citing Jacob Stolworthy, “30 Rock Joke Referenced Harvey Weinstein Allegations in 2012”, Independent, 11 October 2017, www.independent.co.uk/​arts-​entertainment/​films/​news/​harvey-​weinstein-​sexual-​assault-​allegations-​30-​rock-​ reference-​tina-​fey-​jenna-​entourage-​oscars-​a7995091.html). 94 Smith v. Van Gorkom, No. 488 A.2d 858 (Supreme Court of Delaware 29 January 1985). 95 Hemel and Lund, “Sexual Harassment and Corporate Law”, 1648–​1649. 96 Hemel and Lund, “Sexual Harassment and Corporate Law”, 1641. 97 Hemel and Lund, “Sexual Harassment and Corporate Law”, 1654. 98 Rosemary Lally and Brandon Whitehall, “How Corporate Boards Can Combat Sexual Harassment: Recommendations and Resources for Directors and Investors”, Council of Institutional Investors, March 2018, 2, www.cii.org/​files/​publications/​misc/​03_​01_​18_​corporate_​boards_​sexual_​ harassment.pdf. 99 Lally and Whitehall, “How Corporate Boards Can Combat Sexual Harassment”, 3. 100 Lally and Whitehall, “How Corporate Boards Can Combat Sexual Harassment”, 7. 101 “Written Testimony of Anne Wallestad President & CEO BoardSource”, EEOC, Written Testimony of Anne Wallestad, 31 October 2018, www.eeoc.gov/​eeoc/​meetings/​10-​31-​18/​wallestad.cfm. 102 David A. Katz and Laura A. McIntosh, “Boards, Sexual Harassment, and Gender Diversity”, New York Law Journal, 24 January 2018, www.law.com/​newyorklawjournal/​sites/​newyorklawjournal/​2018/​ 01/​24/​boards-​sexual-​harassment-​and-​gender-​diversity/​?slreturn=20191127021104. 103 Hemel and Lund, “Sexual Harassment and Corporate Law”, 1658. Citing TheBoardlist, “Corporate Boards Aren’t Preparing for Sexual Harassment and Gender Discrimination Issues”, Medium (blog), 24 October 2017, https://​medium.com/​@theBoardlist/​corporate-​boards-​arent-​preparing-​for-​ sexual-​harassment-​and-​gender-​discrimination-​issues-​24ba425d6497?. 104 Investment Management Due Diligence Association (IMDDA), “Us Too: A Due Diligence Survey and Analysis on the Current State of Sexual Harassment in the Investment Management Industry”, 2018,  https://​ c dn2.hubspot.net/​ h ubfs/​ 3 842049/ ​ S exual%20Harassment%20and%20Due%20 Diligence%20Survey/ ​ I MDDA%20Sexual%20Harassment%20and%20Due%20Diligence%20 Survey%20Report.pdf?hsCtaTracking=4af1fc72-​fd99-​4bcb-​98d8-​bb2e8dc9fc3a%7C9441843b-​ 9473-​432b-​8077-​c2585fd4d4e2. 105 Feldblum and Lipnic, Select Task Force, 36.

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Audrey Roofeh 106 Feldblum and Lipnic, Select Task Force. Citing Mindy E. Bergman et al., “The (Un)Reasonableness of Reporting: Antecedents and Consequences of Reporting Sexual Harassment”, Journal of Applied Psychology 87, no. 2 (2002): 230. 107 Andrea S.  Kramer and Alton B.  Harris, “How Do Your Workers Feel About Harassment? Ask Them”, Harvard Business Review, 28 January 2019, https://​hbr.org/​2018/​01/​how-​do-​ your-​workers-​feel-​about-​harassment-​ask-​them. 108 Feldblum and Lipnic, Select Task Force,  25–​30. 109 Chloe Hart, Alison Dahl Crossley, and Shelley J.  Correll, “Study:  When Leaders Take Sexual Harassment Seriously, So Do Employees”, Harvard Business Review, 14 December 2018, https://​hbr. org/​2018/​12/​study-​when-​leaders-​take-​sexual-​harassment-​seriously-​so-​do-​employees. 110 Feldblum and Lipnic, Select Task Force,  67–​68. 111 Feldblum and Lipnic, Select Task Force,  31–​34. 112 Feldblum and Lipnic, Select Task Force, 45. 113 Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, “Training Programs and Reporting Systems Won’t End Sexual Harassment. Promoting More Women Will”, Harvard Business Review, 15 November 2017, https://​hbr.org/​2017/​11/​training-​programs-​and-​reporting-​systems-​wont-​end-​sexual-​harassment-​ promoting-​more-​women-​will. See also Dana Kabat-​ Farr and Lilia M.  Cortina, “Sex-​ Based Harassment in Employment:  New Insights into Gender and Context”, Law and Human Behavior 38, no. 1 (2014): 58–​72; Lindsey Joyce Chamberlain et al., “Sexual Harassment in Organizational Context”, Work and Occupations 35, no. 3 (2008): 262–​295. 114 S.B. 826 (CA 2018). 115 Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, National Domestic Workers Alliance, “Unstoppable”, https://​ unstoppable.domesticworkers.org. 116 EEOC, “Written Testimony of Judge Laura Safer Espinoza, Executive Director, Fair Food Standards Council”. Written Testimony of Judge Laura Safer Espinoza, 22 October 2015, www.eeoc.gov/​ eeoc/​task_​force/​harassment/​testimony_​cortina.cfm. 117 “Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act”, S.B. 2112, 116th Congress, 1st Session (2019), www.congress.gov/​bill/​116th-​congress/​senate-​bill/​2112/​text. 118 EEOC, “Written Testimony of Kasey Nalls”. Written Testimony of Kasey Nalls, www.eeoc.gov/​ eeoc/​task_​force/​harassment/​nalls.cfm; Alexia Fernandez Campbell, “How a Button Became One of the Greatest #MeToo Victories”, Vox, 1 October 2019, www.vox.com/​identities/​2019/​10/​1/​ 20876119/​panic-​buttons-​me-​too-​sexual-​harassment. 119 Erin Wade, “I’m a Female Chef. Here’s How My Restaurant Dealt with Harassment from Customers”, Washington Post, 29 March 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/​opinions/​how-​my-​ restaurant-​successfully-​dealt-​with-​harassment-​from-​customers/​2018/​03/​29/​3d9d00b8-​221a-​11e8-​ badd-​7c9f29a55815_​story.html.

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Audrey Roofeh S.B. 6313, 65th Leg., 2018 Reg. Sess. (Wash. 2018). S.B. 7507C § 296-​d, sub-​part B, 2017–​2018 Leg. Sess. (N.Y. 2018). S.B. 3, § 6, 2019 Gen. Assemb. (Conn. 2019). S.B. 0075, 101st Gen. Assemb. (Ill. 2019). S.B. 726, 80th Leg., Reg. Sess. (Or. 2019). Sherwyn, David S., J. Bruce Tracey, and Zev J. Eigen. “In Defense of Mandatory Arbitration of Employment Disputes: Saving the Baby, Tossing Out the Bath Water, and Constructing a New Sink in the Process”. University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment 2, no. 1 (1999): 73–​150. Smith v. Van Gorkom, No. 488 A.2d 858 (Supreme Court of Delaware, 29 January 1985). Stempel, Jonathan. “21st Century Fox in $90 Million Settlement Tied to Sexual Harassment Scandal”. Reuters, 21 November 2017. www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​fox-​settlement-​idUSKBN1DK2NI. Stone, Katherine V.W., and Alexander J.S. Colvin. “The Arbitration Epidemic: Mandatory Arbitration Deprives Workers and Consumers of Their Rights”. EPI Briefing Paper. Economic Policy Institute, 5 December 2015. TheBoardlist. “Corporate Boards Aren’t Preparing for Sexual Harassment and Gender Discrimination Issues”. Medium (blog), 24 October 2017. https://​medium.com/​@theBoardlist/​corporate-​boards-​ arent-​preparing-​for-​sexual-​harassment-​and-​gender-​discrimination-​issues-​24ba425d6497?. Thulin, Lila. “A Complete List of Sexual Assault and Harassment Allegations Against Harvey Weinstein”. Slate, 31 October 2017. https://​slate.com/​news-​and-​politics/​2017/​10/​a-​list-​of-​sexual-​assault-​and-​ harassment-​allegations-​against-​harvey-​weinstein.html. Tippett, Elizabeth. “Non-​Disclosure Agreements and the #MeToo Movement”. ABA Dispute Resolution Magazine, 2019. www.americanbar.org/​groups/​dispute_​resolution/​publications/​dispute_​resolution_​ magazine/​2019/​winter-​2019-​me-​too/​non-​disclosure-​agreements-​and-​the-​metoo-​movement/​. Title 26: Labor and Industry, M.R.S.A. § 807 (1991). Title 46a. Human Rights, RCSA § 46a-​54–​200 through 207, inclusive (1993). Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Pub. L. No. 88–​352, § 2000e, 42 U.S.C. (n.d.). www.eeoc.gov/​ laws/​statutes/​titlevii.cfm. UC San Diego Center on Gender Equity and Health Stop Street Harassment. Measuring #MeToo:  A National Study on Sexual Harassment and Assault. April 2019. www.stopstreetharassment.org/​wp-​ content/​uploads/​2012/​08/​2019-​MeToo-​National-​Sexual-​Harassment-​and-​Assault-​Report.pdf. UK Parliament. “Written Evidence from Zelda Perkins (SHW0052)”. March 2018. http://​data.parliament.uk/​writtenevidence/​committeeevidence.svc/​evidencedocument/​women-​and-​equalities-​ committee/​sexual-​harassment-​in-​the-​workplace/​written/​80725.html. UK Parliament. “Written Submission from Zelda Perkins SHW0058”. March 2018. www.parliament. uk/​documents/​commons-​committees/​women-​and-​equalities/​Correspondence/​Zelda-​Perkins-​ SHW0058.pdf.United States. Corporations: boards of directors, S.B. No. 826 (2018). https://​leginfo. legislature.ca.gov/​faces/​billTextClient.xhtml?bill_​id=201720180SB826. United States Arbitration Act, Ch. 213, 43 Stat. 883 (1925). VA. CODE ANN. § 40.1-​28.01 (2019). VERMONT ACT 183, H.707, § 1, 2017–​2018 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Vt. 2018). Wade, Erin. “I’m a Female Chef. Here’s How My Restaurant Dealt with Harassment from Customers”. Washington Post, 29 March 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/​opinions/​how-​my-​restaurant-​ successfully-​ dealt-​ w ith-​harassment- ​from- ​customers/ ​2018/​03/ ​29/​ 3d9d00b8-​ 221a-​11e8-​badd-​ 7c9f29a55815_​story.html. Weinstein Company. “Statement from Members of the Weinstein Company Staff”, Accessed 13 May 2020. https://​assets.documentcloud.org/​documents/​4112683/​Statement-​From-​Members-​of-​the-​ Weinstein-​Company.pdf. Wong, Julia Carrie. “Google Board Tried to Cover up Sexual Misconduct, Shareholders Allege”. Guardian, 11 January 2019. www.theguardian.com/​technology/​2019/​jan/​10/​google-​sexual-​harassment-​ shareholder-​lawsuit-​alphabet.

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16 BEING A DISABLED FEMINIST KILLJOY IN A FEMINIST MOVEMENT Freyja Haraldsdóttir

The feminist killjoy or the female troublemaker, as defined by Sara Ahmed, is a pushy feminist, someone who pushes normative structures, norms, systems, and cultures. A  feminist killjoy also literally kills joy and happiness —​a joy and happiness that reinforces oppression. A female troublemaker is someone who causes unhappiness or interrupts peace by only thinking about or voicing things that are not supposed to make her unhappy, but do.1 As a disabled feminist activist, scholar, woman, and human being, I live in both a sexist and ableist world.2 I kill joy and cause trouble, sometimes by just being in a room —​being present, existing. I don’t just kill joy out in public or in spaces that are dominated by men, I also kill joy in feminist and disability movements and spaces. The #MeToo movement is no exception and has left less privileged and marginalised groups at its margins, asking themselves if they belong in this revolution, and if so, on what terms. #MeToo is, as much as every other space, affected by the multiple and complex entanglements between gender and disability. The manifestations of violence are often different, as well as the social context of the victim/​perpetrator dichotomy. In this chapter I will explore the experience of disabled women in Iceland in the era of the #MeToo movement, the barriers of ableism when practicing intersectional feminism, and the importance of the voices of the disabled in feminist social justice work. I will also examine how we can break down boundaries to inclusion, intersectionality, and belonging in the global fight to end sexual and gender-​based violence. This I will do through the lens of Black feminist thinkers, in particular, Sara Ahmed and Audre Lorde.

The ableist nature of oppression It is vital to understand the nature of oppression in order to unwrap the multiple facades of discrimination in feminist movements and beyond. Oppression occurs when one group has more privilege and access to power than another group, and that power and privilege are used to preserve the status quo by maintaining inequalities, exclusion, and stagnation. It is both a state of inequality and a process of upholding that inequality. Oppression surfaces not only as hostility and dominance, but also as negligence and ignorance. It is conserved through imposition and deprivation. Oppression by imposition includes the oppressor labelling marginalised people and forcing them into roles and/​or living conditions that are unwanted and potentially painful. In the lives of disabled women this can represent itself through labelling them as 221

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dependent victims, not offering support for living independently and therefore leaving them stuck in violent relationships or institutions where they are excluded from society. Oppression through deprivation, on the other hand, involves depriving disabled women of desired jobs, healthcare, social services, and education, or living conditions, such as nutrition, housing, loving relationships, and dignity —​factors which are necessary for physical and mental well-​ being. Oppression can also be institutional or systemic, which presents through laws, policies, physical environments, and social norms and traditions.3 Oppression on the grounds of disability is known as ableism, where cognitive, competitive, and consumer abilities are favoured. It is a set of beliefs, practices, and processes that produce an understanding of “oneself, one’s body and one’s relationship with others of humanity, other species and the environment, and includes how others judge one”.4 Ableism also produces systems and social relations that presume able-​bodiedness, which consequently marginalises disabled people by labelling disabled bodies as abnormal, sick, unnecessary, and inconvenient. Ableism is also “victim-​blaming” in the sense that all the barriers and lack of opportunities that disabled people face are seen as their bodies’ fault since they are “inherently and naturally horrible”, and that therefore these are their problems to solve.5

Disability and gender on the intersections My experience of oppression and harassment in politics has been unquestionably gendered, but more importantly, it has always been deeply intersected with discrimination on the grounds of disability and the fact that I live in a body that is “traditional” neither in terms of femininity nor in terms of disability. Western feminist movements have long been criticised for being based on the values and norms of a rather narrow set of women and a lack of intersectional approaches. Disabled people, like other marginalised groups, often experience what is known as multiple discrimination, i.e. simultaneous oppression of individuals on the grounds of two or more factors. In such cases, different power structures overlap and create an entirely new form of oppression.6 Theorists of intersectionality reject the notion that a marginalised person can only belong to one marginalised group at a time.7 Crenshaw points out that for women who are located in two or more marginalised spaces their political energy is split between those groups which sometimes have different agendas. When this fact is not acknowledged by more privileged people in these groups it can be disempowering for multiply marginalised women. They may feel that they have to deny a part of themselves or refuse to acknowledge their whole identity.8 As Audre Lorde has said: “I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.”9 In her article, Embla Guðrúnar Ágústsdóttir, a queer disabled feminist activist and scholar from Iceland, makes a similar point: In my case, and probably most, it is impossible to break to pieces the discrimination I encounter. I can’t be disabled on Mondays, a woman on Tuesdays and a lesbian on Wednesdays to fit better into social movements’ agenda’s each time.10 Disabled women have pointed out in various literature that they feel as if they neither belong entirely to women’s organisations nor to disability organisations. As discussed by Blackwell-​Stratton et al., disabled women face somewhat different issues then nondisabled women.11 While nondisabled women have fought for the right to abortions, disabled women have fought against forced sterilisation and abortions. Furthermore, disabled women are often perceived as unfit partners or mothers while nondisabled women have a great obligation to become partners and mothers.12 222

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Concerning the #MeToo movement, it has been difficult for many disabled women to come forward with their stories aligned with the grand narrative of the stories being published by nondisabled women.13 Despite the many different kinds of violence addressed in those stories the traditional definitions of violence presented do not necessarily capture the experiences of disabled women. The definition of intimate relationships, for example, is often different for disabled women who frequently experience violence of different kinds within their own homes. Both family members and personal assistants are often in the position of assisting with tasks such as personal hygiene, medication, cooking, and other activities that require intimacy. Such a position can create a great power imbalance.14 Last but not least, a great number of people are necessarily allowed into disabled women’s homes and therefore have easy access to their bodies. For all these reasons, it is much more difficult for disabled victims to call for aid or leave their home and relationships. Disabled women are also often in danger of being institutionalised, particularly women with intellectual impairments or mental illness. This means that they are forced to depend on traditional services like group homes, where they have no control over their living conditions, or who lives with, or works for, them. They have, therefore, few chances to set boundaries regarding their bodies and lives. When women live in institutions, large or small, the violence that they may encounter is often defined as institutional violence or care-​related violence. Although such a definition is not wrong per se, it can prevent the violence from being defined and treated as violence in an intimate relationship.15

Being a feminist killjoy in the #MeToo movement When the #MeToo movement was emerging, I received an invitation to a #MeToo Facebook group for women in politics in Iceland, being a former alternate member of parliament and having been an active member of a political party. Initially, I  was happy that someone had thought of me. Soon however, reading the women’s accounts of violence in politics and the #MeToo statement of the group, I found my anxiety levels rising. The discussion was exclusively gender-​based and intersectional discrimination of any kind, but especially on the grounds of disability or race, received little or no attention. I wanted to contribute to this amazing movement, which presumably should have been empowering for me, but my experience just didn’t fit the mainstream feminist criteria. I thought about raising my voice and pointing this out, but as so often happens in the feminist movement, I worried about the possible outcome of my story being told. I didn’t want to ruin this revolutionary party. I didn’t want to kill the joy. I didn’t want to make trouble. Countless times I, as well as other disabled women, had felt this way in the feminist movement in Iceland, e.g. during big events or celebrations where disability is erased through lack of accessibility or room for disabled women’s perspectives and voices. Each time we needed to make a decision on whether to make trouble or not. If we made trouble we could possibly push for change but also be further marginalised due to offending the mainstream feminist movement and being pushed further away. Causing trouble could also be seen as not showing solidarity with feminists, as not being a feminist, or being a bad one. By making trouble we were jeopardising the little connection we had to the feminist movement but at the same settling for being positioned on the side-​lines. As so often, we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Ahmed points out that the feminist killjoy can be seen as a whistle-​blower since, in exposing the misconduct of an organisation, the one who blows the whistle is often perceived as causing a problem rather than exposing a problem. To blow the whistle is an act of institutional disloyalty: suggesting that the very demand for loyalty 223

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is a demand that subjects “agree” to cover over misconduct, for which they will get something in return.16 Although tempted to stay silent I ended up blowing the whistle. A few days later, a woman published on the group’s Facebook page a post where she pointed out that the statements that the group was about to release did not address the intersection of gender-​based violence and oppression with the experience of racial, ethnic, and national discrimination. I decided to show solidarity by agreeing with her while also addressing the erasure of disability. I was terrified. But I didn’t get much of a response. There was silence. Again. One politician replied to my post and pointed out to me that this was a good point, but unfortunately, for now they were just talking about gender. For the hundredth time, I was asked to erase a part of my identity. My disability. It was just one sentence —​but it broke my heart. I unsubscribed from the group and did not sign the statement. I was angry and hurt but I also felt ashamed and guilty. I felt like a bad feminist. This experience resonates well with how feminist movements have often been hesitant to change definitions of violence and broadening the gender-​based approach because of fear that it will affect the safeguarding of women.17 I was not alone in this reading of the #MeToo movement. Through my work for Tabú, a feminist disability movement which I co-​founded in Iceland in 2014, it became clear that many disabled women felt uneasy within mainstream feminist movements. Either they felt as though they did not belong or that their experience of violence did not tick the boxes of more normative definitions of violence. The culture of violence is so normalised for many of us that we don’t even recognise it. The different representation of violence in disabled women’s lives makes it difficult for us to name our experience. We even struggle to believe that our experience of violence is “violent enough”. A woman with mental health difficulties raised her voice about this in a public Facebook post where she said: For some experience of sexual harassment is first and foremost and experience of sexual rejection or humiliation instead of an experience of invasion of personal space due to lack of fitting normative standards of femininity. A different type of shame can result in such an experience and it can thus be difficult for survivors to find solidarity among women who seem to have dominant feminine trades.18 This was something many of us in Tabú could relate to due to our experience of being desexualised. In our closed circle we also discussed #MeToo in relation to the health care system from forced medical treatment, such as putting in a catheter, to rape. Anna Sigrún Ingimarsdóttir, a disabled woman and scholar, spoke on this at a conference in Reykjavík on #MeToo and disabled and chronically ill women in 2019 where she said: “An important issue to address is, when is the line crossed? When does care become violent? Who gets to define that and how? For example, when does a catheter insertion become an act of violence? When does a physical examination become violent? Is it when a disabled person protests? Is it when the examination room fills with students looking at how to do a physical? Is it only violence if the person being examined is not asked for approval? Is approval enough?” This is a familiar discourse in that it could apply to all women, but with the medicalisation of disabled women’s bodies, normalisation of pain, the extreme access to our bodies from birth, and the great need for personal assistance, the position of women with disabilities is exacerbated many times over and can be extremely challenging and complicated for them to know, sense, and understand the nature and setting of boundaries.

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We all grappled with these questions together trying to make sense of our feelings about the lack of belonging we felt in the #MeToo movement. We felt partly obligated to act and speak out since, if we didn’t, we were causing trouble and killing joy. We also knew that by speaking our truths about different experiences of violence and exclusion in the feminist movement we would most likely be labelled troublemakers and killjoys anyway. The decision to speak or not to speak, however, goes far beyond dealing with feminist movements. Sharing our stories on public forums is difficult, since protecting our privacy can be very complicated within small communities. Many disabled women are dependent upon their perpetrators (who could be partners, personal assistants or doctors), and so sharing their stories puts them in danger. Moreover, our bodies and lives are constantly under scrutiny and treated like public or even state property.19 In Tabú’s work we have relied heavily on Black feminist thought, especially Audre Lorde’s work on silence. She has taught us a lot about the importance of breaking silences: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”20 While Tabú has been very active in breaking silences, somehow this was different. For most of us, sharing our stories was the last thing we felt like doing at the time. Staying silent, in some odd way, made us feel in control of our stories, bodies, and lives, and helped us claim safety and power. So the majority of us in Tabú stayed silent. As time passed, people in our lives, from the media as well as in academia and activist spaces, seemed to notice our silence and asked questions about our reasons for absence in the discussion. But we did not respond. We remained silent.

The solidarity of intersectional feminism As for women in general, the #MeToo movement most certainly sparked important conversations in the space that we have collectively created for ourselves at Tabú, and some disabled women in our movement have spoken out and found it liberating and empowering.21 We made a conscious decision as a group that staying silent was more powerful for us than speaking out or making a public statement at that time. As I reflect back on this time now I see that although we did not break silences publicly we did so amongst ourselves. Some of us shared experiences out loud about violence, or the fear of violence, for the first time. As Audre Lorde teaches us, speaking out is not just about making a public statement, or confronting oppressors or perpetrators. It’s about finding your voice, connecting to people we trust and who hear you, searching for and inventing words and terminology to describe our lived experience. For every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.22 And this we did, becoming closer, more aware, and accepting of our experience of violence, validating each others’ complex feelings. Sara Ahmed elaborates on Lorde’s work on silence, suggesting that we are not all in the same position to speak out, to be killjoys, and therefore we need to become inventive: Killing joy thus requires a communication system: we have to find other ways for the violence to become manifest. We might need to use guerrilla tactics, and we have a feminist history to draw on here; you can write down names of harassers on books;

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put graffiti on walls; red ink in the water. There are so many ways to cause a feminist disturbance.23 For us, breaking silences in our safe spaces but staying silent to the outside world, was our way of creating a disturbance. For me, the #MeToo movement evoked so many difficult emotions —​guilt, shame, anger, and loneliness —​that I did not feel safe or up to speaking out. It’s different now —​looking back, I  have more clarity and more confidence to reflect on those experiences with some understanding of the forces that were at work. Experiencing exclusion and lack of belonging in the feminist movement is not isolated to #MeToo. In this context, it is important to note that Iceland is often presented as a queer and equality paradise.24 Icelandic authorities have, for a long time, been very keen on presenting and reproducing this image, and it has become one of the more important foundations of the image of the nation, both domestically and internationally. Feminists as well as diverse marginalised groups in society have paved the way to where we are today in terms of gender equality; we are privileged but we can be proud of our progress in many ways. However, I don’t identify with this paradise which does not involve disabled people. Our bodies are not offered access to seats at the table. Our voices are not heard. When we demand to be listened to in the feminist movement, we are seen as killjoys and troublemakers. And it is so much more painful to be seen as a killjoy or troublemaker in movements that were built up by feminist killjoys and female troublemakers; movements that should be eager to add some more trouble and killjoy to their grassroots. So where do we go from here? From where I’m standing, or lying down actually, it’s not just disabled women’s job to answer that question. We have told the mainstream feminist movement, a million times. We have reminded them of our existence every time they have forgotten to include us and advised them over and over again when they have failed us. But it’s not working very well. And we cannot wait any longer. It’s time for the mainstream feminist movement to hold itself accountable. To do the work. To not take up all the space, because they need us, even though they don’t realise it, just as much as we need them. Including disabled women in feminist movements does not only mean including us in their agenda. It means combining our agendas. It means fighting alongside us for de-​ institutionalisation and proper social services. It means joining the fight for reproductive justice, which entails fighting not only for access to abortion but also for freedom to deny abortion and sterilisation, and having equal access to fertility treatments, the foster care and adoption systems, and accessible and unstigmatised health care and sex education.25 It means demanding access to the built environment and information. It means fighting for disabled women to be hired in government positions.26 Not to play along with ableist structures and cultures but to make fundamental change. It means fighting alongside us for sign language interpretation. These are just a few in a long list of issues that are also feminist issues. I cannot speak for all disabled women, but I  know many of them will agree with me when I say that feminism is my lifeline. I could not breathe without it. I owe the world to Black feminists and feminist disability thinkers. Their work has spoken to us, through the intersectional lenses on feminism. Our struggles don’t always look the same, but our shared experience of difference is a thread that we hold onto.27 When I’m lost, I  turn to them. When I’m scared, I read their words. When I need to be brave, when I must kill joy or make trouble, I think of them. I would not have the courage to speak out if it wasn’t for them. As a white feminist, I know Black feminist thinkers didn’t necessarily write for me; as a white woman I’m a part of the system that holds them down and pushes their feminism to the margins. But through their fierce activism and academic work, where they confront their 226

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experience of exclusion from white feminist movements and the silencing of their voices as Black women in different areas of life, they have both opened up room for discussion about disabled women’s absence and exclusion in feminist movements at the same time as they have confronted white disabled women of our racism. That is why it is so obvious to me that we won’t survive without each other. The future of feminist movements must acknowledge, respect, include, and celebrate the relentless work and contribution of disabled women and other marginalised groups for gender equality and social justice in the world. It’s the only way to move forward. That work should not be left to marginalised feminist movements alone. To borrow Ahmed’s work again: Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.28

Notes 1 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 230; see also Ahmed’s blog, Feministkilljoys, blog at WordPress, feministkilljoys.com. 2 This chapter is based on a lecture held at the #MeToo: Moving Forward conference, Reykjavík, 18 September 2019. 3 E. J. R. David and Annie O. Derthick, “What Is Internalized Oppression, and So What?” in Internalized Oppression: The Psychology of Marginalized Groups, ed. E. J. R. David (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2013), 1–​29. 4 Dan Goodley, Dis/​ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 22. 5 Dan Goodley and Katherine Runswick-​Cole, “The Violence of Disablism”, Sociology of Health and Illness 33, no. 4 (2011): 602–​617. 6 UN General Assembly, Session 61 Resolution 106, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, A/​RES/​61/​106 (13 December 2006), www.un.org/​ga/​search/​view_​doc.asp?symbol=A/​ RES/​61/​106; Rosemary Garland-​Thomson, Re-​shaping, Re-​thinking, Redefining:  Feminist Disability Studies, Barbara Waxman Fiduccia Papers on Women and Girls with disabilities (Washington, DC: Center for Women Policy Studies, 2001). 7 Alfredo Artiles, “Untangling the Racialization of Disabilities:  An Intersectionality Critique Across Disability Models”. Du Bois Review 10, no.  2 (2013):  329–​347; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”, in The Public Nature of Private Violence, eds Martha Albertson Fineman and Rixanne Mykitiuk (New  York:  Routledge 1991), 93–​118; Marian Marian Blackwell-​Stratton et al., “Smashing Icons: Disabled Women and the Disability and Women’s Movements”, in Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, eds Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 306–​332; bell hooks, Rock My Soul (New York: Atria Books, 2003). 8 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”. 9 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2007), loc. 1884, Kindle. 10 Ágústsdóttir, “Fötluð á mánudögum, kona á þriðjudögum og samkynhneigð á miðvikudögum?” [Disabled on Mondays, a Woman on Tuesdays, and Gay on Wednesdays?] 19. júní 64 (2015): 68‒70. 11 Blackwell-​Stratton et al., “Smashing Icons”. 12 Blackwell-​Stratton et al., “Smashing Icons”. 13 Anna Sigrún Ingimarsdóttir, “Not Being Heard:  #MeToo and Disabled Women”, speech at the #MeToo: Moving Forward conference, Reykjavík, 19 September 2019; Emily Flores, “The #MeToo Movement Hasn’t Been Inclusive of the Disability Community”, TeenVogue, 24 April 2018, www. teenvogue.com/​story/​the-​metoo-​movement-​hasnt-​been-​inclusive-​of-​the-​disability-​community. 14 Jennifer Nixon, “Defining the Issue: The Intersection of Domestic Abuse and Disability”, Social Policy and Society 8, no. 4 (2009): 475–​485.

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Freyja Haraldsdóttir 15 Maria Attard and Sonya Price-​Kelly (ed.), Accommodating Violence. The Experience of Domestic Violence and People with Disability Living in Licenced Boarding Houses (Sidney: People with Disability Australia, 2010). 16 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 17 Nixon, “Domestic Violence and Women with Disabilities: Locating the Issue on the Periphery of Social Movements”, Disability and Society 24, no. 1 (2009): 77–​89. 18 Adda Ingólfs Heiðrúnardóttir, “Er #metoo að valda þér vanlíðan? Það er allt í lagi, við eigum öll erfitt núna” [Is #MeToo Negatively Impacting Your Mood? It Is Okay, We Are All Having a Hard Time], Knúz, 21 December 2017, https://​knuz.wordpress.com/​2017/​12/​12/​veldur-​metoo-​ther-​vanlidan. 19 Lydia X. Z. Brown. “Ableism Is Not ‘Bad Words’. It’s Violence”, Autistic Hoya, 25 July 2016, www. autistichoya.com/​2016/​07/​ableism-​is-​not-​bad-​words-​its-​violence.html. 20 Lorde, Sister Outsider, 40. 21 Slauga [pseud.], “Grunnskólaárin sem í móðu #GameOver”, Slauga slamm (blog), 18 February 2018, http://​slaugaslamm.blogspot.com/​2018/​02/​grunnskolaarin-​sem-​i-​mou-​gameover.html. 22 Lorde, Sister Outsider, 41. 23 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 260. 24 World Economic Forum, The Global Gender Gap Report 2017 (Geneva:  World Economic Forum, 2017), www3.weforum.org/​docs/​WEF_​GGGR_​2017.pdf, where Iceland placed first for the ninth year in a row. 25 World Health Organisation, World Report on Disability (Geneva: World Health Organisation, 2011), www.who.int/​disabilities/​world_​report/​2011/​report.pdf. 26 UN General Assembly, Session 61 Resolution 106, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, A/​RES/​61/​106 (13 December 2006), www.un.org/​ga/​search/​view_​doc.asp?symbol=A/​ RES/​61/​106. 27 Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (New York, Crown Publishing Group, 1982). 28 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press and Routledge, 2004), 189.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and Routledge, 2004. Ahmed, Sara. Feministkilljoys. Blog at WordPress. feministkilljoys.com. Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Artiles, Alfredo. “Untangling the Racialization of Disabilities:  An Intersectionality Critique Across Disability Models”. Du Bois Review 10, no. 2 (2013): 329–​347. Attard, Maria and Sonya Price-​Kelly (ed.). Accommodating Violence. The Experience of Domestic Violence and People with Disability Living in Licenced Boarding Houses. Sidney: People with Disability Australia, 2010. Ágústsdóttir, Embla Guðrúnar. “Fötluð á mánudögum, kona á þriðjudögum og samkynhneigð á miðvikudögum?” [Disabled on Mondays, a Woman on Tuesdays, and Gay on Wednesdays?]. 19. júní 64 (2015): 68–​70. Blackwell-​Stratton, Marian, Mary Lou Breslin, Arlene Byrnne Mayerson, and Susan Bailey. “Smashing Icons: Disabled Women and the Disability and Women’s Movements”. In Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, eds. Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch, 306–​332. Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 1989. Brown, Lydia X. Z. “Ableism is Not ‘Bad Words’. It’s Violence”. Autistic Hoya, 25 July 2016. www. autistichoya.com/​2016/​07/​ableism-​is-​not-​bad-​words-​its-​violence.html. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins:  Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”. In The Public Nature of Private Violence, eds. Martha Albertson Fineman and Rixanne Mykitiuk, 93–​118. New York: Routledge 1991. David, E. J. R. and Annie O. Derthick, “What Is Internalized Oppression, and So What?” In Internalized Oppression:  The Psychology of Marginalized Groups, ed. E. J.  R. David, 1–​29. New  York:  Springer Publishing Company 2013. Flores, Emily. “The #MeToo Movement Hasn’t Been Inclusive of the Disability Community”. TeenVogue, 24 April 2018. www.teenvogue.com/​story/​the-​metoo-​movement-​hasnt-​been-​inclusive​of-​the-​disability-​community.

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Being a disabled, feminist, killjoy Garland-​Thomson, Rosemary. Re-​ shaping, Re-​ thinking, Redefining:  Feminist Disability Studies. Barbara Waxman Fiduccia Papers on Women and Girls with Disabilities. Washington, DC: Center for Women Policy Studies, 2001. Goodley, Dan, Dis/​ability Studies: Theorising disablism and ableism. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Goodley, Dan and Katherine Runswick-​Cole. “The Violence of Disablism”. Sociology of Health and Illness 33, no 4 (2011): 602–​617. Heiðrúnardóttir, Adda Ingólfs. “Er #metoo að valda þér vanlíðan? Það er allt í lagi, við eigum öll erfitt núna” [Is #MeToo Negatively Impacting Your Mood? It Is Okay, We Are All Having a Hard Time]. Knúz, 21 December 2017. https://​knuz.wordpress.com/​2017/​12/​12/​veldur-​metoo-​ther-​vanlidan. hooks, bell. Rock my soul. New York: Atria Books, 2003. Ingimarsdóttir, Anna Sigrún. “Not Being Heard:  #MeToo and Disabled Women”. Speech at the #MeToo: Moving Forward conference. Reykjavík, 19 September 2019. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. New York, Crown Publishing Group, 1982. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2007. Nixon, Jennifer. “Defining the Issue: The Intersection of Domestic Abuse and Disability”. Social Policy and Society 8, no. 4 (2009): 475–​485. Nixon, Jennifer. “Domestic Violence and Women with Disabilities: Locating the Issue on the Periphery of Social Movements”. Disability and Society 24, no. 1 (2009): 77–​89. Slauga [pseud.]. “Grunnskólaárin sem í móðu #GameOver”. Slauga slamm (blog), 18 February 2018. http://​slaugaslamm.blogspot.com/​2018/​02/​grunnskolaarin-​sem-​i-​mou-​gameover.html. UN General Assembly, Session 61 Resolution 106, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, A/​RES/​61/​106 (13 December 2006), www.un.org/​ga/​search/​view_​doc.asp?symbol=A/​RES/​61/​ 106 World Economic Forum. The Global Gender Gap Report 2017. Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2017. www3.weforum.org/​docs/​WEF_​GGGR_​2017.pdf. World Health Organisation. World Report on Disability. Geneva: World Health Organisation, 2011. www. who.int/​disabilities/​world_​report/​2011/​report.pdf.

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17 BLACK WOMEN, #METOO AND RESISTING PLANTATION FEMINISM Marai Larasi

Libation I begin by acknowledging the voices and journeys of diverse Black women who have influenced the narrative and rhythm of this work. With deep respect, I [re]call June Jordan’s beautifully defiant “Declaration of Independence” in which she states, I would hope that the sum total of the liberation struggles I have attempted to sketch, and briefly to criticise, would mean this: that I will be free to be who I am, Black and female, without fear, without pain, without humiliation. That I will be free to become whatever my life requires of me, without posturing, without compromise, without terror.1 In this chapter, I seek to honour this tradition of sketching and critiquing in service to our collective liberation. I revisit Tarana Burke’s early reflections on #MeToo as she says, I started this work with the intention of reaching young Black and Brown girls, but fully believing in its potential to move the world. Some people call it a watershed moment, and there definitely feels like a shift is happening, but it feels incomplete.2 As I  sit with the resonance of her words, I  repeatedly replay a moment in a documentary where a young Black British woman says, “I’d love to give some decent advice because I know it happens all the time, but I  don’t really have any; and I  don’t have any, because it’s not discussed.”3 In this chapter, I also seek to attend to spaces of this incompleteness, and silence, in service to the many Black #MeToos that remain unspoken, undiscussed and unheeded.

Me Too Is…? At a global level, #MeToo has undoubtedly become synonymous with [mainly] women speaking out against sexual harassment, sexual assault, and to a certain extent, gender injustice. 230

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In its 2018 report on sexual harassment, UN Women says of the #MeToo movement, “The most significant global challenge to male sexual claims on women’s bodies is in full swing and shows no sign of abating. The #MeToo wave has unearthed a long running injustice and invited the public into a discussion that has not previously garnered widespread attention or support. It taps into and grows from ongoing struggles against violence and abuse, including on social media…”4 The #MeToo wave has travelled, driven by women from New York to Northern Nigeria. In countries as far apart as Uganda, Chile, and India, groups of women have spoken out about their experiences and have devised strategies to resist, and to demand change. Women have imagined new possibilities for transformation, while drawing on the #MeToo momentum to strengthen their existing work. In many ways, the amorphous “movement” that is #MeToo has opened up more space for public dialogue about issues such as sexual harassment while making it harder for some members of our societies to turn away. #MeToo is credited, by some, with forging a new kind of global connection between women. For example, UN Women’s 2018 report speaks of women occupying the power of solidarity to “name the pain of sexual harassment”.5 But which women and girls are seen, heard and validated when we say #MeToo? Is it even appropriate to reference MeToo as a single movement? Is it possible to deliver on a vision of ending gender injustice and its by-​products, including sexual violence, without addressing racial injustice and other forms of oppression? For example, is gender itself not, ever always, racialised?

Reflections on a #MeToo /​#Time’sUp moment … and now In January 2018, a group of Black women and women of colour activists were the “Red Carpet” guests for a number of white women celebrities at the annual Golden Globes Awards Ceremony in Hollywood.6 The overall aim was to come together in solidarity to highlight issues such as sexual violence and workplace harassment, while acknowledging the expertise and amplifying the work of each activist. As one of the activists attending, my intention was to draw connections between the struggles and resistance strategies of Black women / women of colour in the United States and those of us here in the United Kingdom (UK).7 I also openly spoke about “bringing it home” with the purpose of highlighting the specific experiences and activism of Black women /​women of colour living on these islands. The tones, patterns and rhythms of this chapter seek to do a similar thing. Through these paragraphs, through multiple voices, this chapter makes connections and maps herstories that integrate the social might of US centric feminist visibility into a broader context of Black, African-​heritage women’s journeys, while also “bringing it home”. In some instances, I deliberately, as Back says, “point to those things that cannot be said…” as “it is in silence that inequitable relations and gross political complicities are hidden”.8 Inequality is structural, and all inequality is held in place by individuals and groups. If the global movement that #MeToo has become, is to fulfil its potential for transformation, beyond a celebrity and entertainment-​industry-​centred moment in time, we need the courage to excavate and expose the ways in which intersecting oppressions hold complex hierarchies in place. We need to address how these hierarchies work dynamically to prevent meaningful collaboration. We need to disrupt “business as usual” and [re]imagine and [re]construct the idea and practice of solidarity. If we are to create connected, unifying, intersectional movements —​ across difference —​we need to deal with the ruptures that exist between us. We need space to grieve, and we need action that is reparative and intentional. We need to heal as ourselves, in our friendship circles, our organisations and our movements. What could be possible if the 231

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next phases of our work move away from a neoliberal, carceral, reformism to the global, revolutionary “movement of movements” that will create a seismic shift in power relations and facilitate an end to harms such as sexual violence?

How we get over This chapter charts its own spiral path while also [re]calling and [re]telling conversations, speeches and presentations that I have given in various locations.9 It is grounded in multiple, interwoven, and interconnected spaces of Black feminist knowledge formation and production, in recognition that, as Lisa Amanda Palmer states, “Black feminism in Britain and its anticolonial imperatives remain central to envisioning, strategising and implementing emancipatory political projects in the present and future.”10 From young women speaking out about their experiences of harassment, to the intricate alchemy that is Gail Lewis’ work on Black women’s “presence”, this chapter is rooted in ancestral journeys and futuristic dreams. Over a number of decades, Black and indigenous feminist activists, theorists and scholars have theorised and drawn attention to the specific ways that Black women, indigenous women and women of colour are /​have been subjected to oppression. From Lucille Mair’s A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica 1655–​1844 to the Caribbean-​American writer and activist Audre Lorde’s speeches, open letters and essays, Black women have engaged in the mapping of colonial legacies and the retrieval and assertion of our humanity.11 Much of this work has also critiqued the race and class bias of white, Western feminist thinking and practice, referred to by Amos and Parmar as “Imperial Feminism”, while troubling the notion of a global, homogenous sisterhood.12 This chapter draws on that legacy, along with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational work on intersectionality and Patricia Hill Collins’ critical interventions on violence.13

Black roots … White blooms In 2006, Tarana Burke, an African American civil rights activist, established MeToo as a space to “help survivors of sexual violence, particularly Black women and girls, and other young women of color from low wealth communities, find pathways to healing”.14 Burke’s work was focussed on supporting survivors and building spaces of solidarity that were necessarily intersectional. When, in October 2017, a white woman celebrity posted on Twitter “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet”, #MeToo moved from a grassroots support space to a global conversation.15 The tweet had come as more and more high-​profile women, including Hollywood A-​listers Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, made allegations of sexual misconduct against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Within the first 24 hours, #MeToo was shared across multiple social media platforms by 12 million users.16 Critically, in the early stages of the social media #MeToo explosion, Alyssa Milano, the celebrity concerned, unaware of Burke’s work and of the legacy of Black woman’s labour that she had unwittingly stumbled upon, was being praised for starting this “new” movement. In response to this, a number of Black women and women of colour used social media to highlight Burke’s work and critique what they interpreted as the erasure of Black women’s labour. For example, journalist and blogger, Aura Bogado tweeted: “#MeToo was started by Tarana Burke. Stop erasing Black women.”17 Milano herself responded with a tweet which stated, “I was just made aware of an earlier #MeToo movement, and the origin story is equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring.”18 The tweet contained a link to Just Be, the original website for Burke’s project. Milano and Burke went on to connect, and even appeared jointly on The Today Show.19 232

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The power of Milano’s celebrity status, and the timing of her tweet, offered a much greater platform than Tarana Burke previously had access to, and this undoubtedly provided almost stratospheric amplification for MeToo. What was striking, however, is that while Burke’s work on sexual violence had been known to, and highlighted by, a number of Black women and women of colour, MeToo had been largely unsupported by white feminists and had not attracted any major media coverage prior to Milano’s tweet. As Sandra E. Garcia noted in a New York Times article about Tarana Burke: “Amid the firestorm that ignited, some women of color noted pointedly that the longtime effort by Ms. Burke, who is Black, had not received support over the years from prominent white feminists.”20 This position was affirmed by Hollywood veteran and long-​time activist Jane Fonda who noted of the #MeToo media storm: It’s too bad that it’s probably because so many of the women that were assaulted by Harvey Weinstein are famous and white and everybody knows them. This has been going on a long time to Black women and other women of color and doesn’t get out quite the same.21 In the months that followed, Burke became increasingly recognised as the founder of MeToo, and her work became further amplified through various media stories and high-​profile events. However, by this time, another dimension of MeToo had emerged, i.e. one which seemingly provided space for anyone to say #MeToo online, but which at the same time retained a celebrity centred, Hollywood focussed foundation. The momentum was undeniable, but as Burke herself stated, I founded the “me too” movement in 2006 because I wanted to find a way to connect with the Black and brown girls in the program I ran. But if I am being honest with myself, and you, I often wonder if that sister in the diner has even heard of #MeToo, and if she has, does she know it’s for #UsToo?22 Burke’s concerns reflect the challenges around the ways that Black women and girls are positioned in the broader context of feminist organising, in locations such as the United States and the United Kingdom. For despite the acknowledgment of Burke’s work, and her increased visibility, #MeToo’s roots in the experiences, labour, resistance strategies, and vision of Black women and girls are largely missing from the everyday narratives around the #MeToo phenomenon. This not only has implications for how we understand the herstory of MeToo itself; it also sets the tone for how we move forward in work to end violence against women and girls. In the Geo-political North, is this for #UsToo or only a certain type of #MeToo? Which women and girls are we willing to listen to? Which MeToo conversation is prioritised? Which voice is heard? Which resistance strategy is validated and remembered? As Burke noted in a BBC Hard Talk interview in February 2020, “the people who made MeToo go viral weren’t those people [i.e. the celebrities], the people that made MeToo go viral were everyday folks, millions from around the world, who got online and told their truth, and we’ve built this movement on the backs of those people, but we don’t get to hear those people’s stories”.23

Which MeToo? In November 2017, Tarana Burke wrote: “What history has shown us time and again is that if marginalised voices —​those of people of color, queer people, disabled people, poor people —​ aren’t centered in our movements then they tend to become no more than a footnote.”24 This 233

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is not about who “owns” our movements. This is also not about which women are actually speaking out, organising, resisting, creating, marching, rebelling, and coming together to heal. This is about which women we choose to acknowledge, which women we hear, which women become understood as “victims”, survivors, resisters, founders, dreamers, visionaries, and change makers. In a context of social media callouts, high profile trials, and fascination with celebrity it is perhaps easy to ignore that thousands of Black women and girls have been saying different versions of #MeToo for decades and indeed centuries. As a wider feminist community, we can continue to centre the conversation on the harms that have been done to white, cis, heterosexual, non-​disabled women who also have a certain type of class privilege, or we could begin to retrieve MeToo —​not just by acknowledging Tarana Burke’s work but by grounding our relationship with that work in the centuries of oppression and resistance that gave rise to her work. For in a world where all women’s lives have less value than the lives of powerful white men, which lives are least valuable? Which girls are simply embodied or dis-​ embodied collateral damage not only for violent men, and for the mainstream media, but even for some of our feminist “sisters”? Which women’s bodies are inscribed as disposable? We know which bodies. They are Black, brown, disabled, working-​class, “lower” caste, queer, lesbian and trans. They are bodies seeking refuge in the very countries that helped to orchestrate the destruction of their homelands. They are us. They are me. Woman is not homogenous. Body is not neutral. As George Yancy has asserted, The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is “seen”, its “truth” is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction. The body is positioned by historical practices and discourses. “The body” is codified as this or that in terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are grounded within further power-​laden social processes.25 In the case of Black, African and African-​heritage women and girls, our bodies have been marked by the racialised tropes which were established through European Enlightenment26 and the colonial projects of various European nations. As Michelle S. Jacobs notes in her 2017 essay The Violent State: Black Women’s Invisible Struggle Against Police Violence, Throughout the entire slave holding period, descriptions and stereotypes about Blacks played heavily in the literature and news of the day. Black men were violent savages and Black women were lascivious, wild creatures without morals, who needed to be tamed in order to get any work out of them.27

The Black body as “other” Although Michelle S. Jacobs’ essay focuses on the US judicial system, the stereotypes she refers to are prevalent across the Geo-political North. Over centuries they have continued to plague Black women and girls in multiple ways which have a direct impact on how we are viewed as victims, survivors and activists. Gail Lewis laments,28 [A]‌recent act of appalling state violence enacted on the body and person of a Black woman in London can be linked to a long trail of colonial practice in which “Black” and “woman” were mutually exclusive terms under conditions of Atlantic enslavement.29 234

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Can Black women and girls actually be harmed? Do we feel pain in the same ways as other women? After all, Marion Simms, the man who is called “The Father of Modern Gynaecology” experimented on 12 enslaved Black women, without anaesthetic over a four-​year period. One woman, Anarcha Westcott was subjected to 30 surgical procedures. As Lewis writes, In this fleshy, de-​gendered presence in the Western world, Black women are discursively and inter-​subjectively “skinned” of (our) capacity for “feeling” —​we can be angry, aggressive, threatening, even physically (too) powerful (think of the commentary that inevitably accompanies any radio or television coverage of a Serena Williams match) but not “feeling” in the form of pain, tenderness, ordinary emotional need, desire, vulnerability or pleasure.30 Are we actually even “women”? Do we get to be “girls”? Can we be trusted to tell the truth? Does a famous white woman have to say #MeToo before anyone will listen? Does our “I’d just like to be free”, #MeToo, and #LifeInLeggings have to be validated through white women’s voices to be heard as an outcry, or are we destined to survive and resist at the “grassroots” and in the margins? Jacobs describes three main “culturally held beliefs” about Black women “that are relevant to the legal determination of whether Black woman can be victims of police killings, of sexual assault, and of domestic violence”.31 These are: (1) “whether a Black woman is promiscuous and of low moral character, such that she, herself is responsible for being raped or sexually assaulted, or in the extreme, whether she is even capable of being raped or assaulted”,32 (2) “whether Black women are credible such that when they report, either under oath or just at the police station, that they’ve been victimized, their words can have value and be believable”,33 and (3) “that Black women are overly aggressive and accustomed to violence within their environment”.34 While Jacobs centres her analysis on the law, widespread “culturally held” beliefs operate dynamically within societies and contribute to the production of common-​sense understandings and knowledge. This includes which individuals and groups are constituted as we/​us and which individuals and groups are constructed as the they/​them/​other. The power relations in a society create the conditions for the we/​us to develop, embed, and reinforce discourses about they/​them/​other usually in ways that reinforce the existing regimes of power. Much of the narrative about who we are as Black women and girls has been written on a template that was not created by us, for us, or with us; and this has implications for all aspects of our lives, including whether we are viewed as credible victims/​survivors of violence and whether we are understood, in our societies, as being capable of defining and implementing our own resistance strategies and solutions. The beliefs that Jacobs refers to have resonance in contemporary Britain. However, there are other cultural beliefs that Black women and girls have to contend with in British society, that directly influence the ways that we are treated in media, public policy, and even feminist organising spaces. For example, legacies of empire and the need to “rescue the natives” from their “savagery” have re-​emerged in orientalist discourses relating to issues such as female genital mutilation (FGM). FGM is often portrayed as barbaric, different, and spectacular, rather than being located within a wider context of violence against women and girls, or child safety concerns. Awareness-​ raising, for example, can include showing the faces of Black girls who have been cut, without the protective sensitivities afforded to white victims of child abuse. This objectification of the Black female body and the instrumentalisation of our pain narratives, including by our white feminist sisters, contributes to the ongoing dehumanising of Black women and girls, and echoes the patterns and rhythms of colonisation. 235

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If such patterns are not recognised, and the violence of colonisation and its racist legacies are not named, understood, and integrated into our collective feminist priorities and labours, how can there be equitable, shared space for #UsToo in this wave of #MeToo?

Race matters. Yes … MeToo Black and indigenous feminist scholars, practitioners and activists have, for decades, argued for an intersectional approach to violence against women and girls. However, work on issues such as sexual harassment have tended to prioritise a linear gendered analysis which is disconnected from factors such as race. The problematic effect of this on Black women is observed by scholars such as NiCole T. Buchanan who writes, “Racial and sexual harassment have traditionally been studied as separate experiences and by separate sets of researchers … As a result, the nexus of race and gender, embodied by Black women, has fallen through the cracks and as a consequence been inadequately studied”.35 Yet, as Azmina Dhrodia stresses of issues such as the online harassment of women, Any analysis of online abuse against women should not be limited to only applying a gender lens to the data. When you are a woman with multiple or intersecting identities, your experience of the world is not just limited to your gender. Your race or disability or sexual orientation, for example, can have just as much of an effect as your gender —​if not more —​on how you are treated both in the physical and digital world.”36 Dhrodia’s observations reflect the experiences of participants in “I’d Just Like To Be Free”, a 2016 film project of Purple Drum,37 London. In the short documentary, a group of young Black women/​women of colour (i.e. women who are minoritised on the basis of ethnicity) spoke out about their experiences of racialised sexual harassment.38 The young women highlighted the importance of talking “about race” in relation to the issue of sexual harassment; with one woman stating, “My experiences are different as a Black woman than they are for my white friends. I should up for it…”39 The experiences described in the film40 are not limited to young women, or to physical spaces. In September 2017, a month before the #MeToo explosion, the New Statesman ran the following headline, “We tracked 25,688 abusive tweets sent to women MPs —​half were directed at Diane Abbott.” The article, by Azmina Dhrodia, included a quote from Diane Abbott, the United Kingdom’s first Black woman Member of Parliament, which read, “I’ve had death threats, I’ve had people tweeting that I should be hung if ‘they could find a tree big enough to take the fat bitch’s weight’ … I’ve had rape threats … and n*gger, over and over and over again”.41 While Dhrodia’s piece drew attention in some spaces, there was no public outrage and/​or widespread feminist solidarity. Ironically, UN Women’s 2018 report rightly notes of #MeToo that “women have had to bleed publicly, to bare their wounds to the world in order to win understanding and in their pursuit of justice”.42 Diane Abbott bled publicly, her wounds were laid bare. The violence itself was enacted online, and in public, yet very little “understanding” has been forthcoming. The victimisation of Black British women and girls from the private sphere to the public sphere to the virtual (public and “private”) sphere has been deprioritised within mainstream feminist agendas and government policies across the United Kingdom. I have yet to encounter any evidence that indicates that #MeToo, as a specific movement, has made a difference to those realities. What is apparent is that #MeToo has, in some contexts, added weight to ongoing work 236

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and led to policy shifts in settings such as the British film industry. “In the wake of #MeToo” has definitely become a reference point for politicians and journalists alike. For example, a 2019 report by the Women and Equalities Committee 2019 notes that “[t]‌he #MeToo movement has helped to bring this problem out into the open in the United Kingdom, and women are glad that it is being more openly discussed”.43 The same report noted that “[s]exual harassment can intersect with other forms of abuse such as disability-​related harassment and racialised sexual harassment”.44 Despite this, governments across the four nations45 are unlikely to take action which will support longer term societal shifts. The work therefore continues to fall to us, as diverse resisters and organisers working on social justice and structural transformation.

Plantation feminism, memory recall, and truth telling Since October 2017, mainstream media has led the way in focusing and maintaining much of the MeToo attention on high profile, powerful, white women. These women, like the young women in the “I’d just like to be free” documentary, had spoken out about their experiences. Many have named some of the powerful men who had abused them. Each woman had, as all survivors should have, a right to speak out (if they are able to, or choose to) and to be heard, and to be believed. Each man who has caused harm should be held accountable for that harm. However, mainstream media’s and our fascination with celebrity has fed an aspect of MeToo that operates outside of what is perceived as the realm of the everyday. This has been constructed as a kind of celebrity spectacle focussed on individual monstrous men, rather than the capitalist, white supremacist, ableist, heteropatriarchy, which birthed, nurtured, enabled, maintained, and promoted their behaviour. In many ways, mainstream media’s approach is predictable, but given that media operates in this way, how can we ensure that our work does not continue to mirror this? Black feminists, women of colour, indigenous feminists, and womanists have for decades, and indeed centuries, pointed to the schisms that exist between us and white Eurocentric feminism. These schisms are an inevitable product of historical and ongoing unequal power relations between the survivors of various versions of Europe’s colonial expansion and those that have benefited directly or indirectly from the colonial project. Indirect benefits include white privilege. Yet, if we are to end all forms of violence against all women and girls, we must develop effective collaborative strategies and deeper systems of solidarity. To do so demands engagement with issues such as race, power, and white supremacy. In asserting that, “Women may share a common global position, yet building a global women’s movement against women’s poverty and powerlessness cannot come at the cost of ignoring how racism and heterosexism also affect women”,46 Patricia Hill Collins calls on us to employ movement-​building approaches that are rooted in women’s diverse lived-​realities. Even so, the legitimacy of race as a critical site of harm, knowledge and resistance is often questioned or overlooked by many white feminists. As Lilla Watson reflects, Then it finally began to dawn on me that when white women speak of women’s liberation, they speak only of white women’s liberation, and rightly so. But they don’t make it clear. They talk and write as if they are speaking for all women.47 Surviving this version of feminism requires that Black and indigenous women and girls navigate the impossible terrain of simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility. A transformative version 237

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of MeToo offers us a potential space to tell the truth about the hierarchies that exist between us along lines of race, class, migration, disability and other sites of inequality. Such an exercise would excavate the deep connections between white women’s liberation and Black women’s oppression. In 2018, I coined the term plantation feminism as a way to draw attention to feminist thought and practice which is rooted in, and/​or seeks to uphold white supremacy. For many of us who have risen from the millions of enslaved Africans who laboured and died to provide Europeans with sugar, tobacco and wealth, “the plantation” is an important symbol of white supremacy. Drawing on the symbolism of the plantation does not minimise the brutality of slavery, or of our ancestors’ experiences, but instead grounds many of our current struggles in the ongoing legacies of colonisation and connects the “then” and the “now”. As a Black feminist, I choose to use “the plantation” in both a historical and metaphorical context, the latter being a way to note/​highlight the persistence of those values and practices that seek to maintain white supremacy. Thus “the plantation” is present, even in spaces of resistance such as left-​wing politics or white “radical” feminism. The trajectory of the emancipation of the white woman is deeply embedded in colonial and imperial privilege. White women’s historic ability to move into economic independence across the so-​called British Isles is deeply connected to the transatlantic slave trade. White women of all classes benefited from the plantation including through ownership of human property. In the course of my own genealogical research,48 I have been struck by how many women owned plantations in Jamaica at a time when married and divorced women’s property-​owning rights were still being fought for in the United Kingdom. Thus, while vast numbers of working-​class white women continued to live in abject poverty, the slave trade also provided unprecedented opportunities, including for employment. Researchers suggest49 that between 25% and 45% of compensatory claims submitted after abolition were made by white women. Wives, widows, and spinsters alike made claims including individual claims as submissions for compensation as the sole claimant. White women were sole and joint owners of enslaved human beings. They were married to, and were daughters of, men who owned enslaved human beings; and as such were compensated for their losses once owning human beings was no longer legal. Black people, and indeed Black women specifically, have never been compensated for anything —​neither our human labour nor our human suffering and losses. While we barely survived, generations of white women were able to thrive, because of us. As Hazel V. Carby wrote, almost four decades ago, [t]‌he benefits of a white skin did not just apply to a handful of cotton, tea, or sugar plantation mistresses; all women in Britain benefited —​in varying degrees —​from the economic exploitation of the colonies. The pro imperialist attitudes of many nineteenth and early twentieth-​ century feminists and suffragists have yet to be acknowledged for their racist implications.50 To confront this toxic history, and to consider what it means for how we are positioned and marginalised as racialised, post-​colonial subjects is painful but necessary work. As Gail Lewis offers, “Rather, this has to be faced in all its feltness and livedness so that its structural, relational, and experiential constitutive power might be undone.51” Relegating colonisation to the past is a diminishment of the ways that we have been rendered unequal as Black women and girls. How can we create a global sisterhood with white women, if they do not truly see us; and if they do not truly see how they have been able to become themselves? 238

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Space, time … and safety in our numbers While building a global feminist movement calls on women to come together in solidarity, across difference, it is also critical that Black women/​women of colour are able to create safe, autonomous spaces that enable healing, self-​determination, strategising and more. It is critical that we create space for joyful resistance, self-​realisation, and self-​definition. As Audre Lorde writes, “[i]‌f I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive”.52 Black women have for centuries been, in Lorde’s terms, consumed. It is critical that we come together to dream, act, and nurture ourselves and each other, without being “eaten alive”. Indeed, as my sistah-​colleague Dorett Jones and I have written, “we assert that reimagined space is more than a composite or response to the socio-​political landscape of the day, but rather a transformative encounter which provides many things, including pause. The pause gives room to work our herstory, resilience, commonalities, resistance, recovery, voice, silence and lived experience”.53 It is essential that we attend to the specific concerns that impact us. Over the last four decades, Black women /​women of colour across the United Kingdom have established specialist, “by and for” organisations which focus on supporting survivors of violence against women and girls. A 2018 report by Imkaan highlights that “by and for” organisations are subjected to chronic underfunding, deprioritising within government agendas and a lack of solidarity from their white-​led sister organisations.54 In practice this includes undermining the need for specialist “BME” women’s organisations, questioning of “BME” organisations feminist credentials and/​or professionalism, and active side-​lining in strategic and commissioning spaces. Thus, while most women’s organisations are undervalued and insufficiently funded, “BME” women’s organisations have been rendered vulnerable both by the State and by their white counterparts. For organisations led “by and for” African and African-​ heritage women, the situation is even more acute. Many of them have closed, with little archival memory of their existence, of their labour, and of the women and children who survived and thrived because of that work. It is as if those organisations have been erased.

There is no ME in erasure The Black women and women of colour who, in October 2017, tweeted to set the #MeToo record straight about Tarana Burke’s work helped to prevent the erasure of her work and of the Black and Brown girls and women who had spoken out in the space that Burke and her colleagues had created. Their actions were critical. Milano’s response was respectful. However, the threat of erasure is constant and ever present for Black women. At a recent #MeToo conference, I listened to a prominent white British feminist recount her experiences of surviving, resisting and organising.55 As she spoke, she mentioned her role in organising the first women’s march in London in 2017. Yet, since 2008, the Million Women Rise March (MWR)56 and Rally, led by Black women, for all women, has been an International Women’s Day event in London, i.e. a women’s march. For me, sitting in an audience which included Sabrina Qureshi, the founder of MWR, the ease of that erasure was sharply painful. I recalled Hazel Carby’s words, “In Britain too, it’s as if we don’t exist”.57 In that instance, I  decided against a public callout and addressed the issue through a brief discussion with the woman’s colleague, and by providing a counter-​narrative in my own presentation. But the damage was already done. There was no public apology for an act of public erasure. There was no public “setting the record straight”. In truth, I was not left convinced that the issue was truly understood by either the presenter or those present in the audience. 239

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As we have experienced with #MeToo, the “ownership” of a movement is complex, and indeed social justice work should be collaborative, collective work. Women and girls should have access to a range of spaces for support, dialogue, affirmation, and accountability. Each of us should be contributing to and claiming diverse spaces that help to create the kind of global explosion that we have felt with #MeToo. However, there is a real problem when others rewrite collective herstories and when the struggles, intellectual contributions, and the labour of marginalised women are written out of those herstories. We must resist erasure. Erasure is a form of violence. We must resist attempts to de-​humanise us. Erasure helps to create the conditions in which women and girls who have been subjected to violence do not see themselves reflected in the media, the blog posts, the tweets, the Instagram stories —​and this can leave us unsure if there are in fact safe spaces in which we can be heard, held, known, and understood. Erasure results in Black women and girls not being exposed to the rich legacies of our activism. Erasure means that we believe that the essence of #MeToo is new. For Black feminists living and working on these islands it is also important to acknowledge the impact of the global cultural dominance of the United States, including in the #MeToo wave. This is not limited to the power of white, celebrity-​centred, media systems. Within Trans-​Atlantic Black feminist dynamics, there are points of connection and areas of fragmentations. While some of this is rooted in specificity of experience, it is also true that decades of Black British feminist labour across key sites of social justice work and movement-​ building is routinely overshadowed, here in the United Kingdom, by US-​based Black feminism. This is also a site of erasure. It is essential that conversations about who we are as survivors, dreamers, and resisters are located not only in the recent #MeToo wave, but in centuries of global Black, indigenous, women of colour struggles against multiple manifestations of violence. The struggles need to be remembered. The warriors, dreamers, writers, marchers, disrupters, and the troublemakers must be remembered. Thus, in the spirit of recall, and respect, I remember this… In March 2008, Sabrina Qureshi led us on to the streets of London for our first Million Women Rise march and rally. A march led by Black women /​minoritised women for all women. #WhyWeRise? To end all forms of male violence against women and girls. In January 2017, Rochelle McFee and seven other women in Jamaica entered a church to demand accountability for the sexual abuse of young women. This action led to the founding of the Tambourine Army. They were connecting into the space already emerging with the #LifeinLeggings hashtag, which in 2016 encouraged Caribbean women to do exactly what Alyssa Milano did with MeToo in October of that year. I remember …

Black intersectional alchemy How do we begin to imagine #MeToo or similar movement building which builds, as bell hooks writes, “from the margins to the centre?”58 How do we use tools such as social media to disrupt systems of power, rather than reinforcing them? As small groups of Black women, we are working these issues out. In our version of the MeToo movement, we retrieve our humanity as deliberate, thoughtful practice. We may not even say #MeToo, while always connecting to the roots of Tarana Burke’s MeToo. We continue to demand an end to the violence inflicted on us by the State. We continue to resist immigration borders. We continue to create spaces that are by us, for us, 240

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with us. We continue to work in ways that affirm that intersectionality is not an abstract academic notion but one that is rooted in our lived experiences. We continue to build disruptive connections across our differences. As Adrienne Maree Brown offers, “For successful movements, we need to develop strong, action-​oriented communities that understand that their analysis and work cannot be limited to one struggle. Together, we must be advancing the frontline of our vision for a sustainable, just world. Our strategies must be more sophisticated and engaging than those of our opposition”.59 We continue to disrupt our own embodied and dis-​embodied performance of power and privilege. We continue to resist the ways we are instrumentalised by white women and by men of all hues. We continue to heal while dreaming and organising. We continue to remember and [re]call. We will be pragmatic, but we will not settle for respectable reforms. We invite our white sisters to join us in reparative solidarity. We will work to call each other in, rather than out. We will weave tapestries with complicated, even messy, threads that include all of us. We will be infused with revolutionary love that is rooted in care for ourselves, each other, and the planet. We will rage. We will rise. We will march. We will write. We will dance. We will grieve. We will retreat. We will rise, again, and again, and again. We will love Asé

Notes 1 June Jordan, Civil Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 121. 2 Tarana Burke, “#MeToo Was Started for Black and Brown Women and Girls. They’re Still Being Ignored”, Washington Post, 10 November 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​post-​nation/​ wp/​2017/​11/​09/​the-​waitress-​who-​works-​in-​the-​diner-​needs-​to-​know-​that-​the-​issue-​of-​sexual-​ harassment-​is-​about-​her-​too/​. 3 Imkaan, “ ‘I’d just like to be free’ —​young women speak out about sexual harassment”, Youtube, 7 March 2016,Video, 4:04, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=lJ-​qpvibpdU. 4 UN Women, Towards an End to Sexual Harassment:  The Urgency and Nature of Change in the Era of #MeToo (New York: UN Women, 2018). 5 UN Women, Towards an End to Sexual Harassment. 6 “ ‘We say, time’s up!’ Who were the activists at the Golden Globes?”, Guardian, 8 January 2018, www. theguardian.com/​film/​2018/​jan/​08/​golden-​globes-​activists-​times-​up-​awards. 7 The idea and politics of the “United Kingdom” is a space of contestation. In this chapter “UK” is used when relevant across the different nations that are called the United Kingdom. 8 Les Back, “Live Sociology” in The Art of Listening (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 166. 9 This heading is in homage to a gospel song, “How I Got Over”, by the late Mahalia Jackson. 10 Lisa Amanda Palmer, “Diane Abbott, Misogynoir and the Politics of Black British Feminism’s Anticolonial Imperatives: ‘In Britain Too, It’s as If We Don’t Exist’ ”, Sociological Review (December 2019), doi:10.1177/​0038026119892404. 11 Lucille Mathurin Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 1655–​1844 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006). 12 Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, “Challenging Imperial Feminism”, Feminist Review 80, no. 1 (July 2005): 44–​63. doi:10.1057/​palgrave.fr.9400220.

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Marai Larasi 13 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”. Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–​299. doi:10.2307/​1229039. 14 “History & Vision”, Me Too, accessed 3 May 2020, https://​metoomvmt.org/​about/​#history. 15 Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_​Milano), “If You’ve Been Sexually Harassed or Assaulted Write ‘Me Too’ as a Reply to This Tweet” Twitter, 15 October 2017, https://​twitter.com/​alyssa_​milano/​status/​ 919659438700670976?lang=en. 16 Sandra E. Garcia, “The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags”, New York Times, 20 October 2017, www.nytimes.com/​2017/​10/​20/​us/​me-​too-​movement-​tarana-​burke.html. 17 Aura Bogado (@aurabogado), “#MeToo Was Started by Tarana Burke. Stop Erasing Black Women”, Twitter, 16 October 2017, https://​twitter.com/​aurabogado/​status/​919970867131555845?lang=en. 18 Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_​Milano), “I Was Just Made Aware of an Earlier #Metoo Movement, and the Origin Story is Equal Parts Heartbreaking and Inspiring”, Twitter, 17 October 2017, https://​twitter. com/​alyssa_​milano/​status/​920067975016624128?lang=en. 19 Today, “MeToo Creator Tarana Burke and Alyssa Milano: ‘It’s Not Just A Moment, It’s A Movement’ ”, Youtube, 6 December 2017, video, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=MxuZB-​K_​Q1A. 20 Garcia, “The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags”. 21 Clark Mindock, “Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Are Getting Attention Because They’re White and Famous, Says Jane Fonda”, Independent, 27 October 2017, www.independent.co.uk/​news/​world/​ americas/​harvey-​weinstein-​jane-​fonda-​white-​women-​sexual-​assault-​rape-​allegations-​attention-​ a8023446.html. 22 Burke, “#MeToo Was Started for Black and Brown Women and Girls”. 23 BBC World Service Hardtalk, “Tarana Burke: What Difference Has #MeToo Made?” 21 February 2020, Audio, 4:28 www.bbc.co.uk/​sounds/​play/​w3csy94m. 24 Burke, “#MeToo Was Started for Black and Brown Women and girls”. 25 George Yancy, “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19, no. 4 (2005): 215–​241. doi:10.1353/​jsp.2006.0008. 26 For example, through emergence of racial science which was evident in the work of leading thinkers such as Kant, Blumenbach, and Herder. 27 Michelle S. Jacobs, “The Violent State: Black Women’s Invisible Struggle Against Police Violence”, William & Mary Journal of Women & Law 24, no.1 (2017): 39–​100. 28 Lewis speaks of a “cry” for Sarah Reed, a Black British woman who died in HMP Holloway in 2016. 29 Gail Lewis, “Questions of Presence”, Feminist Review 117, no. 1 (November 2017): 1–​19. doi:10.1057/​ s41305-​017-​0088-​1. 30 Lewis, “Questions of Presence”, 1–​ 19; see also Claudia Rankine, Citizen:  An American Lyric (London: Penguin, 2015). 31 Jacobs, “The Violent State”, 39–​100. 32 Jacobs, “The Violent State”, 39–​100. 33 Jacobs, “The Violent State”, 39–​100. 34 Jacobs, “The Violent State”, 39–​100. 35 NiCole T.  Buchanan, “The Nexus of Race and Gender Domination:  The Racialized Sexual Harassment of African American Women”. In In the Company of Men: Re-​Discovering the Links between Sexual Harassment and Male Domination, ed. P. Morgan and J. Gruber (Boston: Northeastern University Press), 294–​320. 36 Azmina Dhrodia, “Unsocial Media: A Toxic Place for Women”. IPPR Progressive Review, 24, no. 4 (2018): 384. doi:10.1111/​newe.12078. 37 Purple Drum, accessed 5 May 2020, www.purpledrum.me. 38 In the United Kingdom, the term Black is sometimes used in the political sense, as Gilroy (2002: xiv) states, “as a phenomenon of assertive decolonisation”. It encompasses people whose journeys originate from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, including the indigenous peoples of Australasia, the Americas and the islands of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. Political Blackness has been important as a “site” of coalescence and collective resistance, but is increasingly contested. People of colour is a term which evolved in the United States, and is being popularised in the United Kingdom. However, historical and contextual differences mean that this term does not necessarily have the same resonance with the people it seeks to describe. Minoritisation is an ongoing, active process which marginalises particular groups on the basis of ‘race’ and ethnicity. 39 Imkaan, “I’d just like to be free”, 2:11. 40 Imkaan, “I’d just like to be free”.

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Black women, #MeToo, plantation feminism 41 Azmina Dhrodia, “We tracked 25,688 abusive tweets sent to women MPs  —​half were directed at Diane Abbott”, New Statesman, 5 September 2017, www.newstatesman.com/​2017/​09/​we​tracked-​25688-​abusive-​tweets-​sent-​women-​mps-​half-​were-​directed-​diane-​abbott. Note: Diane Abbott received almost half (45.14 per cent) of all abusive tweets in the period leading up to the election. 42 UN Women, Towards an End to Sexual Harassment. 43 House of Commons —​Women and Equalities Committee, Sexual Harassment of Women and Girls in Public Places (London: House of Commons, 2019), https://​publications.parliament.uk/​pa/​cm201719/​ cmselect/​cmwomeq/​701/​70102.htm. 44 House of Commons —​Women and Equalities Committee, Sexual Harassment of Women and Girls in Public Places. 45 While the Westminster government retains central control over a number of areas, much of this agenda is devolved to each nation, i.e. Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. 46 Patricia Hill Collins, On Intellectual Activism (Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 2013), 1121–​ 1122, Kindle. 47 Lilla Watson quoted in Sarah Maddison, “Discursive Politics:  Changing the Talk and Raising Expectations”, in The Women’s Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet: Australia in transnational perspective, ed. Sarah Maddison and Marion Sawer (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 47. 48 Personal research drawing on Former British Colonial Dependencies, Slave Registers, 1813–​1834 via www.ancestry.co.uk 49 David Prior. “White Women in British Caribbean Plantation Societies (Topical Guide)”. H-​Slavery. May 2016. https://​networks.h-​net.org/​node/​11465/​pages/​127503/​white-​women-​british-​caribbean​plantation-​societies-​topical-​guide See also Ian Steadman, “Site traces huge payouts slave owners received after abolition” Wired, 27 February 2013 www.wired.co.uk/​article/​slavery-​database-​goes-​live 50 Hazel V. Carby, “White Woman Listen!” in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and racism in 70s Britain ed. University of Birmingham. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson in association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,1982), 212–​235. 51 Gail Lewis, “Unsafe Travel:  Experiencing Intersectionality and Feminist Displacements”, Signs 38, no. 4 (2013): 869–​892, doi:10.1086/​669609. 52 Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s”, in Sister Outsider:  Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, New York: Crossing Press, 1984). 53 Dorett Jones and Marai Larasi, “Revolutionary Spaces? [Re]imagining and Transforming Work to End Violence against Black Women and girls”, in Intersectionality in Social Work Activism and Practice in Context, ed. S. Nayak and R. Robbins (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019) 107–​121. 54 Imkaan, “From Survival to Sustainability”, London: Imkaan, 2018 www.imkaan.org.uk. 55 Catherine Mayer, speaking at the “#MeToo Moving Forward” Conference in Iceland, September  2019. 56 Million Women Rise (website), accessed 5 May 2020, www.millionwomenrise.com. 57 Hazel V. Carby, “White Woman Listen!” 212–​235. 58 Paying homage to bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984). 59 Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy:  Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico:  AK Press, 2017), 63.

Bibliography Amos, Valerie, and Pratibha Parmar. “Challenging Imperial Feminism”. Feminist Review 80, no. 1 (July 2005): 44–​63. doi:10.1057/​palgrave.fr.9400220. Back, Les. “Live Sociology”. In The Art of Listening. Oxford: Berg, 2007. BBC World Service Hardtalk. “Tarana Burke: What Difference Has #MeToo Made?” 21 February 2020. Audio, 4:28. www.bbc.co.uk/​sounds/​play/​w3csy94m. Bogado, Aura (@aurabogado). “#MeToo Was Started by Tarana Burke. Stop Erasing Black Women”. Twitter, 16 October 2017. https://​twitter.com/​aurabogado/​status/​919970867131555845?lang=en. Brown, Adrienne Maree. Emergent Strategy:  Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico:  AK Press 2017. Buchanan, NiCole T. “The Nexus of Race and Gender Domination: The Racialized Sexual Harassment of African American Women”. In In the Company of Men:  Re-​Discovering the Links between Sexual

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Black women, #MeToo, plantation feminism Me Too. “History & Vision”. Accessed 3 May 2020. https://​metoomvmt.org/​about/​#history. Milano, Alyssa (@Alyssa_​Milano). “I Was Just Made Aware of an Earlier #MeToo Movement, and the Origin Story is Equal Parts Heartbreaking and Inspiring”. Twitter, 17 October 2017. https://​twitter. com/​alyssa_​milano/​status/​920067975016624128?lang=en. Milano, Alyssa (@Alyssa_​Milano). “If You’ve Been Sexually Harassed or Assaulted Write ‘Me Too’ as a Reply to This Tweet”. Twitter, 15 October 2017. https://​twitter.com/​alyssa_​milano/​status/​ 919659438700670976?lang=en. Million Women Rise (website), accessed 5 May 2020. www.millionwomenrise.com. Mindock, Clark. “Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Are Getting Attention Because They’re White and Famous, Says Jane Fonda”. Independent, 27 October 2017. www.independent.co.uk/​news/​world/​americas/​ harvey-​weinstein-​jane-​fonda-​white-​women-​sexual-​assault-​rape-​allegations-​attention-​a8023446.html. Palmer, Lisa Amanda. “Diane Abbott, Misogynoir and the Politics of Black British Feminism’s Anticolonial Imperatives:  ‘In Britain Too, It’s as If We Don’t Exist.’ ” Sociological Review (December 2019). doi:10.1177/​0038026119892404. Prior, David. “White Women in British Caribbean Plantation Societies (Topical Guide)”. H-​Slavery. (May 2016) https://​networks.h-​net.org/​node/​11465/​pages/​127503/​white-​women-​british-​caribbean-​ plantation-​societies-​topical-​guide. Purple Drum. Accessed 5 May 2020. www.purpledrum.me. Rankine, Claudia Citizen: an American lyric, London: Penguin, 2015. Steadman, Ian “Site Traces Huge Payouts Slave Owners Received after Abolition” Wired, 27 February 2013 www.wired.co.uk/​article/​slavery-​database-​goes-​live. Sutton, Tara, Sadia Ahmed, Christian Bennett, Tracy McVeigh, Maggie O’Kane and Jacqui Timberlake. “Summer Holiday Circumcision: Girls’ Bodies at Risk”. Guardian, 25 July 2010. www.theguardian. com/​uk/​video/​2010/​jul/​25/​girls-​facing-​female-​circumcision. Today. “MeToo Creator Tarana Burke And Alyssa Milano: ‘It’s Not Just A Moment, It’s A Movement.’ ” Youtube, 6 December 2017. Video, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=MxuZB-​K_​Q1A. UN Women. Towards an End to Sexual Harassment: The Urgency and Nature of Change in the Era of #MeToo. New York: UN Women, 2018. Yancy, George. “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body”. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19, no. 4 (2005): 215–​241. doi:10.1353/​jsp.2006.0008.

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PART III

Global perspectives

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18 #METOO Anger, denouncement, and hope Purna Sen

The world has changed because of the #MeToo movement. A  spontaneous, international, unfunded movement, primarily of women, has been impactful and powerful. If women are given safety and space, they will speak of the traumas, abuse, and pain they know. If they are not provided the space they may create that opportunity and shout out to the world what it should know and hasn’t acknowledged or addressed. That is what happened with the #MeToo movement: the social media driven phenomenon through which international solidarity between victims of sexual harassment and assault unexpectedly began to rupture life as it has been known, at work and university but also in the world more generally. The movement has created a moment where some abusers have been held to account, including some high status men. Those who have fallen include the Japanese Vice Minister of Finance, Junichi Fukuda, Indian Minister, and former journalist MJ Akbar and the former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.1 It has been and remains a powerful show of solidarity across the world, with far-​reaching consequences including in discourse, policies, laws, and institutional change. Sexual harassment has been a topic on many agendas in unprecedented ways, from politics to popular media (traditional and social) to corporate and educational institutions, and the broader issue of sexual violence, particularly against women, is better recognised than it had been before. Women have found comfort and strength in collective naming of their abuse, calls for accountability, and changes in practice. What has it been about? Where has it taken hold? What is sexual harassment, this topic of interest to so many people now? And how do international efforts connect with the social media tidal wave that shook the world in 2017 and since?

A global story of connection and ambition An international movement The #MeToo movement began in 2006 with the work of Tarana Burke. Tarana sought to “interrupt sexual violence” by providing support and resources for women of colour in low income communities in the United States.2 She understood the harm of sexual violence and the need for healing that is so important for victims and survivors. In villages, cities, and countries

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across the world, sexual violence has poisoned many lives, and underfunded, under-​recognised support from women and their organisations has long been offered. Criminal justice systems have been both a space for contestation by women, towards recognition of the reality of their violations, and have provided (limited) outcomes on accountability and justice. Like Tarana, women who have received scant attention and uncertain support have continued their work for decades. The substance of their work and the nature of their ambition connected advocates and victim-​survivors in what they were doing, but in 2017 those connections grew in strength and recognition in the most astonishing and powerful way. A spontaneous noise, an extraordinary and inspiring movement against sexual abuse, with the greatest geographical reach, made its presence known, showed the power of solidarity, and shook the world —​changing indelibly the nature of public discussion on sexual harassment and sexual violence more generally. Victims and survivors found a route through which to denounce the abuse to which they had been subjected, to name their abusers and to connect with others with whom they shared such experiences. Without working together in any organised way, without knowing each other, they created and shared a common struggle, primarily through social media but also with the participation of some elements of traditional media. They named their abuse, they spoke against power holders, celebrities, politicians, bosses, teachers… They connected through a tiny expression that in its very formulation is about connection: Me Too. In 2017, Alyssa Milano sent out a call on Twitter —​an invitation for a community to identify itself as having been sexually harassed or assaulted, through use of the term “me too”.3 Social media overnight became a valued meeting place and powerful conduit for connections, sharing, and calls for change, for justice and accountability amongst victim-​survivors across the world. In the first 24 hours following Alyssa Milano’s tweet, the hashtag #MeToo was used half a million times on Twitter and 4.7 million times on Facebook.4 Media commentaries use language such as the “movement taking hold” that recognise the phenomenon of #MeToo and the dominance it commanded in public discourse.5 By December 2019 there were over 24 million (24,256,318) impressions on Twitter using the hashtag #MeToo (see below for discussion of MeToo on Twitter). Social media activism tells a range of stories about sexual harassment, violence, accountability, and change over 2017–​2019 and shows that the uprising was and remains international in character. #MeToo voices have drawn links between various forms of sexual violence, whether it be sexual harassment, other sexual violence  —​especially rape  —​and sexual exploitation and abuse as well as domestic or other violence. Patterns that were known for many years were reinforced in this spontaneous outcry: perpetrators were predominantly men and those targeted were predominantly women, but anyone with relatively less power or not conforming to heteronormative constraints could be abused and would be likely to know the accountability vacuum that tends to follow —​sexual harassment follows the contours of inequality.6 The core problematic of the sexual abuse outed and condemned by #MeToo is the normalisation, the culturally sanctioned expressions of male sexual entitlement to women’s bodies and lives. Sexual violence is structural, being systemically discriminatory and mutually reliant upon other structures of gender inequality as is seen in legal and economic systems. In a 1986 landmark US Supreme Court decision on sexual harassment, former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote: “Without question … when a supervisor sexually harasses a subordinate because of the subordinate’s sex, the supervisor discriminates on the basis of sex.”7

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#MeToo told the world stories of power, powerlessness, hunger for justice and accountability, and the continued privilege that is afforded to those who abuse. While the main public learning appears to have been around sexual harassment, the movement also displayed the commonalities between and across different forms of abuse: intimate partner abuse, domestic violence, rape, child abuse, stalking, upskirting, and so on.8 On sexual harassment specifically, the movement educated public discourse on its ubiquity —​a higher prevalence than the standard one-​in-​three proportion that is the recognised global measure of violence against women.9 It also laid bare the inadequacy of global data —​there are no reliable measures of sexual harassment, despite an indicator having been included in the Sustainable Development Goals of 2015.10

The Twitter data Social media users found many ways to make MeToo connections and to make these media their own —​a tool and expression of global solidarity. They created related hashtags (see Figure 18.1) and used many languages. The #MeToo movement exists in French and in Spanish, in Korean, and in Turkish. It manifests across all regions, from Kenya to Philippines, Japan to Mexico. UN Women with Global Pulse is researching Twitter data around the #MeToo movement presence on this platform, over the period 2016–​2019, giving a unique opportunity to review patterns.11 This section draws on preliminary analysis of this data. The hashtag list shows the relevance of the #MeToo movement in different contexts, the urge to participate across languages and places through the creation of associated hashtags that have local, cultural, or linguistic pertinence. All regions of the world witnessed participation, as Figure 18.2 shows.12 The weight of Twitter engagement from the United States is noted in Table 18.1, at nine and a half million out of a total of over 24 million, but both Figures 18.2 and 18.3 and Table 18.1 show that the movement is neither a Hollywood phenomenon (a niche “celebrity” problem) nor is it solely about industrialised countries (a “Western” fascination), though it is the case that a major proportion of these Twitter impressions come from Europe and North America. It is not about poverty (certainly not concentrated only or primarily in low income countries) and has found traction in countries leading on gender equality (Iceland and the Nordic states). #MeToo has genuinely been an international movement, across rich and poor, with both high and low gender equality ranking, where laws against sexual harassment exist and where they don’t.13 The movement has affirmed decades of testimonial and experiential knowledge that has drawn the commonality of women’s experiences of male sexual entitlement, manifest in violence, across place and context. It has laid bare the universality of sexual harassment and its links with other sexual violence. #MeToo themes coincide with relevant events or developments including legal and political. The #Metoo hashtag saw two significant peaks in activity. The first was in October 2017 around the time of the Milano tweet and again in early September 2018, as the Kavanaugh hearings took place in the United States.14 #Cuentalo in Spain spiked in April/​May 2018, around the time of the Manada case when five men accused of a gang rape were found guilty instead of a lesser offence of sexual abuse. #MeToo appears to have provided the momentum and been a rallying place that connected with the reality of struggle against sexual violence: Spain had over 1.2 million Twitter impressions using #MeToo. Another hashtag associated with #MeToo —​ #IBelieveYou —​was prominent in the Spanish agitation around this case.15

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Figure 18.1  MeToo-​associated hashtags Source: Created by the author, at UN Women.

#MeToo on Twitter by region

2% 19%

20% 59% 1%

Africa

Europe and North America

Latin America and Caribbean

West Asia

Asia-Pacific

Figure 18.2  Regional distribution of Twitter impressions Source: Data from UN Women.

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Table 18.1  Volume of tweets by region and country (selected)

Europe

Asia and Pacific 9,502,299 1,201,269 974,359 654,485

Australia

259,401

France Germany Italy Sweden Netherlands Finland

585,995 235,269 232,111 125,744 124,817 69,631

Indonesia Thailand Pakistan

217,970 153,369 124,126

Philippines

52,545

Republic of Ireland Belgium Turkey

63,580

Malaysia

62,067 50,672

Switzerland Russia Norway Denmark Austria Portugal Republic of Serbia Poland Greece Israel

48,212 43,120 31,576 26,283 25,922 22,031 17,001

Africa

1,587,549 1,238,875 729,061

Latin America & Caribbean Argentina

2,415,685

Nigeria

156,271

Mexico

630,560

South Africa

101,005

Brazil

413,012 342,364 297,130 182,204 129,145 121,892 95,702

28,016

Kenya

43,137

43,488

United Arab Emirates Egypt

Chile Peru Colombia Venezuela Ecuador Uruguay

18,213

Egypt

18,213

Paraguay

54,945

New Zealand Hong Kong

36,581 35,506

Saudi Arabia Iran

17,684 17,461

Uganda Ghana

17,425 16,415

33,675 24,291

Vietnam Singapore Iran Nepal China Bangladesh

28,094 23,096 17,461 13,086 12,870 11,410

Jordan

13,451

Costa Rica Dominican Republic Guatemala Panama Nicaragua El Salvador Bolivia

23,310 21,405 17,934 16,796 11,445

#MeToo: Anger, denouncement, and hope

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USA Spain United Kingdom Canada

15,665 14,253 13,860

India Japan South Korea

Western Asia

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Figure 18.3  A global uprising Source: Created by the author.

Sexual harassment and sexual violence: Not distinct From the vantage point of victims and survivors, the #MeToo movement has illustrated that sexual harassment and sexual violence are not distinct. Concerns and expectations highlighted about one have also been raised about the other and their connections have become more popularly apparent. The term sexual harassment currently has wider use and recognition compared to just three years ago. For decades, women, and some men, have known sexual harassment and adjusted their expectations to accommodate what was seen as an inevitable and inescapable part of life. Women would make comments carefully to warn others about colleagues and managers, about lecturers and teachers. They would watch out for each other or remain vigilant near a one-​to-​one meeting. Sexual harassment is not new: it did not suddenly start in 2017 with Milano’s tweet, but it did find a global growth in recognition and push towards action thereafter. There are two forms of sexual harassment: quid pro quo and hostile environment. Quid pro quo sexual harassment involves an exchange of sexual behaviour for employment or educational benefit, such as promotion or a pay rise or good grades or for the avoidance of adverse consequences such as demotion or losing a job in a round of redundancies or, in an educational setting, failing an exam. Sexual harassment can also create an environment where unwelcome sexual behaviour is present and not be attached to a consequent benefit, known as a hostile environment. Behaviours can run from looks —​for example constantly staring at a woman’s breasts in meetings or in class —​to words, and contact, through to sexual assault. Not all will meet definitions of criminal behaviour but if unwelcome, can constitute sexual harassment.16 Sexual harassment is a creature of gender and sex inequality, that links with other dimensions of inequality, including race, immigration status, disability, sexual orientation, class, and age. These vectors of inequality can shape the way in which individuals belonging to any or a combination of these groups are targeted for harassment. Work on intersectionality has profoundly

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advanced the understanding of and efforts to deal with the interplay among different dimensions of inequality, following the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw in particular. With an initial focus on race and gender, Crenshaw points out the “need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is structured” and has furthered our understanding of how dimensions of inequality impact severally as well as each in themselves.17 They help to define who is seen as sexual, sexually attractive or undesirable, they help to shape who is believed when they speak about their abuse. They also delineate a credibility gap between those who speak about their abuse and those who are accused. For example, if there exists a stereotype about Black women, or poor women, or any other category of women, being hyper-​sexual then their accounts of being harassed are more easily dismissed than otherwise; if someone with intellectual disabilities reports sexual harassment then their ability to recall and tell their story can more easily be undermined than other people. What constitutes sexual violence, including rape, has been contested and is still changing in terms of policy and popular discourse. A common, minimalist approach has seen rape as penile-​ vaginal penetration, evidenced by the victim fighting the assailant and consequently bearing marks or injury that are deemed to evidence a lack of consent, that is subsequently relied upon in court. This tightly defined approach has not captured the sense of sexual invasion and violation that many women have known nor does it recognise men as victims of rape. More recently, dynamics of power and inequality, coercion and control that infuse the accounts of the abused are beginning to find reflection in definitional discussions including internationally:18 The Tribunal defines rape as a physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive. The Tribunal considers sexual violence, which includes rape, as any act of a sexual nature which is committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive. Sexual violence is not limited to physical invasion of the human body and may include acts which do not involve penetration or even physical contact … The Tribunal notes in this context that coercive circumstances need not be evidenced by a show of physical force. Threats, intimidation, extortion and other forms of duress which prey on fear or desperation may constitute coercion.19 This landmark judgement, of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on the Akeyesu case, brings into international standards an understanding of rape and sexual violence that is expansive in the scope of actions covered, not specific in sexing who is a rapist and who is raped and does not rely on the notion of consent. Instead it centres sexualised physical invasion and the conditions of threats, coercion, and so on that express power inequalities. These are common elements across the continuum of sexual violence, including sexual harassment, and very much in tune with the content of the #MeToo movement’s uncovering and denouncing of sexual abuse.20 Definitions shape the gathering of crime statistics, of administrative data and thus the “evidence base” on which so called good policy and practice development are expected to be built. There is no agreed definition of sexual harassment which can form the basis of comparative data on sexual harassment; there is, therefore, no basis for collation of comparable data. This remains the case despite a global agreement to collect data on and to track the “Proportion of persons victim of physical or sexual harassment, by sex, age, disability status and place of occurrence” so as to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe and sustainable.21

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What is available, however, is the data that has shaken public discourse in countries across the world: #MeToo.

Power and privilege Sexual harassment is marked by inequality of power between the perpetrator and the abused. In the workplace and the university, power is often a function of the position held in that organisation in that seniority and sexually harassing behaviour are closely associated. However, peers too are harassers, as surveys on sexual harassment have shown.22 Structural inequalities —​gender, race, and more —​also shape how power is distributed and how it can be exercised and may not always fall neatly along the lines of workplace hierarchy particularly when there are women, people with disabilities, ethnic, or racial minorities or young people in supervisory or leadership positions. A recent study found that women supervisors in the United States, Japan, and Sweden experienced higher levels of sexual harassment than women in other grades: women holding senior positions remain subjected to expressions of structural male power.23 Power, or its absence, is not only determined by organisational status but also by social structure. Privilege is a close ally of power, gifting those who have it particular benefits including in relation to sexual harassment: privilege enables those who hold it often to know protection and support from others, escape from scrutiny or having their words endowed with a credibility not enjoyed by others.

Inequality of voice, commonality of experience Countries that have historically been seen as leaders in the struggle and on progress towards gender equality found themselves rocked by accusations, resignations, and popular engagement in the #MeToo movement. From Norway,24 to Sweden25 and Iceland,26 the Nordic states hitherto known as beacons of gender equality found that women decried the same behaviours and called for action on accountability for sexual harassment as did women in countries lower in the gender equality rankings.27 This shattered the perception that gender equality had been achieved and supported a re-​examination of underlying and persistent sex and gender discrimination. Norwegian newspaper editor Berit Aalborg commented that “there was a realization that we are actually not equal”.28 Sexual harassment, like other gendered violence, is said to be hard to prosecute as it boils down to a “he said, she said” situation. That is, the victim (“she said”) gives an account of what has happened while the accused (“he said”) has an account at odds with that of the accuser. Since sexual harassment tends not to be in public or have an audience, the task of determining what happened is fraught with the difficulty of assessing one unsubstantiated account against another. With a presumption of innocence and the absence of witnesses or corroboration, establishing the facts of the case is said to be particularly difficult, hence these are often not progressed.29 The difficulty of knowing what happened is perhaps compounded by the common perception that women fabricate accusations and should not be believed. Yet, the weight of women’s accounts against those of men is not equal:  it can take several women’s accounts about one man’s behaviour before they are believed or, at least, not dismissed out of hand. Tables 18.2 and 18.3 show just how many accusers it can take for them to be believed. In the case of Bill Cosby, there were 60 accusers to one accused. In Harvey Weinstein’s case, there were 87 accusers to one accused.

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#MeToo: Anger, denouncement, and hope Table 18.2  Bill Cosby’s accusers: 60 to one

She said She said She said She said She said She said She said She said She said She said She said She said She said She said She said She said

She said She said She said She said

He said She said She said She said She said

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She said She said She said She said

See Anna North, “How Many Accusers Is Enough? What the Cosby Trial Shows About the Unfinished Work on #MeToo”, Vox, 16 April 2018 , www.vox.com/​2018/​4/​16/​17207756/​ bill-​cosby-​andrea-​constand-​accusers-​retrial-​mistrial-​metoo-​movement. Table 18.3  Harvey Weinstein’s accusers: 87 to one.

She said She said She said She said She said She said

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She said

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She said

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She said

She said

She said

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He said

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See Sara M. Moniuszko and Cara Kelly, “Harvey Weinstein Scandal: A Complete List of the 87 Accusers”, USA Today, 14 December 2019, https://​eu.usatoday.com/​story/​life/​people/​2017/​10/​27/​ weinstein-​scandal-​complete-​list-​accusers/​804663001.

Speaking is dangerous The #MeToo movement is not a one-​way street, an unmitigated or uncontested direction of travel towards ending sex and gender inequalities, the racial dimensions of such discrimination or the marginalisation of too many groups of people who are targeted for sexual harassment with relative impunity. Addressing and undoing structures of power, primarily patriarchy but also racism, able-​bodied privilege, homophobia, and more, is a struggle necessarily marked by contest between those who have an investment in the status quo and those who will change it. Contestation, therefore, or resistance or backlash or other labels used for it, is no surprise. It will be constant in its presence but how it operates may be varied in form. One of the bleakest and most costly manifestations of this struggle is the price paid by those who challenge it. The ease with which women’s accounts can be dismissed belies the dangers inherent in their speaking out. Accusations of frivolity, vexatious allegations, or malice are often or easily levelled against those who raise their voices. Online spaces have been popular routes through which to attack women but the dangers are physical too:30

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•

•

•

In Bangladesh —​18-​year-​old Nusrat Jahan Rafi reported that her headmaster had sexually harassed her. She was convinced to go back to her school building where she was set alight. She subsequently died from her injuries.31 In Pakistan —​popular music star Meesha Shafi accused another entertainer of sexual harassment. She was met by a wave of attacks on social media and a defamation case brought by the alleged perpetrator. Later she too brought a defamation case against him.32 In the United States —​Professor Christine Blasey Ford alleged sexual abuse by the then Supreme Court nominee. Her testimony was followed by harassment, death threats and caused her and her family to move out of their home for reasons of safety.33

Women are accused of alleging sexual harassment for financial motives, of rampant lying, and of being too ugly to be sexually abused, the last being both an accusation of lying and misrepresenting sexual abuse as a “reward” for attractiveness.34 The personal implications arising from naming sexual harassment include mental and physical health costs, lost income and damaged reputation.35

Rape culture These factors are powerful inhibitors to action by targets of sexual harassment, as it is for those who have been raped or otherwise violated. These and other aspects of rape culture together normalise rape, sexual abuse, and all violence against women, to stifle any questioning of these, undermine any challenging of their normalisation. They excuse perpetrators their abuse, instead holding accountable and shaming those whom they abuse. Rape culture involves intertwined beliefs and attitudes that seek to teach us that victims and survivors are abused because they behave or dress inappropriately, presume to drink, accept invitations or pressure from others to spend time with them. It is about victim blaming. In the work context, it can take the form of “did you really have a drink at the work party?” or “why did you agree to have a work meeting in a bar with him?” Class, race, and other considerations shape the ease with which accounts of abuse, particularly by women, are dismissed or undermined. Rape culture normalises abuse —​making it seem inevitable, unavoidable —​and provides a myriad excuses for perpetrators. Allegations against him can’t be credible or ought not to be pursued, for example, because he has done great work for the organisation, been a long-​term colleague, or has a stellar career ahead of him which should not be derailed. These attitudes push many targets of abuse into a reluctance or refusal to make their experiences known to systems which stake a claim to delivering justice or accountability. These systems, whether criminal justice or administrative or organisational, are infused with these judgmental norms that emerge in easy dismissal of reports they receive, failure to act with appropriate urgency, refusal to recognise the harm of harassment which is compounded by a recklessness as to the harm done by procedures that re-​traumatise, refuse to believe victims, and repeatedly deny them justice. The paucity of reports can then be presented as the absence of a problem.

Normative standards Sexual harassment falls under the remit of a number of international and regional instruments that address discrimination or violence, the most recent of which was adopted in 2019. The global compact that is Agenda 2030, adopted in 2015, is also relevant as are several decisions or resolutions of the General Assembly and other bodies of the United Nations. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) does not make

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reference to sexual harassment or even to violence against women (except for trafficking), but sexual harassment falls into CEDAWs ambit as it has been increasingly widely recognised as a form of sexual and gender discrimination.36 Advisory statements by the oversight and monitoring Committee have clarified that violence against women is a form of sexual discrimination: The Convention in article 1 defines discrimination against women. The definition of discrimination includes gender-​based violence, that is, violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately. It includes acts that inflict physical, mental or sexual harm or suffering, threats of such acts, coercion and other deprivations of liberty. Gender-​based violence may breach specific provisions of the Convention, regardless of whether those provisions expressly mention violence.37 Thus, gender-​based violence is prohibited by CEDAW and States Parties required by this law to eliminate it.38 Agenda 2030, with its Sustainable Development Goals, reaffirms this level of ambition by committing to the elimination of all forms of violence against women in target SDG 5.2. Other goals also address this work: SDG 8.8 obliges the promotion of safe and secure working environments, SDG 10.3 calls for the elimination of discriminatory laws, practices and policies and SDG 11.7 seeks access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces.39 This last target is further elaborated in a monitoring indicator which makes explicit mention of physical and sexual harassment. In 2019 the International Labour Organisation adopted Convention 190 on violence and harassment in the world of work.40 Unlike CEDAW it is not a tool dedicated solely to gender and sex inequalities, but it does recognise that these are significant dimensions of the larger picture of violence and harassment in the world of work. This new resolution has been called “the MeToo movement’s powerful new tool”.41 This important new treaty declares “the right of everyone to a world of work free from violence and harassment, including gender-​ based violence and harassment”, which is explained thus: “[G]‌ender-​based violence and harassment” means violence and harassment directed at persons because of their sex or gender or affecting persons of a particular sex or gender disproportionately, and includes sexual harassment.42 The world of work is defined as including: • • • •

travel to and from a workplace, places where workers take breaks and use sanitary facilities, official travel, work-​related communications including through technology.

The convention applies to those who are employed, volunteers, interns, apprentices and job applicants.43 International standards include a number of regional instruments, notably from Africa, Europe, and Latin America.44 •

Africa —​the Maputo Protocol (2003):

“ ‘Violence against women” means all acts perpetrated against women which cause or could cause them physical, sexual, psychological, and economic harm, including the 259

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threat to take such acts; or to undertake the imposition of arbitrary restrictions on or deprivation of fundamental freedoms in private or public life in peace time and during situations of armed conflicts or of war.”45 •

Europe —​the Istanbul Convention (2011):

“ ‘Violence against women’ is understood as a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women and shall mean all acts of gender-​based violence that result in, or are likely to result in, physical, sexual, psychological or economic harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.”46 •

Latin America —​Belem do Para Convention (1994):

“ ‘Violence against women’ shall be understood as any act or conduct, based on gender, which causes death or physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, whether in the public or the private sphere.”47 Associated initiatives on sexual harassment include the Guidelines for Combating Sexual Violence and its Consequences issued by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights which address the eradication of sexual violence, including sexual harassment.48 A Model Law against violence against women in politics, issued by the Organization of American States directly addresses sexual harassment.49 The UN General Assembly (UNGA), the Human Rights Council (HRC) and the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) have adopted measures that address sexual harassment. The CSW has focused on violence against women at different times including the adoption of a resolution (in 2017) entitled “Preventing and eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace”,50 and in 2018, that commits to: Pursue, by effective means, programmes and strategies for preventing and eliminating sexual harassment against all women and girls, including harassment in the workplace and in schools, and cyberbullying and cyberstalking, including in rural areas, with an emphasis on effective legal, preventive and protective measures for victims of sexual harassment or those who are at risk of sexual harassment.51 Following the #MeToo explosion in October 2017, the UN has passed a resolution on ending sexual harassment at work and addressed online safety of women journalists, violence against women in politics, and cyberbullying and cyberstalking.52 In 2018, a UN Human Rights Council resolution recognised that “discrimination and violence against women and girls in digital contexts, inter alia, harassment… threats of sexual and gender-​based violence” require systemic gender-​based discrimination to be addressed as “all forms of discrimination, intimidation, harassment and violence in digital contexts prevent women and girls from fully enjoying their human rights and fundamental freedoms”.53 The same year, the General Assembly adopted a wide ranging resolution on the “Intensification of efforts to prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls: sexual harassment”.54 It recognises that “sexual harassment, is rooted in historical and structural inequality in power relations between men and women”, notes its presence in private and public spaces and digital contexts, that it creates a hostile environment and is concerned with the risk of retaliation against 260

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victims who name their abuse. The resolution also acknowledges the specific challenges facing women and girls with “multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination”, specifically naming poor legal protections for domestic workers, including migrant domestic workers. Further, the resolution seeks social norm change and urges states to support the efforts of civil society. Progress towards zero tolerance, criminalisation (where appropriate), and remedy including criminal sanctions are called for, as are measures to address structural causes. The resolution calls for change in discriminatory attitudes, behaviour, and attitudes of men and boys and the provision of support for victims, including legal protection, witness protection, adequately resourced services, state cooperation with relevant parties including feminist groups, trade unions, and the private sector. States are also asked to ensure the promotion and protection of sexual and reproductive health and rights.55

Conclusion: Remaining actions and new strengths #MeToo has nurtured a sense of urgency, particularly among organisations, to show that sexual harassment is taken seriously and will be addressed. There has been a rush to show that change has been effected in corporations, universities, governments, and parliaments with a hunt for best practices, low hanging fruit, and quick fixes. It really matters that a deep commitment to overdue change is spoken and known by all. Yet, if the true nature and depth of the problems are to be addressed, then quick fixes will not suffice. Ending sexual harassment is not simply a matter of correcting faulty policies and practices, though this is absolutely needed. Policies and practices need comprehensive content to: •

Recognise and name what is sexual harassment  —​including but not limited to examples. • Include the core concept of unwelcomeness. • Acknowledge structural inequalities and power relations at the core of such abuse. • Commit to ending sexual harassment, provide support to victim survivors and ensuring that perpetrators are held accountable. • Provide independent (trusted) routes for investigation. • Encompass the full range of justice processes and outcomes including compensation, recourse to the law, disciplinary measures that include demotions, terminations. • Commit organisations to the difficult and likely lengthy work of deep and lasting cultural change. • Set out and practice the content of zero tolerance and victim focused work. The recognition of individual harm and organisational failings wrought by sexual harassment are also essential, as are the absence of prejudicial principles and procedures.56 Training will certainly remain core to efforts at behavioural change, not only to dissemination of policy, and these initiatives have to learn from and apply the lessons of evaluations of such work.57 The fixes require a combination of many strands of work, efforts on a variety of fronts. They must spread beyond human resource functions —​an understanding of inequality and how it can be challenged and recast is essential to ending sexual harassment. Expertise on gender and sex discrimination must drive discussions, shape training, and inform efforts at cultural change. There is much to be done beyond institutions too. Good laws and their implementation are part of the necessary measures: international standards provide the framework for these, and gender equality expertise should inform their content and subsequent scrutiny. Yet laws do not easily provide protection or redress to the millions who work in the informal sector. 261

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What has MeToo changed? MeToo has been a spontaneous international roar against the hitherto everyday reality of sexual harassment; it has shaken the foundations of normal sexual entitlement, impunity, and injustice for women. Women and some men have made virtual connections in their denouncements, demands, and expectations of change. Victim-​survivors and their allies have extended belief, support, and encouragement to each other. Without any formal leadership or funding, these threads of activism have profoundly and irrevocably changed the inherited landscape of sexual harassment. There has undoubtedly been a clear shift in expectations, fracturing the notion that sexual harassment and abuse are simply facts of life —​in college or university, work, or public transport. Increased reports of sexual harassment and violence illustrate the demands for action and for accountability —​the test now is whether the systems that hold those reports deliver against the demands being made of them. A movement that has grown in confidence will not forgive failure; #MeToo has deepened that resolve and glued the various parts that were previously somewhat atomised into a truly astonishing international movement. Women across the world and many men, too, either as survivors or through a commitment to a different social, economic, and political settlement, have made it extremely clear that they will not acquiesce to what has hitherto been considered unavoidable, excusable, or normal. #MeToo has ushered in a new form of effective activism and a sea change in public discourse and institutional actions. As its impact continues there remains a need to ensure that outcomes work for those for whom social media was not a viable route to shape the work or for whom the dangers of raising their voices was prohibitive. For the #MeToo revolution to have meaning for all, this agenda will need to be a primary focus in the next phase. It has already shaken the world and provided hope and possibility for millions and it will not be undone.

Notes 1 Justin McCurry, “Japan’s #MeToo:  Senior Bureaucrat Resigns Over Sexual Misconduct Allegations”, Guardian, 19 April 2018, www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​apr/​19/​japans-​metoo-​ senior-​bureaucrat-​resigns-​over-​sexual-​misconduct-​allegations; “#MeToo in India:  14 Powerful Men Accused of Sexual Misconduct”, News, 14 October 2018, www.thenews.com.pk/​latest/​ 380871-​metoo-​in-​india-​14-​powerful-​men-​accused-​of-​sexual-​misconduct; Michael Safi, “India Has #MeToo Moment as Claims of Sexual Misconduct Reach Government”, Guardian, 9 October 2018, www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​oct/​09/​india-​has-​metoo-​moment-​as-​claims-​of-​sexual-​ misconduct-​reach-​government; Abhery Roy, “2018:  The Year When #MeToo Shook India”, Economic Times, 1 June 2019, https://​economictimes.indiatimes.com/​magazines/​panache/​2018-​ the-​year-​when-​metoo-​shook-​india/​2018-​the-​year-​of-​metoo-​in-​india/​slideshow/​66346583.cms; Meaghan Keneally, “Schneiderman Called #MeToo Movement ‘Extraordinary’ in Interview Days Before Resignation”, ABC News, 10 May 2018, https://​abcnews.go.com/​US/​schneiderman-​called-​ metoo-​movement-​extraordinary-​interview-​days-​resignation/​story?id=55041576; Matt Stevens, “Who is Eric Schneiderman? A Look Back at His Rise and Abrupt Fall”, New York Times, 7 May 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​05/​07/​nyregion/​who-​is-​eric-​schneiderman.html. See also: Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar, “Despite Protest Resignations, Editors Guild Retains Members Accused of Sexual Misconduct”, Wire, 17 November 2018, https://​thewire.in/​media/​two-​women-​quit-​editors-​guild-​ alleging-​spineless-​response-​towards-​metoo; Sunetra Choudhury and Sunil Prabhu, “MJ Akbar Resigns Over #MeToo, His Defamation Case to Be Heard Today”, NDTV, 18 October 2018, www. ndtv.com/​i ndia-​n ews/​u nion-​m inister-​m j-​a kbar-​resigns-​over-​m etoo-​a llegations-​2 -​d ays-​a fter-​ suing-​one-​of-​his-​accusers-​for-​de-​1933515. 2 “About”, Me Too (website), accessed 8 June 2020, https://​metoomvmt.org/​about/​.

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#MeToo: Anger, denouncement, and hope 3 Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_​Milano), “If You’ve Been Sexually Harassed or Assaulted Write ‘Me Too’ as a Reply to This Tweet”, Twitter, 15 October 2017, https://​twitter.com/​alyssa_​milano/​status/​ 919659438700670976?lang=en. 4 Levi Sumagaysay and Martha Ross, “As #MeToo Trends, Here’s a List of Sex Scandals in Tech and Entertainment”, Mercury News, updated 1 November 2017, www.mercurynews.com/​2017/​10/​16/​ as-​metoo-​trends-​heres-​a-​list-​of-​sex-​scandals-​in-​tech-​and-​entertainment. 5 Laura Bicker, “#MeToo Movement Takes Hold in South Korea”, BBC News, 26 March 2018, www. bbc.com/​news/​world-​asia-​43534074. 6 See: Purna Sen, What Will It Take? Promoting Cultural Change to End Sexual Harassment (New York: UN Women, 2019), www.unwomen.org/​-​/​media/​headquarters/​attachments/​sections/​library/​publications/​ 2019/​discussion-​paper-​what-​will-​it-​take-​promoting-​cultural-​change-​to-​end-​sexual-​harassment-​ en.pdf?la=en&vs=1714. 7 Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 US 57 (1986). 8 For some background, see: Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 9 See:  “Violence Against Women”, World Health Organisation, 29 November 2017, www.who.int/​ news-​room/​fact-​sheets/​detail/​violence-​against-​women; “A Staggering One-​in-​Three Women, Experience Physical, Sexual Abuse”, UN News, 24 November 2019, https://​news.un.org/​en/​story/​ 2019/​11/​1052041. 10 “Targets & Indicators:  11:7:2”, Sustainable Development Goal 11, Sustainable Development Goals Knowledge Platform, accessed 10 June 2020, https://​sustainabledevelopment.un.org/​sdg11. 11 UN Women has been working with Global Pulse in the UNSGs office, on this big data project and hopes to conclude analysis in 2020. See: UN Global Pulse, accessed 10 June 2020, www.unglobalpulse.org. 12 Data here follows membership groupings by UN regional economic commissions. See: UN Regional Commissions:  New  York Office (website), accessed 10 June 2020, www.regionalcommissions.org; Purna Sen, #MeToo: Headlines from a Global Movement (New York: UN Women, 2020), www.unwomen. org/en/digital-library/publications/2020/08/brief-metoo-headlines-from-a-global-movement. 13 In 59 countries there are no legal protections against sexual harassment. World Bank Group, Women, Business and the Law 2018 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018), 2, 6, 20. See also foreword. 14 Sophie Tatum, “Brett Kavanaugh’s Nomination: A Timeline”, CNN, accessed 8 June 2020, https://​ edition.cnn.com/​interactive/​2018/​10/​politics/​timeline-​kavanaugh. 15 James Badcock, “Spain ‘Wolf Pack’ Case:  Fury Over Verdict Sparks #MeToo Campaign”, BBC News, 1 May 2018, www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​europe-​43960647; Gina Benevento, “Spain’s MeToo Moment: #IBelieveYou”, Al Jazeera, 8 May 2018, www.aljazeera.com/​indepth/​opinion/​spain-​metoo-​ moment-​ibelieveyou-​180508094155579.html; Sam Jones, “Spanish Newspaper El País Appoints Its First Gender Correspondent”, Guardian, 13 May 2018, www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​may/​13/​ spanish-​newspaper-​el-​pais-​appoints-​its-​first-​gender-​correspondent-​metoo. 16 See: Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 17 See:  Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins:  Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”, Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–​1299. 18 Phillip Weiner, “The Evolving Jurisprudence of the Crime of Rape in International Law”, Boston College Law Review 54, no. 3 (May 2013): 1207–​1237. 19 Prosecutor v. Jean-​Paul Akayesu, Case No. ICTR-​96-​4-​T, Judgement (2 September 1998), https://​ unictr.irmct.org/​sites/​unictr.org/​files/​case-​documents/​ictr-​96-​4/​trial-​judgements/​en/​980902.pdf. 20 These are themes laid out throughout Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence. 21 Sustainable Development Goals Knowledge Platform, “Targets & Indicators: 11:7:2”. 22 Examples include European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Violence against Women: An EU-​ wide Survey. Results at a Glance (Luxembourg:  Publications Office of the European Union, 2014); National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2018). 23 Olle Folke, Johanna Rickne, Seiki Tanaka, and Yasuka Tateishi, “Sexual Harassment of Women Leaders”, Daedalus 149, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 180–​197. 24 See:  Anca Gurzu, “#MeToo Hits Norway’s Woman-​ Dominated Politics”, Politico, 2 February 2018, www.politico.eu/​article/​trond-​giske-​kristian-​tonning-​r iise-​ulf-​leirstein-​metoo-​hits-​norways-​ woman-​dominated-​politics; Sveinung Sleire, “#MeToo Hits Norway:  Top Politician Steps Down

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Purna Sen Amid Sexual Misconduct Allegations”, Time, 8 January 2018, https://​time.com/​5092957/​ trond-​g iske-​norway-​sexual-​misconduct. 25 Andrea Booth and Kelsey Munro, “Why Is the #MeToo Movement Sending Shockwaves Through Sweden?” SBS News, 27 November 2017, www.sbs.com.au/​news/​why-​is-​the-​metoo-​movement-​ sending-​shockwaves-​through-​sweden; Hanna Hoikkala, Veronica Ek, and Niklas Magnusson, “Sweden Says #MeToo”, Bloomberg, 20 December 2017, www.bloomberg.com/​news/​articles/​ 2017-​12-​20/​sweden-​says-​metoo; Björn Wiman, “Scandal in Sweden:  Nobel Prize for Literature Faces #MeToo Moment”, Guardian, 15 April 2018, www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​apr/​15/​ sweden-​metoo-​moment-​nobel-​prize-​literature-​swedish-​academy-​scandal. 26 See: Alice Demurtas, “#MeToo: Foreign Women in Iceland Unite!” Reykjavik Grapevine, 2 February 2018, https://​g rapevine.is/​mag/​articles/​2018/​02/​02/​metoo-​foreign-​women-​in-​iceland-​unite/​ ; “Icelandic President Speaks about #metoo”, Iceland Monitor, 7 February 2018, https://​icelandmonitor. mbl.is/​news/​politics_​and_​society/​2018/​02/​07/​icelandic_​president_​speaks_​about_​metoo. 27 See rankings: World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2020 (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2020). 28 Gurzu, “#MeToo Hits Norway’s Woman-​Dominated Politics”. 29 Allison Leotta, “I Was a Sex-​Crimes Prosecutor. Here’s Why ‘He Said, She Said’ Is a Myth”, Time, 3 October 2018, https://​time.com/​5413814/​he-​said-​she-​said-​kavanaugh-​ford-​mitchell. 30 For example, see here for the experience of female parliamentarians as researched by the Inter-​ Parliamentary Union:  Inter-​Parliamentary Union, Sexism, Harassment and Violence against Women in Parliaments in Europe (Geneva: Inter-​Parliamentary Union, 2018). 31 “Bangladesh Teen Burned to Death for Reporting Sexual Harassment”, Quint, 19 April 2019, www.thequint.com/​news/​world/​bangladeshi-​g irl-​killed-​by-​madrasa-​teacher-​for-​reporting-​sexual-​ harassment-​against-​him-​police. 32 Rabia Mehmood, “Pakistan’s Long #MeToo Moment”, Al Jazeera, 22 April 2018, www.aljazeera. com/​indepth/​opinion/​pakistan-​long-​metoo-​moment-​180422151525450.html; “Meesha Shafi Is Suing Ali Zafar for Rs2b for Defamation”, Samaa, 2 May 2019, www.samaa.tv/​lifeandstyle/​2019/​05/​ meesha-​shafi-​is-​suing-​ali-​zafar-​for-​rs2b-​for-​defamation/​. 33 Tiffany Layne, “Justice on Trial:  Where Is Christine Blasey-​ Ford Now?” Black Sphere, 16 July 2019,  https:// ​ t heblacksphere.net/ ​ 2 019/ ​ 0 7/ ​ j ustice-​ o n-​ t rial-​ w here-​ i s-​ c hristine-​ blasey-​ f ord-​ now/​; Erin Durkin, “Christine Blasey Ford’s Life ‘Turned Upside Down’ After Accusing Kavanaugh”, Guardian, 19 September 2018, www.theguardian.com/​us-​news/​2018/​sep/​19/​ christine-​blasey-​ford-​brett-​kavanaugh-​sexual-​assault-​accuser-​threats. 34 Scott Johnson, “Whatever Happened to Blasey Ford?” Powerline, 29 October 2018, www. powerlineblog.com/​archives/​2018/​10/​whatever-​happened-​to-​christine-​blasey-​ford.php; J. R. Dunn, “The Three Lies of Christine Blasey Ford”, American Thinker, 2 October 2018, www.americanthinker. com/​articles/​2018/​10/​the_​three_​lies_​of_​christine_​blasey_​ford.html; Dan Evon, “Is This a Picture of Christine Blasey Ford in 1982?” Snopes, 5 October 2018, www.snopes.com/​fact-​check/​ christine-​blasey-​ford-​1982. 35 Chai Feldblum and Victoria Lipnic, Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace:  Report of the Co-​ Chairs of the EEOC (EEOC Report, June 2016). www.eeoc.gov/​ select-​task-​force-​study-​harassment-​workplace. 36 “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women New  York, 18 December 1979”, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, www.ohchr.org/​EN/​ ProfessionalInterest/​Pages/​CEDAW.aspx. 37 UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights, CEDAW General Recommendation 19 (1992), https://​tbinternet.ohchr.org/​Treaties/​CEDAW/​Shared%20Documents/​1_​Global/​INT_​CEDAW_ ​ GEC_​3731_​E.pdf. See also UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights, CEDAW General Recommendation 35 (2018) which updates it regularly, last accessed 10 June 2020, http://​docstore.ohchr.org/​ SelfServices/​FilesHandler.ashx?enc=6QkG1d%2fPPRiCAqhKb7yhsldCrOlUTvLRFDjh6%2fx1pW AeqJn4T68N1uqnZjLbtFua2OBKh3UEqlB%2fCyQIg86A6bUD6S2nt0Ii%2bndbh67tt1%2bO99yE EGWYpmnzM8vDxmwt. 38 These are states that have ratified the treaty, numbering 189 as of April 2019: http://​indicators.ohchr. org/​. 39 UN General Assembly, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, A/​RES/​ 70/​1 (21 October 2015) https://​sustainabledevelopment.un.org/​post2015/​transformingourworld.

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#MeToo: Anger, denouncement, and hope 40 International Labour Organisation, Convention Concerning the Elimination of Violence and Harassment in the World of Work (21 June 2019), www.ilo.org/​dyn/​normlex/​en/​f?p=NORMLEX PUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_​ILO_​CODE:C190. 41 Nisha Varia, “The #MeToo Movement’s Powerful New Tool”, Human Rights Watch, 14 October 2019, www.hrw.org/​news/​2019/​10/​14/​metoo-​movements-​powerful-​new-​tool. 42 International Labour Organisation, Convention Concerning the Elimination. 43 International Labour Organisation, Convention Concerning the Elimination. 44 Text here draws from Purna Sen, Eunice Borges, Estefania Guallar, and Jade Cochran, eds, Towards an End to Sexual Harassment: The Urgency and Nature of Change in the Era of #MeToo (New York: UN Women, 2018). 45 African Commission on Human Rights and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (11 July 2003), www. achpr.org/​legalinstruments/​detail?id=37. 46 Council of Europe, Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence “Istanbul Convention” (11 May 2011), https://​r m.coe.int/​ 168046031c. 47 Organization of American States, Inter-​American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women “Convention of Belem do Para” (9 June 1994), www.oas. org/​juridico/​english/​treaties/​a-​61.html. 48 ACHPR, Guidelines on Combating Sexual Violence and its Consequences in Africa (May 2017), www.achpr.org/​legalinstruments/​detail?id=4. 49 Organization of American States, Inter-​American Model Law on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women in Political Life (Washington, DC: Organization of American States, 2017), www.oas.org/​es/​mesecvi/​docs/​LeyModeloViolenciaPolitica-​EN.Pdf. 50 UN Economic and Social Council, Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) —​Report on the 61st Session (24 March 2016 and 13–​24 March 2017), E/​2017/​27 E/​CN.6/​2017/​21, 32–​34, https://​ undocs.org/​E/​2017/​27. 51 UN Economic and Social Council, Report of the Commission on the Status of Women —​Report on the 62nd Session, E/​2018/​27-​E/​CN.6/​2018/​20, (24 March 2017 and 12–​23 March 2018), 17, https://​undocs.org/​E/​2018/​27. 52 See: UN Economic and Social Council, Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) —​Report on the 61st Session, 32–​34; UN Human Rights Council, The Promotion, Protection and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet, A/​RES/​72/​290 —​278 (22 May 2018), http://​undocs.org/​A/​HRC/​ 32/​L.20; UN General Assembly, Interaction between the United Nations, National Parliaments and the Inter-​Parliamentary Union, A/​RES/​72/​278 (22 May 2018), https://​undocs.org/​A/​RES/​72/​278; UN Economic and Social Council, Report of the Commission on the Status of Women —​Report on the 62nd Session, 17. 53 UN Human Rights Council, Accelerating Efforts to Eliminate Violence against Women and Girls:  Preventing and Responding to Violence against Women and Girls in Digital Contexts, A/​ HRC/​38/​L.6 (18 June–​6 July 2018), http://​undocs.org/​A/​HRC/​38/​L.6. 54 UN General Assembly, Intensification of Efforts to Prevent and Eliminate All Forms of Violence against Women and Girls: Sexual Harassment, A/​RES/​73/​148 (17 December 2018), www.un.org/​ en/​ga/​search/​view_​doc.asp?symbol=A/​RES/​73/​148. 55 In line with ICPD and BPfA and the review outcome documents. 56 Presumption of innocence or guilt  —​instead no presumption should be made. See Sen, Borges, Guallar, and Chochran, Towards an End to Sexual Harassment. 57 An overview of reviews of such training will be issued by UN Women in March 2019.

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Purna Sen Badcock, James. “Spain ‘Wolf Pack’ Case: Fury Over Verdict Sparks #MeToo Campaign”. BBC News, 1 May 2018. www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​europe-​43960647. Benevento, Gina. “Spain’s MeToo Moment: #IBelieveYou”. Al Jazeera, 8 May 2018. www.aljazeera.com/​ indepth/​opinion/​spain-​metoo-​moment-​ibelieveyou-​180508094155579.html. Bhatnagar, Gaurav Vivek. “Despite Protest Resignations, Editors Guild Retains Members Accused of Sexual Misconduct”. Wire, 17 November 2018. https://​thewire.in/​media/​two-​women-​quit-​ editors-​guild-​alleging-​spineless-​response-​towards-​metoo. Bicker, Laura. “#MeToo Movement Takes Hold in South Korea”. BBC News, 26 March 2018. www.bbc. com/​news/​world-​asia-​43534074. Booth, Andrea, and Kelsey Munro. “Why Is the #MeToo Movement Sending Shockwaves Through Sweden?” SBS News, 27 November 2017. www.sbs.com.au/​news/​why-​is-​the-​metoo-​movement-​ sending-​shockwaves-​through-​sweden. Choudhury, Sunetra, and Sunil Prabhu. “MJ Akbar Resigns Over #MeToo, His Defamation Case to Be Heard Today”. NDTV, 18 October 2018. www.ndtv.com/​india-​news/​union-​minister-​mj-​akbar-​ resigns-​over-​metoo-​allegations-​2-​days-​after-​suing-​one-​of-​his-​accusers-​for-​de-​1933515. Council of Europe. Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence. “Istanbul Convention”. 11 May 2011. https://​r m.coe.int/​168046031c. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins:  Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”. Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–​1299. Demurtas, Alice. “#MeToo: Foreign Women in Iceland Unite!” Reykjavik Grapevine, 2 February 2018. https://​g rapevine.is/​mag/​articles/​2018/​02/​02/​metoo-​foreign-​women-​in-​iceland-​unite. Dunn, J.R. “The Three Lies of Christine Blasey Ford”. American Thinker, 2 October 2018. www. americanthinker.com/​articles/​2018/​10/​the_​three_​lies_​of_​christine_​blasey_​ford.html. Durkin, Erin. “Christine Blasey Ford’s Life ‘Turned Upside Down’ After Accusing Kavanaugh”. Guardian, 19 September 2018. www.theguardian.com/​us-​news/​2018/​sep/​19/​christine-​blasey-​ ford-​brett-​kavanaugh-​sexual-​assault-​accuser-​threats. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Violence against women: An EU-​Wide Survey. Results at a Glance. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2014. Feldblum, Chai R., and Victoria A. Lipnic. Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace:  Report of the Co-​ Chairs of the EEOC. EEOC, June 2016. www.eeoc.gov/​ select-​task-​force-​study-​harassment-​workplace. Folke, Olle, Johanna Rickne, Seiki Tanaka, and Yasuka Tateishi. “Sexual Harassment of Women Leaders”. Daedalus 149, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 180–​197. Gurzu, Anca. “#MeToo Hits Norway’s Woman-​Dominated Politics”. Politico, 2 February 2018. www. politico.eu/​article/​trond-​g iske-​kristian-​tonning-​r iise-​ulf-​leirstein-​metoo-​hits-​norways-​woman-​ dominated-​politics. Hoikkala, Hanna, Veronica Ek, and Niklas Magnusson. “Sweden Says #MeToo”. Bloomberg, 20 December 2017. www.bloomberg.com/​news/​articles/​2017-​12-​20/​sweden-​says-​metoo. Jones, Sam. “Spanish Newspaper El País Appoints Its First Gender Correspondent”. Guardian, 13 May 2018. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​may/​13/​spanish-​newspaper-​el-​pais-​appoints-​its-​first-​ gender-​correspondent-​metoo. Iceland Monitor. “Icelandic President Speaks About #metoo”. 7 February 2018. https://​icelandmonitor. mbl.is/​news/​politics_​and_​society/​2018/​02/​07/​icelandic_​president_​speaks_​about_​metoo. International Labour Organisation. Convention concerning the elimination of violence and harassment in the world of work. 21 June 2019. www.ilo.org/​dyn/​normlex/​en/​f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0: :NO::P12100_​ILO_​CODE:C190. Inter-​Parliamentary Union. Sexism, harassment and violence against women in parliaments in Europe. Geneva: Inter-​Parliamentary Union, 2018. Johnson, Scott. “Whatever Happened to Blasey Ford?” Powerline, 29 October 2018. www.powerlineblog. com/​archives/​2018/​10/​whatever-​happened-​to-​christine-​blasey-​ford.php. Kelly, Liz. Surviving Sexual Violence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Keneally, Meaghan. “Schneiderman Called #MeToo Movement ‘Extraordinary’ in Interview Days Before Resignation”. ABC News, 10 May 2018. https://​abcnews.go.com/​US/​schneiderman-​called-​metoo-​ movement-​extraordinary-​interview-​days-​resignation/​story?id=55041576. Layne, Tiffany. “Justice on Trial:  Where is Christine Blasey-​Ford Now?” Black Sphere, 16 July 2019. https://​theblacksphere.net/​2019/​07/​justice-​on-​trial-​where-​is-​christine-​blasey-​ford-​now.

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#MeToo: Anger, denouncement, and hope Leotta, Allison, “I Was a Sex-​Crimes Prosecutor. Here’s Why ‘He Said, She Said’ Is a Myth”. Time, 3 October 2018. https://​time.com/​5413814/​he-​said-​she-​said-​kavanaugh-​ford-​mitchell. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Sexual Harassment of Working Women. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. McCurry, Justin. “Japan’s #MeToo:  Senior Bureaucrat Resigns Over Sexual Misconduct Allegations”. Guardian, 19 April 2018. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​apr/​19/​japans-​metoo-​senior-​bureaucrat​resigns-​over-​sexual-​misconduct-​allegations. Me Too (website). “About”. Accessed 8 June 2020. https://​metoomvmt.org/​about/​. Mehmood, Rabia. “Pakistan’s Long #MeToo Moment”. Al Jazeera, 22 April 2018. www.aljazeera.com/​ indepth/​opinion/​pakistan-​long-​metoo-​moment-​180422151525450.html. Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986). Milano, Alyssa (@Alyssa_​Milano). “If You’ve Been Sexually Harassed or Assaulted Write ‘Me Too’ as a Reply to This Tweet”. Twitter, 15 October 2017. https://​twitter.com/​alyssa_​milano/​status/​ 919659438700670976?lang=en. Moniuszko, Sara M., and Cara Kelly. “Harvey Weinstein Scandal: A Complete List of the 87 Accusers”. USA Today, 14 December 2019. https://​eu.usatoday.com/​story/​life/​people/​2017/​10/​27/​weinstein-​ scandal-​complete-​list-​accusers/​804663001. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sexual Harassment of Women:  Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2018. News. “#MeToo in India: 14 Powerful Men Accused of Sexual Misconduct”. 14 October 2018. www. thenews.com.pk/​latest/​380871-​metoo-​in-​india-​14-​powerful-​men-​accused-​of-​sexual-​misconduct. North Anna. “How Many Accusers Is Enough? What the Cosby Trial Shows About the Unfinished Work on #MeToo”. Vox, 16 April 2018. www.vox.com/​2018/​4/​16/​17207756/​ bill-​cosby-​andrea-​constand-​accusers-​retrial-​mistrial-​metoo-​movement. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. New  York, 18 December 1979. www.ohchr.org/​EN/​ ProfessionalInterest/​Pages/​CEDAW.aspx. Organization of American States. Inter-​ American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women “Convention of Belem do Para”. 9 June 1994. www.oas.org/​ juridico/​english/​treaties/​a-​61.html. Organization of American States. Inter-​American Model Law on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women in Political Life. Washington, DC: Organization of American States, 2017. www.oas.org/​es/​mesecvi/​docs/​LeyModeloViolenciaPolitica-​EN.Pdf. Prosecutor v. Jean-​Paul Akayesu. Case No. ICTR-​96-​4-​T, Judgement (2 September 1998). https://​unictr. irmct.org/​sites/​unictr.org/​files/​case-​documents/​ictr-​96-​4/​trial-​judgements/​en/​980902.pdf. Quint. “Bangladesh Teen Burned to Death for Reporting Sexual Harassment”. Quint, 19 April 2019. www.thequint.com/​news/​world/​bangladeshi-​g irl-​killed-​by-​madrasa-​teacher-​for-​reporting-​sexual-​ harassment-​against-​him-​police. Roy, Abhery. “2018:  The Year When #MeToo Shook India”. Economic Times, 1 June 2019. https://​ economictimes.indiatimes.com/​magazines/​panache/​2018-​the-​year-​when-​metoo-​shook-​india/​2018-​ the-​year-​of-​metoo-​in-​india/​slideshow/​66346583.cms. Safi, Michael. “India Has #MeToo Moment as Claims of Sexual Misconduct Reach Government”. Guardian, 9 October 2018. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​oct/​09/​india-​has-​metoo-​moment-​as​claims-​of-​sexual-​misconduct-​reach-​government. Samaa. “Meesha Shafi Is Suing Ali Zafar for Rs2b for Defamation”. 2 May 2019. www.samaa.tv/​ lifeandstyle/​2019/​05/​meesha-​shafi-​is-​suing-​ali-​zafar-​for-​rs2b-​for-​defamation. Sen, Purna. #MeToo: Headlines from a Global Movement. New York: UN Women, 2020. www.unwomen. org/en/digital-library/publications/2020/08/brief-metoo-headlines-from-a-global-movement. Sen, Purna. What Will it Take? Promoting Cultural Change to End Sexual Harassment. New York: UN Women, 2019.  www.unwomen.org/​ - ​ / ​ m edia/​ h eadquarters/ ​ a ttachments/ ​ s ections/ ​ l ibrary/ ​ p ublications/​ 2019/​discussion-​paper-​what-​will-​it-​take-​promoting-​cultural-​change-​to-​end-​sexual-​harassment- ​ en.pdf?la=en&vs=1714. Sen, Purna, Eunice Borges, Estefania Guallar, and Jade Cochran, eds. Towards an End to Sexual Harassment: The Urgency and Nature of Change in the Era of #MeToo. New York: UN Women, 2018. Sleire, Sveinung. “#MeToo Hits Norway: Top Politician Steps Down Amid Sexual Misconduct Allegations”. Time, 8 January 2018. https://​time.com/​5092957/​trond-​giske-​norway-​sexual-​misconduct.

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Purna Sen Stevens, Matt. “Who is Eric Schneiderman? A Look Back at His Rise and Abrupt Fall”. New York Times, 7 May 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​05/​07/​nyregion/​who-​is-​eric-​schneiderman.html. Sumagaysay, Levi, and Martha Ross. “As #MeToo Trends, Here’s a List of Sex Scandals in Tech and Entertainment”. Mercury News, updated 1 November 2017. www.mercurynews.com/​2017/​10/​16/​ as-​metoo-​trends-​heres-​a-​list-​of-​sex-​scandals-​in-​tech-​and-​entertainment. Sustainable Development Goals Knowledge Platform. “Targets & Indicators:  11:7:2”. Sustainable Development Goal 11. Accessed 10 June 2020. https://​sustainabledevelopment.un.org/​sdg11. Tatum, Sophie. “Brett Kavanaugh’s Nomination:  A Timeline”. CNN, accessed 8 June 2020. https://​ edition.cnn.com/​interactive/​2018/​10/​politics/​timeline-​kavanaugh. UN Economic and Social Council. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) —​Report on the sixty-​ first session. 24 March 2016 and 13–​24 March 2017. E/​2017/​27 E/​CN.6/​2017/​21, 32–​34. https://​ undocs.org/​E/​2017/​27. UN Economic and Social Council. Report of the Commission on the Status of Women —​Report on the sixty-​second session. E/​2018/​27-​E/​CN.6/​2018/​20. 24 March 2017 and 12–​23 March 2018, 17. https://​undocs.org/​E/​2018/​27. UN General Assembly. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, A/​RES/​ 70/​1. 21 October 2015. https://​sustainabledevelopment.un.org/​post2015/​transformingourworld. UN General Assembly. Intensification of Efforts to Prevent and Eliminate All Forms of Violence against Women and Girls:  Sexual Harassment, A/​RES/​73/​148. 17 December 2018. www.un.org/​en/​ga/​ search/​view_​doc.asp?symbol=A/​RES/​73/​148. UN General Assembly. Interaction between the United Nations, National Parliaments and the Inter-​ Parliamentary Union, A/​RES/​72/​278. 22 May 2018. https://​undocs.org/​A/​RES/​72/​278. UN Global Pulse. Accessed 10 June 2020. www.unglobalpulse.org. UN Human Rights Council. Accelerating Efforts to Eliminate Violence against Women and Girls:  Preventing and Responding to Violence against Women and Girls in Digital Contexts. A/​ HRC/​38/​L.6 (18 June–​6 July 2018). http://​undocs.org/​A/​HRC/​38/​L.6. UN Human Rights Council. The Promotion, Protection and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet, A/​RES/​72/​290 —​278 (22 May 2018). http://​undocs.org/​A/​HRC/​32/​L.20. UN News. “A Staggering One-​in-​Three Women, Experience Physical, Sexual Abuse”. 24 November 2019. https://​news.un.org/​en/​story/​2019/​11/​1052041. UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights. CEDAW General Recommendation 19. 1992. https://​tbinternet.ohchr.org/​Treaties/​CEDAW/​Shared%20Documents/​1_​Global/​INT_​CEDAW_​ GEC_​3731_​E.pdf. UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights. CEDAW General Recommendation 35 (2018). http://​docstore.ohchr.org/​SelfServices/​FilesHandler.ashx?enc=6QkG1d%2fPPRiCAqhKb7yhsldCr OlUTvLRFDjh6%2fx1pWAeqJn4T68N1uqnZjLbtFua2OBKh3UEqlB%2fCyQIg86A6bUD6S2nt0I i%2bndbh67tt1%2bO99yEEGWYpmnzM8vDxmwt. UN Regional Commissions:  New  York Office (website). Accessed 10 June 2020. www. regionalcommissions.org. Varia, Nisha. “The #MeToo Movement’s Powerful New Tool”. Human Rights Watch, 14 October 2019. www.hrw.org/​news/​2019/​10/​14/​metoo-​movements-​powerful-​new-​tool. Weiner, Phillip. “The Evolving Jurisprudence of the Crime of Rape in International Law”. Boston College Law Review 54, no. 3 (May 2013): 1207–​1237. Wiman, Björn. “Scandal in Sweden:  Nobel Prize for Literature Faces #MeToo Moment”. Guardian, 15 April 2018. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​apr/​15/​sweden-​metoo-​moment​nobel-​prize-​literature-​swedish-​academy-​scandal. World Bank Group. Women Business and the Law 2018. Washington, DC.: World Bank, 2018. World Economic Forum. Global Gender Gap Report 2020. Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2020. World Health Organisation. “Violence against Women”. 29 November 2017. www.who.int/​news-​room/​ fact-​sheets/​detail/​violence-​against-​women.

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19 #METOO IN FRANCE, A FEMINIST REVOLUTION? A sociohistorical approach Bibia Pavard, Florence Rochefort, and Michelle Zancarini-​Fournel In France, as in a great many other countries, #MeToo was a major feminist event in every sense of the term. While part of a longer history of struggles against sexist and sexual violence, it also marked a new historical milestone. Enshrined in the French context, the #MeToo event was, at the same time, strengthened by its global reach and its unprecedented circulation. The end of the 2000s was notable in France for its dual socio-​political context. On the one hand, triumphant neoliberalism was exacerbating inequalities of all kinds. On the other, feminist movements were facing divisions. They were increasingly affected by challenges from queer and intersectional theories, which questioned the idea that “women” were the political subject of feminism. In addition, feminist movements were challenged by the emergence of new Afrofeminist groups and by the more autonomous dynamics of lesbian and LGBTQI+ mobilisations. Several disputes seemed impossible to resolve, such as those related to sex workers, Muslim feminism, and racism. Although these debates continued, one of the impacts of #MeToo was to restore a collective dynamic that tended to blur the divisions and to rally new protagonists to a common goal: the fight against harassment, sexual violence, and sexism. A large-​scale movement was born on the internet but also in classic and festive types of activism, and through media offensives. Nevertheless, the #MeToo event could not be separated from the negative responses it attracted, and it raised questions about the extent to which anti-​feminism and masculinism —​ always quick to be expressed —​were entrenched in France. Men, and also women, opposed to #MeToo depicted themselves as defenders of a “seduction à la française” that guarantees the untroubled gender relations and liberated sexuality which are allegedly features of a national and republican identity that must be protected at all costs from the aggressiveness of Anglo-​American feminism. These statements echoed the positions of what had become an equally globalised “anti-​gender movement”, which was highly active in France and opposed same-​sex marriage in 2013. However, in a context where paedophile crimes, especially in the Catholic Church, were condemned, awareness of violence against women and condemnation of femicide were genuinely heightened in France. All this ensured, for example, that the upsurge in domestic violence during the COVID-​19 lockdown period did not go unnoticed. Even so, is it possible to talk about a feminist revolution? For us, as socio-​historians,1 the challenge is both to identify the impact of the event and to place it in a wider timeframe in order to examine the continuities and breaks in the history of feminisms in France. 269

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To account for this complexity, we will recall the extent to which violence has been a major theme in feminist mobilisations since the 1970s, not without criticism from both the right and the left. In the ensuing decades, the achievements of institutional feminism and the major contribution of gender studies did not entirely stem oppositions towards feminist analyses of violence, as evidenced in particular by the hostile reactions to the conviction of Dominique Strauss-​Kahn in 2011. We will give an account of the emergence of the #MeToo movement, beginning in November 2017 when the hashtag #balancetonporc (rat out your pig) appeared in France, as well as looking at the various forms of speaking out and taking action that followed, and the attendant debates. Lastly, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which a vast movement came into being as a continuation of the #MeToo movement, both online and off, leading to questions as to whether the historic event has become a historic moment.

From consciousness raising to outrage about gender violence: The role of feminists (1970–​2017) It is undeniable that, since the end of the 1960s, in France as in all countries where feminist movements have developed and promoted a political approach to privacy and private life, violence against women has been denounced as a major problem. The scale of rape, fear, and domestic violence has been revealed by women’s words and testimonies. The focus on lived experience has enabled the reappropriation of the female body and sexuality. In one of the first feminist publications of 1970, entitled “Libération des femmes année zéro” (Women’s Liberation Year Zero), Emmanuelle de Lesseps, writing under a pseudonym, recounted being raped.2 Breaking the silence and giving victims the opportunity to speak out went hand in hand with a new critical assessment of acts of violence which entailed deconstructing prejudices about the allegedly passive, masochistic nature of women, and about male impulses, seen as irrepressible and characteristic of men’s “virility”. These received ideas played down the violence experienced by women, even legitimising it by confining it to a private and psychological relationship. Guilt lay with the woman, therefore, and suspicion that there had been seduction and consent was so prevalent that the facts were only rarely checked. Feminist analysis, by contrast, was expressed in terms of oppression, of “everyday imperialism”, and of male domination in order to describe a social reality that could be understood only in terms of centuries steeped in misogyny, sexism, and phallocracy. The violence inherent in the patriarchal power relationship made rape a male weapon to subjugate and control women. This line of thought was further fuelled by Erin Pizzey’s book on domestic violence Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear and Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, translated in 1975 and 1976 respectively.3 In 1972, a two-​day meeting was held to denounce crimes against women, which brought together more than 4,000 people.4 Several groups targeted the issue in 1975, and large-​scale campaigns were launched regarding rape, domestic violence, and street assaults. Women held marches to “reclaim the night”. These actions did not occur without internal discussions. “Is every man a potential rapist?” wondered the Quotidien des femmes (Women’s Daily) in 1976. In 1978, the poster for a demonstration, depicting a man’s face captioned “this man is a rapist, this man is a man,” was highly contested even if it revealed the desire to put an end to a system rather than attack individual men.5 What were the most appropriate means of struggle? One part of the women’s liberation movement was close to a far-​left counterculture and suspicious both of parliamentary politics and of “bourgeois justice”. Other groups, on the contrary, advocated recourse to the law and the Penal Code, in particular lawyer Gisèle Halimi and her organisation Choisir (Choose). The 270

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tactic of political trials amplified by the media had already been used by Halimi, a lawyer of Tunisian origin, who was known for her defence of Algerian militants during the war of independence and, specifically, of Djamila Boupacha who had been tortured by French soldiers. In 1972, Gisèle Halimi successfully organised highly publicised legal proceedings in defence of a young girl named Marie-​Claire, accused of obtaining an abortion with her mother’s help. This became a landmark case on the abortion ban.6 In 1978, Halimi used the same tactic to put the rape law on trial when she defended two young Belgian tourists, raped near Marseille by three men whose advances they had rejected. Although there were many who spoke out in support of the cause generated by the trial court case, the judge did not allow supporters to appear in court as they had in the 1972 abortion case. Their testimonies were, however, published in book form. Along with many other campaign actions, the impact of the trial would play its part in getting the law changed. Accusations were rife on all sides, however: feminists, who were also campaigning against pornography and the eroticisation of rape, were accused on multiple occasions by the Left of puritanism, wanting to introduce censorship, supporting the bourgeois authorities, and levelling accusations against immigrants. For the Right, these feminists were “hysterical”, causing a scandal, and advocating sexual anarchy. The legalist strategy proved effective, however, even under right-​wing governments. This was the case with the legalisation of abortion in 1975. The 1980 law expanded the definition of rape to “any sexual act of whatever kind, forced upon someone else by violence, coercion, or surprise”, and enabled organisations to seek prosecution.7 This law initiated an important legislative process, and the number of laws cracking down on violence against women has been growing ever since. In addition to rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment also became the subject of active lobbying. Institutional feminism, after the creation of a Ministry for Woman’s Rights in 1981 during the term of socialist President François Mitterrand, gave fresh impetus to the support of gender-​equality policies. Encouraged by the motions of UN conferences on the rights of women (beginning with the Copenhagen conference in 1980) and motions of the Council of Europe, institutional feminism proved highly effective at launching national information campaigns and providing financial support to organisations running telephone helplines and shelters. It was also very useful in bringing laws to fruition once activists had done the initial groundwork. One example was the 1992 law banning sexual harassment by a supervisor at work (extended in 2001 to all workplace relationships), which was initiated by the Association contre les violences faites aux femmes au travail (the Association Against Violence Toward Women at Work) (AVFT), which introduced France to books about harassment written by North Americans Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Grassroots activism and the activities of state agencies were now joined by the work of feminist academics and the dynamics of women and gender studies. Spurred on by the United Nation’s Beijing conference in 1995, the first major scientific enquiry into violence against women was conducted. The publication of its results in 2003 acted as a wake-​up call.8 Thirteen years later, it was continued by the VIRAGE survey.9 Concrete figures offered proof of the scale of the phenomenon: only one woman in ten brought a complaint. From then on several stunned media outlets became key players in disseminating outrage, thanks to women journalists who themselves were often on the receiving end of profound sexism. Shocking headlines mounted “One woman in ten is the victim of domestic violence”, “a woman dies every four days”, then later “every two days”… The persistence of violence seemed even more incomprehensible than that of inequalities in pay or job security, careers, and political representation despite the law on political parity, which was adopted in 2000. Not everyone shared this new sensitivity. Feminist discourse and strategies irritated a number of political and media personalities and opinion leaders, including individuals associated with 271

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universalist feminism, such as philosopher Elisabeth Badinter. In her 2003 Fausse route (Dead End Feminism), she condemned the move towards victimhood in feminism, the amalgamation of different types of violence, and the omission of violence committed by women themselves. Like a good many other commentators, she saw in this the influence of an aggressive North American feminism, liberally caricatured in the press since the 1980s for its “politically correct” strategies, puritanical censorship, and hyper-​legislation of social relationships.10 The idea of a “seduction à la française”, believed to have protected women from violence and to have guaranteed sexual freedom since the eighteenth century, was championed by well-​known historians like Mona Ozouf, equally opposed both to US historian Joan W. Scott and to France’s own pioneers of women’s and gender history. Encouraged by the LGBTQI+ movements, research became more interested in gender, sexualities, violence against men, and homophobia. All disciplines, including psychoanalysis were invited to reconsider analyses of gender-​ based violence and the issue of consent.11 Women’s voices were becoming more and more credible. Several highly publicised affairs added to the outrage. In 2002, the death of Sohane Benziane, a 17-​year-​old girl burnt to death by the boyfriend she rejected, was condemned in particular by women from disadvantaged urban areas who set up the group Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Doormats). In 2003, the actress Marie Trintignant died after a beating from her partner, singer Bertand Cantat, proving yet again that no levels of society were spared. In 2010, the public controversy over the legal case against film-​maker Roman Polanski resulted in several new complaints. In 2011, the “DSK affair” implicated a potential Socialist Party candidate for the French presidency, IMF Director Dominique Strauss-​Kahn, who was accused of raping Nafissatou Diallo, a chambermaid at New York’s Carlton Hotel.12 FEMEN, a new Ukrainian group that had become established in France, made itself known on this occasion by demonstrating beneath the windows of the accused who was initially defended in the press by certain media and political figures. FEMEN’s actions, topless, their slogans written on their skin, inaugurated a new feminist strategy of physical performance, which had previously been reserved for the arts, and expressed a new level of anger among women. For all that, feminism’s internal debates had never gone away, and even more diverse and polarised tendencies emerged. As a result, their messages were difficult for the general public to understand. Disagreements now focused on how to evaluate violence against sex workers at a time when some believed prostitution to be a profession threatened by abolitionism and the criminalisation of the client.13 Just as divisive were issues of secularism, racism, and queer and intersectional analyses, which shone a light on the stigmatisation of immigrant populations and Muslim culture, condemned as especially sexist after 9/​11 and the attacks by Daesh. Islamophobia went on to develop in every setting, including feminist circles. The Muslim man ultimately came to embody the violent “Other”, absolving Western men of their own machismo. This appeared to be proof that many men and women of the elite could not bear to be confronted with the violence of their own milieu. Despite these conflicts, the number of women who broke the silence and implicated elected officials and male politicians in sexual harassment was growing all the time, an example being the case involving Green Party Deputy Denis Baupin in 2017, which had a major impact despite eventually being dismissed under the statute of limitations. As in the case of political parity, a consensus took shape which transcended traditional party politics to some extent and which led to direct —​and dramatic —​political action. Institutional feminism provided a degree of continuity even as one ruling party gave way to the next. In 2010 several feminist organisations launched a campaign with the clear and catchy slogan: “La honte doit changer de camp!” (“Shame must switch sides!”)14 In 2012, 313 women announced that they had been 272

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raped. This was an initiative begun by left-​wing politician Clémentine Autain, recalling the famous Manifesto of the 343 who declared in April 1971 that they had had abortions.15 Street harassment also became a focus for new organisations and public campaigns to condemn everyday sexism as of 2014. A new generation accessing university courses in gender studies was no longer willing to remain silent. They were impassioned readers of King Kong Theory (2006) by writer Virginie Despentes who called for a radical rejection of guilt and a different attitude to sexuality, homosexuality, pornography, and the sex work she engaged in for some time after her rape.16 By 2017, despite a shameless masculinism that led to an explosion in the sales of the most grotesquely misogynist books, and recent spectacular anti-​gender campaigns against same-​sex marriage and same-​sex parenting, the attitude toward rape and sexual harassment had changed immensely. In half a century, worldwide understanding of rape as a weapon of war, of femicide, and also of the psychological mechanisms of control, paralysis, and blame had become much more sophisticated. Malfunctions of the judicial machinery were obvious despite legislation like France’s laws of 2010 and 2014, which attempted to remedy the legal system’s inability to prevent violence. It was now known that, as a rule, a rapist was not a stranger but someone close —​in the family, the neighbourhood, or work environment, or even within the couple. The dangerous nature of domestic violence was no longer denied. While the need for an intersectional approach was not always acknowledged, outrage was largely shared. Cultural landmarks played a major role, like Xavier Legrand’s film Custody ( Jusqu’à la garde), leaving the audience stunned by the violence experienced and the tormentor’s strategies for circumventing legal constraints.17 In the run-​up to #MeToo, faced with the impunity of the perpetrators and the impotence of activist and public efforts, outrage gave way to an exasperation that could find no fitting means of expression.

“French identity” tested by the #MeToo event In France the Weinstein affair gave rise to a hashtag that preceded the #MeToo phenomenon. On 13 October 2017, French journalist Sandra Muller, who was living in the United States and had shown no prior interest in feminism, called for the naming and shaming of sexual harassers in the work place and launched the hashtag #balancetonporc (rat out your pig). She followed up this first message with a second in which she mentioned a media mogul by name, an action for which she was found guilty of defamation in September 2019, but which at the time gave rise to numerous other tweets. Within a month, #balancetonporc had been used 496,000 times on Twitter. Women journalists, speakers, academics, and others, albeit primarily from the upper class, recounted their own experiences of harassment. Two days later, a tweet by actress Alyssa Milano, calling for an inventory of sexual assaults, led to a massive response in France where the #MeToo hashtag in English was immediately adopted.18 The elements needed to enable a major new phase in the movement against gender violence in France were already in place. As in many other countries, the scale of the phenomenon was such that it led to intense and ongoing media coverage, emphasising the unique nature of the campaign, which was joined by many women, both activists and not, who gave evidence of the variety of acts of violence endured, ranging from harassment on the street to sexual harassment, from assault to rape and incest. These shared messages confirmed what had been demonstrated by studies and feminist discourse on the issue: no woman was safe, and violence was a normalised experience which gave structure to male domination. The formula “libération de la parole des femmes” (women speak out) very quickly became established in the media to describe this flood of testimonies. 273

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The outpouring on social networks also provoked resistance. Rival hashtags were immediately launched, such as #balancetatruie (rat out your sow) which targeted women in a bid to establish equivalence between acts of aggression carried out by both sexes. It was certainly far less successful (6,000 tweets) but it formed part of a broader reaction from the far-​right and neo-​reactionary online networks, sometimes called the “faschosphere”, and shifted the accusation towards specific men, embodying the stereotypical assailant:19 the young non-​white man from the “banlieue;”20 hence the hashtag #balancetaracaille (rat out your scum) and the sharing of articles setting working-​class areas against the rest of the country. The phenomenon became part of the “brutalisation” of the online public debate, in which violence was typically both banalised and legitimised.21 Women who were feminist activists, humorists, or journalists were especially subject to organised campaigns of cyber-​harassment including insults, rape threats, and incitement to murder. This countermovement also revealed the far-​r ight’s growing influence on French politics. Although transnational, the #MeToo event became part of a social and political context specific to France. Debates about harassment and sexual violence brought to light faultlines regarding questions of national identity not long after the 2015 attacks on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on 7 January and on the Bataclan concert hall and several other entertainment venues on 13 November. As a result, after Marine Le Pen, head of the Rassemblement national, reached the second round of the 2017 presidential election, she felt able to say in her New Year’s address to the media in January 2018 that “the vast majority of street harassment is carried out by immigrants who import a culture which does not respect women, a culture of the submission of women, and which, for many, expresses contempt for French women”.22 She had, for many years, based her xenophobic and Islamophobic discourse on a rhetoric of defending French women, which went hand in hand with her strategy of recruiting women voters.23 Beyond social networks and political issues, the public debate about the #MeToo event became particularly polarised. Feminists faced a series of counter-​offensives on several fronts, which in turn prompted them to take joint action. Opposition became concentrated around the “rat out your pig” formula, which rang alarm bells about the potential abuses of a culture of denunciation. References to the Vichy Regime during World War II were very soon being bandied about. Philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, for instance, in a morning radio broadcast on 16 October 2017, feared that Twitter might replace the courts, and women “answerable to the law” become its “administrators” as part of a “purge” operation.24 Similarly, the young neoreactionary activist, Eugénie Bastié, in a book published in 2018 with the title Le porc émissaire: Terreur ou contre-​révolution (The Scapepig: Terror or Counterrevolution), feared the excesses of a “victim” feminism that might lead to a war on men. Referring to 1793, she compared #balancetonporc and #MeToo to the Terror following the French Revolution. Claiming to be a feminist herself, she reiterated accusations routinely levelled at certain activists regarding their excesses and aggressiveness and advocated, instead, an equality based on complementarity and respect for a traditional definition of the difference between the sexes.25 The facts refute these fears, however, since analysis of the tweets themselves shows that only a very small minority mention assailants by name. Many speak of a boss, a colleague, a teacher, a family member, a neighbour, etc. without naming names at all. Several celebrities, moreover, lamented the predicted end of seduction and a deterioration in heterosexual romantic relationships. An open letter on 9 January 2018 defended the “freedom to importune, indispensable to sexual freedom”. Published in the leading newspaper Le Monde, it benefited from the newspaper’s aura and hit the headlines. The article recalled that violence was a crime but stated that “trying to pick someone up, even persistently or awkwardly, is not a crime”. It went on to add that “this frenzy of sending ‘pigs’ to the slaughterhouse, far 274

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from helping women to gain autonomy, in reality, served the interests of the enemies of sexual freedom, religious extremists, the worst reactionaries …” It was signed by 100 women, primarily journalists, writers, and artists from several generations, a number of whom had already come to the defence of Dominique Strauss-Kahn a few years earlier.26 Famous names attracted attention, particularly that of Catherine Deneuve who had signed the feminist Manifesto of the 343 in 1971, calling for the legalisation of abortion. The film star, who later apologised to victims who might have felt attacked by the letter,27 is the embodiment of charm and “seduction à la française”. This is also true of Brigitte Bardot who told Paris Match magazine she found actresses condemning sexual violence “ridiculous, hypocritical, and of no interest”, adding that she had also found it “charming” to be told she was beautiful or that she had “a nice little arse”.28 The two French icons were widely mocked in the US television programme Saturday Night Live on 3 February 2018, by two female comedians who over-​exaggerated their accents and, the “cigarette-​in-​hand” posturing.29 This demonstrated that the fantasy of “seduction à la française” was a co-​construction of France and the United States. It was a fantasy condemned by some researchers, such as Laure Murat, a French academic living in the United States. She wrote an essay calling for the sterile confrontation between French-​style gallantry and American puritanism to be put in its historical context, and for a reflection on the radical break represented by the #MeToo event which, in her view, stood out because of its “unique and global” nature.30 In response to the letter in Le Monde, several feminists objected to the idea of “freedom to importune” and defended “the right to be left alone”. While admittedly more restricted, their riposte was not, however, without value. Responding to each argument in the original letter and permitting no conflation of seduction and sexual violence, it was, in addition, written in the first person plural, which bolstered the sense of a growing movement: “We are victims of violence. We are not ashamed. We are on our feet. Strong. Keen. Determined. We are going to do away with sexist and sexual violence.”31 All these offensives were unable to curb the impact of #balancetonporc and #MeToo, which were particularly effective among young people. A survey of female students in Bordeaux, for example, an age group particularly affected by street harassment, found them adopting a “pragmatic feminism” which now led them to “speak out both as victims and as witnesses”.32 Their awareness was based more on their use of social networks and their cultural consumption than on readings of theory. In addition to English-​speaking stars like Emma Watson and Beyoncé, two young francophone Belgian singers popularised the revolt against sexism and violence against women: Angèle and her mocking video hit Balance ton quoi (Rat out Your Whatever);33 and rapper Chilla with an outraged Balance ton porc of her own: “J’déverse mon amertume (I unleash my bitterness)/​Combien de larmes? (How many tears?) Ma rage écume (My fuming fury)/​Combien de fois? (How many times?) Combien de femmes? (How many women?)/​Combien ont succombé aux frappes du mâle et son culte? (How many have succumbed to the blows of the male and his cult?).”34 They personify the values of disobedience and the aspiration for equality. The shock wave also promoted a change in legislation, submitted by Marlène Schiappa, Secretary of State for Equality between Men and Women and the Fight against Discrimination. The law of 3 August 2018, which strengthened the fight against sexual and sexist violence, recognised “offensive sexist behaviour” and introduced sanctions for “forcing upon any person any remark or behaviour with a sexual or sexist connotation, which is an affront to that person’s dignity because of its degrading or humiliating nature or because it creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive situation towards that person”. 275

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At the same time, movements to condemn discrimination and sexual harassment emerged in certain professions. This was especially true of journalism. The groundwork for this situation had already been done with the creation of a professional organisation in 2015, Prenons la une! (Let’s Take the Front Page!), which condemned the unequal representation of men and women in the media and the obstacles to women’s careers in journalism. In 2019, “the MeToo of French journalism” erupted.35 It began with the revelation of a Facebook group —​the “Ligue du Lol” (Lol League) —​designed to systematically harass young, female, feminist, journalists, and men who did not correspond to hegemonic standards of masculinity. Between 2009 and 2013, it brought together prominent young men, working in the media and communications, who sent abusive messages, staged practical jokes, and circulated photoshopped pornographic images. The exposé led to some people losing their jobs and encouraged women journalists to testify to the still considerable role played by sexism in the media. The effect was especially notable, however, in terms of the spectacular resurgence of feminist campaigning in France, encouraged by the extent of transnational circulations.

“Let’s get up and break away” Slogans and symbolic objects (such as the triangular green scarf in favour of abortion in Argentina) crossed national frontiers and travelled as far as France where they were taken up by activists.36 One example of the circulation of these types of actions was the success of the Chilean song “Un violador en tu camino” (a rapist on your path), in French “Un violeur sur ton chemin”. The song and dance performance, done for the first time in Santiago by the Las Tesis collective, was copied in several cities on every continent on 25 November 2019, and picked up by social networks and mainstream media. Familiar because the images had circulated quickly, certain slogans and sets of actions helped to forge a global movement. In Martinique, on 8 March 2020, a group of women danced and sang in Fort-​de-​France in a performance that recalled the one from Chile although the words in Creole had been changed: “Complis la sé wou (The bystander is you)/​Coupable la sé wou (The perpetrator is you)/​Kriminel la sé wou (The criminal is you)/​Violè la sé wou (The rapist is you)”. This integration into a global movement was interpreted as the sign of a feminist revival, sometimes called the “fourth wave”, which acts as an identity marker for young feminists. Current feminist mobilisations are characterised locally and globally by the desire to spread rapidly between social networks, the traditional media, and the street while, post #MeToo, condemnation of femicides has been on the rise. For the United Nations Human Rights Council, femicide is the death of a woman by violence and refers to various situations depending on the country, including spousal homicides, the abortion of unborn girls, and honour crimes. An increase in the term’s transnational circulation started in 2015 when the slogan “Ni una menos” (Not one (woman) less), used by feminists in Argentina, was taken up. Made popular by the group Osez le féminisme! (Dare Feminism!), a collective set up by young activists in 2009, the word femicide became established in France, attesting to the revival of campaigns focused on violence against women. Activist Marguerite Stern used the urban landscape to write slogans in big black letters on white sheets of paper posted on walls, first in Marseille, and then in Lyon and Paris. As of September 2019, numerous informal collectives adopted this kind of action and also condemned the murders of women using language designed to shock, such as “we refuse to keep counting our dead”, or by posting the number of victims and their names. In 2018, activist Caroline de Haas founded the #NousToutes (WeAll) collective in order to attract as many people as possible to the demonstration on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. She had the advantage of having been 276

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an activist in a student union and then with Osez le féminisme! as well as political experience in the Socialist Party and then at the Ministry for Women’s Rights. Armed with her new professional practice as a communicator specialising in gender equality, she developed a multipronged strategy based on social networks to coordinate the dissemination of messages online as well as through her contacts with journalists from the mainstream media. Throughout the year, the #NousToutes movement held a variety of events to provide information about the figures for acts of violence. The feminist demonstrations of 2018–​2020, as huge as those in favour of abortion in 1979 and 1995, were striking in terms of the youth and diversity of their participants. They indicated an influx of activists, women and men, and the spread of demands to a wider public. Dissenting voices created the #NousAussi (WeToo) slogan, which brought together Afrofeminists, Muslim feminists, and the Union of Sex Workers, who felt feminist movements had rendered them invisible. Feminists continued to disagree over issues such as the Muslim veil being worn in public spaces and the fight against prostitution. Nevertheless, the large-​scale demonstrations of 25 November 2018 and 2019 provided an opportunity to unite in a single march that went beyond political disagreements, whereas in the past feminists had regularly marched separately. The moment was magnified by the creation of alternative feminist media outlets, online magazines, and podcasts. Gender, class, and racial identities are deconstructed in a variety of programmes, such as Kiffe ta race37 by Rokhaya Diallo and Grace Ly, a podcast “that jumps head first into racial identities”, Les couilles sur la table (Whip it Out) by Victoire Tuaillon on masculinity, and the Camille podcast on gender and sexualities. Alongside these professionalised modes of speaking out, there are a number of Afrofeminist youtubers, women who want to reappropriate what they say is “speech confiscated”, by white feminists and Black men;38 in this way they are building networks around the concept of non-​integration, the concept of intersectionality, or the term “misogynoir” (a contraction of misogyny and noir (black)) for example.39 Two documentaries produced in 2017, Mariannes noires by Mame-​Fatou Niang and Ouvrir la voix (Speak Up:  Make Your Way) by Amandine Gay, based on statements of young Black women living in France, were in the same vein.40 The #MeToo movement also became part of a continuum of new feminist perspectives on the body, which attested to the search for an egalitarian sexual revolution. Menstruation, the clitoris, female pleasure, and even medicine had been politicised, giving rise to campaigns such as the successful protests against the “pink tax”, a higher level of VAT on sanitary towels and tampons. The fight against power relations in gynaecology developed using the term “gynaecological and obstetric violence”. When, in February 2020, a collective of young feminists published a new version of the book Notre corps, nous-​mêmes (Our Bodies, Ourselves, an adaptation of the 1971 American original, first published in France in 1977), it appeared to attest to a reconfiguration of demands related to the body, which had been in circulation since the 1970s, even if the new version had been thoroughly reworked. In March 2019, four feminists launched a highly aestheticised poster campaign depicting the clitoris in 3D: “It is not a Bretzel”, “It is not an alien”, “It is not a ghost”. Accompanied by a Twitter account and a website exhorting visitors to “Join the clitoris revolution”, the multi-​ media campaign sought to make information more accessible to all. Behind the campaign was Julia Pietri, a graphic designer, who joined forces with Bouchera Azzouz and Ouarda Sadoudi, animators from the Féminisme populaire (Popular Feminism) organisation, and with Axelle Jah Njiké, administrator of the Group for the Abolition of Genital Mutilation, who hosts the podcast Me, My Sex, and I. Together, they launched a petition to have the anatomy of the clitoris depicted as an integral part of female genitalia in the school curriculum and in school textbooks and to ensure not only lessons but also training for educators in how to provide sex education 277

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that was free from taboos or censorship. In addition to advancing knowledge about female pleasure, such teaching sought to combat “rape culture” and female genital cutting. On 8 March 2020, the “On arrête toutes” (We all stop) collective launched an appeal for a “feminist strike against the patriarchy”, its tone seemingly prophetic amid the COVID-19 crisis (apart from the open borders): Stop job insecurity, overexploitation, low pay, discrimination, racism. Stop almost single-handedly taking on housework, children’s education, care for the elderly. Stop neoliberal capitalism which is seeing off our public services […]. Stop insults, blows, gynaecological and obstetric violence, harassment, rape, murders, femicide. Stop closing voluntary termination centres […]41 The protests of 8 March 2020, were also affected when Roman Polanski’s latest film, J’accuse, about the Dreyfus Affair, was nominated for 12 prizes at the Césars, French cinema’s most prestigious award ceremony, where it ultimately took the best director prize. The film world’s recognition of a man accused of numerous sexual assaults was the subject of actions before, during, and after the evening of the ceremony. The hashtag #BoycottPolanski had already targeted the director during a retrospective of his work at the Cinématheque Française in 2017 and again when his film reached the movie halls. He was regarded as the symbol of a system that protected the assailants rather than the victims. The young actress, Adèle Haenel, openly feminist and an out lesbian, who had accused another director of harassment and inappropriate touching when she was between 12 and 15 years old, was once again in the spotlight at the Césars ceremony. She had been nominated for her role in the film Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), directed by Céline Sciamma, which features women, their solidarity, and their love. When Roman Polanski was declared the winner, Haenel stood up and left the auditorium, shouting, “It’s a disgrace”. She was followed by Sciamma. The entire ceremony was marked by people taking political positions, including actress Aïssa Maïga who spoke powerfully about the marginal place of Black actresses and actors in French cinema and the stereotypical roles reserved for them. Virginie Despentes, the author of the 2006 feminist essay King Kong Theory and, more recently, of the Vernon Subutex trilogy, wrote an opinion piece published in leftwing newspaper Libération on 1 March 2020, under the title “Césars: From Now on, We’re Getting Up and Getting Out”. The gesture and the article led to numerous arguments that were intensified by the media and by social networks but also became flags to which feminists rallied. They were taken up as slogans stuck on walls or written on home-made placards at demonstrations and as catchphrases and plays on words such as “portrait of the patriarchy on fire”, “let’s get up and get out of here”, and “let’s get up and break away”, the last one seen in Figure 19.1. Despentes, Sciamma, and Haenel took part in the 8 March parade in Paris, thereby strengthening the association between their public stances and the current movement. The various happenings on 8 March 2020 were both a distillation of and an insight into contemporary issues in the history of feminism. First, they revealed a great variety of demands, diverging politically but coming together in this institutionalised feminist celebration. Second, the role of show business personalities has become ever more significant, which in turn heightens media coverage. Moreover, a revived spectacularisation of protests can be seen in the linking of demands to symbols, costumes, songs, and graphic styles. Finally, the 8 March events were part of the construction of a feminist memory and of passing the baton. They indicated the political desire to take part in a long history of struggle while marking the specific moment with a stamp of renewal. In this respect, the circulation of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF - Women’s Liberation Movement) song from 1971, which activists have taken 278

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Figure 19.1  7 March 2020, Paris, 20th arrondissement. The French slogan translates to “Let’s get up and break away”. Source: Photo: Bibia Pavard.

up and adapted, the return of certain slogans such as “Ras le viol!” (Enough of rape!), “A baby if I want, when I want”, or again the re-​use of the 1978 poster (challenged and not in fact put up at the time) “This man is a rapist, this man is a man”, enables reflection on the extent to which the past is interwoven with the present. It also shows a process of memorialisation marked by a kind of limited vision (or ignorance) of the past, recalling the feminists who proclaimed in Partisans review in 1970: “Women’s liberation, year zero”. We are evidently on the verge of a revival and of a feminist uprising on an as yet unknown scale which, even as it hitches itself to the slogans of the past, is acquiring the guise of a modernity specific to the twenty-​first century in its forms and global scale, its visual output, and impact on social networks. It is the interweaving of these timeframes which turns the #MeToo event and its consequences into a specific “moment” in the history of French and global feminisms.

Notes 1 Bibia Pavard, Florence Rochefort, and Michelle Zancarini-​ Fournel, Ne nous libérez pas, on s’en charge: Histoire des féminismes de 1789 à nos jours [Don’t Liberate Us, We’ll Do it Ourselves. History of Feminisms from 1789 to the Present Day] (Paris: La Découverte, 2020). 2 “Libération des femmes année zéro” [Women’s Liberation Year Zero], Partisans, no.  54–​55 (July–​October  1970). 3 Erin Pizzey, Crie moins fort les voisins vont t’entendre, trad. par le collectif de traduction des éditions des femmes [translated by the translation collective at the Éditions des femmes] (Paris: Éditions des Femmes, 1975), originally published as Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear (London: IF Books, 1974); Susan Brownmiller, Le Viol, trad. Anne Villelaur (Paris:  Stock, 1976), originally published as Against Our Will: Men,Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975). 4 Françoise Picq, Libération des femmes: Les années mouvement [Women’s Liberation: The Movement Years] (Paris: Seuil, 1993). 5 Colette Pipon, Et on tuera tous les affreux: Le féminisme au risque de la misandrie (1970–​1980) [And We’ll Kill All the Ugly Ones: Feminism and Misandry] (Rennes: PUR-​Mnémosyne, 2013).

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Bibia Pavard et al. 6 Bibia Pavard, Si je veux quand je veux: contraception et avortement dans la société française (1956–​1979) [If I Want, When I Want: Contraception and Abortion in French Society (1956–​1979)] (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012). 7 Pauline Delage, Violence conjugales:  Du combat féministe à la cause publique [Domestic Violence:  From Feminist Combat to Public Cause] (Paris: Les Presses de Sciences Po, 2017). 8 Maryse Jaspard et al., Les violences envers les femmes en France: Une enquête nationale [Violence against Women in France: A National Inquiry] (Paris: La Documentation française, 2003). 9 Christelle Hamel et al., “Viols et agressions sexuelles en France: Premiers résultats de l’enquête Virage” [Rapes and Sexual Assaults in France: First Results of the Virage Survey], Population et Sociétés, no. 538 (2016). 10 Elisabeth Badinter, Fausse route [Dead End Feminism] (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003). 11 Maria Eugenia Uriburu, Laurie Laufer and Alvain Vanier, eds, “Violence envers les femmes: impasses, résistances, silences” [Impasses, Resistances, and Silences:  Violence Against Women], Cliniques Méditerranéennes Psychanalyse et psychopathologie freudiennes, no. 88 (2013). 12 Abigail C. Saguy, “Les conceptions juridiques du harcèlement sexuel en France et aux États-​Unis avant et après l’affaire DSK” [Legal Understandings of Sexual Harassment in France and the United States Before and After the DSK Affair], Travail, genre et sociétés, no. 28 (2012). 13 Loi 2016–​444 du 13 avril 2016 visant à renforcer la lutte contre le système prostitutionnel et à accompagner les personnes prostituées [Law 2016–​444 of 13 April 2016 Aimed at Strengthening the Fight Against the Prostitutional System and Providing Support for Prostitutes], Journal Officiel de la République Française, 14 April 2016, www.legifrance.gouv.fr/​jo_​pdf.do?id=JORFTEXT000032396046. 14 Campagne Viol (website), accessed 9 June 2020, www.contreleviol.fr/​. 15 Elsa Vigoureux, “ ‘Je déclare avoir été violée’: L’Obs lance le manifeste des 313” [I Declare Having Been Raped:  L’Obs Publishes the Manifesto of the  313] L’Observateur, 12 November 2012, www. nouvelobs.com/​societe/​viol-​le-​manifeste/​20121119.OBS9861/​je-​declare-​avoir-​ete-​violee-​l-​obs-​ lance-​le-​manifeste-​des-​313.html. 16 Virginie Despentes, King Kong théorie [King Kong Theory] (Paris: Grasset, 2006). 17 Xavier Legrand, dir, Jusqu’à la garde [Custody] (KG Productions, 2017). 18 Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_​Milano), “If You’ve Been Sexually Harassed or Assaulted Write ‘Me Too’ as a Reply to This Tweet”, Twitter, 15 October 2017, https://​twitter.com/​Alyssa_​Milano/​status/​ 919659438700670976. 19 La Netscouade, “#balancetonporc la polémique désossée” [#balancetonporc:  The Argument Picked Apart], 23 November 2017, https://​medium.com/​@LaNetscouade/​balancetonporc​lapolemiquedesossee-​7e7bf0a8a9f4. 20 The term refers to poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of large cities, where the majority population are descendants of immigrants from North Africa and Sub-​Saharan Africa. 21 Romain Badouard, “Internet et la brutalisation du débat public” [Internet and the Brutalisation of the Public Debate], La vie des idées, 6 November 2018, https://​laviedesidees.fr/​Internet-​et-​la-​brutalisation-​ du-​debat-​public.html. 22 “Marine Le Pen condamne le harcèlement de rue, produit de l’immigration selon elle” [Marine Le Pen Condemns Street Harassment, Says It Is a Product of Immigration], Le Parisien, 15 January 2018, www. leparisien.fr/​politique/​marine-​le-​pen-​condamne-​le-​harcelement-​de-​rue-​produit-​de-​l-​immigration-​ selon-​elle-​15-​01-​2018-​7502490.php. 23 Christèle Marchand-​Lagier, “Le vote des femmes pour Marine Le Pen. Entre effet générationnel et précarité socioprofessionnelle” [The Women’s Vote for Marine Le Pen. Between Generational Effect and Socioprofessional Insecurity], Travail, genre et sociétés, no. 40, 2018. 24 Anna Bretau, “ Un hashtag peut-​il se substituer à la justice?” [Can a Hashtag Take the Place of the Courts?], Le Point, 18 October 2017, www.lepoint.fr/​societe/​balancetonporc-​un-​hashtag-​peut-​il-​se-​ substituer-​a-​la-​justice-​18-​10-​2017-​2165609_​23.php. 25 Eugénie Bastié, Le porc émissaire: Terreur ou contre-​révolution [The Scapepig: Terror or Counterrevolution] (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2018). 26 “Nous défendons une liberté d’importuner, indispensable à la liberté sexuelle” [We Defend a Freedom to Importune, Which Is Indispensable to Sexual Freedom], Le Monde, 9 January 2018, www.lemonde. fr/​idees/​article/​2018/​01/​09/​nous-​defendons-​une-​liberte-​d-​importuner-​indispensable-​a-​la-​liberte-​ sexuelle_​5239134_​3232.html. 27 Catherine Deneuve, “Rien dans le texte ne prétend que le harcèlement a du bon, sans quoi je ne l’aurais pas signé” [Nothing in the Declaration Implies That Harassment Is Reasonable: Had It Been

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#MeToo in France: A feminist revolution? the Case, I  Would not Have Signed], Libération, 14 January 2018, www.liberation.fr/​debats/​2018/​ 01/​14/​catherine-​deneuve-​r ien-​dans-​le-​texte-​ne-​pretend-​que-​le-​harcelement-​a-​du-​bon-​sans-​quoi-​ je-​ne-​l-​aurais_​1622399. 28 “Son combat pour les animaux, le harcèlement sexuel, son cancer, Brigitte Bardot nous dit tout” [Her Fight for Animals, Sexual Harassment, Her Cancer, Brigitte Bardot Tells Us Everything], Paris Match. com, 17 January 2018, www.parismatch.com/​People/​Son-​combat-​pour-​les-​animaux-​le-​harcelement-​ sexuel-​son-​cancer-​Brigitte-​Bardot-​nous-​dit-​tout-​1440152. 29 Saturday Night Live, Season 43, episode 13, aired 3 February 2018, on NBC, www.hulu.com/​series/​ saturday-​night-​live-​94218485-​ec4e-​4e58-​9c8c-​2acadcb2371c. 30 Laure Murat, Une révolution sexuelle? Réflexion sur l’après-​Weinstein [A Sexual Revolution? Thoughts on What Happened in the Aftermath of Weinstein] (Paris: Stock, 2018). 31 “Les porcs et leurs allié.e.s ont raison de s’inquiéter” [The Pigs and Their Allies Are Right to Be Worried], France Info, 10 January 2018, www.francetvinfo.fr/​societe/​droits-​des-​femmes/​tribune-​ les-​porcs-​et-​leurs-​allie-​e-​s-​ont-​raison-​de-​sinquieter-​caroline-​de-​haas-​et-​des-​militantes-​feministes-​ repondent-​a-​la-​tribune-​publiee-​dans-​le-​monde_​2553497.html. 32 Viviane Albenga and Johanna Dagorn, “Après #MeToo: Réappropriation de la sororité et résistances pratiques d’étudiantes françaises”, [After #MeToo:  Reappropriation of the Sisterhood and the Resistance Practices of French Female Students], Mouvements, no. 99 (2018): 79. 33 Angèle, Balance ton quoi (Angèle VL Records, 2018). 34 Chilla, #Balancetonporc (Paris: Capitol Music France, 2018). 35 Richard Sénéjoux, “Ligue du Lol:  les coulisses d’un scoop” [Lol League:  Behind the Scenes of a Scoop], Télérama, 15 February 2019, www.telerama.fr/​medias/​ligue-​du-​lol-​les-​coulisses-​dun-​ scoop,n6133342.php. 36 “Let’s get up and break away” is a reference to an expression used by the writer Viginie Despentes: “On se lève et on se casse”. 37 This is a slang expression in French, which means “having a blast”. At the same time, it is a play on words since it could be interpreted literally as “Love Your Race”. 38 Jaércio Bento da Silva, “L’empowerment féminin noir sur YouTube en France” [Black Feminine Empowerment on YouTube in France], Terminal, no. 125–​126 (2019), https://​journals.openedition. org/​terminal/​5453. 39 Stéphanie Melyon-​ Reinette, “Contre Misogynoir. Des Caribéennes francophones entre Black Feminism et afroféminisme” [Against Misogynoir: French-​speaking Caribbean Women between Black Feminism and Afrofeminism], Archipélies:  Université des Antilles, no.  6 (2018), www.archipelies.org/​ 369. 40 Mame-​Fatou Niang, dir., Mariannes noires [Black Mariannes] (Round Room Image, 2017); Amandine Gay, dir., Ouvrir la voix [Speak Up: Make Your Way] (Bras de Fer, 2017). 41 “Notre ‘appelle’ ” [Our Appeal], On arrête toutes, accessed 9 June 2020, http://​onarretetoutes.org.

Primary sources and bibliography Albenga, Viviane, and Johanna Dagorn. “Après #MeToo: Réappropriation de la sororité et résistances pratiques d’étudiantes françaises” [After #MeToo:  Reappropriation of the Sisterhood and the Resistance Practices of French Female Students]. Mouvements, no. 99 (2018): 75–​84. Angèle, Balance ton quoi [Rat out Your Whatever]. Angèle VL Records, 2018. Badinter, Elisabeth. Fausse route [Dead End Feminism]. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003. Badouard, Romain. “Internet et la brutalisation du débat public” [Internet and the Brutalisation of the Public Debate]. La vie des idées, 6 November 2018. https://​laviedesidees.fr/​Internet-​et-​la-​brutalisation-​ du-​debat-​public.html. Bastié, Eugénie. Le porc émissaire: Terreur ou contre-​révolution [The Scapepig: Terror or Counterrevolution]. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2018. Bento Da Silva, Jaércio. “L’empowerment féminin noir sur YouTube en France” [Black Feminine Empowerment on YouTube in France]. Terminal, no. 125–​126 (2019). https://​journals.openedition. org/​terminal/​5453. Bretau, Anna. “Un hashtag peut-​il se substituer à la justice?” [Can a Hashtag Take the Place of the Courts?]. Le Point, 18 October 2017. www.lepoint.fr/​societe/​balancetonporc-​un-​hashtag-​peut-​il-​se-​ substituer-​a-​la-​justice-​18-​10-​2017-​2165609_​23.php.

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Bibia Pavard et al. Brownmiller, Susan. Le Viol. Translated by Anne Villelaur. Paris:  Stock, 1976. Originally published as Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975. Campagne Viol (website). Accessed 9 June 2020. www.contreleviol.fr/. Chilla, #Balancetonporc [Rat out Your Pig]. Paris: Capitol Music France, 2018. Delage, Pauline. Violences conjugales:  Du combat féministe à la cause publique [Domestic Violence:  From Feminist Combat to Public Cause]. Paris: Les Presses de Sciences Po, 2017. Deneuve, Catherine. “Rien dans le texte ne prétend que le harcèlement a du bon, sans quoi je ne l’aurais pas signé” [Nothing in the Declaration Implies That Harassment Is Reasonable:  Had It Been the Case, I Would not Have Signed]. Libération, 14 January 2018. www.liberation.fr/debats/2018/01/14/ catherine-deneuve-rien-dans-le-texte-ne-pretend-que-le-harcelement-a-du-bon-sans-quoi-je-ne-laurais_1622399. Despentes, Virginie. King Kong théorie [King Kong Theory]. Paris: Grasset, 2006. France Info. “Les porcs et leurs allié.e.s ont raison de s’inquiéter” [The Pigs and Their Allies Are Right to Be Worried]. 10 January 2018. www.francetvinfo.fr/societe/droits-des-femmes/tribune-les-porcs-etleurs-allie-e-s-ont-raison-de-sinquieter-caroline-de-haas-et-des-militantes-feministes-repondent-ala-tribune-publiee-dans-le-monde_2553497.html. Gay, Amandine, dir. Ouvrir la voix [Speak Up: Make Your Way]. Bras de Fer, 2017. Hamel, Christelle, Alice Debauche, Elizabeth Brown, Amandine Lebugle, Tania Lejbowicz, Magali Mazuy, Amélie Charruault, Sylvie Cromer, and Justine Dupuis. “Viols et agressions sexuelles en France. Premiers résultats de l’enquête Virage” [Rapes and Sexual Assaults in France: First Results of the Virage Survey]. Population et Sociétés, no. 538 (2016). Jaspard, Maryse, Elisabeth Brown, Stéphanie Condon, Dominique Fougeyrollas-Schwebel, Annick Houel, Jean-Marie Firdion, Brigitte Lhomond, Florence Maillochon, Marie-Josèphe Saurel-Cubizolles, and Marie-Ange Schiltz. Les violences envers les femmes en France:  Une enquête nationale [Violence against Women in France. A National Inquiry]. Paris: La Documentation française, 2003. La Netscouade. “#balancetonporc la polémique désossée” [#balancetonporc:  The Argument Picked Apart]. Medium, 23 November 2017. https://medium.com/@LaNetscouade/balancetonporclapolemiquedesossee-7e7bf0a8a9f4. Le Monde. “Nous défendons une liberté d’importuner, indispensable à la liberté sexuelle” [We Defend a Freedom to Importune, Which Is Indispensable to Sexual Freedom]. 9 January 2018. www.lemonde. fr/idees/article/2018/01/09/nous-defendons-une-liberte-d-importuner-indispensable-a-la-libertesexuelle_5239134_3232.html. Le Parisien. “Marine Le Pen condamne le harcèlement de rue, produit de l’immigration selon elle” [Marine Le Pen Condemns Street Harassment, Says It Is a Product of Immigration]. 15 January 2018. www. leparisien.fr/politique/marine-le-pen-condamne-le-harcelement-de-rue-produit-de-l-immigrationselon-elle-15-01-2018-7502490.php. Legrand, Xavier dir. Jusqu’à la garde [Custody]. KG Productions, 2017. “Libération des femmes année zéro” [Women’s Liberation Year Zero]. Partisans, no. 54–5 (July–October 1970). Loi 2016–444 du 13 avril 2016 visant à renforcer la lutte contre le système prostitutionnel et à accompagner les personnes prostituées [Law 2016–444 of 13 April 2016 Aimed at Strengthening the Fight Against the Prostitutional System and Providing Support for Prostitutes]. Journal Officiel de la République Française, 14 April 2016. www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jo_pdf.do?id=JORFTEXT000032396046. Marchand-Lagier, Christèle. “Le vote des femmes pour Marine Le Pen. Entre effet générationnel et précarité socioprofessionnelle” [The Women’s Vote for Marine Le Pen. Between Generational Effect and Socioprofessional Insecurity]. Travail, genre et sociétés, no. 40, 2018: 85–106. Melyon-Reinette, Stéphanie. “Contre Misogynoir. Des Caribéennes francophones entre Black Feminism et afroféminisme” [Against Misogynoir: French-speaking Caribbean Women between Black Feminism and Afrofeminism]. Archipélies: Université des Antilles, no. 6 (2018). www.archipelies.org/369. Milano, Alyssa (@Alyssa_Milano). “If You’ve Been Sexually Harassed or Assaulted Write ‘Me Too’ as a Reply to This Tweet”. Twitter, 15 October 2017. https://twitter.com/alyssa_milano/status/ 919659438700670976?lang=en. Murat, Laure. Une révolution sexuelle? Réflexion sur l’après-Weinstein [A Sexual Revolution? Thoughts on What Happened in the Aftermath of Weinstein]. Paris: Stock, 2018. Niang, Mame-Fatou, dir. Mariannes noires [Black Mariannes]. Round Room Image, 2017. On arrête toutes. “Notre ‘appelle’” [Our Appeal]. Accessed 9 June 2020. http://onarretetoutes.org.

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#MeToo in France: A feminist revolution? Paris Match. “Son combat pour les animaux, le harcèlement sexuel, son cancer, Brigitte Bardot nous dit tout” [Her Fight for Animals, Sexual Harassment, Her Cancer, Brigitte Bardot Tells Us Everything]. 17 January 2018. www.parismatch.com/People/Son-combat-pour-les-animaux-le-harcelementsexuel-son-cancer-Brigitte-Bardot-nous-dit-tout-1440152. Pavard, Bibia. Si je veux quand je veux:  contraception et avortement dans la société française (1956–1979) [If I Want, When I Want: Contraception and Abortion in French Society (1956–1979)]. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012. Pavard, Bibia, Florence Rochefort, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel. Ne nous libérez pas, on s’en charge: Histoire des féminismes de 1789 à nos jours [Don’t Liberate Us, We’ll Do it Ourselves. History of Feminisms from 1789 to the Present Day]. Paris: La Découverte, 2020. Picq, Françoise. Libération des femmes: Les années mouvement [Women’s Liberation: The Movement Years]. Paris: Seuil, 1993. Pipon, Colette. Et on tuera tous les affreux: Le féminisme au risque de la misandrie (1970–1980) [And We’ll Kill All the Ugly Ones. Feminism and Misandry]. Rennes: PUR-Mnémosyne, 2013 Pizzey, Erin. Crie moins fort les voisins vont t’entendre. Traduit par le collectif de traduction des éditions des femmes [translated by the translation collective at the Éditions des femmes]. Paris: Éditions des Femmes, 1975. Originally published as Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. London: IF Books, 1974. Saguy, Abigail C. “Les conceptions juridiques du harcèlement sexuel en France et aux États-Unis avant et après l’affaire DSK” [Legal Understandings of Sexual Harassment in France and the United States Before and After the DSK Affair]. Travail, genre et sociétés, no. 28 (2012): 89–106. Saturday Night Live. Season 43, episode 13. Aired 3 February 2018, on NBC. www.hulu.com/series/ saturday-night-live-94218485-ec4e-4e58-9c8c-2acadcb2371c. Sénéjoux, Richard. “Ligue du Lol: les coulisses d’un scoop” [Lol League: Behind the Scenes of a Scoop]. Télérama, 15 February 2019. www.telerama.fr/medias/ligue-du-lol-les-coulisses-dun-scoop,n6133342. php. Uriburu, Maria Eugenia, Laurie Laufer, and Alvain Vanier, eds. “Violence envers les femmes: impasses, résistances, silences” [Impasses, Resistances, and Silences:  Violence against Women]. Cliniques Méditerranéennes Psychanalyse et psychopathologie freudiennes [Mediterranean Clinic:  Freudian Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology], no. 88 (2013). Vigoureux, Elsa. “ ‘Je déclare avoir été violée’:  l’Obs lance le manifeste des 313” [I Declare Having Been Raped:  L’Obs Publishes the Manifesto of the 313]. L’Observateur, 12 November 2012. www. nouvelobs.com/ societe/ viol- le- manifeste/ 20121119.OBS9861/je- declare- avoir- ete- violee- l- obslance-le-manifeste-des-313.html.

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20 POLISH #METOO When concern for men’s rights derails the women’s revolution Magdalena Grabowska and Marta Rawłuszko

International debates on #MeToo span issues of women’s subjectivity in the political process,1 durability and effectiveness of the internet as a tool to fight violence against different groups of women,2 and the productivity of clustering various forms of sexual violence in internet testimonies.3 Many of these accounts ask broader questions related to power in the structure of domination,4 and freedom in the context of “affirmative consent” as a proposed formula of fighting sexual violence.5 Critics have contemplated whether the #MeToo movement has gone too far, or perhaps not far enough,6 and whether it will move “beyond naming and shaming”.7 The ongoing contentions have centred on feminism as a theoretical approach and social practice, providing analyses of power and dominance within progressive movements and feminism,8 historical examinations of feminist approaches to women’s subjectivity, and agency with regard to sexual freedom and sexual violence,9 while asking crucial questions of the progress of women’s movements, and their ability to move women’s rights forward over the decades.10 Finally, these debates have recognised #MeToo as an unavoidable reaction among women to the substantial discrepancy between their experiences of sexual violence and the law.11 The majority of existing interrogations of #MeToo focus on the “Western” context of the campaign, highlighting the fact that the new means of fighting sexual violence proposed by #MeToo descend directly from the work of first-​and second-​wave Western feminism.12 However, the fact that the #MeToo movement spread immediately across the globe adjures as a crucial task of feminist research the study of international aspects of the campaign and various local receptions of this new phenomenon. Any examination of this unique campaign and its attendant social upheaval cannot be fully constructive without bringing critical assessment of local contexts to the centre. Therefore, in this chapter we propose to examine the course of #MeToo movement in Poland through the lenses of actual practices of law enforcement, wider social norms that regulate popular attitudes towards sexual violence and its female survivors, and the status and condition of women’s movements. We argue that in Poland, many topics brought up in Western discussions are present, but the local context also shapes the ways in which the campaign has developed. Relatively weak visibility and accountability of feminist perspectives in national media, as well as constraints and limitations of feminist debates in Poland (which centre on the role of state institutions in fighting violence against women, while also drawing

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heavily on the Western, liberal, approach to freedom and sexuality) are major factors shaping Polish debates on #MeToo. In this chapter we argue that in Poland, the trajectory of #MeToo can be called an “unfinished revolution”, which had ambivalent social and political effects: the movement contributed to the mainstreaming of the issue of sexual violence against women in popular debate, but simultaneously triggered no progress in legal proceedings against rape or sexual violence perpetrators. The effects of #MeToo on the feminist movement in Poland are dubious: while it has strengthened the visibility of anti-​sexual violence activism in the public sphere, it has also revealed major rifts within feminism itself, indicating that on issues of women’s accountability and effective strategies to combat sexual violence, the movement remains split along ideological and generational divides. Before we present our interpretation of the Polish #MeToo trajectory and impact, it is necessary to explain our positioning. We have been involved in studying the phenomenon of sexual violence against women in Poland and have participated in several public conversations regarding this topic prior to #MeToo.13 During #MeToo, we used our private social media channels to express our views, and clearly positioned ourselves within the existing debate. We openly disagreed with certain feminist voices and supported others.14 We wrote this chapter with the clear knowledge that the Polish debate on #MeToo went in many directions and brought together different, sometimes contradictory voices. We systematically followed the local debate and carefully examined dozens of related media reports of #MeToo, using analytical skills and feminist engagement. Still, our analysis is not neutral, nor does it pretend to be objective. What we present below is our reading of what happened, and we are part of this story.

#MeToo —​the legal and political context in Poland Delineating the local, legal, and political context in which the Polish #MeToo movement unravelled may be a good starting point for attempting to comprehend how scattered hegemonies and intersecting power structures contributed to the trajectory of #MeToo in Poland and produced complex, if unsatisfying outcomes of the movement. The current state of Polish legal provisions on sexual abuse, including rape, attempt to rape, and sexual harassment, are, on paper, in full accordance with international standards, defined either by the EU directives or by the Council of Europe. The most recent changes introduced to the Polish Penal Code in 2014 concerned legal proceedings in cases of rape —​the treatment of rape victims, as well as the work of police officers, prosecution, and courts. The most fundamental modification was brought to the status of rape cases, which are no longer prosecuted at the victim’s request, but ex officio by law enforcement. This crucial legal change did not, however, lead to the improvement of rape prosecution in Polish courts, and the legal practice regarding sexual assaults is seriously lagging behind.15 Women’s organisations, which, for over 20 years, played a crucial role in assisting survivors of sexual abuse, argue that the existing legal definition of rape, based on the requirement of “lack of consent”, is part of the problem.16 Prosecutors often look for physical evidence of attack and defense and demand proof that the perpetrator comprehended the victim’s verbal and/​or physical resistance as constant, real, and not simulated.17 For decades now, Polish courts as well as “experts” (including sexologists) have conceived of rape either as a horrifying act of violence (often excused by the idea of male sexuality), and/​or as an incident for which women are responsible (often explained by the idea of female promiscuity).18 Courts and “experts” do not recognise women’s well-​being and subjectivity as important components of the judicial proceedings.

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Women and feminist activists who produce vast amounts of knowledge on the status of sexual violence survivors confirm that the criminal justice system representatives remain undereducated, misinformed, or openly prejudiced. Women who report sexual assault face distrust, disregard, or mistreatment. They are not perceived as sufficiently accountable, and throughout the whole formal proceedings of cases of sexual assault, their testimonies are challenged.19 The Polish legal system largely disregards the magnitude of rape as a crime. Between 2014 and 2016, an average of 67% of all rape cases were dropped by the prosecution,20 and although the Polish criminal code proposes one of the highest penalties for rape in Europe (up to 12 years of imprisonment), the official statistics confirm that more than 40% of all rape cases that are eventually processed by Polish courts ultimately end up with a suspended sentence. In other words, even if the court admits the guilt of the rapist, the rapist may still escape punishment. This is how the well-​known vicious circle operates. As a recent Amnesty International report on gender-​based violence in Poland concluded:  “every time we approach state institutions and we receive no support at all, the feeling of helplessness increases, as well as the risk that a person who experiences violence will not take up any further action. Inefficient proceedings and insufficient institutional support result in women not seeking any help. At the same time, with less women asking for legal assistance, the number of undisclosed crimes and abusers, who do not bear any criminal responsibility increases”.21 Media have started to play an important role in publicising both cases of sexual abuse and deficiencies of the legal system. In 2014, many mainstream outlets reported on the case of a translator from Elbląg who was raped by two paramedics during a professional training retreat. While the perpetrators were found guilty by the court, their sentences were suspended on account of the lack of previous instances of violence. At the end of 2018, an independent journalists’ report drew attention to the story of an 18-​year-​old woman who was raped by her colleagues during her birthday party. Although the perpetrators used a rape pill and photographed the crime on their cell phones, the prosecutor initially closed the file. The court chose to trust the abusers, who alleged the woman’s consent, and supported their decision with an “expert opinion” which argued that traces of the GHB drug in the victim’s blood could have been produced “independently” on her own. These accounts increase the public’s knowledge about the scale of sexual abuse and the obvious shortcomings of the criminal system, yet they rarely put the question of women’s subjectivity, gender discrimination, sexism, and power at the centre of their analysis. Many public reports of sexual abuse cases, especially in the workplace and/​or in a professional relationship, refer to them as to “sex scandals” or “zipper cases” rather than as instances of rape or sexual misconduct. These accounts follow in the footsteps of the more distant past when, in 2007, local politician Aneta Krawczyk accused two of her former party colleagues of rape and sexual harassment. Despite feminists’ ongoing efforts to represent Krawczyk’s and other women’s experiences as cases of discrimination and abuse,22 in many media expositions, sexual violence is still represented as a question of “sex” and “career making”, a situation in which women willingly compromise their sexual autonomy for privileges related to power or money. The actual extent of gender-​based violence, including sexual violence, in Poland also remains a topic of debate and contention, and oftentimes, a subject of political manipulation. Well-​known expert and victimisation professor, Beata Gruszczyńska, indicates that women in Poland experience some form of violence every 40 seconds, and argues that as many as 800,000 women a year experience violence in Poland. However, the same victimisation research notes that only 30% of women report being assaulted to the police.23 Low reporting rates reflect the fact that large portions of Polish society excuse violence and sexual violence. 286

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Indeed, 30% of Poles agree that sex without consent can be justified, while 28% support the statement that violence is often provoked by the victim.24 Recent public opinion polls revealed that only 38% of men in Poland think that making public comments on women’s buttocks or breasts may be inappropriate or insulting. Moreover, 20% of men think that making sexual offers to female strangers is a neutral behaviour or a form of compliment, and 12% think similarly about deliberate sexual touching.25 Such attitudes are fertile ground for an ongoing right-​wing argument against “gender ideology”, which relies on the assumption that a social constructivist approach to gender is a concept foreign to Polish culture, an idea imported from the “rotten West”,26 or undemocratically imposed by international, “foreign” forces and their local supporters.27 According to conservative right-​wing discourse, Polish culture is and should remain untouched by “gender” equality propaganda that permeates Western Europe and brings about such violence against women and sexual violence, supposedly unknown amongst traditional, family-oriented societies. Complementary to that is the idea that the Polish family, based on traditional and exclusively heterosexual structures, provides respect or “adoration” to women and their protection from abuse, which, in Poland, is minor and insignificant. Surprisingly, the statistics produced within European institutions, namely the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), have become an unexpected ally of such patriarchal argumentation. According to the FRA pan-​European study on violence against women and sexual violence conducted in 2014, Poland was among the countries with the lowest rate of partner and sexual violence. The research indicated that only 19% of women in Poland experienced physical and/​or sexual violence from partners or non-​partners, compared to the European average of 33%. Some right-​wing journalists and commentators in Poland considered this FRA research to be irrefutable proof that Polish culture is violence-​free. Many emphasised the professional character of these statistics, in contrast to what they called “feminist confabulations” about the scale of violence against women in Poland, and noted that the rate of violence against women, according to the FRA, is significantly lower in Catholic countries, including Poland, Portugal, and Spain, and higher in Scandinavia and Western Europe.28 While the FRA study was quoted in a number of Polish right-​wing media outlets as proof that traditional conservative values, often related to Catholicism, prevent violence against women, activists pointed out that different EU countries have different cultural norms around revealing and reporting sexual violence against women, and identified potential methodological misgivings about the FRA study. In 2015, the Foundation for Emancipation and Equality (STER) conducted a study that challenged the FRA report. This recent research, which we co-​ authored, revealed that the statistics generated by FRA might have underestimated the scale of sexual violence against women in Poland. The substantial majority of women who participated in the STER study (87.6%) experienced one or several forms of sexual harassment from the age of 15, 37% participated in unwanted sexual activity, 22% experienced an attempted rape, and 22% survived rape.29 The study revealed that sexual violence is a common experience for women; over 90% of our interviewees had encountered some form of assault (ranging from sexual harassment to rape) since the age of 15. However, mundane sexual violence that constitutes an inherent part of women’s lives from childhood easily goes “unnoticed” and “unrecorded”. Our research also illuminated the existence of a “gray area”:  society (family members, teachers, friends, neighbours, colleagues) tends not react, but rather to discredit and undermine numerous instances of sexual violence, which leads to women rarely speaking up about abuse or reporting it to the authorities. The overwhelming majority of women chose to remain silent about the violence that they experienced, often deciding to “manage the situation by themselves”. 287

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Nearly all cases (91.8%) of rape never get reported to the police. Women claimed that they didn’t speak up primarily because they felt shame and embarrassment and doubted that the police could do anything to help. Unsurprisingly, women’s decisions seem perfectly reasonable within the existing institutional and cultural context, which urges sexual violence survivors to stay silent. Importantly, sexual violence as conceptualised in many women’s narratives does not meet existing legal definitions of a crime or of a violation of women’s rights. “Suffering”, “harm”, and “injury” experienced by women are rarely framed in legal terms, or precisely navigated among different and formally distinctive definitions of “sexual harassment”, “other sexual assault”, “rape”, and “attempt to rape”. Rather, women narrate sexual assault, including rape, as an incident that detracted from the well-​being of people (i.e., their own well-​being), and/​ or groups of people (e.g., the family). The actions of institutions such as the police are seen as inadequate and/​or irrelevant responses to the experience of violence.30 These arbiters of crime prosecution and crime prevention do not, in these women’s experience, effectively establish or reestablish the well-​being of survivors. The material collected in both qualitative and quantitative research on sexual violence against women in Poland supports the argument that the structural nature of sexual violence is an indispensable component of contemporary Poland’s patriarchal order, and that such a structure reproduces norms of behaviour that disregard survivors, excuse perpetrators, and downplay the importance of the phenomenon in general.31 This ambivalent attitude towards rape permeates Polish culture and society: rape is condemned in the public sphere even as it is approved of, or at least ignored, in the private space of family and community. Consequently, the pervasiveness of all forms of sexual violence against women is coupled with great levels of impunity for sexual offenders whose interests are indirectly defended by a strikingly ineffective legal system. This was, and still is, the overall context of the #MeToo movement in Poland. Last but not least, the #MeToo movement started almost two years after the political victory of right-​wing, populist, and nationalist parties in Poland that remain in power after the 2019 elections. The political victors succeeded in gaining significant electoral support through the deliberate use of anti-​gender and anti-​LGBTQ discourses greatly approved of by the local Catholic Church. The rise of the movement took place within the political context of a strong conservative backlash against women’s rights. The new authorities officially announced that they would not do anything to implement the Istanbul Convention, and since 2015, feminist NGOs providing services to survivors of gender-​based violence have been cut off from public funding. Instead, they have experienced attacks from public media, smear campaigns, and police raids. In practice, as of 2019, Poland lacks any comprehensive state system of supporting sexual violence survivors.

Polish #MeToo: Two stages Polish manifestations of the #MeToo movement fall into two successive stages. First, the hashtag #MeToo and its Polish alternative #jatez spread virally on social media in October 2017, joining the global movement. According to the media monitoring analysis, the Polish response was immediate. Within the first week after 15 October, the hashtag was used in more than 35,000 posts and comments, mostly on Facebook (30,869) and Twitter (1,786).32 This was at the peak of the movement, marked by thousands of spontaneous, uncoordinated, and individual women’s testimonies of sexual violence experienced at the hand of male perpetrators and revealed on social media. The stories were numerous and diverse, and differed in length and form. In some cases, users simply posted the hashtag on their personal wall on Facebook, while others offered detailed and intimate reports of sexual abuse experienced 288

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during their lifetime, in childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, at home, in the workplace, in schools, or in public. The posts referred to different forms of assault: verbal harassment, cyberstalking, unwanted sexual advances, forced touch, or rape, and these assaults were perpetrated by all types of offenders: relatives, colleagues, teachers, priests, former partners, supervisors, or strangers. Some commentators underscored the fact that “the wall of shame [had] fallen”, and women of different ages and social backgrounds felt encouraged to speak up, thus revealing the massive scope and pervasiveness of male sexual power and violence.33 Significantly, at that stage, the perpetrators remained anonymous and none of them was publicly identified. None of the local showbiz celebrities took part in the campaign, and the media coverage of the #MeToo movement was quite general, reporting on the popularity of the growing movement and its international outlook (mainly focusing on the Weinstein case and Hollywood) and referring in broad terms to the prevailing phenomenon of sexual violence. The second stage of the Polish #MeToo movement started with loud call-​outs. Women who made accusations had names, and men who were accused had both their names and faces revealed. The offences were described by relatively young, early-​career female journalists, activists and writers (Anna Śmigulec, Sara Czyż, Dominika Dymińska, Patrycja Wieczorkiewicz, Agnieszka Ziółkowska), and the accused were publicly known figures: a writer, an editor, and a journalist (Janusz Rudnicki, Michał Wybieralski, Jakub Dymek, respectively). #MeToo became a catalyst to reveal women’s experiences of sexual violations, including rape. The accusers pointed to three individual men as perpetrators, but also to the social context of their deeds, namely, an informal culture of passive indifference or silent approval to men treating women as sexual objects. One of these powerful texts, meaningfully entitled “Cartoon feminists. Hypocrisy on the left and the new faces of Polish #MeToo”,34 was published as a letter in the online journal Feminist Daily, and referred to men who publicly supported women’s rights but who, in professional and social settings, enumerated vulgar and sexual texting, promises of rewards in exchange for sex, unwanted kissing and grabbing, as well as forced sexual contact and incidents of physical violence. The ultimate goal of this article was to disclose both sexual violence and the hypocrisy of portions of progressive and left-​wing circles. Another text published by the leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza called out a well-​known writer. His name appeared in an interview about sexual harassment as a response to a call for more “positive examples” of women acting as role models by reporting sexual offenders. The publication concluded that, as “we cannot expect that abusers will on their own admit they are guilty” and we still do not know who they are, women should dare to call them out and “wind it up”.35 Thus, in its second stage, Polish #MeToo was directed towards fighting the outright hypocrisy of influential and said-​to-​be progressive circles; the accused were considered “brilliant minds” of the liberal and left media. The individual testimonies were seen as a tool for dismantling “sexism and the reproduction of patriarchal and paternalistic norms” and revealing “the unequal treatment of women within the environment, which speaks about gender equality as often as it strikes against it”.36 Significantly, none of the call-​outs referred to criminal justice or demanded that formal punishments be imposed. The men accused in Feminist Daily admitted their sexual offences with the exception of rape. They made public non-​apologies and apologies, and their employers —​one of the biggest Polish liberal news outlets Gazeta Wyborcza and the biggest leftist online daily Political Critique —​immediately suspended their contracts. Jakub Dymek, the journalist accused of objectifying and sexually harassing his female colleagues and committing rape, admitted the former and denied the latter. He filed a civil lawsuit for defamation against the authors of “Cartoon Feminists” and its publisher the Feminist Daily, a popular online feminist magazine in Poland published on a voluntary, non-​commercial basis. Further, Dymek appeared on mainstream media several times to declare his innocence and indulge in 289

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victim-​shaming by questioning the accountability and mental stability of his accusers, all while undermining the gravity and destructive impact of what he admitted he had done. Finally, because the Feminist Daily publication included allegations of rape, the police and prosecutor initiated an official examination of the case reported. The proceedings received extensive media coverage and provoked fierce discussions.

Unfinished revolution? After November 2017, the #MeToo movement irreversibly focused on the “Cartoon Feminist” testimonies and their protagonists. Soon, it turned out that the way in which the debate that followed the publication was framed was deeply embedded within formal and informal hierarchies of power and the pervasive patriarchal structures of the Polish public sphere. The immediate responses to the call-​outs were mixed, with a large number of supportive comments expressed on the internet and some manifestations of downright hostility towards the presumed perpetrators. Outside of the virtual space, initial reactions seemed hopeful, with several important feminist commentaries pointing to the campaign’s grassroots and revolutionary (if sweeping) potential,37 and the critical importance of highlighting the large scale of women’s suffering from sexual abuse, rather than focusing on the abuser’s wellbeing.38 However, these feminist interventions appeared in the shadow of the most emblematic public response to the “Cartoon Feminists”, which was produced less than two weeks after the publication by dozens of liberal and left-​wing journalists, editors, and academics, including colleagues from the editors’ offices of the abusers, who called themselves “people of culture”.39 Their public reaction has the quite awkwardly long but very meaningful title: “An open letter with regard to ethical and procedural standards and #MeToo action, as well as other public acts of stigmatizing improper behavior”. Although the letter did not mention “Cartoon Feminists”, or anyone personally involved in the case, the chronology of events made this letter a significant response to the public call-​outs published in the Feminist Daily. The “people of culture” publication used a rather perverse discursive strategy. On the one hand, it stated that #MeToo initiated “important changes to the ways of speaking about sexual harassment and other forms of sexual abuse against women” and that “we should make every effort so that no woman is afraid of talking about aggression she has experienced”.40 On the other hand, it argued that #MeToo should not transform itself into depriving the accused of their “right to defense” and “right to fair trial”. The letter warned against “accidental victims of #MeToo” and underlined the constitutional principle of the “presumption of innocence”. The well-​ known group of liberal and leftist members of the Polish intelligentsia reminded the public that even as we support women who have endured sexual assault, we should never forget about fundamental democratic values. In other words, public allegations concerning sexual violence should always be “formally examined” before people are accused and thus “thought to be guilty” in the eyes of the public. The letter carefully followed the “legalistic” line of defense employed a few days earlier by the abusers —​the truth about what happened to the women lay not in the women’s words, but in legal judgements and state institutions. This “law-​abiding” strategy dominated the further discursive framing of #MeToo and impacted the subsequent development of the movement. Public interest shifted from focusing on the problem of sexual violence against women to the assessment of the perpetrators’ situation and well-being, and an obligation to depend on the legal system and institutional measures. This immediate legalistic “shift” was not the only tactic used to steer the conversation away from the issue of women’s experiences of sexual violence. In the first months after the beginning of #MeToo in Poland, public figures, media-​experts, and commentators, including feminists 290

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and feminist “allies”, inundated the “Cartoon Feminists” publication and, more broadly, the #MeToo movement, with an endless list of doubts and questions: what about the consequences of call-​outs on the accused men —​their career, mental health, and general well-​being? Should abused women go to the police first? Should the call-​outs be preceded by a journalistic investigation or a “frank talk” with the accused? Are the call-​outs just personal revenge? Why did the Polish #MeToo evolve differently from the one in Sweden or in Hollywood? Shouldn’t survivors act more “professionally”, as they did in Western countries? To what extent do we risk transforming #MeToo into moral panic and imposing limitations on our sexual freedom? And so on. Media opinion pieces that pondered the consequences of the campaign focused on the limitations and “problems” of #MeToo, rather than on its empowering potential and ability to mainstream the debate about the prevalence of sexual violence in Poland. The list of issues of potential wrongdoing was long and included: the possibility of undermining women’s sexual autonomy and agency, while instating them as sexual gatekeepers; the danger of denigrating and ridiculing the otherwise important issue of sexual violence;41 and the possibility of brutalising public discourse on violence and law.42 Public debates around #MeToo in Poland focused on almost everything that could be produced to question, or at least to muffle, women’s voices. Doubting women’s statements, undermining their decision to call-​out the abusers, blaming actual victims of violence for “acting against the cause”, educating them on “how they should have proceeded”, and so on, were prevalent on liberal, conservative, leftist, as well as right-​wing and nationalistic media.43 When we take a closer look at the structural framework of the debate, we can see that the social position of the accused men and their confederates was definitely higher than that of the accusing women and their allies. Women’s testimonies and the voices supporting their decisions appeared as “individual” or “personal” statements, published on private social media channels and blogs or, at best, on feminist or feminist-​friendly media.44 Mainstream and traditional publications were dominated by high profile “experts” with significant symbolic capital and media experience, who, in many instances, happened to belong to the same social circles as the abusers. They preached common sense and represented “the golden middle”, which, without fail, was always placed notably far from the voices of the women who follow through with callouts.45 The biggest liberal and leftist dailies, where the accused men used to work, gave space to very similar stances and did not welcome any stronger feminist voices, thus decisively limiting more diverse discussion. The #MeToo movement began to be trivialised as “a sex scandal on the left” or, at best, a needed campaign that “went too far”.46 Within the ongoing debate, divisions within the women’s movement started to surface. While some activists and scholars called for unconditional support for women’s testimonies and described the distrust of women’s words as “patriarchy as usual”,47 others focused on issues related to the reliability of women-​accusers, and called for focusing on strengthening institutions rather than wide-​spread testimonies in the “grey area” of social media (where judgments are easily formulated before charges have been proved). Significantly, the voices of women who decided to support the call-​outs and recognised the existence of “rape culture” were depicted by some well-​known feminists as “radical”, “hostile”, and “young”, and were further confronted with a narrative presented as “balanced” or “critical”.48 In response to women speaking out about sexual abuse, feminist critiques of #MeToo also appealed to the “higher norms” of democratic society, including the “innocent until proven guilty” rule, that should be taken into account in the process of revealing sexual violence.49 These accounts touched upon issues of misusing the power of the internet, inaccurate coverage by the publishers of the Feminist Daily (including insufficient research done prior to the publication in comparison with the New York Times coverage of the Weinstein case), under-utilising 291

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institutional tools for social justice,50 and the dangers of tacking together (“mixing”) various kinds and forms of sexual violence (“light” forms such as sexual harassment and “hard” forms such as rape). In addition, the issue of women’s agency and subjectivity and women’s ability to verbalise an enthusiastic, affirmative consent to sex and assess their own experiences (as being or not being instances of sexual violence) within the given patriarchal order of Polish culture and women’s oppressive socialisation permeated the #MeToo debate in Poland, leaving the question of male socialisation, actions, and power on the margins of the debate. Many of the doubts about the reliability of the accusers —​namely, claiming that testimonies of sexual abuse led to a disregard for due process or intensive journalistic investigation  —​seemed to portray the movement as out for blood, pursuing quick punishment for the accused under conditions of moral panic which, critics claimed, focused on “victims’ emotions and feelings” rather than “facts”.51 We, the authors, see such voices as a means of undermining the power of the “I trust women” slogan,52 as critics cast women in the all too familiar role of passive victims of social norms, and/​or conversely demand the “reasonable” boundaries within which women’s experiences can be articulated. Moreover, such comments echo mainstream patriarchal narratives, which shift the responsibility of proof onto women and undermine women’s experiences by doubting the severity of the assault or questioning women’s abilities to assess what really happened. For instance, in the previously mentioned case of Anita Krawczyk, some activists pointed to the double standard by which many feminists unconditionally believed women who were abused by right-​wing conservative men, yet at the same time supported men accused of sexual assaults whom they perceived as allies of the broadly defined left or simply their colleagues.53 The social status and political affiliation of the abuser, they claimed, still determined the reactions of feminists and of the public to the allegations raised by women. Many women supported their colleagues, often because they were their friends or feminist friend’s partners.54 We think that the decisions of several public personalities and feminist commentators to distance themselves from women involved in call-​outs was, in the long run, what contributed to halting the #MeToo campaign in Poland. Claims by feminists to strengthen the institutional component of the #MeToo movement in Poland sound pretty careless, because dozens of research reports have confirmed that the legal system and state agents improperly and inefficiently handle cases of sexual violence, often infringing upon survivors’ rights in the process. Such statements also appear contradictory to the often expressed commitment against the “criminalisation of sexuality” and regulations such as affirmative consent formulated in the spirit of a liberal feminism rooted in the liberal understanding of sexual freedom as freedom from state prosecution.55 Whether the ceasing of the #MeToo movement in Poland is seen as a consequence of the blunt call-​outs, the disregard for legal tools, an inability to follow the Western trajectory of development,56 or, as we claim, the inability of the intellectual elite to stand by women’s testimonies and the downplaying of the scale and prevalence of sexual violence, the fact is that by 2018, the campaign in Poland had lost its momentum. The popularity of the hashtag declined among individual women, no celebrities joined the action, and intense but inconclusive debate faded away. The initial energy of common, bottom-​up efforts to express women’s experiences of sexual violence and raise social awareness of the cause faced an impassable barrier and eventually lost its impetus. The “uncontrolled wave” of women’s testimonies of sexual violence stopped, #MeToo started to be interpreted as an “unfinished” or “reverse” revolution, and its transformative potential seemed to go unfulfilled. As one female journalist noticed, “the heroines of 2017 were women who dared to break silence”, but there will not be any drastic change in Poland, since “#MeToo turned into #HeDidNot”.57 Many women were silenced again, and, as Zofia Nawrocka framed it sharply in her research on rape, making 292

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women silent about their experiences of violence serves nothing but men’s interests and the patriarchy.58

Conclusions: The impact of #MeToo In January 2019, the prosecutor’s office dismissed the rape case brought by the “Cartoon Feminists”.59 This decision concludes a particular stage of the #MeToo movement in Poland and calls for a recapitulation of the trajectory of the movement in the country. The #MeToo hashtag is still in use, but rarely by individual women on their social media channels. Rather, media outlets use the hashtag to frame news reports related to sexual violence against women, which continue to appear regularly. Maja Staśko, a feminist intensively involved in #MeToo discussions, suggests that the #MeToo movement in Poland neither stopped nor was reversed, but rather transformed into a less visible undertaking that relies on women’s activists’ unpaid emotional and care work. As Staśko argues, under conditions of hostile institutions and the structural precariousness of women facing violence, the common support received and given through informal networks of women and their allies remains the primary and most important means of confronting sexual violence.60 This observation seems valid and persuasive. As in other contexts (most famously, in the context of the United States’s recent case of Dr Christine Blasey Ford vs. Brett Kavanaugh), in Poland the political impact of the #MeToo movement turned out to be rather weak, or at least uneven. At the level of legal proceedings of sexual violence cases, the practices of the Polish courts remained unchanged, and the perpetrators live on, unaffected by the consequences of their actions. No legal amendments or new institutional measures, such as those in Sweden (changes to the legal definition of rape) or France (introduction of new fines for sexual harassment on streets), were proposed in Poland. However, within the depicted institutional and cultural context of law enforcement in Poland, such propositions were also convincingly dismissed from a feminist perspective.61 It is true that the #MeToo movement was one of the factors (along with a number of publications and ongoing efforts of activists, and experts, mostly representing non-​governmental organisations) that contributed to the intensification of the debate on violence against women, and new cases of sexual abuse against women repeatedly hit Polish news. Women struggle against violence and decide to name their perpetrators in public. Polish media outlets seem to be more open to reporting these cases, giving space for women’s voices and supporting them with clear, strong expert opinions (as in the recent case of Roman Polański’s invitation by Lódź Film School). We are likely experiencing important but incremental changes, and more radical political victories still lie ahead. At this point in time, it is impossible to assess the reach of the #MeToo movement and the extent to which the #MeToo movement affected the lives of women in Poland or translated into various forms of mobilisation against violence against women, from educational to self-​defense and political activities. While the topic was indeed widely discussed by the mainstream media, it remained focused on the expert voices of women representing the urban middle class, and did not feature first-​hand accounts of experiences of working-​class women, non-​heterosexual women, or women living in rural areas. Last but not least, high profile celebrities did not take part in the campaign, and the burden of call-​outs was shouldered by educated women working on temporary and low-​wage contracts. Recent cases of sexual harassment revealed by actresses and female employees working in the Cracow theatre Bagatela follow this trend: women who accused the head of the theatre emphasised that the perpetrator abused them in part because of their precarious economic and social position. In a broader sense, the #MeToo debate in Poland engaged with questions about power in various contexts. It raised issues related to the weight of women’s voices in power structures, 293

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the importance of women’s testimonies, and the practical consequences of sexual violence revelations. The public debate around the Polish #MeToo movement, notably influenced by the controversies around the case of the “Cartoon Feminist” article, revealed that the feminist critique is weakly embedded in the liberal and leftist dominant discourse. The immediate and irreversible “legalistic” shift, focused around “the presumption of innocence” of the men accused of sexual violence, bared the patriarchal limits of media and “expert” discourse, with rare exceptions formulated by Małgorzata Fuszara, Sylwia Spurek, and Krzysztof Śmiszek.62 When we say “patriarchal limits”, we mean that the discussions were disproportionately focused on the perspective of the accused men and actual abusers, and expressed absolutely groundless trust in the legal system, state institutions, and criminal justice. Moreover, only single and often peripheral voices expressed feminist concerns about the long-​term and destructive impact of sexual violence on girls and women, shame and disbelief, secondary victimisation experienced by violence survivors, men’s socialisation and their objectifying of women and using sexual violence as an instrument of domination, and discursive practices of undermining women’s experiences and excusing abusive men. In other words, the Polish debate on the #MeToo movement avoided taking into account its obvious political context: the unequal position of men and women in society. Male domination and its fundamental instrument, sexual violence, was hardly exposed, and the hierarchies of power remained in place. This preservation of the patriarchal status quo was also evident in the discursive manner of managing emotions in the #MeToo movement, a process that can be analysed from the perspective of disciplining women by silencing and repressing their anger.63 Indeed, the #MeToo movement was described by mainstream media as an exaggeration, an excess, and an example of rule-​breaking. Women were accused of man-​hating, and this hatred was presented as something entirely inappropriate. The systemic context of sexual violence and thus, the structural foundations of women’s anger expressed in the #MeToo movement, were made invisible. Furthermore, since women’s anger may lead to social turbulence and put men’s interests and position at risk, keeping things unchanged required regulating women’s fury. Unfortunately, in the case of the Polish #MeToo movement, the liberal and left-​wing media effectively contributed to this process. This reveals, albeit indirectly, their gender bias. Whereas the frustration and hard feelings of men who lost their social status via economic transformation (and subsequently voted for the extreme right in recent parliamentary elections) are taken seriously by the media, the anger of women facing sexual abuse by men from every social class and throughout their lifetimes was simply dismissed. For feminism and women’s social movements, the #MeToo movement has had mixed results as well. To begin with, it has demonstrated that, when it comes to issues related to violence against women, feminists are not unanimously united. The rifts that accompanied the Polish #MeToo debates challenged the assumption that women’s rights activists in Poland agree on the assessment of the scale of violence and successful strategies for fighting it. The diversity of voices surrounding #MeToo provides further evidence that feminist adherence to the idea of trusting women, and women’s solidarity, is far from obvious, and trust happens to be an unequally distributed resource within the movement. As some commentators in other contexts point out, one problem of the current (feminist) contentions about #MeToo is that, while it focuses on sex, it downplays the question of power.64 Many of the stories related to sexual violence reveal that the #MeToo movement is not about “sex” but about power, and this realisation allows us to move beyond existing representations of women as ideal victims, as well as the idea that “all women are victims” that permeates feminism as much as the rest of the society. It is also a starting point for a

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conversation about power and conflict within feminist movements. The conflict that emerged during the #MeToo movement was cast by various commentators as a generational or ideological confrontation. Some argued that younger, more radical feminists, lacking the experience of older generations, sought a “feminist revolution”, while at the same time striving to overthrow feminist icons.65 Others pointed to the limitations of the liberal vision of feminism that has dominated feminism in Poland since the transformation of the 1990s and permeates dominant public debate, media, and feminist discourse to this day. Critics called for the reconstitution of the foundation of feminism in Poland, towards a movement that is more inclusive, socially oriented, and self-​aware.66 In general, the conflict itself was represented as a threat by the members of the conversation, rather than as an opportunity to develop the women’s movement in Poland. Some commentators called for an end to internal dispute, as in-​fighting could potentially damage the representation of feminism in the public sphere in Poland, which is already right-​wing and antifeminist. They argued that feminism should appear undivided on the issue of violence, particularly in light of the backlash instantiated by, among other things, cuts of the government’s subsidy for the women’s help centres. The idea that the feminist movement should look for a wide support base, and thus needs to stay united, as it appeared to be during the 2016 Black protests against the total ban on abortion, seems to prevail as an overall idea about the direction in which the #MeToo debate should go. Given the unifying power of the slogan “Solidarity is our strength” recited regularly by feminists expressing various views on the #MeToo movement, the conflict among feminists has rarely been presented as revitalising or unavoidable while still allowing for the assessment of various positions present within the movement. The fact that the seemingly uncontroversial subject of sexual violence provoked conflicts amongst feminists —​contentions related to age, experience, and class —​indicates that the debate about power and domination is also important for feminism. The #MeToo debate destabilised the convenient assumption that, as feminist activists, we share certain codes, values, norms, and ideas. The Polish #MeToo movement revealed significant differences related to feminist strategies, as well as various positionalities that feminists occupy within power structures, locations related to age, professional position, and access to media, as well as financial and professional resources. The assessment of what happened in the course of the #MeToo movement in our local Polish setting led us to think about alternatives.67 What can we do differently in the future when women decide to call abusive men out? What lessons do we draw from this particular women’s struggle? For now, we agree on four main conclusions. First, the existing legal system and its underlying liberal norms should not be treated as main points of reference for defining what is just and fair for sexual violence survivors. The existing solutions are deficient, ineffective and thus serve men’s interests. Second, #MeToo inspires us to focus on social power relations that allow men to use sexual violence as an instrument of domination. Thus, we can redirect our focus from the figure of an “ideal” and “innocent” victim and the “proper” way of announcing the experience of sexual abuse. Third, we agree with Rebecca Traister that we should further explore the revolutionary power of women’s anger.68 We assume that women’s fury, impatience and rage are adequate reactions under given conditions of prevalent sexual violence against us and the impunity of our predators. Finally, Polish #MeToo suggests that feminist communities may benefit from better recognition of internal power structures. Trust in women’s testimonies and access to public debate are unequally distributed resources within the women’s rights movement. These inequalities should not hinder our struggles towards greater gender justice.

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Notes 1 Ann Snitow, “Talking Back to the Patriarchy”, Dissent, Spring 2018, www.dissentmagazine.org/​article/​ talking-​back-​to-​patriarchy-​feminist-​history-​tone-​exuberance; Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad:  The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). 2 Tarana Burke and Elizabeth Adetiba, “Tarana Burke Says #MeToo Should Center Marginalized Communities”, in Where Freedom Starts:  Sex, Power, Violence #MeToo (London/​New  York:  Verso, 2018),  26–​34. 3 Hope Reese and Stephanie Cooontz, “#MeToo is Powerful but Will Fail Unless We Do More”, in Where Freedom Starts: Sex, Power,Violence #MeToo (London/​New York: Verso, 2018), 35–​49. 4 Melissa Gira Grant, “The Unsexy Truth About Harassment”, in Where Freedom Starts:  Sex, Power, Violence #MeToo (London/​New York: Verso, 2018), 288–​299. 5 Janet Halley, “The Move to Affirmative Consent”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 1 (2016): 257–​279. 6 Laura Kipnis, “Has #MeToo Gone Too Far, or Not Far Enough? The Answer is Both”, in Where Freedom Starts: Sex, Power,Violence #MeToo (London/​New York: Verso, 2018), 276–​287. 7 Sarah Jaffe, “The Collective Power of #MeToo”, Dissent, Spring 2018, www.dissentmagazine.org/​article/​collective-​power-​of-​me-​too-​organizing-​justice-​patriarchy-​class. 8 Gira Grant, “The Unsexy Truth”. 9 Snitow, “Talking Back”. 10 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “We Still Haven’t Learned from Anita Hill’s Tesitimony”, New  York Times, 27 September 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​09/​27/​opinion/​anita-​hill-​clarence-​thomas-​brett-​ kavanaugh-​christine-​ford.html. 11 Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Sexual Harrassment in the Age of #MeToo”, interview by Durba Mitra, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 4 June 2018, http://​signsjournal.org/​mackinnon-​metoo. 12 Snitow, “Talking Back”; Traister, Good and Mad. 13 Magdalena Grabowska and Marta Rawłuszko, “Universality and Prevalence of Sexual Violence Against Women: Methodological Challenges and Results of Quantitative Research”, in Breaking the Taboo:  Report on Sexual Violence, eds Grabowska and Agnieszka Grzybek (Warsaw:  Foundation for Equality and Emancipation STER, 2016), 11–​24, www.fundacjaster.org.pl/​upload/​R_​ENG-​final. pdf. 14 Rawłuszko, “Świat, w którym rządzą kolesie”, Codziennik feministyczny, 5 December 2017, http://​codziennikfeministyczny.pl/​swiat-​w-​ktorym-​rzadza-​kolesie-​cykl-​tekstow-​kulturze-​gwaltu; Rawłuszko, “Siostrom kończy się cierpliwość”, Codziennik feministyczny, 4 July 2018, http://​ codziennikfeministyczny.pl/​rawluszko-​siostrom-​konczy-​sie-​cierpliwosc. 15 Grzybek and Barbara Błońska, “New Procedure of Prosecuting Rape: The Results of Research with Prosecutors and Police Officers”, in Grabowska and Grzybek, Breaking the Taboo,  43–​64. 16 For example Centrum Praw Kobiet [Women’s Rights Centre], accessed 11 June 2020, https://​cpk.org. pl/​en; Fundacja Feminoteka [Feminoteka Foundation], accessed 11 June 2020, http://​en.feminoteka. pl; Niebieska Linia [Blue Line], accessed 11 June 2020, www.niebieskalinia.pl; Victoria Association, Facebook page, accessed 11 June 2020, www.facebook.com/​Stowarzyszenie-​na-​Rzecz-​Kobiet-​ Victoria-​219850051437085; Baba Lubuskie Stowarzyszenie na rzecz Kobiet [Baba Association], accessed 11 June 2020, http://​baba.org.pl. 17 Zofia Nawrocka, Paulina, Julia, Magda, Anna, and Weronika, Gwałt:  Głos kobiet wobec społecznego tabu [Rape:  Women’s Voices against the Social Taboo] (Warsaw:  Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 2013). 18 Agnieszka Kościańska, Płeć, przyjemność i przemoc. Kształtowanie wiedzy eksperckiej o seksualności w Polsce [Gender, Pleasure and Violence: The Emergence of the Expert Knowledge on Sexuality in Poland] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2014). 19 Beata Zadumińska, Sytuacja ofiar zgwałcenia w postępowaniu przygotowawczym. Report z monitoringu [The Situation of Rape Victims in the Preparatory Proceedings: Audit Based Report] (Kraków: Centrum Praw Kobiet, 2016), Joanna Piotrowska, and Alina Synakiewicz (eds), Dość milczenia. Przemoc seksualna wobec kobiet i problem gwałtu w Polsce [Stop the Silence: Sexual Violence against Women and Rape in Poland] (Warsaw: Fundacja Feminoteka, 2011), Artur Piertyka, Odmowy wszczęcia i umorzenia postępowań w sprawach o zgwałcenia po zniesieniu wnioskowego trybu ścigania. Report z badań przeprowadzonych na zlecenie Pełnomocnika Rządu ds. Równego Traktowania [Refusals to Initiate and Discontinued Proceedings

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Polish #MeToo in Rape Cases after the Abolition of the “on Request” Prosecution: The Report on the Research Conducted for the Office of Government’s Plenipotentiary of Equal Treatment] (Warsaw: Kancelaria Prezesa Rady Ministrów, 2014). 20 Grzybek and Błońska “New procedure”. 21 Amnesty International, Polska wolna od przemocy wobec kobiet. Wybrane problemy dotyczące wdrożenia Konwencji o Zapobieganiu i Zwalczaniu Przemocy Wobec Kobiet i Przemocy Domowej [Poland Free from Violence against Women:  Selected Issues Regarding the Implementation of the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence] (Warsaw: AI, 2018). https://​amnesty.org.pl/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2018/​02/​Polska-​wolna-​od-​przemocy-​wobec-​kobiet_​ analiza_​Amnesty-​International-​2.pdf. 22 Feminoteka Foundation, Niemoralne propozycje. Molestowanie seksualne w miejscu pracy [Indecent Proposals: Sexual Harassement in the Workplace] (Warsaw, Feminoteka Foundation 2008). 23 Beata Gruszczyńska, Przemoc wobec kobiet w Polsce. Aspekty prawnokryminologiczne [Violence against Women in Poland: Legal and Criminal Aspects] (Warsaw: Wolters Kluwers Polska, 2007). 24 European Commission, Gender-​Based Violence. Special Eurobarometer 449, November 2016. https://​ data.europa.eu/​euodp/​en/​data/​dataset/​S2115_​85_​3_​449_​ENG. 25 CBOS, Molestowanie czy komplement? Komunikat z badań nr 142/​2017, Warsaw, 2017, www.cbos.pl/​ SPISKOM.POL/​2017/​K_​142_​17.PDF. 26 Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk, “Gender as ‘Ebola from Brussels’:  The Anti-​ Colonial Frame and the Rise of Illiberal Populism”, Signs:  Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43, no.  4 (2016): 797–​821. 27 Rawłuszko, “And if the Opponents of Gender Ideology are Right? Gender Politics, Europeanization and Democratic Deficit”, Politics & Gender (2019): 1–​23, doi:10.1017/​S1743923X19000576. 28 FRA, Violence Against Women:  An EU-​Wide Survey (Brussels:  Publication Office of the European Union, 2014). 29 Grabowska and Rawłuszko, “Universality and Prevalence”. 30 Grabowska and Rawłuszko, “Universality and Prevalence”. 31 Grabowska, “ ‘Grey Area’ of Sexual Violence Against Women:  Qualitative Research Result”, in Grabowska and Grzybek, Breaking the Taboo,  24–​43. 32 Press Service Monitoring, The Wall of Shame Has Fallen. Over 35,000 #MeToo #JaTez Publications in Polish Media, 30 October 2017, https://​psmm.pl/​en/​informacja-​prasowa/​ wall-​shame-​has-​fallen-​over-​35000-​metoo-​jatez-​publications-​polish-​media. 33 Renata Durda, “#MeToo  —​otworzyła się przestrzeń publiczna, żeby rozmawiać o molestowaniu [MeToo —​A Public Space Is Open Now for a Conversation about Harassment], interview by Agata Kowalska, Radio podcast Analizy —​Tok.fm radio, 28 November 2017. 34 As Polish grammar uses different forms of nouns (feminine/​masculine/​neutral) to indicate gender, the original version of the title and the word “feminist” refers, in Polish, exclusively to men. 35 Alicja Długołęcka, “#MeToo. Musimy ujawniać zachowania, które wiązały się z jawnym przekroczeniem. Jeśli nie my, to kto?” [#Metoo. We Must Disclose the Behaviours, Which Crossed the Line. If Not Us, Who?], interview by Anna Śmigulec, Wysokie Obcasy, 4 November 2017, www. wysokieobcasy.pl/​wysokie-​obcasy/​7,127763,22582989,metoo-​musimy-​ujawniac-​zachowania-​ktore-​ wiazaly-​sie-​z-​jawnym.html. 36 Sara Czyż, Dominika Dymińska, Patrycja Wieczorkiewicz, and Agnieszka Ziółkowska, “Papierowi feminiści. O hipokryzji na lewicy i nowych twarzach polskiego #MeToo” [Paper Made Feminists: On Left Wing Hypocrisy and New Faces of Polish #MeToo], Codziennik Feministyczny, 27 November 2017, http://​codziennikfeministyczny.pl/​papierowi-​feminisci-​nowe-​twarze-​polskiego-​metoo. 37 Joanna Krakowska, “Konformy: rewolucja czy rabacja?” [Konformy: A Revolution or a Slaughter?] Dwutygodnik, no.  225 (2017), www.dwutygodnik.com/​artykul/​7510-​konformy-​rewolucja-​czy-​ rabacja.html. 38 Inga Iwasiów, “#MeToo bez żadnego ‘ale’”, Dwutygodnik, no. 226 (2017), www.dwutygodnik.com/​ artykul/​7547-​metoo-​bez-​zadnego-​ale.html. 39 “List otwarty ludzi kultury w związku z akcją #MeToo i oskarżeniami o przemoc seksualną” [An Open Letter of People of Culture, Regarding #Metoo Campaign and the Sexual Violence Accusations], Onet, 8 December 2017, https://​kultura.onet.pl/​wiadomosci/​list-​otwarty-​ludzi-​kultury-​w-​zwiazku-​ z-​akcja-​metoo-​i-​oskarzeniami-​o-​przemoc-​seksualna/​emr8yg3 40 Onet, “List otwarty”.

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Magdalena Grabowska and Marta Rawłuszko 41 Jakub Janiszewski, “Jak nie ośmieszyć ważnej sprawy”, [How Not to Ridicule the Right Cause], Gazeta Prawna, 12 December 2017. www.gazetaprawna.pl/​artykuly/​1090593,kryzys-​emancypacji-​ nadchodzi.html. 42 Grzegorz Niziołek, “(Kontr)rewolucja seksualna” [Sexual (Counter)Revolution], Dwutygodnik 226 (December 2017), www.dwutygodnik.com/​artykul/​7536-​kontrrewolucja-​seksualna.html. 43 Aleksander Krejckant, “Wobronie prawa do obrony Jakuba Dymka” [In Defence of Jakub Dymek], Medianarodowe, 4 December 2017, https://​medianarodowe.com/​obronie-​prawa-​obrony-​jakuba-​ dymka; Piotr Szumlewicz, “Polskie #MeToo”, Lewica, 3 December 2017, http://​lewica.pl/​ ?id=31731&tytul=Piotr-​Szumlewicz:-​Polskie-​. 44 Natalia Broniarczyk, Alicja Palęcka, and Maja Staśko, “Trzymamy stronę kobiet:  List otwarty osób solidaryzujących się z kobietami ujawniającymi przemoc” [We Are on Women’s Side: An Open Letter of Solidarity with Women Who Disclose Sexual Violence], Codziennik feministyczny, 8 December 2017. http://​codziennikfeministyczny.pl/​list-​otwarty-​trzymamy-​strone-​kobiet. 45 Szumlewicz, “Polskie”. 46 See for example the right-​wing media coverege at: “Skandal w salonie. Feministki przełamały zmowę milczenia, pokazując hipokryzję ‘chłopców lewicy’ ” [The Scandal in the Society. Feminists Broke the Collusion on Silence, and They Revealed the Hypocrisy of the ‘Left Wing Boys’], WPolityce, 27 November 2017, https://​wpolityce.pl/​spoleczenstwo/​369062-​skandal-​w-​salonie-​feministki-​ przelamaly-​zmowe-​milczenia-​pokazujac-​hipokryzje-​chlopcow-​lewicy. 47 Iwasiów, “#MeToo bez”; Krakowska, “Konformy”; Broniaczyk et al., “Trzymamy stronę”; Rawłuszko, “Siostrom”. 48 Agnieszka Graff, “O szerokich konsekwencjach akcji #MeToo” [On the Broad Consequences of #MeToo Movement], interview by Tomasz Stawiszyński, Radio podcast Wieczór —​Tok.fm radio, 12 December 2017; Elżbieta Korolczuk, “Zaprośmy do rozmowy o #MeToo kobiety, które do tej pory w niej nie uczestniczyły: pracownice supermarketów, rolniczki, emerytki” [Let's Open up the #Metoo Conversation to Women Who Were So Far Absent from It: Supermaket Workers, Farmers and Older Women], Gazeta Wyborcza, 12 May 2018, http://​wyborcza.pl/​magazyn/​7,124059,23387572,zaprosmy-​ do-​rozmowy-​o-​metoo-​kobiety-​ktore-​do-​tej-​pory-​w-​niej.html?disableRedirects=true. 49 Monika Płatek, prawniczka, “Warszawa 14 marzec 2018: Po kolei, w nawiązaniu do listu/​wypowiedzi Julii Maciochy w odpowiedzi na mój wpis”, [Warsaw, 14 March. First things first. My response to Julia Maciocha’s response to my entry], Facebook, 14 March 2018, www.facebook.com/​permalink. php?story_​fbid=10155423210288527&id=162286418526. 50 Korolczuk, “Zaprośmy”; Elżbieta Korolczuk, “Konsekwencje akcji #MeToo w Polsce” [Consequences of #MeToo in Poland], Radio podcast Dość przemocy by Paweł Sulik in Tok.fm radio, 11 January 2018. 51 Graff, “O szerokich konsekwencjach”. 52 Snitow, “Talking Back”. 53 Anna Czerwińska, “Wierzę Anecie Krawczyk:  O molestowaniu seksualnym w Polsce w ostatnim dziesięcioleciu z perspektywy feministycznej” [I Believe Aneta Krawczyk:  A Decade of Feminist Debate on Sexual Harassment in Poland], unpublished paper presented at the conference Kobiece utopie w działaniu, Cracow:  Jagiellonian University, 21–​22 September 2018; Maja Staśko “Nasze #MeToo, wasz Janusz” [Our #MeToo, Your Janusz], Krytyka polityczna, 16 November 2017, http://​ krytykapolityczna.pl/​kraj/​nasze-​metoo-​wasz-​janusz. 54 Traister, “Good and Mad”, 161. 55 Graff, “O szerokich konsekwncjach”; Halley, “The Move to Affirmative Consent”; Janiszewski, “Jak nie ośmieszyć“. 56 Korolczuk, “Konsekwencje akcji #MeToo w Polsce”. 57 Kalina Błażejowska “Zawrócona rewolucja” [Revolution Turned Around], Tygodnik Powszechny, 22 December 2017, www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/​zawrocona-​rewolucja-​151471. 58 Nawrocka, “Gwałt”. 59 The prosecutors working under the supervision of the right-​wing government are said to have used the proceedings concerning the ‘Cartoon Feminists’ (run ex officio because of the rape accusations) to infiltrate the left and get information discrediting their political enemies. 60 Maja Staśko, “#MeToo w działaniu” [#MeToo in Action], unpublished paper presented at the conference Kobiece utopie w działaniu, Cracow: Jagiellonian University, 21–​22 September 2018. 61 Anna Ratecka, “Sprawiedliwość w czasach #MeToo” [Justice in Times of #MeToo], in Utopie kobiet. 100 lat praw wyborczych kobiet (1918–​-​2018) [Women’s Utopia(s): 100 Years of Women’s Right to Vote

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Polish #MeToo (1918-​2018)], eds Krystyna Slany et al. (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2019), 289–​308. 62 Małgorzata Fuszara, “Nawet na lewicy istnieje poczucie władzy mężczyzn nad kobietami” [Even on the Left There Is a Sense of Men's Power over Women], interview by Paula Szewczyk, Newsweek Polska, 3 December 2017; Anna Studzińska, “Taki klimat” [This Is Our Climate], interview by Aleksandra Żelazińska, Polityka, 5 December 2017. www.polityka.pl/​tygodnikpolityka/​spoleczenstwo/​ 1729790,1,nie- ​podwazajmy-​tego-​ co-​mowia- ​ofiary-​tylko- ​dlatego-​ze- ​o skarzaja-​a utorytet.read; Sylwia Spurek, “Zacznijmy wierzyć ofiarom” [We Need to Believe the Victims], interview by Adam Puchejda, Kultura liberalna 459, 24 October 2017, https://​kulturaliberalna.pl/​2017/​10/​24/​spurek-​ puchejda-​molestowanie-​ofiary; Krzysztof Śmiszek, “#MeToo. Jak się bronić przed molestowaniem seksualnym w pracy?” [#MeToo. How to Defend Yourself against Sexual Harassment at Work], interview by Monika Tutak-​Goll, Wysokie Obcasy, 13 January 2018, www.wysokieobcasy.pl/​wysokie-​ obcasy/​7,163229,22868014,metoo-​jak-​sie-​bronic-​przed-​molestowaniem-​seksualnym-​w-​pracy.html. 63 Traister, “Good and Mad”. 64 Gira Grant, “The Unsexy Truth”. 65 Korolczuk, “Zaprośmy”. 66 Anna Adamczyk et al., “Feministyczna zmiana warty! Czas na prawdziwą solidarność” [The Changing of the Feminist Guard! It’s Time for Real Solidarity], Opinie, 12 January 2018, https://​opinie.wp.pl/​ feministyczna-​zmiana-​warty-​czas-​na-​prawdziwa-​solidarnosc-​6208578687879297a. 67 Grabowska and Rawłuszko, “Między utopią a dystopią. Kilka refleksji o polskim #MeToo”, [Between Utopia and Dystopia. Some thoughts on Polish #MeToo], in Slany et al., Utopie kobiet, 261–​297. 68 Traister, “Good and Mad”.

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Polish #MeToo Korolczuk, Elżbieta. “Zaprośmy do rozmowy o #MeToo kobiety, które do tej pory w niej nie uczestniczyły: pracownice supermarketów, rolniczki, emerytki”[Let's Open up the #Metoo Conversation to Women Who Were So Far Absent from It:  Supermaket Workers, Farmers and Older Women]. Gazeta Wyborcza. 12 May 2018. http://​wyborcza.pl/​magazyn/​7,124059,23387572,zap’rosmy-​do-​ rozmowy-​o-​metoo-​kobiety-​ktore-​do-​tej-​pory-​w-​niej.html?disableRedirects=true. Kościańska, Agnieszka. Płeć, przyjemność i przemoc: Kształtowanie wiedzy eksperckiej o seksualności w Polsce [Gender, Pleasure and Violence: The Emergence of the Expert Knowledge on Sexuality in Poland]. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2014. Krakowska, Joanna. “Konformy:  rewolucja czy rabacja?” [Konformy:  A Revolution or a Slaughter?], Dwutygodnik 225. www.dwutygodnik.com/​artykul/​7510-​konformy-​rewolucja-​czy-​rabacja.html. Krejckant, Aleksander. “Wobronie prawa do obrony Jakuba Dymka” [In Defence of Jakub Dymek]. Medianarodowe.com. 4 December 2017. https://​medianarodowe.com/​ obronie-​prawa-​obrony-​jakuba-​dymka. MacKinnon, Catharine A. “Sexual Harrassment in the Age of #MeToo”. Interview by Durba Mitra. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 4 June 2018. http://​signsjournal.org/​mackinnon-​metoo. Nawrocka, Zofia; Paulina, Julia, Magda, Anna, and Weronika. Gwałt: Głos kobiet wobec społecznego tabu [Rape: Women’s Voices against the Social Taboo]. Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 2013. Niziołek, Grzegorz. “(Kontr)rewolucja seksualna” [Sexual (Counter)Revolution]. Dwutygodnik 226, no. 12 (December 2017). www.dwutygodnik.com/​artykul/​7536-​kontrrewolucja-​seksualna.html. Onet. “List otwarty ludzi kultury w związku z akcją #MeToo i oskarżeniami o przemoc seksualną” [An Open Letter of People of Culture, Regarding #Metoo Campaign and the Sexual Violence Accusations]. 8 December 2017. https://​kultura.onet.pl/​wiadomosci/​list-​otwarty-​ludzi-​kultury-​w-​ zwiazku-​z-​akcja-​metoo-​i-​oskarzeniami-​o-​przemoc-​seksualna/​emr8yg3. Piertyka, Artur. Odmowy wszczęcia i umorzenia postępowań w sprawach o zgwałcenia po zniesieniu wnioskowego trybu ścigania. Report z badań przeprowadzonych na zlecenie Pełnomocnika Rządu ds. Równego Traktowania [Refusals to Initiate and Discontinued Proceedings in Rape Cases after the Abolition of the “on Request” Prosecution:  The Report on the Research Conducted for the Office of Government’s Plenipotentiary of Equal Treatment]. Warsaw: Kancelaria Prezesa Rady Ministrów, 2014. Piotrowska, Joanna, and Alina Synakiewicz. Dość milczenia. Przemoc seksualna wobec kobiet i problem gwałtu w Polsce [Stop the Silence: Sexual Violence against Women and Rape in Poland]. Warsaw: Fundacja Feminoteka, 2011. Płatek, Monika prawniczka. “Warszawa 14 marzec 2018: Po kolei, w nawiązaniu do listu/​wypowiedzi Julii Maciochy w odpowiedzi na mój wpis” [Warsaw, 14 March. First things first. My response to Julia Maciocha’s response to my entry]. Facebook, 14 March 2018. www.facebook.com/​permalink. php?story_​fbid=10155423210288527&id=162286418526. Press Service Monitoring. The Wall of Shame Has Fallen. Over 35,000 #MeToo #JaTez publications in Polish media. 30 October 2017. https://​psmm.pl/​en/​informacja-​prasowa/​wall-​shame-​has-​fallen-​ over-​35000-​metoo-​jatez-​publications-​polish-​media. Ratecka, Anna. “Sprawiedliwość w czasach #MeToo” [Justice in Times of #MeToo]. In Slany et  al., Utopie kobiet, 289–​308. Rawłuszko, Marta. “Świat, w którym rządzą kolesie”. Codziennik feministyczny, 5 December 2017. http://​ codziennikfeministyczny.pl/​swiat-​w-​ktorym-​rzadza-​kolesie-​cykl-​tekstow-​kulturze-​gwaltu. Rawłuszko, Marta. “Siostrom kończy się cierpliwość”. Codziennik feministyczny, 4 July 2018. http://​ codziennikfeministyczny.pl/​rawluszko-​siostrom-​konczy-​sie-​cierpliwosc. Rawłuszko, Marta. “And if the Opponents of Gender Ideology are Right? Gender Politics, Europeanization and Democratic Deficit”. Politics & Gender (2019), 1–​23. doi:10.1017/​S1743923X19000576. Reese, Hope and Stephanie Cooontz. “#MeToo Is Powerful but Will Fail Unless We Do More”. In Where Freedom Starts: Sex, Power, Violence #MeToo, 35–​49. London/​New York: Verso, 2018. Slany, Krystyna, Justyna Struzik, Beata Kowalska, Magdalena Ślusarczyk, Marta Warat, Ewa Krzaklewska, Ewelina Ciaputa, Agnieszka Król and Anna Ratecka, eds. Utopie kobiet:  100 lat praw wyborczych kobiet (1918–​2018) [Women's Utopia(s):  100 Years of Women’s Right to Vote (1918-​ 2018)]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2019. Snitow, Ann. “Talking Back to the Patriarchy”. Dissent, Spring 2018. www.dissentmagazine.org/​article/​ talking-​back-​to-​patriarchy-​feminist-​history-​tone-​exuberance. Spurek, Sylwia. “Zacznijmy wierzyć ofiarom” [We Need to Believe the Victims]. Interview by Adam Puchejda. Kultura liberalna 459, 24 October 2017. https://​kulturaliberalna.pl/​2017/​10/​24/​ spurek-​puchejda-​molestowanie-​ofiary.

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Magdalena Grabowska and Marta Rawłuszko Staśko, Maja. “Nasze #MeToo, wasz Janusz” [Our #MeToo, Your Janusz]. Krytyka polityczna, 16 November 2017. http://​krytykapolityczna.pl/​kraj/​nasze-​metoo-​wasz-​janusz. Staśko, Maja. “#MeToo w działaniu” [#MeToo in Action]. Unpublished paper presented at the conference Kobiece utopie w działaniu, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, 21–​22 September 2018. Studzińska, Anna. “Taki klimat” [This Is Our Climate]. Interview by Aleksandra Żelazińska. Polityka, 5 December 2017. www.polityka.pl/​tygodnikpolityka/​spoleczenstwo/​1729790,1,nie-​podwazajmy-​ tego-​co-​mowia-​ofiary-​tylko-​dlatego-​ze-​oskarzaja-​autorytet.read. Śmiszek, Krzysztof. “#MeToo. Jak się bronić przed molestowaniem seksualnym w pracy?” [#MeToo. How to Defend Yourself against Sexual Harassment at Work]. Interview by Monika Tutak-​Goll. Wysokie Obcasy, 13 January 2018. www.wysokieobcasy.pl/​wysokie-​obcasy/​7,127763,22868014,metoo-​jak-​ sie-​bronic-​przed-​molestowaniem-​seksualnym-​w-​pracy.html. Szumlewicz, Piotr. “Polskie #MeToo” [Polish #MeToo]. Lewica, 3 December 2017. http://​lewica.pl/​ ?id=31731&tytul=Piotr-​Szumlewicz:-​Polskie-​. Traister, Rebecca. Good and Mad:  The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. New  York:  Simon & Schuster, 2018. WPolityce, “Skandal w salonie. Feministki przełamały zmowę milczenia, pokazując hipokryzję ‘chłopców lewicy’” [The Scandal in the Society. Feminists Broke the Collusion on Silence, and They Revealed the Hypocrisy of the ‘Left Wing Boys’], 27 November 2017, https://​wpolityce.pl/​spoleczenstwo/​369062-​ skandal-​w-​salonie-​feministki-​przelamaly-​zmowe-​milczenia-​pokazujac-​hipokryzje-​chlopcow-​lewicy. Zadumińska, Beata. Sytuacja ofiar zgwałcenia w postępowaniu przygotowawczym. Report z monitoring [The Situation of Rape Victims in the Preparatory Proceedings: Audit Based Report]. Kraków: Centrum Praw Kobiet, 2016.

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21 #ЯНЕБОЮСЬСКАЗАТЬ (#IAMNOTAFRAIDTOSPEAK), #METOO, AND THE RUSSIAN MEDIA Public discourse around violence against women in Russia Anna Sedysheva

Global assessments of the power and impact of the #MeToo campaign worldwide often represent the movement as initiated by US-based activists and media celebrities, before spreading outside of the Western world. Moreover, within the “geographies of #MeToo”, Russia appears to be conspicuously untouched by the global campaign against sexual violence that has shaken the world. For example, Google’s interactive “Me Too Rising” map created in April 2018 (to mark Sexual Assault Awareness Month) suggests that #MeToo has made no headway in Russia. Existing examinations of the ways in which #MeToo travelled internationally do not, however, take into account the movement that appeared in the Russian-​speaking world a year before #MeToo. This chapter focuses on the #яНеБоюсьСказать (#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak)1 campaign initiated by Ukrainian activists in 2016 which had a significant impact on the debate on violence against women there, and which simultaneously shaped the Russian reception (or lack thereof) of the #MeToo movement. I  analyse how Russian media reacted to the #яНеБоюсьСказать campaign in 2016, and how the narrative of violence against women began to appear and develop in traditional Russian media outlets. I do this by focusing on the main differences between the #яНеБоюсьСказать and #MeToo campaigns, and examining how the #MeToo movement reinforced the discourse initiated by the #яНеБоюсьСказать campaign. In order to understand the extent to which the #яНеБоюсьСказать and #MeToo campaigns challenged the dominant patriarchal discourse in Russia, I will address the issues of how culturally specific gender relations operate in contemporary Russian society, and how this specific context shapes women’s protests in Russia. My analysis will show that #яНеБоюсьСказать was embedded in the Russian social and historical debates on violence against women and, more broadly, women’s rights. The historical

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legacies of Soviet-​attempted equality and recent legal changes r egarding violence against women have also shaped the context of the campaign. In addition, the #яНеБоюсьСказать campaign challenged the existing status quo from within, with new forms of political mobilisations, particularly digital activism, which has begun to foster a new language of women’s emancipation and linguistic agency. Importantly, due to linguistic differences, digital activism of the Russian speaking community developed largely independently from the international proceedings of #MeToo and has therefore gone unrecognised by a number of global attempts to summarise the campaign. At the same time, media and discourse analysis of the #яНеБоюсьСказать and #MeToo campaigns in the Russian context reveals certain similarities between the Russian and Western contexts, particularly where the critical voices against both campaigns are concerned. Strategies of critically evaluating women’s testimonies, discrediting the voices of women, and victim blaming, were all present within the mainstream media responses to #яНеБоюсьСказать. Characteristic of the Russian context, however, was the way in which these critical voices engaged with contemporary political matters, in particular the Russian-​Ukrainian armed conflict and ongoing criticism of Western —​and in particular US —​politics and social matters.

#яНеБоюсьСказать and Russian debates on violence against women and women’s rights The #яНеБоюсьСказать (#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak) hashtag first appeared on 5 July 2016 in a Facebook status post in Ukrainian (#ЯнеБоюсьСказати) by the Ukrainian activist Anastasia Melnychenko. Melnychenko encouraged women to speak out about experiences of sexual violence and to rally against victim-​blaming in Ukrainian society. She started her post with a call for action: “I want us —​women —​to speak today. Let us talk about the violence that most of us have experienced.” She then shared her story of sexual abuse and concluded her post by saying: “[W]‌e, women, must talk about our experience. It is important to make it visible. Please speak. #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak”.2 Within a day, a similar campaign gained momentum in Russia via social media,3 using a Russian variation of the hashtag, #яНеБоюсьСказать.4 This soon drew attention —​and opposition —​to the feminist discourse within Russia. Throughout July 2016, thousands upon thousands of Russian women offered up their experiences, spurring other users to enter the national conversation. Traditional Russian media (including TV networks) covered the issue and today, thanks to the reinforcement by the global #MeToo movement, the hashtag remains in collective memory. While as a rule, Russian Facebook users did not actively participate in the #MeToo movement, Russian mass media sources followed the global discussion and drew parallels to that of #яНеБоюсьСказать. Moreover, various feminist online and offline actions took place for the first time in Russia in 2017 and 2018; actions that likely would not have been possible had it not been for these hashtag movements. Both #MeToo and #яНеБоюсьСказать normalised women’s protests against violence in Russia, prompted widespread debate on this previously taboo topic, and brought the scale of violence against women into the broader forum of public debate. According to the 2018 Gender Inequality World Index, Russia ranks 49th globally, and Russia’s 30% wage gap is relatively high as compared with the rest of the world.5 This is despite the history of the Soviet state, where gender equality was touted as official government policy. Sociologist Elena Kochkina argues that Soviet-​era support for genuine women’s empowerment was a myth and exposes the true purpose of the gender quota system introduced in 1919 by the Soviet government. Kochkina claims that this quota system was not intended to enforce gender equality, but rather to expand the labor force during extensive industrial development.6 304

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Beth Holmgren concurs with this assessment and argues that while Soviet women’s emancipation may have been declared, it was never actually realised. She points out that “when the country was not wracked by war and desperate for every citizen’s self-​sacrifice, women were denied high-​wage jobs and leadership positions…[and they] suffered sexual harassment on the job as a matter of course, with no reliable means of protection”.7 After the collapse of the USSR, the Russian state discarded the existing quota system. Since 1991, male lawmakers have continued to dominate Russian government, with women’s representation in parliament fluctuating between 5% and 15%.8 This reflects the patriarchal attitudes that pervade the mass consciousness of Russians today, and that “a significant part of women themselves are focused on the patriarchal model of gender relations”.9 Women in Russia continue to suffer economic disadvantages and face greater obstacles to upward mobility. Gender discrimination is often justified by referencing women’s supposed “biological predisposition to perform certain functions”.10 Consider, for example the way Russia celebrates International Women’s Day, which has been held annually on 8 March since 1921. International Women’s Day is meant to commemorate women’s rights; however, since the end of the Second World War, this has instead become a sexist holiday in Russia, celebrating —​and reinforcing —​women’s “traditional” roles as mothers, wives, domestic caretakers, and so on. In this spirit, the 2018 celebration witnessed Vladimir Putin reciting a poem on television which congratulated women on being “the beautiful half of humankind”. In his speech, Putin hailed women as mothers and the source of men’s inspiration.11 Russian laws do not incline women to seek out help from the police: if a woman does contact law enforcement, she is likely to be interrogated about what she was wearing and why, and what she was doing and why.12 Russian women are subject to such sexism from their media, as well. Popular comedy shows like “Comedy Club” and “Comedy Women” promote toxic gender stereotypes. For 11 years and counting, the popular show “Let’s Get Married” (Давай поженимся) has put forth the idea that marriage ought to be Russian women’s primary goal. Other shows, particularly those focusing on fashion, such as “Fashion’s Verdict” (Модный приговор) and “Take It Off Immediately” (Снимите это немедленно), judge women harshly for everything from their clothing to their lifestyle choices, especially if they do not have a husband or boyfriend. Commentators on the TV shows “Let Them Talk” (Пусть говорят) and “Male/​Female” (Мужское/​женское) often criticise and blame victims of rape and domestic violence. Russia has no law to protect individuals against sexual harassment. Domestic violence is not treated as a criminal act. Indeed, as the Human Rights Watch Report of 2018 states: “Though some Russian state bodies do keep some data on violence within the family, the government does not systematically collect information on domestic abuse and official statistics are scarce, fragmented, and unclear”.13 Russian statistics are imprecise, but according to official government statistics, 3,500 women were raped in 2017.14 According to Elena Bolyubakh, Director of the Crisis Center for Women in Moscow, “The statistics on appeals to the Ministry of Internal Affairs fix only the appeals themselves.” Bolyubakh further claims that in the span of one year, 6,480 women contacted her centre after having experienced certain types of gender-​based violence related to rape or domestic violence.15

New digital platforms for women’s activism Hashtag activism often addresses issues that receive less public attention; taking advantage of their social media accounts, online activists have the ability to raise public awareness of stigmatised topics. Aided by new digital platforms such as hashtag activism,16 the idea that sexual violence 305

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is systematic is being taken up in large parts of the world. The linguistic agency of various actors engaged in the debate on sexual violence, including women, is of crucial importance herein. Public discourses and the way experiences of sexual violence are narrated fundamentally affect how the issue is treated by the general public, legal system, and its institutions, e.g. law enforcement. Laura M. Ahearn, in her essay “Language and Agency”, illuminates the meaning of linguistic agency, noting that “because language and culture are so tightly interwoven, neither should be studied in isolation from the other, especially when a researcher seeks to understand a concept as complex as agency”.17 Engaging with discursive aspects of linguistic agency is equally crucial for such an analysis, as it illuminates how gender limits access to public discourse. The яНеБоюсьСказать (#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak) movement did not have any clear demands and did not name names; most perpetrators commented upon in posts were left unknown. The movement’s goal was to give women linguistic agency to show the scale of the problem and advance the idea that violence against individual women only occurs when individual men momentarily lose control is a myth. In reality, “such acts are most often the end of a mindset congruent with the rules of patriarchal power, in which the perpetrator views the woman not as a person…but as an object to be manipulated”.18 Other hashtag campaigns over the last several years have focused on a variety of issues concerning violence against women. The global #MeToo movement garnered broad media coverage for its focus on the relationship between gender inequality and sexual assault. In the United States in 2014, #YesAllWomen addressed the issue of misogyny and #WhyIStayed contextualised why women remain in abusive relationships; the following year, #ShoutYourAbortion endeavored to destigmatise and normalise abortion experiences.19 The worldwide success of the #MeToo movement has further emphasised social media users’ ability to challenge the dominant public discourse. Consider, for instance, that 200 prominent men lost their jobs due to public allegations of sexual harassment in the wake of a New York Times exposé on the subject (followed days later by a New Yorker investigation): “At least 920 people came forward to say that one of these men subjected them to sexual misconduct. And nearly half of the men who have been replaced were succeeded by women.”20 Per the same article, “over 1.7 million tweets included the hashtag ‘#MeToo,’ with 85 countries that had at least 1,000 #MeToo tweets”.21 Within Facebook’s Russian-​ speaking community, discussions around violence against women preceded the #MeToo movement. In fact, #яНеБоюсьСказать was the first large-​ scale online women’s movement, and took off on Facebook in Ukraine and Russia over a year before #MeToo began in 2017. This is why Russian social media users did not join American actress Alyssa Milano’s call to share stories of sexual harassment and abuse using the hashtag #MeToo. Indeed, because #яНеБоюсьСказать was so recent, the #MeToo movement did not gain traction in Russia, serving instead to redirect attention back to discussions already taking place around gender inequality in Russia. Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind the divide between the Russian-​speaking community in Russia and Ukraine and that of the Western world. According to an analysis conducted by the Levada Analytical Center in 2014, only 11% of Russians speak English.22 Russian social media sites operate exclusively in Russian, so #MeToo did not have nearly as much resonance within these spheres. It makes sense that #ЯнеБоюсьСказати —​a movement that began in Ukraine, a country that is not only geographically and linguistically, but also culturally close to Russia —​would resonate more in the Russian-​speaking world.23 Russian is one of the world’s largest languages and the ninth most popular internet language.24 Former republics of the Soviet Union still use Russian to varying degrees. It is also 306

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one of the languages most frequently translated —​both from and into. For these reasons, the large online space occupied by Russian speakers tends to be relatively disconnected from the rest of the English-​speaking world, especially in light of the traditional East–​West opposition embedded in Russian culture. As a rule, Russian social media users do not display much solidarity with the international English-​speaking community, although in the case of the global movement against gender-​based violence, the public debate initiated by #яНеБоюсьСказать was propelled even further by the #MeToo movement. It is worth noting, for context, that by the time the #MeToo movement began, the #яНеБоюсьСказать (#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak) campaign had already spread beyond Russia and Ukraine to former Soviet countries such as Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, proving that societies in those countries still share a common public space, and that the Russian language still connects them.

Russian media reactions to the #яНеБоюсьСказать campaign in 2016 For this chapter I conduct discourse analysis on a selection of newspaper articles relating to the #яНеБоюсьСказать campaign of 2016, which began on 5 July of that year. As Blanche and Durrheim state, discourse analysis is “the act of showing how certain discourses are deployed to achieve particular effects in specific contexts”,25 acknowledging the important role that discourse plays in producing and reproducing gender stereotypes. The first Russian media response to the campaign came two days after it began.26 Some media sources simply presented a selection of Facebook posts with the hashtag, without providing any impressions or conclusions: “#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak: hundreds of women shared their sexual abuse stories on Facebook.”27 Meanwhile, other sources tried to analyse the campaign and its intentions, and even speculated on possible conspiracies. “#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak: Women Hate Men and Openly Talk About It”, an article in Ria Novosti, published select posts from Facebook without any commentary, yet its provocative title shifted the focus from the problem of gender-​based violence to the myth of women’s hatred of men.28 In order to examine how the media participated in this public debate, I have selected articles in which authors present their point of view or have invited experts to share their opinions. The first article, co-authored by two journalists, was published by Zvezda, a regional newspaper from Perm, a few days after the campaign: “Battle of opinions: #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak or #BetterNotToSay”. This headline  —​and the debate it speaks to  —​highlights societal confusion in the wake of the campaign. The first author, Ivan Kozlov, addressed his conflicted feelings, and expressed disbelief that the campaign could, in fact, spur any real change: Outside… there is a huge and great Russia where it’s scary to let a girl out, even to go to the store, but individuals in safer parts of Russia and [on] social networks pontificate on … the ethical nuances of the movement while sexual violence and murder continue unabated.29 But at the same time, Kozlov also sees something positive in the campaign: I am happy when people write: “I am reading stories attached to these hashtags and it gives me chills, I did not think that everything was so terrible”. There is something of benefit herein. Such people did not think, but now will think about this.30 Kozlov’s coauthor, Sergei Yakupov, took the contrary position, expressing scepticism about the campaign: “I don’t think Facebook is the place for such exhibitionism.” This appraisal echoes 307

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Russia’s pervasive practice of victim-​blaming, which is precisely what the campaign hoped to rally against: A cry to the crowd that you were raped or beaten will not help you to internally free yourself from … victimhood. This will only reinforce it, because now … many people [know] … and not all of them are ready to acknowledge it. [They] will use it against you.31 Yakupov also reveals his misunderstanding of the scale of violence against women, and expresses a critique of the supposed ambiguity of perpetrators: So here there is a clear image of the victim, but there is no clear image of who makes her this victim; each one [victim] has her own [perpetrator]. Therefore, it is not entirely clear how to deal with this if he [the perpetrator] cannot be identified unambiguously.32 Yakupov wants to claim that he is not personally a victim-​blamer, and yet he proceeds to blame the prevalence of domestic violence on the forgiving attitudes of the victims: On the other hand, the problem lies in the women themselves. Many live with it [the violence] and consider it the norm.33 Ultimately, both of these male authors are sceptical about the influence of the campaign. They do not see the campaign as the mass mobilisation of women against systematic sexual violence, nor do they seem to understand some of the campaign’s primary goals:  to expose and rally against Russia’s culture of victim-​blaming, and to emphasise the scale of the problem of sexual harassment and abuse against women. The online news publication Lenta.ru published an article entitled “If you are afraid of men, stay at home: Why the campaign #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak to help victims of violence turned into a farce.”34 Analysing posts with the hashtag in question, the authors claim that many of the problems addressed are too insignificant to matter. In their discussion of the campaign, the authors also support one of the myths about rape: that many rape stories are fabricated. They quote therein Lenta.ru’s Editor in Chief, Pyotr Kamenchenko: The Internet and social networks are a great field for the activities of patients with hysteria. To fantasize, tell lies and show off in all forms on the network has become the general norm. And this is the other side of the #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak coin.35 In fact, various studies have shown that false sexual assault accusations typically only account for 2–​8% of cases. Moreover, many victims remain silent for fear of being accused of lying. The stereotype that false rape allegations are a common occurrence, a widely held misconception in broad swathes of society, including among police officers…  . contributes to the enormous problem of under-​reporting by victims of rape and sexual abuse. It is estimated that between 64% and 96% of victims do not report the crimes committed against them […] and a major reason for this is the victims’ belief that his or her report will be met with suspicion or outright disbelief […].36 The views of the Lenta.ru expert support the dominant patriarchal discourse and rape myths. The authors completely misunderstood the goal of the campaign. 308

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One of the first Russian media sources to react to the campaign with serious attention and analysis in a series of articles (including an interview with Melnychenko) was the online newspaper Meduza. On 8 July 2016, Meduza published the article “#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak: What Do Thousands of Flashmob [campaign] Posts on Violence Have in Common?” with an analysis of the preliminary results of the campaign. The article emphasised the scale of the problem and the impossibility of determining whether one was a potential victim or abuser without first understanding violence, the leitmotif of apologising, and silence. Meduza pointed out that men are also victims, and indeed, several posts were written by male victims of sexual violence. However, one can argue that spotlighting male victims sidelines women’s experiences and shows a misunderstanding of Melnychenko’s call, which was deliberately addressed to women. To be sure, male victims of sexual assault are also victims of a patriarchal culture that cultivates violence, but the perpetrators in the absolute majority of cases are men. The victims of domestic violence and sexual assault are mostly women, and the perpetrators of these crimes are mostly men. One of the first sources to bring a theoretical explanation of violence as a tool of systematic oppression was the article “Publicist Lynn Khanova  —​on why the movement #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak is so important for Russia”, published online at Life.ru on 8 July 2016: Therefore, the problem of rape is not only rapists. In feminism there is a term for this —​“rape culture”. This culture always believes the abuser’s excuses rather than the testimony of the victim; it puts the blame on the victim; it silences the victims.37 This article demonstrates how one Russian media source appropriately formulated its language in order to support an understanding of violence against women as a systematic problem. This is how sociologist Raewyn Connell sees the issue: “[R]‌outinely presented in media as individual deviance”, sexual violence such as rape is “a form of person-​to-​person violence deeply embedded in power inequalities and ideology of male supremacy. Far from being a deviation from the social order, it is in a significant sense an enforcement of it.”38 Whether media sources in Russia addressed the once-​taboo topic of gender-​based violence as systemic or not, the issue began to be publicly debated and discussed by a large number of traditional media sources, marking a turning point in Russia, beginning in July 2016. As is clear, common themes of critically assessing the transformative potential of digital activism, undermining women’s credibility, victim blaming, and shifting focus to male victims of sexual violence appeared throughout the media responses to #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak campaign, making it quite similar to what happened in other parts of the world, in the context of #MeToo. One interesting and unique aspect of #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak is, however, the way in which the media coverage of the campaign engaged with broader issues of Russian politics, particularly Russian-Ukranian armed conflict. On 8 July 2016, Zhurnalistskaya Pravda published the article “#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak: What Nastya, the feminist, does not say”, in which Grigory Ignatov speculated about conspiracies surrounding the campaign.39 He pointed out that the woman who spearheaded the campaign, Anastasia (a female name commonly shortened to “Nastya”) Melnychenko, was a human rights activist who had supported victims of the ATO (a Ukrainian anti-​terrorist organisation), and is part of a group that receives grants from George Soros:  “A feminist who helps war criminals with the money of an American billionaire —​that’s fine, how cool!” Taking his personal attack further, the author adds that Melnychenko comes from a troubled family and is a single mother, in an effort to diminish the importance of her initiative regarding patriarchal discourse. 309

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The author then redirects the focus from the campaign to complicated Russian–​Ukrainian relations, accusing Anastasia Melnychenko of being deaf to the victims of rape in East Ukraine. Ignatov suggests an alternative hashtag campaign: For example, let’s run the hashtag #TruthAboutATO, how many such stories there would be —​not thousands, but millions! … Feminist Nastya helps the rapists from the Ukrainian Armed Forces to relax and forget all their dirty tricks. This is not a fashionable harassment, but the routine days of independence [of Ukraine].40 This article was widely shared on social media, thereby fuelling the fire of the conspiracy discussion and deflecting public attention away from the real intention of the campaign.

The formation of new public discourse: #MeToo and Russia The scope of this chapter will not allow for a complete evaluation of the way in which media outlets addressed issues of violence and sexism in the years between #яНеБоюсьСказать and the #MeToo movement, but I would nevertheless like to highlight a few specific incidents. Russian politicians all but ignored the #яНеБоюсьСказать campaign. The issue of domestic violence was discussed at the parliamentary level at the beginning of 2017, and shockingly, some forms of domestic violence were actually decriminalised. As Vladimir Putin said in December 2016, “unceremonious intervention in the family is unacceptable”.41 In February 2017, he then signed into law a legislation that decriminalised some forms of domestic violence in order to further “protect” families from any “intervention”, thereby making the home less safe for women and children. This loss in the battle to replace Russia’s “traditional” (i.e., misogynistic) values with principals of gender equality did, however, garner a strong response. Cases of domestic violence became more visible and drew widespread public attention on social media. More than 400,000 Russians signed a petition to enact a law against domestic violence in 2018.42 When the #MeToo movement was popularised by Alyssa Milano, traditional Russian media immediately joined the discussion, with a number of sources comparing #MeToo and #яНеБоюсьСказать, or, at the very least, mentioning that such a discussion had already taken place in Russia. Some even called #MeToo the American version of the Russian #яНеБоюсьСказать campaign.43 Other articles questioned why the #MeToo movement had not included Russia. An article published 8 January 2018 titled “There is no sex in the West: business, politicians and artists reflect on the global ‘Weinsteingate’ ” described the way in which most Russian media sources reacted to #MeToo, particularly to the case against Harvey Weinstein: Unfortunately, in Russia, “Weinsteingate” was covered superficially or even sarcastically the whole year. One can and should argue about individual accusations against specific actors or politicians, but with Weinstein, the situation looks quite transparent. Almost a hundred women accused the producer of harassment and forced sexual contact.44 Another article, “7 Days (US):  Why Russia did not touch the #MeToo movement”, translated into Russian and published on Inosmi on 7 October 2018, offers a similar sentiment, seemingly ignoring the several large sexual harassment media scandals in Russia that took place in 2018:

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Patriarchal sentiment still prevails in Russia, as President Vladimir Putin’s government pursues a policy that emphasizes the country’s supposed traditional values, including a reduction in the legal protection of women subjected to violence.45 Russia did have its #MeToo moment when various powerful men were accused of sexual assault during 2018, visibly affecting public discourse. The article “The Hashtag #MeToo has become a social tool and weapon”, published 29 March 2018 on Dni.ru, noted that the #MeToo movement in America first hit the artistic world of Hollywood, while in Russia, the first attack was on the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. The article declares the allegations against members of the State Duma to be part of a Western conspiracy: It is completely obvious that the Russian version of #MeToo, expressed in a “hitting” of the State Duma and several famous people (and I assure you that harassment will be “discovered” everywhere), is not a homebrew product… Weapons are used against us [by the West].46 In the excerpt above, the author references the sensational media scandal which took place in February–​March 2018. On 23 February 2018, the newspaper Vedomosti published an article titled, “Who has accused deputy Slutsky of sexual harassment and why. Russian society is not ripe for discussion of sex scandals and is used to blaming women for it”.47 The author describes three journalists’ accusation of sexual assault against State Duma Deputy Leonid Slutsky, and draws a parallel to the Harvey Weinstein scandal: Since the time of the scandal with Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein on the sidelines of the State Duma, the correspondents have not ceased being bitterly ironic:  “We could have our own Harvigate”. The TV channel “Dozhd” made an attempt to make it happen.48 However, subsequent developments in the scandal, with additional journalists covering the Duma, called for an investigation of Slutsky, which suggests that the traditional Russian media community supports the global #MeToo movement.49 The Slutsky scandal was widely discussed by social media users in Russia. Students from the Faculty of Political Science at Moscow State University demanded that Slutsky be removed from his post as head of the Department of International Relations.50 On 21 March 2018, however, the Duma Ethics Commission found Slutsky guilty of no behavioural violations.51 A media boycott ensued: “More than 20 media outlets in one form or another supported the boycott of the State Duma, and of the LDPR deputy Leonid Slutsky personally.”52 The RBK News Source concluded that “the Ethics Commission, in fact, recognized the possibility of sexual harassment of journalists by newsmakers as the norm”.53 This act of solidarity among Russian media sources was unprecedented. Pro-​government and independent media sources alike all judged the sham findings of the Ethics Committee to be unacceptable. Further, the online news site Meduza (which extensively covered the developments of #яНеБоюсьСказать and the #MeToo movement “and issued instructions for people harassed at work”, as Radio Svoboda stated)54 was the subject of its own sexual harassment scandal at the end of 2018. Ivan Kolpakov, Editor in Chief of Meduza, was accused of harassing the spouse of an employee at an 20 October 2018 party in honor of the anniversary of the publication, and he subsequently resigned:

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At a party dedicated to the birthday of the publication, he touched the buttocks of the wife of one of the employees of Meduza and said: “You are the only one at this party whom I can harass, and nothing will happen to me for that”.55 His resignation, however, was not a free choice. A media outcry led to his being suspended for two weeks, and then a few days after being reinstated to his position, Meduza readers called for him to resign, which he did begrudgingly on 9 November 2018.56 Kolpakov never admitted to having harassed anyone. On his private Facebook account, he wrote: From now on, I am not the editor-​in-​chief of Meduza. I leave because I see no other way out. … About the so-​called incident, I categorically refuse to admit accusations of abuse and sexual harassment. But I found myself in a situation where it was impossible and senseless to defend myself.57 The fact that neither Kolpakov (nor Meduza, given its silence on the matter) ever explicitly admitted to sexual harassment is a distressing development at this otherwise progressive news organisation. On the other hand, readers were able to influence the case and this suggests an adeptness at using Facebook as a platform to spur change. Also utilising Facebook, in January 2019, journalist Ekaterina Fedorova from the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok accused Alexey Migunov, the co-​founder of an influential local holding company, Prima Media, of rape. Even though Vladivostok does not receive much attention from federal news sources, this case did receive significant coverage in Echo Moscow, Wonderzine, Meduza, Svoboda.Org, and Yandex News, among others. These developments suggest the emergence of a new narrative in Russian public discourse. The precedent of men in power facing charges of sexual harassment has been set, and in the wake of #яНеБоюсьСказать, has furthermore been sanctioned by traditional media sources.

Conclusion In 2016, Russian media sources publicised the #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak campaign but expressed reservations about its short-​lived nature and doubted its ability to spark social change. However, over the next two years, the issue of women’s discrimination continued to grow as a topic of discussion, and the hashtag #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak remains alive in collective memory. The sexual harassment scandal in the State Duma catalysed unprecedented solidarity among various media sources, which boycotted the accused deputy (Leonid Slutsky) and indeed the entire Duma by refusing to send journalists there. Unlike in Western countries, however, it is still very difficult to fire men in power in Russia on the basis of sexual harassment accusations. Still, media sources have expressed solidarity on this issue, and the scandal concerning the online newspaper Meduza revealed that readerships’ critical reactions do matter and can effect serious changes. In closing, it is worth remembering that whereas the #MeToo movement was popularised by celebrities and featured a very public Hollywood scandal, the #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak campaign started at the grassroots level. Ukrainian human rights activist Anastasia Melnychenko introduced the hashtag in a post on her private Facebook page. From her several thousand followers, the campaign spread across Ukraine, Russia, and other Post-​Soviet countries, among people who did not know her. The mass media response to Melnychenko’s post opened the door to a new narrative in public debate. The door has since been opened even wider by social media users using the 312

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hashtag as a tool to draw public attention to issues ignored by the government, in a society where visible public expressions of protest are limited by the State.

Appendix Articles analysed for this chapter were drawn from the following sources (and the figures of these online sites’ monthly visitors have been included to indicate the popularity of these sources): 1 Ria Novosti —​online media source: 122 million monthly visits. 2 Lenta.ru —​one of the leading Russian online news publications: 100 million monthly visits. 3 Dni.ru (Дни.Ру) —​online newspaper: 43 million monthly visits. 4 Life.ru —​online media source: 33 million monthly visits. 5 Meduza —​Russian language online newspaper, registered in Latvia by Lenta.ru’s former chief-​editor Galina Timchenko: 33 million monthly visits.58 6 Inosmi.ru  —​an internet portal that tracks and translates articles that are in some way connected to Russia from foreign (mostly Western) media and translates them into Russian: around 15 million monthly visits. 7 Radio Svoboda  —​international nonprofit broadcasting organisation: 9  million monthly website visits.59 8 Vedomosti (Ведомости) —​online newspaper: 9 million monthly visits. 9 BMF.ru —​business portal: 6 million monthly visits. 10 Zhurnalistskaya Pravda (Журналистская правда)  —​online newspaper: over 600,000 monthly visits. 11 Zvezda (Звезда) —​regional online newspaper of Perm: over 100,000 monthly visits. 12 BBC News Russia —​UK government-​sponsored online media source in Russian (information on monthly visits specific to the BBC News Russia is not available).

Notes 1 It should be pointed out that#яНеБоюсьСказать can be translated as either #IamNotAfraidToSayIt or #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak. The latter version, as used by the Guardian, is more expressive in my view. See “#yaNeBoyusSkazat  —​flashmob protiv seksual’nogo nasiliya I  diskriminatsii” [#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak —​Flashmob against Sexual Violence and Discrimination], Afisha, 6 June 2017, https://​daily.afisha.ru/​relationship/​2199-​yaneboyusskazati-​fleshmob-​protiv-​seksualnogo-​ nasiliya-​i-​diskriminacii/​; Shaun Walker, “Putin Approves Legal Change That Decriminalises Domestic Violence”, Guardian, 7 February 2017, www.theguardian.com/​world/​2017/​feb/​07/​ putin-​approves-​change-​to-​law-​decriminalising-​domestic-​violence. 2 Melnychenko, “Я хочу, аби сьогодні говорили ми, жінки. Аби ми говорили про насильство, яке пережила більшість з нас” [I Want Women to Speak Today. Let Us Talk about Violence That Most of Us Have Experienced], Facebook, 5 July 2016, www.facebook.com/​nastya.melnychenko/​ posts/​10209108320800151. 3 “#yaNeBoyusSkazat:  sotni zhenshchin rasskazali v Feysbuke o seksual’nom nasilii nad soboy” [#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak:  Hundreds of Women Shared on Facebook Their Stories of Sexual Violence], Komsomolskaya Pravda, 8 July 2016, www.kp.ru/​daily/​26552/​3568569/​. 4 The Russian hashtag (#яНеБоюсьСказать) differs from the Ukrainian hashtag (#яНеБоюсьСказати) by only one letter as the languages are very similar but still have various differences. 5 “Human Development Data (1990–​2018)”, Human Development Reports, accessed 11 January 2019, http://​hdr.undp.org/​en/​composite/​GII; IgorNikolaev, T.  Marchenko, and O.  Tochilkina, Genderny Razryv v Oplate Truda. Analiticheskiy Doklad [The Gender Gap in Wages. Analytical Report], report, Institute of Strategic Analysis (Moscow: FBK Grant Thorton, 2017), 23.

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Anna Sedysheva 6 Elena Kochkina, “Predstavitel’stvo Zhenshchin v Strukturakh Rossii, 1917–​2002 Gg” [Representation of Women in Russian Power Structures 1917–​2002], in Gendernaya Rekonstruktsiya Politicheskikh Sistem [A Gender Reconstruction of Political Systems] (St Petersburg: SPG-​Aleteya, 2003). 7 Beth Holmgren, “Toward an Understanding of Gendered Agency in Contemporary Russia”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 3 (2013): 536. 8 “Russian Federation Gossoudarstvennaya Duma Last Elections. Women in Parliaments:  World Classification”, IPU Parline Database, accessed 7 January 2018, http://​archive.ipu.org/​parline/​ reports/​2263_​E.htm. 9 Nelli Romanova, Ilona Romanova, and Tatyana Sharova, “Adaptatsionnyye Resursy Zhenshchin Kak Ob’Yekt Sotsial’nogo Upravleniya” [Women’s Ability to Adapt as an Object of Social Control], Vestnik ChitGu 7, no. 74 (2011): 116–​125. 10 Romanova et al., “Adaptatsionnyye Resursy Zhenshchin”. 11 Anton Zarubin, “Putin Pozdravil Zhenshchin s 8 Marta, Prochitav Im Stikhi Poeta Dement’yeva” [Putin Congratulated Women on 8 March International Women’s Day After Having Read Them Some Poetry by the Poet Dementyev], Federal’noye agentstvo novostey Riafan [Riafan Federal News Agenc], 7 March 2018. https://​r iafan.ru/​1033033-​putin-​pozdravil-​zhenshin-​s-​8-​ marta-​prochitav-​im-​stikhi-​poeta-​dementeva. 12 Krizisnyj centr dlya zhenshchin [Crisis Center for Women] (website), accessed 10 February 2018, https://​crisiscenter.ru/​pochemu/​ kazhdaya 7ya zhenshhina idet v policiyu. 13 Marina Pisklakova-​Parker et  al., Nasiliye v Otnoshenii Zhenshchin v Rossii. Al’ternativnyy Doklad O Vypolnenii v Rossiyskoy Federatsii Konvencii OON o likvidatsii vsekh form diskriminatsii v otnoshenii zhenshchin [Violence Connected to Women in Russia. Alternative Report on How the Russian Federation Fulfills the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women], report (Moscow: Judicial Department under the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, 2010), 4. 14 Pisklakova-​Parker et al., Nasiliye v Otnoshenii Zhenshchin v Rossii, 4. 15 Mariya Osina, “ ‘Sama Vinovata’:  Chto Takoye Victimblaming I  Kak Deystvuyet Mekhanizm Samoobvineniya” [[“You Are Guilty Yourself:”:  What Is Victim Blaming and How Does the Mechanism of Self-​Accusation Work], Center for Dealing with the Problem of Violence, Nasiliyu. net, 3 July 2018. https://​nasiliu.net/​sama-​vinovata-​chto-​takoe-​viktimblejming-​i-​kak-​dejstvuet-​ mehanizm-​samoobvineniya/​. 16 Joan Alleluia Filemoni-​Tofaeno and Lydia Johnson, Reweaving the Relational Mat: A Christian Response to Violence Against Women from Oceania (London: Routledge, 2016), 1. 17 Laura M.  Ahearn, “Language and Agency”, Annual Review of Anthropology 30, no.  1 (2001):  131, https://​doi.org/​10.1146/​annurev.anthro.30.1.109. 18 Filemoni-​Tofaeno and Johnson, Reweaving the Relational Mat, 1. 19 Emanuella Grinberg, “Why #YesAllWomen Took Off on Twitter”, CNN, 27 May 2014, http://​ edition.cnn.com/​2014/​05/​27/​living/​california-​killer-​hashtag-​yesallwomen; Grinberg, “Meredith Vieira Explains #WhyIStayed”, CNN, 17 September 2014. http://​edition.cnn.com/​2014/​09/​09/​ living/​r ice-​video-​why-​i-​stayed; Michael Pearson, “Women Embrace, Criticize #ShoutYourAbortion”, CNN, 30 September 2015, https://​edition.cnn.com/​2015/​09/​22/​living/​shout-​your-​abortion-​feat. 20 Audrey Carlsen et al., “#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women”, New  York Times, 23 October 2018, www.nytimes.com/​interactive/​2018/​10/​23/​us/​ metoo-​replacements.html. 21 Carlsen et al., “#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men”. 22 “Issledovaniye Levada-​ Tsentra:  70 Protsentov Rossiyan Ne Vladeyut Inostrannymi Yazykami” [Research of the Levada Center:  70% of Russian Citizens Don’t Speak Foreign Languages], Gumanitarnyy Portal, 28 May 2014, https://​gtmarket.ru/​news/​2014/​05/​28/​6787. 23 For the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on the Russian side of the #яНеБоюсьСказать campaign, and how it was buttressed by the subsequent #MeToo movement. 24 “Internet World Users by Language: Top Ten Languages”. Internet World Stats. Internet Statistics. Accessed 21 January 2019. www.internetworldstats.com/​stats7.htm. 25 Martin Terre Blanche and Kevin Durrheim, Research in Practice (Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town, 1999), 154. 26 The selected articles analysed for this chapter (from newspapers and online information sites listed in appendix A) were published between July 2016 and January 2019. The focus is on the media response to the issue of violence against women in 2016 (during the #яНеБоюсьСказать campaign)

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#MeToo and the Russian media and throughout the following year, as well as the way in which that campaign was reinforced by the #MeToo movement after October 2017. 27 “#yaNeBoyusSkazat: sotni zhenshchin rasskazali v Feysbuke o seksual’nom nasilii nad soboy” [#IAm NotAfraidToSpeak: [Hundreds of Women Shared on Facebook Their Stories of Sexual Violence]. 28 Anastaiya Melnikova, “#Yaneboyus’skazat’: Zhenshchiny Nenavidyat Muzhchin i Otkryto Ob Etom Rasskazyvayut” [#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak: Women Hate Men and Openly Talk About It], RIA Novosti, 11 July 2016, https://​r ia.ru/​20160708/​1461715068.html. 29 This quote (as well as all other subsequent quotations from Russian language media sources) was translated from the original Russian by the article’s author. Ivan Kozlov and Sergey Yakupov, “Bitva Mneniy:  #YANeBoyus’Skazat’ Ili #LuchsheNeStoitGovorit’?” [Battle of Opinions: #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak or #BetterNotToSay], Zvezda, accessed 23 January 2019, http://​ zvzda.ru/​opinions/​b6c213e8b67a. 30 Kozlov and Yakupov, “Bitva Mneniy”. 31 Kozlov and Yakupov, “Bitva Mneniy”. 32 Kozlov and Yakupov, “Bitva Mneniy”. 33 Kozlov and Yakupov, “Bitva Mneniy”. 34 Ksenia Krivotulova and Petr Kamenchenko, “Muzhika Boyat’sya —​Doma Sidet’. Pochemu Aktsiya v Pomoshch’ Zhertvam Nasiliya #yaNeBoyus’Skazat’ Prevratilas’ v Fars” [If You Are Afraid of Men, Stay at Home. Why the Campaign #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak to Help Victims of Violence Turned into a Farce], Lenta, 9 July 2016. https://​lenta.ru/​articles/​2016/​07/​09/​onineboyatza/​. 35 Krivotulova and Kamenchenko, “Muzhika Boyat’sya —​Doma Sidet’ ”. 36 David Lisak, Lori Gardinier, Sarah C. Nicksa, and Ashley M. Cote, “False Allegations of Sexual Assault: An Analysis of Ten Years of Reported Cases”, Violence Against Women 16, no. 12 (2010): 1318–​1334. 37 Linn Khanova, “Kultura Iznasilovania” [Rape Culture], Life News Source, 8 July 2016, https://​life.ru/​ p/​875015. 38 Raewyn Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 116. 39 Grigory Ignatov, “ ‘Ya Ne Boyus’ Skazat’: O Chom Molchit Feministka Nastya” [I Am Not Scared to Speak: What Nastya, the Feminist, Does Not Say], Zhurnalistskaya Pravda, 25 July 2016. https://​ jpgazeta.ru/​ya-​ne-​boyus-​skazat-​o-​chyom-​molchit-​feministka-​nastya/​. 40 Ignatov, “ ‘Ya Ne Boyus’ Skazat”. 41 Leonid Bershidsky, “Kak Rossiya Mogla Razreshit’ Nemnogo Domashnego Nasiliya?” [How Russia Was Able to Allow a Little Bit of Domestic Violence], InoSMI, 16 January 2017, https://​inosmi.ru/​ social/​20170114/​238527099.html. 42 “Alena Popova: ‘Chego My Khotim Ot Zakona Protiv Domashnego Nasiliya’ ”[Alena Popova: “What We Want from a Law Against Domestic V ​ iolence”], Novye Izvestia, 26 December 2018, https://​newizv.ru/​ article/​general/​26-​12-​2018/​alena-​popova-​chego-​my-​hotim-​ot-​zakona-​protiv-​domashnego-​nasiliya 43 Ekaterina Klimushkina, “#MeToo ili zapadnyy #yaneboyus’skazat’. Novyy fleshmob v sotssetyakh ob istoriyakh seksual’nykh domogatel’stv i nasilii” [#MeToo or the Western #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak], Medialeaks, 16 October 2017, https://​medialeaks.ru/​1610qaz-​metoo-​ili-​zapadnyiy-​yaneboyusskazat/​ ; Baleva, Elena. “#MeToo —​YA tozhe: sotsseti otkliknulis’ na skandal s Weinsteinom”, RadioVesti.ru, 17 October 2017, https://​radiovesti.ru/​brand/​61178/​episode/​1556540/​. 44 “7 Dney (SSHA):  Pochemu Rossiyu Ne Kosnulos’ Dvizheniye #MeToo”, Inosmi.ru, 7 October 2018. https://​inosmi.ru/​social/​20181007/​243400321.html. 45 Inosmi.ru, “7 Dney (SSHA)”. 46 Dmitry Drobnitsky, “Hashtag #MeToo Stal Sotsial’noy Tekhnologiyey I Oruzhiyem” [The Hashtag #MeToo Has Become a Social Tool and Weapon], Dni.ru, 29 March 2018, https://​dni.ru/​society/​ 2018/​3/​29/​394632.html. 47 Olga Churakova, “Kto I  Pochemu Obvinil Deputata Slutskogo v Seksual’nykh Domogatel’stvakh” [Who Accused the MP Slutsky of Sexual Harassment and Why], Vedomosti, 23 February 2018, www. vedomosti.ru/​opinion/​articles/​2018/​02/​23/​751893-​kto-​pochemu-​deputata-​slutskogo. 48 Churakova, “Kto I Pochemu Obvinil Deputata Slutskogo v Seksual’nykh Domogatel’stvakh”. 49 Taisiya Bekbulatova, “Zhurnalisty Poprosili Volodina Obsudit’ Povedeniye Deputata Slutskogo. Yego Obvinyayut v Seksual’nykh Domogatel’stvakh” [Journalists Asked Volodin to Discuss the Behavior of MP Slutsky. He Is Accused of Sexual Harassment], Meduza, 26 February 2018, https://​meduza. io/​feature/​2018/​02/​26/​zhurnalisty-​poprosili-​volodina-​obsudit-​povedenie-​deputata-​slutskogo-​ego-​ obvinyayut-​v-​seksualnyh-​domogatelstvah.

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Anna Sedysheva 50 “MGU: Trebovaniye Snyat’Slutskogo S Posta Zavkafedry —​Eto Politicheskaya Igra I Zamysly Naval’nogo” [Moscow State University: The Demand to Remove Slutsky from the Postion of Department Chair —​That Is Navalny’s Scheme and Political Game], Meduza, 9 March 2018, https://​meduza.io/​news/​2018/​03/​ 09/​mgu-​trebovanie-​snyat-​slutskogo-​s-​posta-​zavkafedry-​eto-​politicheskaya-​igra-​i-​zamysly-​navalnogo. 51 “Zasedaniye Dumskoy Komissii Po Etike Po Povodu Dela Leonida Slutskogo. Rasshifrovka” [The Meeting of the Duma Committee on Ethics on the Leonid Slutsky Affair. Deciphering], Meduza, 21 March 2018, https://​meduza.io/​feature/​2018/​03/​21/​ zasedanie-​dumskoy-​komissii-​po-​etike-​po-​povodu-​dela-​leonida-​slutskogo-​rasshifrovka. 52 “Ot “Meduzy” Do “Spetsnaza”:  Kakiye SMI Podderzhali Boykot Gosdumy” [From Meduza to Spetnaz: Which News Media Supported the Boycott of the State Duma], BBC News Russia, 22 March 2018, www.bbc.com/​russian/​news-​43492913. 53 “Ot “Meduzy” Do “Spetsnaza”, BBC News Russia. 54 “Glavnyy Redaktor ‘Meduzy’ Ivan Kolpakov Podal v Otstavku” [Editor-​in-​chief of Medusa, Ivan Kolpakov, resigns], Radio Svobody, 9 November 2018, www.svoboda.org/​a/​29591600.html. 55 “Glavnyy Redaktor ‘Meduzy’ Ivan Kolpakov Podal v Otstavku”, Radio Svobody. 56 “Glavnyy Redaktor ‘Meduzy’ Ivan Kolpakov Podal v Otstavku”, Radio Svobody. 57 Ivan Kolpakov, “S etoy minuty ya ne glavnyy redaktor «Meduzy»” [From Now on I Am Not the Editor in Chief of Meduza], Facebook, 9 November 2018, www.facebook.com/​ivan.kolpakov/​posts/​ 10218327928016164. 58 Podrez, Taras, “Eks-​glavred Lenta.ru Galina Timchenko Uchredila Medusa Project” [The Former Editor in Chief Galina Timchenko Set up a Meduza Project], Izvestia, 26 August 2014, https://​iz.ru/​ news/​575816. 59 Digital World Market Intelligence Platform. SimilarWeb. Accessed 22 January 2019. www.similarweb. com/​(search box below webpage masthead used to generate figures).

Bibliography Ahearn, Laura M. “Language and Agency”. Annual Review of Anthropology 30, no. 1 (2001): 109–​137. https://​doi.org/​10.1146/​annurev.anthro.30.1.109. Afisha. “#yaNeBoyusSkazat —​flashmob protiv seksual’nogo nasiliya i diskriminatsii”[#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak —​ Flashmob against Sexual Violence and Discrimination]. 6 June 2017. https://​daily.afisha.ru/​relationship/​ 2199-​yaneboyusskazati-​fleshmob-​protiv-​seksualnogo-​nasiliya-​i-​diskriminacii/​. Baleva, Elena. “#MeToo —​YA tozhe: sotsseti otkliknulis’ na skandal s Weinsteinom”. RadioVesti.RU. 17 October 2017. https://​radiovesti.ru/​brand/​61178/​episode/​1556540/​ BBC News Russia. “Ot “Meduzy” Do “Spetsnaza”: Kakiye SMI Podderzhali Boykot Gosdumy” [From Meduza to Spetnaz: Which News Media Supported the Boycott of the State Duma]. 22 March 2018. www.bbc.com/​russian/​news-​43492913. Bekbulatova, Taisiya. “Zhurnalisty Poprosili Volodina Obsudit’ Povedeniye Deputata Slutskogo. Yego Obvinyayut v Seksual’nykh Domogatel’stvakh” [“Journalists Asked Volodin to Discuss the Behavior of the MP Slutsky. He Is Accused of Sexual Harassment”]. Meduza, 26 February 2018. https://​meduza. io/​feature/​2018/​02/​26/​zhurnalisty-​poprosili-​volodina-​obsudit-​povedenie-​deputata-​slutskogo-​ego-​ obvinyayut-​v-​seksualnyh-​domogatelstvah. Bershidsky, Leonid. “Kak Rossiya Mogla Razreshit’ Nemnogo Domashnego Nasiliya?” [How Russia Was Able to Allow a Little Bit of Domestic Violence]. Inosmi, 16 January 2017. https://​inosmi.ru/​social/​ 20170114/​238527099.html. Carlsen, Audrey, Maya Salam, Claire Cain Miller, Denise Lu, Ash Ngu, Jugal K. Patel, and Zach Wichter. Research in Practice. Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town, 1999. Churakova, Olga. “Kto I  Pochemu Obvinil Deputata Slutskogo v Seksual’nykh Domogatel’stvakh” [Who Accused the MP Slutsky of Sexual Harassment and Why]. Vedomosti, 23 February 2018. www. vedomosti.ru/​opinion/​articles/​2018/​02/​23/​751893-​kto-​pochemu-​deputata-​slutskogo. Connell, Raewyn. Gender and power: Society, the person and sexual politics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Deluca, Kevin M., Sean Lawson, and Ye Sun. “Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement”. Communication, Culture & Critique 5, no. 4 (2012): 483–​509. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​j.1753-​9137.2012.01141.x. Digital World Market Intelligence Platform. SimilarWeb. Accessed 22 January 2019. www.similarweb. com/​(search box below webpage masthead used to generate figures).

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#MeToo and the Russian media Drobnitsky, Dmitry. “Hashtag #MeToo Stal Sotsial’noy Tekhnologiyey I  Oruzhiyem” [The Hashtag #MeToo Has Become a Social Tool and Weapon]. Dni.ru, 29 March 2018. https://​dni.ru/​society/​ 2018/​3/​29/​394632.html. Durrheim, Kevin, Desmond Painter, and Terre Blanche M. J. Research in Practice: Applied Methods for the Social Sciences. Cape Town: UCT Press, 2006. Filemoni-​Tofaeno, Joan Alleluia, and Lydia Johnson. Reweaving the Relational Mat: A Christian Response to Violence against Women from Oceania. London: Routledge, 2016. Garrand, Danielle. “On Google’s Map of #MeToo Searches, India Lights up like a Christmas Tree”. CBS News, 17 October 2018. Global Voices. “#IAmNotAfraidToSayIt:  Ukrainian Social Media Users Break the Silence on Sexual Violence”. 6 July 2016. https://​globalvoices.org/​2016/​07/​05/​iamnotafraidtosayit-​ukrainian-​social-​ media-​users-​break-​the-​silence-​on-​sexual-​violence/​. Grinberg, Emanuella. “Meredith Vieira Explains #WhyIStayed”. CNN. Cable News Network, 17 September 2014. http://​edition.cnn.com/​2014/​09/​09/​living/​r ice-​video-​why-​i-​stayed/​. Grinberg, Emanuella. “Why #YesAllWomen Took off on Twitter”. CNN, 27 May 2014. http://​edition. cnn.com/​2014/​05/​27/​living/​california-​killer-​hashtag-​yesallwomen/​. Gumanitarnyy Portal. “Issledovaniye Levada-​Tsentra: 70 Protsentov Rossiyan Ne Vladeyut Inostrannymi Yazykami” [Research of the Levada Center: 70% of Russian Citizens Don’t Speak Foreign Languages]. 28 May 2014. https://​gtmarket.ru/​news/​2014/​05/​28/​6787. Holmgren, Beth. “Toward an Understanding of Gendered Agency in Contemporary Russia”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 3 (2013): 535–​42. doi:10.1086/​668517. Human Development Reports. “Human Development Data (1990–​2015)”. Accessed 11 January 2019. http://​hdr.undp.org/​en/​composite/​GII. Ignatov, Grigory. “ ‘Ya Ne Boyus’ Skazat’: O Chom Molchit Feministka Nastya” [I Am Not Scared to Speak:  What Nastya, the Feminist, Does Not Say]. Zhurnalistskaya Pravda, 25 July 2016. https://​ jpgazeta.ru/​ya-​ne-​boyus-​skazat-​o-​chyom-​molchit-​feministka-​nastya/​. Inosmi.ru. “7 Dney (SSHA): Pochemu Rossiyu Ne Kosnulos’ Dvizheniye #MeToo”. 7 October 2018. https://​inosmi.ru/​social/​20181007/​243400321.html. Internet World Stats. “Internet World Users by Language. Top Ten Languages”. Internet Statistics. Accessed 21 January 2019. www.internetworldstats.com/​stats7.htm. IPU Parline Database, “Russian Federation Gossoudarstvennaya Duma Last Elections. Women in Parliaments: World Classification”. Accessed 7 January 2018. http://​archive.ipu.org/​parline/​reports/​ 2263_​E.htm. Khanova, Linn. “Kultura Iznasilovania” [Rape Culture]. Life, 8 July 2016. https://​life.ru/​p/​875015. Klimushkina, Ekaterina. “#MeToo ili zapadnyy #yaneboyus’skazat’. Novyy fleshmob v sotssetyakh ob istoriyakh seksual’nykh domogatel’stv i nasilii” [#MeToo or the Western #IAmNotAfraid ToSpeak]. Medialeaks, 16 October 2017. https://​medialeaks.ru/​1610qaz-​metoo-​ili-​zapadnyiy-​ yaneboyusskazat/​. Kochkina, Elena. “Predstavitel’stvo Zhenshchin v Strukturakh Rossii, 1917–​2002 Gg” [Representation of Women in Russian Power Structures 1917–​2002]. In Gendernaya Rekonstruktsiya Politicheskikh Sistem [A Gender Reconstruction of Political Systems]. St Petersburg: SPG-​Aleteya, 2003. Kolpakov, Ivan. “S etoy minuty ya ne glavnyy redaktor «Meduzy»”. Facebook, 9 November 2018. www. facebook.com/​ivan.kolpakov/​posts/​10218327928016164. Komsomolskaya Pravda. “#yaNeBoyusSkazat: sotni zhenshchin rasskazali v Feysbuke o seksual’nom nasilii nad soboy” [#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak:  Hundreds of Women Shared on Facebook Their Stories of Sexual Violence]. 8 July 2016. www.kp.ru/​daily/​26552/​3568569/​. Kozlov, Ivan, and Sergey Yakupov. “Bitva Mneniy: #YANeBoyus’Skazat’ Ili #LuchsheNeStoitGovorit’?” [Battle of Opinions:  #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak or #BetterNotToSay]. Zvezda, accessed 23 January 2019. http://​zvzda.ru/​opinions/​b6c213e8b67a. Krasnova, Alina. “#YANeBoyus’Skazat’: Zvezdy Rasskazali O Perezhitom Nasilii v Ramkakh Fleshmoba” [#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak:  Stars Talked about Violence They Have Suffered in the Framework of a Flashmob]. Cosmopolitan, 8 July 2016. www.cosmo.ru/​stars/​news/​08-​07-​2016/​yaneboyusskazat-​ zvezdy-​rasskazali-​o-​perezhitom-​nasilii-​v-​ramkah-​fleshmoba/​#part0. Krivotulova, Kseniya, and Petr Kamenchenko. “Muzhika Boyat’sya  —​Doma Sidet’. Pochemu Aktsiya v Pomoshch’ Zhertvam Nasiliya #yaNeBoyus’Skazat’ Prevratilas’ v Fars” [If You Are Afraid of Men, Stay at Home! Why the Campaign #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak to Help Victims of Violence Turned into a Farce]. Lenta, 9 July 2016. https://​lenta.ru/​articles/​2016/​07/​09/​onineboyatza/​.

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Anna Sedysheva Krizisnyj centr dlya zhenshchin [Crisis Center for Women] (website). Accessed 10 February 2018. https://​ crisiscenter.ru/​pochemu/​ kazhdaya 7ya zhenshhina idet v policiyu. Lisak, David, Lori Gardinier, Sarah C. Nicksa, and Ashley M. Cote. “False Allegations of Sexual Assault: An Analysis of Ten Years of Reported Cases”. Violence Against Women 16, no. 12 (2010):  1318–​1134. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​1077801210387747. Meduza. “Ya Ne Boyus’Skazat’: Chto Obshchego U Tysyach Postov Fleshmoba O Nasilii”[I Am Not Scared to Speak: What Do Thousands of Flashmob Posts on Violence Have in Common]. 8 July 2016. https://​meduza. io/​feature/​2016/​07/​08/​ya-​ne-​boyus-​skazat-​chto-​obschego-​u-​tysyach-​postov-​fleshmoba-​o-​nasilii. Meduza. “MGU: Trebovaniye Snyat’ Slutskogo S Posta Zavkafedry —​Eto Politicheskaya Igra I Zamysly Naval’nogo”[Moscow State University: The Demand to Remove Slutsky from the Postion of Department Chair —​That Is Navalny’s Scheme and Political Game]. 9 March 2018. https://​meduza.io/​news/​2018/​03/​ 09/​mgu-​trebovanie-​snyat-​slutskogo-​s-​posta-​zavkafedry-​eto-​politicheskaya-​igra-​i-​zamysly-​navalnogo. Meduza. “Zasedaniye Dumskoy Komissii Po Etike Po Povodu Dela Leonida Slutskogo. Rasshifrovka” [The Meeting of the Duma Committee on Ethics on the Leonid Slutsky Affair. Deciphering]. 21 March 2018. https://​meduza.io/​feature/​2018/​03/​21/​zasedanie-​dumskoy-​komissii-​ po-​etike-​po-​povodu-​dela-​leonida-​slutskogo-​rasshifrovka. Melnikova, Anastaiya. “#Yaneboyus’skazat’:  Zhenshchiny Nenavidyat Muzhchin i Otkryto Ob Etom Rasskazyvayut” [#IAmNotAfraidToSpeak: Women Hate Men and Openly Talk About It]. RIA Novosti, 11 July 2016. https://​r ia.ru/​20160708/​1461715068.html. Melnychenko, Anastasia. “Я хочу, аби сьогодні говорили ми, жінки. Аби ми говорили про насильство, яке пережила більшість з нас” [I Want Women to Speak Today. Let Us Talk about Violence That Most of Us Have Experienced]. Facebook, 5 July 2016. www.facebook.com/​nastya. melnychenko/​posts/​10209108320800151. Moscato, Derek. “Media Portrayals of Hashtag Activism: A Framing Analysis of Canada’s #Idlenomore Movement”. Media and Communication vol. 4, no. 2.2016 www.doi.org/​10.17645/​mac.v4i2.416 Nikolaev, Igor, T. Marchenko, and O. Tochilkina. Genderny Razryv v Oplate Truda. Analiticheskiy Doklad [The Gender Gap in Wages. Analytical Report]. Report. Institute of Strategic Analysis. Moscow: FBK Grant Thorton, 2017. Novye Izvestia. “Alena Popova:  ‘Chego My Khotim Ot Zakona Protiv Domashnego Nasiliya’ ” [Alena Popova: “What We Want from a Law Against Domestic v-​Violence”]. 26 December 2018. https://n ​ ewizv.ru/​ article/​general/​26-​12-​2018/​alena-​popova-​chego-​my-​hotim-​ot-​zakona-​protiv-​domashnego-​nasiliya. Osina, Mariya. “Sama Vinovata”:  Chto Takoye Victimblaming I  Kak Deystvuyet Mekhanizm Samoobvineniya” [‘You Are Guilty Yourself ”: What Is Victimblaming and How Does the Mechanism of Self-​Accusation Work]. Center for Dealing with the Problem of Violence, Nasiliyu.net, 3 July 2018. https://​nasiliu.net/​sama-​vinovata-​chto-​takoe-​viktimblejming-​i-​kak-​dejstvuet-​mehanizm-​ samoobvineniya/​. Park, Andrea. “#MeToo Reaches 85 Countries with 1.7M Tweets”. CBS News, 6 December 2017. www. cbsnews.com/​news/​metoo-​reaches-​85-​countries-​with-​1-​7-​million-​tweets. Patel, and Zach Wichter. “#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women”. New  York Times, 23 October 2018. www.nytimes.com/​interactive/​2018/​10/​23/​us/​ metoo-​replacements.html. Pearson, Michael. “Women Embrace, Criticize #ShoutYourAbortion”. CNN, 30 September 2015. https://​edition.cnn.com/​2015/​09/​22/​living/​shout-​your-​abortion-​feat/​. Pisklakova-​Parker, Marina, Sinelnikov Andrey, Zolotilova Elena, Ponarina Larisa, Koksharova Nadezhda, Voykova Nataliya, Vasileva Nataliya, and Yermakova Lyudmila. Nasiliye v Otnoshenii Zhenshchin v Rossii. Al’ternativnyy Doklad O Vypolnenii v Rossiyskoy Federatsii Konvencii OON o likvidatsii vsekh form diskriminatsii v otnoshenii zhenshchin [Violence Connected to Women in Russia. Alternative Report on How the Russian Federation Fulfills the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women]. Report. Moscow: Judicial Department under the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, 2010. www.cdep.ru/​mps/​4/​ch4/​Alter%202.pdf. Podrez, Taras. “Eks-​glavred Lenta.ru Galina Timchenko Uchredila Medusa Project” [The Former Editor in Chief Galina Timchenko Set up a Meduza Project]. Izvestia, 26 August 2014. https://​iz.ru/​news/​ 575816. Radio Svobody, “Glavnyy Redaktor ‘Meduzy’ Ivan Kolpakov Podal v Otstavku” [Editor-in-chief of Medusa, Ivan Kolpakov, resigns]. 9 November 2018. www.svoboda.org/a/29591600.html.

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#MeToo and the Russian media Romanova, Nelli, Ilona Romanova, and Tatyana Sharova. “Adaptatsionnyye Resursy Zhenshchin Kak Ob’Yekt Sotsial’nogo Upravleniya” [Women’s Adaptational Resources as an Object of Social Control]. Vestnik ChitGu 7, no. 74 (2011): 116–​125. Romashkov, Andrey. “Na Zapade Seksa Net:  Biznes, Politiki I  Artisty Refleksiruyut Po Povodu Global’nogo ‘Vaynshteyngeyta’ ” [There Is No Sex in the West: Business, Politicians and Artists Reflect on the Global “Weinsteingate”]. BFM.ru (Business Portal), 4 January 2018. www.bfm.ru/​news/​ 374207. Studena (website). “About Us”. Accessed 1 February 2018. http://​studena.org/​pro-​nas. Walker, Shaun. “Putin Approves Legal Change That Decriminalises Some Domestic Violence”. Guardian, 7 February 2017. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2017/​feb/​07/​putin-​approves-​change-​to-​law​decriminalising-​domestic-​violence. World Health Organisation (WHO). “Global and Regional Estimate of Violence against Women: Prevalence and Health Effects of Intimate Partner Violence and No-​partner Sexual Violence”. Report. 2013 www.endvawnow.org/​uploads/​browser/​files/​who_​prevalence_​2013.pdf Zarubin, Anton. “Putin Pozdravil Zhenshchin s 8 Marta, Prochitav Im Stikhi Poeta Dement’yeva” [Putin Congratulated Women on 8 March International Women’s Day After Having Read Them Some Poetry by the Poet Dementyev]. Federal’noye agentstvo novostey Riafan [Riafan Federal News Agenc], 7 March 2018. https://​ riafan.ru/​1033033-​putin-​pozdravil-​zhenshin-​s-​8-​marta-​prochitav-​im-​stikhi-​poeta-​dementeva.

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22 #METOO IN POST-​S OCIALIST COUNTRIES A comparative analysis of Romanian and Chinese feminist activism against sexual violence Mirela Violeta David

At a march organised in October 2018 by a coalition of feminist organisations in Romania, feminist activist Iulia, from ANAIS, held a public speech in which she reflected upon the slogan of the protest:  “Together for women’s safety”. She reiterated the feminist activists’ commitment to stopping violence against women: “We will not stop. We will modify laws, we will create institutions if they do not exist, we will sanction governments because we have to save children. The temporary protection order will come in effect in one month.”1 This is the latest legal win for feminist activists in the post #MeToo era, allowing the police to give a temporary protection order. However, Iulia cautioned that the state has failed to fund ankle monitors to enforce the protection order, showing its lack of interest in the protection of women.2 Post-​socialist countries like Romania face pervasive sexism, gender inequality, and sexual violence. This chapter compares feminist activism against sexual violence in Romania and China before and after the global #MeToo movement, and highlights the different challenges faced by feminist activist groups. Despite a similar socialist past, feminist activists operate under divergent political climates and have adapted to the conditions created by the Romanian and Chinese post-​socialist governments. Romania has a post-​communist democratic society with a burgeoning civil society, including several NGO networks openly promoting women’s issues and advocating against sexual violence. Romanian feminist organisations have permanent online presence, cooperate on joint campaigns, and organise large scale public protests. However, Romania is still battling widespread political strife, government inefficiency, and corruption, which encumber the work of feminist activists. Sexism and gender inequality stemming from traditional patriarchal values promoted by the Orthodox Church encumber the #MeToo movement. In contrast, the PRC has a hybrid post-​socialist system where one-​party rule and autocratic governance coexist with capitalism, neoliberal societal aspirations, and a growing influence of Western values. Government pressure, censorship and harassment of feminist activists in China represent the major impediments to the success of #MeToo in China. Grassroots activism is limited to transient online social media campaigns and small-​scale public performances, often at great personal risk to activists. 320

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#MeToo in China started in universities: Luo Qianqian was the first woman in China to publicly accuse an academic who sexually harassed her, creating a student grassroots #MeToo movement on China’s campuses and eliciting responses and promises from Chinese universities’ governing bodies. Student-​led action has not been successful in Romania. In a solitary event, Romanian university students at SNSPA organised to protest sexual harassment, demanding that the university change its ethics policy. However, SNSPA dismissed the petition signed by 600 students. Moreover, 29 Romanian universities have no policy on sexual harassment.3 With the banning of Feminist Voices, the largest feminist platform in China, the #MeToo movement in China was initiated through diaspora activism and expanded on university campuses in China. The #MeToo movement in China is intersectional, being advocated by feminist and LGBTQ activists, Chinese diaspora and students. Romanian feminist activism is also intersectional, advocating against sexual violence, and prejudices about Roma and LGBTQ people. Romanian feminists protested against the 2018 family referendum that eroded LGBTQ rights, by demonstrating that domestic violence hurts family values. I will investigate Romanian and Chinese feminist activist advocacy against sexual violence by analysing their social media posts relating to #MeToo, including the Facebook pages of: @ FreeChineseFeminists; Romanian Feminism run by the NGO Front Association (part of a Network for Violence against Women); the feminist organisation FILIA; and E-​Romnja, the only Roma feminist organisation in Romania. I  will couple this with an analysis of media coverage of #MeToo and survival stories in both countries. In addition, I will analyse some seminal posts relating to #MeToo that appeared on Chinese social media platforms like Sina Weibo.

Romanian feminist activism: Inspiring collective action to fight violence against women The Facebook page Romanian Feminism is a result of collective feminist activism efforts that go beyond institutional boundaries. Though run by Front Association, it showcases events organised by other feminist organisations that cooperate with Front, as part of two larger coalitions: VIF Network for Prevention and Combatting Violence against Women with 25-​member organisations across 9 cities and The Coalition for Gender Equality. Front Association is an NGO whose mission is to fight for women.4 FILIA Centre supports political action to better women’s lives.5 Some NGOs specialise in violence against women and are part of the larger VIF Network. The Association Transcena uses social theatre as a medium to educate students about prevention of sexual violence and functions as a watchdog to monitor protection orders.6 Anais and Sensiblu provide counselling and legal advice to survivors of domestic violence, and E-​Romnja promotes the rights of Roma women.7 These organisations joined forces to form the VIF network between 2011 and 2014 to lobby and modify the law no. 217/​2003, an order of protection for women, but also to promote the protection order.8 Their legal achievements date before the #MeToo movement, but they have utilised #MeToo to re-​energise their public protest events, which represent a culmination of feminist collaboration. One legislative success came at the end of 2018, allowing the police to issue a temporary protection order reducing the lengthy wait time for judge-​issued orders.9

Public protest, performative feminism, victims and conquerors: Fighting violence in the traditional patriarchal family On 8 March 2017, feminists protested in front of the Romanian Ministry of Justice by laying flowers tagged with the names of women murdered by their husbands (Figures 22.1 and 22.2). 321

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Figure 22.1  Feminism Romania, 8 March 2017. “Cade una, cădem toate” (One falls, we all fall) —​ “acțiune de 8 martie la Ministerul Justiției” (action on 8 March at the Ministry of Justice) Source: Photo taken by photographer Gabriel Bălănescu, used with permission.

Figure 22.2  Feminism Romania, 8 March 2017. #8martie (8 March) #mulțumescpentruflori (thank you for the flowers) Source: Photo taken by photographer Gabriel Bălănescu, used with permission.

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They described the deaths of 30 Romanian women, aged 16 to 66, from different parts of the country. The murders depicted included stabbings, beatings, and shootings of domestic partners. Holding a banner announcing “One falls, we all fall” (cade una, cădem toate) and pictured with their arms on each other’s shoulders, activists stood in a circle and simultaneously lay down to demonstrate their solidarity with the victims. They demanded emergency restraining orders issued by the police, ankle monitors, and the implementation of the recommendations of the Istanbul Convention.10 This feminist performance protest was radical, original, and solidary. A new online platform “I too succeed” (#Și eu reușesc) allows domestic violence survivors to contact other survivors to show solidarity and positive narratives.11 The website aims to change the perception of domestic violence by inviting women to share their experiences, under a hashtag similar to #MeToo that emphasises “succeeding”.12 Alina describes herself as a strong woman, despite enduring her father’s beatings, and as învingătoare, meaning winner.13 In that sense, the word învingătoare gives more agency to women and is the word preferred by women in Romania to describe the experience of survivors of domestic/​sexual violence. The website encourages women to use this word to build local support groups, and encourage others that “I too can make it”.14 This website demonstrates the power of sharing experiences of abuse to forge a supportive community. Mihaela could only escape from her abusive husband who cracked her spine, after 40  years. She obtained a certificate from the Institute of Legal Medicine and finally got a protection order against him.15 The website instructs how to obtain a Protection Order, which can temporarily evacuate the aggressor and allow the victim to return home.16 A good outcome of feminist activism is the inauguration of a pilot centre to handle rape cases at the University Hospital in Bucharest, the first of its kind in Romania.17 This is the result of a collaboration between the National Agency for Chance Equality between Men and Women and health and public safety authorities. This centre allows for expedited medical legal examination, post-​traumatic assistance and psychological counselling. Given the slowness of obtaining medico-​legal certificates many women decide against pressing legal charges. This centre can trigger legal action by informing the police and allows the medical team to collect pathological evidence. Instead of mandating that victims/​survivors go from the hospital to the Institute for Legal Medicine, the process is now simplified by routing the paperwork and evidence.18 This cuts through the onerous red tape that encumbers survivors of sexual assault. Feminist Romania cited a dire statistic according to which one in four Romanian women were physically or sexually abused by a partner or former partner. It also blames politicians for failing to allocate funds for ankle monitors to keep track of the assailants, instead preferring to contribute public funds for a massive Orthodox cathedral.19 Also denounced is sexual harassment on the streets including cat calls from strangers; fondling; sexual harassment in schools, universities, and in the workplace. The posting highlighted factors that make girls vulnerable to violence, including poverty, or being Roma, migrant, or transgender: “Today we refuse their culpability for their forced vulnerability, for the decisions they have to make to feel safe.”20 This posting reiterates the intersectional commitment of Romanian feminists, especially when it mentions that “the experience of violence is inseparable from racism, poverty and homophobia”, but also when it references the indignities experienced by pregnant and overweight women, women with disabilities, and trans persons in the Romanian medical system.21 The post condemns any repressive and racist policy against Roma or migrant women, as well as neoliberal policies that lessen access to shelters, medical, and psychological services and make it harder for abused women to escape violence.22 Any person in Romania who belongs to one of these categories knows that these experiences are rampant in the Romanian medical system, 323

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fuelled by pettiness, a lack of bedside manner, insufficient salaries, and illegal bribes that ensure proper treatment for those who can afford them. A major persistent problem is that victims of violence often find their testimonies discredited or ignored:  “We want the voices of those who suffered sexist violence to be heard! I believe you!”23 Other posts tell women’s stories such as that of Andreea, who was locked in her house for five years because of her husband’s jealousy. She was only rescued after she put a note in her daughter’s lunch bag, which was found by the kindergarten teacher who alerted the police.24 Her husband was placed under arrest for 60 days and the woman was taken to a shelter.25 Around 1,000 people in Bucharest took part in October 2018 in the “March-​Together for women’s safety” (Figure  22.3) that started in University Square, chanting slogans like: “Solidarity”, “Without Tolerance for Violence”, “We want safety on the street and in the house”, “Shelters for all, and adequate budgets”, “Indifference feeds violence”, and “I am not flattered to be aggressed”. Solidarity marches also occurred in major cities in Transylvania: Cluj and Timisoara. Feminists from different organisations spoke at the March. Tudorina Mihai spoke about the traditional family, referring to the recent referendum organised by the Coalition for Family, according to which the traditional family should be made up of a man and a woman: “The man is mentioned first, and this is not a coincidence. The man has priority for the Orthodox church, as well as for traditional values.”26 The failed referendum was trying to prevent future legislation to allow LGBTQ to marry. Romanian feminists think safety in the family should be a priority, instead of such discriminatory homophobic conceptions of the family. Tudorina denounced “violence in the family because of these kinds of patriarchal traditional conceptions that give man power to remake the hierarchy”,27 leaving women either in a subservient role or forced to make sacrifices in the name of their children.28 Tudorina stated that the real cause of domestic violence is sexism, not poverty or alcoholism and that the best weapon against violence is equality.29 This speaker underscored the pervasive patriarchal, chauvinistic, and sexist attitudes in Romanian society, and identified the root cause of violence in gender inequality.30 Mihaela Săsărman, a founding member of Transcena, stated that the police and the legal and medical systems should constitute a support system for victims. Mihaela recapped some of the gains of feminist activism: “Since 2012 we obtained some legal successes, introducing the protection order, parliament voted to introduce the temporary protection order this year.”31 These successes occurred because NGOs worked with female senators and lawmakers.32 Cristina Horia from Sensiblu gave an impassioned speech drawing on her experience of working with abused women. Sensiblu offers an alternative to women who want to leave their abusive environment. In her work Cristina “encountered thousands of women who shared their experience of domestic violence, who wanted to be heard and believed, to be treated as humans, and did not want to be blamed for either the violence they endured or for trying again”.33 Cristina describes them as “învingătoare” meaning conqueror, a word more powerful than just survivor. Cristina talked about their bravery to start life anew, but also of their need to feel safe long term. Cristina also emphasised shelters and counselling services, which are necessary to save lives in Romania where there are rural counties with no shelters.34 In rural areas some communities engaged orthodox priests like Danu Florin help vulnerable people. The priest founded an NGO, Mană cerească (Godsent) to fundraise for his community projects. He built three social houses in Lada village in Teleorman province including one for mothers driven away from their homes by violence.35 Despite European norms that mandate one shelter bed for 10,000 people, in Romania there are only a third of the required beds. Further encumbering endangered women, some shelters demand medico-​legal certificates to demonstrate their abuse. 324

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Figure 22.3  March “Together for women’s safety”, organised yearly in Bucharest by the NGO Network for Preventing and Fighting Violence Against Women. Feminism Romania Source: Photo taken by /​copyright: Ioana Ulmeanu, Coordinator Elle Romania. Feminism Romania, Facebook, 20 October 2018, www.facebook.com/​photo.php?fbid=2319714468058581&set=pcb.23197 14834725211&type=3&theater. Used with permission.

Some women fearing for their lives are reluctant to get such evidence. Another pertinent point Cristina made is that the lack of public funding reflects the general tolerance for violence of our society. In this sense she demands zero tolerance for domestic violence. She ended her speech with the chant: “You are not alone!” “Nu esti singura!”36 Another speaker, Andreea from FILIA Centre, tried to rally feminist activists by arguing that solidarity is construed every day: “it is our role to act against violence, we cannot be afraid to say no”. She asked all feminists to use the megaphone to chant slogans such as: “Solidarity”, “Indifference feeds violence”, “1, 2, 3 The aggressors, take them down”, “We want safety on the street and at home.”37 Their organising skills were crucial to the success of the march, bringing banners that were offered to the crowd for a more impactful visual messaging of their protest. 325

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Empowering Roma women from the bottom up: Intersectional Roma feminism, fighting anti-​Roma stereotypes, and community activism Anca Nica from E-​Romnja, the only feminist grassroots Roma organisation in Romania, also spoke eloquently at the march. Anca took on an intersectional analysis of violence by asserting that “violence is not cultural and has no colour”38 Here she was trying to combat entrenched views in Romania that associate illicit behaviour with the Roma population. Anca underscored that racism and institutional discrimination have to be considered as contributing factors to violence against women. She witnessed Roma women having “ten times less access” to social services and police protection. Because of latent discrimination against Roma in the social services, medical and police sectors, Roma women are often left without protection. E-​Romnja, a grassroots organisation, informs Roma women about their own vulnerability and helps them organise, such as bringing a group of Roma women from Mizil to the march.39 Anca also wanted to combat antiquated traditions such as forced marriage of underaged youth that represent an infringement of children’s rights. She ended poignantly: “Violence is not in my culture, violence has no colour.”40 Roma female representatives of E-​Romnja went to the Hirundo Centre in Helsinki to visit their social services for women.41 E-​Romnja also protested against the Referendum for traditional family, arguing that when the rights of a group like the LGBTQ are endangered, the rights of other groups might follow.42 Roma feminists are aware of the pervasive racism against Roma people in other European countries and staged protests together with 800 Roma people against anti-​Roma racism bringing awareness to crimes against the Roma in Bulgaria, Italy, and Ukraine.43 Under the slogan #Roma Feminism, a grassroots campaign “You educate a woman, you educate a community”, encourages Roma girls to attend school. This campaign was organised in four different Roma communities from Valea Seacă, Mizil, Giurgiu, and Bucharest for two months. Ten per cent of Roma girls only finish eighth grade, while a third have high illiteracy rates. This campaign also focuses on educating parents, who want to marry their underaged children that cannot legally give consent, a major problem in the Roma community.44 Sexual violence and power relations loom large on the agenda of E-​Romnja, which approaches this topic in consultation with Roma women from different Initiative Groups to come up with a local strategy.45 For instance they organised a grassroots workshop on violence with the group from Mizil that featured a screening of an educational film on early marriage, as seen in Figure 22.4.46 Additionally, E-​Romnja partnered with the county police in Giurgiu for the campaign “Violence has no colour”, which included a caravan of youth Roma activists, a culturally specific tool. The caravan went to two high schools in Mihăilești and Bolintin Vale, and then took to the streets to talk about violence against women. This campaign was also identified as a goal of personal development for the youth.47 Moreover, E-​Romnja wrote an open letter to the Chamber of Deputies to vote promptly on the modification of law no. 217/​2003 to prevent and combat violence in the family, which had been adopted by the Senate on 16 April 2018.48 Despite the deep political entrenchment in Romania, even opposing politicians came together on this issue. A group of Roma women from Valea Seaca invited feminist activists from E-​Romnja and FILIA to discuss forms of violence that high school girls face, and how to recognise sexual violence. Roma girls from a group “Demands from the village” discussed instances of sexual harassment, harassment of classmates with disabilities, and offences against teachers. They organised a contest #We want respect for the present that included an essay contest, photos, and drawings that promoted respect among youth. 326

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Figure 22.4  A group of Roma women from Mizil watching a film on early marriage Source: E-​Romnja, “Am început luna iunie cu o săptămână plină de activități începând de luni cu un atelier pe violență cu Grupul de Inițiativă al Femeilor din Mizil” [We started June with a busy week on Monday, with a workshop on violence with the Mizil Women’s Initiative Group], Facebook, 8 June 2018, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​1846442938745842?_​_​tn_​_​=-​R. Used with permission.

FILIA Centre also made a video for the project Phenja entitled “Violence Has No Colour”, that contains the testimonies of Roma women from Valea Seacă, Giurgiu, and Bucharest about their experiences with violence and how they educate their children about it.49 This material was realised in the spirit of #MeToo. An elder, Vasilica Slate, teaches the youth not to endure beatings like she herself had done. A Roma mother, Larisa Asan, tells her 13-​year-​old son that violence against women is forbidden. Muscata, a 42-​year-​old Roma woman says she disagrees with underage marriage for her daughter, and told her son to not beat his wife. Roma women discuss experiencing shame and silence, and staying with their abusers for their children. They want harsher punishments for domestic violence and they ask activists to also talk to men in order to change their mentality. They want to encourage other Roma women to go to the police, asking “if we are Roma, do we not have the same rights?”50 Roma youth got involved in this project to remove prejudices towards victims of violence against women.51 Another Roma group of youth from Mizil organised during 16 days of activism a campaign against bullying and street harassment.52 Starting on 27 November 2017 E-​Romnja organised workshops in high schools in Giurgiu to combat violence against women.53 They also drafted a letter that women could send to the minister of Justice to demand the temporary protection order.54 That legal victory can also be attributed to such feminist organising. 327

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A sobering assessment of the impact of #MeToo for Roma women reminds us that “despite the popularity of #MeToo, women continue to be blamed for their silence. For Roma women exposing instances of sexual violence is more difficult because they distrust the system, and don’t have support.”55 Silence doesn’t mean they didn’t experience sexual harassment, but that it became a constant in their lives together with other forms of violence.56 Such an argument is powerful. Roma feminists are also conscious how Roma people are seen in Western media, given that many European countries have normalised stereotypes about Roma women. Antigypsyism also stems from patriarchal values that led not only to the sterilisation of Roma women or Romnjia, but also to the creation of Roma ghettoes. Roma feminists also want Roma men to denounce the violations of the rights of women and girls, because only in this way can they bring to light systemic power structures of discrimination against Roma people across Europe.57 In 2017, under the banner #March 8 intersectional, E-​Romnja organised an event from a Roma feminist perspective to discuss and increase public visibility of specific issues affecting Roma women, such as forced evacuation, discrimination in accessing health services, and violence against women.58

#MeToo: Overcoming tradition through innovative campaigns of solidarity to combat sexual harassment and violence against women In anticipation of 8 March 2018, International Women’s Day, Romanian Feminists organised the campaign #ThankYouForTheFlowers (#‎MultumescPentruFlori), which targets the popular traditional male custom of gifting women flowers on this day by pointing out this does not make up for the violence against women. If, in 2017, they focussed on women killed by their domestic partners, in 2018 they adapted this campaign in light of the global #MeToo movement by taking striking pictures with powerful slogans that included many references to sexual harassment and violence against women (Figures 22.5 and 22.6). The caption for Figure  22.6 is framed in light of the global #MeToo movement, which brought to light sexual violence and sexual harassment in Romania as well. That same picture elicited the most responses. A series of testimonies on virulent acts of sexual harassment and sexual assault follows: one from L.B. who recounts that she was followed by a flasher to her apartment, and her experience of domestic violence. “I feel like a victim every time I walk down the street, with the keys in my hand ready to defend myself.”59 Other testimonies belong to A.P.: That man … masturbated near me. … touched my behind. …[P]‌eople … do not react when someone is sexually assaulted. I too had to explain why I am afraid to go out at night … . Yes, I too know men who assault, but who find … stories of assault unbelievable #MeToo.60 L.F. confesses: I was wolf whistled and catcalled “hei pisi pisi” and other things… Respect for all the girls that made public their stories of aggression. I did not talk about these things until now, for obvious reasons. I don’t just want to feel safe, I want to really be safe.61 These three raw testimonies are about street sexual harassment, which has been endemic in Romanian society, and which I  and every woman have experienced most commonly in crowded transportation. 328

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Figure 22.5  In Romania there are no ankle monitors for aggressors. The picture above states: “Instead of flowers, I want bracelets for aggressors” Source: This photo of activist Cristina Horia was taken by renowned photojournalist Andreea Câmpeanu, who took all the powerful pictures of this campaign (used with permission). Feminism Romania, “În România nu există brățări electronice de monitorizare a agresorilor” [In Romania there are no ankle monitors for aggressors], Facebook, 2 March 2018, www.facebook.com/​Feminism.Romania/​posts/​ 1688776491189904

The Romanian justice system has not been a good venue for sexual harassment survivors. However, a new law 202/​2002 pioneered by representative Oana Barzan forbids sexual harassment and attaches to it some monetary penalties.62 Andreea Bragă from FILIA states that #MeToo brought out the complexity of sexual harassment beyond the psychological, social and emotional aspects of coming forward. Andreea situates sexual harassment as a form of violence against women, resulting from unequal power relations among the sexes.63 FILIA did a survey among 668 university students that found that more than half experienced sexual harassment. Andreea argued that to prevent sexual harassment, one has to educate people about gender equality, show solidarity with victims, and stop defending the aggressors.64 Andreea suggested that it can become a yearly campaign.65 Andreea also criticised the millions of Euro spent on a “referendum of hate”, referring to the referendum for traditional family, when 26% of killings in 2017 in Romania occurred in the family.66 In her work as activist, Andreea also spoke about violence against women and institutions that can help victims of domestic violence during an event organised by FILIA in Vrancea.67 FILIA Centre also went to the Spanish, British, Dutch, and US embassies and obtained messages of solidarity with the feminist march “Together for women’s safety”.68 Another 329

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Figure 22.6  E-​Romnja, 4 March 2018 Source: “I need self-​defence lessons for a simple walk?” This photo was taken by Andreea Câmpeanu (used with permission). E-​Romnja Facebook, 4 March 2018, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​ 1747044965352307.

campaign organised by Marina Moldovan, founder of the Skin Deep brand, “NO MEANS NO” will donate 30% of its profits to FILIA.69 FILIA Centre also holds public lectures in universities about preventing sexual harassment, such as when they went to Pitesti University to discuss vulnerable situations students might be exposed to.70 Legal successes such as the temporary protection order are also due to the tireless lobby of this and 60 other Romanian NGOs that demanded legal protection for women and called for the terms “domestic violence” and “violence against women” to replace the term “violence in the family” in relevant laws.71 One positive impact of the #MeToo movement is that it has put the media spotlight on the work of feminist organisations. On 14 October 2017 beside Coltea Hospital, a march of solidarity with victims of domestic violence took place, where Roma women from Mizil joined many Non-​ Roma feminists under the hashtags #You are Not Alone, STOP Violence against Women.72 The #MeToo wave only amplified their voices and offered a larger platform. In 2018 Romanian feminists convened solidarity protests at the Bulgarian embassy to condemn violence against women in Bulgaria,73 in an effort to consolidate Eastern European feminist solidarity. Romanian feminists protested against conservative forces in Bulgaria, who rejected ratification of the Istanbul Convention adopted by the Council of Europe in 2011 to combat violence against women. Under the hashtag #you are not alone, Romanian feminists organised solidarity protests in light of the global rise of populism and considering the existence of similar conservative voices in Romania.74 Unlike in other Eastern European post-​socialist countries, Romanian feminist activists are free to protest and call upon politicians to improve women’s rights and don’t face government pressures. For instance, while the Hungarian right-​wing government of Victor Orban 330

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pressures community centres like Aurora, which house LGBT and Roma activists,75 the feminist grassroots Roma organisation in Romania, E-​Romnja, can at least function unencumbered by government pressures and even cooperate with the police.

#MeToo in China: Chinese feminist activists’ resistance to government censorship The work of Romanian feminist organisations, in cooperation with lawmakers and the police, can also serve as an example of effective activism in post-​socialist countries. In China, however, such activities seem unlikely considering the censorship of feminist activism. Following the interest in #MeToo in China on university campuses, Chinese feminist activists sent three proposals to the National People’s Congress delegates to fight sexual violence. Current legal references to sexual harassment are only peripherally included in two laws related to the protection of women and female employees, and are useless to lawyers as they contain no clear definition, or clear guidelines on punishments.76 The Chinese government considers #MeToo as a threat because it goes against its preference for traditional gender roles.77 #MeToo in China attracts the attention of the international press because of China’s geopolitical place in the world, and because it makes the Chinese government look bad, when it tries to censor it. The initial reception in the Chinese state-​controlled media was controversial due to an ethnic understanding of sexual harassment. China Daily tweeted on 16 October 2017 “What prevents sexual harassment from being a common phenomenon in China, as it’s in most Western societies?” The newspaper tried to justify the supposed absence of sexual harassment in Chinese society on account of the social benefit of traditional values.78 Such an assumption disregards the detrimental effect of traditional values that maintain a patriarchal social order in China. If in Romania traditional values are encouraged by the Orthodox church, in China it is the Chinese government that promotes them.

#MeToo on China’s university campuses: Student grassroots activism and Chinese feminist activism against sexual harassment In China, the movement is known as #我也是 (#WoYeShi, meaning #MeToo), and #MeToo在中国 (or “#MeToo in China”). To circumvent internet censorship, feminist activist Xiao Qiqi had the idea of using emoji for rice mi and rabbit tu, #米兔 #RiceBunny. These two words are homophones to the English #MeToo.79 #MeToo in China started in the diaspora, with former PhD student Luo Qianqian 罗茜茜 denouncing Beihang University professor Chen Xiaowu 陈小武 for sexual harassment. The act of being sexually harassed was seared into Luo’s mind even after 12 years. Emboldened by the global #MeToo, she contacted her former classmates, who started to share similar stories.80 Luo formed a group comprised of former female students harassed by Chen, who shared that they were forced by Chen to drink alcohol. One of them even recorded the harassment.81 Luo contacted the president of the Beihang Alumni Association to denounce Chen publicly. Discipline inspectors discussed this allegation with Luo.82 According to feminist activist Lü Pin, Beihang’s initial cautionary reaction demanding more evidence against Chen is about unequal power dynamics, with the burden of truth falling on the female survivors. The university moved first to protect itself. Seeing this case, Xiao Qiqi’s hashtag #MeToo在中国 (#MeToo in China) on Weibo attracted more than 2.3 million views in a few days.83 Beihang University eventually removed Chen from his position as deputy dean. China Daily also reversed course on the issue of sexual harassment, praising Beihang University on its Weibo account as a benchmark for other universities for its openness and 331

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for not covering up the scandal.84 The commentary even encouraged students to break the silence and tell #MeToo to expose “abusive teachers”.85 Chinese universities harshly punished professors accused of sexual harassment. Overseas Chinese students also wrote an open letter to the Members of the National People’s Congress, the Ministry of Education, and the Heads of All Universities in China expressing their support for survivors of sexual assault, adding to the alumni of 70 Chinese universities who sent open letters to combat sexual harassment on Chinese campuses. They gave helpful suggestions such as making public cases of sexual harassment, creating codes of conduct addressing abuses of power and sexual misconduct for faculty and staff, mandatory reporting, investigation timelines, punishments, and dismissals for harassers.86 Feminist activist Lü Pin considers that a decentralised movement like #MeToo requires core activists to keep a feminist advocacy agenda. Feminist activists attract public attention to individual stories shared by women in China, to promote policy change. That was the purpose of the 70 online petitions from female students at different academic institutions in China. Lü Pin praised Zhang Leilei for creating the template that was subsequently used by others.87 The second stage in the #MeToo movement in China was, according to Lü Pin, students organising themselves. In the third stage, individual sexual harassment or sexual assault scandals came to light rocking Chinese public opinion.88 In a country that has an authoritative government like China, social movements face repression from the authorities. Therefore, Lü Pin stresses the role of feminist activist organisers in providing resources and capital for the movement, whether in terms of capacity building, knowledge production, or personal connections. When the movement is slowing, the continuous work of the activists can produce the internal drive needed to prepare for the next opportunity.89 Despite such organisational efforts, feminists in the post Tiananmen period try to avoid large protests, and instead use social media and survivor hotlines. Feminist activists like Da Tu had been actively fighting sexual harassment in China since 2012. The public space for such activism diminished dramatically in 2014 at the intervention of the police and the government’s censorship. Things escalated when, on the eve of the International Women’s Day on 8 March 2015, five feminists were arrested and held in custody for 37 days for plans to distribute flyers against sexual harassment on public transportation under the accusation of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. According to Da Tu, public protest and feminist performance art became impossible and dangerous, her feminist organisation was forced to close, and she had to report to the police.90 Along with Da Tu, the other feminists were Li Maizi (Li Tingting), Wei Tingting, Wu Rongrong, and Wang Man. Li Maizi was humiliated in prison for her sexual orientation and mocked for being a lala lesbian.91 This underscores the shared problem feminist and LGBT activists face in China today. Maizi’s two identities as a lesbian and feminist activist were part of the reasons for her detention. Maizi and Xiao Meili met while interning at Feminist Voices and began a lesbian relationship. In 2012 they occupied men’s toilets in Beijing and wore bloody bride dresses to protest domestic violence that same year.92 This is a form of convincing feminist performance art. Maizi’s interest in activism against domestic violence also comes from her personal experience of being frequently beaten by her own father.93 Similar to Romanian feminism, Maizi’s multifaceted activism demonstrates the intersectionality of Chinese feminism. Following the arrest of the feminist five, the police came to Xiao Meili’s house to gather her biometric data, which they entered into a database that contains information on activists. Xiao 332

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Meili entered into another lesbian relationship with #MeToo activist Zhang Leilei and together they were active in promoting #MeToo in China.94 In March 2016 a Guangzhou based organisation “F Group” launched a campaign to raise funds for advertising on the Guangzhou subway against sexual harassment. Despite raising $6,000 from more than 1200 people, the local government rejected this ad. In March 2017 Zhang Leilei started the “Anti-​Sexual Harassment Human Billboard” campaign, by wearing the advertisement on her own body for a month and recruiting 100 volunteers to do the same. Such activism comes at a high personal cost, as Leilei was once struck by a motorcycle while wearing the poster. According to Da Tu, Leilei’s action is a good example of direct activism and social mobilisation.95 Such innovative feminist protest solutions are a testament to the resourcefulness and bravery of Chinese feminist activists whose bodies represent sites of resistance against misogyny. The embodied experience of Chinese feminist activists whether wearing billboards or bloody dresses is a powerful feminist tool. Such campaigns, though successful in attracting social media attention after posting pictures on Sina Weibo, ended when police asked Leilei and Da Tu to move from Guangzhou.96 Police harassment of feminist activists is common in China, including forced evictions as experienced by Ye Haiyan and documented in “Hooligan Sparrow”, the debut documentary of female director Wang Nanfu. Ye protested on the Island of Hainan against the school principal who molested six elementary school students in the summer of 2013. The hashtag “Hey Principal get a room with me and leave the kids alone” made Ye famous.97 That same year, Xiao Meili, trekked 2,000 km from Beijing to Guangzhou to shed light on the sexual abuse that women suffer. Ye Haiyan and Lü Pin also walked with her for part of the journey.98 At the height of the #MeToo movement in China, Xiao Meili wrote an open letter addressing sexual harassment on Chinese campuses and decrying the lack of investigation and injustice. Meili suggested universities could teach students, staff, and faculty about sexual harassment through public lectures, conduct online surveys, hire an investigator, establish a procedure of how students can report sexual harassment to school officials.99 Other brave young women such as Gu Huaying (顾华盈), a Peking University graduate, wrote a joint letter to PKU signed by 9,000 students. Chai Xiaoyang (柴小阳), a university senior, also emailed faculty members and local education authorities. The campaign “10,000-​Person Letters to Alma Maters to Establish Sexual Harassment Prevention Mechanisms” faced suppression, intimidation from school authorities, and deletion from social media. Such suppression of #MeToo in China has also attracted the interest of international netizens.100 Lü Pin finds that patriarchy traumatises women, and impedes their complaints regarding sexual harassment. At the height of the popularity of the #MeToo movement in China, in April 2018, China was shocked over the retelling of the 20-​year-​old story of Peking University student Gao Yan, who had committed suicide because of sexual assault. Lü Pin used the we-​Chat index to determine that Gao Yan’s tragedy, together with the case at Sun Yat-​Sen University involving Prof. Zhang Peng, led to a spike in public interest in #MeToo.101 As a result of #MeToo, Shen Yang, who was accused of sexual assault by Gao Yan prior to her death, was sacked from his two part-​time jobs from Shanghai Normal University and Nanjing University.102

#MeToo in China expands: Female workers, journalists, athletes, and nuns speak out about sexual harassment Female workers also started to complain about sexual harassment in the work force. The women’s labour rights website Jianjiaobuluo 尖椒部落 published an essay by a female Foxconn worker, who described the daily indignities on the Foxconn assembly line, such 333

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as hearing dirty jokes about her body, being accused of being too sensitive when she tried to complain, unwanted bodily contact, as well as abuses of power resulting in harassment of female workers.103 Animated by the revelations at Beihang University, she demanded institutional guarantees to fight sexual harassment in the work place and suggested placing anti-​ sexual harassment posters, educating managers and new employees about sexual harassment, and establishing a mechanism for reporting sexual harassment by assigning such investigative duties to a specific department that can handle complaints.104 Such a voice gives agency to women workers, especially in light of the vulnerability of Chinese migrant workers, undocumented rural women working in urban industrial areas. One such instance occurred at Wuhan University, where it was reported that a female migrant worker screamed for help in vain while being assaulted by a male student.105 Professional work environments are also plagued with sexual transgressions. A  Chinese female journalist Huang Xueqin, who was employed by a state-​owned agency, left her job after her supervisor attempted to rape her in a hotel room. She conducted a survey among female journalists in China. Of the 250 journalists she polled, 80% reported sexual harassment that they suffered in silence, with only 3.3% resigning and 1% reporting this to the police.106 In 2019 Huang was arrested by the police in Guangzhou for “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” because of her #MeToo activism.107 Many women who go to the police to report sexual harassment are deterred from pressing charges because of the lack of sensitivity of male police officers. The only police guidelines concern minor victims, when a female officer is required to be present during the questioning.108 Even the religious milieus were not spared #MeToo revelations. A  stunning report was published online, but banned soon after, detailing the sexual misconduct of the abbot of a Buddhist Temple, Longquan Monasteries. The 95-​page report was written by two monk supervisors at Beijing Longhua Temple, Shi Xianxia and Shi Xianqi. The two monks outed the abbot Shi Xuecheng for sexual misconduct.109 It details how Shi Xuecheng sent sexually harassing text messages to nun Xianjia 贤甲, who was afraid of the abbot and wanted to leave the house.110 Moreover, Shi Xuecheng also texted five female disciples from the Kek Lok Temple 极乐寺 in Malaysia. Four of them, after much hesitation, agreed to the sexual demands of Shi Xuecheng, while two others were more defensive. Shi Xianbing reproached Shi Xuecheng for using her to get sexual favours from other disciples in exchange for teaching them how to apply to college.111 The Haidian district police was alerted to a case of sexual assault at this temple in June 2018.112 Such instances go against Buddhist law, according to which the male master cannot live with female disciples. According to the report, the female disciples have been sexually harassed to become dependent on the abbot’s influence.113 Xuecheng was not just an abbot, but also an official and member of the communist party, being the head of the government run Buddhist Association. As a result of this scandal, he was removed from his position as abbot, and is under investigation for sexual misconduct.114 Such cases have rocked China’s religious environment and pose moral implications about religious leaders in position of power using their influence to harass, assault, and engage in illicit sexual behaviour. Had it not been for the #MeToo movement, such actions might not have come to light. The report is stunning not only in its indictment, but also in the meticulous way in which it presents its evidence to include the actual text messages and women’s testimonies. Free Chinese Feminists also posted the first page of this report to draw attention to this case.115 Despite its reluctance and censoring of the #MeToo activists, Chinese authorities have been swift in punishing #MeToo related sexual transgressions, primarily by removing the accused from their positions.

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Post-​socialist climate for feminist activism: Divergent obstacles, mixed results In conclusion, Romanian and Chinese feminist activists engage with the global #MeToo movement and fight patriarchal conceptions, but face different challenges. In both post-​ socialist countries, feminist activism on sexual violence predated the global #MeToo movement. Feminist activists in Romania have been vocal about violence against women, especially sexual violence, since the Istanbul Convention in 2011, and active since the early 2000s. Chinese feminist activities against sexual harassment and sexual violence have been invigorated since 2012. However, the global #MeToo movement gave feminists in both countries a platform and the attention of the public to find a larger and more attuned audience for their progressive advocacy. Some legal and social improvements were observed in Romanian society following the explosion of the global #MeToo, especially resulting from feminist organisations lobbying lawmakers and politicians. Beyond individual testimonies, the cooperation between different Romanian feminist organisations against sexual violence in light of the global #MeToo has been productive and inspiring. It took the murder of 15-​year-​old Alexandra Măceșanu in 2019 for the Romanian public to worry about violence against women. Alexandra’s desperate calls to the police, where she recounted she was raped and bound by a man in Caracal, her disappearance, and the police’s failure to rescue her held the nation’s attention like no other case before and resulted in nationwide public protests and resignations from high ranking police officials.116 The public interest in this case validates the work of feminist organisations against sexual violence. In China, feminist activists are also actively petitioning the government. Other than unfulfilled legal promises, the only successes have been suspensions of aggressors in positions of power. What’s more, international attention to the #MeToo movement only makes the crackdown on feminism in China more coercive. The Chinese government has resorted to arrest, harassment, intimidation, and online censorship of Chinese feminists and of #MeToo content. However, Chinese feminist activists are not deterred, and continue to organise the #MeToo movement in China. The particularity of the Chinese case is that #MeToo started in universities and spread to other parts of society, student activists benefitting from the support of experienced feminist activists. Both Chinese students fighting sexual harassment and Roma feminists fighting stereotypes of ethnic violence represent successful models of community engaged grassroots feminist action. Chinese and Romanian feminists often use feminist performance and their own bodies in their advocacy. In Romania, feminist activists have taken on more prominently the issue of violence against women, which is rampant and deadly, rather than focussing only on sexual harassment. Romanian feminists who work to prevent violence against women rarely attract the attention of the international press, compared to the Chinese feminists who are targeted by the Chinese state. Chinese and Romanian feminist activists see themselves as part of an international community of feminist activists and have both made the fight against sexual violence a core value, but face specific challenges in their respective countries. While Romanian feminists are more attuned to regional activism in Eastern Europe and in the European Union, Chinese feminist activists rarely refer to other Asian countries, being more connected to developments in the United States or Western Europe, where Chinese diaspora student activists reside. Both cases demonstrate the necessity of organised feminist activism to channel the attention of the public to #MeToo survival stories and to effect social and legal change to protect women.

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Notes 1 Feminism Romania, “Marșul VIF 2018” [The March VIF 2018], Facebook, 21 October 2018, www. facebook.com/​Feminism.Romania/​videos/​562981507490139. 2 Feminism Romania, “Marșul VIF  2018”. 3 Dela0.ro, “Universitatea de hartuire, un altfel de resist” [The university of harassment, a different kind of resist], Facebook, 9 September 2018, www.facebook.com/​Dela0.ro/​posts/​2228146317213677. 4 “ONG” [NGOs], Front Association, 10 August 2010, www.feminism-​romania.ro/​activism/​ong. 5 FILIA Centre, accessed 4 January 2020, www.centrulfilia.ro. 6 Transcena Association, accessed 4 January 2020, http://​transcena.ro. 7 Sensiblu Foundation, accessed 4 January 2020, www.fundatiasensiblu.ro. 8 “VIF Reteaua pentru Prevenirea si Combaterea Violentei împotriva Femeilor” [VIF The Network for Prevention and Combatting Violence against Women], Asociatia Trnscena, accessed 4 January 2020, http://​transcena.ro/​parteneriat-​social-​blog-​violenta-​domestica. 9 Feminism Romania, “Începând de astăzi, polițiștii vor putea emite un ordin de protecție provizoriu (OPP)” [Starting today policemen can issue a temporary protection order], Facebook, 28 December 2018, www.facebook.com/​Feminism.Romania/​posts/​2083237275077155. 10 Vlad Petri, “Acțiune feministă de 8 martie la Ministerul Justiției” [Feminist action on March 8th at the Ministry of Justice], Facebook, 8 March 2017, www.facebook.com/​vladpetri/​videos/​ 10210910104966809. 11 Feminism Romania, “Pentru prima oară, femeile care se confruntă cu violența domestică sunt puse în legătură cu femeile …” [For the first time, women facing domestic violence are put in touch with women …], Facebook, 27 November 2018, www.facebook.com/​Feminism.Romania/​posts/​ 2039316422802574. 12 “Da încredere si altor femei” [Give confidence to other women], Și eu reușesc, accessed 4 January 2020, https://​sieureusesc.ro/​?fbclid=IwAR0-​iOMcYI3afP8Y_​ 4zbA1GCE4i4GZFN9KteosvTFBAoAHsGl9BoY5_​XX38. 13 “Povestea Alinei” [Alina’s story], Și eu reușesc, accessed 4 January 2020, https://​sieureusesc.ro/​ro/​ testimoniale/​articol/​povestea-​alinei. 14 “Despre noi” [About us], Și eu reușesc, accessed 4 January 2020, https://​sieureusesc.ro/​ro/​despre-​noi. 15 “Povestea Mihaelei” [Mihaela’s story], Și eu reușesc, accessed 4 January 2020, https://​sieureusesc.ro/​ testimoniale/​articol/​povestea-​mihaelei. 16 “Ordin de protecție” [Protection order], Și eu reușesc, accessed 4 January 2020, https://​sieureusesc.ro/​ blog/​ordin-​de-​protectie. 17 Feminism Romania, “Un centru pilot pentru gestionarea situațiilor de viol …” [A pilot centre for managing rape cases …], Facebook, 26 November 2018, www.facebook.com/​Feminism.Romania/​ posts/​2039318882802328. 18 Alina Neagu, “Primul centru pilot pentru gestionarea situațiilor de viol din România, inaugurat la Spitalul Universitar din București” [The first pilot centre for handling rape cases in Romania was opened at the University Hospital in Bucharest], HotNews.ro, 26 November 2018, www.hotnews. ro/​stiri-​sanatate-​22833450-​primul-​centru-​pilot-​pentru-​situatii-​viol-​din-​romania-​inaugurat-​spitalul-​ universitar-​din-​bucuresti.htm. 19 Feminism Romania, “Astăzi este Ziua Internațională împotriva Violenței asupra Femeilor” [Today is the International day against violence against women], Facebook, 25 November 2018, www.facebook. com/​Feminism.Romania/​posts/​2037473696320180. 20 Feminism Romania, “Astăzi este Ziua”. 21 Feminism Romania, “Astăzi este Ziua”. 22 Feminism Romania, “Astăzi este Ziua”. 23 Feminism Romania, “Astăzi este Ziua”. 24 Feminism Romania, “O femeie de 34 de ani și-​a acuzat partenerul că a sechestrat-​o vreme de cinci ani în casa în care locuiau” [A 34-​year-​old woman accused her partner of holding her hostage for five years in the house where they had lived] Facebook, 30 October 2018, www.facebook.com/​Feminism. Romania/​posts/​2002988839768666. 25 Iulia Martin and David Muntean, “Prizioniera” [The Prisoner], Recorder, 29 October 2018, https://​ recorder.ro/​prizoniera. 26 Feminism Romania, “Marșul VIF 2018”. 27 Feminism Romania, “Marșul VIF 2018”.

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#MeToo in post-socialist countries 28 Feminism Romania, “Marșul VIF 2018”. 29 Feminism Romania, “Marșul VIF 2018”. 30 E-​Romnja (@ERomnja), “Marșul VIF 2018” [The March VIF  2018], Facebook, www.facebook. com/​ERomnja/​videos/​187607872132829. 31 E-​Romnja, “Marșul VIF 2018”. 32 E-​Romnja, “Marșul VIF 2018”. 33 E-​Romnja, “Marșul VIF 2018”. 34 E-​Romnja, “Marșul VIF 2018”. 35 Preot Danu Florin, “Împreună cu dvs am schimbat vieți!” [I have changed lives with you!], Facebook, 17 December 2019, www.facebook.com/​PreotDanuFlorin/​posts/​993477977684868. 36 E-​Romnja, “Marșul VIF 2018”. 37 E-​Romnja, “Marșul VIF 2018”. 38 E-​Romnja, “Marșul VIF 2018”. 39 E-​ Romnja, “Gata si Marsul Impreuna pentru siguranta femeilor …” [Ready with the march Together for women’s safety …], Facebook, 20 October 2018, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​ 2042031775853623. 40 E-​Romnja, “Marșul VIF 2018”. 41 E-​ Romnja, “Săptămâna trecută E-​ Romnja a organizat un schimb …” [Last week, E-​ Romnja organised an exchange …] Facebook, 3 October 2018, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​ 2018445481545586. 42 E-​Romnja, “Solidaritatea este obligatorie într-​o democrație” [Solidarity is mandatory in a democracy], Facebook, 11 September 2018, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​1991784677545000. 43 E-​Romnja, “Impreuna cu 800 de persoane venite din diferite zone ale tarii …” [Together with 800 people from different parts of the country], Facebook, 28 July 2018, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​ videos/​1928571340533001; E-​Romnja, “In data de 2 august vor avea loc proteste impotriva rasismului si in Bulgaria si Italia” [Protests against racism will take place on 2 August in Bulgaria and Italy], Facebook, 1 August 2018, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​videos/​1928571340533001. 44 E-​Romnja, “Lansăm Campania Educi o FEMEIE, educi o COMUNITATE!” [We are launching the educate a woman, educate a community campaign], Facebook, 23 July 2018, www.facebook.com/​ ERomnja/​posts/​1913751685348300. 45 E-​Romnja, “Ieri am fost în deplasare la Valea Seacă …” [Yesterday, I went to Valea Seacă], Facebook, 13 June 2018, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​1852424518147684. 46 E-​Romnja, “Am început luna iunie cu o săptămână plină de activități …” [We started June with a busy week on Monday], Facebook, 8 June 2018, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​1846442938745842. 47 E-​Romnja, “Am început primul atelier cu grupul de tineri romi și ne-​romi ‘Anti-​Violență’ din Giurgiu” [We started the first workshop with the group ‘Anti-​ Violence’ [comprised] of young Roma and non-​Roma from Giurgiu], Facebook, 24 April 2018, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​ posts/​1800749506648519; E-​Romnja, “E-​Romnja și Inspectoratul Județean de Poliție Giurgiu” [E-​ Romnja and the Giurgiu County Police Department], Facebook, 25 May 2018, www.facebook.com/​ ERomnja/​posts/​1832050526851750. 48 E-​Romnja, “Am început primul atelier”. 49 “Phenja  —​Violența nu are Culoare” [Violence has no colour], Asociatia E-​Romnja, YouTube, 3 January 2019, video, https://​youtu.be/​yy8V1JQQLh0. 50 “Phenja —​Violența nu are Culoare”, 3 January 2019. 51 E-​Romnja, “Grupurile de femei rome și nerome din Giurgiu …” [Roma and non-​Roma women’s groups from Giurgiu], Facebook, 24 November 2017, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​ 1642587372464734. 52 E-​Romnja, “In cadrul celor 16 zile de activism impotriva violentei, in data de 1 decembrie 2017 grupul tinerilor si tinerelor de la Mizil” [On 1 December 2017, a group of young people from Mizil carried out a spontaneous action as part of the 16 days of activism for the elimination of violence against women], Facebook, 4 December 2017, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​1653213411402130. 53 E-​Romnja, “În cadrul celor 16 Zile de activism împotriva violenței asupra femeilor organizăm atelierele în liceele din Giurgiu” [During the 16 days of activism against violence against women, we are organising workshops in high schools in Giurgiu], Facebook, 28 November 2017, www.facebook. com/​ERomnja/​posts/​1646571745399630. 54 E-​Romnja, “Pe 25 noiembrie au inceput cele 16 zile zile de activism pentru Eliminarea Violenței împotriva Femeilor” [The 16  days of activism for the elimination of violence against women have

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Mirela Violeta David begun on 25 November], Facebook, 27 November 2017, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​ 1645321755524629. 55 E-​Romnja, “Campania #metoo care circulă zilele acestea pe Facebook a scos la iveală multe situații de hărțuire sexuală” [The #metoo campaign circulating on Facebook these days has revealed many instances of sexual harassment], Facebook, 19 October 2017, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​ 1607961709260634. 56 E-​Romnja, “Campania #metoo”. 57 E-​Romnja, “Neither democracy nor progress for women can move forward if all the diverse faces of millions of women around the world are not included”, Facebook, 12 March 2018, www.facebook. com/​ERomnja/​posts/​1754989024557901; Patricia Caro, “We Are Roma Women, and our Voices Deserve to Be Heard”, Huffington Post, 8 March 2018, www.huffingtonpost.ca/​romanipe/​roma-​ women-​international-​womens-​day_​a_​23380720. 58 E-​Romnja, “Invitatie —​‘8 Martie Intersectional’ ” [Invitation —​intersectional 8 March], Facebook, 20 February 2017, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​1351701084886699. 59 Feminism Romania, “Mișcarea #metoo a scos la iveală experiențe de hărțuire și violență sexuală din toată lumea” [The #MeToo movement has revealed experiences of harassment and sexual violence around the world], Facebook, 4 March 2018, www.facebook.com/​Feminism.Romania/​posts/​ 1691281287606091 60 Feminism Romania, “Mișcarea #metoo”. 61 Feminism Romania, “Mișcarea #metoo”. 62 Raluca Stepanov, “MeToo de România. Legea care interzice actele de hărţuire sexuală sau hărţuire psihologică, promulgate” [MeToo of Romania. The Law That Prohibits Sexual Harassment or Psychological Harassment Was Promulgated], Adevarul, 16 July 2018, https://​adevarul.ro/​news/​ societate/​me-​too-​romania-​legea-​interzice-​actele-​hartuire-​sexuala-​hartuire-​psihologica-​promulgata-​ 1_​5b4c754ddf52022f7548daf7/​index.html. 63 Vladimir Adrian Costea, “Interviu/​Andreea Bragă, FILIA: Hărțuirea sexuală este prezentă în toate mediile, însă rămâne în continuare invizibilă” [Interview with Andreea Bragă, FILIA: Sexual Harassment is Present in All Environments, But Continues to Remain Invisible], Europunkt, 3 November 2017, https://​europunkt.ro/​2017/​11/​03/​interviu-​andreea-​braga-​filia-​hartuirea-​sexuala-​este-​prezenta-​in-​ toate-​mediile-​insa-​ramane-​in-​continuare-​invizibila. 64 Costea, “Interviu/​Andreea Bragă”. 65 Costea, “Interviu/​Andreea Bragă”. 66 Centrul FILIA, “Colega noastră, Andreea Braga” [Our colleague, Andreea Braga], Facebook, 5 October 2018, www.facebook.com/​centrul.filia/​posts/​1966730340039754. 67 Centrul FILIA, “Discutam despre prevenirea si combaterea violentei impotriva femeilor” [We discuss prevention and combating of violence against women], Facebook, 29 October 2018, www.facebook. com/​centrul.filia/​videos/​2188509368139917. 68 Centrul FILIA, “E.S Doamna Stella Ronner-​Grubacic, Ambasadoare a Regatului Țărilor de Jos, va participa mâine la Marșul “Împreună pentru siguranța femeilor!” [Her Excellency Mrs. Stella Ronner-​Grubacic, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, will participate tomorrow in the March ‘Together for women’s safety’!], Facebook, 19 October 2018, www.facebook.com/​centrul. filia/​photos/​a.455572067822263/​1987769884602466; Centrul FILIA, “Ambasadorul Marii Britanii condamnă violența împotriva femeilor …” [The British ambassador condemns violence against women …], Facebook, 19 October 2018, www.facebook.com/​centrul.filia/​posts/​1987830071263114; Centrul FILIA (@centrul.filia), “Impreună cu Ambasada Spaniei la marșul pentru siguranța femeilor!” [Together with the Spanish Embassy on the march for women’s safety!], Facebook, 19 October 2018, www.facebook.com/​centrul.filia/​posts/​1987789954600459. 69 Centrul FILIA, “Marina Moldovan, fondatoarea brand-​ului SKIN DEEP, a lansat colecția NoMeansNo/​ Raise boys and girls the same way, iar 30% din profit va fi donat către Centrul FILIA” Facebook, 27 September 2018, www.facebook.com/​centrul.filia/​photos/​a.455572067822263/​1956235064422615. 70 Centrul FILIA, “Suntem la Pitesti si vorbim despre prevenirea si combaterea hartuirii sexuale in universitati” [We are in Pitesti and we are talking about preventing and combatting sexual harassment in universities], Facebook, 29 January 2019, www.facebook.com/​centrul.filia/​videos/​ 229413247996633. 71 Centrul FILIA, “60 de ONG-​uri fac un apel către deputați pentru susținerea proiectului de lege pentru siguranța femeilor!” [60 NGOs call on MPs to support the legislation on the safety of women!], Facebook, 19 April 2018, www.facebook.com/​centrul.filia/​posts/​1737926886253435.

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#MeToo in post-socialist countries 72 E-​Romnja, “Va astepta astazi, de la ora 15  …” [Va astepta astazi, de la ora 15  …], Facebook, 14 October 2017, www.facebook.com/​ERomnja/​posts/​1603483769708428. 73 Feminism Romania, “Ieri am fost în fața Ambasadei Bulgariei …” [Yesterday, in front of the Bulgarian Embassy …] Facebook, 27 November 2018, www.facebook.com/​Feminism.Romania/​posts/​ 2039927459408137. 74 Feminism Romania, “Ieri am fost în fața Ambasadei Bulgariei”. 75 Sheena McKenzie, “How a Hungarian Community Centre Became an ‘Enemy of the State,’ ” CNN, 30 December 2018, www.cnn.com/​2018/​12/​26/​europe/​hungary-​orban-​aurora-​ngos-​intl/​index. html. 76 Mimi Lau, “After #MeToo Success, Chinese Rights Activists Urge Lawmakers to Join the Fight Against Sexual Harassment”, South China Morning Post, 8 March 2018, www.scmp.com/​news/​china/​ policies-​politics/​article/​2136199/​after-​metoo-​success-​chinese-​r ights-​activists-​urge. 77 Leta Hong Fincher, Betraying Big Brother, The Feminist Awakening in China (London: Verso, 2018), 4. 78 Jiayun Feng, “Sexual Harassment in China:  Different than in the U.S.?  —​China’s Latest Society and Culture News”, SupChina  —​ Sinica, 16 October 2017, https://​supchina.com/​2017/​10/​16/​ sexual-​harassment-​china-​different-​u-​s-​chinas-​latest-​society-​culture-​news. 79 Fincher, Betraying Big Brother, 54. 80 罗茜茜[Luo Qianqian], “我要实名举报北航教授、长江学者陈小武性骚扰女学生” [I Want To Report the Name of Beihang Professor and Changjiang Scholar Chen Xiaowu Sexually Harassed Female Students], Weibo, 1 January 2018, www.weibo.com/​ttarticle/​p/​show?id=2309404191293831018113. 81 罗茜茜[Luo Qianqian], “我要实名举报北航教授“. 82 罗茜茜[Luo Qianqian], “我要实名举报北航教授“. 83 Lü Pin and Deeidi Wang, “Can Anti-​Sexual Harassment Actions by Young People Set a New Feminist Agenda in China?” Free Chinese Feminists, Facebook, 18 January 2018, www.facebook.com/​notes/​ free-​chinese-​feminists/​can-​anti-​sexual-​harassment-​actions-​by-​young-​people-​set-​a-​new-​feminist-​ agenda-​in-​/​932789503544464. 84 人民日报[China Daily], “人民微评:当”打破沉默的人” [China Daily: Being ‘the person who breaks the silence’], Weibo, 12 January 2018, www.weibo.com/​2803301701/​FE4fRzp7k?from=page_​ 1002062803301701_​ p rofile&wvr=6&mod=weibotime&type=comment#_​ l og inLayer_​ 1591733504768. 85 人民日报[China Daily], “人民微评“. 86 “Open Letter from Overseas Chinese Students and Scholars on Combating Sexual Harassment 海外中国学生学者就性骚扰防治的公开联名信“, Free Chinese Feminists, Facebook, 30 January 2018, www.facebook.com/​notes/​free-​chinese-​feminists/​open-​letter-​from-​overseas-​chinese-​students-​ and-​scholars-​on-​combating-​sexual-​hara/​939735272849887. 87 Lü Pin, “The Stages of the #MeToo Movement in China and the Role of Feminist Activists, Why Core Organizers Are Still Important in a Decentralized Movement”, Free Chinese Feminists, Facebook, 17 October 2018, www.facebook.com/​notes/​free-​chinese-​feminists/​the-​stages-​of-​the-​ metoo-​movement-​in-​china-​and-​the-​role-​of-​feminist-​activists/​1137981019691977. 88 Lü Pin, “The Stages of the #MeToo Movement in China”. 89 Lü Pin, “The Stages of the #MeToo Movement in China”. 90 Zheng Churan (Da Tu), “ ‘Direct Activism, Social Mobilization, and Rejecting Defeatism’ —​The Anti-​Sexual Harassment “Human Billboard” Movement in China”, trans. Siodhbhra Parkin, Free Chinese Feminists, Facebook, 18 January 2018, www.facebook.com/​notes/​free-​chinese-​feminists/​ direct-​activism-​social-​mobilization-​and-​rejecting-​defeatism-​the-​anti-​sexual-​hara/​932556050234476. 91 Leta Hong Fincher, “China’s Feminist Five”, Dissent Magazine, Fall 2016, www.dissentmagazine.org/​ article/​china-​feminist-​five. 92 Fincher, Betraying Big Brother, 97. 93 Fincher, Betraying Big Brother,  83–​84. 94 Fincher, Betraying Big Brother, 103. 95 Zheng Churan (Da Tu), “Direct Activism”. 96 Zheng Churan (Da Tu), “Direct Activism”. 97 Wang Nanfu, dir., Hooligan Sparrow, (New York City: Little Horse Crossing the River, 2016). 98 Fincher, Betraying Big Brother,  97–​98. 99 Xiao Meili, “China Must Combat On-​ Campus Sexual Harassment:  An Open Letter”, SupChina, 8 January 2018, https://​supchina.com/​2018/​01/​08/​china-​must-​combat-​on-​campus​sexual-​harassment-​an-​open-​letter.

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Mirela Violeta David 100 Xiao Meili, “Who Are the Young Women Behind the ‘#MeToo in China’ Campaign? An Organizer Explains”, China Change, 27 March 2018, https://​chinachange.org/​2018/​03/​27/​ who-​are-​the-​young-​women-​behind-​the-​metoo-​in-​china-​campaign-​an-​organizer-​explains. 101 Lü Pin吕频, “MeToo”何来:从蝴蝶到飓风  —​ 个传播的视角[“The Origins of #MeToo:  From Butterflies to Hurricanes  —​A  Point of View’s Dissemination”], Free Chinese Feminists (@ feministchina), Facebook, 4 September 2018, www.facebook.com/​notes/​free-​chinese-​feminists/​the-​ origins-​of-​metoo-​from-​butterflies-​to-​hurricanes-​a-​point-​of-​views-​disseminati/​1109858635837549. 102 Mimi Lau, “As #MeToo Movement Gains Traction in China, Professor is Sacked 20 Years After Alleged Rape”, South China Morning Post, 7 April 2018, www.scmp.com/​news/​china/​society/​article/​2140724/​chinese-​professor-​sacked-​friends-​suicide-​victim-​demand-​apology-​20. 103 我是富士康女工,我要求建立反性骚扰制度 本文来自尖椒部落-​中国唯一女工权益与生活资讯平台 [I Am a Female Worker at Foxconn. I Am Asking for a System of Anti-​Sexual Harassment] Jianjiao buluo, 23 January 2018, www.jianjiaobuluo.com/​content/​11481. 104 我是富士康女工 [I Am a Female Worker at Foxconn]. 105 Laurie Chen, “Rape Case Shocks Elite Chinese University Students, Raises Fears of Off-​Campus Accommodation Safety”, South China Morning Post, 5 October 2018, www.scmp.com/​news/​china/​ society/​article/​2167113/​rape-​case-​shocks-​elite-​chinese-​university-​students-​raises-​fears. 106 Mimi Lau, “#MeToo? Silence, Shame and the Cost of Speaking Out About Sexual Harassment in China”, South China Morning Post, 8 December 2017, www.scmp.com/​news/​china/​society/​article/​ 2123481/​metoo-​silence-​shame-​and-​cost-​speaking-​out-​about-​sexual-​harassment. 107 Mimi Lau, “Police Detain Chinese #MeToo activist Sophia Huang Xueqin on Public Order Charge”, South China Morning Post, 24 October 2019, www.scmp.com/​news/​china/​politics/​article/​ 3034389/​police-​detain-​chinese-​metoo-​activist-​sophia-​huang-​xueqin-​public. 108 Lau, “Police Detain Chinese #MeToo activist Sophia Huang Xueqin”. 109 Shi Xianxia 释贤佳and Shi Xianqi释贤启, “重大情况汇报” [A Report on a Significant Situation], 1, http://​xqdoc.imedao.com/​164f59c8b1799c43fe3a7953.pdf. 110 Shi Xianxia 释贤佳and Shi Xianqi释贤启, “重大情况汇报” [A Report on a Significant Situation],  4–​5. 111 Shi Xianxia 释贤佳and Shi Xianqi释贤启, “重大情况汇报” [A Report on a Significant Situation], 6. 112 Shi Xianxia 释贤佳and Shi Xianqi释贤启, “重大情况汇报” [A Report on a Significant Situation], 9. 113 I Shi Xianxia 释贤佳and Shi Xianqi释贤启, “重大情况汇报” [A Report on a Significant Situation], 10. 114 “Chinese Monk Xuecheng Removed as Head of Beijing’s Longquan Monastery Amid Sex Probe”, Straits Times, 30 August 2018, www.straitstimes.com/​asia/​east-​asia/​ chinese-​monk-​xuecheng-​removed-​as-​head-​of-​beijings-​longquan-​monastery-​amid-​sex-​probe. 115 Free Chinese Feminists, “#MeTooChina #MeToo was exposed in China’s Buddhist Temple Longquan Monasteries”, Facebook, 3 August 2018, www.facebook.com/​feministchina/​posts/​ 1075471609276252. 116 Alina Mitran, “Uciderea Alexandrei, cazul care a ținut România cu sufletul la gură” [The Killing of Alexandra, The Case that Held Romania Breathless], Adevarul, 28 July 2019, https://​adevarul. ro/​locale/​slatina/​uciderea-​alexandrei-​cazul-​tinut-​romania-​sufletul-​gura-​un-​copil-​exemplu-​copil-​ rafinament-​dragalasenie-​1_​5d3dc224892c0bb0c6f25684/​index.html.

Bibliography Asociatia E-​Romnja. “Phenja  —​Violența nu are Culoare” [Violence Has No Colour]. YouTube, 3 January 2019. Video. https://​youtu.be/​yy8V1JQQLh0. Caro, Patricia. “We Are Roma Women, and our Voices Deserve to Be Heard”. Huffington Post, 8 March 2018. www.huffingtonpost.ca/​romanipe/​roma-​women-​international-​womens-​day_​a_​23380720. Centrul FILIA [FILIA Centre]. Accessed 4 January 2020. www.centrulfilia.ro. Chen, Laurie. “Rape Case Shocks Elite Chinese University Students, Raises Fears of Off-​Campus Accommodation Safety”. South China Morning Post, 5 October 2018. www.scmp.com/​news/​china/​ society/​article/​2167113/​rape-​case-​shocks-​elite-​chinese-​university-​students-​raises-​fears. Costea, Vladimir Adrian. “Interviu/​Andreea Bragă, FILIA: Hărțuirea sexuală este prezentă în toate mediile, însă rămâne în continuare invizibilă” [Interview with Andreea Bragă, FILIA:  Sexual Harassment is Present in All Environments, But Continues to Remain Invisible]. Europunkt, 3 November 2017.

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#MeToo in post-socialist countries https://​europunkt.ro/​2017/​11/​03/​interviu-​andreea-​braga-​filia-​hartuirea-​sexuala-​este-​prezenta-​in-​ toate-​mediile-​insa-​ramane-​in-​continuare-​invizibila Feng, Jiayun. “Sexual Harassment in China:  Different than in the U.S.?  —​China’s Latest Society and Culture News”. SupChina  —​ Sinica, 16 October 2017. https://​supchina.com/​2017/​10/​16/​ sexual-​harassment-​china-​different-​u-​s-​chinas-​latest-​society-​culture-​news. Fincher, Leta Hong. “China’s Feminist Five”. Dissent Magazine, Fall 2016. www.dissentmagazine.org/​ article/​china-​feminist-​five. Fincher, Leta Hong. Betraying Big Brother, The Feminist Awakening in China. London: Verso, 2018. Free Chinese Feminists. “Open Letter from Overseas Chinese Students and Scholars on Combating Sexual Harassment 海外中国学生学者就性骚扰防治的公开联名信”. Facebook, 30 January 2018. www.facebook.com/​notes/​free-​chinese-​feminists/​open-​letter-​from-​overseas-​chinese-​students-​and-​ scholars-​on-​combating-​sexual-​hara/​939735272849887. Front Association. “ONG” [NGOs]. 10 August 2010. www.feminism-​romania.ro/​activism/​ong. Jianjiao buluo. “我是富士康女工，我要求建立反性骚扰制度 本文来自尖椒部落-​ 中国唯一女工权益与生活资讯平台” [I Am a Female Worker at Foxconn. I am Asking for a System of Anti-​Sexual Harassment]. 23 January 2018. www.jianjiaobuluo.com/​content/​11481. Lau, Mimi. “After #MeToo Success, Chinese Rights Activists Urge Lawmakers to Join the Fight Against Sexual Harassment”. South China Morning Post, 8 March 2018. www.scmp.com/​news/​china/​policies-​ politics/​article/​2136199/​after-​metoo-​success-​chinese-​r ights-​activists-​urge. Lau, Mimi. “As #MeToo Movement Gains Traction in China, Professor is Sacked 20 Years After Alleged Rape”, South China Morning Post, 7 April 2018. www.scmp.com/​news/​china/​society/​article/​ 2140724/​chinese-​professor-​sacked-​friends-​suicide-​victim-​demand-​apology-​20. Lau, Mimi. “Police Detain Chinese #MeToo activist Sophia Huang Xueqin on Public Order Charge”. South China Morning Post, 24 October 2019. www.scmp.com/​news/​china/​politics/​article/​3034389/​ police-​detain-​chinese-​metoo-​activist-​sophia-​huang-​xueqin-​public. Lau, Mimi. “#MeToo? Silence, Shame and the Cost of Speaking Out About Sexual Harassment in China”, South China Morning Post, 8 December 2017, www.scmp.com/​news/​china/​society/​article/​ 2123481/​metoo-​silence-​shame-​and-​cost-​speaking-​out-​about-​sexual-​harassment. Lü Pin. “The Stages of the #MeToo Movement in China and the Role of Feminist Activists, Why Core Organizers Are Still Important in A Decentralized Movement”. Free Chinese Feminists. Facebook, 17 October 2018. www.facebook.com/​notes/​free-​chinese-​feminists/​the-​stages-​of-​the-​metoo-​ movement-​in-​china-​and-​the-​role-​of-​feminist-​activists/​1137981019691977. Lü Pin. “吕频, ‘MeToo’何来：从蝴蝶到飓风  —​ 个传播的视角” [The Origins of #MeToo:  From Butterflies to Hurricanes  —​A  Point of View’s Dissemination]. Free Chinese Feminists (@ feministchina). Facebook, 4 September 2018. www.facebook.com/​notes/​free-​chinese-​feminists/​the-​ origins-​of-​metoo-​from-​butterflies-​to-​hurricanes-​a-​point-​of-​views-​disseminati/​1109858635837549. Lü Pin, and Deeidi Wang. “Can Anti-​Sexual Harassment Actions by Young People Set a New Feminist Agenda in China?” Free Chinese Feminists. Facebook, 18 January 2018. www.facebook.com/​notes/​ free-​chinese-​feminists/​can-​anti-​sexual-​harassment-​actions-​by-​young-​people-​set-​a-​new-​feminist-​ agenda-​in-​/​932789503544464. 罗茜茜 [Luo Qianqian]. “我要实名举报北航教授、长江学者陈小武性骚扰女学生” [I Want To Report the Name of Beihang Professor and Changjiang Scholar Chen Xiaowu Sexually Harassed Female Students]. Weibo, 1 January 2018. www.weibo.com/​ttarticle/​p/​show?id=2309404191293831018113. Martin, Iulia, and David Muntean. “Prizioniera” [The Prisoner]. Recorder, 29 October 2018. https://​ recorder.ro/​prizoniera. McKenzie, Sheena. “How a Hungarian Community Centre Became an ‘Enemy of the State.’ ” CNN, 30 December 2018. www.cnn.com/​2018/​12/​26/​europe/​hungary-​orban-​aurora-​ngos-​intl/​index.html. Mitran, Alina. “Uciderea Alexandrei, cazul care a ținut România cu sufletul la gură” [The Killing of Alexandra, The Case that Held Romania Breathless]. Adevarul, 28 July 2019. https://​adevarul.ro/​ locale/​slatina/​uciderea-​alexandrei-​cazul-​tinut-​romania-​sufletul-​gura-​un-​copil-​exemplu-​copil-​ rafinament-​dragalasenie-​1_​5d3dc224892c0bb0c6f25684/​index.html. Neagu, Alina. “Primul centru pilot pentru gestionarea situațiilor de viol din România, inaugurat la Spitalul Universitar din București” [The First Pilot Centre for Handling Rape Cases in Romania Was Opened at the University Hospital in Bucharest]. HotNews.ro, 26 November 2018. www.hotnews. ro/​stiri-​sanatate-​22833450-​primul-​centru-​pilot-​pentru-​situatii-​viol-​din-​romania-​inaugurat-​spitalul-​ universitar-​din-​bucuresti.htm. Sensiblu Foundation. Accessed 4 January 2020, www.fundatiasensiblu.ro.

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Mirela Violeta David Shi Xianxia 释贤佳and Shi Xianqi释贤启. “重大情况汇报” [A Report on a Significant Situation]. http://​xqdoc.imedao.com/​164f59c8b1799c43fe3a7953.pdf. Și eu reușesc. “Da încredere si altor femei sa spună #Și eu reușesc. Povestea ta, de învingătoare poate salva vieți” [Give Confidence to Other Women to Way #I Too Suceed. Your Story of Survival Can Save Lives]. Accessed 4 January 2020. https://​sieureusesc.ro/​?fbclid=IwAR0-​iOMcYI3afP8Y_​ 4zbA1GCE4i4GZFN9KteosvTFBAoAHsGl9BoY5_​XX38. Și eu reușesc. “Despre noi” [About Us]. Accessed 4 January 2020. https://​sieureusesc.ro/​ro/​despre-​noi. Și eu reușesc. “Ordin de protecție” [Protection Order]. Accessed 4 January 2020. https://​sieureusesc.ro/​ blog/​ordin-​de-​protectie. Și eu reușesc. “Povestea Alinei” [Alina’s Story]. Accessed 4 January 2020. https://​sieureusesc.ro/​ro/​ testimoniale/​articol/​povestea-​alinei. Și eu reușesc. “Povestea Mihaelei” [Mihaela’s Story]. Accessed 4 January 2020. https://​sieureusesc.ro/​ testimoniale/​articol/​povestea-​mihaelei. Stepanov, Raluca. “ ‘MeToo’ de România. Legea care interzice actele de hărţuire sexuală sau hărţuire psihologică, promulgate” [MeToo of Romania. The Law That Prohibits Sexual Harassment or Psychological Harassment Was Promulgated]. Adevarul, 16 July 2018. https://​adevarul.ro/​news/​ societate/​me-​too-​romania-​legea-​interzice-​actele-​hartuire-​sexuala-​hartuire-​psihologica-​promulgata-​ 1_​5b4c754ddf52022f7548daf7/​index.html. Straits Times. “Chinese Monk Xuecheng Removed as Head of Beijing’s Longquan Monastery Amid Sex Probe”. 30 August 2018. www.straitstimes.com/​asia/​east-​asia/​chinese-​monk-​xuecheng-​removed-​ as-​head-​of-​beijings-​longquan-​monastery-​amid-​sex-​probe. Transcena Association. Accessed 4 January 2020, http://​transcena.ro. Transcena Association. “VIF Reteaua pentru Prevenirea si Combaterea Violentei împotriva Femeilor” [VIF The Network for Prevention and Combatting Violence against Women]. Accessed 4 January 2020. http://​transcena.ro/​parteneriat-​social-​blog-​violenta-​domestica. Wang Nanfu, dir. Hooligan Sparrow. 2016; New York City: Little Horse Crossing the River. Xiao Meili. “China Must Combat On-​Campus Sexual Harassment:  An Open Letter”. SupChina, 8 January 2018. https://​supchina.com/​2018/​01/​08/​china-​must-​combat-​on-​campus-​sexual-​harassment-​ an-​open-​letter. Xiao Meili. “Who Are the Young Women Behind the ‘#MeToo in China’ Campaign? An Organizer Explains”. China Change, 27 March 2018. https://​chinachange.org/​2018/​03/​27/​ who-​are-​the-​young-​women-​behind-​the-​metoo-​in-​china-​campaign-​an-​organizer-​explains. Zheng Churan (Da Tu). “ ‘Direct Activism, Social Mobilization, and Rejecting Defeatism’ —​The Anti-​ Sexual Harassment ‘Human Billboard’ Movement in China”. Translated by Siodhbhra Parkin. Free Chinese Feminists. Facebook, 18 January 2018. www.facebook.com/​notes/​free-​chinese-​feminists/​ direct-​activism-​social-​mobilization-​and-​rejecting-​defeatism-​the-​anti-​sexual-​hara/​932556050234476.

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23 IN THE NAME OF #RICEBUNNY Legacy, strategy, and efficacy of the Chinese #MeToo movement Li Jun

Building on the exposure by diaspora Chinese scholars of sexual harassment perpetrated against them, young Chinese women brought the discussion of sexual harassment into the public sphere in China in January 2018. To avoid censorship of their online collective action, #MeToo in China developed localised hashtags such as “Rice Bunny”,1 “An Ye Yi Yang”,2 and “Wo Ye Shi”,3 pointing to the movement’s own unique agenda in the context of Chinese society. Once the floodgates were opened, the sheer number of cases overwhelmed media outlets and exceeded the processing capability of women’s organisations in China. As of early 2020, around 60 perpetrators had been named, including renowned figures such as a host of the national TV station (CCTV), a Buddhist abbot (who is also the president of the state-​run National Buddhist Association and a member of the standing committee of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference), celebrities in civil society and many Changjiang scholars.4 In 2019, #RiceBunny entered its next phase, characterised by greater support for victims, providing legal aid, and public, fact-​based debates around cases entering the judicial process.5 Through case studies and interviews, this chapter analyses #RiceBunny’s institutional resources, how silence-​breakers and feminists coordinate and negotiate the movement’s agendas, what the mobilisation mechanism is and whether it has resulted in policy outcomes. It will interrogate the contribution of the feminist movement in China and social media in shaping the course of the #RiceBunny movement.

Anti-​sexual harassment movement and social media in China The contemporary women’s movement in China originated with women’s grassroots association activities in the 1980s. The Fourth UN Conference on Women (FUNCW) held in Beijing in 1995 exposed women’s organisations to transnational feminist theories and diverse practices of NGOs in different countries. This exposure directly impacted the development of local women’s organisations, and China’s anti-​sexual harassment agenda developed as domestic women’s organisations (re)connected with the international feminist movement.6 Thus, the first generation of women’s NGO activists attempted to explain and define “women’s problems” in a transitional society using transnational feminist theories.7 This wave of “theory travelling”

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included introducing the concept of sexual harassment and relevant theories drawn from beyond China and transnational conversations on legal practices.8 Chinese feminists can be divided into two generations —​the first emerging in the 1990s and the second around 2010 —​based on their relationship with the State, status, resources, and mobilisation paradigms.9 The older generation relies on the status of experts and interpersonal networks within the system, embedding issues related to gender equality and women’s rights into the government’s agenda. By contrast, younger feminists tend to turn to commercial mass media and adopt diverse channels such as drama, art exhibitions, and the internet to promote feminist agendas to the public.10 After 2011, feminist issues started to flourish on social media as two main feminist communication NGOs —​Feminist Voices and Women Awakening Network (WAN)11 —​ entered Weibo and WeChat, the two most frequented social media platforms in China.12 The former, commonly referred to as “Chinese Twitter”, is a micro-​blogging site and mobile app launched in 2009, which has transformed into a comprehensive media platform which is more like “Chinese Facebook” with 462 million monthly active users.13 Meanwhile, WeChat has been operating since 2011 as an instant messaging application and now has a user base of 1.151 billion.14 Weibo and WeChat have different features in terms of function settings. Weibo is more like a public square open to everyone. The latter is an almost indispensable app for communication and building strong relationships which make it the most powerful platform for closed-​door group discussion, where people can conveniently discuss, collaborate, and share information in a targeted manner. Most of the anti-​sexual harassment campaigns on social media were initiated by women’s organisations in the early stages of mobile social media. In 2012, a lesbian feminist organisation in Shanghai produced performance art in the subways —​“I can be a slut, but you can’t harass me” —​to protest against the local subway corporation for victim-​blaming on Weibo. In 2013, feminist Ye Haiyan posted a photo of herself holding a placard with the hotline number of the Women’s Federation, saying, “Headmaster, have sex with me but let go of the school children”, protesting a case in Hainan province of a headmaster raping and pimping school children to local officials. A  large number of netizens followed in Ye’s footsteps, eventually forcing the police to reinvestigate the case. The anti-​sexual harassment campaign that has had the greatest impact on the #MeToo movement is the 2014 case of the Xiamen University, in which a professor sexually assaulted his graduate students. This was the first case in higher education to be publicised on social media. The feminist community supported survivors in position of vulnerability and adopted a strategic communication framework, propelling the Ministry of Education to add anti-​sexual harassment regulation to official profiles. Feminist action and the policy consequences it entails have shaped the agenda, repertoire, and networks of actors of policy advocacy in #RiceBunny 2018, shaping the ‘Chinese character’ of #RiceBunny. This will be discussed in detail in a subsequent section. In 2015, Feminist Voices began an online protest called “anti-​discrimination on Spring Festival Gala [on the national TV station]”. Volunteers also sent an open letter to demand that the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) stop broadcasting discriminatory programs. In 2016, prior to International Women’s Day, the movement initiated by WAN —​“Resisting March 7, celebrating March 8” —​involved 110 million netizens.15 This movement, still active today both online and offline, emphasises the feminist significance of International Women’s Day and opposes the “Girls’ Day” in Chinese campus culture, which emphasises men’s “protection” and “love” for women, stereotypical and dualistic masculinity and femininity, and festival customs rife with sexual harassment. 344

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The detention of the “Feminist Five” in 2015 marked a setback for the Chinese feminist movement.16 Nevertheless, changes in the structure of social media users can explain why discussions of gender discrimination and violence on social media have not diminished, but actually increased after the “Feminist Five” incident. Since the State’s 2014  “Clean Up the Internet campaign”, the influence of male-​dominated, liberal-​leaning KOLs (key opinion leaders) has been limited, and discussions of public affairs have been censored more rigorously.17 In this context, feminist issues provide a new space for public discussion. Moreover, in the past five years, as e-​commerce, shopping, and entertainment functions have evolved, the commercialisation of Weibo has been accompanied by a growth in female users.18 Alongside the feminist organisations and individuals, some female-​targeted consumption bloggers have also begun to consciously run feminist content to attract young women with spending power. For instance, between 2016 and 2017, before the rise of #MeToo, incidents concerning child sex abuse became hot topics on Weibo that makeup bloggers covered obsessively. This phenomenon highlights the unexpected confluence between commercial interests and an increased visibility of feminist issues. This coming together can be seen as the mainstream media’s investment in popular trends such as the burgeoning public interest in issues of sexual assault and the consequent movements of solidarity. As Sarah Banet-​Weiser writes, “one of the most hopeful manifestations of #MeToo has been the focus on the sheer numbers of women coming forward, forcing people to deal with the collectivity of it all”.19 In consonance with the global #MeToo movement, China’s #MeToo awareness has connected victims with each other, building solidarity and bringing public intellectuals, both male and female, together on media platforms for discussions of sexual harassment, issues including consent, testimony, and the possibility of false accusations, as well as control and manipulation in power relations. However, the confluence of feminist and capitalist interests is not always so smooth, and not only has the Chinese #MeToo movement been highly censored from the start,20 but also, as Lim suggests, social media is not inherently a tool for social change: “At its best, it facilitates and amplifies a culture that helps establish a foundation, a training ground, and a learning space for individuals to express their opinions, to exercise their rights and to collaborate with others.”21 The occurrence of the Chinese #MeToo is certainly not just an automatic result of these functional outputs of social media; it should be understood in the context of the feminist movement’s cultivation of issues in the public sphere, its previous policy advocacy, and its mobilisation of grassroots actors. Given this context, it is pertinent to consider how the current #MeToo movement in China differs from anti-​sexual harassment feminist actions hitherto, what has changed in the role of feminist organisations that have been dealing with sexual harassment issues for years, and how the silence-​breakers on social media and these feminist organisations have negotiated the agendas and strategies they employed. Further, questions regarding the policy outcomes and the effect they and the #MeToo movement in China will have on the future development of the anti-​sexual harassment movement need to be considered. In the following discussion, I analyse the most significant components of China’s #MeToo movement. I use participatory observation and analysis of news reports and social media to examine the mobilisation mechanism of online and offline communication networks and their impact. My findings also stem from formal interviews and private conversation I conducted from March 2018 to May 2020 with ten key actors, including survivors, feminists, and journalists, in different sexual abuse cases and focuses on their actions at different stages, their motivations and strategies, their manner of cooperating with others, and their appraisal of the ramifications. 345

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The three stages of the #RiceBunny movement in China The #RiceBunny movement can be divided into three stages. The first stage began in January 2018 and lasted until the end of spring, the second stage started in July, and the third at the end of 2018 and continues to this day. In the first stage, inspired by the Weinstein case, Luo Xixi, an engineer with a PhD in Computer Science from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and who now lives and works in Silicon Valley in the United States, reported to the university that she had been sexually assaulted 12 years ago by the well-​known Changjiang scholar Chen Xiaowu, her then-​supervisor.22 Luo, together with several other victims, issued a complaint against Chen Xiaowu. Since Luo is somewhat protected by her American residence status, she is the only one who spoke out using her real name. At the same time, Huang Xueqin, a freelance journalist, started running a WeChat account called ATSH (abbreviation of “Anti-​Sexual Harassment”). Huang revealed her experience of being sexually harassed by her superior in a media agency, declaring that she would initiate a #MeToo movement in China and encourage other female journalists to share their experiences. The Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics suspended Chen Xiaowu’s job and launched an investigation into the allegations. However, since the results of this investigation were delayed indefinitely, Luo Xixi contacted Huang Xueqin, who introduced her to feminist NGOs in Beijing and Guangzhou. Then, she posted an article on her personal Weibo and ATSH on the first day of 2018. The former gained more than five million hits, and the incident was covered by both domestic and overseas media. Ten days later, the allegation was confirmed by the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics to be true. Chen Xiaowu was subsequently dismissed from his roles as Executive Vice President of the Graduate School, PhD supervisor, and professor. Luo Xixi’s success inspired the existing feminist community and additional victims to break their silence. She created the first stage of #MeToo in the spring, mainly in the field of higher education. On 2 January 2018, Hexi, a graduate of Xi’an International Studies University and founder of the campus feminist group, issued a letter to her alma mater urging the rector to establish a mechanism to prevent sexual harassment. The proposed mechanism was drafted by the Women Awakening Network (WAN), which had submitted the draft to the Ministry of Education and Xiamen University in the 2014 case. This triggered a series of actions by individuals and the feminist community. The WAN shared the 2014 draft of the mechanisms online and encouraged people to download and submit such suggestions to their alma maters. Luo Xixi issued an open letter urging the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics to establish sexual harassment prevention mechanisms rather than merely punishing one perpetrator. She appealed to the public to support this initiative by signing the letter online. Zhang Leilei, a young feminist activist, together with peers, initiated the campaign #WriteToYourAlmaMaters. As a result, the 2014 draft was sent to universities nationwide. Before crackdown on these activities, over 13,000 people from 77 universities nationwide had participated in the #WriteToYourAlmaMaters campaign. Xiao Qiqi, a Chinese student at the University of British Columbia in Canada, who is also active in the #WriteToYourAlmaMaters, initiated the hashtag #MeToo Zai Zhongguo (“#MeToo in China”) to centralise posts on sexual violence in one place. The hashtag had almost five million hits before it was deactivated two weeks later. Qiqi has focused on managing gender-​based violence-​related hashtags on social media to this day, which has facilitated collaboration among netizens and volunteers. In April 2018, a number of Peking University graduates who now live in the United States disclosed the suicide of Gao Yan, a Peking University student who was sexually assaulted 20 years ago by Shen Yang, another Changjiang scholar. Around the same time, many students 346

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from the School of Sociology and Anthropology at Sun Yat-​sen University accused Zhang Peng, a “Young Changjiang Scholar”, of sexual harassment. Further allegations also emerged in universities such as the prestigious Renmin University. Meanwhile, students in most universities started taking action to demand that perpetrators be held accountable. Some Renmin University students besieged classrooms to intercept the perpetrator. Students at other universities demanded that the administrations handle relevant cases, make procedures transparent, and establish anti-​sexual harassment mechanisms. This extensive mobilisation in universities, coupled with the fact that a number of State-​honoured scholars were being accused by members of the Chinese diaspora in the United States, made China’s security department believe there to be an anti-​China force behind #MeToo. It is thus unsurprising that this movement was under strict censorship on social media and that students who engaged in the movement were also suppressed. Thus, the first stage of the #MeToo movement in China constituted the first stage of accusations in academia, the subsequent rush of millions of supporters online, some perpetrators being held accountable, and the resultant suppression of the movement as anti-​ national —​all in the space of about half a year. The second stage began in the summer. A former student volunteer accused Lei Chuang, a well-​known activist for the rights of Hepatitis B carriers, of assaulting her during a hiking trip for advocacy in Beijing.23 Subsequently, numerous cases were exposed, mostly against celebrities and leaders in the media and charity sectors.24 The most compelling case was that of Zhu Jun, a famous Chinese State TV host, who was accused of sexually harassing an intern. Four years ago, the victim had immediately reported the matter to the police, but the investigation was suspended for unknown reasons.25 There was a marked difference in the response of the State to the two stages. In the first stage, State-​run colleges levied relatively light punishments on prestigious professors in the cases of sexual harassment in universities, disqualifying them as teachers, for instance, but letting them keep their jobs as researchers. Indeed, the severity of punishments hinged not on the gravity of misconduct, but on the identity of the perpetrator; perpetrators who held unimportant, less prestigious positions were frequently fired. Up to this point, the universities involved in #MeToo cases published relevant rules but avoided discussing them with students or making them public. They were forced to respond to students’ appeals, but there were signs that active discussions and mobilisation both offline and online were frequently censored and subtly suppressed. For instance, when a group of students won an innovation award with their proposal to establish an anti-​sexual harassment mechanism at the university, they were banned from giving the customary public presentation of their proposal. In general, students’ demands for accountability were seriously thwarted, and the government used the cyber police to shut down feminist social media accounts, ban search phrases and hashtags related to #MeToo, delete posts and sent police to harass, intimidate, or even detain student societies, feminist organisations, and individuals. Although sometimes the media had its reports censored and feminist organisations and individuals received warnings, the government’s attitude towards the second stage was moderate compared to the first stage —​with the exception of the CCTV host’s case, which was censored for a time. In terms of the offender-​government relationship, most of the perpetrators were not employees of public sectors, meaning that the government did not need to take responsibility. Indeed, the perpetrators exposed by survivors during this second stage were in some sense the complete opposite of the government; the accused were activists and NGO staff working on environmental and animal protection, charity, LGBT rights, and anti-​discrimination against Hepatitis B and AIDS carriers, as well as former liberal journalists and writers in the glorious era of watchdog journalism in China. In terms of the collective mobilisation potential of the accusers, most accusers in the second stage had no collective identity (in contrast to easily 347

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unified groups like college students), which meant that there was less potential for second stage accusers to mobilise. In the historical context of China’s political change, college student protests have had strong moral legitimacy and social impact. However, the accused celebrities sued the silence-​breakers and/​or bloggers who helped publish the silence-​breakers’ accounts.26 Most of the exposed perpetrators were NGO leaders or freelancers who are not threatened by demotion since most of them have no superiors or employers, which somehow dampened the urgency of the movement and gave way to the ongoing third stage, in which survivors have to face the difficulties of achieving justice in the real world. The third phase thus does not centre on another outbreak of cases, but on those cases that entered the judicial process. The progress of cases is updated from time to time, which stimulates public discussion on the incidences and legal issues around sexual harassment. At this stage, organisations and volunteers continue to support victims in court and in public debates, to facilitate institutional change, and to collect archival materials for the #RiceBunny movement.

Before #RiceBunny: Judicial dilemmas and feminist legacy One of the main characteristics of Chinese #MeToo is its prevalence in higher education. For example, of the 58 cases that I studied, 30 cases took place in higher education. The most common form of punishment meted out to the perpetrators in academia was a revocation of their teaching qualifications while allowing them to continue as researchers. However, only 11 were given administrative penalties such as annulling their administrative positions and honorary titles, withdrawing their state project funding, and demoting or —​rarely —​expelling them.27 Due to legal and institutional deficiencies, at least 38 perpetrators got away without punishment and six men even sued their accusers for defamation. In criminal proceedings, only two were investigated or sentenced. One of these relates to the sexual assault of Buddhist nuns,28 and the other involves the victim committing suicide.29 As for civil lawsuits, only in one case did the court confirm the allegation of sexual harassment and demand that the perpetrator publicly apologise to the plaintiff; the final judgment has not yet been issued.30 The national movement took shape rapidly once the first case appeared, focusing on the sole goal of establishing anti-​sexual harassment mechanisms within the system. To understand why most of the accusations of sexual harassment occured in higher education with this legal emphasis, it is important to situate these events in the context of China’s policies and laws and the anti-​sexual harassment movement. According to research by the feminist legal aid organisation Yuanzhong Gender Development Center (YGDC), among the tens of millions of lawsuits in China during the years 2010 to 2017, only 34 cases were related to sexual harassment and 55.9% of those 34 cases were defamation suits or illegal discharge suits lodged by offenders as the plaintiff.31 The victims were the plaintiffs in only two cases. A mere 32.4% of sexual harassment complaints were confirmed by the court; in the seven cases where the victims had turned to the police, effective investigations were rarely conducted, and only in one case did the police confirm that sexual harassment had occurred.32 The plaintiffs are overwhelmingly the sexual offenders not only because they tend to be of a higher socioeconomic status, but also because of the inadequacies of the law. Most importantly, in previous judicial practices, sexual violence committed by acquaintances or by superiors (involving an abuse of power) was rarely scrutinised (whether it be rape or violent sexual assaults not amounting to rape) in criminal law or minor indecency in security law. China’s first anti-​ sexual harassment legal clause was added to the amendment of the Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests in 2005; this clause stated that sexual harassment against women is prohibited and victims have the right to report to relevant institutes. Nevertheless, the clause 348

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neither provides a clear definition or criteria of sexual harassment nor suggests any prevention, investigation, nor compensation measures for handling sexual harassment cases. Seven years later, in 2012, a new clause was added to Special Provisions on Labour Protection for Women Workers issued by the State Council after feminist scholars and lawyers fought to ensure that employers take precautions against and prevent sexual harassment, but this clause, too, lacks specific operational rules. Furthermore, prior to #MeToo, sexual harassment was not listed as a cause of action by the Supreme People’s Court.33 Instead, sexual harassment could only be filed as “disputes over the right to personhood” and could therefore not be properly addressed by legal action.34 Finally, the legal responsibilities of employers to prevent sexual harassment lack clarity. Most government bodies, colleges, and companies in China do not have an internal policy or mechanism for preventing sexual harassment, which makes sexual harassment pervasive but invisible, and prevention and complaint-​handling difficult. In the campaign of #WriteToYourAlmaMaters, the petition letter initially provided by the Women Awakening Network came from a campaign against a Xiamen University case of sexual harassment in 2014. In the summer of 2014, two graduates of Xiamen University accused their professor of sexually harassing many of his students. However, journalists failed to protect the privacy of the accusers and 122 students wrote a public joint letter rebuking them. Furthermore, the university’s administration was reluctant to discipline the professor. With the help of the WAN and Yuanzhong Gender Development Centre, however, public attention turned to this issue, and lawyers pressed on the university to take action. This event brought together key feminists from two generations. A  WeChat Group was established with members including professors, scholars, students, women’s NGOs, young feminists, and so on. Together, members of this group co-​ edited proposals for laws and regulations to the Ministry of Education and proposals for policies and measures to Xiamen University, and translated relevant policy documents from different universities worldwide. The group wrote a joint letter in the name of 256 domestic and overseas scholars to the Ministry of Education, urging officials to issue State regulations and establish anti-​sexual harassment mechanisms in universities to prevent campus sexual harassment and safeguard academic and educational safety and equality. This co-​signed letter has garnered massive media exposure, providing greater visibility to feminist scholars and activists’ analyses and discussions of sexual harassment, thereby leading to the victim being interviewed on a nationally renowned talk show, provoking public indignation and increasing demands to hold the perpetrator accountable. Throughout this process, feminist organisations set the media agenda, supported victims, and pressured the university to punish the perpetrator, Wu Chunming, by dismissing him from the Communist Party and annulling his teaching certification. Activists also compelled the Ministry of Education to add a clause in Opinions on Establishing and Improving the Long-​ Term Mechanism for the Construction of Teachers’ Morality in Colleges and Universities, ruling that sexual harassment or “improper relationship” with students is forbidden. This was the first time that the term “sexual harassment” appeared in a Ministry of Education document. This file and the handling of the Wu Chunming case created an “institutional legacy”, which became a referent point for future cases, including the #MeToo cases. This “legacy” means three things: First, the concept of sexual harassment has been explicitly stated and now requires that authorities address it. Sexual harassment is no longer an “unnamed” problem in the private sphere. Second, the issue has been framed in the language of “teacher morality” rather than in the language of control and domination in power relations, the latter of which the feminist community considers to be the essence of sexual harassment. Indeed, as the feminist community sees it, 349

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the problem needs to be addressed by monitoring and regulating power. In fact, the authorities handled this case by determining whether or not the professor had sex with his students. If the professor had had sex with his student(s), the action would be deemed “improper relationship” rather than sexual harassment. The Ministry of Education has taken it upon itself to define what constitutes an “improper relationship” as opposed to “sexual harassment”, and the Ministry’s definitions vary greatly from those used by the feminist community. This has resulted in a loophole in the system. This (faulty) distinction between “improper relationship” and “sexual harassment” has safeguarded the “perfect victim” myth of rape culture —​and this is exactly what the #MeToo activists intend to dismantle. Third, the university administration relies on the Party’s inspection commission to investigate and discipline staff, rather than following scholars’ recommendation to establish a specific commission to educate, investigate and handle sexual harassment in an effort to cultivate gender equality and inclusion on campus. The feminist agenda centres on constraining power, advocating gender equality, and eliminating the roots of sexual harassment and gender discrimination. When silence-​breakers take over the unfinished task of establishing an “anti-​sexual harassment mechanism” and deconstructing the myth of the “perfect victim”, opinions on social media tend toward the feminist point of view.

#MeToo as connective action Bennett and Segerberg propose that the internet created “connective logic”: people voluntarily make an effort on the internet to serve the public good (which is also an act of self-​presentation that builds mutual trust), to gain approval of others, and to maintain and expand their own social network by sharing information and actions.35 The #MeToo movement’s spread on social media demonstrates this connective logic in action. One of the most significant consequences is that the activists’ original motivations are individualised. Silence-​breakers who share their stories on social media are often either inspired by other cases publicised on social media, or are supporting friends who are victims. Xian Zi is one such well-​known example: having accused the CCTV host Zhu Jun of sexual harassment, she published her experience on WeChat Moments in support of a friend who had been sexually assaulted. Her account was finally posted by a friend on Weibo, a more publicly accessible platform than WeChat. The nature of social media is such that it helps different activists collaborate by spreading information, and allowed silence-​breakers to gain enormous support, significantly promoting the cause. Participants from different domains came together through this move, including women’s organisations, KOLs not previously connected to the feminist movement, commercial accounts, bloggers, and media agencies. Speed, flexibility, the ability to escape censorship by using hashtags to sort posts, and constantly change homophonic search phrases to prevent posts from being deleted allowed social media to sustain the development of the movement even though the mainstream media was muted from time to time. As an alternative public sphere, social media constitutes both a critical and a constructive force for the traditional media, and has contributed to the change of mainstream media.36 Social media has facilitated the creation of a self-​help network of survivors. For instance, a support network with Xian Zi at its centre was established to help emerging victims find mainstream media channels, legal aid, and psychological consultation. This network has become a place where survivors facing defamation lawsuits can strategise together and mentally support each other. Victims have developed solidarity and trust based on shared experiences, and social media enables them to collaborate regardless of location. This kind of network has significantly influenced the progress of #MeToo. Thus, the cross-​border nature of the internet provides 350

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an opportunity for actors in #RiceBunny to form transnational alliances, connecting silence-​ breaking diaspora members and the “perennial simultaneity and simultaneous ubiquity” of network society, both domestic and overseas activists.37 The case of Richard Liu, who sexually assaulted a student at the University of Minnesota, speaks to this vast network of connections.38 Overseas volunteers began by translating English indictments and police files into Chinese for the domestic media and public to have open access. They then edited audio and video evidence related to the case, and connected a network of KOLs to unleash an online attack against the manipulation of information. The hashtag #HereForJingyao indicates that a victim-​ supporting campaign is on-​going. This cross-​border collaboration includes strategic negotiations, mobilisation of international media, collaborative production and dissemination of information, mobilisation of supporters to the courts, and first-​hand coverage of the judicial process by citizen-​journalists.

“#MeToo in ZSYU”: Localised, community-​based, and decentralised action As demonstrated in the 2014 case of Xiamen University, feminist organisations played a key role in strategising, coordinating actions, and demonstrating strong agenda-​setting abilities related to anti-​sexual harassment advocacy. Compared to previous organised anti-​sexual harassment movements, #RiceBunny shows more personalisation, decentralisation, and de-​organisation. The core actors and agenda-​setters in #RiceBunny were networks of survivors and supporters in local communities rather than formal feminist organisations. However, not every silence-​ breaker can be a core actor or person setting the agenda, so those with broad media networks and narrative skills, such as Xian Zi (who was sexually harassed by the famous TV host) and “Hua Hua” (who was raped by a renowned activist for the rights of Hepatitis B carriers) attracted the most attention. They gained support from their media friends and attention from the public thanks to both their excellent communication skills and the newsworthiness of the celebrity offenders. Xian Zi even became a KOL (Key Opinion Leader) on Weibo after sharing her experience and continuing to discuss related issues online. Since large-​ scale movements are likely to be suppressed, activists limit their actions to relatively small communities:  university campuses and Public Welfare Circles. In the #WriteToYourAlmaMaters campaign involving 13,000 people, students and alumni divided the movement into 77 micro campaigns by sending letters signed by several people to their alma maters, which made the campaign, despite being severely suppressed, capable of garnering different responses from administrators. The self-​help network of survivors does not mean that the movement is centralised. Rather, the movement’s structure is scattered, such that specific incidents provide a survivor-​centred “temporary stage” on which actors in the community can connect and collaborate to play different roles and reach out to various external resources such as the mainstream media and women’s organisations. The network of actors in different events overlaps, thereby shaping a “network of network of network”.39 When university professors were accused of sexual harassment, local student associations, alumni, and groups at the university used social accounts to support and empower the victims, negotiated with university authorities face by face, urged accountability, and demanded the establishment of a sexual harassment prevention mechanism at the university. Likewise, when leaders in the civil sector of society were accused of sexual abuse, reports, discussions, and related institutional building actions were often undertaken within the charity and non-​profit community. Compared with strangers on the infinite internet, people in small communities tend to more easily build trust and collaborate. Further, because members of a community are likely to have previous public participation experience and understand the local environment 351

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and institutions, they can quickly bring keyboard activism to brick and mortar action. The movement’s localised, community-​based, and decentralised nature makes it flexible, agile, and deeply grounded in the particular cultural context of specific communities or universities. In the case of the Anthropology Department at Sun Yat-​sen University, a prestigious university in South China, activists clearly and demonstrably collaborated through community-​based communication and actions. Sun Yat-​sen University is the epicentre of gender education and studies in South China, as well as of a growing feminist movement in Guangzhou. Since the 2015 “Feminist Five”, the feminist movement in Guangzhou’s colleges and universities has been under strict surveillance. Consequently, during the “#WriteToYourAlmaMaters” campaign in January 2018, approximately 200 alumni and students sent letters to their university via email or regular mail, but their demands for change were denied. However, the group didn’t stop there; alumni set up a WeChat media account called “#MeToo in ZSYU” to update the event. On 27 April 2018, a graduate published an article titled “Hypocrite in the Field” on her personal WeChat media account. Therein, she exposed Anthropology professor Zhang Peng’s sexual misconduct while doing fieldwork. A  few days later, the “Anti-​Sexual Harassment Group in the Department of Anthropology, Sun Yat-​sen University”, comprised of members who had submitted oral accounts against two accused professors, assembled and demanded that the college investigate these cases and establish anti-​ sexual harassment mechanisms. The group later lent its support to victims of Zhang Peng, collectively reporting to the Discipline Inspection Commission. However, entries related to “Teaching Practice and Teacher’s Morality Improvement Mechanism” to promote the creation of a sexual harassment prevention mechanism won awards in the “Top Ten Suggestions” competition held annually by the university, but were banned from being presented publicly. Due to the two-​month delay in the investigation, members of the Concern Group decided to work with the mainstream media and put pressure on the university. In July, the article “She Thought She Could Escape the Professor’s Claw” was published.40 Members of the group believed that such exposure would help to increase the pressure on the authorities to respond. To this end, the group published “Sun Yat-​sen University, Face Sexual Harassment on Campus Directly” on “#MeToo in ZSYU”, and social media accounts of alumni KOLs also launched the internet protest “Banish Zhang Peng”. Finally, on the third day, under the mounting pressure of public opinion, the college announced that Zhang Peng would be punished. A member told the author that participants in the university community had intimate knowledge of the administrative logic of the university, and thus they strategically used “decentralization consciously” to decrease political sensitivity, resist suppression, and ensure democratic participation for everyone, knowing that university authorities were extremely alert to organised protest activities.41

#RiceBunny and feminism: An alliance? The most notable actors in the #RiceBunny movement do not identify as feminists. An argument has raged between the best-​known silence-​breaker, Xian Zi, and feminist-​leaning keyboard warriors on social media, regarding Xian Zi’s refusal to associate #MeToo with feminism. She argues that victims receive little help from feminist organisations which lack resources and that #MeToo is not exclusively a movement about feminism, but rather about a broader sense of freedom of speech —​something that her own case bears out. There are several related arguments worth noting that might explain why feminist organisations active in the previous anti-​sexual harassment campaigns have appeared relatively weaker and played a marginal role in the #MeToo movement. 352

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To begin with, #MeToo is, above all, a spontaneous speak-​out movement initiated by survivors based on personalised communication. The original intention of many survivors is to voice their own stories, garnering psychological support from and for each other. These stories also construct cultural critiques while pointing to the magnitude of the problem. Most survivors are insufficiently prepared for legal and administrative accountability, which gives women’s NGOs little chance for involvement. Instead, survivors prioritise support from the local community and the amplification of their voice by social media opinion leaders. Moreover, the political environment prevents women’s organisations from playing a more significant role. After the detention of the “Feminist Five” in 2015 and the implementation of the Overseas Organisation Law, civil society and feminist organisations have entered a period of decline due to tightened surveillance and censorship. During the #RiceBunny movement, a series of feminist organisations’ social accounts were blocked, the Guangzhou Gender and Sexuality Education Center was suspended from operation,42 and Huang Xueqin was detained for months. Most tellingly, women’s organisations lack adequate manpower and resources. As a result of the confined policy space and lack of funding during the recession period, feminist organisations in China are relatively small with not more than five full-​time staff employed by most organisations. Thus, when #MeToo brought a flood of cases, feminist organisations failed to provide victims with adequate support, especially legal and psychological services, which were most needed. However, previous anti-​sexual harassment feminist forces have undeniably left an institutional heritage as well as repertoires of contention to the anti-​sexual harassment movement, and nurtured communities of feminist activists and volunteers who jointly promoted the momentum of the movement. For instance, the education, media, and charity sectors with a high occurrence of #RiceBunny are precisely the sectors in which gender education and gender equality advocacy have had the greatest impact in the past decades. Feminist programs have also built an offline network of resource sharing and trust. An anti-​ sexual harassment workshop held in the summer of 2017 that brought together a diverse group of women’s organisations and volunteers with experience in anti-​sexual harassment campaigns also laid the groundwork for collaboration between actors in the #MeToo movement. Despite difficulties, women’s organisations continue to do their best to help, especially in communication support and legal aid to victims lacking in sufficient social capital. Among these is providing strategies and relevant resources for actions in communities: “#WriteToYourAlmaMaters”, for example, is a strategy proposed by feminist organisations, which brought together different feminist organisations to produce draft reports of the campaign. These organisations supplied the necessary survey data and research required in order to submit the suggestions and garner media coverage. They served as disseminators, giving voice to non-​celebrity cases that struggled to attract media attention. Most information related to #MeToo is fragmentary and fades easily, due to scattered individual voices and censorship, and therefore, feminist media organisations help increase the visibility of silence-​breakers, strengthening the social media users who support the movement. They also maintain and curate a record of the movement. In an internet that is under strict censorship, feminist organisations coordinated volunteers to archive the movement by, for instance, integrating the social media posts and related reports of the campaign into “Chinese #RiceBunny Record (Zhong Guo Mi Tu Zhi)”, including an art exhibition for #RiceBunny in different cities both at home and abroad. On the ground, women’s Legal Organisations continue to provide free legal assistance to victims involved in lawsuits.43 Most importantly, perhaps, women’s organisations advocate for institutional change, using the public awareness and opinions sparked by #RiceBunny as important resources for policy advocacy. With years of experience and partnership with 353

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lawmakers, feminist organisations leveraged the momentum of the movement and submitted suggestions to representatives of People’s Congress and CPPCC, including issuing practical rules against sexual harassment for institutions. In an era when social movements are suppressed, women’s organisations have attempted to embed themselves invisibly into #MeToo, to provide a strategic framework and coordinate actions behind the scenes, and to keep a low profile about their organisational affiliation. As the person in charge of a women’s NGO said, an organisation is more like a “semi-​consultant”, working backstage to provide silence-​breakers and activists with strategies and resources, and directing the scattered emergence of cases into structural transformation.44

Conclusion: The achievement of #RiceBunny Generally speaking, the Chinese government’s strategy to address #RiceBunny entails responding to individual appeals and incorporating the public’s suggestions into policy and legislative adjustments, all while curbing both collective and connective mobilisation. On the one hand, many #MeToo posts on social media are frequently deleted, as can be seen in the #WriteToYourAlmaMaters campaign in particular. But on the other hand, #RiceBunny has brought about policy and legal changes. In November 2018, the Ministry of Education published teachers’ professional code of conduct that include zero tolerance towards sexual harassment, stressing that abuse, obscene behaviour, and sexual misconduct will lead to the cancellation of monetary awards or teaching qualifications, as well as being blacklisted from education institutions facing judicial penalties once accusations have been verified.45 In 2019, in response to the recommendation from the National People’s Congress that higher education institutions create committees to help prevent sexual harassment, the Ministry promised to work with local authorities to step up their preventative measures. At the end of 2018, the Supreme People’s Court announced a new cause of action —​“liability for harm in sexual harassment disputes” —​ for civil litigation, thereby making it easier for such cases to proceed.46 Half a year later, a social worker sexually harassed by Liu Meng, a celebrity in the Sichuan Earthquake, became the first plaintiff to win the #RiceBunny lawsuit and file a case under the new cause of action. As a result of all these developments, the newly adopted Civil Code, which is expected to take effect on January 1, 2021, defines the term sexual harassment more clearly by emphasising the influence of power dynamics and the employer’s responsibility to take “precautions, hear complaints, and implement management measures”. Bennett and Segerberg propose that social media transforms “collective action” into “connective action”, bringing about transformation.47 In #RiceBunny, social media platforms have proved to have a strong yet limited connective power. The structure of social media does amplify people’s voices and facilitate activism, and yet, as Zarkov and Davis write, the empowerment of new media is not equal, and the social capital and media skills of the people concerned have played an important role.48 Offline networks and organisational foundations are still indispensable to complicated collaborations dealing with accountability and policy lobbying, especially in the context of the extensive repression of collective action and scrutiny of social platforms in China. In addition, as many have noted, spontaneous speak-​out action can hardly touch sexual harassment in “hard-​core” power relations, such as those in government, state-​owned or monopolistic corporations, and the entertainment industry.49 So far, the #RiceBunny movement has occurred in institutional settings at the “periphery of power relations”, where the management hierarchy is relatively flat, members have considerable cultural capital, and interpersonal relationships and moral integrity count heavily in social interaction and reputation. 354

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#MeToo is a global cultural initiative with rich and diverse agendas and has had an enormous impact on the transformation of China’s public culture. It has also incorporated diverse agents into the campaign against gender-​based violence. It is true, as scholars have pointed out, that social media has transformed social movements from “non-​governmental organisations” into loose “public participation networks”, which, in turn, has led to a decentralised organisational logic forming a glocalisation participation structure.50 Nevertheless, the case of China implies that the “connective action” is not an automatic outcome of social media platforms, but rather depends on the discourses, repertoires of contention, trust-​based offline networks, and potential activists cultivated and summoned on the internet and in the community by previous NGO campaigns. Previous feminist NGO campaigns have strategically used and occupied the internet as an alternative space of opportunity time and time again and provided the foundations and means for connective actions, thereby ensuring that the connective potential of social media is able to transcend structural constraints.

Notes 1 Chinese characters that are homophonic to “me too”. 2 “Me too” in the dialect which is spoken in the rural areas in north China. 3 “Me too” in Chinese. 4 There are different statistics on the number of cases. The author refers to the website with the most complete collection of 56 cases: MeToo China, accessed 25 May 2020, https://​metoochina.me/​, with individual cases that do not meet the criteria (facts related to sexual harassment are not revealed on social media) are removed and recent cases added. The Changjiang (Yangtze River) Scholar Award (Changjiang Xuezhe Jiangli Jihua) is the highest academic award issued to an individual in higher education by the state. Javier C.  Hernández, “She’s on a #MeToo Mission in China, Battling Censors and Lawsuits”, New  York Times, 4 January 2019, www.nytimes.com/​2019/​01/​04/​world/​asia/​china-​ zhou-​xiaoxuan-​metoo.html; Ian Johnson, “#MeToo in the Monastery: A Chinese Abbot’s Fall Stirs Questions on Buddhism’s Path”, New York Times, 15 September 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​09/​ 15/​world/​asia/​metoo-​china-​monastery.html. 5 Sui-​Lee Wee and Li Yuan, “They Said #MeToo. Now They Are Being Sued”, New  York Times, 26 December 2019, www.nytimes.com/​2019/​12/​26/​business/​china-​sexual-​harassment-​metoo.html. 6 Naihua Zhang, “Searching for ‘Authentic’ NGOs: The NGO Discourse and Women’s Organizations in China”, in Chinese Women Organizing:  Cadres, Feminists, Muslims, Queers, ed. Ping-​Chun Hsiung et al., Anthropology Archive 1993–​2013 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001), 159–​179; Li Huiying, “Jiang Xingbie Yishi Naru Juece Zhuliu De Taolun” [Discussion on Mainstreaming Gender Awareness in Decision-​making], Funv Yanjiu Luncong [Collection of Women’s Studies], no. 3 (1996). 7 Ge Youli and Susan Jolly, “East Meets West Feminist Translation Group: A Conversation between Two Participants”, in Chinese Women Organizing: Cadres, Feminists, Muslims, Queers,  61–​76. 8 Feng Yuan, “Jinru Di Sanshi Ge Shinian De Lvcheng: Zhongguo Dalu Fanxingsaorao Licheng Huigu” [Journey into the Third Decade: A Review of Anti-​Sexual Harassment in Mainland China], in Sixiang [Reflections], ed. Qian Yongxiang, (Taipei: Linking Publishing Company, 2019), 203–​229. 9 Jun Li and Xiaoqin Li,“Media as a Core Political Resource: TheYoung Feminist Movements in China”, Chinese Journal of Communication 10, no. 1 (2017), https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​17544750.2016.1274265. 10 Li and Li, “Media as a Core Political Resource: The Young Feminist Movements in China”. 11 Feminist Voices (Nv Quan Zhi Sheng) is a Beijing based NGO aimed at promoting gender equality and increasing the visibility of women and gender issues in the media and in society. Women Awakening Network (Xin Mei Ti Nv Xing) is a feminist communication organisation based in Guangzhou, the capital of South China, which was established in 2004. Its main job is to run social media, organise journalist training workshops, conduct media monitoring and criticism, hold public lectures on gender issues, book fairs, exhibitions, and seminars, as well as conduct research and advocacy on gender-​related public policy and legislative work. 12 The WeChat “Public Platform” (Gongzhong Pingtai) offers individuals and institutions the possibility to upload media content to share with other users.

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Li Jun 13 Sina Weibo Data Center, 2018 Weibo User Development Report, Sina Technology (China) Co., Ltd (Beijing, 2019). 14 “Weixin fa bu shuju baogao: jiezhi dao qunian sanjidu, weixin yuehuo zhanghu shu wei 11.51 yi” [WeChat released data report: As of the third quarter of last year, the number of WeChat monthly active accounts was 1.151 billion], Internet Tencent Technology, 9 January 2020, https://​tech.qq.com/​ a/​20200109/​051470.htm. 15 Bin Wang and Catherine Driscoll, “Chinese Feminists on Social Media: Articulating Different Voices, Building Strategic Alliances”, Continuum 33, no.  1 (2019/​01/​02 2019), https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​ 10304312.2018.1532492. 16 Wang Zheng, “Detention of the Feminist Five in China”, Feminist Studies 41, no. 2 (2015), https://​ doi.org/​10.15767/​feministstudies.41.2.476, www.jstor.org/​stable/​10.15767/​feministstudies.41.2.476. 17 Chris Luo, “Outspoken Celebrity Blogger’s Arrest Triggers Online Debate”, South China Morning Post, 26 August 2013, www.scmp.com/​news/​china-​insider/​article/​1299519/​outspoken-​celebrity​bloggers-​arrest-​triggers-​online-​debate. 18 Female users are more willing to pay via Weibo (56.1%), and female users (62.4%) far exceeded their male counterparts (37.6%) among paid Weibo members. Further, 84% of users who benefit from content payment are male, while 59.3% who pay for content are female. Most of these young women were born during the “one child policy”, are monopolising family resources, more likely well-​educated than their male peers, and are mostly raised in the urban areas of China in the era of consumerism. 19 Sarah Banet-​Weiser, “Popular Feminism:  Structural Rage”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 30 March 2018, https://​lareviewofbooks.org/​article/​popular-​feminism-​structural-​rage/​. 20 Jing Zeng, “#MeToo as Connective Action: A Study of the Anti-​Sexual Violence and Anti-​Sexual Harassment Campaign on Chinese Social Media in 2018”, Journalism Practice 14, no. 2 (2020): 171–​ 190, https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​17512786.2019.1706622. 21 Merlyna Lim, “Many Clicks but Little Sticks:  Social Media Activism in Indonesia”, Journal of Contemporary Asia 43, no. 4 (2013): 654, https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​00472336.2013.769386. 22 Jiayang Fan, “China’s #MeToo Moment”, New Yorker, 1 February 2018, www.newyorker.com/​news/​ daily-​comment/​chinas-​me-​too-​moment. 23 Pei Li and Ryan Woo, “In China, #MeToo Escalates as Public Figures Are Accused of Sexual Assault”, Reuters, 27 July 2018, www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​china-​harassment/​in-​china-​metoo-​ escalates-​as-​public-​figures-​are-​accused-​of-​sexual-​assault-​idUSKBN1KH0ZB. 24 Feng Jiayun, “#MeToo In China Reaches the Nonprofit and Media Worlds”, SupChina, 26 July 2018, https://​supchina.com/​2018/​07/​26/​metoo-​in-​china-​reaches-​the-​nonprofit-​and-​media-​worlds/​. 25 Hernández, “She’s on a #MeToo Mission in China, Battling Censors and Lawsuits”. 26 Wee and Yuan, “They Said #MeToo. Now They Are Being Sued”. 27 Besides, 14 of the 58 perpetrators in media or internet circles, seven in non-​profit organisations, five in entertainment, and one in religion and politics respectively. 28 Associated Press in Beijing, “Senior Chinese Monk Resigns Amid Sexual Misconduct Claims”, Guardian, 15 August 2018. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​aug/​15/​senior-​chinese-​monk-​shi​xuecheng-​resigns-​sexual-​misconduct-​claims. 29 Sun Liangzi and Li Rongde, “Livestreamed Suicide Raises Painful Questions in China”, Caixin Global, 29 June 2018, www.caixinglobal.com/​2018-​06-​29/​livestreamed-​suicide-​raises-​painful-​questions-​in-​ china-​101287314.html. 30 Lily Kuo, “ ‘It Is Not Hopeless’: China’s #MeToo Movement Finally Sees Legal Victories”, Guardian, 4 November 2019, www.theguardian.com/​world/​2019/​nov/​04/​it-​is-​not-​hopeless-​chinas-​metoo​movement-​finally-​sees-​legal-​victories. 31 Beijing Yuanzhong Gender Development Center (Chinese:  Beijing Yuanzhong Xingbie Fazhan Zhongxin) is a Beijing-​based feminist NGO that engaged in women’s legal aid, research on judicial practice on women’s rights, and legislative advocacy. 32 Beijing Yuanzhong Gender Development Center, Zhichang Xingsaorao Sifa Shenpan Anjian Shuju Fenxi Baogao [Data analysis report on judicial trials of workplace sexual harassment] (2018). 33 Cause of action refers to a set of predefined factual elements that allow for a legal remedy. The factual elements needed for a specific cause of action can come from a constitution, statute, judicial precedent, or administrative regulation. See “Cause of Action”, Wex, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed 2 June 2020, www.law.cornell.edu/​wex/​cause_​of_​action. 34 In Chinese law, the personality right includes such rights as the right to life, body, health, name, likeness, reputation, honour, and privacy.

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In the name of #RiceBunny 35 W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics”, Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2013): 739–​ 768, https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​1369118X.2012.670661. 36 For instance, the netizen Qiqi initiated the hashtag #IAmNotAPerfectVictim both to encourage people to share their experiences and to create an atmosphere that rejects victim-​blaming. Social media has brought about what Nancy Fraser calls a “multiplicity of public” and “politics of articulation”, impacting the conservative stance of mainstream legacy media. When emerging cultural values were passed to the mainstream media, exterior pressure mounted for the authorities to hold people accountable for individual cases. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere:  A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, Social Text, no.  25/​26 (1990):  56–​80, https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​ 466240; Jeffrey S. Juris, “Networked Social Movements: Global Movements for Global Justice”, in The Network Society, ed. Manuel Castells (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004). 37 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Wiley, 2011). 38 Richard Liu, with the Chinese name Liu Qiangdong, is the founder of JD.com, one of the leading e-​commerce companies in China. In this case, after the prosecutors in Minnesota refused to charge Liu with sexual assault due to inadequate evidence, the internet was flooded with manipulated posts, video, and audio clips, and comments humiliating the victim. To clarify facts and support the victim (named ‘Jingyao’r), overseas students in different time zones collaborated with domestic supporters. 39 Juris, “Networked Social Movements”. 40 Huang Xueqin, “Ta Ceng Yiwei Ziji Neng Taokai Jiaoshou De Shou” [She Thought She Could Have Got out of Claw of Professor], China Digital Times, 2018, “https://eur02.safelinks.protection. outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchinadigitaltimes.net%2Fchinese%2F2018%2F07%2F%25E4% 25BA%25BA%25E9%2597%25B4%25E4%25B8%25A8%25E5%25A5%25B9%25E6%259B%25BE% 25E4%25BB%25A5%25E4%25B8%25BA%25E8%2587%25AA%25E5%25B7%25B1%25E8%2583% 25BD%25E9%2580%2583%25E5%25BC%2580%25E6%2595%2599%25E6%258E%2588%25E7%25 9A%2584%25E6%2589%258B%2F&data=01%7C01%7Cirma%40hi.is%7Ca8d8464431af47fb2c2d08 d86f29b575%7C09fa5f0e211846568529677ed8fdbe78%7C0&sdata=Re7cMErfyxkSQOewwPZ0sT KxQITfZtH%2FYBXfBiN6dTw%3D&reserved=0” https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2018/07/ 人间丨她曾以为自己能逃开教授的手/​. 41 Interviewee 4, Network calls with author, 10 March 2019. 42 Guangzhou Gender and Sexuality Education Center (Chinese: Guangzhou Xingbie Jiaoyu Zhongxin) is a feminist LGBTI NGO based in Guangzhou, which provided sexual diversity education in universities and support for sexual harassment cases. Feng Jiayun, “Guangzhou Gender and Sexuality Education Center Shuts Down”, SupChina, 6 December 2018, https://​supchina.com/​2018/​12/​06/​ guangzhou-​gender-​and-​sexuality-​education-​center-​shuts-​down/​. 43 The only such case where the victim won was supported by Yuanzhong Center, whose director has engaged in legal assistance and legislation for sexual harassment for almost 20 years. 44 Interviewee 7, Network calls with author, 2 February 2020. 45 Tang Ziyi, “China Publishes First Detailed Protocol for Handling Abuse by Educators Amid Wave of Scandals”, Caixin Global, 16 November 2018, www.caixinglobal.com/​2018-​11-​16/​china-​publishes-​ first- ​ d etailed- ​ p rotocol- ​ f or- ​ h andling- ​ a buse- ​ by- ​ e ducators- ​ a mid- ​ wave- ​ o f- ​ s candals- ​ 1 01347870. html. 46 Liu Xiaonan and Darius Longarino, “Fan Qi Shi Gong Ju Xiang Geng Feng Fu Le, Wo Men Neng Hao Hao Li Yong Ta Me?” [The Anti-​Discrimination Toolkit Has Expanded. Can We Make Good Use of It?], Financial Times Chinese, 29 March 2019, www.ftchinese.com/​story/​001082103?full= y&archive. 47 Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action”. 48 Dubravka Zarkov and Kathy Davis, “Ambiguities and Dilemmas Around #MeToo: #ForHow Long and #WhereTo?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no.  1 (2018), https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​ 1350506817749436. 49 Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualization of Culture’ to #MeToo”, Sexualities 21, no.  8 (2018):  1313–​ 1324, https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​ 1363460718794647. 50 Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action”; Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Oxford: Wiley, 2015); Juris, “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation”, American Ethnologist 39, no. 2 (2012): 259–​279.

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Bibliography Associated Press in Beijing. “Senior Chinese Monk Resigns Amid Sexual Misconduct Claims”. Guardian, 15 August 2018. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​aug/​15/​senior-​chinese-​monk-​shi-​xuecheng-​ resigns-​sexual-​misconduct-​claims. Banet-​Weiser, Sarah. “Popular Feminism: Structural Rage”. Los Angeles Review of Books, 30 March 2018. https://​lareviewofbooks.org/​article/​popular-​feminism-​structural-​rage/​. Beijing Yuanzhong Gender Development Center. Zhichang Xingsaorao Sifa Shenpan Anjian Shuju Fenxi Baogao [Data Analysis Report on Judicial Trials of Workplace Sexual Harassment]. 2018. Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. “The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics”. Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2013): 739–​ 768. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​1369118X.2012.670661. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Wiley, 2011. Castells, Manuel. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Oxford: Wiley, 2015. Cornell Law School. “Cause of Action”. Wex, Legal Information Institute. Accessed 2 June 2020. www. law.cornell.edu/​wex/​cause_​of_​action. Fan, Jiayang. “China’s #MeToo Moment”. New Yorker, 1 February 2018. www.newyorker.com/​news/​ daily-​comment/​chinas-​me-​too-​moment. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere:  A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”. Social Text, no. 25/​26 (1990): 56–​80. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​466240. Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power:  From the ‘Sexualization of Culture’ to #Metoo”. Sexualities 21, no. 8 (2018):  1313–​ 1324. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​ 1363460718794647. Hernández, Javier C. “She’s on a #MeToo Mission in China, Battling Censors and Lawsuits”. New York Times, 4 January 2019. www.nytimes.com/​2019/​01/​04/​world/​asia/​china-​zhou-​xiaoxuan-​metoo.html. Huang Xueqin, “Ta Ceng Yiwei Ziji Neng Taokai Jiaoshou De Shou” [She Thought She Could Have Got out of Claw of Professor], China Digital Times, 2018, “https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchinadigitaltimes.net%2Fchinese%2F2018%2F07%2F%25E4%25B A%25BA%25E9%2597%25B4%25E4%25B8%25A8%25E5%25A5%25B9%25E6%259B%25BE%25E 4%25BB%25A5%25E4%25B8%25BA%25E8%2587%25AA%25E5%25B7%25B1%25E8%2583%25B D%25E9%2580%2583%25E5%25BC%2580%25E6%2595%2599%25E6%258E%2588%25E7%259A %2584%25E6%2589%258B%2F&data=01%7C01%7Cirma%40hi.is%7Ca8d8464431af47fb2c2d08d8 6f29b575%7C09fa5f0e211846568529677ed8fdbe78%7C0&sdata=Re7cMErfyxkSQOewwPZ0sTKx QITfZtH%2FYBXfBiN6dTw%3D&reserved=0” https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2018/07/人 间丨她曾以为自己能逃开教授的手/​. Huiying, Li. “Jiang Xingbie Yishi Naru Juece Zhuliu De Taolun” [Discussion on Mainstreaming Gender Awareness in Decision-​making]. Funv Yanjiu Luncong [Collection of Women’s Studies], no. 3 (1996). Internet Tencent Technology. “Weixin Fa Bu Shuju Baogao: Jiezhi Dao Qunian Sanjidu, Weixin Yuehuo Zhanghu Shu Wei 11.51 Yi” [Wechat Released Data Report: As of the Third Quarter of Last Year, the Number of Wechat Monthly Active Accounts Was 1.151 Billion]. 9 January 2020. https://​tech. qq.com/​a/​20200109/​051470.htm. Jiayun, Feng. “Guangzhou Gender and Sexuality Education Center Shuts Down”. SupChina, 6 December 2018. https://​supchina.com/​2018/​12/​06/​guangzhou-​gender-​and-​sexuality-​education-​center-​shuts-​down/​. Jiayun, Feng. “#MeToo In China Reaches The Nonprofit And Media Worlds”. SupChina, 26 July 2018. https://​supchina.com/​2018/​07/​26/​metoo-​in-​china-​reaches-​the-​nonprofit-​and-​media-​worlds/​. Juris, Jeffrey S. “Networked Social Movements: Global Movements for Global Justice”. In The Network Society, edited by Manuel Castells, 341–​362: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004. Juris, Jeffrey S. “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation”. American Ethnologist 39, no. 2 (2012): 259–​279. Johnson, Ian. “#MeToo in the Monastery: A Chinese Abbot’s Fall Stirs Questions on Buddhism’s Path”. New  York Times, 15 September 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​09/​15/​world/​asia/​metoo-​china-​ monastery.html. Kuo, Lily. “ ‘It Is Not Hopeless’:  China’s #Metoo Movement Finally Sees Legal Victories”. Guardian, 4 November 2019. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2019/​nov/​04/​it-​is-​not-​hopeless-​chinas-​metoo-​ movement-​finally-​sees-​legal-​victories.

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In the name of #RiceBunny Li, Jun, and Xiaoqin Li. “Media as a Core Political Resource:  The Young Feminist Movements in China”. Chinese Journal of Communication 10, no. 1 (2017):  54–​ 71. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​ 17544750.2016.1274265. Li, Pei and Woo, Ryan. “In China, #MeToo Escalates as Public Figures Are Accused of Sexual Assault”. Reuters, 27 July 2018. www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​china-​harassment/​in-​china-​metoo-​escalates-​as​public-​figures-​ re-​accused-​of-​sexual-​assault-​idUSKBN1KH0ZB. Liangzi, Sun, and Li Rongde. “Livestreamed Suicide Raises Painful Questions in China”. Caixin Global, 29 June 2018. www.caixinglobal.com/​2018-​06-​29/​livestreamed-​suicide-​raises-​painful-​questions-​in-​ china-​101287314.html. Lim, Merlyna. “Many Clicks but Little Sticks: Social Media Activism in Indonesia”. Journal of Contemporary Asia 43, no. 4 (2013): 636–​657. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​00472336.2013.769386. Luo, Chris. “Outspoken Celebrity Blogger’s Arrest Triggers Online Debate”. South China Morning Post, 26 August 2013. www.scmp.com/​news/​china-​insider/​article/​1299519/​outspoken-​celebrity-​bloggers-​ arrest-​triggers-​online-​debate. Sina Weibo Data Center. 2015 Weibo User Development Report. Sina Technology (China) Co., Ltd. (Beijing: 2016). Sina Weibo Data Center. 2018 Weibo User Development Report. Sina Technology (China) Co., Ltd. (Beijing: 2019). Wang, Bin, and Catherine Driscoll. “Chinese Feminists on Social Media: Articulating Different Voices, Building Strategic Alliances”. Continuum 33, no. 1 (2019/​ 01/​ 02 2019):  1–​ 15. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1080/​10304312.2018.1532492. Wee, Sui-​Lee, and Li Yuan. “They Said #Metoo. Now They Are Being Sued”. New  York Times, 26 December 2019. www.nytimes.com/​2019/​12/​26/​business/​china-​sexual-​harassment-​metoo.html. Xiaonan, Liu, and Darius Longarino. “Fan Qi Shi Gong Ju Xiang Geng Feng Fu Le, Wo Men Neng Hao Hao Li Yong Ta Me?” [The Anti-​Discrimination Toolkit Has Expanded. Can We Make Good Use of It?]. Financial Times Chinese, 29 March 2019. www.ftchinese.com/​story/​001082103?full=y&archive. Youli, Ge, and Susan Jolly. “East Meets West Feminist Translation Group: A Conversation between Two Participants”. In Chinese Women Organizing: Cadres, Feminists, Muslims, Queers. Edited by Ping-​Chun Hsiung, Maria Jaschok, Cecilia Milwertz and Red Chan. Anthropology Archive 1993–​2013, 61–​76. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001. Yuan, Feng. “Jinru Di Sanshi Ge Shinian De Lvcheng: Zhongguo Dalu Fanxingsaorao Licheng Huigu” [Journey into the Third Decade: A Review of Anti-​Sexual Harassment in Mainland China]. In Sixiang [Reflections], edited by Qian Yongxiang, 203–​229. Taipei: Linking Publishing Company, 2019. Yuan, Li “She Accused a Tech Billionaire of Rape. The Chinese Internet Turned against Her”. New York Times, 13 December 2019. www.nytimes.com/​2019/​12/​13/​business/​liu-​jingyao-​interview-​richard-​liu.html. Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #Metoo: #Forhow Long and #Whereto?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 1 (2018):  3–​9. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​ 1350506817749436. Zeng, Jing. “#Metoo as Connective Action:  A Study of the Anti-​Sexual Violence and Anti-​Sexual Harassment Campaign on Chinese Social Media in 2018”. Journalism Practice 14, no. 2 (2020): 171–​ 190. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​17512786.2019.1706622. Zhang, Naihua. “Searching for ‘Authentic’ NGOs: The NGO Discourse and Women’s Organizations in China”. In Chinese Women Organizing: Cadres, Feminists, Muslims, Queers, 159–​79. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001. Zheng, Wang. “Detention of the Feminist Five in China”. Feminist Studies 41, no. 2 (2015): 476–​482. https://​doi.org/​10.15767/​feministstudies.41.2.476. Ziyi, Tang. “China Publishes First Detailed Protocol for Handling Abuse by Educators Amid Wave of Scandals”. Caixin Global, 16 November 2018. www.caixinglobal.com/​2018-​11-​16/​china-​publishes-​ first-​detailed-​protocol-​for-​handling-​abuse-​by-​educators-​amid-​wave-​of-​scandals-​101347870.html.

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24 THE #METOO MOVEMENT IN JAPAN Tentative steps towards transformation Robert O’Mochain Historical background and social context In the early 1970s, on a number of US university campuses such as MIT and Cornell, groups of activist women began to recognise, name, and analyse a social problem that had long gone unnamed and unchallenged: sexual harassment.1 They shared their stories, recognised patterns and commonalities, and identified two main types of harassment: “quid pro quo” —​when an employer or work colleague demands sexual favours for work benefits, promotion, or being spared dismissal —​and a “hostile work environment” —​when colleagues habitually do physical, verbal, or nonverbal acts of a sexual nature that other employees find offensive.2 Over time, “sexual harassment” also came to denote unwanted sexual attention in situations outside of the workplace, and it gradually entered into public consciousness in a number of countries around the world, including Japan. Until the 1980s, victims of sexual harassment in Japan had to rely on tort and contract breach provisions under the Japanese Civil Code to pursue justice for assault or slander offences. At a later date, though, high profile cases brought sexual harassment into public awareness as a social problem and legal changes followed. In 1988, a national outcry followed an incident on a train in Osaka city, during which a man sexually harassed a young woman inside the train car.3 One female passenger intervened, but the assailant and an accomplice turned their ire on her. They dragged the woman off the train, brought her to a vacant construction site, and raped her. As a result of this case, the protection of women from sexual violence suddenly became an issue that was considerably more prominent in the public consciousness. In addition, the first sexual harassment civil lawsuit case in Japan was filed in Fukuoka District Court in 1989. Haruno Mayumi alleged that her employers in a publishing house were guilty of sexual harassment, and she won her damages lawsuit three years later.4 As a means of expressing support for the litigant and for other victims, the Tokyo Second Bar Association —​an organisation of female lawyers —​hosted a one-​day hotline to provide legal counselling and received 138 calls, a number that gave some indication of the extent of the problem. In 1989, the term “seku hara” was voted “word of the year” as it had become a household word within the span of that one year. The word itself is simply an abbreviation of the katakana (Japanese syllabary used for foreign terms) version: sekushuaru harasumento. Muta Kazue points out the mixed legacy of the translation of the English language term as “seku hara” in everyday 360

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Japanese parlance. On the one hand, as a euphemism, it does not have a sense of great seriousness or gravity, which makes it easier for victims to come forward when they accuse a person of the offence. On the other hand, the radically political and confrontational sense of the original has been “lost in translation”, she argues. The term has also been used as an umbrella term for a wide range of behaviours, some of which —​the sexual abuse of children, for ­example —​are trivialised when they are denoted by the not-​so-​serious-​sounding “seku hara”.5 In April 1985, Equal Employment Opportunities legislation was enacted to prevent sexual discrimination in Japanese workplaces.6 However, the laws only required that employers make efforts to avoid gender discrimination. Such behaviour only became illegal in 1999, as did two types of workplace sexual harassment: hostile environment and quid pro quo. Employers, rather than individual harassers, were held responsible.7 The efficacy of provisions against workplace harassment made during the 1980s and 1990s is doubtful, as can be discerned from the fact that 9,500 people filed cases of harassment with the Japanese Ministry of Labour in 2000.8 World Economic Forum data for 2017 indicate that Japan’s record on gender equality remains poor, as the country was ranked at number 114 out of 144 countries, despite a downward trend over the previous decade.9 In addition to problems regarding equal pay, opportunities for promotion, access to child-​ care and maternity leave, and lack of gender balance in key political and economic institutions, many problems exist around issues of sexual violence. In a review of measures against workplace sexual harassment in Japan, Yuki W. P. Huen argued that this problem is so extensive in workplaces in Japan because of societal attitudes of acceptance, with unhelpful gender stereotypes that construct sexual harassment as part of a “normal” workplace.10 Government census statistics show an overall trend of fewer cases of sexual harassment being reported each year, from a peak of almost 16,000 cases in 2007 to fewer than 11,500 in 2014.11 However, this remains a worryingly high figure, especially when one considers Gender Equality Bureau findings from 2017: One in nine Japanese women has experienced persistent unwanted sexual attention.12 Further, Justice Ministry estimates show that only 18% of cases of sexual harassment are actually reported to police.13 In addition, it may be that fewer employees are reporting sexual harassment because there is less social acceptability for such reporting or greater awareness among victims of the negative implications involved, such as being pilloried by anonymous trolling on social media networks. In addition to workplace harassment, “street sexual harassment” remains a serious social problem in Japan. This unwanted sexual attention usually occurs when men believe they have the impunity to commit a range of inappropriate acts, such as groping women on crowded trains or buses, exposing their genitals without consent, looking at pornographic images in a way that others are forced to see them, “upskirting” (taking photos of a person’s lower body) on escalators and stairs, and similar actions. All of these offensive behaviours receive varying degrees of tolerance, in spite of the deleterious effects on the psychological well-​being of victims. Considerable progress has been made since the term “seku hara” was integrated into public consciousness in the late 1980s and greater victim support has been provided since then. However, the need for a social movement like #MeToo is clear, even if the actual long-​term impact of the movement may be harder to evaluate.

Positive impact of the Me Too movement In February 2018, prominent activists in Japan re-​branded the Me Too movement as #WeToo Japan. This was because of victims’ fear of a lack of support from others and the targeting of individuals who forego anonymity. Activists believed that Japanese citizens would feel deeper 361

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affinity for a campaign with a more clearly underlined sense of group solidarity, rather than a sense of individual rights. In Japan, the discourse of human rights is often characterised as self-​ centred or “Western”, even though the rationale of the Me Too campaign itself is grounded in social solidarity and the power of numbers.14 A number of high-​profile cases show that #MeToo helped in some way to challenge a culture of impunity for harassers in Japan. In late 2017, a blogger and writer under the name of “Hachu” accused prominent creative director Kishi Yuki, her former senior colleague at Dentsu, of sexual harassment. She claimed that he used to call her up in the middle of the night and tell her to come to his house, where he would insult her appearance, among other instances of inappropriate behaviour. Kishi admitted part of the allegations and apologised for his actions, and he quit the company the following day. In a separate incident, two senior executives from a large food company, NH Foods, were forced to step down after a female flight attendant alleged that they had made offensive and sexually inappropriate remarks to her during a flight. In April, Yamaguchi Tatsuya, a bass guitarist with the pop group Tokio, lost his contract with the group due to an allegation of sexual harassment made by a young high school student. Later that month, tapes were released that revealed that a prominent Finance Ministry bureaucrat, Fukuda Jun’ichi, had habitually made sexually inappropriate remarks to a young female reporter for TV Asahi, a popular Japanese media conglomerate.15 The journalist, who has chosen to remain anonymous, was expected to establish a working relationship with Fukuda as part of her job. She went to one of her managers in the workplace who advised that she say nothing and do nothing about the harassment. However, she later received support from her union, which acknowledged faults in the news reporting system in Japan whereby journalists are assigned to one particular politician or bureaucrat and are expected to develop a bond with that person so as to obtain access to information. This practice typically involves female reporters enduring abusive behaviour from older men who take advantage of the asymmetrical power structure of their relationship. In its statement on the need for greater protection for women, the newspaper employees’ union said, “Many female reporters have had to put up with sexually abusive language… they have had to suffer silently, despite being subjected to humiliating and mortifying treatment.”16 The union statement placed pressure for action on the Finance Ministry which initially tried to ignore the incident; Finance minister Asō Tarō said he had no intention of investigating the case. He went on to say that if any female reporters had allegations to make, they should do so publicly and cooperate with police authorities. Surprisingly, a female member of the cabinet, Noda Seiko, the Internal Affairs and Communications minister, publicly criticised the way the Finance Ministry had handled the case. She stated that Minister Asō’s suggestion was unfair because it demanded that victims of harassment face their perpetrators in a traumatic way.17 Moreover, a group of opposition lawmakers demanded that the case should not be dealt with according to laws that are not helpful to victims. The Diet representatives held up #MeToo posters and slogans in the Diet debate chamber. They also spearheaded a new gender equality campaign, #WithYou. Their protests led to bureaucrat Fukuda’s resignation on a reduced allowance, a resignation which would have been very unlikely in similar circumstances even five years ago. Soon after the Fukuda resignation, in late April 2018, the #WeToo campaign attracted over 2,000 protestors to the streets of Tokyo for a large demonstration, the first of its kind in Japan. Protestors held up slogans like “I will not remain silent” and “We’re gonna start the revolution”. A month later, the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan provided a forum for an Osaka professor in international human rights law, Taniguchi Mayumi, who is a spokesperson for the campaign “No More Sexual Harassment in the Media”. Professor Taniguchi expressed the hope that the work of the campaign on behalf of harassed women in the media would renew 362

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the Me Too movement in Japan and promote a groundswell of support by women who would break their silence about harassment and express genuine solidarity with all victims. The professor could point to 600 shares on Facebook where women told their stories of sexual harassment or expressed support for the movement. #MeToo has inspired similar campaigns that fight against sexual harassment and other forms of discriminatory gendered behaviour. Japanese activists are coming up with their own initiatives to eliminate tolerance for sexual harassment. In July 2018, activists set up the Twitter hashtag “#Watashi mo evidence” (I too am evidence). The message was that any member of society who has witnessed sexual harassment or instances of sexist hostility could provide an account of the incident to promote awareness in Japanese society. Yamasaki Alisa notes the value of this type of campaign, which has emerged within Japan and is not generally perceived to be a foreign import.18 Cases of sexual harassment in educational contexts cause increasing concern, and the willingness to engage in campus activism to challenge toxic practices is also increasing.19 Student activism has also contributed to transforming negative social conditions. During 2018 and 2019, petitions among university students in Keio, Tokyo, Sophia, and other prominent universities have prompted authorities to publish guidelines on creating safe campus environments. The student group “Voice Up Japan” of International Christian University in Tokyo carried out fundraisers to produce a pamphlet on consent issues which educates incoming students about sexual harassment during their orientation week. The pamphlet makes use of manga to make the information accessible and easily understandable. They also have online surveys that ask vital questions: “Have you ever been harassed?” “What does harassment mean to you?” “Have you harassed somebody?” In January 2019, a young female university student, Yamamoto Kazuna, began organising a #StandUpJapan campaign on social networks to protest the denigration of women in the popular weekly news magazines called shukanshi. One of these publications, Shukan Spa, offered a ranking of the “best” universities for having sex with girls after drinking parties.20 As well as objectifying young women in an extremely offensive way, the article authors were irresponsible in naming certain university campuses as places where “easy” women could be found. It seems likely that sexual harassers felt they now had social approbation to visit these campuses and begin sexually harassing young women there. Within a few weeks, the online petition to protest the magazine article had gained 40,000 signatures and the weekly magazine in question was forced to apologise. Yamamoto says that the meeting with representatives from Shukan Spa went better than she and her fellow activists imagined. They had a constructive discussion and the magazine editors were open to publishing an article on issues of consent.21 In a similarly positive vein, near the end of 2018, students, activists, and educators from all over Japan gathered for a learning event in a university in Tokyo on the theme of equity and social justice. One roundtable discussion specifically focused on gender equality and the #MeToo movement in Japan.22 Perhaps these types of interventions, which clearly emerge from within Japan and local activism, may have some hope for long-​term success. Nevertheless, in 2018 and 2019, only relatively small numbers of victims of sexual harassment have come forward in Japan, and most of these individuals prefer to remain anonymous.23 #MeToo inspired seven similar campaigns in 2018 and 2019: #WeToo; #WithYou; #KuTsu (against the obligation for women to wear high-​heeled shoes at work); #StandUp Japan; #Watashi mo evidence; VoiceUp Japan (a student feminist group); and “FlowerDemo” (a series of street protests against court decisions on rape cases). Perhaps the cumulative effect of these campaigns will have long-​term significance. Alternatively, the existence of multiple spin-​off initiatives may indicate a lack of success, and new efforts to gain popular traction where others have failed. It is still too early for definitive judgements. Certainly, no one campaign has been 363

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able to gain sustained national attention, provoke a deluge of factual account narratives from victims, or bring massive numbers of protestors onto the streets. In April 2019, Ueno Chizuko, a prominent gender scholar and feminist, delivered a speech at the University of Tokyo matriculation ceremony. In her extensive review of gender issues in Japan, Ueno denied the claim that the country had remained impervious to #MeToo. Some commentators had made this claim simply on the basis that #MeToo had been re-​branded in the Japanese context. Ueno pointed to the impact of #MeToo in Japan, but her claim was modest, stating simply, “It is not true to say that #MeToo did not spread to Japan.”24 Her central message was that gender problems in Japan constitute a “human disaster” due to the country’s deep-​ rooted patriarchal tendencies. The following sections explore some of the gender problems and factors that hinder progress on equality issues, especially sexual harassment.

Continuing pressures to remain silent While the positive effects of #MeToo deserve recognition, a realistic assessment will also point to more negative indicators of a lack of progress on sexual harassment issues. In a recent government survey, 30% of employees in Japan reported being sexually harassed at work.25 Many victims of sexual assault are reluctant to report their experiences and to seek justice. Mori Kurumi and Oda Shoko cite findings from a survey of over 1,000 working women in Japan. 60% of women who experienced sexual harassment in the workplace never reported it. Follow-​ up questions indicated that respondents feared that their chances for promotion or for respect from work colleagues would be undermined if the report of sexual harassment became public knowledge.26 Recent studies in Japan have focused on social and cultural factors that silence victims and hinder anti-​harassment initiatives. In an extensive probe of rape trials in Japan, Burns concluded that victim-​blaming was rife in cases when women reported sexual assault.27 In many cases, victims are expected to be satisfied with an apology from the accused. Certainly, the act of apologising has much more weight and significance in Japanese culture than it has in Western cultures. However, apologies fail to act as a deterrent in the way that jail sentences do for crimes which are seen to be abhorred by society. Social pressure often makes victims express acceptance of apologies as proof that justice is being done, when they actually feel the opposite to be the case. The lack of any advantage of some court apologies is indicated by an account of the experience of one victim of sexual harassment in a Japanese workplace. When Ninomiya Saori reported the toxic behaviour of her boss, senior company colleagues made comments like “Why don’t you just quit?” and “It’s nothing to make a fuss over.” Ninomiya sees those comments as indicative of a victim-​blaming attitude that prevails in broader society. Most worryingly, Ninomiya says, victims will often internalise the messages they receive from broader society and blame themselves: “[Victims hear] comments such as, “You know, she always wears those revealing clothes”; “If only she didn’t walk alone at night”. But, even without being blamed by those around them, victims blame themselves.28 Perpetrators apologise only for their actions and not for the years of psychological anguish that have been caused by their actions. In his interview with Ninomiya, Saito Akiyoshi, who runs programs to prevent assailants from becoming repeat offenders, also raises the issue of public apologies. He refers to numerous cases where a perpetrator of sexual harassment receives a light sentence because he writes a letter of apology which is read out in court. These words often suffice to merit a suspended or very light sentence. Even without referring to their role in diminishing justly deserved punishment, Saito believes that the apologies themselves are often so perfunctory and formulaic that they leave victims feeling worse than before. From his experience in helping perpetrators of molestation on trains not to 364

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become repeat offenders, Saito argues that the practice of accepting letters of apology as meaningful evidence in court needs to be abolished.29 The experience of Shiiki Rika, a 20-​year-​old university student entrepreneur who used the #MeToo hashtag to share her story of sexual harassment, illustrates a silencing effect in action. After posting her narrative of how she had lost contracts when she refused to give sexual favours to clients, she then faced considerable levels of hostility with comments such as, “Show us evidence”; “You led him on when you had dinner with him”; and “Just go to the police.”30 The article which reported on Shiiki’s experience also referred to another case which many will recognise as typical. When a 26-​year old male clerk in a shoe store experienced habitual sexual harassment from an older male colleague, he simply quit his job without trying to fight for justice.31 Similarly, many victims of sexual harassment in Japan choose to quit work and seek employment elsewhere. This is a very understandable course of action, but one that leaves perpetrators in a position to continue their patterns of abuse and victims feeling defeated and too powerless to break their silence. Writing about #MeToo near the end of 2017, journalist Yamasaki Alisa concluded that “While non-​English-​speaking countries have localised the hashtag in order to spread awareness about sexual assault and harassment in their own culture, the conversation hasn’t taken off in Japan just yet.”32 Although the April 2018 #WeToo demonstration in Tokyo received considerable media attention, it did not bring about the groundswell of support that the organisers had hoped for. That same month, BBC reporter Shiraishi Sakiko noted that women who make public allegations are met either with “deafening silence” or with hostile comments on social media forums: “The #MeToo movement has been slow to pick up in Japan, unlike in Korea where it has rapidly gained movement.”33 The lack of success of the movement is due to a range of complex, interacting factors, one of which is the role of education. If schools are places where sexual harassment is common or where no programs are in place to educate young people on issues surrounding harassment and consent, then movements like #MeToo will have limited success. The most prominent victim of sexual assault in Japan is journalist Itō Shiori, a woman who convinced prosecutors to issue an arrest warrant for her alleged rapist. However, at the last moment, the warrant was cancelled by a high-​ranking police officer and a criminal case was not pursued. Itō’s story and her identification with the Me Too movement in the public mind are key to understanding the fate of #MeToo as a social movement in Japan.

Itō Shiori’s story Society’s ambiguity and lack of commitment to dealing with sexual harassment is adverted to by Itō Shiori when she questions the resolve of authorities to tackle sexual harassment; the problem has been allowed to perpetuate itself for a very long time. She recalls how she and her female peers often experienced groping on public trains and buses as they made their daily commutes to and from high school during their teenage years. Itō believes that a social climate that privileges men and their right to express “natural” sexual desires lies at the root of the problem of both sexual harassment and of high rates of rape in Japanese society.34 While #MeToo-​related news stories garnered considerable media attention, little or no progress has been made in terms of mandatory reporting, restorative justice measures, provision of rape kits, survivors’ rights, or statute of limitations issues. Strong condemnations of incidents of serious sexual assault are minimal if not non-​existent. This was certainly the case when news stories appeared regarding Itō’s story of rape and a stymied pursuit of justice. In 2015, Itō met a senior work colleague, a television company’s foreign correspondent named Yamaguchi Noriyuki, who she believed was interested in finding a foreign correspondent 365

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for the TBS media company. She alleges that she was drugged and raped by Yamaguchi; sufficient evidence was gathered from a taxi driver and from hotel CCTV footage that police were poised to arrest the man as soon as he arrived back to Japan at Narita airport, Tokyo. However, while waiting at the airport, the arresting officer received a telephone call from the acting chief of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police directing him not to make the arrest, in spite of the fact that it is extremely rare for an arrest warrant to be issued and not served without any new evidence being involved.35 As can be expected, Itō was devastated by this last-​minute failure of justice and the subsequent failure of the prosecution inquest committee to validate her case. Itō could not help noting that Yamaguchi had powerful friends, seeing as he was given access to senior echelons of government when he wrote an admiring biography of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. One commentator noted, “Both Yamaguchi and the police chief who ended the investigation are reportedly close friends of Prime Minister Abe.”36 Worse was to come because Itō was not given justice by the courts. In May 2017, she gave a press conference to detail her allegations, but she received only small levels of support from the general public, so little in fact that Itō has decided to live outside Japan, as she fears for her own safety and that of her family. Itō has received some expressions of support in Japan. In December 2019, she was awarded over three million yen for her civil lawsuit (although she had sought 11 million yen). The counter-​lawsuit of the alleged perpetrator, Yamaguchi, was dismissed with the assertion that Itō was a credible witness. This was a major victory for Itō and for those who oppose sexual violence against women. In time, activists may be able to use this victory to embolden women to break their silence about sexual assault, whether through #MeToo or some other movement. As always, progress will probably be slow, painstaking, and in the face of severe opposition. Many negative comments against Itō were posted online following the December 2019 court announcement, and the Mainichi newspaper took down its online video of Itō’s statement within a few hours, so great was the onslaught of extremely negative comments. A commentator noted that “ ‘I want to rape her too’ was a typical comment.”37 Itō’s case has gained greater exposure and recognition outside the country than in Japan. In December 2018, Itō was a panellist at the Council of Europe’s World Forum for Democracy assembly meeting. In Europe, also, she has been interviewed by the BBC World Service, on the popular television chat show Skavlan, and on the news channel France 24. The BBC has focused on her story in the documentary Japan’s Secret Shame.38 The documentary also featured an interview with Diet lawmaker Sugita Mio, who cast doubt on the veracity of Itō’s case. In the public mind, perhaps, the Me Too movement has become intertwined with a highly politicised issue: the fate of Itō Shiori and that of the man she accuses, a man with close ties to the political establishment. In spite of the fact that she was a serious journalist with a promising career who has since had her work accepted by Reuters and The Economist magazine, Itō was not taken seriously or given the support she needed to survive and thrive in Japanese society. The issue of sexual harassment in workplaces, on public transportation, in educational contexts, and in other social sites came to be eclipsed by the focus on society’s responses to allegations of rape in one particular case. Perhaps, over the passage of time, the many groups that are working to challenge gender inequality in Japan will manage to disassociate sexual harassment issues from one particular, politicised case and bring “seku hara” into public consciousness in a way that is beneficial in terms of awareness, prevention, and response.39

Final reflections This chapter’s outline of historical background and social context in Japan may help to explain dominant attitudes towards issues of sexual harassment. It remains difficult to explain, though, 366

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why so many targets of harassment remain silent. In her analysis of sexual harassment in Japanese culture, Muta Kazue argues that deep-​rooted cultural values of wa (social harmony) and respect for fatherly authority often constrain institutions from initiating effective measures to protect individuals from all types of harassment.40 A similar analysis, with a focus on gender, is made by Itō Kazuko, a lawyer and promoter of the Me Too movement in Japan, who says that “Lack of legal protection, combined with cultural pressure to accept and bear one’s hardship, make young women vulnerable…”41 Gitte Marianne Hansen examines a range of cultural products to argue that the self-​directed violence of many Japanese women with eating disorders and cutting issues is strongly connected to negative discursive forces in Japanese society.42 These forces place too many contradictory obligations upon women through a media culture where women’s struggles with their bodies for thinness has become part of public entertainment discourse. Women are supposed to endure the pain of uncomfortable work shoes, dieting, and cosmetic surgery while remaining fully functional for their duties, especially those of the domestic sphere. Though Hansen does not elaborate on sexual harassment issues, it seems plausible that the demands of “contradictive femininity” also contribute to the silence of women who have been sexually harassed. The sense of paralysis that engenders silence during sexual assault and the tortured decision to endure traumatic pain alone may be another form of self-​directed violence by targets of harassment who lack sufficient social support. Romit Dasgupta, Deguchi Makiko, and Hata Momoko explore the ways in which hegemonic masculinity works in the Japanese socio-​cultural context.43 Their analysis allows for reasonable conjectures about the lack of willingness of male victims of sexual harassment to report incidents. The demands of an idealised gender performance for an impermeable, tough, physically strong body which is adept for working long hours and protecting “wife and children” remains normative. To admit that such a body has been objectified and reduced to society’s feminine subject position will often be too difficult for male targets who have internalised discourses of hegemonic masculinity.44 In addition, discourses of homophobic subject positioning will also have a chilling effect. While homophobia in Japan may not be as overt as in many other social locales, it remains a potent ideology of discriminatory attitudes and behaviour.45 One way to gain a very cursory impression of how a society views an issue is to see how published authors have treated the topic. Inputting the term “seku hara” on a commercial book website or search engine, one soon sees summaries of many books that deal with the topic in a mature and responsible way. However, out of the first 30 books, around seven or eight will probably be pornographic manga (comics) with titles such as Seku hara OK no kaisha (the company where sexual harassment is okay), Seku hara buraza–​zu (sexual harassment brothers), and Buka ni seku hara sareterun desu ga (I’m being sexual harassed by company subordinates). These book search results indicate the paradox of a society that takes a problem seriously and simultaneously eroticises and commodifies the topic to such an extent that meaningful progress seems highly difficult to achieve. This is the social climate that the Me Too movement must take account of in Japan, a society where women and men, girls and boys, often feel obliged to silently endure the psychological pain that follows sexual harassment victimisation. #MeToo and affiliated campaigns in Japan have unfolded in a way that brought much serious attention to sexual harassment issues and won some notable victories. However, it is also true to say that the topic was often trivialised on television variety shows and on the pages of shukanshi weekly magazines. The Me Too movement did not evolve into a broad grass-​roots campaign that could unite Japanese women in a spirit of solidarity through their shared experiences of sexual harassment. The groundwork had not been laid in educational institutions, where few young people receive information about sexual harassment issues and where cultures of abuse often go unchallenged. Itō Shiori’s highly politicised case and her failure to gain justice simply 367

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reinforced the message that Japan was not yet ready for a movement which would subvert the power of patriarchy in a radical way. Perhaps the implicit message that many received was that speaking up about sexual assault is dangerous; it involves taking on the male-​dominated establishment, where male power is still entrenched. For some, #MeToo was perceived as a foreign phenomenon, something that was understandable for outsiders, but not emerging from Japanese experience. This helps to explain why Itō Shiori supported the transformation of #MeToo into #WeToo Japan and the appearance of similar campaigns. If these and other campaigns are able to gather momentum and build a strong sense of solidarity among victims of sexual harassment, then #MeToo will have been a stepping stone that helped others to reach key objectives. Thus far at least, none of these campaigns has gained enough momentum to destabilise the roots of hyper-​masculinist culture in Japan. It is positive that a number of harassers in a wide range of social spheres —​politics, education, business, journalism, and entertainment —​have been forced to quit their jobs when their offences were made public. However, it remains extremely difficult for victims to break their silence and to risk being condemned as selfishly individualistic eccentrics in a cultural milieu that demands that women and men have high tolerance for pain.46 The essential objective of campaigners must be to bring an end to cultures of silence for victims and of impunity for offenders as well as achieving the institutional and social changes that minimise incidents of sexual harassment. Comprehensive education on gender equality, relationships, and consent issues among students and instructors in Japanese schools and universities may offer the best chance for long-​term change. Over time, institutional cultures of sexual harassment may be dissolved and silence-​breakers like Itō Shiori will be able to survive and thrive in their home country, instead of being forced to go down the path of forced exile.

Notes 1 Katherine Seagrave, The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Workplace: From 1600 to 1993 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994). 2 Catharine A.  MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women:  A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). 3 Philip Brasor, “Japan Struggles to Overcome its Groping Problem”, Japan Times, 17 March 2018, www. japantimes.co.jp/​news/​2018/​03/​17/​national/​media-​national/​japan-​struggles-​overcome-​g roping-​ problem/​#.XcPVYnduJPY. 4 Catherine Burns, Sexual Violence and the Law in Japan (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005). 5 Muta Kazue, “The Making of Seku Hara:  Sexual Harassment in Japanese Culture”, in East Asian Sexualities: Modernity, Gender and New Sexual Cultures, ed. Stevi Jackson, Liu Jieyu, and Woo Juhyun (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008): 52–​68. 6 Burns, Sexual Violence and the Law in Japan. 7 Okunuki Hifumi,“Japan Sees Progress on Sexual Harassment but Some Still Don’t Get It”, Japan Times, 25 March 2015, www.japantimes.co.jp/​community/​2015/​03/​25/​issues/​japan-​sees-​progress-​sexual-​ harassment-​still-​dont-​get/​#.XcPPrHduJPY. 8 Yuki W. P. Huen, “Workplace Sexual Harassment in Japan: A Review of Combating Measures Taken”, Asian Survey 47, no. 5 (2007): 811–​827. 9 Global Gender Gap Report 2017, World Economic Forum, accessed 1 May 2019, www.weforum.org/​ reports/​the-​global-​gender-​gap-​report-​2017. 10 Huen, “Workplace Sexual Harassment in Japan”, 826. 11 “Actual Conditions Concerning Sexual Harassment”, Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office, accessed 1 May 2019, www.gender.go.jp/​about_​danjo/​whitepaper/​h27/​zentai/​html/​zuhyo/​ zuhyo01-​04-​14.html. 12 Yamasaki Alisa, “#Stand Up Japan and Other Hashtags Allow for New Voices to Be Heard”, Japan Times, 17 January 2019, www.japantimes.co.jp/​community/​2019/​01/​17/​general/​standupjapan-​ hashtags-​allow-​new-​voices-​heard/​#.XEJpvPZuLIU.

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The #MeToo movement in Japan 13 Yamasaki Alisa, “In Japan, We Too Need to Talk about Sexual Misconduct, Japan Times, 8 November 2017, www.japantimes.co.jp/​community/​2017/​11/​08/​voices/​japan-​need-​talk-​sexual-​misconduct/​ #.WgjouIhpHIU. 14 Mori Kurumi and Oda Shoko, “#MeToo Becomes #WeToo in Victim Blaming Japan”, Japan Times, 15 May 2018, www.japantimes.co.jp/​news/​2018/​05/​15/​national/​social-​issues/​becomes-​victim-​ blaming-​japan/​#.XCwWjvZuLIW. 15 Highly placed bureaucrats in Japanese ministries have as much if not more power than government ministers. See Adam Gamble and Watanabe Takesato, A Public Betrayed:  An Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and their Warnings to the West (Washington, DC: Regency, 2004). 16 “#MeToo Hits Japan as Junichi Fukuda Quits over Harassment Claims”, BBC News, 19 April 2018, www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​asia-​43819001. 17 Shiraishi Sakiko, “#MeToo Japan: What Happened when Women Broke their Silence”, BBC News, 25 April 2018, www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​asia-​43721227. 18 Yamasaki, “#Stand Up Japan”. 19 Robert O’Mochain, “Sexual Harassment: A Critical Issue for EFL in Japan”, The Language Teacher 43, no. 1 (2019): 10–​15. 20 Sugiyama Satoshi, “Tabloid Mag under Fire for Publishing List of Japanese Colleges Where Girls Are ‘Easily Available’ for Sex at Drinking Parties”, Japan Times, 7 January 2019, www.japantimes.co.jp/​ news/​2019/​01/​07/​national/​social-​issues/​tabloid-​mag-​fire-​publishing-​list-​japanese-​colleges-​g irls-​ easily-​available-​sex-​drinking-​parties/​#.Xcp643duJPZ. 21 Yamasaki, “#Stand Up Japan”. 22 “J.A.P.A.N.  in B.I.T.S  —​Wake Up!” Toyo University International Association for Japan Studies, accessed 1 June 2019, https://​docs.google.com/​document/​d/​1OaLx2v-​x5JcYRM17vSf6_​ IuLMzvRtM2OukULF-​giz2M/​edit#. 23 Rebecca Seales, “What Has #MeToo Actually Changed?” BBC News, 12 May 2018, www.bbc.com/​ news/​world-​44045291. 24 Nakao Yuka, “Japan’s Gender Problem is a ‘Human Disaster’ Says Award-​ winning Scholar Chizuko Ueno”, Japan Times, 2 July 2019, www.japantimes.co.jp/​news/​2019/​07/​02/​national/​ social-​issues/​japans-​gender-​problem-​human-​disaster-​says-​award-​winning-​scholar-​chizuko-​ueno/​ #.XbER2XduJPY. 25 Yamasaki, “#Stand Up Japan”. 26 Mori and Oda, “#MeToo Becomes #WeToo”. 27 Burns, Sexual Violence and the Law in Japan. 28 Miura Yue, “ ‘Masaka kimi ga boku o uttaeru to wa’ —​sei hanzai kagaisha-​tachi no kokkei na hodo no ‘higaisha ishiki’ ” [“I Never Dreamed You Would Sue Me”: How “Sense Of Victimhood” Among Sex Offenders Borders On the Absurd], Asahi Shimbun: Aera, 7 December 2017, https://​dot.asahi.com/​ dot/​2017120500010.html?page=3. 29 Yue, “Masaka kimi ga boku o uttaeru to wa”. 30 “#MeToo Campaign Spreads in Japan but Some Sexual Violence Victims Face Backlash”, Mainichi Japan, 28 December 2017, https://​mainichi.jp/​english/​articles/​20171228/​p2a/​00m/​0na/​011000c. 31 “#MeToo Campaign Spreads in Japan”. 32 Yamasaki, “In Japan, We Too Need to Talk”. 33 Shiraishi, “#MeToo Japan”. 34 Itō Shiori, Black Box (Tokyo: Bungeishunju, 2017). 35 Jake Adelstein, who has worked as a crime journalist in Japan for 25 years, referred to conversations with police officers:  “It is highly irregular for a top-​ranking official to stop an arrest warrant or interfere with a case at this level, say many police sources”. Jake Adelstein, “Is Japan’s Top Politician Behind a Shameful Rape Cover-​ up?” Daily Beast, 20 June 2017, www.thedailybeast.com/​ is-​japans-​top-​politician-​behind-​a-​shameful-​rape-​cover-​up. 36 Monica Hunter-​Hart, “How Did #MeToo Start in Japan? These Voices are Planting Small, yet Powerful Seeds of Change”, Bustle, 3 January 2018, www.bustle.com/​p/​how-​did-​metoo-​start-​in-​ japan-​these-​voices-​are-​planting-​small-​yet-​powerful-​seeds-​of-​change-​7770062. 37 David McNeill, “High-​profile Rape Case Raises Questions for Japanese Society”, Irish Times, 23 December 2019, www.irishtimes.com/​news/​world/​asia-​pacific/​high-​profile-​rape-​case-​raises-​questions-​for​japanese-​society-​1.4121675. 38 Japan’s Secret Shame (documentary film), BBC Two, accessed 10 January 2019, www.bbc.co.uk/​ programmes/​b0b8cfcj.

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Robert O’Mochain 39 Chris Linder, Sexual Violence on Campus:  Power-​ conscious Approaches to Awareness, Prevention, and Response (Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2018). 40 Muta, “The Making of Seku hara”, 57. 41 Shiraishi, “#MeToo Japan”. 42 Gitte Marianne Hansen, Femininity, Self-​harm and Eating Disorders in Japan: Navigating Contradictions in Narrative and Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2016). 43 Romit Dasgupta, Re-​reading the Salaryman in Japan:  Crafting Masculinities (New  York:  Routledge, 2013); Deguchi Makiko and Hata Momoko, “Resistance, Self-​awareness and Change: The Processes of Coming to Terms with Male Privilege for Male College Students”, SIETAR Japan’s 34th Annual Conference, Sophia University, Tokyo, 9–​10 November 2019, Conference Program, 51–​52, www. sietar-​japan.org/​en/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2019/​11/​Conference-​Program_​2019_​V01.pdf. 44 cf. Raewyn W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 45 Mark McLelland, Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social Realities (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2000). 46 cf. Dasgupta, Re-​reading the Salaryman in Japan; Hansen, Femininity, Self-​harm and Eating Disorders in Japan.

Bibliography Adelstein, Jake. “Is Japan’s Top Politician Behind a Shameful Rape Cover-​up?” Daily Beast, 20 June 2017. www.thedailybeast.com/​is-​japans-​top-​politician-​behind-​a-​shameful-​rape-​cover-​up. BBC News. “#MeToo Hits Japan as Junichi Fukuda Quits over Harassment Claims”. 19 April 2018. www. bbc.com/​news/​world-​asia-​43819001. BBC 2. Japan’s Secret Shame (documentary film). Accessed 10 January 2019. www.bbc.co.uk/​programmes/​ b0b8cfcj. Brasor, Philip. “Japan Struggles to Overcome its Groping Problem”. Japan Times, 17 March 2018. www. japantimes.co.jp/​news/​2018/​03/​17/​national/​media-​national/​japan-​struggles-​overcome-​g roping- ​ problem/​#.XcPVYnduJPY. Burns, Catherine. Sexual Violence and the Law in Japan. London: Routledge Curzon, 2005. Connell, Raewyn W. The Men and the Boys. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Dasgupta, Romit. Re-​reading the Salaryman in Japan: Crafting Masculinities. New York: Routledge, 2013. Deguchi, Makiko and Hata Momoko. “Resistance, Self-​awareness and Change: The Processes of Coming to Terms with Male Privilege for Male College Students”. SIETAR Japan’s 34th Annual Conference, Sophia University, Tokyo, 9–​10 November 2019. Conference Program, 51–​52. www.sietar-​japan.org/​ en/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2019/​11/​Conference-​Program_​2019_​V01.pdf. Gamble, Adam and Watanabe Takesato. A Public Betrayed: An Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and their Warnings to the West. Washington, DC: Regency, 2004. Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office. “Actual Conditions Concerning Sexual Harassment”. Accessed 1 May 2019. www.gender.go.jp/​about_​danjo/​whitepaper/​h27/​zentai/​html/​zuhyo/​ zuhyo01-​04-​14.html. Hansen, Gitte Marianne. Femininity, Self-​harm and Eating Disorders in Japan:  Navigating Contradictions in Narrative and Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 2016. Huen, Yuki W.P. “Workplace Sexual Harassment in Japan: A Review of Combating Measures Taken”. Asian Survey 47, no. 5 (2007): 811–​827. Hunter-​Hart, Monica. “How Did #MeToo Start in Japan? These Voices are Planting Small, yet Powerful Seeds of Change”. Bustle, 3 January 2018. www.bustle.com/​p/​how-​did-​metoo-​start-​in-​japan-​these-​ voices-​are-​planting-​small-​yet-​powerful-​seeds-​of-​change-​7770062. Itō, Shiori. Black Box. Tokyo: Bungeishunju, 2017. Japan Subculture Research Center. “Rape in Japan Is a Crime but Justice is Rarely Served:  A Non-​ arrest and Shiori Ito’s Full Statement”. Accessed 1 May 2019. www.japansubculture.com/​tag/​metoo-​ watshimo-​私も/​. Linder, Chris. Sexual Violence on Campus: Power-​conscious Approaches to Awareness, Prevention, and Response. Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2018. Mainichi Japan. “#MeToo Campaign Spreads in Japan but Some Sexual Violence Victims Face Backlash”. 28 December 2017. https://​mainichi.jp/​english/​articles/​20171228/​p2a/​00m/​0na/​011000c.

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The #MeToo movement in Japan McLelland, Mark. Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan:  Cultural Myths and Social Realities. Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2000. MacKinnon, Catharine A. Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. McNeill, David. “High-​profile Rape Case Raises Questions for Japanese Society”. Irish Times, 23 December 2019. www.irishtimes.com/​news/​world/​asia-​pacific/​high-​profile-​rape-​case-​raises-​questions-​for​japanese-​society-​1.4121675. Miura, Yue. “Masaka kimi ga boku o uttaeru to wa” —​sei hanzai kagaisha-​tachi no kokkei na hodo no “higaisha ishiki” [“I Never Dreamed You Would Sue Me”: How “Sense Of Victimhood” Among Sex Offenders Borders On the Absurd]. Asahi Shimbun:  Aera, 7 December 2017. https://​dot.asahi.com/​dot/​ 2017120500010.html?page=3. Mori, Kurumi, and Oda Shoko. “#MeToo Becomes #WeToo in Victim Blaming Japan”. Japan Times, 15 May 2018. www.japantimes.co.jp/​news/​2018/​05/​15/​national/​social-​issues/​becomes-​victim-​ blaming-​japan/​#.XCwWjvZuLIW. Muta, Kazue. “The Making of Seku hara:  Sexual Harassment in Japanese Culture”. In East Asian Sexualities: Modernity, Gender and New Sexual Cultures, edited by Stevi Jackson, Liu Jieyu, and Woo Juhyun, 52–​68. London and New York: Zed Books, 2008. Nakao, Yuka. “Japan’s Gender Problem is a ‘Human Disaster’ Says Award-​winning Scholar Chizuko Ueno”. Japan Times, 2 July 2019. www.japantimes.co.jp/​news/​2019/​07/​02/​national/​social-​issues/​japans-​ gender-​problem-​human-​disaster-​says-​award-​winning-​scholar-​chizuko-​ueno/​#.XbER2XduJPY. Okunuki, Hifumi. “Japan Sees Progress on Sexual Harassment but Some Still Don’t Get It”. Japan Times, 25 March 2015. www.japantimes.co.jp/​community/​2015/​03/​25/​issues/​japan-​sees-​progress-​sexual-​ harassment-​still-​dont-​get/​#.XcPPrHduJPY. O’Mochain, Robert. “Sexual Harassment: A Critical Issue for EFL in Japan”. The Language Teacher 43, no. 1 (2019): 10–​15. Seagrave, Katherine. The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Workplace:  From 1600 to 1993. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994. Seales, Rebecca. “What Has #MeToo Actually Changed?” BBC News, 12 May 2018. www.bbc.com/​ news/​world-​44045291. Shiraishi, Sakiko. “#MeToo Japan: What Happened when Women Broke their Silence”. BBC News, 25 April 2018. www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​asia-​43721227. Sugiyama, Satoshi. “Tabloid Mag under Fire for Publishing List of Japanese Colleges Where Girls Are ‘Easily Available’ for Sex at Drinking Parties. Japan Times, 7 January 2019. www.japantimes.co.jp/​ news/​2019/​01/​07/​national/​social-​issues/​tabloid-​mag-​fire-​publishing-​list-​japanese-​colleges-​g irls-​ easily-​available-​sex-​drinking-​parties/​#.Xcp643duJPZ. Toyo University International Association for Japan Studies. “J.A.P.A.N.  in B.I.T.S  —​Wake Up!” Accessed 1 June 2019. https://​docs.google.com/​document/​d/​1OaLx2v-​x5JcYRM17vSf6_​ IuLMzvRtM2OukULF-​giz2M/​edit#. World Economic Forum. Global Gender Gap Report 2017. Accessed 1 May 2019. www.weforum.org/​ reports/​the-​global-​gender-​gap-​report-​2017. Yamasaki, Alisa. “In Japan, We Too Need to Talk about Sexual Misconduct. Japan Times, 8 November 2017. www.japantimes.co.jp/​community/​2017/​11/​08/​voices/​japan-​need-​talk-​sexual-​misconduct/​ #.WgjouIhpHIU. Yamasaki, Alisa. “#Stand Up Japan and Other Hashtags Allow for New Voices to Be Heard”. Japan Times, 17 January 2019. www.japantimes.co.jp/​community/​2019/​01/​17/​general/​standupjapan-​hashtags-​ allow-​new-​voices-​heard/​#.XEJpvPZuLIU.

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25 #ANAKAMAN —​ METOO IN THE ARAB WORLD A journalist’s account Rym Tina Ghazal Reporting on the sexual harassment of women: A personal note Over the last 17 years, I have worked as a senior correspondent across the world, mainly the Arab world, covering minor and major stories including assassinations and protests. This is my personal account of being a female journalist in the field, and of what we had to do sometimes as women covering a wide range of stories. I am sure that many women correspondents near and far can relate to these experiences. I had a special wardrobe for covering stories involving large crowds of men. I deliberately wore the baggiest, ugliest outfits I could find as a way to shield myself from unwanted attention and to avoid being touched or harassed, while covering protests, marches, and revolutions on Arab streets in countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. I am actually embarrassed to admit that throughout my years as a senior journalist and writer, I  sometimes had to camouflage my female identity. I  have written numerous stories urging people to stop shaming women for what they wear or do, emphasising that no person has the right to disrespect or violate another person on the basis of gender, race, or religion. However, time and again, I heard men, colleagues in the media, supposed experts, and even other women imply or explicitly point to a woman’s outfit as the probable reason she was harassed, harmed, or raped. I didn’t take any chances: I dressed as modestly and inconspicuously as I possibly could. I was not the only one. Many of my colleagues would also “uglify” themselves —​not putting on makeup, leaving their hair unbrushed or in a ponytail —​to avoid being noticed. But that’s not always possible, particularly for broadcast journalists who are expected to look good on screen. “Is your shield ready?” a few female colleagues and I would joke when we hit the streets to cover protests, such as the Cedar Revolution in 2005, or later during the 2010–​2011 Arab Spring marches. By “shield”, we meant both our drab clothing and our safety in numbers: we never went anywhere without at least one other person. Sometimes we also insisted on being accompanied by a male colleague, often a cameraman, which added a feeling of safety and security. My personal experience echoes the experiences of many women journalists who, despite having covered war zones and bombings and assassinations, still balk at the thought of walking through a throng of men whose inhibitions may disappear along with the anonymity and impunity that comes with being in large numbers. I am still haunted by a video that went viral, in which a woman runs, screaming, clothes torn off, while men film her escape, laughing and trying to grab her even though she has visibly been sexually assaulted. The woman in the video was an Egyptian 372

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protestor who believed in changing her country for the better. There are hundreds of stories like hers,1 but the men who commit these atrocities are not held accountable. When I tried to do a follow-​up on this story, I was brushed off; an official in Cairo told me to focus on “more serious” stories. “What did she expect? Going out in tight clothes in the middle of the night to a crowd of men?” he asked rhetorically. Sadly, his sentiment was repeated by many others, including women, who were often more aggressive than men in their judgments. Women correspondents constantly need to navigate through a sea of contradictions, confusion, and calamity.

Feminism in the Arab world: Historical and contemporary perspectives There is an old Arabic proverb that goes: “The men are the wool of the tribe, but the women are the ones who weave the pattern”. It reflects the traditional belief of the central importance of women in Arab culture. Indeed, as Carsten Niebhur observed in 1772, “the women of Arabia seem to be as free and happy as that of Europe”.2 This traditional sense of the significant role of Arab women in their societies seems to have been lost in recent times. In public discourse and cultural memory, online as well as in other forums, Arab women are still frequently pigeonholed, “orientalised”, and “othered” in Western discussions about their lives and their rights. The focus is too often on what they wear (or don’t wear) and how different they are from “Western” women. The truth is, however, that in the age of global digitisation, boundaries between East and West, Arab and European, are becoming blurred to the point that many fear that Arab identity and culture are being subsumed by “Americanisation”. We need much more information and grassroots research to foreground the voices and histories of women from this region, bringing them into conversation with the men and women of contemporary society. There have always been feminists in the Arab world. All women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) should know the names of Arab feminists Huda Shaarawy (Egyptian 1879–​1947), May Ziade (Lebanese-​Palestinian 1886–​1941), Anbara Salam Khalidi (Lebanese 1897–​1986), Nabawiyya Musa (Egyptian 1886–​1951), Doria Shafik (Egyptian 1908–​1975), and Fatema Mernissi (Moroccan 1940–​2015). These names are just a few of the many who paved the way for women in the region. My grandmother told me about these women, and they are indelibly inked in my memory as pioneers who fought for women’s rights and equality, risking their reputations, their livelihoods, and their lives. Yet these women are too often forgotten by the beneficiaries of their actions, even in the Arab world, proving once again that we often appreciate rights and privileges, but neglect the history of struggle and resistance that made them possible (Figure 25.1). In addition, current Arab feminists are not well known outside of small academic circles and specific university disciplines, such as Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College, or the Arab Institute for Women at the Lebanese American University. Further, many Arab feminist figures face reproach. One such controversial figure is the novelist, doctor, and feminist Nawal Al Saadawi, who, in her late eighties, is still struggling to make women’s voices heard and taken seriously. Indeed, Al Saadawi has paid a heavy price for her words and work; she has been imprisoned, exiled, and made the target of countless death threats. When I met her in 2015, she reminded me to always be “courageous”  —​to not be afraid to speak out against injustices. “Women are half of society”, she noted in an interview. “You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have equality without women. You can’t have anything without women.”3 My colleagues working for the press admonished me for interviewing Al Saadawi. They cautioned me to avoid becoming too closely associated with her because she is seen as “dangerous”. When I told her what my colleagues had said, she responded, “Yes! I am dangerous as 373

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Figure 25.1  From left to right, Nabawiyya Musa, Huda Shaarawy, and Saiza Nabarawi —​the Egyptian delegates —​all pioneers in women rights —​at the 1923 International Alliance of Women conference in Rome. Upon their return from Rome, the three women in a symbolic act removed their veils (some reports said they removed the face cover Niqab) in public at Cairo station. Source: Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections. Used with permission.

I am honest and I say it like it is”. She continued, “An intelligent woman is a dangerous thing in the Arab world, and she will struggle because she will say what they don’t want to hear or see.” Al Saadawi has written frankly about undergoing the process of female genital mutilation (FGM), a barbaric procedure that still occurs today. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that more than 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM in the countries where the practice is most concentrated.4 Feminism in the Arab world is a complicated concept. Religion and culture play significant roles in (mis)perceptions of what it means to be a woman or a man, and in dictating the consequences of gender discrimination. In an interview, Lebanese author, poet, and feminist Joumana Haddad said that she didn’t know “how a woman can be a woman today without being constantly furious at the insults and abuses that affect her, whether they aim to eliminate her or to exploit her”.5 In one of her books, Superman Is an Arab, she explores the corrosive effects of macho culture and patriarchal attitudes towards women and men in the Middle East, noting: Indeed, Superman is an Arab. He may appear powerful, but his muscles are just a facade for his insecurities … He may look resistant, but he doesn’t last long. A simple challenge can shake him, scare him and break him.6 374

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Religious roots and feminist diversity in the Arab world Religion is a contentious topic that poses a challenge in any discussion of gender roles and feminism, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. We must keep in mind that the Arab world is not just a Muslim world, but rather a diverse region populated by Christians, Jews, Yazidi, and Assyrians, to name a few major sects and minorities. The Arab world encompasses two continents; its expansiveness contributes to its complex political and cultural history, as do the traditions of its many and varied people —​nomadic, mountainous, pastoral, and coastal. All these factors contribute to a mass of contradictory stances on nearly everything in this part of the world. It cannot be understood or summed up in simple strokes. Even if we confine our investigation to understanding the impact of Islam on women and women’s rights in MENA countries —​Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen (16 additional countries are sometimes included) —​we must still adopt a nuanced, complex approach that accounts for all of these variables. “Woman is half of society; any country which pursues development should not leave her in poverty or illiteracy. I am on the woman’s side; I always say so in order to uphold her right to work and participate in the process of building her country”, said the late Founding Father of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan.7 This statement encapsulates one core reality of the Arab world: the international media frequently report on extreme cases of oppression and suppression in this region, but often leave out the progress that has been made towards achieving greater women’s rights in some countries. The UAE, for example, which ranks the highest in terms of gender equality in the Gulf, has a growing female workforce, including political positions, and a higher proportion of women than men attend higher education institutions, according to The Human Development Report 2018 —​a report compiled by the United Arab Emirates University in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme.8 The UAE’s launch of a Gender Balance Council in 2017 played a significant role in furthering the active participation of Emirati women in society, and through the history of the UAE, women’s civic status has steadily improved. The country was founded upon a vision of equality and empowerment.9 Currently, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, too, is undergoing massive reforms to grant women more power over both their finances and their fates.10 While the region remains ripe with sociopolitical hurdles —​which is the case with any nation undertaking major reforms to calcified laws and regulations —​much progress has been made towards the empowerment of women. Those reforms send an important message of women’s liberation to other Islamic states that follow the Kingdom’s stances. Saudi Arabia’s influence in the region is underscored by it being the caretaker or custodian of the holiest of sites, Makkah (Mecca) and Madīnah (Medina). Alongside legal reform, contrary to public perception in many countries in the West, scholarly and social debates around the confluence and contradictions of feminism and Islam are alive there. Indeed, there is an ongoing debate by scholars about whether or not the Messenger of Islam, the Prophet Mohammed, was a feminist, with a focus on the role his wives played in history.11 As we know, history is constantly being written and rewritten by those in power and by those who control the public media. Global perceptions of Islam and its history have undergone a sea change over the last few centuries; once, through its culture and scholarship, its civilisation and political leadership, the Islamic world was seen as a torchbearer. Now, global perception of this region is largely ignorant, Islamophobic, and hostile. 375

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#MeToo in the Arab world: # ‫ – ﻛامن_أﻧﺎ‬#AnaKaman No major Arab woman celebrities or public figures openly joined the #MeToo movement, apart from a few journalists. Nonetheless, a number of famous women have told me in confidence, during meetings and interviews, of sexual harassment and abuse they have either witnessed or experienced at the hands of powerful men. But this did not hinder thousands of women’s stories from coming out on social media. Their previously private accounts of violations committed by men they knew — including men in their own families, their fathers and uncles — were excruciating to read. One said: “They blamed me when my uncle molested me as a child.” And another: “I was molested by several male family members, and my mother and aunt knew and did nothing.” What you read in these abbreviated narratives is a cry for help, often a cry to be freed from the violence of family members, a cry that had fallen on deaf ears. In my own personal experience, when a cousin looked lustfully at me and rubbed his hand against my behind, I was too ashamed to tell anyone, and blamed myself for wearing jeans.12 Telling personal stories of sexual harassment in Arab cultures, as in others, is complicated; often people dismiss inappropriate comments or behaviour in workplaces, brushing it off as “cultural” or a “compliment”. Unsurprisingly, when I went through the #MeToo posts with the Arabic words # ‫( ﻛامن_أﻧﺎ‬#AnaKaman) or # ‫( اﻳﻀﺎً_أﻧﺎ‬#AnaAydan) — a large number appeared to originate in Egypt. In a 2017 poll by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Cairo was ranked as “the most dangerous megacity for women from a UN list of 19 cities”.13 Much attention had been drawn to the prevalence of sexual harassment in Egypt in the course of the Tahrir Square protests, leading to greater public and social awareness of an endemic problem. In the wake of the Arab Spring marches, brave testimonies from victims of sexual assault, groping, and rape that had taken place during the demonstrations came to light.14 The Arab Spring protests were meant to turn a new page in history; in this regard, they did not. Egypt is thought to have had the majority of these cases, with reports of hundreds of sexual assaults, including attacks on journalists who feared going out in public in a climate where many, including their male colleagues, believed that these women, by virtue of their presence in the streets, were responsible for being assaulted. However, the assault on reporter Lara Logan of the CBS news network made headlines around the world, and the international press reacted by drawing attention to ongoing gang rapes and mob sexual assaults that were perpetrated in Cairo’s Tahrir Square protests.15 This public attention was a social force for change, but change itself was not effected in legal and judicial mechanisms. Legally, while there are penalties for sexual harassment with a potential jail term of six months to one year and fines of up to 10,000 Egyptian Pounds (E£; about $550),16 they are difficult to impose; survivors who speak out are occasionally indicted instead for crimes like “spreading fake news”. At the end of 2018, an Egyptian appeals court imposed a two-year prison sentence against the women’s rights activist Amal Fathy, who criticised the authorities for failing to tackle sexual harassment.17 In May 2018, Fathy uploaded a video to her Facebook account in which she detailed an incident of sexual harassment that she experienced during a visit to her bank. In that video, she criticised the government for its failure to protect women. Two days after the post appeared, the Egyptian security forces entered her home in a pre-dawn raid and arrested her, her husband, and their young son; her husband and son were later released. She was charged with “spreading fake news”. As a result of her conviction, she was fined and arrested and remained in detention for seven months.18 Stories like Fathy’s, however, propelled the #MeToo movement in MENA countries. Yasmeen Mjalli, a Palestinian-American woman, produced and sold clothing with the slogan “Not Your Habibti” (“habibti” is akin to “sweetie” in English) to women in the West Bank. 376

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She designed her clothes to emphasise the term “habibti”, which is commonly used by men, to encourage Palestinian society to confront the sexualization of women. Mjalli argued, “when a woman is exposed to so much harassment on the street, she begins to dress to protect herself, to hide herself as opposed to expressing herself ”.19 Unique to this region was the outcry of domestic workers, who also joined in the #MeToo movement and spoke out against sexual abuse, sharing stories of incidents in their own lives through the local manifestations of the hashtag. “I started ironing clothes and he pulled me and attempted to rape me. I was lucky his younger brother rang the doorbell —​he then left”, the twenty-​year-​old Basma N. (who changed her name for safety reasons) told Human Rights Watch.20 Violence against women in less privileged and lower income groups like that of Basma is often unreported and goes unnoticed. For this reason in particular, these stories made an inestimable contribution to the #MeToo movement. Egyptian-​ American feminist and journalist Mona Eltahawy’s tweet with the hashtag #MosqueMeToo was a revelation to public consciousness.21 She tweeted: I have shared my experience of being sexually assaulted during Haj in 1982 when I was 15 in the hope that it will help fellow Muslim women break silence and taboo around their experience of sexual harassment/​abuse during Haj/​Umra or in sacred places. Let’s use #MosqueMeToo.22 Her tweet in February of 2018 was retweeted almost 400 times; it was inspired by a message posted by Sabica Khan, a woman from Pakistan, who wrote on Facebook about being assaulted next to the Kaaba, the holy Black Stone, at the centre of Islam’s most sacred mosque in Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Ms Khan said that she had been touched by different men while she performed tawaf —​seven circles around the Kaaba —​a mandatory part of the pilgrimage. She said the experience left her feeling petrified: “I was afraid to share this because it might hurt your religious sentiments”, she posted.23 Khan said she first felt a hand on her waist but brushed it off as an innocent mistake. However, the touching persisted and she became very uncomfortable. “During my sixth tawaf, I  suddenly felt something aggressively poking my butt, I froze, unsure of whether it was intentional. I ignored [it] and just kept moving slowly because the crowd was huge.”24 Using this hashtag, Muslim women posted their experiences of sexual harassment during the annual Hajj pilgrimage and in other religious settings. One of them wrote: I was doing tawaaf last year in Umrah, it wasn’t even crowded and many men were pushing their bodies against mine and touching me with their hands. I was actually terrified and thought omg that couldn’t be happening in this holy spot!25 A male social media user posted:  “Each time my mom and her sisters went to Hajj, they were groped —​disgusting ppl w/​no morals/​’deen’; toxic patriarchy; keep doing what you’re doing, Mona. #MosqueMeToo”.26 Some of the posts mentioned their “devastation” at having this precious memory tainted by the inappropriate sexual behaviour of men while observing Islamic rituals. These women’s bodies were completely covered, and they observed the expected decorum; the holiness of the site was assumed to serve as a hindrance to any type of violation. The sexual harassment that takes place there, then, reveals the lie at the heart of victim blaming: What you wear, where you go —​two staples of rape culture discourse —​are subverted by the reality that assault and harassment take place even within the grounds of a mosque, even when the body is fully concealed by clothes. 377

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The conversations that took place on social media in response to the #MosqueMeToo hashtag would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and while there has been some criticism, these uncomfortable revelations are essential to progress.27

The devastating power of stories “Help! I’ve been raped!” Manal Issa, disheveled and staggering down a street in Beirut, frantically yelled those words, desperately appealing to the bystanders around her. A crowd gathered. Some told her to calm down, and even to be quiet. Shockingly, one person reprimanded her for wearing a miniskirt, while another accused her of being a drug addict. Not a single person called the police. Fortunately, Issa had not been raped —​her public appeal was a social experiment organised by the Lebanese Women’s Rights group, the Resource Centre for Gender Equality (ABAAD), to highlight the public’s blindness to rape and sexual assault in Lebanon.28 Inspired by the #MeToo movement, the group conducted a campaign, #ShameOnWho, that lasted for several weeks in November 2018 to address social stigmas and victim blaming.29 “We’re trying to encourage women who are survivors of rape to speak up, to get out of the cycle and culture of victim blaming”, the group’s founder, Ghida Anani, said recently.30 While this incident was a staged scenario, I have seen the real thing. When I was based in Beirut around 2007, I saw a woman running down one of the city’s busier streets in the middle of the night, yelling that she had been robbed and sexually assaulted. A group of people sat outdoors at a restaurant, but they did not respond to her cries; some people shook their heads and looked away. Two women shouted at the woman, telling her to “be quiet” because there were children in the area. I was with a group of journalists and we ran to the woman and tried to help. A colleague immediately called the police with information about the woman in distress, but he struggled to persuade them to come to the scene. “Yes, she is walking and standing up, but she needs help! She needs an ambulance and to file a report, right?” he said. In the end, the police didn’t come. When we offered to take the woman to the nearest police station, she refused and asked us to take her home and not to report the assault. Left with few options, we did as she asked and the attack ultimately went unaddressed. It comes as no surprise, then, that UN Women reports that in Arab and North African countries, more than six in 10 female survivors of violence remain silent and do not ask for support or protection.31 The agency also found that one in three women have experienced physical or sexual violence at least once —​most often perpetrated by a partner. Psychiatrist and trauma specialist Judith Herman says in her book Trauma and Recovery: It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.32 Combined with the pervasive culture of patriarchy in MENA and other parts of the world, this dynamic between perpetrator-​bystander and survivor-​bystander is a powerful deterrent to believing victims and, accordingly, supporting or helping them in any way. Perhaps the most relevant question raised by the #MeToo movement has centred on the difficulty of changing societal norms and perceptions that continue to hamper the course of justice. The backlash to the movement has been swift and brutal, and the effort to change the 378

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predominant mindset appears almost impossible. In this context, it is gratifying that the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”.33 The Prize, and the spotlight it cast on women in conflict zones, helped to emphasise the need to believe survivors while also focusing public attention on the particularly vulnerable position of survivors of sexual assault in war-​torn regions. I  began to closely follow the work of both figures after I witnessed the conditions in a crammed tent in Lebanon, packed with Syrian refugee women. These women had been raped and then abandoned in what some called the “tent of shame”.34 Since I first reported on this despicable label in 2017, volunteer psychologists have assisted the victims. Mental health, trauma, and rehabilitation services for refugees are still lacking, but there are ongoing efforts to meet this pressing need. In a survey I conducted in Saudi Arabia in 2001, I found that women were the harshest critics of other women.35 If a woman finds herself alone with a man and he violates, assaults, or disrespects her in any way, other women are often the quickest to lay the blame on their own gender. “She put herself in danger and only has herself to blame” was one of the most common responses to a scenario in which a woman entered a shop alone and a man assaulted her. The Quran is emphatic and unequivocal about the importance of protecting the dignity and self-​ respect of women, stating that one of the worst crimes is maligning a woman’s reputation.36 Patriarchy and the need to maintain the status quo in power hierarchies, however, override even religious injunctions, sometimes leaving women at the mercy of their own gender. Murad, a member of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq, was a witness to and a victim of war crimes by the terrorist group ISIS. Her story challenges the worst prejudices prevalent in societies around the world, not merely in the Middle East, but it is inextricable from Middle Eastern society’s readiness to blame victims rather than apprehend the guilty. Murad has recounted her story widely in the belief that doing so is the “best weapon against terrorism”.37 When ISIS launched a brutal, systematic attack aimed at exterminating the Yazidis in the villages of Iraq’s Sinjar district, hundreds were killed in Murad’s village, and young women were taken captive to be used as sex slaves. Murad, then 19 years old, was repeatedly raped. She was also threatened with execution unless she converted to ISIS’s warped version of Islam. After a three-​month nightmare of unimaginable horror, she managed to escape. The power of narrating stories of sexual abuse has fuelled the #MeToo movement, and the support of journalists in this regard has been integral to the traction it has gained. I have interviewed Yazidi women and others who have been sexually abused or, worse, made to continually relive the assault against them, alongside new violations, as sex slaves.38 What they all want, through the sharing of their stories, is dignity. “I want a revolution in how the world helps us. They are helping us just with food but we want ‘real’ help to be able to live in our homes in safety and with dignity”, Nuha Al Fihdawy, who was then a 25-​year-​old Yazidi woman from Bashiqa, said to me in 2015. She now lives in Erbil as a refugee. One survivor, who asked that her name be withheld, told me that she tried to kill herself after she was gang raped. “I felt like I was less than trash”, she said, and those words haunt me to this day. NGO workers arrived just in time to save her, but the deep psychic wounds within her are still there.39 An estimated 3,000 Yazidi girls and women have been victims of rape and other abuses by ISIS. The women (and even children and men) all share the same fears: of being recognised, of backlash from the perpetrators, their own families, and their communities. Murad has shown particular courage in speaking up about the horrors she suffered in the hope that others will be spared from the same ordeal. Perhaps one of the greatest revelations of the #MeToo movement in MENA has been greater understanding of the connection between reclaiming one’s dignity and being believed by those around you. In honour of Murad’s courage, we owe her, and 379

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all those who have suffered like her, the dignity of believing their stories, of not pre-​judging. We must dedicate ourselves to ending the deplorable way that women around the world are treated. Murad was made the UN’s first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. The fact that such a position has now been instituted speaks to the growing awareness of the harm done to survivors who are shamed instead of being believed. The significance of this position, and its first appointee, is global: MENA is not the only region of the world where victims of sexual violation struggle to speak up. Dr Christine Blasey Ford, who in 2018 testified in the US senate against then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, has inspired women around the world to speak up about their own stories of violations long buried out of fear or shame. The #MeToo movement has both benefited from and supported these two high-​profile cases from opposite ends of the world. More importantly, these cases, and others like them, broaden and strengthen the basic tenet and driving force of the movement: Believe the survivor. This simple call to action is the direct result of the millions of stories of sexual abuse that have been shared as part of the #MeToo movement.

On the cusp of change “A more peaceful world can only be achieved if women and their fundamental rights and security are recognised and protected in war.”40 This statement appears on the website of the Nobel Peace Prize. The question is: how do we get there? And the “how”, I submit, fundamentally lies in no longer doubting those who have shown courage in revealing the anguish they have suffered as a result of attacks against their bodies and souls. As a journalist who has covered honour killings, child brides and refugee bride kidnappings, and rape cases,41 it never ceases to astound me that these stories are so often rationalised with a shrug: “Well, she must have done something to deserve it.” In war or peace, in a refugee camp or a modern metropolis, blaming women must stop. That is the first step towards change. The next step is maintaining the momentum of the past few years and reforming systems that are inherently harmful to women. For instance, in the Arab world, leniency is shown to rapists who marry their victims; that legislation is changing in some countries. In Morocco, Article 475 of the penal code previously allowed rapists who married their victims to avoid prosecution. This law was repealed in 2014 when a victim committed suicide after she was forced to marry her rapist.42 Lebanon and Jordan similarly reformed their legal codes in 2017. That year, the Jordanian government reported 36 “justified” honour killings,43 leading to an amendment of the penal code which had previously specified less severe penalties for crimes committed in “fits of fury” —​honour killings commonly occur within families, when male family members kill their sisters or daughters for bringing “dishonour” upon the family. Tunisia’s legislative reform, implemented in 2017, is the most progressive in the region, mandating compensation and follow-​up support for survivors, while recognising that men and boys can also be victims of rape.44 In some countries such as the UAE, rapists can face the death penalty —​yet paradoxically, sex outside of marriage, or zina, is considered a serious crime, and some women who have reported sexual assaults have, as a result, been arrested themselves.45 It remains to be seen whether the momentum of these global #MeToo movements will be maintained. We can do no better than to heed the wise words of Al Saadawi: For me feminism includes everything. It is social justice, political justice, sexual justice … It is the link between medicine, literature, politics, economics, psychology, and history. Feminism is all of that. You cannot understand the oppression of women without it.46 380

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Notes 1 Elias Groll, “Egypt’s Awful Math:  99 Percent of Its Women Have Been Sexually Harassed”, Foreign Policy, 9 June 2014, https://​foreignpolicy.com/​2014/​06/​09/​egypts-​awful-​math-​99-​percent-​of-​its-​ women-​have-​been-​sexually-​harassed/​. 2 M. [Carsten] Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia and Other Countries in the East, Performed by M. Niebuhr, Now a Captain of Engineers in the Service of the King of Denmark, trans. Robert Heron, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Morison and Son, 1792), https://​archive.org/​details/​travelsthrougha00conggoog/​page/​n9. 3 Nawal El Saadawi, “Nawal El Saadawi Interview”, Interview by Joseph Mayton, Progressive, 12 December 2011, https://​progressive.org/​magazine/​nawal-​el-​saadawi-​interview/​. 4 “Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)”, World Health Organisation, accessed 17 May 2020, www.who. int/​reproductivehealth/​topics/​fgm/​prevalence/​en/​. 5 Faisal Al Yafai, “Joumana Haddad —​Writing Against Machismo and for Freedom”, National Newspaper, 22 September 2012, www.thenational.ae/​arts-​culture/​books/​joumana-​haddad-​writing-​against​machismo-​and-​for-​freedom-​1.391446. 6 Joumana Haddad, Superman is an Arab: On God, Marriage, Macho Men and Other Disastrous Inventions (London: Westbourne Press, 2012). 7 Manar Al Hinai, “The UAE’s Empowerment of Women is an Example for the World to Follow”, Entrepreneur, 7 March 2019, www.entrepreneur.com/​article/​329624. 8 Liz Cookman, “UAE ranks highest for gender equality in GCC, says Human Development Report”, National, 5 June 2018, www.thenational.ae/​uae/​uae-​ranks-​highest-​for-​gender-​equality-​in-​gcc​says-​human-​development-​report-​1.737261. 9 The UAE was the first Arab country to introduce a mandatory female presence in boardrooms. The government has called for women to occupy 50% of the legislature to “further empower Emirati women”. Ramola Talwar Badam, “Sheikh Khalifa:  UAE’s Federal National Council to be 50 per cent women”, National, 5 December 2018, www.thenational.ae/​uae/​government/​ sheikh-​khalifa-​uae-​s-​federal-​national-​council-​to-​be-​50-​per-​cent-​women-​1.800357. 10 In 2019, royal decrees issued in the kingdom stated that women can be granted passports and travel abroad without the consent of their male guardians and can also register a birth, marriage or divorce. “Saudi Arabia Implements End to Travel Restrictions for Saudi Women”, Arab News, 20 August 2019, www.arabnews.com/​node/​1542731/​saudi-​arabia. 11 It is believed that Prophet Mohammed held a special regard for mothers and often stressed the importance of women. He would remind his companions and followers to treat women well, and, most significantly, would include his daughters in important decisions. For further perspectives on the Prophet’s wives and their place in history, see Sayyid Muhammad Sohofi, “The Status of Mothers in Islam”, Al-​Islam, accessed 18 May 2020, www.al-​islam.org/​status-​mothers-​islam-​sayyid-​muhammad-​sohofi/​ status-​mothers-​islam; Rym Tina Ghazal, “Fathers, Daughters in a Relationship Close to the Heart”, National, 17 February 2011, www.thenational.ae/​fathers-​daughters-​in-​a-​relationship-​close-​to-​the-​ heart-​1.428015; Cayla Wagner, “Aisha: A Life and Legacy”, paper presented in 2015 at Eastern Illinois University, www.eiu.edu/​historia/​Cayla%20Wagner%20historia%202016.pdf; Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras, The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 62. 12 Rym Tina Ghazal, “Arab Women Wake up to #MeToo Movement”, Khaleej Times, 8 March 2018, www.khaleejtimes.com/​editorials-​columns/​arab-​women-​wake-​up-​to-​metoo-​movement. 13 “Most Dangerous Megacities for Women: 2017”, Thomson Reuters Foundation, accessed 18 May 2020, http://​poll2017.trust.org. 14 Thomson Reuters Foundation, “Sexual Harassment in Tahrir:  Testimony from Victims of Gang Assaults”, YouTube, 4 July 2013, video, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=Jed-​IYMC8Sc. 15 Brian Stelter, “CBS Reporter Recounts a ‘Merciless’ Assault”, New York Times, 28 April 2011, www. nytimes.com/​2011/​04/​29/​business/​media/​29logan.html. 16 “Egyptian Parliament Introduces Tougher Penalties for Sexual Harassment”, Cairo Scene, 1 January 2017, http://​cairoscene.com/​Buzz/​Egyptian-​Parliament-​Introduces-​Tougher-​Penalties-​for-​Sexual-​ Harassment. 17 “Amal Fathy: Egypt Court Imposes Jail Term Over Harassment Video”, BBC News, 31 December 2018, www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​middle-​east-​46720727. 18 “Egyptian Sexual Harassment Activist Amal Fathy Released”, Guardian, 27 December 2018, www. theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​dec/​27/​egyptian-​sexual-​harassment-​activist-​amal-​fathy-​released.

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Rym Tina Ghazal 19 “ ‘Not Your Habibti’: Palestinian Designer Seeks to Empower Women”, Arabian Business, 15 January 2019, www.arabianbusiness.com/ ​retail/​411337-​not-​your-​habibti-​palestinian-​designer-​seeks-​to-​ empower-​women. 20 Rothna Begum, “#MeToo, Say Domestic Workers in the Middle East”, Human Rights Watch, 8 December 2017, www.hrw.org/​news/​2017/​12/​08/​metoo-​say-​domestic-​workers-​middle-​east. 21 Faranak Amidi, “100 Women:  Muslim Women Rally Round #MosqueMeToo”, BBC News, 9 February 2018, www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​43006952. 22 Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy), “Being Sexually Assaulted During Haj”, Twitter, 6 February 2018, https://​twitter.com/​monaeltahawy/​status/​960701491328712706?ref_​src=twcamp%255Eshare%257 Ctwsrc%255Eios%257Ct wgr%255Eother. 23 Rayana Khalaf, “Women Are Speaking out About Being Sexually Harassed During Hajj”, StepFeed, 5 February 2018. https://​stepfeed.com/​women-​are-​speaking-​out-​about-​being-​sexually-​harassed-​ during-​hajj-​8156. 24 “Facts and Figures: Ending Violence Against Women and Girls”, UN Women, Arab States, accessed 18 May 2020, http://​arabstates.unwomen.org/​en/​what-​we-​do/​ending-​violence-​against-​women/​ facts-​and-​figures. 25 Anjali Jha, “Muslim Women Share Sexual Harassment Incidents During Hajj with #MosqueMeToo”, Indian Express, 11 February 2018, https://​indianexpress.com/​article/​trending/​trending-​globally/​muslim-​ women-​sharing-​their-​sexual-​harassment-​incidents-​at-​hajj-​has-​shaken-​up-​netizens-​metoo-​5058222. 26 “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2018: Announcement”, Nobel Prize (website), 5 October 2018, www. nobelprize.org/​prizes/​peace/​2018/​press-​release/​. 27 Aviva Stahl, “Controversy Over #MosqueMeToo Sheds Light on Sexualized Violence and Xenophobia”, Women’s Media Center, 19 February 2018, www.womensmediacenter.com/​news-​ features/​mosquemetoo. 28 ABAAD is a UN ECOSOC accredited organisation. ABAAD (website), “About”, accessed 18 May 2020, www.abaadmena.org/​about. 29 Rym Tina Ghazal, “The Struggle with the Stigma Associated with Rape”, Arab News, 1 January 2019, www.arabnews.com/​node/​1428896. 30 M. Cherif Bassiouni, “The Social System and Morality of Islam”, Middle East Institute, 24 January 2012, www.mei.edu/​publications/​social-​system-​and-​morality-​islam. 31 UN Women, “Facts and Figures”. 32 Sara McHaffie, “Victim Blaming”, Amina: The Muslim Women Resource Center, accessed 18 May 2020, https://​mwrc.org.uk/​victim-​blaming/​. 33 Nobel Prize (website), “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2018”. 34 Rym Tina Ghazal, “This Year’s Nobel Peace Prize Can Be the Catalyst to Ending the Blame Women Suffer for the Violence Done to Them”, Syndication Bureau, 30 October 2018, https://​ syndicationbureau.com/​en/​this-​years-​nobel-​peace-​prize-​can-​be-​the-​catalyst-​to-​ending-​the-​blame-​ women-​suffer-​for-​the-​violence-​done-​to-​them. 35 Joseph A. Vandello and Dov Cohen, “Culture, Gender, and Men’s Intimate Partner Violence”, Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2, no. 2 (2008): 652–​667. 36 Bassiouni, “The Social System and Morality of Islam”. 37 Nadia Murad, “I Was an Isis Sex Slave:  I Tell My Story Because It Is the Best Weapon I  Have”, Guardian, 6 October 2018, www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2018/​oct/​06/​nadia-​murad-​isis-​ sex-​slave-​nobel-​peace-​prize. 38 Rym Tina Ghazal, “Female Victims of ISIL Given a Voice in a Journalistic-​ Style Workshop”, National, 5 March 2015, www.thenational.ae/​arts-​culture/​female-​victims-​of-​isil-​given-​a-​voice​in-​a-​journalistic-​style-​workshop-​1.24125. 39 Homa Khaleeli, “Nawal El Saadawi:  Egypt’s Radical Feminist”, Guardian, 15 April 2010, www. theguardian.com/​lifeandstyle/​2010/​apr/​15/​nawal-​el-​saadawi-​egyptian-​feminist. 40 Nobel Prize (website), “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2018”. 41 Rym Tina Ghazal, “Brides for ‘Sale,’ ” Huffington Post, 4 January 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/​rym-​ tina-​ghazal/​brides-​for-​sale_​b_​2983806.html. 42 “Morocco Amends Controversial Rape Marriage Law”, BBC News, 2 January 2014, www.bbc.com/​ news/​world-​africa-​25855025. 43 Stephanie Miller, “Focus On: Honor Killings in Jordan”, Diplomatic Envoy, 30 March 2018, website discontinued, see archive: http://​web.archive.org/​web/​20180902172735/​http://​thediplomaticenvoy. com/​2018/​03/​30/​focus-​on-​honor-​killings-​in-​jordan.

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#AnaKaman — MeToo in the Arab world 44 “Tunisia Passes Historic Law To End Violence Against Women And Girls”, UN Women, 10 August 2017, www.unwomen.org/​en/​news/​stories/​2017/​8/​news-​tunisia-​law-​on-​ending-​violence​against-​women. 45 “Know Your Rights:  UAE Law”, Emirates Woman, accessed 18 May 2020, http://​emirateswoman. com/​know-​your-​r ights-​uae-​law/​. 46 Khaleeli, “Nawal El Saadawi”.

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#AnaKaman — MeToo in the Arab world Stelter, Brian. “CBS Reporter Recounts a ‘Merciless’ Assault”. New York Times, 28 April 2011. www. nytimes.com/​2011/​04/​29/​business/​media/​29logan.html. Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Most Dangerous Megacities for women: 2017”. Accessed 18 May 2020. http://​poll2017.trust.org. Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Sexual Harassment in Tahrir: Testimony from Victims of Gang Assaults”. YouTube, 4 July 2013. Video. www.youtube.com/​watch?v=Jed-​IYMC8Sc. UN Women. “Tunisia Passes Historic Law to End Violence Against Women and Girls”. 10 August 2017. www.unwomen.org/​en/​news/​stories/​2017/​8/​news-​tunisia-l​ aw-o ​ n-e​ nding-v​ iolence-a​ gainst-w ​ omen. UN Women, Arab States. “Facts and Figures:  Ending Violence Against Women and Girls”. accessed 18 May 2020, http://​arabstates.unwomen.org/​en/​what-​we-​do/​ending-​violence-​against-​women/​ facts-​and-​figures. Vandello, Joseph A., and Dov Cohen. “Culture, Gender, and Men’s Intimate Partner Violence”. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2, no. 2 (2008): 652–​667. Wagner, Cayla. “Aisha: A Life and Legacy”. Paper presented in Professor Brian Mann’s Islamic History class in the Fall of 2015 at Eastern Illinois University. www.eiu.edu/​historia/​Cayla%20Wagner%20 historia%202016.pdf. World Health Organisation. “Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)”. Accessed 17 May 2020. www.who.int/​ reproductivehealth/​topics/​fgm/​prevalence/​en/​.

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26 #METOO, THE LAW, AND ANTI-​SEXUAL VIOLENCE ACTIVISM IN KENYA K. Kanyali Mwikya, Judy Gitau, and Esther Waweru

The global #MeToo movement Ten years before the call was renewed in the wake of the shocking scandal implicating Harvey Weinstein, the #MeToo movement had been sparked in 2006 by Tarana Burke, a Black woman seeking to give voice to the experiences of sexual violence against Black women and girls in the United States.1 Famously, the movement raised awareness about the prevalence of sexual violence against women and its institutionalised form in society;2 and scholars argue that the movement has functioned as a form of consciousness raising, creating ways in which women see and respond to institutionalised, personalised, and widespread sexual violence.3 #MeToo has left a cultural, political, and sociological imprint around the world, with the biggest impact being felt as far as Europe, Central and South America, parts of the Middle East, India, China, Korea, Japan, and elsewhere.4 In this regard, recent advocacy against sexual harassment in particular, and sexual violence in general, can be broadly categorised as pre-​and post-​#MeToo with the pre #MeToo activism being borne mostly from egregious incidences of sexual harassment that resulted in assault or rape and the post #MeToo activism finding refuge, if not courage, in social media to express the pervasive nature of sexual violence in society. However, the “global” impact of the #MeToo movement obscures more than it reveals. For instance, although the #MeToo movement has left an indelible mark on the way many “Western” societies view the prevalence of sexual violence and the need to centre the large proportion of women who are subjected to it, it cannot be correctly assumed that the movement has had little or no impact in Africa.5 This assumption is linked to the way the “impact” of the #MeToo movement has been surmised: by the use of social media metrics (such as traffic and use of the #MeToo hashtag).6 Considering that many parts of Africa are characterised in this case by lower social media coverage, high cost of internet and related services, and social and political factors that may depress social media virality (such as, for example, censorship and backlash), it is unsurprising that the #MeToo movement had a different —​rather than a lesser —​impact on the African continent than in other regions. Additionally, the #MeToo movement’s approach could not be perfectly translated into all contexts and realities across the world. For example, many high-​profile accusations of sexual violence perpetrated by influential men developed into litigation to redress the act of sexual violence itself as well as to dismantle the institutionalised silencing (through the use 386

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of non-​disclosure agreements, for example) that undergirded the lack of accountability for these crimes. Considering the low uptake of social media among key constituencies (primarily women) needed to drive discussions on the prevalent nature of sexual violence as well as self-​ censorship by mainstream media on issues of sexual violence and women’s rights affairs in general culminating in a lack of confidence in the justice system among would-​be whistle blowers,7 the deck was stacked against women seeking to cultivate a homegrown version of #MeToo in Kenya and parts of Africa. This chapter seeks to provide a record of existing and emergent movements against sexual violence in Kenya in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the correlations that these movements have with other movements across the continent.

The #MeToo movement in Africa Women in Africa were already finding ways of discussing their own personal experiences in the context of institutionalised sexual violence in their communities. Indeed, the #MeToo movement not only provided a platform and space for the discussion of institutionalised sexual violence in Africa, it became a frame of reference for ongoing discussions regarding dismantling rape culture, sexism, and misogyny. The case of the #RUReferenceList, a list of credible accusations of sexual violence of known student perpetrators attending Rhodes University in South Africa, is instructive about some of the techniques that feminist student activists made use of in responding to institutionalised sexual violence and repeated refusals by the university administration to decisively tackle the issue.8 By accepting accusations of sexual violence anonymously, the #RUReferenceList provided a relatively safe space for victims and survivors to speak about their own experiences which were in turn amplified through associations with the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movement that gripped South Africa in 2015.9 The #Nopiwouma campaign in Senegal sought to contextualise the experiences of Senegalese women with institutionalised sexual violence along the lines of the global #MeToo movement. In this case, #Nopiwouma used #MeToo as a launchpad for discussions about sexual violence, taking into consideration the personal and familial risk women faced for making an accusation of sexual violence. According to the founders of the #Nopiwouma campaign, the anonymisation of accusations of sexual violence was integral to the campaign and a departure from the approach favoured by the global #MeToo.10 Although the #MeToo movement in the United States began as a way of raising awareness about the widespread and institutionalised nature of sexual violence, it developed into a movement that sought to dismantle the institutional foundations of sexual violence in that country. In order to do so, the US #MeToo movement had to change tactics by leveraging highly publicised accusations of sexual violence against powerful and well-​known men to push for legal reforms that had undergirded impunity, in this case the flagrant use of non-​disclosure agreements and other silencing tactics.11 Both #RUReferenceList and #Nopiwuoma focused on ways of preserving the safety of women who came forward with accusations of sexual violence while maintaining the core aims of the movements: to raise awareness about the widespread and institutionalised nature of sexual assault and to demand action aimed at dismantling the systems that entrenched this sexual violence in the first place. Kenya’s first glimpse of a #MeToo style media story occurred when a former employee of the tech firm Ushahidi came forward with credible accusations of sexual assault against the company’s head, Daudi Were. In the weeks that followed, a pattern of past abuses and impunity by Were uncovered, leading to his dismissal from the company. Although the story had all the elements of a #MeToo story —​a victim who came forward with accusations of 387

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sexual harassment, the uncovering of years of misconduct and impunity, and a powerful male perpetrator who was ignominiously removed from power for his behaviour  —​the story failed to catalyse deeper reflection about the widespread nature of sexual violence in the country. It has been argued that the failure of stories of sexual violence to expand to other industries in Kenya is a testament to the entrenched rape culture in other sectors and industries that have existed in the country for much longer. This is only partly true: this failure can also be attributed to the difficulty many Kenyans have relating to the background of the story. Most Kenyans are employed in the informal sector where protections for workers, especially women workers, are few if not non-​existent. The case of a young, educated, and middle-​class professional victim of sexual harassment failed to elicit the same kind of relatability that other #MeToo movements worldwide elicited. The failure of #MeToo-​ style movements and campaigns to take off in Africa, even in cities where citizens are more affluent and have more access to the internet and global socio-​political trends, is something that has been acknowledged about the #Nopiwouma campaign as well.12 In addition, deeply ingrained rape myths about women who “willingly” exchange sexual favours for promotions and other job prospects added to the scepticism that many Kenyans probably felt about the case.13 The Daudi Were case is instructive about the media dynamics that underpinned much of the #MeToo movement with women who came forward with accusations of sexual assault being typecast into roles that allowed the public to process and eventually support them.14 With Were’s accuser mostly kept away from the media spotlight, the frames with which international media had portrayed women who had come forward with stories of sexual violence could not be used in this case. As opposed to the Daudi Were case, #MyDressMyChoice was easily relatable to the majority of Kenyans who took public transport in a city where transport workers were infamous for their impunity, violence, and flouting transport laws. In line with persistent rape myths and other myths surrounding violence against women as well as liberalising attitudes about appropriate women’s clothing, the case was almost immediately characterised as one of unacceptable violence against a “defenceless” woman. Online, many Kenyans demanded the arrest and prosecution of the men who had carried out the stripping and, even though the police claimed that they could not make an arrest until a case was filed, they eventually arrested and charged two men with assault.

#MeToo and the recent history of women’s anti-​sexual violence activism in Kenya Sexual harassment in Kenya is as prevalent if not more so than sexual violence in all its other forms. A  2019 survey by Action Aid indicated that 74% of young women and girls aged between 14 to 21 years in Kenya had encountered sexual harassment in the six-​month period the study was undertaken.15 The 2014 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey found that 14.1% of women and girls aged 15 to 49 years had experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, with 7.8% having experienced sexual violence 12 months prior to the survey.16 Although laws exist to address sexual violence, the legal response to the widespread nature of sexual violence has been lacklustre. For instance, in Kenya, sexual harassment is construed within the limiting context of the workplace and public offices.17 By failing to criminalise sexual harassment outside the workplace and public offices, Kenyan law operates from the assumption that unwanted and unwelcome sexual overtures made outside these spaces are devoid of any power dynamic and therefore do not fall within the context of legal intervention. This assumption was apparent as early as during the reading of the Sexual 388

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Offences Bill in the Kenyan parliament in 2006, when male parliamentarians decried and sought to limit the bill’s intended “criminalisation of flirting and courtship”.18 This narrow framing of the law, however, has not hindered efforts by women’s rights activists to advocate for accountability for sexual harassment. Kenyan women have continued to organise around and agitate for the dismantling of rape culture and the way the law and society prop up perpetrators of sexual violence. In many respects, Kenyan women incorporated tactics and approaches honed during the #MeToo movement to express not only their disgruntlement with the status quo but also articulate how they wanted systematised sexual violence to be dismantled. In this regard, movements that sought to address sexual violence used online campaigning and awareness raising, litigation, and protest to place the fight against sexual violence firmly on the national agenda. We turn now to these campaigns and their impact on anti-​sexual violence work in Kenya. In the wake of a story about a woman who had been stripped at a bus station in downtown Nairobi, feminist and women rights activists in 2014 organised one of the biggest marches in the city’s history. The incident, which saw the woman publicly stripped and humiliated, led to a series of copycat attacks that were captured on video by the perpetrators and shared on social media.19 Dubbed #MyDressMyChoice, the protest movement sought to sound the alarm about widespread sexual violence experienced by female commuters as well as rebuke the patriarchal, sexist, and misogynistic beliefs that underlined the assault. #MyDressMyChoice was unique in that it was organised by members of Kilimani Mums, a popular women-​only Facebook group with more than 25,000 active members.20 In addition to the prosecution of the perpetrators of the assault, the pressure generated by the #MyDressMyChoice campaign led to a number of reforms, including the passing of a law that criminalised forcible stripping with ten years’ imprisonment upon conviction.21 Additionally, the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) adopted a new driving school curriculum for public transport workers that sought to better protect the safety of women and girls and was a prerequisite for vehicles issued with licenses to operate.22 The accountability mechanism for cases of sexual violence occurring in any single public service vehicle was reformed to create economically punitive measures that emphasised the seriousness of sexual assault.23 #MyDressMyChoice was a flashpoint for both online and protest activism and set the stage for the intervention of feminist and women’s rights activism in future campaigns and news stories relating to sexual violence. Taking place before the resurgence of the #MeToo campaign, #MyDressMyChoice sought, once and for all, to dismantle the notion that it was appropriate for men to forcibly and publicly shame women who were deemed to dress “inappropriately”. Part of the success of #MyDressMyChoice stems from evolving notions about bodily autonomy and personal choice heralded by the passing of a new constitution in 2010. However, #MyDressMyChoice was able to mobilise scores of Kenyans to demand policies and laws in place to effectively deal with this particular form of violence. On the heels of the #MeToo movement, localised actions emerged in response to sexual harassment in different public spaces and professional groups. For instance, Kenyan women journalists blew the whistle on widespread sexual harassment in the newsroom. A feature article and interview about the professional career of Amina Chombo, a renowned talk show host, exposed systematised sexual harassment, discrimination, and sexism in the news and media industry as having a profound negative effect on the career prospects of women journalists, which in turn had long-​term effects in the way news was reported and presented, especially when it came to women’s affairs.24 The article had been prefaced by an investigative story by South African’s Mail & Guardian which exposed pervasive sexual harassment in the news media industry. The Mail & Guardian piece revealed accounts of news and media executives 389

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demanding sexual favours in return for professional assistance or better working conditions.25 Through blogs and platforms such as Jambo News Network, women journalists blew the whistle on a festering problem within the journalism community. Not only did these forums help to expose systematised sexual violence in the news industry, they also served as rallying cries meant to organise women journalists who had experienced sexual harassment in the workplace and raise the consciousness of this group as having the agency to confront the problem.26 The use of blogs and specific forums outside of social media speaks to the different ways in which women organised to address sexual violence in the specific industries they worked in, an approach that characterised industry specific organising in the #MeToo movement.27 The April 2015 gang rape of “Liz”, a 16-​year-​old girl, once again reinvigorated women’s protest organising in Kenya, this time with international implications. A one million signature petition pushed the government to reverse its earlier lenient punishment to three men who had been identified by the victim.28 While pushing the conversation on the trivialisation of sexual violence by law enforcement, the #JusticeForLiz campaign also consolidated protest activism as a favoured tactic by women’s rights and feminist activists in the country. Protest has continued to be a defining feature of anti-​sexual violence activism by both feminist and women’s rights activists. Indeed, the #MyDressMyChoice campaign and its success in leading to policy changes by government has consolidated protest as a way of shedding light on emerging manifestations of long-​standing patriarchal beliefs, rape culture, and the justification of violence against women. This was evident in January 2018 when women admitted to the maternity ward at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi raised the alarm about sexual violence by hospital staff through a Facebook group named “Buyer beware”.29 Although the hospital administration dismissed the claims, hundreds of feminist and women’s rights activists held a day-​long protest, marching from the Ministry of Health building to the hospital itself, thereby triggering a probe into the allegations and the initiation of criminal investigations. However, unlike other campaigns which had led to the prosecution of perpetrators and law and policy reforms aimed at redressing the harm caused to victims and survivors, this particular campaign did not lead to arrests, prosecutions, or measures aimed at preventing future cases of abuse. This campaign therefore shows the limits of protest activism when feminist and women’s rights activists lack access to spaces where discussions and work towards institutional accountability take place. In this particular case, feminist and women’s rights activists were unable to leverage their organising and agitation (both online and offline) into deeper engagement on legal and policy reforms to combat institutionalised sexual violence.

Litigating sexual harassment in the #MeToo era Several cases have been decided in recent years that attempt to widen the jurisprudence on sexual harassment within and outside of the work environment. These cases have taken advantage of legal reforms instituted by the passing of the Employment Act (2014) and the Sexual Offences Act (2014). However, as discussed above, Kenyan law narrowly defines accountability for sexual harassment in the workplace and in relation to power differentials within relationships characterised by formal authority. Complex social and economic dynamics taking place outside these spaces are rarely considered. The passing of the Sexual Offences Act paved the way for legal reforms that took into consideration the needs of victims and survivors of sexual violence in Kenya. Although the law passed with controversial provisions that sought to criminalise victims and survivors who made “false” allegations of sexual violence, the provision (Section 38 of the Act) was repealed in 2012 after years of advocacy by women’s rights organisations concerned about the silencing effect 390

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that the provision had in a legal and sociological context where victims and survivors of sexual violence are already likely to be disbelieved. The Employment Act (2014) opened up spaces for employees who have experienced sexual violence in the workplace to seek justice in the country’s legal system. In the case of Lydiah Mongina Mokaya v. St. Leornard’s Maternity Nursing Home Limited the court noted the difficulty of proving sexual harassment and, in a departure from the approach favoured in the determination of these matters before the passing the Employment Act and Sexual Offences Act, applied the standard of probability test as opposed to the standard burden of proof test in coming to the finding that the claimant had been sexually harassed. The court also awarded damages of 600,000 Kenya shillings (approximately 6,000 US dollars). By recognising that sexual harassment takes place in circumstances where victims and survivors might not have access to stricter evidentiary standards, the court went on to decide in a manner that affirmed the rights of victims and harassers, departing from the handwringing that the judiciary engaged in prior to the passage of these laws. The Employment and Labour Relations Court’s holding in the case JWN v. Securex Agencies (K) Limited held that the false public accusation that the claimant had engaged in sexual conduct at her workplace amounted to sexual harassment within the meaning provided for by the Employment Act.30 This was further aggravated by the respondent employer’s failure to institute a sexual harassment policy as required by the Employment Act. The court observed that “the humiliation and harassment had a serious effect leading to the unfair constructive loss of employment as well as anxiety between the claimant and her husband”. The court further held that the claimant’s right to dignity as guaranteed under Article 28 of the Constitution was violated. The claimant was awarded damages of 1,000,000 Kenya shillings (approximately 10,000 US dollars), in consideration of her “humiliation, hurt feelings, loss of self-​respect, loss of dignity, loss of self-​ esteem and confidence, and her subsequent vulnerability at work and family levels”. In the case of CAS v. CS Ltd where the claimant disclosed that she was constantly sexually harassed by various staff members, including some who were in management and further explained that the lack of a sexual harassment policy on the part of the employer added to her frustration and harassment, the court found the employer liable for failing to have a sexual harassment policy in violation of the Employment Act.31 Similarly, in the case of SRM v GSS (K)  Limited & another, where the claimant disclosed that she was sexually harassed by an employee in top management and was dismissed after making her complaint, the court found the respondent liable for neglecting to investigate the claim expeditiously and impartially as required by the company’s internal procedures.32 The claimant saw a connection between the termination of her employment and her complaint against sexual harassment. In light of this, the court awarded damages of two years’ salary. In the cases highlighted above, the court incorporated a holistic approach that considered the power dynamics at play between employees and their employers. This not only related to the way in which sexual harassment occurred in such dynamics but also how these same dynamics had affected judicial decision-​making prior to the passing of the Employment Act and Sexual Offences Act. However, discussions by parliament during the passing of the Sexual Offences Act as well as the incorporation of provisions in the law that sought to criminalise “false” accusations of sexual violence point to ongoing contestations about how far the legal system is willing to go to accommodate the new wave of anti-​sexual violence activism in the country. The Tony Mochama case (Tony Mochama v.  Wambui Mwangi & Shailja Patel) is testament to the backlash that feminist and women’s rights activists have experienced in relation to raising the alarm or blowing the whistle regarding violence against women.33 In late 2014, 391

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Dr Wambui Mwangi accused poet and newspaper columnist Tony Mochama (the claimant) of assaulting Shailja Patel during an event held at Dr Mwangi’s house in September that year. In 2015, the claimant instituted defamation proceedings against the two. In its findings, the court held that both Dr Mwangi and Ms Patel had defamed the claimant and ordered them to pay 9,000,000 Kenya shillings (approximately 90,000 US dollars) and the claimant’s legal fees, as well as issue an apology to the claimant and refrain from continuing to make the accusations against the claimant. The decision sent shockwaves through Kenya’s feminist and women’s rights movement, especially considering the ramifications of the case for future instances involving victims and survivors of sexual violence publicly accusing their perpetrators. For instance, both Dr Mwangi and Ms Patel had reported the assault to the police within a week of the assault after grappling with the issue of whether to report cases of sexual violence in a country where the police routinely ignored and even retraumatised victims and survivors of sexual violence.34 By failing to consider that the defendants had engaged with formal crime reporting processes in addition to making their accusations public, the court effectively determined that, in the future, victims and survivors must exclusively engage with the justice system under penalty of damages for defamation. With this precedent, victims and survivors must essentially extrapolate their chances of securing a criminal conviction against the perpetrators they publicly accuse before making any accusations against them. Considering the low reporting rate for sexual violence, and the fact that victims and survivors of sexual violence often pursue extra-​legal avenues such as whisper networks to accuse their perpetrators of sexual violence, the Kenyan judicial system effectively raised even more barriers for victims and survivors seeking justice. Although the Tony Mochama case was initiated in 2015, the court’s decision, released in 2019, coincided with the legal backlash against women who had made public their own experience with sexual violence. For instance, in France, one of the founders of the #MeToo-​ styled movement in that country was found liable for defamation. Susan Muller, who had triggered the #balancetonporc (“expose your pig”) hashtag by speaking about inappropriate sexual comments that ex-​TV boss Eric Brion directed at her at a party in 2012, was ordered to pay damages and legal fees and to delete a tweet that accused Brion of harassment.35 In coming to its decision, the French court affirmed the argument that Brion had a “right to flirt” and took into consideration the fact that Brion had apologised when he was rebuffed by Muller.36 Both Tony Mochama and the Muller case illustrate some of the limitations of #MeToo style movements when it comes to challenging more structural and systematic aspects of rape culture, especially with regard to the ways in which the legal system continues to give men the benefit of the doubt. Additionally, the differences in the way the court awarded damages for defendants found culpable for sexual harassment in the work place and the award of damages in the Tony Mochama case may indicate that rape myths about victims and survivors who “lie” about sexual violence and the trivialisation of sexual harassment are still rife within the legal system.

Conclusion By providing a space for victims and survivors to speak about their experience of sexual violence, the #MeToo movement sparked worldwide conversations and approaches that resonated in communities that, on the face of it, seemed not to have a #MeToo explosion quite like the one experienced in the United States and other parts of the world. In Kenya, as was the case with some parts of Africa, the #MeToo movement invigorated the work of feminist and women’s rights activists to speak about and organise around their own experiences and contexts. In some cases, #MeToo provided a frame of refence and launchpad for local discussions while in other cases, as for instance, in the African countries discussed in this article, 392

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it provided an opportunity for activists and organisers to think critically about how anti-sexual violence movements were informed almost exclusively by local realities, trends, and dynamics. The case of Kenya shows the difficulty feminist and women’s rights activists face in terms of organising a viable anti-sexual violence movement without the mainstream and social media infrastructure that underwrote #MeToo in countries where the campaign was successful. Although Kenyan feminist and women’s rights activists have made use of protest to raise the alarm about institutionalised sexual violence, the consciousness-raising and critical organising among women and feminist themselves is yet to fully take shape in a way that leads to public acknowledgement that sexual violence takes institutional forms and is part of a culture of violence and discrimination against women. The legal backlash faced by Shailja Patel and Wambui Mwangi in the Tony Mochama case is testament to the fear victims and survivors of sexual violence have when it comes to publicly speaking about their experiences. Although the #MeToo movement led to a groundswell of testimonies that spoke to the institutionalised, personalised, and widespread nature of sexual violence, the movement struggled to consolidate the organising around this topic into longterm legal reforms. In countries like Kenya as well as other parts of Africa where social strictures on reporting sexual violence of any kind exist, this backlash was the main reason women hesitated to publicly come forward with their stories of sexual harassment. The fact that many African anti-sexual violence movements  — before and after the #MeToo global movement began — have continued to invest in longer term approaches to raise awareness should bolster hopes about the continued work that is being done to eliminate rape culture on the continent. However, there is a need for the continued honing of approaches and learning from other feminist, women’s rights, and anti-violence movements across the world, as part of the necessary work that remains to be done in this regard.

Notes 1 “History & Vision”, Me Too (website), https://metoomvmt.org/about/#history, accessed 27 February 2020. 2 Katharina Berndt Rasmussen, K. and Nicolas Olsson Yaouzis,“#MeToo, Social Norms, and Sanctions”, Journal of Political Philosophy 0, no. 0 (2019): 1–23, https://doi.org/ 10.1111/ jopp.12207 . ​ ​ ​ 3 Juliana Restrepo Sanín, “#MeToo What Kind of Politics? Panel Notes”, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 40, no. 1 (2019), 122–128, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/ 1554477X.2019.1563418 . ​ ​ ​ 4 Jesse C.  Starkey, Amy Koerber, Miglena Sternadori, and Bethany Pitchford, “#MeToo Goes Global: Media Framing of Silence Breakers in Four National Settings”, Journal of Communication Inquiry 43 no. 4 (2019) 437–461. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/ 0196859919865254 . ​ ​ ​ 5 Nita Bhalla and Inna Lazareva, “Why Africa’s #Metoo Is More a Murmur than an Outcry”, Reuters, 8 March 2019, www.reuters.com/article/ usdayafricametoofeature/ whyafricasmetoois​ ​ womens​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ more-athananidUSKCN1QP1VO . ​ murmur​ ​ ​ outcry​ ​ 6 Ying Xiong, Cho Moonhee, and Brandon Boatwright, “Hashtag Activism and Message Frames Among Social Movement Organizations: Semantic Network Analysis and Thematic Analysis of Twitter During The #MeToo Movement”, Public Relations Review, 45, no. 1 (2019) 10–23 http://doi.org/ 10.1016/ ​ ​ ​ j.pubrev.2018.10.014. 7 Fredrick Ombwori, Status of Gender Desks at Police Stations in Kenya: A Case Study of Nairobi Province (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2009). 8 Eliza Mackintosh, “The Me Too Movement Was Silent in Senegal.These Women Are Trying to Change That”, CNN, 12 December 2019, https://edition.cnn.com/ 2018/ 12/ senegalas​ ​ ​ 19/ ​ africa/ ​ ​ ​ equals​ ​ intl/index.html . ​ 9 Tanja Bosch (2017) “Twitter Activism and Youth in South Africa: The Case of #RhodesMustFall”, Information, Communication & Society, 20, no.  2 (2016) 221–232, http://doi.org/ 10.1080/ ​ ​ ​ 1369118X.2016.1162829. 10 Mackintosh, “The Me Too Movement Was Silent in Senegal”.

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K. Kanyali Mwikya et al. 11 Elizabeth Tippett, “The Legal Implications of the MeToo Movement”, Minnesota Law Review, forthcoming, https://​ssrn.com/​abstract=3170764. 12 Mackintosh, “Me Too Movement Was Silent in Senegal”. 13 Cynthia Wangamati, “Why Attitudes towards Sexual Violence in Kenya Need a Major Refresh”, Conversation, 22 July 2018, http://​theconversation.com/​why-​attitudes-​towards-​sexual-​violence-​in-​kenya-​need-​ a-​major-​refresh-​100033. 14 Starkey et al., “#MeToo Goes Global”. 15 ActionAid, “ ‘She Can’ Project:  National Forum  —​Dissemination of Baseline Survey Findings” (2019), https://​kenya.actionaid.org/​publications/​she-​can-​summary-​baseline-​survey. 16 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (2014). 17 Section 23 of the Sexual Offences Act (2012) Chapter 62A Laws of Kenya criminalises sexual harassment by holders of public office. 18 National Assembly Official Report: Wednesday, 26 April 2006, The Hansard, (accessed 27 February  2020). 19 Dana Regev, “#MyDressMyChoice:  Kenyans Hold Rally to Support Woman Beaten for Wearing Miniskirt”, Deutsche Welle, 17 November 2014, www.dw.com/​en/​mydressmychoice-​kenyans-​hold-​ rally-​to-​support-​woman-​beaten-​for-​wearing-​miniskirt/​a-​18069645. 20 #MyDressMyChoice: “How Women Fought Harassment in Kenya”, Transport Matters, 2 May 2018, www.itdp.org/​2018/​05/​02/​st-​mag-​mydressmychoice/​. 21 Section 14 of the Security Laws (Amendment) Act (2014) Laws of Kenya. 22 #MyDressMyChoice: “How Women Fought Harassment in Kenya”. 23 Section 15 (2), National Transport and Safety Authority (Operation of Public Vehicles) Regulations (2014). 24 Mgandi Ngala, “Sexual Harassment, a Challenge Media Women Face in Kenya”, Jambo News Network, 9 June 2018, www.jambonewsnetwork.com/​head-​on/​gender/​sexual-​harassment-​a-​challenge-​media-​ women-​face-​in-​kenya. 25 Njeri Kimani, “I Just Couldn’t Argue Back”, Mail & Guardian, 12 January 2018, https://​mg.co.za/​ article/​2018-​01-​12-​00-​i-​just-​couldnt-​argue-​back. 26 Florence Dallu, “Kenyan Women Journalists Confront Sexual Harassment in the Newsroom”, International Association of Women in Radio & Television, accessed on 27 February 2020, www. iawrt.org/​news/​kenyan-​women-​journalists-​confront-​sexual-​harassment-​newsroom. 27 Stephane Fortado, “Workplace Sexual Abuse, Labor and the #MeToo Movement”, Labor Studies Journal, 43, no. 4 (2018) 241–​244. http://​doi.org/​10.1177/​0160449X18809431. 28 Kashmira Gander, “Justice for Liz: Rapists Jailed for 15 Years Following Protests over Grass-​Cutting Punishment”, Independent, accessed on 27 February 2020, www.independent.co.uk/​news/​world/​ africa/​justice-​for-​liz-​rapists-​jailed-​for-​15-​years-​following-​protests-​over-​g rass-​cutting-​punishment- ​ 10174293.html. 29 Aggrey Omboki, “Outrage on Social Media over Rape Allegations at KNH”, Daily Nation, 19 January 2018, www.nation.co.ke/​news/​Outrage-​on-​Facebook-​over-​rape-​allegations-​at-​KNH/​1056-​ 4270106-​g9u9x2/​index.html. 30 JWN v. Securex Agencies (K) Limited [2018] eKLR, accessed 27 February 2020, http://​kenyalaw. org/​caselaw/​cases/​view/​153700/​. 31 CAS v. CS Ltd [2016] eKLR, Kenya Law (website), accessed 27 February 2020, http://​kenyalaw.org/​ caselaw/​cases/​view/​123783. 32 SRM v. GSS (K) Limited & another [2017] eKLR, Kenya Law (website), accessed 27 February 2020, http://​kenyalaw.org/​caselaw/​cases/​view/​135583. 33 Tony Mochama v. Wambui Mwangi & Shailja Patel (Civil Suit 399 of 2015) (Unreported). 34 Ombwori, “Status of Gender Desks”. 35 Angelique Chrisafis, “Woman Behind ‘French #MeToo’ Found Guilty of Defaming Media Executive”, Guardian, 25 September, 2019, www.theguardian.com/​world/​2019/​sep/​25/​woman-​ behind-​french-​metoo-​sandra-​muller-​guilty-​defaming-​media-​boss. 36 Madeline Roache, “The Woman Who Kicked Off France’s #MeToo Is Being Sued for $55,000 by the Man She Accused”, TIME, 30 May 2019, https://​time.com/​5598098/​sandra-​muller-​defamation/​.

Bibliography ActionAid, “ ‘She Can’ Project: National Forum —​Dissemination of Baseline Survey Findings”. 2019. https://​kenya.actionaid.org/​publications/​she-​can-​summary-​baseline-​survey.

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#MeToo, law, anti-sexual violence in Kenya Bhalla, Nita and Lazareva, Inna. “Why Africa’s #MeToo Is More a Murmur Than an Outcry”. Reuters, 8 March 2019. www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​womens-​day-​africa-​metoo-​feature/​why-​africas-​metoo-​is-​ more-​a-​murmur-​than-​an-​outcry-​idUSKCN1QP1VO. Bosch, Tanja. “Twitter Activism and Youth in South Africa: The Case of #RhodesMustFall”. Information, Communication & Society, 20, no. 2 (2016) 221–​232. http://​doi.org/​10.1080/​1369118X.2016.1162829. Bosch, Tanja. Twitter and Participatory Citizenship: #FeesMustFall in South Africa. In Digital Activism in the Social Media Era, ed. Mutsvaiiro Bruce. (London:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) http://​doi.org/​ 10.1007/​978-​3-​319-​40949-​8_​8. CAS v.  CS Ltd [2016] eKLR. Accessed 27 February 2020, http://​kenyalaw.org/​caselaw/​cases/​view/​ 123783. Chrisafis, Angelique. “Woman behind ‘French #MeToo’ Found Guilty of Defaming Media Executive”. Guardian, 25 September. 2019. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2019/​sep/​25/​woman-​behind-​french-​ metoo-​sandra-​muller-​guilty-​defaming-​media-​boss. Dallu, Florence. “Kenyan Women Journalists Confront Sexual Harassment in the Newsroom”. International Association of Women in Radio & Television. Accessed on 27 February 2020. www. iawrt.org/​news/​kenyan-​women-​journalists-​confront-​sexual-​harassment-​newsroom. Employment Act (2012), Chapter 226, Laws of Kenya. Fortado, Stephane. “Workplace Sexual Abuse, Labor and the #MeToo Movement”, Labor Studies Journal, 43, no. 4 (2018) 241–​244. http://​doi.org/​10.1177/​0160449X18809431. Gander, Kashmira. “Justice for Liz:  Rapists Jailed for 15 Years Following Protests over Grass-​Cutting Punishment”. Independent, 13 April 2015. www.independent.co.uk/​news/​world/​africa/​justice-​for-​ liz-​rapists-​jailed-​for-​15-​years-​following-​protests-​over-​grass-​cutting-​punishment-​10174293.html Hansard. “National Assembly Official Report: Wednesday, April 26, 2006”. Accessed 27 February 2020. https://​info.mzalendo.com/​hansard/​sitting/​national_​assembly/​2006-​04-​26-​14-​30-​00. JWN v. Securex Agencies (K) Limited [2018] eKLR. Accessed 27 February 2020. http://​kenyalaw.org/​ caselaw/​cases/​view/​153700. Kenya Demographic and Health Survey. (2014). Kimani, Njeri. “I Just Couldn’t Argue Back”. Mail & Guardian, 12 January 2018. . https://​mg.co.za/​article/​2018-​01-​12-​00-​i-​just-​couldnt-​argue-​back. Lydiah Mongina Mokaya v. St. Leornard’s Maternity Nursing Home Limited [2018] eKLR. Accessed 27 February 2020. http://​kenyalaw.org/​caselaw/​cases/​view/​160649. Mackintosh, Eliza. “The Me Too Movement Was Silent in Senegal. These Women Are Trying to Change That”. CNN, 12 December 2019. https://​edition.cnn.com/​2018/​12/​19/​africa/​senegal-​as-​equals-​ intl/​index.html Me Too (website). “History & Vision”. Accessed 27 February 2020. https://​metoomvmt.org/​about/​#history. National Transport and Safety Authority (Operation of Public Vehicles) Regulations (2014). Ngala, Mgandi. “Sexual Harassment, a Challenge Media Women Face in Kenya”. Jambo News Network, 9 June 2018. www.jambonewsnetwork.com/​head-​on/​gender/​sexual-​harassment-​a-​challenge-​ media-​women-​face-​in-​kenya. Omboki, Aggrey. “Outrage on Social Media over Rape Allegations at KNH”. Daily Nation, 19, January 2018. www.nation.co.ke/​news/​Outrage-​on-​Facebook-​over-​rape-​allegations-​at-​KNH/​1056-​4270106-​ g9u9x2/​index.html Ombwori, Fredrick. Status of Gender Desks at Police Stations in Kenya: A Case Study of Nairobi Province. Institute of Economic Affairs, 2009. Rasmussen, Katharina Berndt and Nicolas Olsson Yaouzis, “#MeToo, Social Norms, and Sanctions”, Journal of Political Philosophy 0, no. 0 (2019): 1–​23, https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​jopp.12207 Regev, Dana. “#MyDressMyChoice:  Kenyans Hold Rally to Support Woman Beaten for Wearing Miniskirt”. Deutsche Welle, 17 November 2011. www.dw.com/​en/​mydressmychoice-​kenyans-​hold-​ rally-​to-​support-​woman-​beaten-​for-​wearing-​miniskirt/​a-​18069645. Roache, Madeline. “The Woman Who Kicked Off France’s #MeToo Is Being Sued for $55,000 by the Man She Accused”. TIME, 30 May 2019. https://​time.com/​5598098/​sandra-​muller-​defamation/​ Sanín, Juliana Restrepo. “#MeToo What Kind of Politics? Panel Notes”, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 40, no. 1 (2019), 122–​128. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​1554477X.2019.1563418 Security Laws (Amendment) Act (2014) Laws of Kenya. Sexual Offences Act (2012), Chapter 62A, Laws of Kenya. SRM v GSS (K)  Limited & another [2017] eKLR. Accessed 27 February 2020. http://​kenyalaw.org/​ caselaw/​cases/​view/​135583

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K. Kanyali Mwikya et al. Starkey, Jesse C., Amy Koerber, Miglena Sternadori, and Bethany Pitchford, “#MeToo Goes Global: Media Framing of Silence Breakers in Four National Settings”. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 43 no. 4 (2019) 437–​461. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​0196859919865254 Tippet, Elizabeth. “The Legal Implications of the MeToo Movement”. Minnesota Law Review, forthcoming. https://​ssrn.com/​abstract=3170764. Tony Mochama v. Wambui Mwangi & Shailja Patel (Civil Suit 399 of 2015) (Unreported) Transport Matters. “#MyDressMyChoice: How Women Fought Harassment in Kenya”. Accessed on 27 February 2020. Wangamati, Cynthia. “Why Attitudes Towards Sexual Violence in Kenya Need a Major Refresh”. Conversation, 22 July 2018. http://​theconversation.com/​why-​attitudes-​towards-​sexual-​violence-​in-​kenya-​need-​a-​ major-​refresh-​100033 Xiong, Ying, Moonhee, Cho, and Boatwright, Brandon. “Hashtag Activism and Message Frames among Social Movement Organizations: Semantic Network Analysis and Thematic Analysis of Twitter during the #MeToo Movement”, Public Relations Review, 45, no. 1 (2019) 10–​23. http://​doi.org/​10.1016/​ j.pubrev.2018.10.014.

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27 CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON #METOO IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICA THROUGH AN AFRICAN FEMINIST LENS Tamara Shefer and Tigist Shewarega Hussen He wears a suit. He wears a uniform. He lives in a fancy suburb. He is homeless. He is wealthy. He is poor. He is queer. He is a cishet. He is in the church. He is in business. He is in corporate. He is in Parliament. He is the president. He doesn’t look like one. He is one. He sleeps next to you. He raises your children. He takes them to school. He teaches them at school. He does it at the school. He raised you. He is your father. He was raised by you. He is your child. He is in prison. He fears prison. He is given a promotion despite the “incident”. He is made associate professor despite the “allegations”.

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He is an allegation. He is talented. He is good at his job. He is an upstanding member of society He is a good guy. He is good to me. He does not look like one. He is one. He is an activist. He is a revolutionary. He reads the feminists. He says he is feminist. He posts woke material on social media. He is violent in the DMs. He leads the #notallmen brigade. He reads the bible. He says he is a man of God. He gropes you in the name of Jesus. He teaches with his door closed. His joke makes you uncomfortable. He is family. He is a family man. He does it in the bathroom of a restaurant. He pleads insanity. He has a mental illness. He is well travelled He is educated. He is privileged. He is on a construction site whistling at you. He is in his office undressing you with his power. He uses his power. He misuses his power. He upholds the mantra: boys will be boys. He is allowed. He is a longtime friend. He didn’t show any “signs”. He is embarrassed to be caught. He is embarrassed he was named. He goes unnamed sometimes. most times. He is not a ghost. He is not an allegation. He is not an isolated case. Him too. Him too. Him too. Him too.1 (Him Too, Koleka Putuma, 2018) South African post-​apartheid democratisation over the last 26  years has included a strong emphasis on gender equality and justice. Given the country’s high rates of HIV and gender-​ based violence (GBV), a focus on sexual violence has also proliferated within national policy, scholarship, and public imaginaries. Yet despite wide-​ranging efforts, South Africa remains

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characterised by high rates of gender-​based and sexual violence, homophobia and homophobic violence, and sexism and racism at multiple levels of society. The pervasiveness of sexual violence, and the “rape culture” that characterises post-​apartheid South Africa, remains a key concern and the focus of a growing body of research over the last few decades, especially by public health researchers and feminist scholars.2 Rape crisis and activist organisations have long repeated the statement that “one in three women” will be victims of sexual violence in their lifetime, and epidemiological researchers have provided statistical back up for this claim: physical intimate partner violence is reported by 25% to 40% of women;3 and 42% of men report having perpetrated intimate partner violence, while 28% report ever having raped a woman.4 Moreover, South Africa is currently ranked fourth highest globally in terms of the murder rate of women, and one woman is murdered every three hours.5 The entanglement of sexual violence with systemic violence embedded in centuries of colonisation and decades of apartheid has increasingly been foregrounded by scholars and activists.6 At the same time, while political and community action against sexual and gender violence in South Africa has a long history, the last five years have witnessed a particularly impressive proliferation of popular and mass-​based activism against sexual violence, as well as artistic and performative engagements that have extended into public terrains through the internet.7 While there have been hybridised feminist movements that make use of the internet to a certain level,8 it is fair to argue that local digital feminist movements against gender-​based violence, with a particular focus on rape and sexual harassment, became most noticeable during the #FeesMustFall student movement during 2015 and 2016. South African higher education institutions were put under the spotlight by #RapeMustFall, #RUReferenceList, #NakedProtest, and #TotalShutDown feminist online activism. All these hashtag activisms have directly impacted public perceptions around sexual assault and exposed “rape culture” in the country.9 #MeToo is one strand of this activism flagging the global challenges of sexual violence and harassment, but represents a relatively minor thread in a rich and complex tapestry of mobilisation against sexual violence in the context of contemporary South Africa. This chapter reflects on the uptake of #MeToo in the particular geopolitical context of South Africa as Global Southern, postcolonial, and post-​apartheid. We locate our discussion in a review of the small but growing local body of work on #MeToo and other forms of online and community-​based activism against sexual violence, within the context of widespread GBV and increased public mobilisation over the last few years. We explore the context in which #MeToo as a global movement “arrives” in South Africa, the already existing climate of activism, and the decolonial feminist activism against sexual violence. We look at the long history of such activism and the way in which #MeToo’s emphasis and methodology intersect with contemporary popular activism, both via online forms of engagement and mass mobilisation. The chapter thus attempts to read the impact of the movement through contemporary South African online and mass activism, acknowledging the value of globalised digital activism but also critically reflecting on the failures and gaps, and in some cases possible dangers, related to #MeToo in this context, which may resonate with Global Southern feminist concerns in general.

Local contexts of activism against sexual violence and #MeToo #MeToo emerged on the global scene at a time when activism against sexual violence in South Africa was already clearly mobilising public support across diverse communities in South African society. This activism was particularly bolstered by decolonial feminist and queer

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activism by students and young people in general as part of the Fallism movement that began in early 2015.10 As mentioned above, student protests with an emphasis on decoloniality have played a significant role in generating local feminist activism, specifically around sexual violence both on and off campus. The argument that a feminist, intersectional, and queer understanding of systems of oppression is key to the decolonial struggle has been widely articulated within the larger framework of student and public protest, and has also been expressed through a proliferation of art and performance against sexual violence and gender justice goals in general.11 Over the last few years, a diverse range of student and broader community mobilisation against sexual violence has been reflected in public events, marches, and online and media interventions, and indeed a proliferation of hashtag movements, including #RUReferenceList, #RapeMustFall, and #NakedProtest. From early 2016, the country witnessed a wave of activism against sexual violence at various universities. One significant example, of relevance since it deployed methodologies similar to the #MeToo movement, was the #RUReferenceList protest in April 2016 at Rhodes University. While protesting online using this hashtag, students mobilised through Twitter and other online methodologies to march in the streets of the small city around the university,12 calling on university management to revisit policies that they argued fail to protect rape victims. The protest followed the presentation of a list of alleged rapists, “the RU reference list”, to university authorities who had allegedly failed to respond. Women students leading the protests foregrounded embodiment by deploying semi-​nakedness as a strategy of both vulnerability and agency, with texts written on their bodies such as “revolt” and “still not asking for it”, thereby challenging the shaming of victims, victim-​blaming, and other rape myths which remain salient in South African contexts.13 These struggles and their methodologies were particularly instrumental in flagging the coloniality and racism of sexual violence and bringing an intersectional, decolonial, feminist, lens to sexual violence activism.14 The last two years have seen the proliferation of larger mass public displays against sexual violence, what some have called “the femicide spring”,15 with the #TotalShutdown movement’s marches in 2018 and 2019, also known as #AmINext? and #EnoughisEnough. Beginning in late August 2019, marches and public activism were ignited by the rapes and murders of University of Cape Town student Uyinene Mrwetyana and University of the Western Cape student Jesse Hess, resulting in widespread public and state engagement and sparking protests in other parts of the world such as Amsterdam and New York.16 This widespread activism, from universities to the streets of many cities, has greatly strengthened public consciousness as well as state commitments, at least on paper, to face the challenges of sexual violence and its embeddedness in the larger injustices and inequalities of apartheid and colonial South Africa that continue to shape environments of poverty and violence in general. In the highly racialised South African context where feminist discourse has been strongly associated with whiteness, the middle-​class, and the Global North,17 it is notable that young Black women and queer and trans people have been particularly active in leading the sexual and gender justice struggle, including the marches against sexual violence, in the decolonial movement.18 Also of note in considering the possible dialogue between local struggles and the #MeToo movement is that the very naming of these movements and activist events within the hashtag format is illustrative of the central facilitative and bolstering role of online strategic engagements.19 Scholars have documented the strong role of hashtags in local movements such as #ThatsNotOK,20 and #EndRapeCulture.21 Local movements have certainly benefited from African-​based feminist protests such as the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (2010), the Kenyan #MyDressMyChoice feminist campaign (2014), the Nigerian

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#BringBackOurGirls (2014) as well as global trends and models of online mobilisation further afield. However, it is not clear whether there is a relationship of causality or determination between them. Online mobilisation has certainly played a large role in accompanying and strengthening collective embodied activism, and indeed many campaigns have relied on the internet not only for advocacy, but also for communication and recruitment of people for planned activist events. #MeToo made an appearance in the South African context in late 2017, not long after the #MeToo Twitter trend and campaign,22 or its reiteration of activist Tarana Burke’s 2006 social media platform.23 The most well-​known local case and entrée of #MeToo into the local domain was the calling out of top South African sports administrator, Danny Jordaan, by Jennifer Ferguson, renowned as both a musician and left-​wing politician in South Africa.24 Following the wave of #MeToo, which until then had emerged locally primarily through media and other communications related to high profile cases in the Global North, Ferguson, now living in Sweden, describes in detail in her blog how she was raped by then-​colleague Jordaan, some 24  years previously. Another high-​ profile #MeToo case in South Africa emerged in April 2018, in which a number of South African women released statements about sexual harassment and violence at the hands of filmmaker Khalo Matabane,25 with one of the statements, by Rosie Motene, specifically using the #MeToo hashtag.26 Although none of the other statements specifically used the hashtag of the global movement, they were reported on the website of one of South Africa’s largest weekly newspapers, City Press, specifically under that hashtag. The statements were all released in April 2018, but there has been no additional information on further developments despite the fact that seven people made allegations against this high-​profile local man. There are clearly other pockets of #MeToo uptake up by South Africans, including a blog post by the South African chapter of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television which includes a poetic sharing of an incident from childhood. The blog begins with a powerful vote of confidence in the movement and its role in South Africa: The #MeToo movement has empowered women to reveal the global extent of gender violence and harassment, but revelation in itself does not create change. “Many of us feel powerless in all this”, says IAWRT South Africa Chapter head Makganwana Mokgalong.27 Some anecdotal evidence also suggests that young South African women are engaging in #MeToo forms of calling out rapists, such as those from some of the local Western Cape universities, particularly spurred on by widespread popular activism in response to the rapes and murders of women in 2019.28 Yet, despite not being taken up by many local South Africans as a primary vehicle for activism against sexual violence, and despite the many widespread local mobilisations against sexual violence in recent years, it seems that the #MeToo movement is currently viewed as an important force in South Africa and looms large in the public and some scholarly imaginary as a significant force within sexual violence activism. Not surprisingly, it has become commonplace to hear feminists in South Africa use phrases such as “in the era of #MeToo”, or “in the wake of the #MeToo moment” as a clear demarcation of a historical period, a trope which is also evident in the citation by Mokgalong, above. There have also been a number of local academic events which have specifically focused on the #MeToo movement and its impact in local and transnational contexts,29 as well as emerging pockets of funding directed specifically at the movement.

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Reflecting on the political and scholarly uptake of #MeToo in South Africa Notably, there is only a small amount of published scholarly material available on the #MeToo movement in South Africa. This may be because the “global” reach of the movement only really started in late 2017, so it is relatively new, although there are numerous articles on it in the international context, which seems to suggest this is not the case. Interestingly, the Pew Research Center notes that 29% of #MeToo Twitter posts were written in a language other than English, with Afrikaans making up the largest share of non-​English tweets (7%).30 Yet there is no scholarship or even public information about the Afrikaans use of #MeToo (or #EkOok, the direct translation) or the uptake of this movement in this language group in South Africa. Alternatively, it may be that the specific hashtag of MeToo did not “take on” as much here as in the United States and United Kingdom, for a range of reasons. These may include some of the critiques already articulated in global contexts as well,31 such as the wide range of overlapping and located activism already taking place as outlined above; the lack of access to mobile and online technology required (such as smartphones and data);32 the confidence, agency or sense of safety to make such public personalised call outs; and the lack of inclusivity given the dominant representation of #MeToo narratives from and in middle class, white, Northern contexts, and the dominant focus on white and/​or middle class women and victimisation.33 It may also be that the individualist methodology of the movement, the way in which #MeToo uses individual stories of pain, violence, vulnerability, and injury caused by rape and sexual violence, does not resonate in the context of South Africa, or other Global Southern contexts, where sexual violence is so powerfully entangled with structural violence of poverty, racism and other forms of inequality. And indeed, as has been shown, most of the current South African activism is framed in a decolonial and intersectional approach with a particular focus on dismantling neo-​colonial power that views women in the global South, in this case African women, as powerless.34 It is notable that much of current feminist scholarship and research on the #MeToo movement raises concerns with respect both to the global movement as well as its particular uptake in South Africa. Brajanac, for example, provides an interesting and lengthy discussion of how local activists and NGOs view the movement.35 The majority of respondents report using #MeToo in addition to other more locally based hashtags (#TotalShutdown, #MenAreTrash, #NakedProtests), which were mentioned in all interviews, and which participants “believe receive more attention than the #MeToo movement”.36 Participants of the study also questioned the relevance of #MeToo in the South African context because “its messages do not add something new to the issue of GBV”, while some reportedly refuse to take up the MeToo hashtag at all on the political grounds that it tends to focus on white women’s victimisation and lacks an intersectional lens.37 The author concluded that “the #MeToo failed to address the multiple struggles that Black and coloured women have to face, making race a fundamental aspect that has been neglected”.38 Thus, while South African scholars have acknowledged the opportunities opened up by the sharing of stories of sexual violence, the importance of global solidarities, and the way in which they work “to mobilise outrage, solidarity and action”, they have also raised a number of concerns.39 One key question has been about who gets to speak and whose voice matters. Locally articulated critiques about the way in which the movement is classed, raced, and reproduces a neoliberal individualism lacking intersectionality have mirrored some of the international arguments.40 For example, Desiree Lewis, adding to a growing critique of the neoliberal capitalist and attendant individualist underpinnings of the movement, notes that stories have been mostly told about middle class, professional, and high profile women, with emphasis 402

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on “their absolute victimisation, powerlessness, and vulnerability”. While not undermining the violence and abuses such women face, their relative power and agency is disguised, and “rarely in recent years has the South African media highlighted the horrific violence affecting women who continue to be coded as ‘dispensable bodies’  —​farm workers, domestics or migrant women”.41 Lewis also raises concern, reflecting global critiques, about the way in which the narratives shared in the #MeToo movement format tend to reproduce the binarism of victim and perpetrator, the “casting of accusers as victims or heroes, aggressors … through tropes of absolute villainhood”.42 Notably, this critique mirrors a growing body of work that highlights this narrative as salient in dominant research and practice on sexualities and sexual violence, particularly as directed at young people in local contexts.43

Critical concluding thoughts on #MeToo in South African contexts In conclusion, it is evident that the #MeToo movement does not seem to have been taken up in South Africa in the same way as it has been in some Western and Northern countries, either as a movement or as a scholarly engagement. As mentioned, it may be that similar digital activism was already in place, and so #MeToo had less of a ground-​breaking impact; or it could be the case that there is less social media reach in South Africa due to fewer people having access to smartphones and the social media apps where #MeToo was most prevalent. While other hashtag movements have been taken up in South Africa (#EndRapeCulture, #NakedProtest, #RUReferenceList, #ThatsNotOK, #TotalShutdown), there also does not seem to be one specific hashtag which stands out as more prominent than the others. Given its global successes and high-​profile cases, the #MeToo movement has undoubtedly played a role in local South African contexts, possibly adding weight to local calls for urgent action against widespread sexual and gender violence. The global presence of the movement may have brought some legitimacy to local online and material struggles against sexual violence, as the strategic use of the #MeToo hashtag in Southern African tweets shows.44 While it is impossible to measure the impact of the #MeToo movement on local movements or vice-​ versa, the shared use of online activism to extend, strengthen, and facilitate on-​the-​g round activism in local movements is evident. However, this may relate more to global shifts in communication and the increased dominance of virtual platforms than to the global reach of #MeToo specifically. We conclude by raising some critical questions, of relevance to any transnational feminist solidarity, about the global politics of the movement across continued global geopolitical inequalities, both material and scholarly. We are concerned here with the particular impact of the movement on local politics and activism, both materially and symbolically. Related to the claim that the movement may add legitimacy to local activism, one concern is the contrary possibility: the insidious impact of a global dominance of #MeToo may be to increase public resistance to local feminism and gender equality projects through the latter’s association with a white, Northern, Western conflation (a long trope in South African histories of feminism). In this way, what seems to be a superficial recognition of a diversity of voices and subjective experience in the #MeToo movement might leave feminist activists and scholars positioned in the global South with the burden of having to yet again legitimise efforts here through disrupting the assumption of “influence from Western feminist ideology”. A second concern that emerges is that of the erasure or obfuscation of local movements, both historical resistances and current local vibrant activism. In this way, an old colonial pattern of privileging Global Northern, Western knowledge and expertise may be repeated. Neither reciprocal and equal knowledge production collaboration, nor global solidarity is then achieved. 403

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Chikapa-​Chiporoa disputes #MeToo’s claims to global reach, arguing “that the movement is representative of Western feminist hijacking of African and African Diaspora movements and a white (feminist) saviour complex”.45 The author notes that the many localised hashtag movements in Africa, including South African ones, “specifically locate the movements in southern feminist activism and are consequently reflective of not only culturally relative but transnational counterpublic spheres”.46 In South Africa, it is of related concern that, despite the limited uptake of #MeToo at a popular level, it has been relatively dominant in the public and scholarly imaginary, which may negatively impact the larger politics around gender justice and against sexual violence in particular. It is troubling, then, that as much as #MeToo features intersectionality and transnational digital feminist activism, it also unintentionally overshadows and may undermine local feminist movements. As illustrated here, South Africans have seen a wide range of intersectional feminist activism against sexual violence that has been working against rape culture and sexual violence prior to #MeToo. Yet, reflecting recalcitrant power relations between Global Northern and Southern contexts, #MeToo is now widely represented as the defining feminist digital activism work globally. Even though it is commonly understood that the #MeToo movement emerged out of pre-​existing transnational feminist activism and scholarly work, its hyper-​visible current position as a global feminist movement, both in popular and academic discourses, makes it appear exceptional and novel. We argue that, together with neoliberalism and capitalism, the Global North continues to be seen as the “expert” on movement-​building, advocacy, and marketisation. Along with this comes diminishing awareness or recognition of knowledge transfer from the Global South to the North, so that histories and current contexts of Southern-​led movements may be erased from collective memory. Such dynamics may undermine and weaken local grassroots feminist movements against sexual violence in Global Southern contexts like South Africa. We need to be ever cautious that a global movement does not demand, even if inadvertently, the erasure of local historical and current activist work, which may have a negative impact on local activism. Thus, while in the world of digital activism #MeToo may be a unique feminist movement, especially because it has maintained its momentum beyond a year, from a Global Southern perspective there remain questions about the way in which the movement keeps its energy, and the political effect thereof. Finally, this analysis raises unease about whom the movement serves and whose lives and narratives are being represented, and therefore inadvertently promoted as “worthy” and grievable, which may also speak to questions about lack of uptake in South African or Global Southern contexts in general.47 While the movement has achieved some inclusion and engagement, its energy and visibility arguably remain dependent on famous and high-​profile narratives for public interest and impact. This was evident in the South African context too. We suggest that these nuances of voice within #MeToo may reflect and re-​entrench global inequalities and un/​privileges, in which certain bodies and lives are valued more than others. As we have argued elsewhere,48 the #MeToo movement —​rather than representing a global and intersectional challenge to sexual violence, the already ever-​present entanglements within the movement, of racism, classism, geopolitics of power, poverty, and so on —​may serve to re/​entrench and re/​produce the privileging and centring of some, and the dispensability and subalternity of others. Perhaps one of the most valuable opportunities that considering #MeToo as a global movement (or not) opens up is space to reflect on contemporary transnational feminisms, successes, failures, and possibilities. We need to continue asking questions about the extent to which global efforts at solidarity remain troubled by geopolitical inequalities, material and 404

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discursive, and relationalities of patronage through privileging particular knowledges and particular bodies. We suggest that the challenge for a global movement would be to find ways of strategically mobilising global, regional, and local resistances to sexual violences and their intersecting possibilities, while resisting an erasure of differences in power and privilege at multiple levels. It also remains imperative to find ways of sharing troubling narratives that are personal, located stories and yet do not reproduce the individualising and binary lens on sexual violence that may perpetuate raced, classed, and gendered representations that feminist activists and scholars have worked so hard to dismantle.

Acknowledgements We are indebted to Karen Graaff for wonderful assistance with literature and editing.

Notes 1 “Him Too”, by eminent South African decolonial feminist poet Koleka Putuma, was written and tweeted in October 2018 in response to the #MeToo Campaign. Koleka Putuma (@KPutuma), “He Wears a Suit…”, Twitter, 22 October 2018, https://​twitter.com/​KPutuma/​status/​1054268051187740672. 2 Pumla Dineo Gqola, Rape: A South African Nightmare (Auckland Parks: MFBooks Joburg, 2015). 3 Rachel K. Jewkes, Jonathan B. Levin, and Loveday A. Penn-​Kekana, “Gender Inequalities, Intimate Partner Violence and HIV Preventive Practices: Findings of a South African Cross-​Sectional Study”, Social Science & Medicine 56, no.1 (2003): 125–​134, doi.org/​10.1016/​S0277-​9536(02)00012-​6; Kristin L. Dunkle et al., “Gender-​Based Violence, Relationship Power, and Risk of HIV Infection in Women Attending Antenatal Clinics in South Africa”, Lancet 363 (2004): 1415–​1421; Rachel K. Jewkes et al., “Rape Perpetration by Young, Rural South African Men: Prevalence, Patterns and Risk Factors”, Social Science & Medicine 63 (2006): 2949–​2961, doi.org/​10.1016/​j.socscimed.2006.07.027. 4 Naeemah R. Abrahams, Rachel K. Jewkes, Ria Laubscher, and Margaret Hoffman, “Intimate Partner Violence: Prevalence and Risk Factors for Men in Cape Town, South Africa”, Violence and Victims 21, no. 2 (2006): 247–​264; Rachel K. Jewkes,Yandisa Sikweyiya, Robert Morrell, and Kristin L. Dunkle, Understanding Men’s Health and Use of Violence: Interface of Rape and HIV in South Africa (Pretoria: Medical Research Council, 2009). 5 Tom Head, “Femicide Rates: South Africa vs the Rest of the World”, South African, 4 September 2019, www.thesouthafrican.com/​news/​how-​many-​women-​killed-​south-​africa-​femicide. 6 Gqola, Rape; Floretta Boonzaier, “The Life and Death of Anene Booysen:  Colonial Discourse, Gender-​Based Violence and Media Representations”, South African Journal of Psychology 47, no.  4 (2017): 470–​481. Kopano Ratele, “Of what Value is Feminism to Black Men”, Communicatio 39, no. 2 (2013): 256–​270, doi.org/​ 10.1080/​02500167.2013.804675. 7 Herman Wasserman, “The Social is Political: Media, Protest and Change as a Challenge to African Media Research”, in The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa, ed. Bruce Mutsvairo (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 213–​224. 8 Bruce Mutsvairo, Digital Activism in the Social Media Era (New  York:  Springer International Publishing, 2016). 9 Tigist Shewarega Hussen,“ICTs, Social Media and Feminist Activism: #RapeMustFall, #NakedProtest, and #RUReferenceList Movements in South Africa”, in Engaging Youth in Activism, Research and Pedagogical Praxis: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race, ed. Tamara Shefer et al. (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 199–​214. 10 Amanda Gouws, “Young Women in the ‘Decolonizing Project’ in South Africa: From Subaltern to Intersectional Feminism” (paper, Nordic Africa Days Conference 2016, Uppsala, 23–​25 September 2016); Gouws, “Feminist Intersectionality and the Matrix of Domination in South Africa”, Agenda 31, no. 1 (2017): 19–​27; Gouws, “#EndRapeCulture Campaign in South Africa: Resisting Sexual Violence Through Protest and the Politics of Experience”, Politikon 45, no. 1 (2018): 3–​15; Hussen, “ICTs, Social Media and Feminist Activism”; Wanelisa Xaba, “Challenging Fanon: A Black Radical Feminist Perspective on Violence and the Fees Must Fall Movement”, Agenda 31, no. 3–​4 (2017): 96–​ 104, doi.org/​10.1080/​10130950.2017.1392786.

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Tamara Shefer and Tigist Shewarega Hussen 11 See for example, Katlego Disemelo, “Performing the Queer Archive:  Strategies of Self-​Styling on Instagram”, in Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa, ed. Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle, 219–​242 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019); Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle, eds, Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019); Tamara Shefer, “Activist Performance and Performative Activism Towards Intersectional Gender and Sexual Justice in Contemporary South Africa”, International Sociology 34, no. 4 (2019): 418–​434. 12 See Gouws, “#EndRapeCulture”; Catriona Macleod and Kim Barker, “Angry Student Protests Have Put Rape Back on South Africa’s Agenda”, Conversation, 26 April 2016, http://​theconversation.com/​ angry-​student-​protests-​have-​put-​rape-​back-​on-​south-​africas-​agenda-​58362. 13 Hussen, “ICTs, Social Media and Feminist Activism”. 14 Gouws, “Young Women”; Gouws, “Feminist Intersectionality”; Shose Kessi and Floretta Boonzaier, “All #Rhodes Lead to Transformation”, Mail & Guardian Online, 28 May 2015, http://​mg.co.za/​article/​ 2015-​05-​21-​all-​rhodes-​lead-​to-​enlightenment; Tamara Shefer, “Embodied Pedagogies: Performative Activism and Transgressive Pedagogies in the Sexual and Gender Justice Project in Higher Education in Contemporary South Africa”, in Socially Just Pedagogies:  Posthumanist, Feminist and Materialist Perspectives in Higher Education, ed. Vivienne Bozalek et al. (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 171–​188; Xaba, “Challenging Fanon”. 15 Bev Foss, “Our Femicide Spring:  The Fight-​Back Has Begun”, News24, accessed 11 June 2020, https://​aminext.news24.com/​Our-​Femicide-​Spring-​-​The-​fight-​back-​has-​begun/​index.html. 16 “#Am I Next? A Global Question”, SA History Online, 2 April 2020, www.sahistory.org.za/​article/​ am-​i-​next-​global-​question. 17 Simidele Dosekun, “Defending Feminism in Africa”, Postamble 3, no.  1 (2007):  41–​47. Gouws, “Young Women”. 18 Gouws, “Young Women”; Gouws, “Feminist Intersectionality”. 19 Hussen, “ICTs, Social Media and Feminist Activism”. 20 Queenin Masuabi and Canny Maphanga, “Exclusive:  SA’s Own ‘Weinstein Culture’ Has Women (and Men) Speaking Out about Sex Abuse in Film/​TV Industry”, Huffington Post, 31 May 2018, www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/​2018/​05/​31/​a-​tortoise-​gets-​more-​protection-​on-​set-​than-​women-​do_​ a_​23447509/​?guccounter=1. 21 Gouws, “#EndRapeCulture”, who also mentions #RUReferenceList and #NakedProtest. 22 Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller, “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture Through Digital Feminist Activism”, European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no.  2 (2018):  236–​246; Angela Onwuachi-​Willig, “What About #UsToo:  The Invisibility of Race in the #MeToo Movement”, Yale Law Journal, 18 June 2018, www.yalelawjournal.org/​forum/​ what-​about-​ustoo; Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualization of Culture’ to #MeToo”, Sexualities 21, no. 8 (2018): 1313–​1324. 23 While #MeToo scholars acknowledge the discrepancy around the roots of the campaign alluding to the story of African-​American women’s right activist Tarana Burke who coined the phrase “Me Too” in 2006, it is notable that little more than an acknowledgement of this is made and little effort is taken to unravel the role that Burke’s MySpace page, at the time the most popular social networking space, might have played regarding activism and support, and its connection with contemporary mobilisation. 24 Jennifer Ferguson, “#Metoo: One Night in PE”, Jennifer Ferguson Journals (blog), 18 October 2017, https://​jenniferkestisferguson.blogspot.com/​2017/​10/​metoo-​one-​night-​in-​pe.html?spref=fb. 25 Charl Blignaut and Rhodé Marshall, “Khalo Matabane:  Women Speak Out”, City Press, 29 April 2018, https://​city-​press.news24.com/​News/​khalo-​matabane-​women-​speak-​out-​20180429; Blignaut and Marshall, “Film Director Raped Me”, City Press, 20 May 2018, https://​city-​press.news24. com/​News/​film-​director-​raped-​me-​20180519; Palesa Letlaka, “Palesa Letlaka’s Open Letter to Khalo Matabane”, City Press, 29 April 2018, https://​city-​press.news24.com/​Voices/​palesa-​ letlakas-​open-​letter-​to-​khalo-​matabane-​20180428. 26 Rosie Motene, “Rosie Motene’s #MeToo Statement”, City Press, 29 April 2018, https://​city-​press. news24.com/​Voices/​rosie-​motenes-​metoo-​statement-​20180429. 27 Mantedieng Mamabolo, “Mantedieng Mamabolo’s #Me Too”, International Association of Women in Radio & Television, 16 October 2017, https://​iawrt.org/​news/​metoo-​south-​africa. 28 Dave Chambers, “Live Shots Fired as UWC Students Target Alleged Rapists in Residence”, Times Live, 4 September 2019, www.timeslive.co.za/​news/​south-​africa/​ 2019-​09-​04-​shots-​fired-​as-​uwc-​students-​target-​alleged-​rapists-​in-​residence.

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#MeToo in contemporary South Africa 29 A colloquium entitled “Intimacy and Injury: In the Wake of #Metoo in India and South Africa” was held at Wits University, Johannesburg, 14–​15 February 2019. 30 Monica Anderson and Skye Toor, “How Social Media Users Have Discussed Sexual Harassment since #MeToo Went Viral”, Pew Research Center, 11 October 2018, www.pewresearch.org/​fact-​tank/​2018/​ 10/​11/​how-​social-​media-​users-​have-​discussed-​sexual-​harassment-​since-​metoo-​went-​viral. 31 See for example, Ritty Lukose, “Decolonizing Feminism in the #MeToo Era”, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36, no. 2 (2018): 34–​52. 32 Titilope F. Ajayi, “#MeToo, Africa and the Politics of Transnational Activism”, Africa Is A Country, 7 June 2018, https://​africasacountry.com/​2018/​07/​metoo-​africa-​and-​the-​politics-​of-​transnational-​activism. 33 Ajayi, “#MeToo, Africa and the Politics of Transnational Activism”; Amina Brajanac, “Addressing Intersectionality in the #MeToo Movement”, (MA thesis, Gothenburg University, Department of Political Science, 2019); Rosemary Chikafa-​Chipiro, “Racialisation and Imagined Publics in Southern Feminisms’ Solidarities”, Agenda 33, no. 3 (2019): 8–​18, doi.org/​10.1080/​10130950.2019.1683459; Desiree Lewis, “The Politics and Ethics of #MeToo in South Africa” (paper, Intimacy & Injury: In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa, Wits Club, University of the Witwatersrand, 14–​ 15 February 2019); Tigist Shewarega Hussen and Tamara Shefer. “#MeToo Through a Decolonial Feminist Lens: Critical Reflections on Transnational Online Activism Against Sexual Violence”, in New Tools for Transnational Analysis in Intersectional Feminist Research, ed. Swati Arora et al. (New York and London: Routledge, in press). 34 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “  ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited:  Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 2 (2003): 499–​535. 35 Brajanac, “Addressing Intersectionality”. 36 Brajanac, “Addressing Intersectionality”, 42. 37 Brajanac, “Addressing Intersectionality”, 41. 38 Brajanac, “Addressing Intersectionality”, 51–​52. 39 Lewis, “The Politics and Ethics of #MeToo in South Africa”. 40 See for example Lewis “The Politics and Ethics of #MeToo in South Africa”; Hussen and Shefer, “#MeToo Through a Decolonial Feminist Lens”. 41 Lewis, “The Politics and Ethics of #MeToo in South Africa”. 42 Lewis, “The Politics and Ethics of #MeToo in South Africa”. 43 See for example, Deevia Bhana, “Gendering the Foundation: Teaching Sexuality amid Sexual Danger and Gender Inequalities”, Perspectives in Education 33, no. 2 (2015): 77–​89; Deevia Bhana and Rob Pattman, “Researching South African Youth, Gender and Sexuality Within the Context of HIV/​ Aids”, Development 52 no. 1 (2009): 68–​74; Tamara Shefer, “Resisting the Binarism of Victim and Agent: Critical Reflections on 20 Years of Scholarship on Young Women and Heterosexual Practices in South African Contexts”, Global Public Health 11, no.  1–​2 (2016):  211–​223, doi.org/​10.1080/​ 17441692.2015.1029959. 44 Hussen and Shefer, “#MeToo Through a Decolonial Feminist Lens”. 45 Chikafa-​Chiporo, “Racialisation”, 15. 46 Chikafa-​Chiporo, “Racialisation”, 15. 47 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004). 48 Hussen and Shefer, “#MeToo Through a Decolonial Feminist Lens”.

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#MeToo in contemporary South Africa Kessi, Shose, and Floretta Boonzaier. “All #Rhodes Lead to Transformation”. Mail & Guardian Online, 28 May 2015. http://​mg.co.za/​article/​2015-​05-​21-​all-​rhodes-​lead-​to-​enlightenment. Letlaka, Palesa. “Palesa Letlaka’s Open Letter to Khalo Matabane”. City Press, 29 April 2018. https://​city-​ press.news24.com/​Voices/​palesa-​letlakas-​open-​letter-​to-​khalo-​matabane-​20180428. Lewis, Desiree. “The Politics and Ethics of #MeToo in South Africa”. Paper presented at Intimacy & Injury: In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa, Wits Club, University of the Witwatersrand, 14–​15 February 2019. Lukose, Ritty. “Decolonizing Feminism in the #MeToo Era”. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36, no. 2 (2018): 34–​52. Macleod, Catriona, and Kim Barker. “Angry Student Protests Have Put Rape Back on South Africa’s Agenda”. Conversation, 26 April 2016. http://​theconversation.com/​angry-​student-​protests-​have-​ put-​rape-​back-​on-​south-​africas-​agenda-​58362. Mamabolo, Mantedieng. “Mantedieng Mamabolo’s #MeToo”. International Association of Women in Radio & Television, 16 October 2017. https://​iawrt.org/​news/​metoo-​south-​africa. Masuabi, Queenin, and Canny Maphanga. “Exclusive: SA’s Own ‘Weinstein Culture’ Has Women (and Men) Speaking Out about Sex Abuse in Film/​TV Industry”. Huffington Post, 31 May 2018. www. huffingtonpost.co.uk/​2018/​05/​31/​a-​tortoise-​gets-​more-​protection-​on-​set-​than-​women-​do_​a_​ 23447509/​?guccounter=1. Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller. “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture Through Digital Feminist Activism”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 236–​246. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 2 (2003): 499–​535. Motene, Rosie. “Rosie Motene’s #MeToo Statement”. City Press, 29 April 2018. https://​city-​press. news24.com/​Voices/​rosie-​motenes-​metoo-​statement-​20180429. Mutsvairo, Bruce. Digital Activism in the Social Media Era. New York: Springer International Publishing,  2016. Onwuachi-​Willig, Angela. “What About #UsToo: The Invisibility of Race in the #MeToo Movement”. Yale Law Journal, 18 June 2018. www.yalelawjournal.org/​forum/​what-​about-​ustoo. Pather, Jay, and Catherine Boulle, eds. Acts of Transgression:  Contemporary Live Art in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019. Putuma, Koleka (@KPutuma). “He Wears a Suit. He Wears a Uniform. He Lives in a Fancy Suburb …”. Twitter, 22 October 2018. https://​twitter.com/​KPutuma/​status/​1054268051187740672. Ratele, Kopano. “Of what Value is Feminism to Black Men”. Communicatio 39, no. 2 (2013): 256–​270. doi.org/​10.1080/​02500167.2013.804675. SA History Online. “#Am I next? A Global Question”. SA History Online, 2 April 2020. www.sahistory. org.za/​article/​am-​i-​next-​global-​question. Shefer, Tamara. “Resisting the Binarism of Victim and Agent:  Critical Reflections on 20 Years of Scholarship on Young Women and Heterosexual Practices in South African Contexts”. Global Public Health 11 no. 1–​2 (2016): 211–​223, doi.org/​10.1080/​17441692.2015.1029959. Shefer, Tamara. “Embodied Pedagogies:  Performative Activism and Transgressive Pedagogies in the Sexual and Gender Justice Project in Higher Education in Contemporary South Africa”. In Socially Just Pedagogies:  Posthumanist, Feminist and Materialist Perspectives in Higher Education. Edited by Vivienne Bozalek, Rosi Braidotti, Tamara Shefer, and Michalinos Zembylas, 171–​188. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Shefer, Tamara. “Activist Performance and Performative Activism Towards Intersectional Gender and Sexual Justice in Contemporary South Africa”. International Sociology 34, no. 4 (2019): 418–​434. Wasserman, Herman. “The Social is Political: Media, Protest and Change as a Challenge to African Media Research”. In The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa. Edited by Bruce Mutsvairo, 213–​224. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Xaba, Wanelisa. “Challenging Fanon: A Black Radical Feminist Perspective on Violence and the Fees Must Fall Movement”. Agenda 31, no. 3–​4 (2017): 96–​104. doi.org/​10.1080/​10130950.2017.1392786.

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28 #METOO ARGENTINA A protest movement in progress Marifran Carlson

There is a deep and rich history of public protests in Latin America. These include dramatic nation-​wide general strikes, public transportation stoppages, and chaotic, often violent, street demonstrations. Mass mobilisations of agricultural laborers, the displaced and unemployed, and victims of human rights abuses occur so frequently because large protests appear to be the only way for dissident groups to make their voices heard. Latin America’s ruling elites are notoriously unresponsive to the chronic problems of poverty, social injustice and gender discrimination. Groups opposing unstable democracies, military dictatorships, and corrupt authoritarian governments depend on public manifestations of broad popular support to bring about change. Levels of economic and social equality are rising in Latin America today, and so is the rate of violent crimes against women.1 Modernisation, urbanisation, and integration into the global economy is no guarantee that women will be more protected from sexual violence than they were in previous decades.2 There is a kind of social backlash against women’s empowerment and the economic independence, social freedom, and geographic mobility she may acquire through educational opportunities or work achievements. In some cases, violence occurs because men feel threatened by changing gender roles. Perpetrators are rarely punished for violent assaults against their partners.3 In a legal and social environment of male impunity, it is a fact that being female is becoming increasingly more dangerous in Latin America. For example, in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, there were 27 femicides in January 2019.4 A  woman died almost every day for committing the crime of being a woman. The dual goals of preventing sexual abuse and punishing violent crimes against women have been on the feminist agenda in Latin America since the end of the nineteenth century.5 Middle and upper class progressive and democratic socialist professional women led a small feminist vanguard dedicated to civil code reform and women’s suffrage in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.6 For most Latin American feminists, the causes of violence against women have always been based on a political and structural analysis that sees violence as one component of a general societal system that is connected to economic and political oppression.7 That is why advocates of improved conditions for women at work and in their domestic lives are usually connected to a political party or a national populist movement whose charismatic leader or leaders promise to, and, occasionally do actually deliver general social and economic reform.8 In Argentina, poor and working-​class women look to Peronist candidates at election time because those politicians

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are the only ones who address themselves directly to the economic and social needs of the 35% of the population that live in poverty.9 The authoritarian tendencies of President Juan Perón (1946–​1955, 1973–​1974) notwithstanding, Perón, with the assistance of his charismatic wife, Eva, produced concrete economic, political, social, and economic improvements for women, including the enactment of women’s suffrage in 1947.10 While all their goals may not have been achieved, the majority of Argentine women believe they are better off supporting a centre-​left brand of populism than waiting for the traditional political establishment to address their needs. (The presidency of the Centre-​Right Mauricio Macri (2015–​2019) can be seen as an exception because Macri promised to stabilise Argentina’s fragile democracy and economy and to put an end to rampant government corruption.) In this section, I  take a brief look at current feminist activism in Latin America before turning to the specific case of Argentina. Women’s movements have long tried to convince governments to protect women from domestic violence in their homes and sexual abuse in the workplace. The slow progress in building multi-​class coalitions to support these goals continues to be frustrating. A general apathy about systematic sexism is compounded by overwhelming political and economic chaos that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to organise in order to accomplish gender-​specific goals. This discouraging situation is starting to improve, although the cruel and pervasive isolation of millions of abused women is far from over. However, many have begun to listen to the anguished voices of persecuted and angry victims. In the last few years, escalating reports of rape assaults and femicides in all Latin American countries resulted in an explosive outcry and an escalation of mobilisation efforts; millions of people from every social class have participated in street demonstrations and marches to protest all forms of sexual abuse. Since 2015, social media networks have been the most important organising tool for women’s protest movements. #MeToo, with its hundreds of variants, arrived in Latin America before the Hollywood scandals in the United States. The Latin American version of the global #MeToo phenomenon is not a single entity but a manifestation of many different political movements and social outlooks.11 #MeToo is now one of the many popular hashtags used to denounce violence against women. In Latin America, a new generation of energetic and tenacious female activists uses social media to protest gender-​based discrimination and all forms of sexual abuse. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram (and other platforms) urge women to either publicly or anonymously denounce their past and current abusers and to refuse to accept the frequent victim-​blaming responses to their pleas for justice. Feminist leaders also use #MeToo style hashtags as organising tools to unite individuals and existing women’s organisations in order to participate in public protests denouncing business and government employers who systematically abuse their employees. These organisations also use these social media platforms as tools to publicise individual cases of violent crimes like rape and femicide. Feminist activists demand that anti-​female violence laws already on the books are enforced and they seek to enact new legislation that would guarantee a woman’s safety in the home and on the streets. Social media campaigns are educating the general public about the ways in which “machismo culture”, the attitude of male superiority and dominance, fuels increasing violence against women. In Chile, female university students use Twitter hashtags like #NiUnaMas (Not One More Woman) to protest inadequate protocols for dealing with discrimination and sexual abuse by professors in the national educational system.12 In Mexico, television journalists and actors lead a #MeToo campaign that challenges the powerful entertainment establishment’s tolerance of sexual harassment.13 One tactic used in Peru, Argentina, and Chile is to occupy public buildings and churches to publicise the way governments and cultural institutions tolerate and even

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support sexual crimes against women. In Argentina there are frequent escraches, public shamings, which serve to “out” alleged sexual predators.14 In Brazil, women have become fed up with constant sexual harassment in their homes, on the streets and in their workplaces.15 In 2015, disgruntled women started #MeuPrimeiroAssedio (My First Assault) to tell their stories of abuse. Two days after the hashtag had been posted, they received 82,000 tweets detailing the chronic sexual harassment of women in their country.16 This unprecedented event drew continent-​wide media attention and spread rapidly, first to Colombia and then to Argentina, where the Spanish language equivalent, #MiPrimeroAcoso, is now a popular vehicle for making harassment complaints. It goes without saying that these kinds of social media campaigns do not garner the support of everyone because not everyone is in agreement about what sexual harassment actually is. While Mauricio Macri was mayor of Buenos Aires (2007–​2010) and later, while he was running for the Argentine presidency in 2014, he was often asked to comment about complaints against the custom of giving “piropos” (compliments) to women on the streets of Buenos Aires. In a radio interview in 2014 he stated that “all women like cat-​calls”.17 Even when he apologised to his own daughter, who criticised him for this remark, he said he still just didn’t understand why a woman would not want to be complimented for her beauty and sex appeal. During his presidency, Macri’s sexist statements were frequent and reflected a lack of sensitivity to the increasing anger of his feminist critics.18 Argentine politicians and male celebrities decry any kind of violent assault on any female, but simultaneously advise women to get a sense of humour, and stop complaining and trying to destroy Argentine culture. Victims of sexual discrimination are called weak “cry-​babies”, who are not tough enough or strong enough to cope.19 Feminist leaders are accused of pushing a “pro-​lesbian” and transgender ideology onto “confused” young people —​a less than subtle reference to the sexual orientation of some of the feminist leaders in Buenos Aires. Cecilia Palmeiro, a prominent feminist activist, is an internationally known Queer theorist and is one of those responsible for insisting on the inclusion of the LGBTQ organisations in a broad anti-​violence feminist movement.20 The traditionalist and insulting backlash against feminists like her and feminism in general is, perhaps, understandable. More than any other country in Latin America, Argentina is the place in which women’s movements social media driven campaigns are having the greatest and potentially the most permanent impact. Argentina is the home of the oldest, most experienced and most culturally influential women’s movement in Latin America.21 A  vibrant women’s movement has been active for more than a century in the cosmopolitan city of Buenos Aires. National and international organisations are led by educated and sophisticated middle-​and upper-​middle class professional women of divergent political persuasions (from far-​left to centre-​right) and conflicting feminist perspectives. Embedded in Argentina’s economic and political instability, it is perhaps not surprising that the Argentine women’s movement is also divided. Until very recently, reaching consensus on how to deal with the problem of violent sexual abuse has been a bridge too far, an unachievable goal. Contentious political debates and personality driven power struggles are not unique to Argentina. In many Latin American countries, male dominated political parties and powerful trade unions demand women set aside their gender equality aspirations to achieve the “higher” goal of election victories. But at least for the time being, a young generation of more flexible feminist leaders has decided they want to improve the lives of abused women more than they want to win supporters for their particular political party or social movement agenda. Argentina is experiencing a wave —​some might call it a tsunami —​of support for campaigns that support women’s struggle against violence. This increase in the public’s awareness of the deadly seriousness of this issue can be attributed to social media  —​specifically, the way in 412

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which a bold group of feminist activists have adopted social media to create the strategies of a revitalised women’s movement. “The Argentine Feminist movement lives on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook”, says Argentine journalist Jasmine Garsd Garcia. Reporting from Buenos Aires in 26 July 2018, Garsd Garcia told the host of Morning Edition, a US National Public Radio (NPR) program, that feminist social media is not only changing the women’s movement but is also changing the Argentine cultural world.22 The rapid response time of social media messaging is revolutionising the country’s powerful media industry. The programming content of popular talk shows and radio call-​in programs is changing because feminist issues are controversial “hot topics” about the latest #MeToo scandals involving politicians, sports stars, media celebrities, Catholic priests and schoolteachers. The list of allegations of sexual misconduct seems to be endless. However, quite apart from the usual media scandal ratings, there is genuine public interest in the movements to decriminalise abortion and end domestic violence. Public debates regarding feminism and the potential for changes in the everyday life of ordinary people are often conducted through the Argentine talk show circuit. A sexist statement made one day by a television talk show host or guest may be instantly denounced by a thousand people using #MeToo hashtags, leading to lively, contentious debates that might then take over the planned agenda for the show. The following episode would then feature a couple of the people who had denounced the sexist statement of the previous day as guests, accompanied by a panel of academic experts and celebrities. Despite, or perhaps because of, the intense, melodrama involved, such forums are proving to be useful educational tools.23 Culturally ingrained ideas of large television or radio talk show audiences are challenged and debated with the concomitant possibility of changing mindsets even about something as culturally defined as rape. Decades-​ old reports from the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, and Amnesty International have taken note of the serious safety issues Argentine women face,24 and formulated suggestions for the Argentinian government to combat these issues, including funding programs aimed at decreasing the maternal death rate and disseminating information regarding the economic and social costs of domestic violence. Very little has been implemented on the ground, however, not even during the presidency of a woman, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–​2015).25 Public recognition of how dangerous it is to be female in Argentina is relatively recent, and while many still repudiate #NosQueremosVivas (We Want to Live) and #MiráCómoNosPonemos (See What You Do to Us), Argentine feminists insist that this is a life or death situation from which there is no turning away. Argentine journalists and media pundits are so impressed by the success of feminists’ use of social media that a few have declared #MeToo to be the contemporary feminist movement, claiming that equal rights and protection from sexual assault can and will be achieved through social media campaigns alone. In this they are incorrect. Although social media has an indisputably broadened support and increased participation, Facebook pages, Tweets, and YouTube videos are not enough to create a substantial feminist social movement. The Argentine feminist movement may have recently found a home on social media, but it could be pushed aside or evicted at any point to be replaced by the latest political scandal or economic crisis. The young, sophisticated, and politically savvy leaders of the newly energised Argentine woman’s movement, #NiUnaMenos (Not One Woman Less), know that it will take years to build feminist protest into a true social movement with the potential to unite women from all social classes and force permanent structural and cultural change.26 Founded in Buenos Aires in 2015, #NiUnaMenos is a women’s collective of artists, writers, academics, and journalists who joined together to protest against the government’s lack of response to a series of gruesome femicides. The immediate catalyst was the murder of a 413

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14-​year-​old pregnant girl. The body of Chiara Páez was found buried under her boyfriend’s home on 11 May 2015. She had been given medication to induce an abortion and, when she had a serious reaction to the drugs, she was beaten to death and her body hidden. This occurred with the full knowledge of the boy’s parents. The shocking details of this crime caused public outrage and an explosive social media reaction. #NiUnaMenos began with one tweet. Radio journalist Marcia Ojeda tweeted:  “They’re killing us! Aren’t we going to do something?” This now historic phrase, with the support of thousands of people from all walks of life, made the #NiUnaMenos hashtag viral. The founding group of journalists announced a nation-​wide protest against the apathetic attitude of the Argentinian government. Two weeks later, on 3 June 2015, 200,000 people demonstrated under the #NiUnaMenos banner in front of the National Congress. Simultaneous marches and demonstrations were held in provincial cities and in Santiago, Chile, and Montevideo, Uruguay. The immediate consequence, announced by Supreme Court Judge Elena Highton, was the establishment of a national registry of femicides. At the same time, then president, Cristina Fernández, a Peronist and leftist social democrat, promised the formation of a congressional committee charged with investigating the causes of and remedies for all acts of violence against women.27 #NiUnaMenos leaders Verónica Gago and Cecilia Palmeiro were not surprised when the government did not follow through on these promises, with the standard excuse of a lack of funding. Gago and Palmeiro than put all their effort into expanding the movement to include the individual women and organisations they had attracted to the 3 June march. From the proliferation of new hashtags and many thousands of tweets they received daily, the #NiUnaMenos Collective could see that their social media campaign was the key to attracting and communicating with new followers. Thousands of Argentine women appeared willing to expand their goals beyond just another anti-​violence hashtag and new support came from all over the country. They were able to recruit women from Argentina’s powerful trade unions, a rural agricultural workers’ collective, and a union of unemployed people. They believed then, as they do now, that mobilising already existing women’s organisations into a non-​judgmental, non-​ hierarchical, community of women was critical to building their movement into a powerful force for social change.28 The leaders of #NiUnaMenos are open about being leftist, anti-​capitalist, and pro-​choice feminists,29 and use their participation in the annual National Women’s Encounter Meetings to connect with diverse women’s organisations across Argentina. Charity organisations and women’s health collectives, among other groups, are encouraged to use the now well-​known #NiUnaMenos hashtag, along with their own Facebook pages and other social media platforms. Palmeiro and others convinced reluctant leaders that a show of female unity could promote the shared goal of advancing women’s rights issues. In accordance with their stated ideology of unity and equality, they issue statements denying the attacks that conservative opponents like the Catholic Church and right-​wing media outlets make against them.30 Argentine feminists face criticism of varying degrees: from being termed man-​haters engaged in a war against civilisation and that #NiUnaMenos, and being accused of siding with the global #MeToo movement, to using thought control strategies of social media to manipulate unsophisticated women into accepting radical, left-​wing, feminism. In addition, those critics claim strident, aggressive, and sexless, feminism is a culturally alien concept created in the United States and Western Europe to destroy the family values of Roman Catholic, culturally traditional, societies. Ironically, in this they are allied very neatly with those same American and Western European societies that they decry. The global #MeToo movement has had a consciousness raising effect on women and men, but is seen by many other men as being threatening. In Argentina, any group that challenges 414

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cultural norms is accused of fomenting social unrest and being ideologically driven. In national and international forums, the outspoken and articulate women of #NiUnaMenos state that they will not be discouraged by representatives of conservative sectors of society that try to divide and divert them from the cause of women’s liberation. They clarify that they are not trying to force women to adopt a socialist agenda; rather, their work is to create popular assemblies of like-​minded women who want to attend public forums and learn what they can do to correct social injustices. The #NiUnaMenos Collective claims that they never interfere with the religious beliefs, social values, or political platforms of any group or individual. In the last three years, a few feminist splinter groups have organised several unruly protests, including one at the sacred shrine of the Virgin of Luján. Several violent encounters have occurred between the police and bare-​ breasted women who have thrown firebombs at churches and other public buildings.31 #NiUnaMenos always publicly discourages such actions on its Twitter site. Within some sectors and individual organisations of the women’s movement, there is concern that being associated with left-​wing radicalism might drive away religious and politically conservative women. Human Rights organisations such as the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are supportive of the anti-​violence goals of global #MeToo;32 the organisation is known for leading a successful non-​violent movement.33 The Mothers and Grandmothers worry that the social media frenzy surrounding individual accusations of sexual abuse often trivialises the pain so many abused women experience, and they warn the #MeToo movement in Argentina about the need to stay focused on bringing women together in collective actions for the betterment of all Argentine women. The current leadership of #NiUnaMenos takes all criticism into account because they must; it is proving difficult to hold together a loose coalition of diverse organisations. Various kinds of public events buttress the online following and collective:  physical demonstrations can have women dressed in black to mourn femicides, and also function as celebrations of national and international feminist unity in Buenos Aires style street theatre. Tangos accompany women in white caps and red handmaid dresses, inspired by the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.34 These organising strategies appear to have been successful, because by the end of 2019, #NiUnaMenos had acquired millions of social media followers and partners all over the world: Margaret Atwood, Angela Y. Davis, and Michelle Obama are among the many international figures who have declared their support for #NiUnaMenos.35 The democratic nature of the coalition of groups that make up the support base of #NiUnaMenos is evident in the individual hashtags and Facebook pages that publicise each individual organisation’s guiding principles, distinct values, and specific objectives. School teachers, trade union locals, and health care workers prefer to set themselves apart from any political agenda that causes division among themselves. Thus, individual marches begin in separate locations but congregate in the same place for the main demonstration acknowledging #NiUnaMenos as Argentina’s leading feminist entity. The importance of a powerful social media presence was especially demonstrated in the 2018 movement to de-​criminalise abortion. In Latin America, unrestricted abortion is legal only in Cuba, Uruguay, and Mexico City; polls show that about 60% of the Argentine people want abortion to be safe and legal, but the procedure is allowed only in cases of rape and where the life of the mother is in danger.36 Safe abortions are difficult even where they are legal because doctors at public hospitals are criticised by pro-​life monitors,37 and Christian evangelicals and the Catholic Church lobby to strengthen already rigid laws that place further restrictions on a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy.38 They also interfere 415

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in individual cases when they suspect a woman has lied about being raped. More than half of the 500,000 abortions in Argentina every year are performed in private hospitals for women who have the one thousand dollars that a safe, but still technically illegal, abortion costs. Poor women and those from the working class form the majority of the thousands of hospitalisations and hundreds of deaths from abortion complications. The 2018 National campaign for the Right to Legal Abortion was already underway when women started to use #MeToo social media platforms to give their personal accounts of botched abortions. At great personal risk, women reported dire health repercussions stemming from the forbidden procedure. For the first time, Argentine women used Twitter hashtags, Facebook, and YouTube videos to share their experiences of personal trauma with millions of people in the Spanish speaking world. In the process, they publicly exposed the shamefully inferior medical treatment they received in public hospitals and the dangerous, unsanitary conditions common to underground networks of abortion providers. When Pope Francis tried to stop the pro-​choice movement with an order to end what he called the violent attacks on the unborn, Catholics for the Right to Decide used social media to declare that the lives of poor women were being violently sacrificed every day in Argentina because they are denied access to a safe pregnancy termination. Argentina’s staunchly pro-​ life Vice President, Gabriella Michetti, countered this argument by saying that whatever her circumstances, a pregnant woman should bear her child and then put it up for adoption. In 2018, Michetti was a supporter of the #NiUnaMenos anti-​violence campaign but she wouldn’t budge on voluntary pregnancy termination.39 So prevalent is the power of social media that even the Catholic Church conducted its own social media campaign to warn followers not to be swayed by a movement that denies the human rights of the unborn foetus. The public continues to respond to anti-​violence social media hashtags that encourage women to give their personal accounts of sexual discrimination and abuse. Among the most popular forums is #Cuéntalo (Tell Your Story), the Spanish version of #MeToo.40 #Cuéntalo began in May 2018, when Spanish journalist, Cristina Fallarás, protested against the acquittal of five men who were charged with the 2016 gang rape of an 18-​year-​old woman during the Running of the Bulls, Pamplona’s San Fermín festival. The men, one of whom was an officer in the Spanish Civil Guard, trapped the young woman in an apartment alcove and then raped her, filming the assault on their WhatsApp messaging group. The men, who call themselves “the wolf pack”, were acquitted of sexual assault, which includes rape, and were found guilty of the lesser offence of sexual abuse and sentenced to nine years in prison. The defence argued that the young woman maintained a “passive or neutral” attitude, and she kept her eyes closed, which meant she consented to the attack —​maybe even enjoyed it. The judge did not believe the victim’s claim that she was too traumatised to resist or struggle against five strong men. Therefore, these men were convicted only of the lesser crime of sexual abuse, which does not involve violence or intimidation. When the verdict was announced after five months, everyone, even the supporters of the so-​called “wolf pack”, were in a state of shock. The more serious crime of violent rape seemed an open and shut case. The judge’s verdict set off a firestorm of public outrage against the judge and the Spanish legal system, and the verdict enraged the leadership of the Spanish women’s movement. Millions saw Cristina Fallarás’ angry Twitter post: “Compañeras! We must tell of these aggressions, these violations”. Within a day the hashtag crossed the Atlantic and #Cuéntalo, the Spanish version of #MeToo, received 430,000 responses from Argentina alone.41 The urgency with which Fallarás communicated the persistence of patriarchal “rape culture” propelled the use of #Cuéntalo as an internationally recognised anti-​violence hashtag. It is a social media vehicle that urges anyone to use this opportunity to tell their story. Even the heart 416

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wrenching testimony given by friends and family of deceased victims, women who cannot speak for themselves, is heard via #Cuéntalo. On 14 December 2018, the New York Times reported that on the previous day, Argentine film and television actress Thelma Fardín ignited Argentina’s own Hollywood style #MeToo scandal with a criminal assault charge.42 Fardín accused her actor colleague, Juan Darthés of raping her in 2009, when she was 16 years old and he was 45. She posted a detailed account of the assault on Instagram with the hashtag #MiraComoNosPonemos (Look What You Do to Us). Fardín’s video was seen by millions of people and received thousands of responses. Darthés denied her accusations, but within three days three other actresses came forward with accusations of being sexually abused by Darthés. The Union of Argentine Actresses stood behind Fardín and others who denounced Darthés as a serial sexual predator. The union also said it was seeking the help of prosecutors with the hope that Darthés would be prosecuted for his violent crimes. On the advice of his attorney, Juan Darthés returned home to his native Brazil, because Brazil and Argentina do not have an extradition agreement. Fardín said she had always been afraid to go public with her enduring sorrow and anger but that #Cuéntalo and the courageous women of the #NiUnaMenos Collective inspired her to come forward. Thelma Fardín and the other alleged celebrity victims have not received universal support; on the contrary, thousands of women, including Fardín’s estranged sister, accuse her of lying and seeking attention. From the end of 2018 to the beginning of 2020, at the time of writing, there have been dozens of scandals involving celebrities and political officials. The Fardín-​Darthés scandal continues on, as yet, unresolved, but Fardín has become an influential #NiUnaMenos spokesperson joining other famous women who feel comfortable enough to go public with accusations of sexual abuse and discrimination. One might ask why a glamorous and successful woman like Thelma Fardín would make up a potentially career-​destroying story? Equally important, one could ask why Fardín’s outing of a popular actor could then be blamed for the escalating number of unproved allegations against men from all walks of life. But this is symptomatic of the contentious mood that currently prevails in Argentina due, in large part, to the several economic that the country is facing.43 For now, #NiUnaMenos is leading a movement that demands that female equality be on the top of the priority list of the new government. The former President, Senator, and now Vice President Cristina Fernández is a charismatic and resilient politician.44 Despite her tarnished personal reputation, including indictments for bribery, corruption, and money-​laundering, she is still seen as Argentina’s most important advocate for women’s issues. This is just the beginning of a new phase of Argentine feminism. One of the most haunting and significant developments in the local and global movement is the way in which individual testimonies of silenced victims are contributing to the compilation of what the Argentine Human Rights community calls a collective, living, national memory bank, a testimonial archive. These silences are placed on record and given their place in the archive through the testimonies of those who choose to stand witness to these absences. I reproduce here two such silenced voices. On behalf of Emely Peguero: I am 16 years old, five months pregnant…with my 19-​year-​old boyfriend, I was missing for 9 days until they found my body in a suitcase, they had performed a cruel abortion and then cracked my skull. I am telling this story because Emely Peguero can’t anymore.45 On behalf of Concepción Arregui: My husband shot me in the head, wrapped up my body and threw it in the Potrerillos Dam. I am the one telling you because Concepción cannot.46 417

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I can only conclude this chapter with several questions, beginning with:  what does all this mean? What role is testimony playing in the anti-​violence movement in Argentina?47 Is there such a thing as collective memory? What will be the ultimate effect on the hundreds of women and their families who have exposed their lives to public scrutiny via social media? Will bruised and battered women be seen as victims or as actors in the #MeToo movement’s battle against male power structures?48 Is it going to be possible to change gender-​based discrimination and violent behaviour with a protest movement led by social media campaigns? If Argentina is consistently divided economically, politically, and socially, is optimism about significant improvement for women justified? Along with other feminist activists around the world, I am asking myself these and many other questions to which only the future holds the answers.

Notes 1 Alison Brysk, The Struggle for Freedom from Fear:  Contesting Violence Against Women at the Frontiers of Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Juan Forero, “Women in Latin America Are Being Murdered at Record Rates”, Wall Street Journal, 9 December 2018, www.wsj.com/​articles/​it-​is-​ better-​not-​to-​have-​a-​daughter-​here-​latin-​americas-​violence-​turns-​against-​women-​11545237843. 2 Brysk, The Struggle for Freedom from Fear,  1–​29. 3 Rosa Linda Fregoso and Cynthia L.  Bejarano, eds, Terrorizing Women:  Feminicide in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 4 Alison Herrera, “These Argentine Women Fight Against a Justice System ‘Written by Men, for Men’ ”, PRI (Public Radio International), 12 July 2019, www.pri.org/​stories/​2019-​07-​12/​these-​ argentine-​women-​fight-​against-​justice-​system-​written-​men-​men. 5 Asunción Lavrin, ed, Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978). 6 Marifran Carlson, Feminismo:  The Women’s Movement in Argentina from Its Beginnings to Eva Perón (Chicago:  Academy Chicago Publishers, 1988); Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–​1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 7 Fabiana Frayssinet, “In Latin America ‘MeToo’ Doesn’t Always Mean the Same Thing”, IPS, 5 March 2018. www.ipsnews.net/​2018/​03/​latin-​america-​doesnt-​always-​mean-​thing. 8 Carlos de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). 9 Luisa Rollenhagen, “Argentina Can’t Quit Peronism”, Nation, 19 October 2019, www.thenation.com/​ article/​argentina-​fernandez-​kirchner-​peronismo. 10 Carlson, Feminismo, 183–​197. 11 Tamara Tenenbaum, “The Untranslatable Journey of Argentina’s Fourth Feminist Wave”, BLARB (blog), Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 March 2019, https://​blog.lareviewofbooks.org/​essays/​ untranslatable-​journey-​argentinas-​fourth-​feminist-​wave. 12 John Bartlett, “Chile’s #MeToo Moment:  Students Protest against Sexual Harassment”, Guardian, 12 October 2018, www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​jul/​09/​chile-​metoo-​sexual-​harassment-​ universities. 13 “Mexico’s #MeToo Movement Swells in Media, Culture Studies”, Associated Press, 27 March 2019, https://​apnews.com/​b1494cd86ecc44f3b719c4ea0914b377. 14 Temma Kaplan, Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2004). 15 Maria Laura Canineu, “For Brazil’s Women, Violence Begins at Home”, Human Rights Watch, 31 January 2018, www.hrw.org/​news/​2018/​01/​31/​brazils-​women-​violence-​begins-​home. 16 Alvar Jarrin and Kia Lily Caldwell, “Beyond #MeToo, Brazilian Women Rise Up Against Racism and Sexism”, Conversation, 11 January 2018, https://​theconversation.com/​beyond-​metoo-​brazilian-​ women-​r ise-​up-​against-​racism-​and-​sexism-​89117. 17 Tanisha Ramírez, “Buenos Aires Mayor Says All Women Like Catcalling”, Cosmopolitan, 29 April 2014, www.cosmopolitan.com/​entertainment/​news/​a24349/​mauricio-​macri-​women-​like-​cat-​calling. 18 “CFK slams Macri after He Makes Shocking Sexist Remark in Interview”, Buenos Aires Times, 15 October 2019, www.batimes.com.ar/​news/​argentina/​cfk-​slams-​macri-​after-​he-​delivers-​shocking-​ sexist-​remark.phtml.

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#MeToo Argentina: A protest movement 19 Tenenbaum, “The Untranslatable Journey”. 20 Linda Yang, “A Women’s Strike Organizer on Feminism for the 99 Percent”, Vice, 11 December 2017, www.vice.com/​en_​us/​article/​3kpk53/​-​womens-​strike-​organizer-​cecilia-​palmeiro-​feminism-​ for-​the-​99-​percent. 21 Carlson, Feminismo. 22 Jasmin Garsd, “Feminism Gets a New Platform in Argentina”, interview by Rachel Martin, Morning Edition, NPR, 26 July 2018, audio, www.npr.org/​2018/​07/​26/​632566945/​feminism-​gets-​a-​new​platform-​in-​argentina. 23 Garsd, “Feminism Gets a New Platform in Argentina”. 24 Amnesty International. Amnesty International Report 2017/​18: The State of the World’s Human Rights (London:  Amnesty International, 2018), 76, www.amnesty.org/​en/​documents/​pol10/​6700/​2018/​ en; United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. “UN Special Rapporteur Challenges Argentina to Step Up Protection of Women in ‘Machismo Culture.’ ” 21 November 2016. www.ohchr.org/​EN/​NewsEvents/​Pages/​DisplayNews.aspx?LangID=E&NewsID=20903; Etienne Krug et al., eds, World Report on Violence and Health (Geneva: World Health Organisation, 2002). 25 Jane L.  Christie, Negotiating Gendered Discourses:  Michelle Bachelet and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (London: Lexington Books, 2016). 26 Cecilia Palmeiro, “#NiUnaMenos:  Estamos creando un mundo nuevo”, [#NiUnaMenos:  We Are Creating a New World], interview by Estación Untref, 3 July 2018, Audio, 1:30, www.untref.edu.ar/​ mundountref/​cecilia-​palmeiro-​ni-​una-​menos. 27 Hinde Pomeraniec, “How Argentina Rose up Against the Murder of Women”, Guardian, 8 June 2015, www. theguardian.com/​lifeandstyle/​2015/​jun/​08/​argentina-​murder-​women-​gender-​violence-​protest. 28 Mike Davis et  al., “Argentina’s Life or Death Women’s Movement:  An Interview with Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago”, Jacobin, 7 March 2017, www.jacobinmag.com/​2017/​03/​ argentina-​ni-​una-​menos-​femicides-​women-​strike. 29 Verónica Gago, Neoliberalism from Below:  Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economics (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2017). 30 Verónica Gago, “They Are Afraid of Us”, Viewpoint, 13 August 2018, www.viewpointmag.com/​ 2018/​o8/​13/​they-​are-​afraid-​of-​us; Alver Metalli, “The People of ‘The Two Lives’ Movement in Argentina”, La Stampa, Vatican Insider, 7 July 2018, www.lastampa.it/​vatican-​insider/​en/​2018/​07/​ 09/​news/​the-​people-​of-​the-​the-​two-​lives-​movement-​in-​argentina-​1.34030615. 31 Inés San Martín, “Argentina’s March for Women Became an Attack on the Church”, Crux:  Taking the Catholic Pulse, 11 March 2017, https://​cruxnow.com/​global-​church/​2017/​03/​ argentinas-​march-​women-​became-​attack-​church. 32 María Sánchez Diez, “#NiUnaMenos:  In 70 Argentine Cities Right Now, Protesters Are Saying ‘No More’ to Killers of Women”, Quartz, 3 June 2015, https://​qz.com/​419010/​ in-​70-​argentine-​cities-​r ight-​now-​protesters-​are-​saying-​no-​more-​to-​killers-​of-​women. 33 Rita Arditti, Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and The Disappeared Children of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of The Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1994). 34 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (New York: Anchor Books, 1998). 35 Luis Andres Henao and Debora Rey, “Argentines Protest Violence Against Women”, Associated Press, 3 June 2016, https://​apnews.com/​d688f665e1ec414881bf907d0a1201ac/​argentines-​protest-​ vio; Julius Gavroche, “In Solidarity:  March 8  —​The Call for a Day without Women’s Work”, Autonomies, 17 February 2018, https://​autonomies.org/​2018/​02/​in-​solidarity-​march-​8-​the-​call​for-​a-​day-​without-​womens-​work. 36 Uki Goñi, “Argentine Senate Rejects Bill to Legalise Abortion”, Guardian, 9 August 2018, www. theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​aug/​09/​argentina-​senate-​rejects-​bill-​legalise-​abortion. 37 Ana Ionova, “Argentina’s Growing Anti-​Abortion Movement”, New Internationalist, 22 July 2019, https://​ newint.org/​features/​2019/​07/​22/​argentina-​pro-​life-​doctors-​are-​growing-​force-​against-​abortion. 38 Mala Htun, Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce and the Family Under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 39 Debora Rey, “Handmaid’s Tale March for Argentine Abortion Rights”, Associated Press, 25 July 2018, https://​apnews.com/​3a0e7a56ee924135a0fa2b31e906eee3/​’Handmaid’s-​Tale’-​march-​for-​ Argentine-​abortion-​r ights. 40 Palmeiro, “#NiUnaMenos: Estamos creando un mundo nuevo”.

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Marifran Carlson 41 Tom Phillips, “#Cuéntalo: Latin American Women Rally Around Sexual Violence Hashtag”, Guardian, 3 May 2018, www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​may/​03/​cuentalo-​latin-​american-​women-​rally​around-​sexual-​violence-​hashtag. 42 Daniel Politi and Megan Specia, “Argentina’s #MeToo Moment: Actress Shares Account of Assault”, New  York Times, 14 December 2018, www.nytimes.com/​2018/​12/​14/​world/​americas/​argentina-​ metoo-​thelma-​fardin.html. 43 Patrick Gillespie, “Why Argentina Keeps Finding Itself in a Debt Crisis”, Bloomberg Businessweek, 18 November 2019, www.bloomberg.com/​graphics/​2019-​new-​economy-​drivers-​and-​disrupters/​argentina.html. 44 Ernesto Londoño and Daniel Politi, “Ex-​Argentine Leader’s New Goal: Vice President”, New York Times, 19 May 2019, 14. 45 Jamie Shenk, “Can Latin America’s #MeToo Movement Save Women’s Lives?” Foreign Policy Rising, 5 November 2018, https://​foreignpolicyrising.com/​2018/​11/​05/​can-​latin-​americas-​metoo​movement-​save-​womens-​lives. 46 Phillips, “#Cuéntalo”. 47 John Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Ana Elena Correa, Somos Belén (Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta Argentina, 2009). 48 Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019); Geoffrey Maguire, The Politics of Postmemory: Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture (Cambridge: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2017).

Bibliography Amnesty International. Amnesty International Report 2017/​18:  The State of the World’s Human Rights. London: Amnesty International, 2018. www.amnesty.org/​en/​documents/​pol10/​6700/​2018/​en. Arditti, Rita. Searching for Life:  The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and The Disappeared Children of Argentina. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Associated Press. “Mexico’s #MeToo Movement Swells in Media, Culture Studies”. 27 March 2019. https://​apnews.com/​b1494cd86ecc44f3b719c4ea0914b377. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. Bartlett, John. “Chile’s #MeToo Moment: Students Protest Against Sexual Harassment”. Guardian, 12 October 2018. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​jul/​09/​chile-​metoo-​sexual-​harassment-​universities. Beverley, John. Testimonio:  On the Politics of Truth. Minneapolis:  The University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Bouvard, Marguerite Guzman. Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of The Plaza de Mayo. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1994. Brysk, Alison. The Struggle for Freedom from Fear:  Contesting Violence Against Women at the Frontiers of Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Buenos Aires Times. “CFK slams Macri after He Makes Shocking Sexist Remark in Interview”. 15 October 2019. www.batimes.com.ar/​news/​argentina/​cfk-​slams-​macri-​after-​he-​delivers-​shocking-​ sexist-​remark.phtml. Canineu, Maria Laura. “For Brazil’s Women, Violence Begins at Home”. Human Rights Watch, 31 January 2018. www.hrw.org/​news/​2018/​01/​31/​brazils-​women-​violence-​begins-​home. Carlson, Marifran. Feminismo:  The Women’s Movement in Argentina From Its Beginnings to Eva Perón. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1988. Christie, Jane L. Negotiating Gendered Discourses:  Michelle Bachelet and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. London: Lexington Books, 2016. Correa, Ana Elena. Somos Belén. Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta Argentina, 2009. Davis, Mike, Liza Featherstone, Peter Frase, and Seth Ackerman. “Argentina’s Life or Death Women’s Movement:  An Interview with Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago”. Jacobin, 7 March 2017. www. jacobinmag.com/​2017/​03/​argentina-​ni-​una-​menos-​femicides-​women-​strike. Diez, María Sánchez. “#NiUnaMenos:  In 70 Argentine Cities Right Now, Protesters Are Saying ‘No More’ to Killers of Women”. Quartz, 3 June 2015. https://​qz.com/​419010/​ in-​70-​argentine-​cities-​r ight-​now-​protesters-​are-​saying-​no-​more-​to-​killers-​of-​women. Forero Juan, “Women in Latin America Are Being Murdered at Record Rates”. Wall Street Journal, 9 December 2018. www.wsj.com/​articles/​it-​is-​better-​not-​to-​have-​a-​daughter-​here-​latin-​americas-​ violence-​turns-​against-​women-​11545237843.

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#MeToo Argentina: A protest movement Frayssinet, Fabiana. “In Latin America ‘MeToo’Doesn’t Always Mean the Same Thing”. IPS (Inter Press Service News Agency), 5 March 2018. www.ipsnews.net/​2018/​03/​latin-​america-​doesnt-​always-​mean-​thing. Fregoso, Rosa Linda and Cynthia L. Bejarano, eds. Terrorizing Women:  Feminicide in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Gago, Verónica. Neoliberalism from Below:  Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economics. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2017. Gago, Verónica. “They Are Afraid of Us”. Viewpoint, 13 August 2018. www.viewpointmag.com/​2018/​ o8/​13/​they-​are-​afraid-​of-​us. Garsd, Jasmin. “Feminism Gets a new Platform in Argentina”. Interview by Rachel Martin. Morning Edition, NPR, 26 July 2018. Audio. www.npr.org/​2018/​07/​26/​632566945/​feminism-​gets-​a-​new-​platform​in-​argentina. Gavroche, Julius. “In Solidarity: March 8 —​The Call for a Day without Women’s Work”. Autonomies, 17 February 2018. https://​autonomies.org/​2018/​02/​in-​solidarity-​march-​8-​the-​call-​for-​a-​day​without-​womens-​work. Gillespie, Patrick. “Why Argentina Keeps Finding Itself in a Debt Crisis”. Bloomberg Businessweek, 18 November 2019. www.bloomberg.com/​graphics/​2019-​new-​economy-​drivers-​and-​disrupters/​argentina.html. Goñi, Uki. “Argentine Senate Rejects Bill to Legalise Abortion”. Guardian, 9 August 2018. www. theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​aug/​09/​argentina-​senate-​rejects-​bill-​legalise-​abortion. Goñi, Uki. “Argentina’s New President Vows to Legalise Abortion”. Guardian, 17 November 2019.  www.theguardian.com/​ world/​ 2 019/​ n ov/​ 1 7/​ a rgentina-​ n ew-​ p resident-​ vows-​ l egalise​abortion#maincontent. Henao, Luis Andres and Debora Rey. “Argentines Protest Violence Against Women”. Associated Press, 3 June 2016. https://​apnews.com/​d688f665e1ec414881bf907d0a1201ac/​argentines-​protest-​vio. Herrera, Alison. “These Argentine Women Fight against a Justice System ‘Written by Men, for Men.’ ” PRI (Public Radio International), 12 July 2019. www.pri.org/​stories/​2019-​07-​12/​ these-​argentine-​women-​fight-​against-​justice-​system-​written-​men-​men. Htun, Mala. Sex and the State:  Abortion, Divorce and the Family Under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Ionova, Ana. “Argentina’s Growing Anti-​Abortion Movement”. New Internationalist, 22 July 2019. https://​ newint.org/​features/​2019/​07/​22/​argentina-​pro-​life-​doctors-​are-​growing-​force-​against-​abortion. Jarrin, Alvar, and Kia Lily Caldwell. “Beyond #MeToo, Brazilian Women Rise Up Against Racism and Sexism”. Conversation, 11 January 2018. https://​theconversation.com/​beyond-​metoo-​brazilian-​women​r ise-​up-​against-​racism-​and-​sexism-​89117. Kaplan, Temma. Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2004. Krug, Etienne, Linda L. Dahlberg, James A. Mercy, Anthony B. Zwi and Rafael Lozano, eds. World Report on Violence and Health. Geneva: World Health Organisation, 2002. Lavrin, Asunción, ed. Latin American Women:  Historical Perspectives. Westport Connecticut:  Greenwood Press, 1978. Lavrin, Asunción. Women, Feminism and Social Change:  Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–​ 1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Londoño, Ernesto and Daniel Politi. “Ex-​Argentine Leader’s New Goal: Vice President”. New York Times. 19 May 2019. Maguire, Geoffrey. The Politics of Postmemory: Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture. Cambridge: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2017. Metalli, Alver. “The People of ‘The Two Lives’ Movement in Argentina”. La Stampa. Vatican Insider, 7 July 2018. www.lastampa.it/​vatican-​insider/​en/​2018/​07/​09/​news/​the-​people-​of-​the-​the-​two​lives-​movement-​in-​argentina-​1.34030615. Palmeiro, Cecilia. “#NiUnaMenos:  Estamos creando un mundo nuevo” [#NiUnaMenos:  We Are Creating a New World]. Interview by Estación Untref. 3 July 2018. Audio, 1:30. www.untref.edu.ar/​ mundountref/​cecilia-​palmeiro-​ni-​una-​menos. Phillips, Tom. “#Cuéntalo: Latin American Women Rally Around Sexual Violence Hashtag”. Guardian, 3 May 2018. www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​may/​03/​cuentalo-​latin-​american-​women​rally-​around-​sexual-​violence-​hashtag. Politi, Daniel and Ernesto Londoño. “Leftist atop Argentina Race Moves from Kirchener’s Shadow: Will His Policies Follow?” New  York Times, 15 August 2019. www.nytimes.com/​2019/​08/​15/​world/​ americas/​argentina-​president-​kircher.html?searchResultPosition=8.

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Marifran Carlson Politi, Daniel and Megan Specia. “Argentina’s #MeToo Moment: Actress Shares Account of Assault”. New  York Times, 14 December 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​12/​14/​world/​americas/​argentina-​ metoo-​thelma-​fardin.html. Pomeraniec, Hinde. “How Argentina Rose up Against the Murder of Women”. Guardian, 8 June 2015. www. theguardian.com/​lifeandstyle/​2015/​jun/​08/​argentina-​murder-​women-​gender-​violence-​protest. Ramírez, Tanisha. “Buenos Aires Mayor Says All Women Like Catcalling”. Cosmopolitan, 29 April 2014. www.cosmopolitan.com/​entertainment/​news/​a24349/​mauricio-​macri-​women-​like-​cat-​calling. Rey, Debora. “Handmaid’s Tale March for Argentine Abortion Rights”. Associated Press, 25 July 2018. https://​apnews.com/​3a0e7a56ee924135a0fa2b31e906eee3/​’Handmaid’s-​Tale’-​march-​for​Argentine-​abortion-​r ights. Rollenhagen, Luisa. “Argentina Can’t Quit Peronism”. Nation, 19 October 2109. www.thenation.com/​ article/​argentina-​fernandez-​kirchner-​peronismo. San Martín, Inés. “Argentina’s March for Women Became an Attack on the Church”. Crux:  Taking the Catholic Pulse, 11 March 2017. https://​cruxnow.com/​global-​church/​2017/​03/​ argentinas-​march-​women-​became-​attack-​church. Shenk, Jamie. “Can Latin America’s #MeToo Movement Save Women’s Lives?” Foreign Policy Rising, 5 November 2018. https://​foreignpolicyrising.com/​2018/​11/​05/​can-​latin-​americas-​metoo​movement-​save-​womens-​lives. Snyder, Rachel Louise. No Visible Bruises:  What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Tenenbaum, Tamara. “The Untranslatable Journey of Argentina’s Fourth Feminist Wave”. BLARB (blog). Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 March 2019. https://​blog.lareviewofbooks.org/​essays/​ untranslatable-​journey-​argentinas-​fourth-​feminist-​wave. de la Torre, Carlos. Populist Seduction in Latin America. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. “UN Special Rapporteur Challenges Argentina to Step Up Protection of Women in ‘Machismo Culture.’ ” 21 November 2016. www.ohchr. org/​EN/​NewsEvents/​Pages/​DisplayNews.aspx?LangID=E&NewsID=20903. Yang, Linda. “A Women’s Strike Organizer on Feminism for the 99 Percent”. Vice, 11 December 2017. www.vice.com/​en_​us/​article/​3kpk53/​-​womens-​strike-​organizer-​cecilia-​palmeiro-​feminism-​for-​the-​ 99-​percent.

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29 MEXICO AND LATIN AMERICA From #MeToo to #NiUnaMenos Edmé Domínguez R.

As a result of simultaneous external and internal forces, gender equality in Latin America has made significant advances over the past 30 years; notably through the integration of women and their interests into public sectors such as health care, the formal economy, and political participation. External forces, namely the highly influential UN women conferences that have taken place since the 1970s, have offered support to the women’s movement in the region. The 1995 conference in Beijing, for example, empowered women and women’s organisations at the grassroots level.1 As a whole, this support for gender equality gradually but effectively shaped a continental movement. The Encuentros Feministas (Feminist Forums) that began in 1981 in Bogotá, Colombia, and continued until 2017 in Uruguay, have contributed to the growth of this movement as well as the formation of alliances across social, sexual, and ethnic differences.2 In recent years, it has grown enormously and consolidated around a shared goal: to stop gender-​based violence by uniting under the slogan and hashtag Ni Una Menos, (Not One Less). The Mexican poet Susan Chávez in 1995 composed “Ni una muerta más” to protest the femicide cases in Ciudad Juárez. The Argentinean organisers used that poem back in 2015 to find a title for their hashtag.3 This slogan is also taken from a powerful poem by María Marta Liébana, an Argentinean poet and activist, published in 2015 under the title “Ni Una Menos” to draw attention to the increasing numbers of victims of gender-​based violence (GBV).4 The movement started in the Southern cone of the continent but spread throughout Latin America and the Caribbean in what many call the marea verde, or “the green tide”, for this colour’s striking significance during the many demonstrations that followed. This anti-GBV movement, the most successful women’s and feminist movement in the history of Latin America, is by its nature collective. Isolated protest initiatives like the #MeToo movement received short-​lived mass media attention, while the Ni Una Menos movement has maintained a level of greater significance in Latin America, with the exception of some specific cases such as Mexico. The aim of this chapter is to present an overview of the impact of the #MeToo movement in Latin America in general, and in Mexico in particular, where the combination of #MeToo and Ni Una Menos has triggered enormous mobilisations, notably among young urban women.

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Background: Progress for autonomy within the framework of the patriarchal model Latin America experienced a difficult transition in the 1980s, when economic restructuring created an influx of women into the labour market for the first time, mostly as cheap labour (41.4% of all women aged 15 years or older in 1990 and 51.7% in 2018).5 As a reaction to this economic hardship, a string of elections led to the victory of left-​leaning, ostensibly progressive governments at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, marking the so-​ called “pink wave”.6 Although one might assume that left-​orientated governments champion women’s rights, this is not always the case; these governments did not promote women’s rights to the extent that the feminist movement expected. Recent examples of the disappointing results from this era include present-​day Nicaragua, with authoritarian and alleged sex abuser Daniel Ortega in power, as well as the rise of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) political party in Mexico.7 The development of women’s rights in Latin America therefore presents a paradox:  on the one hand, there have been advancements in women’s education and economic standing (and thus autonomy), as well as growing consolidation of the women’s movement both locally and at the continental level. On the other hand, patriarchal values and social norms continue to dictate gender relations in Latin American society, which facilitate explicit and implicit modes of control over women’s behaviour, attitudes, and sexual identities. This effort to maintain the subordinate socio-​economic and political position of women largely entails upholding masculine privileges at the private and public level. As a whole, this is based on the machista model: the overarching ideology of patriarchal norms that voices the justifications for male supremacy. This is an attitude and ideology deeply engrained in social and political structures that serve to differentiate people according to their sex as either male or female, with little room for other sexual identities, and thereby determines the extent of their access to the public space.8 The beliefs and practices that constitute this machista ideology exercise gender-​based violence at all levels. According to United Nations figures, 14 of the 25 countries with the highest indexes of violence in the world can be found in Latin America.9 The Ni Una Menos movement and its Northern counterpart, the #MeToo movement, are reactions against this violence. Sociologist and Feminist activist Graciela Di Marco speaks of the rise of the “feminist people” in Argentina, or “the emergence of new feminist identities and feminist movements’ radicalisation”.10 According to Di Marco, new political configurations formed in the wake of the 2001 crisis in Argentina,11 and led to the conceptualisation of feminist people as a political identity within the struggle of two antagonistic projects: one fighting for democratic opportunities and new spaces, and the other resisting these new rights. This confrontation became very clear in mid-​2018, when the Argentinian Congress discussed the process of decriminalising abortion, which prompted various coalitions both in support and in opposition to the motion. The feminist rhetoric that arose during this political time was strikingly explicit in its aim to challenge the hegemony of machista values in society. The public response of feminist activists was also characterised by its diversity, in which all kinds of feminist identities and demands were addressed, even those traditionally separated by class, racial-​ethnic identities, or sexual identity. Although these differences continued to exist, they did not become essentialist or politically divisive.12 The case of Argentina is rather exceptional, and such an inclusive platform may not have developed in the same way elsewhere in Latin America, but similar advances in feminist rhetoric and response can be found in most countries in the region. This shift is especially prevalent with regard to gender-​based violence, which seems to be one of the most significant impacts of the Ni Una Menos campaign upon Latin American society and politics. 424

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The #MeToo movement in Latin America Some observers note that the dramatic increase in the circulation of the #NiUnaMenos hashtag in 2015 marks the official entry of the Ni Una Menos movement into public discourse. As several cases of tragic femicides emerged only to be met with impunity on behalf of relevant authorities, massive demonstrations occurred with a rippling effect across most countries in Latin America.13 According to the 2019 Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Index, which ranks 169 countries according to women’s well-​being and empowerment, Latin America continues to be marked by discriminatory norms, partner and ex-​partner abuse, and organised violence against women.14 In a survey of 12 Latin American and Caribbean countries carried out between 2003 and 2010, 53% of women aged 15–​49 were victims of at least one form of violence at the hands of their intimate partner(s).15 Even taking into account the countries that were ranked higher than others in the region, such as Argentina, the WPS Index of Latin America as a whole remains far below that of developed countries. The mobilisations under the Ni Una Menos movement have, to an extent, successfully rallied the many subsections of the feminist and women’s movement around a shared concern: violence. However, other feminist demands, such as the legalisation of abortion and LGTBQ+ rights, have not received the same support from broader women’s movements. On the contrary, large conservative sectors of society have sought to divide these movements according to underlying differences in their respective agendas. For example, conservative sectors of both the Catholic and Protestant Churches have opposed any “gender-​related rights” on the grounds that such rights threaten socio-​political stability. This is especially evident in countries like Peru, Argentina, and Brazil, where these forces have opposed the so-​called “gender ideology” that they attribute to women’s movements and therefore serve as a means of rejecting any and all feminist demands for reform.

The #MeToo campaigns in Latin America With the exception of Mexico in 2019, the #MeToo movement in Latin America never reached the level of influence it had in the United States and other countries around the world. Nevertheless, expressions of the movement arose in several Latin American countries in other ways. For example, in May 2018 in Chile, the #MeToo movement gained traction among public universities and spread rapidly across the country through the educational sector, as women denounced sexual harassment committed by lecturers, administrative faculty, and male students. Protesters held several marches, which were followed by occupations of school property and the publication of demands for concrete changes to university policies and codes of conduct at the national level. Their demands included capacity-​building courses for teaching staff and administration alongside an increased presence of women’s voices in the curriculum.16 Although this movement did not reach the same heights as the movement for the democratisation of university education that had taken place years prior, it came to play a new role at the end of 2019 in the midst of general protests against social inequality. Among the participants in these massive protests was a group of young Chilean activists, Colectivo Las Tesis, who created a performance piece that has since travelled all over the world as an expression of young women’s rage against gender-​based violence. This piece, entitled “Un violador en tu camino” (“A rapist in your way”), addresses perpetrators of sexual assault and harassment in private spaces and on behalf of public authorities, such as the police, state policies, and governmental institutions. According to the group, their aim was to translate the central thesis of feminist authors into a performance format so it could reach all kinds of audiences. Their song is based on texts 425

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written by a feminist Argentinian social anthropologist, Rita Segato, and it has been interpreted across the world in massive demonstrations that have proven extremely potent in projecting the message of shared outrage. Even though young women make up the majority of those participating in these demonstrations and performances, one was organised specifically for older women in Santiago, Chile, to represent the trans-generational character of this struggle.17 Argentina, where the largest Ni Una Menos mobilisations in Latin America have taken place (see Di Marco above), has also been active in the #MeToo movement. Like the development of #MeToo in the United States and other Latin American countries, the central #MeToo message in Argentina originated from suppressed cases of sexual harassment and assault in the entertainment business. Thelma Fardín, a famous actress, came forward with her personal case of sexual harassment and rape at the hands of Juan Darthes, a fellow actor on the set of a TV show they both starred in. Her use of the hashtag #MiraComoNosPonemos is an echo of what she alleges Darthes said in the act of rape following an event in Nicaragua when she was just 16 years old. The phrase “mirá cómo nos ponemos” translates to “See how you excite me”, and was used by thousands of followers to share countless similar stories and demonstrate support to victims of sexual harassment and assault. The group “Argentinian actresses” voiced their support for Thelma Fardín and publicly offered to support any other victims who chose to denounce their aggressor, as well as those who remained silent about their experience. The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights declared that the telephone reports of child harassment increased 1240% after the revelation of Fardín’s case.18 The Argentinian movement has also recently expanded to highlight the effects of austerity measures and the economic crisis upon women, who are particularly vulnerable to economic hardships.19 In drawing attention to the social implications of the current economic crisis, the #NiUnaMenos movement has introduced new hashtags such as #LibresYDesendeudadasN osQueremos (#WeWantUsFreeAndWithoutDebt) and #NiUnaMenosSinJubliación (#NotOne LessWithoutRetirement). Peru also witnessed several Ni Una Menos protests, with an increase in mobilisations organised by the political organisation Frente Nacional de Mujeres (FNM) since 2011. In response to chilling figures of gender-based violence published by the Defensoria del Pueblo (Office of the Public Defender), an enormous demonstration took place in Lima and several other Peruvian cities in 2016. The Defensoria del Pueblo had found that ten women were murdered every month by their partners, and a staggering 795 femicides were committed between the years 2009 and 2015, many of them small girls. The mobilisation unified around the hashtags #NiUnaMenos and #A13 under the slogan Si nos tocan a una nos tocan a todas (“if you touch one, you touch all”). The marches were organised again in 2017 and 2018 as a reaction to other femicides that went unpunished.20 The women’s movement in Colombia has been forced to compete for public attention alongside the protests from other movements to make itself heard. Nevertheless, hundreds of women marched on 25 November 2019 to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in cities across the country. Although these demonstrations were somewhat overshadowed by protests surrounding the peace process,21 Colombia’s struggle to overcome the predominance of violence against women is one that most other countries in Latin America are trying to achieve as well. According to official data provided by the UN, roughly 33% of Colombian women between the ages of 15 and 49 have experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of an intimate partner, and among the 34,600 cases of femicide, 90% remain unpunished. Furthermore, indicators of gender inequality, such as reproductive health and access to the national labour market, rank Colombia at 98 out of 187 countries.22 As in other Latin American countries, patriarchal structures and machista culture are still deeply 426

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entrenched, to the extent that conservative crusades against what these conservative forces call gender ideology contributed to the negative results of the 2016 Peace Agreement referendum.23 These agreements included a section regarding the damages inflicted upon women during the war and the measures to compensate them, yet the implementation of these measures lagged far behind the target level as of 2019.24 Nonetheless, there have also been some signs of progress. In 2015, Congress passed a groundbreaking law (Law 1761)  that laid out the criminal charges for committing femicide, which was followed by another piece of legislation in 2016 (Law 1773) that was ratified to address specialised organised crimes against women (such as acid attacks) with a harsher penalty. And in 2019, the municipality of Bogotá elected an openly gay female mayor, Claudia López. Despite these social and legislative advances, it seems that women’s vulnerability has not been significantly reduced, nor has the #MeToo movement been able to gain substantial traction in society. Feminists remain a minority in Colombia, and women’s political representation in Congress (22%) remains stubbornly among the lowest levels in Latin America. Therefore, despite the widespread use of activist hashtags like #YoTambién (#MeToo), #LibresDeViolencias (#FreeFromViolence), and #NiUnaMenos across social media platforms and performance of the Chilean-​created routine of “El violador eres tu” in demonstrations throughout the world, concrete actions to specifically target gendered forms of violence have faltered. Cases like the denunciation of sexual abuse made by the journalist Claudia Morales against a high-​level politician, who is suspected to be Columbia’s former president Alvaro Uribe, have not been successful. Similarly, other public statements against political candidates from the left, like that of Hollman Morris, have not impacted their respective political campaigns. As a whole, a successful #MeToo campaign in Colombia has yet to come to fruition.25 In Costa Rica, however, a series of denunciations of sexual harassment and assault successfully followed the arrival of the #MeToo campaign.26 In early 2019, a female psychiatrist alongside eight other women accused former president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oscar Arias of sexual harassment.27 In contrast to public attitudes in Colombia, the Costa Rican public reacted strongly to the accusation, which was taken seriously by society and social media, thus prompting the rapid spread of #YoTeCreo (“#IBelieveYou”).28 This campaign inspired marches of solidarity on behalf of the women who dared to come forward with their shared experience and led to a serious questioning of Arias within his own political party, the powerful Liberal Party. The differential impact of the #MeToo campaigns in Colombia and Costa Rica may reflect contextual differences (the emergence of an internal bloody conflict in Colombia in contrast to political stability and an apparently gender friendly equality attitude in Costa Rica). These are also two contrasting examples of how such international campaigns may impact in different countries and regions in Latin America.29 As we can see, these examples reveal that even if the #MeToo movement in Latin America has not had the same repercussions and widespread impact as it has in the United States and parts of Europe, it has united the struggle against sexual violence nonetheless. Indeed, this kind of violence is so widespread across the continent that it has given rise to an unprecedented level of mobilisation amongst feminists and women in general. As a result, the Ni Una Menos movement has reached a scale never seen before on the continent. The intersection of the #MeToo movement and the Ni Una Menos movement is perhaps most evident in Mexico, which will be discussed further in the next section.

#MeToo arrives in Mexico The #MeToo movement arrived in Mexico in late October 2017, shortly after its rise to prominence in the United States, following statements made by a famous Mexican actress 427

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Karla Souza, who cited her experiences of sexual assault as part of the reason she decided to migrate to the United States.30 Other actresses such as Kate del Castillo, Alejandra Avalos, and Dulce Maria followed suit by contributing their own stories of systemic abuse of power within the entertainment industry. For instance, they revealed to the public that a prominent TV chain, Televisa, organised special events where young actresses were offered as escorts to prominent directors or guests of the company.31 Other members of the entertainment business such as the standuperas (female stand-​up comedians) also began to voice public statements of their experiences, and new hashtags like #Yaestuvo (“That’s enough”) began to appear on social media platforms. In February 2018, Carmen Aristegui, a prominent independent journalist, interviewed several well-​known women from the entertainment and sport industry, such as actresses Karla Souza, Paola Nunez, Stephanie Sigman, and Sofia Nino de Rivera, as well as the dramaturge Sabina Berman, swimmer Azul Almazan, and fashion editor Lucy Lara. These interviews provided striking insights into the normalisation of sexist machista norms, and thereby a spectrum of gendered violence across various industries which consequently revived the movement as a whole.32 During the spring of 2018, the #MeToo movement spread into literary circles through Anna G. Gonzalez’s accusation against Herson Barona. Combined with the use of more specialised hashtags like #MeTooEscritoresMexicanos (“#MeToo” Mexican Authors) and formation of public social media accounts like @MeTooEscritores, nearly 135 writers had been accused of sexual misconduct within just two days.33 Accounts such as @MeTooCineMX (“#MeToo” Movies Mexico), @MeTooPeriodista (“#MeToo” Journalism), @MeTooCreativas (“#MeToo” Creative Arts), @MeTooMusicaMX (“#MeToo” Music Mexico), @MeTooFotografos (“#MeToo Photography), and several others were started for the purpose of shedding light on the sexual misconduct of individuals involved in the arts, certain enterprises, legal professions, and medicine industries, as well as male activists, academics, and politicians. Even specific geographical regions in Mexico, such as Jalisco, formed close-​knit groups of awareness and activism. One of the most active groups consisted of female journalists, consequently called the Mexican United Women Journalists (Periodistas Unidas Mexicanas, PUM), who used the hashtag #MeTooPeriodistasMexicanos (“#MeToo” Mexican Journalists) to receive and report hundreds of stories of sexual harassment and assault from people working in the media industry. Several newspapers, as well as journalist associations like CIMAC noticias and La red de periodistas a pie (The Network of Journalists on Foot), responded by either firing accused persons or launching internal investigations among their staff.34 Other hashtags such as #YoSíLesCreo (I do believe them) and #EstoyConEllas (I’m With Them) as well as email addresses like [email protected] (I Believe You MX) were created as yet another platform of support and public awareness for victims. Although the denunciations and scandals continued throughout 2018, the year 2019 marked the peak of impact of #MeToo in Mexico. In 2019, the #MeToo campaign finally reached one of the most vulnerable groups of victims: female university and high school students. Over the course of 2019, the extent of public rage toward these cases of gender-​based violence became increasingly apparent through dramatic increases in support of, and participation in, the feminist movement in the country.35 This shift began in the beginning of that year, as the #MeToo campaign spread across more and more spheres of society and further increased its outreach when perpetrators began facing real-​world consequences, such as being fired or suspended from their positions. Knowing that perpetrators could, and would likely, be punished for their actions greatly contributed to the legitimisation of the campaign and thereby encouraged more women to come forward. The movement also led to dramatic events through these public accusations, notably the suicide of Armando Vega Gil, a famous musician under investigation 428

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for sexual misconduct. As a result, some opposition reactions emerged to call for the movement to scale down its scope and impact due to the personal consequences that a #MeToo story entailed for the accused.36 Several debates arose to analyse the implications of the movement in general.

Debates around the tactics and strategies of #MeToo The Feminist Circle of Juridical Analysis (Círculo Feminista de Análisis Jurídico), which took place in April 2019, organised two panel debates on the #MeToo phenomenon in Mexico.37 The discussion centred on two themes: the failure of the judicial system to seriously address women’s reports of sexual harassment and assault and the prevalence of anonymous allegations in Mexico.38 The latter issue provoked a controversial and intense debate over the condition of anonymity. Some participants declared that even though it is technically legal to file an anonymous complaint in Mexican courts, doing so could result in a complicated situation. First, the lack of a personal identity on behalf of the victim largely served to benefit the accused, given that the man could easily deny the claim and instead file a legal complaint for public slander. Furthermore, the condition of anonymity provided no means of compensating the victim. Some of the participants in the debate were lawyers, and they maintained that many victims didn’t want to condemn the offender to prison, but rather wanted public acknowledgement of the misconduct and a request for forgiveness. As such, this anonymous approach excluded the victims and feminists who sought severe punishments for sexual harassment and assault. Indeed, the debates largely focused on the issue of agreeing upon a procedure to determine what form and degree of punishment perpetrators should receive for their actions. Some participants emphasised the need for alternative means of conflict resolution, arguing that the use of an already-​flawed judicial system poses obstacles to claimants that range from high costs, persistent inefficiency in processing their claims, and low levels of credibility, to an overarching history of institutional oppression. Moreover, the legal typification of a crime oversimplifies a larger social phenomenon and risks barely skimming the surface of the original demands for justice and corresponding punishment.39 As gender-​ based violence continued, so did the #MeToo denunciations, persisting throughout 2019. The #MeToo campaign spread to universities and led to various mobilisations, notably the occupation of high schools and university buildings. At the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the biggest and one of the most prestigious universities in Latin America, for instance, the Department of Philosophy and Literature has been occupied by female students from October 2019 to mid-​March 2020 (it stopped temporarily because of the official measures against the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico) and uses the hashtag #MeTooFFYL. According to the occupation committee, this event is the final step in a long struggle for recognition that began three years earlier, when as many as 72 claims against lecturers and male students emerged following the #MeToo campaign. They had organised as Mobilised Women of the Philosophy and Literature Faculty (Mujeres Organizadas de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras) and had formulated 11 demands for increased security and justice through the modification of articles 95, 98, and 99 of the General Statutes of the UNAM. The goals were to formally recognise sexual harassment as a serious crime and force the resignation of one of the denounced faculty members. Most importantly, perhaps, the mobilisation aimed at the eradication of harassment and sexual abuse of female students and faculty on campus. While one of the accused faculty members was removed from some of his functions, he was allowed to continue lecturing. Nonetheless, the group also demanded the introduction of courses and workshops promoting gender equality and outlining the prevalence of sexual misconduct for all 429

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bachelor students and faculty members.40 At the same time, similar movements among female students occurred at other well-​known universities such as El Colegio de Mexico (under the hashtag #AquíTambiénPasa, or “It Happens Here Too”), Centro de Investigación y Docencia Economía (CIDE), Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), and the Escuela Libre de Derecho.41 By February 2020, the #MeToo movement had reached several other high schools belonging to the UNAM, some of which had also been occupied and had experienced an increased degree of confrontation with university authorities. The fact that several masked activists had resorted to violent means of preventing authorities and other students from recovering the buildings also sparked large-​scale controversy as to the validity of their protests. The federal government condemned such occupations, arguing among other things that there were “dark forces” seeking to gain from the situation.42

Counter reactions to #MeToo: Threats and increased gender-​based violence As mentioned above, #MeToo campaigns have also provoked aggressive reactions from certain areas of public opinion. One example is the events surrounding the campaign in Merida in January 2020.43 The account @MeTooMerida was created to highlight cases of sexual harassment and assault and quickly gained thousands of followers, but it was shortly shut down due to threats of violence. Another account was organised by Mexican women abroad under the username @MeTooMerida2, which facilitated another wave of denunciations of teachers, students, and other professionals in the city. Soon enough, another account, @Chelorejoon, started to send targeted threats to the account, and #MeToo Merida participants in general, and even offered 200,000 pesos (about 10,000 USD) for hackers to reveal the personal identities of the account’s organisers in order to sue them legally for slander. The threats became highly personal, stating, for instance, that “Merida is very small and we can find out who you are”.44 Several residents in Merida supported the @MeTooMerida2, however, and called for the victims to attend a demonstration with photos of their harassers and a printed claim of their accusations. During their march, they chanted, “¿Nos buscaban? Aquí nos tienen. ¡Juntas, unidas, fuertes!” (“Are you looking for us? Here we are, united and strong!”).45 In this regard, the #MeToo movements can be seen not only as a reaction to, but also a contributing factor to the increase in gender-​based violence in the country. Indeed, according to official data from public authorities and civil society groups, Mexico seems to suffer from the most gender-​based violence in all of Latin America. Furthermore, the year 2019 represents two diverging aspects of advancing women’s rights and promoting public awareness about gender-​ based violence. On the one hand, the #MeToo movement gathered significant strength, and yet 2019 seems to have been the most violent year against women in Mexico and the year of the most mortal violence in general among the nation’s population. According to official figures from the National Agency for Public Security (Secretariado Nacional de Seguridad Publica), which has recorded case statistics since 1997, there were 51,146 official criminal complaints in 2019. This marks an increase of 19.1% compared to 2018 (42,929 cases). In contrast, there were a total of 31,171 cases in 2015 and 35,102 cases in 2016. There is of course a discussion of whether these figures reflect an increase in violence rates or an increase in awareness and willingness to report. My own feeling, shared by other Mexican specialists is that it reflects both, an actual increase of rates and a willingness to report this violence. This upward trend represents a staggering increase of 137% since 2015.46 It is also worth noting that about 45% of these complaints in 2019 were regarding sexual abuse, which marks an increase of 22% in such cases since 2018.47 Another striking aspect of this data is that according to the National Agency for 430

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Statistics INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica), nine out of ten victims of sexual violence are women. There was also a 55% increase in sexual harassment complaints in public places or work environments, totaling 4,205 cases, which indicates that 27 out of every 100 women and 10 out of every 100 men suffered this type of harassment.48 The states that were identified as having the highest figures of reported femicides were Veracruz, the State of Mexico, Nuevo Leon, and Puebla.49 Moreover, the number of cases related to the abduction and extortion of women has nearly doubled since 2015. This data is reflected in the sharp increase in telephone calls from women soliciting help: from 3989 in January 2015 to 21,628 in January 2020.50 Although domestic violence in Mexico can be linked to the general prevalence of gender-​ based violence on the global scale, the specific situation in Mexico seems to be different in some aspects. In February 2019, the Observatorio Ciudadano Nacional del Feminicidio (The National Observatory of Femicides), an umbrella organisation overseeing several associations all over the country, announced that the state was trying to obscure cases of femicides committed by criminal groups. This organisation revealed that 70% of all reported femicides are committed by criminals unknown to the victims while only 30% are perpetrated by people close to the victims.51 This data, according to the organisation, was carefully collected over a 12-​year period across the 23 states of the Mexican federation. In the state of Mexico in the year 2018 alone, there were already 3260 cases of women reported as missing, among whom as many as 946 had still not been found a year later. However, according to the Observatory, state authorities have simply maintained the narrative that gender-​based violence occurs mainly in the form of domestic violence, and thus state authorities refuse to conduct proper investigations into criminal violence that is not household-​related.52

The resistance: Massive demonstrations and legislative advances As a reaction to both the increase in violence and to the growing strength of the #MeToo movement, several demonstrations were organised in different urban centres across Mexico. Following the hashtag #NoMeCuidanMeViolan (They Don’t Take Care of Me, They Violate Me), the biggest demonstration took place on 12 August 2019 in Mexico City, with several thousand protestors in attendance, most of them young women. However, the head of the security apparatus of Mexico City declared that the women were too radical, and thus refused to have a dialogue with them. In response, some of the demonstrators lashed out, resulting in damages to both private and public property. On 16 August, additional marches took place in Mexico City and other major cities. As on 12 August, material damages ensued, prompting a debate about how to address violent acts on behalf of protestors and their right to peaceful protest. Indeed, these events made it easy for mass media outlets to portray the demonstrators as violent radicals rather than victims. Several feminists held that media reports had exaggerated the damages carried out by demonstrators, thereby obscuring the truth of what had taken place at the protests. They also issued public statements explaining that such violence was of a completely different caliber than the violence that thousands of women in the country have endured. In other words, women encountered “a systemic violence rooted in history and reproduced in daily life”53 whereas these protests occasionally resulted in material damages. At the end of November 2019, a moving performance of “Un violador en tu camino” (“A rapist in your path”) took place in Mexico City among thousands of people, many of them young women, within the main square of Zocalo.54 The demonstration was followed by several more performances of the piece in other cities around the country. Despite this degree of public resistance to the Ni Una Menos and #MeToo movements in general, there have been some positive developments in Mexico. In September 2019 in Oaxaca, 431

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a marginalised region known for its high levels of poverty and dense indigenous population, the state congress approved a measure to legalise abortion. Although this piece of legislation is still being processed at the time of writing (February 2020), it nonetheless constitutes an unexpected advance for women and the feminist cause. Furthermore, at the end of 2019, the National Congress approved the Olimpia law which is explicitly aimed at combating online sexual abuse and harassment.55 From a comprehensive perspective, a key component of both the Ni Una Menos and the #MeToo platforms in Mexico is the fact that among all cases of sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and other forms of gender-​based violence, a disproportionate amount of cases that result in fatalities are women. The feminisation of these fatalities can be linked to challenges described by those who actively participate in the public sphere in order to change broader social norms and patterns regarding systemic gender-​based violence. The process should be supported by similar changes at the institutional, political, and societal levels. In Mexico, these changes mark a very gradual shift towards the improvement of conditions for women. Furthermore, the implementation of the alerta de género (gender alert) to report violence or fear of violence has successfully spread across several states of the Mexican federation. The alerta de género is a set of urgent government actions that aim to eradicate violence against women (called “feminised violence”) and other threats that restrict women from fully exercising their human rights in certain states or cities.56 Although it seeks to implement urgent measures to ensure women’s security, it is mostly a way to increase the visibility and formally recognise threats against women in the public sphere. In November 2019, Mexico City’s governor reluctantly agreed to establish such an alert within its municipalities, mandating that the relevant authorities create special units to help women, conduct capacity-​building workshops for all their staff, and increase the budget of complementary programmes that are cooperating with the government to address this situation. This alert mechanism has been criticised for not producing any significant results in the states most affected by gender-​based violence. Nevertheless, many feminists welcome the measure as a more direct policy on behalf of the government and hope that it can make a positive difference in the long term.

Final reflections Gender-​based violence is not a recent phenomenon in Latin America. However, resistance efforts have emerged as part of public reactions to the Ni Una Menos and #MeToo movements over the past several years. It is difficult to find any other region in the world where such large-​ scale resistance is occurring at the same time as such widespread raising of public consciousness. Admittedly, the mobilisations do not cross all sectors of society given that rural, peasant, and working-​class women are perhaps less engaged and less represented in the public response to the issues related to gender-​based violence, and are even less aware of its growing attention in urban areas. Indeed, this phenomenon is largely the product of younger generations of urban women that are facing contradictions in machista culture as they enter society. In other words, young women in Latin America have more opportunities, education, resources, and autonomy from these patriarchal structures than previous generations, and consequently they have become more aware of their rights. They are acutely attuned to the ways in which their rights are not being respected or taken seriously by their fellow students, coworkers, bosses, nor by the machista ethos that characterises public and private sectors of daily life. They have therefore become aware of the lack of respect for women in the public sphere, the long-​lasting silence of female victims on behalf of relevant authorities, and their physical vulnerability in a socio-​ political climate that is increasingly characterised by endemic violence; sometimes provoked by criminal gangs, sometimes by the state, and in other cases by family members. 432

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The organisational strategies may differ between the #MeToo and the Ni Una Menos movements, but their goals are the same: to demand respect, justice, and the end of impunity regarding cases of sexual harassment and assault. Furthermore, the enemy is the same: a system still characterised by extreme inequalities, in which gender hierarchies are among the most obvious and visible in the world. The struggle is formidable, and the resistance of conservative sectors and especially of privileged men affected by the campaigns may be fierce. But the outreach of grassroots mobilisations, combined with institutional and legislative advances, is making progress. Despite the many backlashes already taking place, such as in Brazil, or that are likely to take place in the near future, one cannot deny the importance of the biggest social movement in Latin America today: the feminist movement.57

Notes 1 For more information on these UN conferences see:  Peggy Antrobus, The Global Women’s Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies (London: Zed, 2004). 2 For an account of the latest Encuentros, see: Edmé Domínguez R, “Sobre el 13º Encuentro Feminista Latinoamericano y del Caribe en Lima, Perú:  22–​25 Noviembre, 2014:  apuntes y reflexiones” [13th Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Congress, Lima, Peru, 22–​25 November 2014: Notes and Reflections], Revista Estudos Feministas 23, no. 2 (2015): 471–​476, http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1590/​ 0104-​026X2015v23n2p471; Domínguez, “The 14th EFLAC 2017 Montevideo, 22–​25 November, Diversas pero no Dispersas (Different but not Dispersed):  Demarks and Reflections”, Gadip (blog), 16 January 2018, https://​gadipblog.wordpress.com/​2018/​01/​16/​the-​14th-​eflac-​2017-​ montevideo-​22-​25th-​november-​diversas-​pero-​no-​dispersas-​different-​but-​not-​dispersed-​remarks-​ and-​reflections. 3 See:  Carmela Torres, “Susana Chávez:  un origen de #NiUnaMenos” [Susana Chávez:  An Origin of #NiUnaMenos], La Izquierda Diario, 3 June 2018, www.laizquierdadiario.com/​ Susana-​Chavez-​un-​origen-​de-​NiUnaMenos. 4 The English translation of “Ni Una Menos” (Not One Less) and further insight on its title and author is available at: Maria Clara Medina, “#NiUnaMenos and the Poetry of Gender Equality”, School of Blogal Studies (blog), 11 March 2019, www.blogalstudies.com/​post/​niunamenos-​and-​the-​poetry-​of-​gender-​ equality. See also Antonella Pisetta, “¿Cómo surgió el Movimiento Ni Una Menos?” [How Did the Movement Ni Una Menos Come About?], Perfil, 7 March 2019, www.perfil.com/​noticias/​sociedad/​ como-​surgio-​movimiento-​ni-​una-​menos-​2015.phtml. 5 See: Marianne H. Marchand and Domínguez, “Labour and Gender in a Global Context: Contestations and Backlashes”, Third World Thematics:  A TWQ Journal 4, no.  1 (2019), 1–​ 8, DOI:  10.1080/​ 23802014.2019.1657038. 6 Gian Luca Gardini, Latin America in the 21st Century: Nations, Regionalism, Globalization (London: ZED Books Ltd., 2012); Daniel C.  Hellinger, Comparative Politics of Latin America:  Democracy at Last? (New York: Routledge, 2015). 7 The National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional) has emerged as a leading political party since the 2015 national parliamentary elections in Mexico. It was disappointing from the beginning because it disregarded women’s demands and, moreover, closed a whole system of day care centers for women workers on the pretext that there had been corrupted practices in their administration. Also because it took a long time to react to domestic violence as a serious problem in Mexico. See  “AMLO provoca descontento social en México por cierre de guarderías” [AMLO Causes Social Unrest in Mexico Due to the Closure of Day-​Care Centers], La Verdad, 18 March 2019, https://​laverdadnoticias.com/​mexico/​AMLO-​provoca-​descontento-​social-​en-​Mexico-​por-​cierre-​de-​ guarderias-​-​20190318-​0112.html. 8 June Nash, “Cultural Parameters of Sexism and Racism in the International Division of Labor”, in Racism and Sexism and the World System, J. Smith, J. Collins, T. K., Hopkins, and A. Muhammed, eds (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988): 11–​36. 9 BBC News Mundo, “De dónde viene ‘El violador eres tú’ ” [Where Does It Come from: ‘The Raper, It’s You’], YouTube, 9 December 2019, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=2l6SQqdn2Y8.

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Edmé Domínguez R. 10 Graciela Di Marco “The Feminist People:  National and Transnational Articulations:  The Case of Argentina”, Baltic Worlds 13, no. 1 (2020): 70, http://​balticworlds.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2010/​ 02/​BW_​1_​2020_​pdf_​FULL.pdf. 11 The crisis of 2001 in Argentina was provoked by Argentina’s default of its foreign debt, the end of the peso’s fixed exchange. This caused a 25% reduction of its GDP (1998–​2002). Unemployment and poverty increased consequently. See: Timothy J. Kehoe, “What Can We Learn from the 1998–​2002 Depression in Argentina?” Timothy J. Kehoe (website), University of Minnesota, accessed 12 May 2020, http://​users.econ.umn.edu/​~tkehoe/​papers/​argentina.pdf. 12 Di Marco, “The Feminist People”, 70. 13 Juliana Rodríguez, “A Year of #MeToo:  This Has Been Its Impressive Impact”, Latin American Post, 10 October 2018, https://​latinamericanpost.com/​23821-​a-​year-​of-​metoo-​this-​has-​been-​ its-​impressive-​impact; Simeon Tegel, “While the US Has #MeToo, Latin America’s ‘Ni Una Menos’ Spotlights Femicides, Violence Against Women”, NBC News, 17 May 2018, www. nbcnews.com/​news/​latino/​while-​u-​s-​has-​metoo-​latin-​america-​s-​ni-​una-​n875091; Jelke Boesten, “Ni Una Menos Stares Down Conservative Reaction/​ Ni Una Menos enfrenta una reacción conservadora”, NACLA, 8 May 2018, https://​nacla.org/​news/​2018/​07/​03/​ ni-​una-​menos-​stares-​down-​conservative-​reaction-​ni-​una-​menos-​enfrenta-​una-​reacción. 14 Jeni Klugman et  al., Women, Peace, and Security Index 2019/​20:  Tracking Sustainable Peace through Inclusion, Justice, and Security for Women (Washington, DC: Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, 2019), https://​gps.prio.org/​Publications/​Publication/​?x=1288. 15 Sarah Bott et al., Violence Against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis of Population-​Based Data from 12 Countries (Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization, 2012), 20, www.paho.org/​hq/​dmdocuments/​2014/​Violence1.24-​WEB-​25-​febrero-​2014.pdf. 16 “Campaña #MeToo se expande a universidades chilenas” [#MeToo Campaign Expands to Chilean Universities], El Mostrador, 9 May 2018, www.elmostrador.cl/​noticias/​pais/​2018/​05/​09/​ campana-​metoo-​se-​expande-​a-​universidades-​chilenas. 17 BBC News Mundo, “De dónde viene”. 18 T13, “Mirá cómo nos ponemos” [Look How We Get Excited], YouTube, 16 December 2018, video, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=BiBM-​jIrC_​k. 19 For more figures on feminicides in Argentina see “Femicidios”, Pagina 12, accessed 13 May 2020, www.pagina12.com.ar/​tags/​1466-​femicidios. 20 “ ‘Ni Una Menos’ convoca nueva marcha en Perú el 12 de agosto” [‘Not One Less’ Calls a New March in Peru on 12 August], Telesur, 3 August 2017, www.telesurtv.net/​news/​Ni-​una-​menos-​convoca-​ nueva-​marcha-​en-​Peru-​el-​12-​de-​agosto-​20170803-​0062.html. 21 To put an end to a 50 year long guerrilla war in 2012, peace talks between the Colombian government and the largest guerrilla group FARC-​EP began, and in 2016 the parties signed a final peace agreement with the accord to put an end to the armed conflict. See R. Segura and D. Mechoulan, Made in Havana: How Colombia and the FARC Decided to End the War (New York: International Peace Institute, 2017), www.ipinst.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2017/​02/​IPI-​Rpt-​Made-​in-​Havana.pdf. 22 Natalia Marquez-​ Bustos and Glenn Ojeda Vega, “Will Colombia See a #MeToo Revolution?” Fair Observer, 17 December 2019, www.fairobserver.com/​region/​latin_​america/​ colombia-​violence-​against-​women-​me-​too-​movement-​latin-​america-​news-​17611. 23 Catalina Oquendo, “La paz en Colombia rezagada para las mujeres” [The Peace in Colombia Delayed for Women], El País, 15 December 2019, https://​elpais.com/​internacional/​2019/​12/​10/​actualidad/​ 1575994845_​411283.html. 24 The war refers to the 50 year long war between the government and the FARC guerilla. See ONU Mujeres [UN Women], 100 medidas que incorporan la perspectiva de género en el acuerdo de paz entre el gobierno de Colombia y las FARC-​EP para terminar el conflicto y construir una paz estable y duradera [100 Measures That Incorporate the Gender Perspective in the Peace Agreement Between the Government of Colombia and the FARC-​EP to End the Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace] (ONU Mujeres Colombia, 2018), https://​colombia.unwomen.org/​es/​biblioteca/​publicaciones/​2017/​05/​ 100-​medidas-​genero-​acuerdos. 25 Marquez-​Bustos and Vega, “Will Colombia”. 26 AmeliaRueda, “#MeToo en Latinoamerica” [#MeToo in Latin America], YouTube, 7 February 2019, video, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=T86RCLF1hVo. 27 Oscar Arias became president of Costa Rica in 1986 and contributed to the peace plan that put an end to the civil war in Central America, which started after the US supported “Contras” army tried to oust

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From #MeToo to #NiUnaMenos the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and the FMLN guerilla force in El Salvador tried to change the government in El Salvador. See “Oscar Arias Sanchez: Facts”, Nobel Prize (website), accessed 4 June 2020, www.nobelprize.org/​prizes/​peace/​1987/​arias/​facts/​. 28 Anne-​Katherine Brigida, “ ‘He Proposes Peace, But Invades Women’s Bodies’: Inside the Allegations Against Costa Rica’s Former President and Nobel Laureate”, Time, 14 February 2019, https://​time. com/​5529479/​costa-​r ica-​me-​too-​oscar-​arias. 29 For more information on this see “Ni Una Menos” [“Not One Less”], El País, accessed 12 May 2020, https://​elpais.com/​noticias/​ni-​una-​menos/​. 30 Javier Poza, “Karla Souza revela que sufrió acoso sexual en México” [Karla Souza reveals she was sexually harassed in Mexico], Radio Formula, 27 October 2017, www.radioformula.com.mx/​programas/​ javier-​poza-​en-​formula/​20171027/​karla-​souza-​revela-​que-​sufrio-​acoso-​sexual-​en-​mexico. 31 Yuriria Ávila, “¿Cómo surgió el movimiento Mee Too y cómo revivió en México?”[How did the #MeToo Movement Arise and How has it Been Revived in Mexico?], Animal Político, 27 March 2019, www. animalpolitico.com/​elsabueso/​como-​surgio-​el-​movimiento-​me-​too-​y-​como-​revivio-​en-​mexico. 32 Ávila, “¿Cómo surgió el movimiento”. 33 Ávila, “¿Cómo surgió el movimiento”. 34 Ávila, “¿Cómo surgió el movimiento”. 35 Fabiola Méndez and Damián Mendoza, “2019, El año del #MeToo en México” [2019, The Year of #MeToo in Mexico], UNAM Global, 11 December 2019, www.unamglobal.unam.mx/​?p=79781. 36 Méndez and Mendoza, “2019, El año del #MeToo en México”. 37 Martha Lamas, “Debates acerca de los #MeToo” [Discussions About #MeToo], Proceso, 12 May 2019, www.proceso.com.mx/​584626/​debates-​acerca-​de-​los-​metoo. 38 Lamas, “Debates acerca de los #MeToo”. 39 Lamas, “Debates acerca de los #MeToo”. 40 Neldy San Martín, “Toma Feminista de la Facultad de Filosofía: ‘Que arda todo lo que tenga que arder’ ” [Feminist Take of the Philophy Faculty: ‘Let Everything that Needs to Burn, Burn’], Proceso, 18 January 2020, www.proceso.com.mx/​614804/​toma-​facultad-​filosofia-​que-​arda. 41 “Denuncian acoso sexual en El Colegio de México” [Claims of Sexual harassment at El Colegio de Mexico] Excelsior, 13 November 2018, accessed 15 March 2020, www.excelsior.com.mx/​comunidad/​ denuncian-​acoso-​sexual-​en-​el-​colegio-​de-​mexico/​1278055 42 Noticiarios Pulso, Radio Educación, 7 February 2020, audio, https://​e-​radio.edu.mx/​Noticiarios-​ pulso?id_​podcast=28369; Noticiarios Pulso, Radio Educación, 9 February 2020, audio, https://​e-​radio. edu.mx/​Noticiarios-​pulso?id_​podcast=28395. 43 Merida is the capital city of the State of Yucatan in South Eastern Mexico. It is an administrative seat but also linked to tourism. It has a population of about 900,000 inhabitants. See “Merida población” [Merida population], INEGI, accessed 12 May 2020, www.inegi.org.mx/​app/​buscador/​default.html? q=Merida+poblacion#tabMCcollapse-​Indicadores. 44 Rosa Santana, “Presuntos acosadores ofrecen recompensa tras ser exhibidos en @MetooMerida” [Alleged Stalkers Offer Compensation After Being Displayed in @MetooMerida], Proceso, 18 January 2020, www.proceso.com.mx/​614726/​acosadores-​recompensa-​metoomerida. 45 Santana, “Presuntos acosadores”. 46 Fabiola Martínez, “2019, el más violento para las mexicanas” [2019, the Most Violent Year for Mexican Women], La Jornada, 26 January 2020, www.jornada.com.mx/​ultimas/​politica/​2020/​01/​26/​el-​2019-​ el-​mas-​violento-​para-​las-​mexicanas-​4369.html. 47 Rafael López, “Pese a #MeToo, cunden delitos sexuales contra las mujeres” [Despite #MeToo, Sex Crimes Against Women Spread], Milenio, 22 January 2020, www.milenio.com/​policia/​violencia-​de-​ genero/​pese-​metoo-​cunden-​delitos-​sexuales-​mujeres. 48 López, “Pese a #MeToo”. 49 These are important states in Mexico. Especially Nuevo León in the North, State of Mexico, surrounding Mexico City, and Puebla, about an hour from Mexico City, are also important industrial centers. See: Martínez, “2019, el más violento para las mexicanas”. 50 Martínez, “2019, el más violento para las mexicanas”. 51 Andrea Vega, “Estado oculta feminicidios cometidos por crimen organizado y no investiga, acusan activistas de 23 entidades” [State Hides Femicides Committed by Organised Crime and These Go Uninvestigated, Activists from 23 States Denounce], Animal Político, Grupo Editorial Criterio, 6 February 2019, www.animalpolitico.com/​2019/​02/​estado-​feminicidios-​crimen-​organizado-​mexico/​. 52 Vega, “Estado oculta feminicidios”.

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Edmé Domínguez R. 53 Nora Muñiz, “Cientos de mujeres protestan contra violencia policíaca en CDMX” [Feminism: Hundreds of Women Protest Against Police Violence in Mexico City], Plumas Atómicas, 12 August 2019, https://​ plumasatomicas.com/​feminismo/​danos-​protesta-​mujeres-​cdmx-​jesus-​orta. 54 Quadratín México, “CDMX canta la Intervención un violador en tu camino en el Zócalo” [CDMX Performs ‘a Rapist in Your Path’ in Zócalo], YouTube, 29 November 2019, video, www.youtube. com/​watch?v=zWpsF8cYTf4. 55 Méndez and Mendoza, “2019, El año del #MeToo en México”. 56 Lau Almaraz, “¿Para qué sirve la Alerta de Género?” [What is the Gender Alert for?], Cultura Colectiva News, 28 January 2020, https://​news.culturacolectiva.com/​mexico/​para-​que-​sirve-​la​alerta-​de-​genero-​cdmx. 57 I would like to thank especially the enormous aid to gather the material for this chapter to Catalina Domínguez in Mexico, and contributing additional material, part of the analysis, and editing and formatting this article to Robyn Baker. Without their support, this chapter could not have been possible.

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From #MeToo to #NiUnaMenos Excelsior. “Denuncian acoso sexual en El Colegio de México” [Claims of Sexual harassment at El Colegio de Mexico]. 13 November 2018. www.excelsior.com.mx/​comunidad/​denuncian-​acoso-​sexual-​en-​el-​ colegio-​de-​mexico/​1278055 Gardini, Gian Luca. Latin America in the 21st Century: Nations, Regionalism, Globalization. London: ZED Books Ltd., 2012. Hellinger, Daniel C.  Hellinger. Comparative Politics of Latin America:  Democracy at Last? New  York: Routledge, 2015. INEGI. “Merida población” [Merida population]. Accessed 12 May 2020. www.inegi.org.mx/​app/​ buscador/​default.html?q=Merida+poblacion#tabMCcollapse-​Indicadores. Kehoe, Timothy J. “What Can We Learn from the 1998–​2002 Depression in Argentina?” Timothy J.  Kehoe (website), University of Minnesota. Accessed 12 May 2020. http://​users.econ.umn.edu/​ ~tkehoe/​papers/​argentina.pdf. Klugman, Jeni, Amie Gaye, Marianne Dahl, Kelly Dale, and Elena Ortiz. Women, Peace, and Security Index 2019/​20: Tracking Sustainable Peace through Inclusion, Justice, and Security for Women. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, 2019. https://​gps.prio.org/​Publications/​ Publication/​?x=1288. La Verdad. “AMLO provoca descontento social en México por cierre de guarderías” [AMLO Causes Social Unrest in Mexico Due to the Closure of Day-​Care Centers]. 18 March 2019. https://​laverdadnoticias. com/​mexico/​AMLO-​provoca-​descontento-​social-​en-​Mexico-​por-​cierre-​de-​guarderias-​-​20190318-​ 0112.html. Lamas, Martha. “Debates acerca de los #MeToo” [Discussions About #MeToo]. Proceso, 12 May 2019. www.proceso.com.mx/​584626/​debates-​acerca-​de-​los-​metoo. López, Rafael. “Pese a #MeToo, cunden delitos sexuales contra las mujeres” [Despite #MeToo, Sex Crimes Against Women Spread]. Milenio, 22 January 2020. www.milenio.com/​policia/​violencia-​de-​ genero/​pese-​metoo-​cunden-​delitos-​sexuales-​mujeres. Marchand, Marianne H. and Edmé Domínguez R. “Labour and Gender in a Global Context: Contestations and Backlashes”. Third World Thematics:  A TWQ Journal 4, no. 1, (2019):  1–​8. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1080/​23802014.2019.1657038. Marquez-​Bustos, Natalia, and Glenn Ojeda Vega. “Will Colombia See a #MeToo Revolution?”Fair Observer, 17 December 2019. www.fairobserver.com/​region/​latin_​america/​colombia-​violence-​against-​women​me-​too-​movement-​latin-​america-​news-​17611. Martínez, Fabiola. “2019, el más violento para las mexicanas” [2019, the Most Violent Year for Mexican Women]. La Jornada, 26 January 2020. www.jornada.com.mx/​ultimas/​politica/​2020/​01/​26/​el-​2019-​ el-​mas-​violento-​para-​las-​mexicanas-​4369.html. Medina, Maria Clara. “#NiUnaMenos and the Poetry of Gender Equality”. School of Blogal Studies (blog). 11 March 2019. www.blogalstudies.com/​post/​niunamenos-​and-​the-​poetry-​of-​gender-​equality. Méndez, Fabiola and Damián Mendoza. “2019, El año del #MeToo en México” [2019, The year of #MeToo in Mexico]. UNAM Global. 11 December 2019. www.unamglobal.unam.mx/​?p=79781. Muñiz, Nora. “Cientos de mujeres protestan contra violencia policíaca en CDMX” [Feminism: Hundreds of Women Protest Against Police Violence in Mexico City]. Plumas Atómicas, 12 August 2019. https://​ plumasatomicas.com/​feminismo/​danos-​protesta-​mujeres-​cdmx-​jesus-​orta. Nash, June. “Cultural Parameters of Sexism and Racism in the International Division of Labor”. In Racism and Sexism and the World System. Joan Smith, Jane Collins, Terence K. Hopkins, and Akbar Muhammed, eds, 11–​36. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. Nobel Prize (website). “Oscar Arias Sanchez: Facts”. www.nobelprize.org/​prizes/​peace/​1987/​arias/​facts. Accessed 4 June 2020. ONU Mujeres [UN Women]. 100 medidas que incorporan la perspectiva de género en el acuerdo de paz entre el gobierno de Colombia y las FARC-​EP para terminar el conflicto y construir una paz estable y duradera [100 Measures That Incorporate the Gender Perspective in the Peace Agreement Between the Government of Colombia and the FARC-​EP to End the Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace]. ONU Mujeres Colombia, 2018. https://​colombia.unwomen.org/​es/​biblioteca/​publicaciones/​2017/​05/​ 100-​medidas-​genero-​acuerdos. Oquendo, Catalina. “La paz en Colombia rezagada para las mujeres” [The Peace in Colombia Delayed for Women]. El País, 15 December 2019. https://​elpais.com/​internacional/​2019/​12/​10/​actualidad/​ 1575994845_​411283.html. Pagina 12. “Femicidios”. www.pagina12.com.ar/​tags/​1466-​femicidios. Accessed 13 May 2020.

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Edmé Domínguez R. Pisetta, Antonella. “¿Cómo surgió el Movimiento Ni Una Menos?” [How Did the Movement Ni una Menos Come About?]. Perfil, 7 March 2019. www.perfil.com/​noticias/​sociedad/​como-​surgio-​ movimiento-​ni-​una-​menos-​2015.phtml Poza, Javier. “Karla Souza revela que sufrió acoso sexual en México” [Karla Souza Reveals She Was Sexually Harassed in Mexico]. Radio Formula, 27 October 2017. www.radioformula.com.mx/​programas/​ javier-​poza-​en-​formula/​20171027/​karla-​souza-​revela-​que-​sufrio-​acoso-​sexual-​en-​mexico. Quadratín México. “CDMX canta la Intervención un violador en tu camino en el Zócalo” [CDMX Performs ‘a Rapist in Your Path’ in Zócalo] YouTube, 29 November 2019. Video. www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=zWpsF8cYTf4 Radio Educación. Noticiarios Pulso. 7 February 2020. Audio. https://​e-​radio.edu.mx/​Noticiarios-​ pulso?id_​podcast=28369. Radio Educación. Noticiarios Pulso. 9 February 2020. Audio. https://​e-​radio.edu.mx/​Noticiarios-​ pulso?id_​podcast=28395. Rodríguez, Juliana. “A Year of #MeToo: This Has Been Its Impressive Impact”. Latin American Post, 10 October 2018. https://​latinamericanpost.com/​23821-​a-​year-​of-​metoo-​this-​has-​been-​its-​impressive-​impact. San Martín, Neldy. “Toma Feminista de la Facultad de Filosofía: ‘Que arda todo lo que tenga que arder’ ” [Feminist Take of the Philophy Faculty:  ‘Let Everything that Needs to Burn, Burn’]. Proceso, 18 January 2020. www.proceso.com.mx/​614804/​toma-​facultad-​filosofia-​que-​arda. Santana, Rosa. “Presuntos acosadores ofrecen recompensa tras ser exhibidos en @MetooMerida” [Alleged Stalkers Offer Compensation After Being Displayed in @MetooMerida]. Proceso, 18 January, 2020. www.proceso.com.mx/​614726/​acosadores-​recompensa-​metoomerida. Segura, R. and D. Mechoulan. Made in Havana:  How Colombia and the FARC Decided to End the War. New  York:  International Peace Institute, 2017. www.ipinst.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2017/​02/​IPI-​ Rpt-​Made-​in-​Havana.pdf. Tegel, Simeon. “While the US Has #MeToo, Latin America’s ‘Ni Una Menos’ Spotlights Femicides, Violence Against Women”. NBC News, 17 May 2018. www.nbcnews.com/​news/​latino/​ while-​u-​s-​has-​metoo-​latin-​america-​s-​ni-​una-​n875091. Telesur. “ ‘Ni Una Menos’ convoca nueva marcha en Perú el 12 de agosto” [‘Not One Less’ Calls a New March in Peru on 12 August]. 3 August 2017. www.telesurtv.net/​news/​Ni-​una-​menos-​convoca-​ nueva-​marcha-​en-​Peru-​el-​12-​de-​agosto-​20170803-​0062.html T13. “Mirá cómo nos ponemos” [Look How We Get Excited]. YouTube. 16 December 2018. Video. www.youtube.com/​watch?v=BiBM-​jIrC_​k. Torres, Carmela. “Susana Chávez:  un origen de #NiUnaMenos” [Susana Chávez:  An Origin of #NiUnaMenos]. La Izquierda Diario, 3 June 2018. www.laizquierdadiario.com/​Susana-​ Chavez-​un-​origen-​de-​NiUnaMenos. Vega, Andrea. “Estado oculta feminicidios cometidos por crimen organizado y no investiga, acusan activistas de 23 entidades” [State Hides Femicides Committed by Organised Crime and These Go Uninvestigated, Activists from 23 States Denounce]. Animal Político, Grupo Editorial Criterio, 6 February 2019. www.animalpolitico.com/​2019/​02/​estado-​feminicidios-​crimen-​organizado-​mexico.

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30 #AKADEMIUPPROPET Social media as a tool for shaping a counter-​public space in Swedish academia Lisa Salmonsson

[At] [t]‌he post-​seminar gathering …a senior faculty member walked up to a female colleague, placed his hand on her bum, and groped her. It happened in front of everyone. …She froze …No open or collective action was taken …She left academia. He stayed, and is now supervising another doctoral [student].1 This testimony from a female junior scholar at a Swedish academic institution is one of more than 100 actual testimonies shared by members of a private Facebook group that initially was created for women who had experienced sexual harassment and sexism in academia but resulted in fostering awareness of sexual harassment in Swedish higher education in general. The woman’s statement and others like it formed the basis of what would come to be known as #akademiuppropet (“The academic petition” in English). Because this testimony shares many themes with other members’ of Swedish academia —​such as asymmetric power dynamics, sexist and misogynist organisational cultures, and various kinds of sexual harassment  —​it can be viewed as a typical testimony. More broadly, the testimonies included bystanders’ reactions, flawed reporting processes, and women’s feelings of marginalisation, disappointment, shame, and guilt. The testimonies are consistent with those from other academic organisational contexts, countries, and historical periods.2 As the initiator of the #akademiuppropet movement, I  have thought a great deal about this consistency across testimonies since the #MeToo movement peaked in November 2017; although the particular case presented here (#akademiuppropet) is relatively new, these testimonies reflect issues that feminists struggling for gender equality have raised time and again for decades. Indeed, ever since they first entered Swedish academia in the early 1900s, women (and, to some extent, men) have fought against oppressive patriarchal systems within the academy, while striving for gender equality. Thus, the #akademiuppropet movement did not address a new phenomenon; instead, it approached an endemic problem in a novel way. Its organisation and mobilisation of resources took place primarily in the digital sphere. I intend to address the way that #akademiuppropet, a tributary of the #MeToo hashtag movement, enacted a creative approach to confronting misogyny in the academy through digital media, as well as the way in which it straddled counter-​public online spaces and public offline spaces to achieve concrete action towards equalising power structures in Swedish academia.

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Feminist activists are increasingly turning to digital technologies and social media platforms to network, organise, and engage in dialogue about sexism, misogyny, harassment, and rape.3 One such example is the Black women’s rights and anti-​violence activist Tarana Burke’s “Me Too” movement in 2006 to support young women of colour who had experienced and survived sexual abuse; as a way to bring attention to the movement, Burke created a MySpace page for “Me Too”.4 In 2017, the affluent white actress Alyssa Milano used “Me Too” as a hashtag, calling upon all women who have been sexually harassed to reply to her tweet with the words “me too”; Milano’s tweet led women all over the world to share their stories on social media under the hashtag #MeToo. Although the importance of Milano’s action cannot be denied, the #MeToo hashtag has been sharply criticised for its erasure of the women of colour who initiated the movement. Fourth-​wave feminism has focused on the ways in which feminists use information technology for community building activities.5 Jessalynn Marie Keller, for instance, shows how young feminists use digital spaces to shape a public self and argues that digital activism in its various forms can be seen as a “significant practice for the future of feminism”.6 At the same time, so-​called technofeminist scholars have demonstrated the ways in which “women’s identities, needs and priorities are configured together with digital technology” and how women “have been able to create alternative publics that function as spaces for debate, politicisation and as fertiliser for feminist activism”.7 Even so, some argue that digital technology has been used by the feminist movement with no “explicit, organised effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends”.8 A conscious effort is needed, these feminist groups argue, because technology incorporates a patriarchal/​masculine bias into its design and basic protocols.9 Alongside these matters, feminist media scholars have also raised other concerns around issues of inclusion and exclusion in terms of access. Aristea Fotopoulou, for example, argues that mobilising online risks excluding people such as the elderly and low-​income groups that do not have the devices needed to access social media on a daily basis.10 I also argue that organising movements online risks excluding people who have a peripheral position with regard to the initiators on social networks. This could, for example, be the case in #akademiuppropet that was organised by mostly white female academics such as myself. At the same time, other scholars have demonstrated that online platforms and sites can also provide a safe space for marginalised groups that previously did not have any way to voice their opinions or experiences.11 Studies have drawn attention to the popularity of Twitter amongst Black women in the United States, which has led some scholars to celebrate social media’s ability to facilitate a more intersectional feminist movement.12 There is an overall awareness within the feminist movement that forms of racialised exclusions where women of colour have not been given credit remain —​for example, in launching and sustaining hashtags such as #MeToo.13 Social movement researchers have also emphasised that digital online activism might not have the same impact as traditional offline activism, due to what is often called “clicktivism” or “slacktivism”.14 Their argument is that online activism and digital political engagement often satisfy people’s moral and psychological need for engagement without necessarily prompting real action and social change. They also suggest that this type of activism results in less engagement in traditional offline activism, social movements, or social actions, and that, in a sense, digital activism amounts to taking the easy way out. My argument is more in line with Kelly Garrett and Carter Olson, who argue, conversely, that information and communication technology (ICT) and digital communities open new possibilities for traditional social movements and change the way we participate in these movements, while shaping mainstream media agendas.15 As Sagi Leizerlov suggests, digitalisation has changed social movements in two important ways: first, by potentially increasing the flow of political information; and second, by 440

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potentially decreasing the cost of conventional forms of participation and creating new low-​cost forms of participation.16 I also agree with Kelly Garrett’s argument that ICT has opened up new ways to shape collective identity, which she defines as “a perception among individuals that they are a part of a larger community by virtue of the grievances they share”.17 This is in line with what I would like to emphasise in my analysis: namely that #akademiuppropet and many of the other occupational petitions in Sweden were far from so called clicktivism. Rather, they are communal spaces that supported harassed women and created a platform for change.

Organisational context of #akademiuppropet Universities can be considered gendered organisations.18 Evidence shows that women in academia tend to be judged more harshly when applying for grants and in the peer-​review process, and they are rewarded less frequently than their male counterparts.19 The movement #akademiuppropet could therefore be understood as an example of online social action that showed how misogyny and harassment affect female academics’ everyday lives in a gendered organisation. The akademiuppropet movement is one of more than 50 such sectoral initiatives among professional groups in Sweden that arose when individuals in certain industries or occupations joined together to speak out against sexual harassment in their particular sector. In the wake of the broader #MeToo movement and social media campaign, the sector-​specific #akademiuppropet gained traction as an online social action against sexual harassment, abuse, and sexism at Swedish universities. Although the hashtag is now public, #akademiuppropet began as a private Facebook group on 13 November 2017.20 I see this as a kind of second wave of the #MeToo movement and as something of a contrast to it as it was more than a digital movement from the beginning. I would argue that #akademiuppropet used both online and offline media to mobilise and shape awareness of sexual harassment in academia in a way that the #MeToo movement initially did not. #akademiuppropet was instead a movement that organised women in academia, allowing them to develop a collective narrative, in contrast to the myriad individual testimonies that initiated the #MeToo movement. One important difference between the broader #MeToo movement and #akademiuppropet was that out of many individual stories, #akademiuppropet constructed a larger narrative of asymmetric power dynamics in academia without naming particular individuals. This strategy I would argue, helped to address structural problems within higher education, but unlike the way in which the #MeToo movement developed, it did not point the finger at individual perpetrators. Unlike the #MeToo movement, #akademiuppropet had more top-​ down control. For example, within the #akademiuppropet movement, we used email as a complement to the social media forum that was designed for debates rather than for listening to people’s experiences of sexual harassment. This way of designing social media as a platform for debate and conflict can be theorised as a masculine bias.21 As a result of the use of email for sending in testimonies, the petition that was collectively produced also included anonymous testimonies of sexual harassment. The petition was later published in one of Sweden’s largest newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet22 and was handed over to the former Minister of Education, Helene Hellmark Knutsson, prompting the Swedish government to launch research into the measures that universities must take to prevent sexual harassment. It was signed by academics working in a variety of disciplines across Swedish academia; the social sciences garnered the largest number of signatures, followed by the humanities. Medicine, the natural sciences, and individuals who had left academia also constituted a significant number of signatures. The fewest signatures came from people working in technology, the arts, and economics. 441

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When I saw the distribution of signatures across academic disciplines, I was not surprised to find that most came from those in the social sciences —​I am an upper middle-​class social scientist, meaning that, as the initiator of the #akademiuppropet movement, I began by reaching out to those in my immediate social network and academic discipline, a bias that was evident in the distribution of the signatures as well. It was not surprising that most of the testimonies came from people of Swedish background because only 31% of staff members at Swedish universities were born outside of Sweden.23 For me, this indicates a network effect of digital feminist activism that warrants research and discussion of the aspect of race, class, and citizenship status. I began the movement that eventually grew into #akademiuppropet by adding female colleagues who were my friends on Facebook to a private group aimed at assessing whether there were stories of sexual harassment in academia. I then asked these female colleagues to add women who worked or had previously worked in academia to the Facebook group. From there, the group grew exponentially, until, two weeks later, I had to close it down in order to ensure confidentiality and to protect the identities of contributors before the petition was published in the mainstream media. At its peak, the group had 9,000 members. As the group grew, so did the measures taken to ensure safety and confidentiality. During the first 48 hours, I accepted new members myself, immediately accepting people who stated their university affiliation in their profile. When people did not share their university affiliation on their Facebook profile, I had to conduct online searches to verify their affiliation. As the group grew, I asked trusted friends and colleagues to become administrators and to help me evaluate profiles. In the end, the group had seven active administrators. The public petition, based on about 100 stories of sexual harassment, was signed by 2,648 people, most of them formerly or currently employed at Swedish universities. One noteworthy aspect of this instance of digital activism is the extent to which the outcome hinged upon who started the movement and what platform was used. While this is likely also true of offline movements, the impact might be even stronger when using social media platforms. For example, women without a Facebook account could not be reached, and it took some time for #akademiuppropet to spread to people beyond my academic discipline. Then again, the fact that the group grew much faster than most offline social movements may have, in part, compensated for the shortcomings resulting from the network effect. The process of closing down the group took a great deal of time because I had to delete all members by hand, one by one. As the initiator of the group that later became #akademiuppropet, I  see myself as having been a participant observer who alternated between the role of an insider and an observer. As a participant, I gained a deep understanding of and insight into how the resources, both material and human, were mobilised. I also read all of the stories of harassment that were sent to the hidden Facebook group. The observer position was especially useful when I conducted follow-​up interviews with 14 of the women who shared testimonies. During these interviews, we discussed what #akademiuppropet and #MeToo meant to them, and how they thought movements like these might be forces for change. These interviews revealed that the hashtags seemed to mean different things to different members: some wanted to share experiences, some wanted to discuss how to go about organising around the issue of sexual harassment and how to move forward, and many just wanted to support the fight to end sexual harassment in Swedish academia. In the case of #akademiuppropet, the Facebook group and the communication that took place within it became more than simple tools for spreading information. I would argue that #akademiuppropet should be understood as a form of digital feminist activism, whereby women in academia shaped a counter-​public platform and developed a digital intimacy that enabled them to share stories about sexual harassment with one another, 442

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and more importantly, to form a collective narrative based on individual testimonies.24 When that objective was achieved, we drafted a petition and went offline with our demands. Drawing on Bennett and Segerberg’s distinction between collective and connective action, I suggest that while the #MeToo movement primarily resembled a connective action, #akademiuppropet was messier —​maybe even what Smith-​Prei and Stehle would call ‘akward politics’ —​because it resembles a collective action, but utilised digital platforms to mobilise and share experience.25 In the case of #akademiuppropet, identities, needs and priorities were configured to fit the social media platform.26 For example, we had to adapt the way we recruited members to the functionality and interface of Facebook. People could not be invited to become members of a hidden Facebook group; instead, only the group administrator(s) could approve new members. This method of mobilising people had an impact on participation rates because the ability to accept members belonged to the founder of the group, or to administrators to whom the founder had delegated that responsibility. The founder of the group could add individuals directly, but members added by other members had to be approved by the founder or administrators. This gave a substantial degree of power to the group founder, and seemingly distanced the mobilisation effort from the grassroots (i.e. the members of the group). The seemingly egalitarian structure of social media, in this case, Facebook, is, in fact, quite complicated. The administrative constraints of inclusion and exclusion were discussed among the group’s members at an early stage. Some members asked if there was an invite function, and others questioned this feature of the social network design. New members were added by existing members, and if the former did not want to be included, they had to actively leave the group. Some of the posts in the group criticised this approach, and some members were quite irritated by the fact that they, in the words of one member, had ‘just been added’ without actively choosing to join the group of their own accord. This aspect became increasingly awkward as the group grew, because we (the founder and administrators) did not personally know the people behind the accounts that were added by members. As the group grew, it lost some of the characteristics of a counter-​public space because nobody really knew who all these members were. As a result, we witnessed the topic of discussion shift from the cause (i.e., sexual harassment and imbalanced power relations in academia) and our strategy for addressing it to an analysis of the group itself. For instance, one such discussion centred on the possibility that transgender and non-​binary people might be excluded, given the binary gender assumptions implicit in Facebook’s design. Also complicated, is the question of administration-​as-​policing, both in terms of structuring the terms of debate and discussion in the group, as well as keeping out unwanted trolling. In the administration group for instance, we also discussed strategies for excluding accounts that might belong to cis-​gendered male trolls, as well as how and when we should intervene in the discussions between members on the group feed. This discussion continued over time, even though we had less and less control over the group as it grew. This method of adding members differentiates this online space from offline counter-​public spaces, where people have to take action to join. In traditional collective actions, people can be invited, but ultimately, they must actively choose to join. This distinction deepens our understanding of how people can be mobilised in the digital age; although social media makes it easy to gain lots of members quickly, the platform’s own interface also shapes the way we mobilise and who is included and excluded in a social movement.27 Understanding the technology itself is important as it relates to administration, but it is also crucial because it, in some ways, determines who has the potential to be a member. Can this type of digital activism turn the whole idea of participation in a social movement on its head? At first, I thought it could. I considered what it would mean if people could, for instance, become members of a political party without knowing it; 443

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what if a person could simply be added to a political party by being added to a social media group administered by the party, and then it was up to each individual to decide whether or not they wanted to remain a member? In many ways this feature felt somewhat scary, because as the founder of the group I felt I had too much power —​power that I did not really want to wield in a movement that was intended to let harassed women in academia know that they were not alone. I also feared that the movement would lose credibility due to the top-​down manner in which members were added. This fear extended to ongoing discussions of how social media platforms such as Facebook use the information they cull from their members —​ a discussion that has gained more political and international visibility after the Cambridge Analytical scandal.28 Then again, this particular private group was not a political party or any kind of formal organisation; rather, it was a space where the issue of sexual harassment could be discussed outside of the public sphere, among people who would likely not have been able to come together face-​to-​face. For all these reasons, I think that the issue of mobilising members by means of social media platforms and digital activism is a topic worthy of further study, especially within research on social movements. In the case of #akademiuppropet, I would argue that the collective identity and participation levels boosted one another: the more members the group had, the more people were added or wanted to be added. The private group also opened up a much-​needed common space. One of the participants wrote: I have read many of the posts and followed the group’s growth. At the same time as my anger and frustration have grown, a stone has fallen from my heart; I am not alone, … and I am not the one who is flawed …Thank you for starting the group.29 The above member describes how both her feelings of anger and frustration and her sense of community and camaraderie grew along with the group. She uses the metaphor of a stone falling from her heart, which can be understood to represent the way that her feelings of shame and guilt diminished as more and more members joined the group and shared similar stories. Reading through my notes from the past year, I understand the group as more than merely a place for sharing information online; it was a digital counter-​public and to some extent intimate space to remind us that there are many women in Swedish universities who experience various degrees of harassment. In this way, #akademiuppropet opened a space for shared identities, political activism, and solidarity. From my perspective, it served to boost and fertilise Swedish feminist movements, enabling women from across disciplines and geographical locations to voice their experiences and join forces: For me, a lot has been ripped open with this petition, both regarding academia and in general. I am happy about this movement, and it has been important to have this group where so many have [made] visible …what is wrong… It has taken away the feeling of being alone.30 In the quote above, the group itself is described as important because it ‘takes away the feeling of being alone’. The writer describes the #akademiuppropet movement as something she is happy about, but the group itself seems even more important because it collectively shoulders the burden that many have long carried alone. This differs considerably from the idea of clicktivism discussed at the beginning of this article. Like many of the other sectoral initiatives, #akademiuppropet was powerful because it formed a collective narrative of sexual harassment in academia based on individual stories that were 444

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shared and discussed in a counter-​public space. However, the movement was also powerful because it did not stop there. It entered the offline, public sphere. This situates #akademiuppropet somewhere between the two ideal types suggested by Bennett and Segerberg, in contrast to the wider #MeToo movement, which often focused on specific accused harassers.31 The #akademiuppropet testimonies were not only shared with the public, but also used to shape a collective voice that emerged from the safety of a counter-​public space, the secret, or unsearchable, social media group. In that regard, #akademiuppropet cannot be understood as a connective action as defined by Bennett and Segerberg.32 Neither can it be viewed as a traditional collective action because it used social media in a very conscious way with the deliberate aim of changing how sexual harassment is handled in universities. I therefore suggest that we need to see #akademiuppropet as a kind of digital intimate counter-​public collective action. I would argue that, even though the unsearchable group on Facebook is now closed, the movement lives on in the streets and in other groups (see, for example, #rättslösa, a movement promoting enhanced jurisdictional rights of women), and the issue of sexual harassment continues to be a central issue in various forums, both on and offline. Even I have a hard time keeping up with the great number of different initiatives around the topic of sexual harassment. I still have the same sense of ‘uncontrollability’ that I felt since starting the group in November 2017; I feel as if the issue has taken on a life of its own and can no longer be coordinated as it initially could. Sexual harassment, mistreatment, and abuse persist —​and everyone must, at the very least, acknowledge it. All the while, movements continue to evolve, making them that much harder to control. As Knappe and Lang put it: Contemporary European women’s movements articulate themselves less in broad mass mobilisations and grassroots protests than earlier generations. Their public engagement repertoires have shifted: Campaigns are increasingly organised online; networking and outreach are facilitated by new technologies. Generating internet-​based issue publics can be relatively low cost and timely, yet can produce effects far beyond the web. This communicative turn suggests that more women’s organisations across Europe might be able to network and turn up the volume from whisper to voice.33 These words summarise much of what I wanted to explore here. The story of #akademiuppropet, especially when viewed in the context of other sectoral initiatives against workplace sexual harassment in Sweden, suggests that Swedish women’s movements are alive and dynamic. In social movement literature, information and communications technology (ICT) is often used as a way to bypass the traditional media, but in the case of #akademiuppropet, the social media platform was instead used as a kind of counter-​public space to withdraw and regroup on the issue of sexual harassment, unacceptable sexual behaviour, and sexism towards women in academia.34 This manner of organising might have to do with contextual factors such as Sweden’s history of strong labour and women’s movements. ICT, in the context of a larger culture of feminist activism in Sweden, was used to create a counter-​public space where people could regroup and hone goals and demands while recognising commonalities that permit the creation of a larger, collective narrative of sexual harassment in academia. This strategy did not lead to individual accusations or trials  —​quite the opposite. Individual testimonies gave voice to a collective narrative that could neither be ignored nor misread as scapegoating. This strategy kept equal opportunity high on the organisational agenda through the concrete governmental action it generated in response to the petition consolidated from individual stories in a single Facebook group. This outcome indicates that many “small whisperings” (online and offline) can, in fact, transform into a powerful collective voice. 445

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Notes 1 Female junior scholar during #akademiuppropet (identity protected). The quote originates from my field notes taken while the private Facebook group was open 10–​21 November 2017. 2 See for example Liisa Husu, “Gender Discrimination in the Promised Land of Gender Equality”, Higher Education in Europe 25, no. 2 (2000): 221–​228. 3 See Kaitlynn Mendes et  al., “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism”, European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 236–​246. 4 See for example Abby Ohlheiser, “The Woman behind ‘Me Too’ Knew the Power of the Phrase When She Created It  —​10 Years Ago”, Washington Post, 19 October 2017, www. washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​wp/​2017/​10/​19/​the-​woman-​behind-​me-​too-​knew-​ the-​power-​of-​the-​phrase-​when-​she-​created-​it-​10-​years-​ago. 5 See for example Sarah J.  Jackson et  al., “#GirlsLikeUs:  Trans Advocacy and Community Building Online”, New Media & Society 20, no. 5 (2018): 1868–​1888; Larisa Kingston Mann,“What Can Feminism Learn from New Media?” Communication and Critical/​Cultural Studies 11, no.  3 (2014):  293–​297; Ealasaid Munro, Feminism: A Fourth Wave? Political Insight (London: The Political Studies Association (PSA), 2013); Pauline Maclaran, “Feminism’s Fourth Wave:  A Research Agenda for Marketing and Consumer Research”, Journal of Marketing Management 31, no.  15–​16 (2015):  1732–​1738; Margaret Matich et al., “#freethenipple —​Digital Activism and Embodiment in the Contemporary Feminist Movement”, Consumption Markets & Culture 22, no.  4 (2019):  337–​362; Helga Sadowski, “Digital Intimacies:  Doing Digital Media Differently” (PhD diss., Linköping University, 2016); and Harriet Kimble Wrye, “The Fourth Wave of Feminism: Psychoanalytic Perspectives Introductory Remarks”, Studies in Gender and Sexuality 10, no. 4 (2009): 185–​189. See also three special sections on “hashtag/​ digital feminism”: Sherri Williams, “Digital Defense: Black Feminists Resist Violence with Hashtag Activism”, Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 2 (2015): 341–​344, www.tandfonline.com/​doi/​full/​10.1080/​ 14680777.2015.1008744; and a special issue of Feminism & Psychology 28, no. 1 (2018), https://​journals. sagepub.com/​toc/​fapa/​28/​1. 6 Keller, “Virtual Feminisms”, Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 3 (2012): 443. 7 Judy Wajcman, “Feminist Theories of Technology”, Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, no. 1 (2010): 150; Henrike Knappe, and Sabine Lang, “Between Whisper and Voice:  Online Women’s Movement Outreach in the UK and Germany”, European Journal of Women’s Studies 21, no. 4 (2014): 362; see also Sarah J. Jackson and Sonia Banaszczyk, “Digital Standpoints: Debating Gendered Violence and Racial Exclusions in the Feminist Counterpublic”, Journal of Communication Inquiry 40, no. 4 (2016): 391–​407; and Sadowski, “Digital Intimacies”. 8 Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation (London: Verso Trade, 2018), 17. 9 Wajcman, “Feminist Theories of Technology”, 150; Mann, “What Can Feminism Learn from New Media?”, 293–​297. 10 Aristea Fotopoulou, “Digital and Networked by Default? Women’s Organisations and the Social Imaginary of Networked Feminism”, New Media & Society 18, no. 6 (2016): 989–​1005. 11 See for example Jackson et al., “#GirlsLikeUs”; and Mann, “What Can Feminism Learn from New Media?”. 12 See for example Melissa Brown et al., “#SayHerName: A Case Study of Intersectional Social Media Activism”. Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no.  11 (2017):  1831–​1846; and Sarah J.  Jackson, “(Re) Imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism to Hashtag Activism”, Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 4 (2016): 375–​379. 13 See for example Dubravka Zarkov and Kathy Davis, “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo:  #ForHow Long and #WhereTo?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no.  1 (2018): 3–​9. 14 See for example Nolan L.  Cabrera et  al., “Activism or Slacktivism? The Potential and Pitfalls of Social Media in Contemporary Student Activism”, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 10, no. 4 (2017): 400; Dennis McCafferty, “Activism vs. Slacktivism”, Communications of the ACM 54, no. 12 (2011): 17–​19. 15 Kelly Garett, “Protest in an Information Society: A Review of Literature on Social Movements and New ICTs”, Information, Communication & Society 9, no.  2 (2006):  202–​224; Candi Carter Olson, “#BringBackOurGirls:  Digital Communities Supporting Real-​ World Change and Influencing Mainstream Media Agendas”, Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 5 (2016): 772–​787.

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#Akademiuppropet: Social media in Swedish academia 16 Sagi Leizerov, “Privacy Advocacy Groups versus Intel:  A Case Study of How Social Movements Are Tactically Using the Internet to Fight Corporations”, Social Science Computer Review 18, no.  4 (2000): 461–​483. 17 Garett, “Protest in an Information Society”, 205. 18 See for example Joan Acker, “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies:  A Theory of Gendered Organizations”, Gender & Society 4, no. 2 (1990): 139–​158; and Lisa K. Hanasono et al., “Secret Service: Revealing Gender Biases in the Visibility and Value of Faculty Service”. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 12, no. 1 (2019): 85. 19 Fredrik Bondestam and Louise Grip, Fördelning eller förfördelning? Forskningsfinansiering, jämställdhet och genus —​en forskningsöversikt [Distribution or Predistribution? Financing Research, Equality and Gender  —​A  Literature Review] (Gothenburg:  Nationella genussekretariatet [Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research], 2015); Jessica A. Johnson and Barrett J. Taylor, “Academic Capitalism and the Faculty Salary Gap”, Innovative Higher Education 44, no. 1 (2019): 21–​35. 20 The group was started by the author in reaction to the other professional groups that had started groups to gather experiences about sexual harassment in different organisational settings. It was not until a few years later that I decided to try to theorise #akademiuppropet. 21 Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto, 17. 22 “Visste inte om jag skulle dö, sen våldtog han mig” [I Did Not Know If I  Was Going to Die, Then He Raped Me]. Svenska Dagbladet, 24 November 2017. www.svd.se/​visste-​inte-​om-​jag-​ skulle-​do-​-​sen-​valdtog-​han-​mig. 23 These numbers are higher in the natural sciences (47%), technology (39%), and medicine (35%) than in the social sciences, where only 23% of staff are not Swedish-​born, and these often come from other European countries. A report from Uppsala University shows that although 33 per cent of their staff were born outside Sweden, only about one per cent of that group were born in Africa or South America. UKÄ [Swedish Higher Education Authority], Högskolans personal [University Staff] 2018, www.uka.se/​download/​18.661e864c1639ebc31e774f/​1527582917749/​personal.pdf. 24 See Jackson, “(Re) Imagining Intersectional Democracy”; Jackson and Banaszczyk, “Digital Standpoints”; Jackson et al., “#GirlsLikeUs”; and Sadowski, “Digital Intimacies”. 25 Bennett and Segerberg write: “The familiar logic of collective action associated with high levels of organizational resources and the formation of collective identities, and the less familiar logic of connective action based on personalized content sharing across media networks”. W.  Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics”, Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 739; Carrie Smith-​ Prei and Maria Stehle, Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2016). 26 See Wajcman, “Feminist Theories of Technology”. 27 See Jackson, “(Re) Imagining Intersectional Democracy”; Jackson et al., “#GirlsLikeUs”; Jackson and Banaszczyk, “Digital Standpoints”; and also the ongoing debate about hashtag and digital feminism in the Journal of Feminist Media Studies. 28 Cambridge Analytica was a private company which had gotten access to private information from Facebook without any users being aware of it. 29 Translation of field notes based on a post in the group. 30 Translation of field notes based on a post in the group. 31 Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action”. 32 Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action”. 33 Knappe and Lang, “Between Whisper and Voice”, 362. 34 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, Social Text, no. 25/​26 (1990): 56–​80, doi:10.2307/​466240.

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Lisa Salmonsson Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. “The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics”. Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 739–​768. Bondestam, Fredrik, and Louise Grip. Fördelning eller förfördelning? Forskningsfinansiering, jämställdhet och genus  —​en forskningsöversikt [Distribution or Predistribution? Financing Research, Equality and Gender —​A Literature Review]. Gothenburg: Nationella genussekretariatet [Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research], 2015. Brown, Melissa, Rashawn Ray, Ed Summers, and Neil Fraistat. “#SayHerName:  A Case Study of Intersectional Social Media Activism”. Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 11 (2017): 1831–​1846. Cabrera, Nolan L., Cheryl E. Matias, and Roberto Montoya. “Activism or Slacktivism? The Potential and Pitfalls of Social Media in Contemporary Student Activism”. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 10, no. 4 (2017): 400. Carter Olson, Candi. “#BringBackOurGirls: Digital Communities Supporting Real-​World Change and Influencing Mainstream Media Agendas”. Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 5 (2016): 772–​787. Cuboniks, Laboria. The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation. London: Verso Trade, 2018. Fotopoulou, Aristea. “Digital and Networked by Default? Women’s Organisations and the Social Imaginary of Networked Feminism”. New Media & Society 18, no. 6 (2016): 989–​1005. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere:  A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”. Social Text, no. 25/​26 (1990): 56–​80. doi:10.2307/​466240. Garett, Kelly. “Protest in an Information Society: A Review of Literature on Social Movements and New ICTs”. Information, Communication & Society 9, no. 2 (2006): 202–​224. Hanasono, Lisa K., Ellen M. Broido, Margaret M. Yacobucci, Karen V. Root, Susana Peña, and Deborah A. O’Neil. “Secret Service: Revealing Gender Biases in the Visibility and Value of Faculty Service”. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 12, no. 1 (2019): 85. Husu, Liisa. “Gender Discrimination in the Promised Land of Gender Equality”. Higher Education in Europe 25, no. 2 (2000): 221–​228. Jackson, Sarah J. “(Re) Imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism to Hashtag Activism”. Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 4 (2016): 375–​379. Jackson, Sarah J., and Sonia Banaszczyk. “Digital Standpoints: Debating Gendered Violence and Racial Exclusions in the Feminist Counterpublic”. Journal of Communication Inquiry 40, no. 4 (2016): 391–​407. Jackson, Sarah J., Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles. “#GirlsLikeUs:  Trans Advocacy and Community Building Online”. New Media & Society 20, no. 5 (2018): 1868–​1888. Johnson, Jessica A., and Barrett J. Taylor. “Academic Capitalism and the Faculty Salary Gap”. Innovative Higher Education 44, no. 1 (2019): 21–​35. Keller, Jessalynn Marie. “Virtual Feminisms”. Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 3 (2012): 429–​ 447. DOI: 10.1080/​1369118X.2011.642890. Knappe, Henrike, and Sabine Lang. “Between Whisper and Voice: Online Women’s Movement Outreach in the UK and Germany”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 21, no. 4 (2014): 361–​381. Leizerov, Sagi. “Privacy Advocacy Groups versus Intel:  A Case Study of How Social Movements Are Tactically Using the Internet to Fight Corporations”. Social Science Computer Review 18, no. 4 (2000): 461–​483. Maclaran, Pauline. “Feminism’s Fourth Wave:  A Research Agenda for Marketing and Consumer Research”. Journal of Marketing Management 31, no. 15–​16 (2015): 1732–​1738. Mann, Larisa Kingston. “What Can Feminism Learn from New Media?” Communication and Critical/​ Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2014): 293–​297. Matich, Margaret, Rachel Ashman, and Elizabeth Parsons. “#freethenipple  —​Digital Activism and Embodiment in the Contemporary Feminist Movement”. Consumption Markets & Culture 22, no. 4 (2019): 337–​362. McCafferty, Dennis. “Activism vs. Slacktivism”. Communications of the ACM 54, no. 12 (2011): 17–​19. Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller. “# MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 236–​246. Munro, Ealasaid. Feminism:  A Fourth Wave? Political Insight. London:  The Political Studies Association (PSA), 2013. Ohlheiser, Abby. “The Woman behind ‘Me Too’Knew the Power of the Phrase When She Created It —​10 Years Ago”. Washington Post, 19 October 2017. www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-​intersect/​wp/​2017/​10/​ 19/​the-​woman-​behind-​me-​too-​knew-​the-​power-​of-​the-​phrase-​when-​she-​created-​it-​10-​years-​ago.

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#Akademiuppropet: Social media in Swedish academia Sadowski, Helga. “Digital Intimacies:  Doing Digital Media Differently”. PhD diss., Linköping University, 2016. Smith-​Prei, Carrie, and Maria Stehle. Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism. Montreal: McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 2016. Svenska Dagbladet. “Visste inte om jag skulle dö, sen våldtog han mig” [I Did Not Know If I Was Going to Die, Then He Raped Me]. 24 November 2017. www.svd.se/​visste-​inte-​om-​jag-​skulle-​do-​-​sen-​ valdtog-​han-​mig. UKÄ [Swedish Higher Education Authority]. “Högskolans personal” [University Staff]. In Årsrapport 2018 för universitet och högskolor [2018 Annual Report for Universities and Colleges], 119–​ 135. Stockholm:  UKÄ, 2018. www.uka.se/​download/​18.661e864c1639ebc31e774f/​1527582917749/​ personal.pdf. Wajcman, Judy. “Feminist Theories of Technology”. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, no. 1 (2010): 143–​ 152. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​cje/​ben057. Williams, Sherri. “Digital Defense: Black Feminists Resist Violence with Hashtag Activism”. Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 2 (2015): 341–​344. www.tandfonline.com/​doi/​full/​10.1080/​14680777.2015.1008744. Wrye, Harriet Kimble. “The Fourth Wave of Feminism:  Psychoanalytic Perspectives Introductory Remarks”. Studies in Gender and Sexuality 10, no. 4 (2009): 185–​189. Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo: #ForHow Long and #WhereTo?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 1 (2018): 3–​9. doi:10.1177/​1350506817749436.

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31 FIGHTING STRUCTURAL INEQUALITIES Feminist activism and the #MeToo movement in Iceland Irma Erlingsdóttir Since patriarchy sustains and adapts itself through absorbing the challenges it encounters, there is a constant need to reinvent forms of feminist resistance.1 The #MeToo movement can be seen as a reaction to a system constructed in a way that offers no other option than to fail those who have been subjected to sexual harassment and violence. Victim-​survivors of sexual violence have suffered what Judith Shklar termed “public cruelty” or the infliction of pain on weaker individuals and groups by stronger ones.2 #MeToo responded to the urgency to create a space to combat such cruelty; it represented an irruptive moment when lived realities and social media coincided to expose ingrained social and cultural injustices. Dramaturgical paradigms are useful to understand the performative nature of such a social action where private and public power relations are embodied through the staging and dynamic interaction of multiple socio-​ political discourses. While #MeToo is not exempt from producing hegemonic effects, it has, nevertheless, signified an interruption within existing structures. By unmasking the full scale of systemic harassment and everyday sexism that women are subjected to  —​the “continuum of sexual violence”3 —​the movement has brought the personal to the attention of the political.4 Identifications have been turned into agency as part of a “performative social act”.5 In this chapter, I  explore the Icelandic response to #MeToo and the movement’s societal impact as part of a new phase in the history of the Icelandic women’s rights movement. By encouraging “affective solidarity” and emphasising shared experiences,6 the Icelandic #MeToo movement has —​through the use of social media and new technologies —​played an instrumental role in increasing societal and political awareness of the need to view this struggle in terms of cultural and structural change. This does not, of course, mean that it has eradicated the social malignancy. As I will stress here, sexual violence remains a major problem in Iceland as everywhere else in the world. The Icelandic #MeToo movement has been criticised by some for not being inclusive enough —​for having failed in substantively addressing intersectionality as part of its overall goal to combat sexual assault and harassment. But despite such shortcomings, it can still be argued that the women’s movement has, through #MeToo, managed to create a stronger cross-​sectional and intergenerational platform to fight gender equalities than ever before. Historically, #MeToo should be placed within the context of two transformative, collective action campaigns by women in Iceland. The first was the Women’s Strike on 24 October 1975, which was inspired by second-​wave radical feminism represented by the Red Stockings 450

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Movement. On that day, approximately 90% of the female workforce in Iceland stayed home, bringing the country to a near-​standstill in a show of unprecedented solidarity.7 The second was the establishment, in the early 1980s, of the Women’s Alliance (Kvennalistinn) —​ an all-​women’s party  —​where shared emotional experiences and cross-​sectorial solidarities were a leading principle.8 These two initiatives dramatically increased the visibility of women’s demands for equal rights, leading to structural changes such as increased participation of women in politics, a more liberal law on abortion rights, and the enactment of long overdue social policies in fields such as child care. As part of collective memory, these concrete actions also produced a series of subversive narratives aimed at overcoming the silencing effects of patriarchal discourses. This legacy can clearly be detected in the emergence of more recent feminist movements in Iceland, such as the SlutWalk, #freethenipple, #outloud and the “Beauty Tips” revolution, which provide the most immediate link to the #MeToo movement through their focus on sexism and sexual abuse and their encouragement of solidarity and community. As Chris Bobel has pointed out, many of the strategies of today’s activism are “more technologically advanced versions of tactics rooted in ‘second-​ wave’ grassroots organising/​ publicity/​ information sharing:  first-​ person narratives, clever thought-​provoking humour, performance, and self-​help are a political tool”.9 Simultaneously, it is a continuation of the struggle of “third wave” feminists. However, while the purpose is still to fight for recognition and against marginalisation —​and the objectifying and stereotypical depictions in public discourse, advertisements, motion pictures, television, and the media —​there is a much stronger emphasis on bringing into question and challenging the systemic nature of sexual violence and connecting the feminist struggle to social injustice in a wider sense. In this chapter, I will show how Icelandic feminist activists have, in the last few years, used such oppositional strategies —​not least on social media platforms —​to develop a powerful counter-​narrative against sexual violence where the slogan “the personal is political” is taken from the margins of feminist theory and pushed into the mainstream. This counter-​narrative goes beyond what Nancy Fraser criticised as the consumerist market-​oriented and culturalist conceptions of equality advanced by mainstream feminism, which overemphasise individual rights, undermining social solidarity and the need for structural changes.10 Instead of focusing on particularist aims, the #MeToo movement in Iceland puts more emphasis on addressing systemic failures, such as the lack of societal accountability and political responsibility.

The forerunners of #MeToo In the years before the emergence of #MeToo, the feminist movement in Iceland had contributed to social awakening by using diverse public venues and technological platforms to highlight sexual violence in performative ways. #MeToo harks back to the SlutWalk (Druslugangan), which has been conducted every year since 2011, calling for an end to victim-​blaming and slut-​shaming of sexual assault victims. Iceland’s SlutWalk was part of a transnational movement which originated in Toronto. While the same messages have been repeated in different cities around the world, the SlutWalk movement has been re-​interpreted and adapted to local cultures.11 Within the Icelandic context, it has raised public awareness of sexism in Iceland as testified to by the fact that over 10% of the Icelandic population participates in it each year. Several feminist campaigns and activities were also organised in 2015 —​on the occasion of the centennial of women’s suffrage in Iceland —​to drive home the point that women did not intend to wait for another one or two hundred years to close the gender gap.12 Sometimes they were triggered or influenced by transnational campaigns, such as the #freethenipple movement, 451

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which was launched a year earlier in the United States. In Iceland, the campaign was dubbed “The Breast Revolution” (Brjóstabyltingin), and its followers exposed their breasts on social media and in front of famous landmarks, such as the Icelandic parliament and government buildings or in spaces commonly “overdetermined” by male narratives. The activists demanded the right for women to determine for themselves where and when they choose to appear topless; they also exhorted the government to take action to eliminate digital harassment such as “image-​based sexual abuse”. These events drew global attention. By taking part in these activities, bare-​breasted, young women were, as Icelandic scholars Annadís Rúdólfsdóttir and Ásta Jóhannesdóttir put it, “disrupting and exposing normative sexist discourses. They took the sexualised breast and the performance of sexual young femininity out of the hegemonic hypersexual context that gives these practices their preferred meaning”.13 The explicit aim was to challenge diverse forms of patriarchal power, such as the porn industry, or to take back power from men who, for example, had shared pictures of them online without their consent. A few months later, these women inspired the Icelandic “Beauty Tips” movement, which started on a closed Facebook page. Its goal was to operate as an online community for women to share and receive advice for women. In early 2015, the group had become a 25,000-​member forum, including many young women stepping forward to share stories of sexual violence with the hashtag “suppression” (#þöggun) and “womenspeakout” (#konurtala). When Beauty Tips first started, the community guidelines were clear: this was a women-​only group. If men somehow managed to get access to the discussion through their online activities, they were removed from the platform; men were, however, allowed to participate if they could explain their interest in the content of the group discussions and why they should be accepted. This exclusivity was in line with the group’s goal to work as a safe zone for women to discuss topics openly, ranging from personal dating advice to accounts of mental health problems. The narrative structure in the group quickly became personal as women explained specific situations in detail to get more insightful support from the community. The Facebook page, then, played a critical role in having women express their feelings and stories and open them up to “public” debate, making possible new forms of solidarity. This environment helped create a community where the stories and accounts of sexual trauma and abuse could be shared. Today, the group has over 35,000 members and is one of the most active Facebook communities in Iceland. That this feminist activism had percolated through intergenerational layers is evident from other acts of resistance in 2015, such as the slam poem and dance piece “Dear Girls” (Elsku stelpur) by a group of 15-​year-​old girls from a Reykjavik junior high school, which won a national talent show. The poetry and dance act showcased the resistance against the double standards of appearance which young girls have to live with in modern society. The following lines are from the poem: Dear patriarchy, do you know that when you tell me to calm down and to shut up you’re goading me on to shout out as loud as I can you can’t stop what you know is coming.14 Finally, the hashtag “out loud” (#höfumhátt), which operated both on Twitter and Facebook, was used to demonstrate against societal and legal suppression of sexual assault cases. This movement was initiated in June 2017, only a few months before the #MeToo surge, and centred on young women who were victims of a convicted sex offender who had been granted 452

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a restoration of honour and civil rights and regained his lawyer certification. Their struggle not only showed that they would not stand for government inactivity and complacency in sexual violence cases; it also brought down the Icelandic government after a political scandal.15 This pre-​#MeToo activism opened up opportunities for young women to interrogate the mechanisms and processes that reproduce structural inequality and understand how they are kept invisible. And more importantly within the context of #MeToo, they introduced empathy and solidarity as a core element, often utilising a singular story or experience as a starting point to build collective narratives and take action.16 Movements like “Beauty Tips” and #freethenipple started on social media platforms that connected the affectively motivated public through bonds of sentiment while at the same time producing and disseminating information. These bonds were then mobilised and shared on digital platforms through what Zizi Papacharissi and Meggan Taylor Trevey have termed the active “modalities of connective action … mobilized by technology as a conduit of connection [and] collaboration”.17 Carol Harrington maintains that such venues function as “intimate publics” that “foster personal disclosure, empathy, and identification among participants, thereby creating a common emotional world”.18 In addition to the affective dimension of membership, feminist internet groups of this nature are characterised by an intensive discursive purchase of interactivity and co-​creativity. As a new form of social movement, they stress personal narratives that form the basis for broader social activism. In other words, they offer the tools to craft an individual biography, while also being a central part of constructing the collective.19 A common “we” conveys a sense of visibility to social media movements, not only because the information will be shared on a wider scale, but also because it can create a connectivity between individuals all around the world. In countries where formal and civil societal channels of feminist activism are increasingly restricted and where women’s bodies are being re-​politicised, the expression of feminist solidarity takes on a more existential meaning. Still, such acts of solidarity are not different from those being carried out in different political contexts through “shared personal struggles with patriarchy”.20 Breaking the silence, “freeing the nipple” can, therefore, travel from being singular acts of resistance to becoming collective and highly political movements.

The #MeToo moment in Iceland Since the struggle against gender-​based violence has been a central part of the Icelandic women’s movement for the past decades, it is not surprising that the explosive power of #MeToo resonated immediately in Iceland. In the days following Alyssa Milano’s tweeting of Tarana Burke’s “MeToo”, thousands of women from various strata of society reacted to it in Facebook statuses or Tweets —​ranging from singer Björk’s Facebook status, discussing her experience of being sexually harassed by director Lars von Trier when filming Dancer in the Dark,21 to a flood of anonymous #MeToo survivors’ accounts. It was a revelation that almost every woman could relate to. The women who stepped forward described their experiences of sexual targeting and mental and physical violence; they referred to humiliating comments on their appearance or abilities, told of experiences of having been subjected to dominance, scorn, and aggression, and of disapproval or inappropriate jokes. Several women went further by speaking out about rapes, both reported and unreported. It can be argued that the #MeToo movement in Iceland constituted a turning point in this history of feminist activism in that it helped bring into focus the systemic nature of the problem and the utter inadequacy of the existing legislative framework and regulations for dealing with gender-​based issues and sexual harassment in the workplace. Its novelty was also 453

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reflected in the participation of women who had hitherto not been active in the feminist movement across social strata, and in the wide-​ranging and cross-​sectional solidarity involved. What characterised the Icelandic #MeToo response was, among other things, the highly organised form it took: women from diverse professions assumed a public stance through declarations against sexual violence. Also noteworthy was the sheer number of anonymous female narratives which were made public. In this recounting, the shame was shifted from the survivors to the perpetrators, and it was emphasised that violence against women was both the cause and the consequence of wider gender inequalities. Activists made it clear that the objective of the #MeToo movement was not to hunt down the wrongdoers and assign penalties.22 To be sure, Iceland’s small population, where family and community bonds are strong, affected this stance. But the political focus was, nonetheless, more on structural inequalities than on individual persons or singular crimes. Thus, unlike the media coverage related to the US #MeToo movement, there were not many disclosures of perpetrators’ names in Iceland; only a half dozen names of nationally renowned men were published in the media.23 As was the case in many other countries, it was the more privileged Icelandic women who first spoke up, such as politicians, doctors, lawyers, scientists, priests, and artists. As in other Nordic countries, Icelandic women used their distinct professional organisations to issue declarations against sexual violence. Women in politics led the way. In November 2017, they publicly demanded that political parties and workplaces establish a crisis response mechanism that guaranteed women the right to speak up and provided them with support if they expressed their experiences publicly. They created a closed Facebook page for former and current women in politics and collected a large number of narratives of harassment and violence. They then published stories under the hashtag “in the shadow of power” (#ískuggavaldsins). This initiative had a significant impact on other social groups that followed suit. Narratives from women in sports were particularly striking; they included experiences of rapes, sexual, mental, and physical violence and harassment by male athletes and other men of influence over women in sports. In April 2018, many narratives were added by women who had suffered domestic violence or were in an abusive relationship under the name “Behind closed doors”;24 and in February 2019, additional narratives were publicised by a group of women recounting harassment and violence which had been ongoing for over 60 years at the hands of a well-​known, powerful, Icelandic politician.25 At the end of 2019, close to two thousand narratives had been published by women from diverse professions, community groups, and organisations; in addition, over seven thousand women had signed petitions calling for action against sexual violence. However, despite the success of the #MeToo movement in galvanising female support, marginalised groups and women in low wage jobs were far more reluctant to step forward. Women with disabilities or substance use issues refrained, for example, from publicising their stories. To be sure, both groups set up closed Facebook groups under the #MeToo tag. The response was, however, minimal, not only because of their social vulnerabilities, but also because of a feeling that their needs were not being addressed within the “mainstream #MeToo”.26 Such dissatisfaction created an immediate problem for the cohesion of the movement. People with disabilities are, after all, 3.5 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than people without disabilities.27 At the height of the #MeToo wave in December 2017, Freyja Haraldsdóttir —​a member of the “Taboo” — ​movement of disabled women, which has played an instrumental role in converting private experiences into public and politicised issues —​stressed in an interview that the manifestation of sexual harassment or violence was not the same for women without disabilities and those with disabilities. She claimed that it was much harder for the latter to express themselves in public, partly because of their weak power position towards those who provide assistance to them within and outside the family.28 The space provided by #MeToo did 454

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not give them the security and trust they needed to tell their stories. This sentiment was echoed in interviews with other disabled women and in their public statements. To them, the #MeToo movement failed to take into account the complexity of their lived experiences of violence where gender, disability, and abuse converged. In the end, they chose silence both as a form of protest and in the belief that it would speak louder than words, signalling the problematic nature of the place of women with disabilities within feminism itself. Their powerful intervention in the #MeToo debate showed that the movement had failed to address their specific concerns, even if it also drew public attention to their peripheral societal status as well as to their struggle for equal rights. Indeed, as Carly Giseler has stressed, the #MeToo movement in general has much ground to gain in refocusing its attention on intersectionality and marginalised communities. Yet, at the same time, as the Icelandic case shows, #MeToo has also been one of few sites committed to opening a protected social space for sharing these experiences.29 For similar reasons, women of foreign descent living in Iceland found themselves alienated from the “mainstream” #MeToo movement in a country that has historically been ethnically homogenous. Many of them worked in low-​paying sectors, such as the tourism and hotel industries where sexual harassment is rampant. Yet, by creating their own platform for story-​ telling, women of foreign origins also managed to highlight the vulnerability of their own position and their lack of presence in public life. They created their own Facebook group, giving women the possibility to share their stories in private messages or via phone calls to make sure that their identities would not be revealed. The number of women who took part in the discussion increased from a few dozens on the first evening to 660 women within a few days.30 This platform had a lasting effect, with women continuing to share stories and information and seeking advice from each other to this day. True, their stories differed from each other, reflecting diverse cultural backgrounds and social conditions. But, at the same time, they provided an affective relationship between them as a community bound in solidarity. Their testimonies revealed shared experiences, such as brutal violence in the workplace, in their private lives, and in personal relationships, as well as mental and physical abuse, bullying, discrimination, and humiliation.31 Doubly discriminated against, these women also experienced indifference, prejudice, and a lack of knowledge and understanding from social services organisations, including the police, child protection services, and other public agencies entrusted with guarding and protecting victims of violence. None of the women were willing to lend their name to their narratives when they were shared with the public, and some women edited them before publication. The stories that were published, however, betrayed a culture of impunity and widespread discrimination vis-​à-​vis these women. Finally, the #MeToo movement in Iceland provided an opportunity for men to acknowledge the message of systemic sexual violence and to start a discussion on “harmful” and toxic masculinity and on shifting the narrative around sexual consent. Stígamót, an education and counselling centre for survivors of sexual abuse and violence, held courses called “Allies” for men who wanted to get actively involved in the movement. A  campaign on social media was launched under the hashtag “masculinity” in which the stereotype of masculinity was challenged; and the Icelandic committee of UN Women started the campaign “Gender-​based violence is closer than you think” with the aim of raising awareness among men and boys about the importance of consciously exerting themselves to fight violence against women. The effects of the #MeToo movement on men’s behaviour need to be studied further. But what this and the preceding discussion show is the extensive societal reach of the Icelandic #MeToo movement, even if its impact on specific groups has varied. Like other Nordic countries, Iceland has alarmingly high rates of intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW).32 Even while leading the world in closing the gender gap according 455

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to different global rankings,33 Iceland is on par with Western European countries when it comes to violence against women, particularly IPVAW. This contradiction has been dubbed by Enrique Gracia and Juan Merlo as the “the Nordic paradox”.34 Despite legislation against sexual harassment in the Nordic countries, it remains a problem, with offenders rarely being punished for their actions. An extensive nationwide research project in Iceland —​which was conducted in the spring of 2019 and in which 30,000 women aged 18 or older participated —​showed that approximately 40% of the women had been subjected to sexual or physical violence at some point during their life: at home, at work, or in school.35 Other statistics revealed a 22% prevalence over a lifetime of physical and/​or sexual intimate partner violence.36 Moreover, the results of a previous Gallup survey indicated that sexual harassment in the workplace was not the exception but the norm: almost every other woman, or 45%, had suffered sexual harassment, compared to 15% of men.37 In the wake of #MeToo, the Icelandic government commissioned a large study on the scope of harassment in the Icelandic labour market, collecting data on sexual harassment, gendered harassment, bullying, and other violence at work. The study showed that 85% of women and 65% of men believed that the #MeToo movement had had a positive impact on Icelandic society and work culture. It also revealed that 25% of women and 7% of men had been victims of sexual harassment during their work life.38 Due in large part to the connections drawn between the systemic nature of sexual harassment and the structural solidarity that the movement built in Iceland, several cross-​institutional initiatives were seen. The pressure on governments, educational institutions, and employers to take collective action in this field has never been greater. Iceland is among the few countries whose political class allied itself, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, with social activists in conducting studies, developing policies, and instituting various mechanisms aimed specifically at combatting sexual harassment. In response to the revelations of the #MeToo movement, the Icelandic government declared that it would “ensure that the women who spoke out are heard and to seek out voices that have not been given a proper platform”.39 Among proposals that have received government support and are set to be approved are widespread changes to how police officers respond to those reporting a crime, legal protection measures for victims of sexual violence,40 laws guaranteeing sexual privacy,41 and changes in school curricula, where education about sexual violence, consent, bodily autonomy, and mutual respect are to be stressed at all levels. The #MeToo-​movement has exposed how sexual and gender-​based harassment continues to exist in all layers of Icelandic society, despite more than 100  years of feminist activism, stronger laws, and governmental measures. A case in point is a political scandal that erupted at the end of 2018, involving a few male parliamentarians and one woman MP who were caught on tape demeaning their female parliamentary colleagues in a highly misogynistic way.42 What this scandal revealed was not only the persistence of such behaviour, but also the unwillingness of the participants to take any political responsibility for their behaviour. This incident is a reminder that the #MeToo-​movement’s calls for accountability have not yet been translated into political practice and that they need to be grounded firmly in demands for structural changes. For the social malignancy of sexual and gender-​based harassment and violence is constantly being reproduced in the shadows of patriarchy across nations, class and status —​irrespective of “best intentions”, laws and societal habits.

Conclusion Foreshadowing the #MeToo movement, French theorist and writer Hélène Cixous described in her renowned text “Sorties”, which was published in 1975, the way in which the ground 456

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would shift under our feet as women and others who had been disempowered, marginalised, and victimised by society stepped forward to share the centre stage. In her words: Then all the stories would have to be told differently, the future would be incalculable, the historical forces would, will, change hands, bodies; another thinking as yet not thinkable will transform the functioning of all society. We are living through this very period when the conceptual foundations of a millennial culture are in the process of being undermined by millions of moles, of a species as yet not identified.43 As in many other parts of the world, the #MeToo movement has provided gender equality activists in Iceland with a political tool that can have a greater impact on the common understanding of sex and gender than changes in laws and attitudes brought on by previous waves of women’s rights movements. It has already achieved some tangible results, both in terms of social recognition and in terms of public awareness of the prevalence of sexual harassment and violence. For the feminist movement in Iceland (both the younger and older generations), the battle against sexist discourses and rape culture continues. The Icelandic #MeToo movement has mutated into different kinds of action beyond the online and different hashtags, keeping the movement alive and relevant to local contexts. Former local hashtags such as “outloud”, “womenspeakout”, and “suppression” also continue to appear alongside the MeToo hashtag. Most levels of society and professional sectors have been involved —​from the arts, businesses, and universities to politics and athletics. Indeed, women who face multifaceted discrimination and vulnerabilities such as economic insecurity, national or ethnic origins, substance use or disability —​as well as people of all genders and sexualities —​have responded to the #MeToo movement in one way or another. To be sure, there is no consensus on how to measure the movement’s successes and failures. Some have embraced the movement as a platform for transformative social change, while others have criticised it for a lack of inclusiveness. I have mentioned two groups in particular, women with disabilities and women of foreign descent, who did not feel part of the “mainstream” movement, but have since joined it or addressed its agenda on their own terms. As I  have stressed here, social media has worked to make the private public, providing a venue for calling out injustice and exposing systemic sexism and misogyny. As Papacharissi and Trevey argue, “social media affords new ways to shift the dynamics of attention and open windows of opportunity for change —​not by instrumental political action through organised groups, but through individually framed political expression that can, via the logic of connective action, raise the salience of issues to the level of decision maker awareness”.44 It has not only been used to address the misrecognition of the problem; it has also become a powerful tool to fight against its manifestations. #MeToo has offered victims of sexual violence what literary critic Shoshana Felman calls “the power of interpretation” or the survivor’s absolute right to speak up (or not to speak up) in her own voice and on her own terms.45 The #MeToo movement has the potential to effect a paradigmatic change by offering a new understanding of  —​and approach to  —​the battle against sexual violence in general. As historian Georges Vigarello put it: “#MeToo marks a shift from a condition whereby the intolerable is accepted to that of refusing to leave the intolerable untouched”.46 The #MeToo movement will be judged by two factors: on the one hand, whether it manages to prove the responsibility of institutions for the physical and mental pain suffered by victims of sexual violence; on the other, whether it can expose and deconstruct the power elitism and hierarchies that make it possible for men, regardless of whether they are in powerful positions, to abuse their power. 457

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The #MeToo movement can be seen as having staged its own “trial” as is common in literature, where events can take place that are unthinkable in restricted and often oppressive regulatory structures that apply outside fiction. In such a venue, victims have a right to tell their own stories —​a right they are often denied in the “House of Justice” or the legal system or through other processes that should ensure justice. Testimonies of sexual violence are abundant in Icelandic literature  —​ranging from medieval manuscripts to modern fiction; they keep alive memories of past wrongs and contain counter-​discourses, offering the possibility of justice. Abuse and violence against women is a major theme in the recent work of the Icelandic poet Gerður Kristný. Many of her books can be understood as an act of resistance against the processes of denying and silencing women. In Bloodhoof,47 she gives voice to a giantess abducted and forced to marry the god Freyr, a story recounted in the Edda, a mediaeval Icelandic text. The original poem is framed around the journey of the god who wins the giant woman, while Gerður Kristný’s contemporary account gives the bride’s perspective. In Requiem, she retraces the real life story of a prostitute who was abused in childhood by her older brother and who took her own life after having spoken out. Connecting a single yet shared past with the present struggle and looking towards a future where justice may arrive, Requiem appeals to the importance of collective memory, and contains a powerful injunction to responsibility: You were indeed the daughter of man she who was sacrificed Your story is made known so that each who believes in it will not be lost Revere the daughter, you judges of the earth!48

Notes 1 Cynthia Enloe, The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy (Brighton: Myriad Editions, 2017). 2 Judith Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First”, Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 17–​27. 3 Liz Kelly, “The Continuum of Sexual Violence”, in Women, Violence and Social Control. Explorations in Sociology, ed. Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), 46–​60. 4 Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller, Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back against Rape Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 46–​60. 5 “Performative Social Act” in Judith Butler’s sense. See Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 6 Clare Hemmings, “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation”, Feminist Theory 13, no. 2 (August 2012): 147–​161. 7 As one Redstocking, poet Vilborg Dagbjartsdóttir, put it:  Women “realized that they were a force, that they were many and that they were strong. They realized that they could support each other other”. Hallgerður Gísladóttir et al., “Rauðsokkahreyfingin kom eins og hressandi gustur: Umræður um Rauðsokkahreyfinguna og jafnréttismál” [The Redstocking Movement Came Like a Strong Wind:  Discussion on the Redstocking Movement and Equality], Þjóðviljinn, 2 September 1978, 18.

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Fighting structural inequalities 8 Lena Dominelli and Guðrún Jónsdóttir, “Feminist Political Organization in Iceland: Some Reflections on the Experience of Kvennaframbothid”, Feminist Review, no. 30 (1988): 39 and 50. 9 Chris Babel, New Blood:  Third-​wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation (New Brunswick:  NJ Rutgers University Press, 2010): 178. Cited by Nancy A. Worcester, “Menstruation Activism: Is the Personal Still Political?”, Sex Roles, 68, no. 1 (2013): 153. 10 For Nancy Fraser, the hegemony of a liberal feminist model seeks to allow privileged women to lead lives that are socially male, while abandoning other women. Such feminist critique of sexism only supplied the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation. See Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History”, New Left Review 56 (2009): 97–​117; Nancy Fraser, “How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden —​And How to Reclaim It”, Guardian, 14 October 2013, www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2013/​oct/​14/​feminism-​capitalist-​handmaiden-​neoliberal. Andrea Petö and Weronika Grzebalska also argue that “identity politics with its focus on individual empowerment and the recognition of minority groups have to a large extent hindered a meaningful critique of progressives’ own entanglement in the neoliberal logic”. See Weronika Grzebalska and Andrea Petö, “The Gendered Modus operandi of the Illiberal Transformation in Hungary and Poland”, Women’s Studies International Forum 68 (2018): 165. 11 Brittany Leach, “Slutwalk and Sovereignty:  Transnational Protest as Emergent Global Democracy” (Paper, American Political Science Association 2013 Annual Meeting, Chicago, August/​September 2013), https://​ssrn.com/​abstract=2300699. 12 Oliver Cann, “More than a Lifetime Away: World Faces 100-​Year Wait for Gender Parity”, World Economic Forum, 3 December 2019, www.weforum.org/​press/​2019/​12/​gggr2020; Briony Harris, “What the Pay Gap Between Men and Women Really Looks Like”, World Economic Forum, 7 November 2017, www.weforum.org/​agenda/​2017/​11/​pay-​equality-​men-​women-​gender-​gap-​report-​2017. 13 Annadís G.  Rúdólfsdóttir and Ásta Jóhannesdóttir, “Fuck the Patriarchy! An Analysis of Digital Mainstream Media Discussion of the #freethenipple Acitivies in March 2015”, Feminism and Psychology 28, no. 1 (2018): 146. 14 Una Torfadóttir, “Elsku Stelpur” [Dear Girls], Andvari Productions, 14 February 2017, YouTube video, 5:02, https://​youtu.be/​AUDvNIubHwQ. 15 Accusations of a political cover-​up in connection with a child molester’s honour case brought down the government. Since 2009, when the first elections took place after the economic crash, this was the third male-​led center-​r ight government almost in a row (with one center left women-​led government serving its full term in between) to lose the confidence of the Icelandic population before serving out its full term. Despite being one of the most democratic and most woman-​friendly governments in the world, male-​dominated informal elite networks remain strong in Iceland. This is one of the paradoxes the Nordic countries face when it comes to gender equality. It shows how informal politics have become the main obstacle to gender equality in the twenty-​first century. Janet Elise Johnson, The Gender of Informal Politics, Russia, Iceland and Twenty-​First Century Male Dominance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 3. 16 See: Robin D. G. Kelley, Jack Amariglio and Lucas Wilson, “ ‘Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange’: An RM Interview with Robin DG Kelley, Part 2”, Rethinking Marxism 31, no. 2 (2019): 152–​172. 17 Zizi Papacharissi and Meggan Taylor Trevey, “Affective Publics and Windows of Opportunity: Social Media and the Potential for Social Change”, in The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism, ed. Graham Meikle (London: Routledge, 2018), 88. 18 Carol Harrington, “Popular Feminist Websites, Intimate Publics, and Feminist Knowledge About Sexual Violence”, Feminist Media Studies 20, no.  2 (2020):  169, www.tandfonline.com/​doi/​pdf/​ 10.1080/​14680777.2018.1546215?needAccess=true. 19 Veronica Barassi, “Social Media Activism, Self-​Representation and the Construction of Political Biographies”, in Meikle, The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism, 144. 20 See Zeynep Gulru Goker, “Memories, Stories and Deliberation:  Digital Sisterhood on Feminist Websites in Turkey”, European Journal of Women’s Studies 26, no. 3 (2019): 313–​328, https://​journals. sagepub.com/​doi/​metrics/​10.1177/​1350506819855414. 21 Andy Sophia Fontaine, “Björk Speaks Out About Being Sexually Harassed”, Reykjavík Grapevine, 16 October 2017, https://​grapevine.is/​news/​2017/​10/​16/​bjork-​speaks-​up-​about-​being-​sexually-​ harassed. 22 #MeToo á Íslandi: Skýrsla félags-​og jafnréttismálaráðherra um stöðu jafnréttismála 2015–​2017 [The #MeToo movement in Iceland:  Report on the status of Gender Equality] (Reykjavík:  Velferðarráðuneytið [Ministry for Social Affairs and Equality], 2018): 12–​22.

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Irma Erlingsdóttir 23 See Þorgerður Þorvaldsdóttir and Guðbjörg Linda Hjartardóttir, “Líkamsbyltingar og #MeTo” [Embodied Revolutions and #MeToo], Fléttur (Reykjavík:  RIKK and Háskólaútgáfan, forthcoming 2020). 24 “Yfirlýsing” [Statement], Metoo-​jonbaldvin (blog), 4 February 2019, https://​metoo-​jonbaldvin.blog.is/​ blog/​metoo-​jonbaldvin. 25 “Þetta var ekki byrjunin á ofbeldinu” [This Was Not the Beginning of the Violence], Morgunblaðið, 24 April 2018, www.mbl.is/​frettir/​innlent/​2018/​04/​23/​thetta_​var_​ekki_​byrjunin_​a_​ofbeldin. 26 Anna Sigrún Ingimarsdóttir, “Not Being Heard. #MeToo and Disabled Women” (speech, #MeToo:  Moving Forward conference, Reykjavík, 18 September 2019), http://​tabu.is/​ not-​being-​heard-​metoo-​and-​disabled-​women. 27 Erika Harrelle, “Crime Against Persons with Disabilities, 2009–​ 2015  —​Statistical Tables”, US Department of Justice, 2017, www.bjs.gov/​content/​pub/​pdf/​capd0915st.pdf. 28 Róbert Jóhannsson, “Flóknara fyrir fatlaðar konur að segja frá” [More Complicated for Disabled Women to Tell Their Stories], RÚV, 21 December 2017, www.ruv.is/​frett/​floknara-​fyrir-​ fatladar-​konur-​ad-​segja-​fra. 29 Carly Gieseler, The Voices of #MeToo: From Grassroots Activism to a Viral Roar (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 13–​14. 30 My recounting of the #MeToo movement of women with foreign backgrounds in Iceland is based on a speech delivered at the #MeToo Moving Forward conference by Tatjana Latinović, the founder of W.O.M.E.N. in Iceland, an NGO for immigrant women in Iceland, see: Tatjana Latinović, [untitled] (speech, #MeToo: Moving Forward conference, Reykjavík, 18 September 2019), https://​youtu.be/​ t99BXBPHpTo; I also hold information from a book chapter by Nichole Leigh Mosty, “Mikilvægi samstöðunnar: #MeToo-​byltingin og konur af erlendum uppruna” [The Importance of Solidarity: The #MeToo Movement and Women with Foreign Backgrounds], in Fléttur (Reykjavík:  RIKK and Háskólaútgáfan, forthcoming 2020). 31 Tatjana Latinović stated in her speech on immigrant women and #MeToo: The stories [they] shared in the safe space we created were quite different from the stories shared in the Icelandic groups. They had an additional dimension, additional layers of horror and humiliation. [Their Stories] were filled with prejudice, discrimination, systemic degradation, seclusion, manipulation and abuse of the worst kind. See Latinović, [untitled]. 32 The prevalence of physical and sexual violence against women in the Nordic countries is similar. Given the scarcity of research on the Nordic paradox, some speculated whether it could be explained because violence against women is systematically reported and substantiated in the Nordic societies, being due to progressive legislation, societal emphasis on gender equality, open discussion, and awareness of gender violence, as well as other cultural factors. However, the results of a comparative study on IPAW in Sweden and Spain carried out by Gracia, Merlo et al., published in 2019 indicate that the higher levels of physical and sexual IPVAW in Spain and Sweden reflect actual differences in IPVAW prevalence and are not the result of measurement bias. See Enrique Gracia et al., “Prevalence of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in Sweden and Spain:  A Psychometric Study of the ‘Nordic Paradox,’ ” PLoS ONE 14, no. 5 (2019): e0217015. https://​doi.org/​10.1371/​journal.pone.0217015. 33 See Global Gender Gap Report 2020 (Geneva:  World Economic Forum, 2020), www3.weforum. org/​docs/​WEF_​GGGR_​2020.pdf; Davide Barbieri et  al., Gender Equality Index, 2017:  Measuring Gender Equality in the European Union 2005–​ 2015 (Luxembourg:  Publications Office of the European Union, 2017); “Gender Inequality Index (GII)”, United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Reports, accessed 8 June 2020, http://​hdr.undp.org/​en/​content/​ gender-​inequality-​index-​gii. 34 Enrique Gracia and Juan Merlo, “Intimate Partner Violence Against Women and the Nordic Paradox”, Social Science & Medicine 157 (2016): 27–​30, https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​j.socscimed.2016.03.040. 35 See the SAGA cohort study, https://​afallasaga.is/​english/​. 36 “Iceland”, UN Global Database on Violence Against Women, 2008/​2010, accessed 8 June 2020, https://​evaw-​global-​database.unwomen.org/​en/​countries/​europe/​iceland. 37 Heiðar Örn Sigurfinnsson, “Önnur hver kona áreitt kynferðislega í starfi” [Every Other Woman Sexually Harassed in the Workplace], RÚV, 22 November 2017, www.ruv.is/​frett/​ onnur-​hver-​kona-​areitt-​kynferdislega-​i-​starfi.

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Fighting structural inequalities 38 Ásta Snorradóttir, “Sexual Harassment at Work in Iceland: Who is Affected and How Do Employers Respond?” (speech, #MeToo: Moving Forward conference, Reykjavík, 17 September 2019), www. youtube.com/​watch?v=kZ7cf_​scehg; Ásta Snorradóttir et al., Valdbeiting á vinnustað: Rannsókn á algengi og eðli eineltis og áreitni á íslenskum vinnumarkaði [Workplace Violence and Harassment:  A Research on the Prevalence and Nature of Bullying and Sexual/​Gendered Harassment in the Icelandic Labor Market] (Reykjavík:  Félagsvísindastofnun Háskóla Íslands, 2020), www.stjornarradid.is/​library/​04-​ Raduneytin/​Felagsmalaraduneytid/​Valdbeiting%20á%20vinnustað_​%20-​%20Copy%20(1).pdf. 39 See Katrín Jakobsdóttir´s speech at the #MeToo Moving Forward conference in Reykjavík, Iceland, See: www.metoo.is. A steering group was appointed in the beginning of 2018 to lead “a progressive and synchronised action” against sexual assault and sexual and gender-​based harassment, both with regard to society as a whole and to the government and its institutions as an employer. See also “Stýrihópur um heildstæðar úrbætur að því er varðar kynferðislegt ofbeldi” [Steering Committee on Comprehensive Responses to Sexual Violence in Iceland], Stjórnarráð Íslands [Government of Iceland], 2018, www.stjornarradid.is/​raduneyti/​nefndir/​nanar-​um-​nefnd/​?itemid=7c67663f-​8a9e-​ 11e8-​942c-​005056bc530c. The Icelandic government produced an action plan for improvements when dealing with sexual offences within the criminal justice system and a strategy on actions against digital sexual violence. It also undertook special prevention and protection measures to prevent further discrimination addressing gender-​based and sexual harassment, intimation, and violence in sports, recreation and leisure activities for children, youth, and adults. In September 2019, it hosted the first major international #MeToo conference, #MeToo Moving Forward. See: #MeToo Moving Forward, www.metoo.is. 40 In January 2018, the Prime Minister appointed a Steering Committee on Comprehensive Responses to Sexual Violence in Iceland, which commissioned a report on ways to to strengthen the legal status and rights of victim-​survivors. The report lays out succinct legal policy recommendations on how to improve the legal status and rights of victim/​survivors and their access to compensation and it finds that among the Nordic countries, victims’ status and rights are particularly weak in Iceland and Denmark, while they are considerably stronger in Finland, Sweden, and Norway. See Hildur Fjóla Antonsdóttir, Réttlát málsmeðferð með tilliti tilþolenda kynferðisbrota:  Greinargerð um leiðir til að styrkjaréttarstöðu brotaþola [A Just Criminal Procedure from the Perspective of Victim-​Survivors of Sexual Violence. A  Report on Ways to Strengthen the Legal Status and Rights of Victims] (Reykjavík: Stjórnarráð Íslands [Government of Iceland], 2019), www.stjornarradid.is/​lisalib/​getfile. aspx?itemid=c9ee2c0c-​927f-​11e9-​9442-​005056bc530c. 41 A report commissioned by Steering Committee on Comprehensive Responses to Sexual Violence in Iceland on sexual privacy was published in 2019. Bjarnadóttir is critical of the Icelandic justice system’s treatment of survivors of digital sexual violence, stating that survivors do not receive enough support and even experience victim-​shaming from police representatives. In the summary, she notes: “In light of societal and technological changes, the Icelandic General Penal Code is not fit for purpose to ensure efficient protection of sexual privacy” and that “although reports of violations have increased year to year since the 2015 legislation, the number of cases that have advanced through the justice system have decreased” (pp.  10–​12). The report calls for harsher sentencing of digital sexual violence, training for representatives within the justice system, and more protection of survivors and their sexual privacy. María Rún Bjarnadóttir, Kynferðisleg friðhelgi: Umfjöllun um réttarvernd og ábendingar til úrbóta [Sexual Privacy: Recommendations for Enhanced Protections] (Reykjavik: Stjórnarráð Íslands [Government of Iceland], 2020), www.stjornarradid.is/​library/​04-​Raduneytin/​ForsAetisraduneytid/​ KynferðislegFriðhelgi_​MRB.pdf. 42 Valur Grettisson, “The Architect for the Barbershop-​Conference Openly Misogynist”, Reykjavík Grapevine, 29 November 2018, https://​grapevine.is/​news/​2018/​11/​29/​the-​architect-​for-​the-​barbershop-​ conference-​openly-​misogynist. 43 Hélène Cixous, “Sorties”, La jeune née [The Newly Born Woman] (Paris: Union Générale d’éditions, 1975), 119. My translation. 44 Papacharissi and Taylor Trevey, “Affective Publics and Windows of Opportunity”, 94. 45 Shoshana Felman, “Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust”, Critical Inquiries 27, no. 2 (2001): 201–​238. 46 Jessica Gourdon, “Le moment #MeToo:  Positif, prometteur mais insuffissant” [The #MeToo Moment: Positive, Promising, but Insufficient], Le Monde, 10 October 2018, www.lemonde.fr/​festival/​article/​2018/​10/​10/​le-​mouvement-​metoo-​positif-​prometteur-​mais-​insuffisant_​5367401_​ 4415198.html. My translation.

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Irma Erlingsdóttir 47 Gerður Kristný Guðjónsdóttir, Bloodhoof, translated by Rory McTurk (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2012), originally published as Blóðhófnir (Reykjavík: Forlagið, 2010). 48 Gerður Kristný Guðjónsdóttir, Sálumessa [Requiem] (Reykjavík: Forlagið, 2018), 52–​53. My translation.

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Fighting structural inequalities Gracia, Enrique, and Juan Merlo. “Intimate Partner Violence Against Women and the Nordic Paradox”. Social Science & Medicine 157 (2016): 27–​30. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​j.socscimed.2016.03.040. Gracia, Enrique, Manuel Martín-​Fernández, Marisol Lila, Juan Merlo, and Anna Karin Ivert. “Prevalence of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in Sweden and Spain: A Psychometric Study of the ‘Nordic Paradox.’ ” PLoS ONE 14, no. 5 (2019): e0217015. https://​doi.org/​10.1371/​journal.pone.0217015. Grettisson, Valur. “The Architect for the Barbershop-​Conference Openly Misogynist”. Reykjavík Grapevine, 29 November 2018. https://​grapevine.is/​news/​2018/​11/​29/​the-​architect-​for-​the-​barbershop​conference-​openly-​misogynist. Grzebalska, Weronika, and Andrea Petö. “The Gendered Modus Operandi of the Illiberal Transformation in Hungary and Poland”. Women’s Studies International Forum 68 (2018): 164–​172. Guðjónsdóttir, Gerður Kristný. Bloodhoof. Translated by Rory McTurk. Todmorden:  Arc Publications, 2012. Originally published as Blóðhófnir. Reykjavík: Forlagið, 2010. Guðjónsdóttir, Gerður Kristný. Sálumessa [Requiem]. Reykjavík: Forlagið, 2018. Harrelle, Erika. “Crime Against Persons with Disabilities, 2009–​ 2015  —​Statistical Tables”. US Department of Justice, 2017. www.bjs.gov/​content/​pub/​pdf/​capd0915st.pdf. Harrington, Carol. “Popular Feminist Websites, Intimate Publics, and Feminist Knowledge About Sexual Violence”. Feminist Media Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 168–​184. www.tandfonline.com/​doi/​pdf/​10.1080/​ 14680777.2018.1546215?needAccess=true. Harris, Briony. “What the Pay Gap Between Men and Women Really Looks Like”. World Economic Forum, 7 November 2017. www.weforum.org/​agenda/​2017/​11/​pay-​equality-​men-​women-​gender​gap-​report-​2017. Hemmings, Clare. “Affective Solidarity:  Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation”. Feminist Theory 13, no. 2 (2012): 147–​161. Ingimarsdóttir, Anna Sigrún. “Not Being Heard:  #MeToo and Disabled Women”. Speech at the #MeToo:  Moving Forward conference, Reykjavík, 18 September 2019. http://​tabu.is/​ not-​being-​heard-​metoo-​and-​disabled-​women. Jóhannsson, Róbert. “Flóknara fyrir fatlaðar konur að segja frá”[More Complicated for Disabled Women to Tell Their Stories]. RÚV, 21 December 2017. www.ruv.is/​frett/​floknara-​fyrir-​fatladar-​konur-​ad-​segja-​fra. Johnson, Janet Elise. The Gender of Informal Politics, Russia, Iceland and Twenty-​First Century Male Dominance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Kelley, Robin D. G., Jack Amariglio, and Lucas Wilson. “ ‘Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange’: An RM Interview with Robin DG Kelley, Part 2”. Rethinking Marxism 31, no. 2 (2019): 152–​172. Kelly, Liz. “The Continuum of Sexual Violence”. In Women, Violence and Social Control. Explorations in Sociology. Edited by Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard, 46–​60. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987. Latinović, Tatjana. [Untitled]. Speech at the #MeToo:  Moving Forward conference, Reykjavík, 18 September 2019. https://​youtu.be/​t99BXBPHpTo. Leach, Brittany. “Slutwalk and Sovereignty: Transnational Protest as Emergent Global Democracy”. Paper presented at the American Political Science Association 2013 Annual Meeting, Chicago, August/​ September 2013. https://​ssrn.com/​abstract=2300699. Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller. Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019. #MeToo á Íslandi: Skýrsla félags-​og jafnréttismálaráðherra um stöðu jafnréttismála 2015–​2017 [The #MeToo Movement in Iceland:  Report on the Status of Gender Equality]. Reykjavík:  Velferðarráðuneytið [Ministry for Social Affairs and Equality], 2018. Metoo-​jonbaldvin (blog). “Yfirlýsing” [Statement]. 4 February 2019. https://​metoo-​jonbaldvin.blog.is/​ blog/​metoo-​jonbaldvin. #MeToo: Moving Forward (website). Accessed 9 June 2020. www.metoo.is. Morgunblaðið. “Þetta var ekki byrjunin á ofbeldinu” [This Was Not the Beginning of the Violence]. 24 April 2018. www.mbl.is/​frettir/​innlent/​2018/​04/​23/​thetta_​var_​ekki_​byrjunin_​a_​ofbeldinu Mosty, Nichole Leigh. “Mikilvægi samstöðunnar:  #MeToo-​byltingin og konur af erlendum uppruna” [The Importance of Solidarity: The #MeToo Movement and Women with Foreign Backgrounds]. In Fléttur. Reykjavík: RIKK and Háskólaútgáfan, forthcoming 2020. Papacharissi, Zizi, and Meggan Taylor Trevey. “Affective Publics and Windows of Opportunity: Social Media and the Potential for Social Change”. In The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism. Edited by Graham Meikle, 87–​97. London: Routledge, 2018. Rúdólfsdóttir, Annadís G., and Ásta Jóhannesdóttir. “Fuck the Patriarchy! An Analysis of Digital Mainstream Media Discussion of the #freethenipple Activities in March 2015”. Feminism and Psychology 28, no. 1 (2018): 133–​151.

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Irma Erlingsdóttir Shklar, Judith. “Putting Cruelty First”. Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 17–​27. Sigurfinnsson, Heiðar Örn. “Önnur hver kona áreitt kynferðislega í starfi” [Every Other Woman Sexually Harassed in the Workplace]. RÚV, 22 November 2017. www.ruv.is/​frett/​ onnur-​hver-​kona-​areitt-​kynferdislega-​i-​starfi. Snorradóttir, Ásta. “Sexual Harassment at Work in Iceland: Who is Affected and How Do Employers Respond?” Speech at the #MeToo Moving Forward Conference, Reykjavík, 17 September 2019. www.youtube.com/​watch?v=kZ7cf_​scehg. Snorradóttir, Ásta, Guðbjörg Andra Jónsdóttir, Guðný Gústafsdóttir, Guðný Bergþóra Tryggvadóttir, Hrafnhildur Snæfríðar-​og Gunnarsdóttir, and Margrét Valdimarsdóttir. Valdbeiting á vinnustað: Rannsókn á algengi og eðli eineltis og áreitni á íslenskum vinnumarkaði [Workplace Violence and Harassment:  A Research on the Prevalence and Nature of Bullying and Sexual/​Gendered Harassment in the Icelandic Labor Market]. Reykjavík: Félagsvísindastofnun Háskóla Íslands, 2020. www.stjornarradid.is/​library/​ 04-​Raduneytin/​Felagsmalaraduneytid/​Valdbeiting%20á%20vinnustað_​%20-​%20Copy%20(1).pdf. Stjórnarráð Íslands [Government of Iceland]. “Stýrihópur um heildstæðar úrbætur að því er varðar kynferðislegt ofbeldi” [Steering Committee on Comprehensive Responses to Sexual Violence in Iceland]. 2018. www.stjornarradid.is/​raduneyti/​nefndir/​nanar-​um-​nefnd/​?itemid=7c67663f-​8a9e-​ 11e8-​942c-​005056bc530c. Torfadóttir, Una. “Elsku Stelpur” [Dear Girls]. Andvari Productions. YouTube, 14 February 2017. Video. https://​youtu.be/​AUDvNIubHwQ. UN Global Database on Violence Against Women. “Iceland”. 2008/​2010. Accessed 8 June 2020. https://​ evaw-​global-​database.unwomen.org/​en/​countries/​europe/​iceland. United Nations Development Programme. “Gender Inequality Index (GII)”. Human Development Reports. Accessed 8 June 2020. http://​hdr.undp.org/​en/​content/​gender-​inequality-​index-​gii. Þorvaldsdóttir, Þorgerður, and Guðbjörg Linda Hjartardóttir. “Líkamsbyltingar og #MeTo” [Embodied Revolutions and #MeToo]. In Fléttur. Reykjavík: RIKK and Háskólaútgáfan, forthcoming.

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INDEX

#8martie (8 March) 322 #a13 426 #akademiuppropet (Academic Petition) 439–​445 #allavi (all of us) 71 #aminext 400 #anakaman (me too) 376 #AnYeYiYang (“the same for me” or “me too”) 8 #aquítambiénpasa (it happens here too) 430 #balancetaracaille (rat out your scum) 274 #balancetonporc (rat out your pig) 270, 273–​275, 392 #betternottosay 307 #blacklivesmatter 158 #boycottpolanski 278 #bringbackourgirls 401 #cuentalo (tell your story) 254, 416–​417 #dammenbrister (the dam bursts) 67 #ekook (me too) 402 #endrapeculture 400 #enoughisenough 400 #estoyconellas (I’m with them) 428 #feesmustfall 387, 399 #flöggun (suppression) 452 #freethenipple 92, 115, 451–​453 #GirlsAtDhabas 5 #girlstoo 76 #hedidnot 292 #höfumhátt (out loud) 452 #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak (# яНеБоюсьСказать) 303–​313 #ibelieveyou 254 #ískuggavaldsins (in the shadow of power) 452 #jatez 288 #justiceforliz 390 #konurtala (women speak out) 452 #kutsu 363 #levedomnik 158

#libresdeviolencias (free from violence) 427 #libresydesendeudadasnosqueremos (we want us free and without debt) 426 #lifeinleggings 154, 158, 240 #menaretrash 402 #metooescritoresmexicanos (me too mexican authors) 428 #metooffyl 429 #metooperiodistasmexicanos (me too mexican journalists) 428 #meuprimeiroassedio (my first assault) 412 #miprimeroacoso (my first assault) 412 #mirácómonosponemo (see what you do to us) 413, 417, 426 #mosquemetoo 11, 377–​378 #mosquemetoo 377 #mulțumescpentruflori (thank you for the flowers) 322 #mydressmychoice 388–​389, 400 #nakedprotest 399–​400, 402, 403 #Nirbhaya (fearless) 5 #NiUnaMenos 8 #niunamenos (not one more woman) 411, 413–​417, 423–​439 #niunamenossinjubliación (not one less without retirement) 426 #nomecuidanmeviolan (they don't take care of me, they violate me) 431 #nopiwouma 387–​388 #nosqueremosvivas (we want to live) 413 #notallmen 179, 398 #notsexnotwork 47 #nousaussi (we too) 277 #noustoutes (we all) 276–​277 #outloud 451 #outloud 451 #Pinjratod (Break the cage) 5

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Index #prataomdet (talk about it) 66 #rapemustfall 399–​400 #rättslösa (lawless) 445 #reasonswhyineedfeminism 157 #rhodesmustfall 387 #ricebunny 米兔 4, 8, 331, 342–​355 #rureferencelist 387, 399–​400, 401–​403 #sayhername 43 #saytheirnames 154, 158, 159–​162 #shameonwho 378 #shoutyourabortion 306 #șieureușesc (itoosucceed) 323 #standupjapan 363 #StopThisShame 5 #tambourinearmy 158, 159–​162 #thatsnotok 400 #timesup 158, 231 #totalshutdown 399–​400, 402, 403 #ustoo 233 #watashimoevidence (i too am evidence) 363 #wetoo 361, 365 #wewantrespectforthepresent 326 #whyistayed 306 #WhyLoiter 5 #whywerise 240 #withyou 362 #WoYeShi 8 #woyeshi 我也是 (metoo) 331 #writetoyouralmamaters 346, 349 #yaestuvo (that‘s enough) 428 #yesallwomen 306 #yosílescreo (I do believe them) 428 #yotambién (me too) 427 #yotecreo (I believe you) 427 #youarenotalone 330 #youtoo 129, 130 #þöggun (suppression) 452 1960s 29, 178–​179, 270 1970s 27, 42, 70, 179, 270, 277, 360, 423 1980s 27, 142, 155, 272, 343, 360–​361, 424, 451 1990s 155, 295, 344, 361, 424 50:50 Project 134 Abbo, E 125 Abbott, D 236 Abdul, P 183 abortion 226, 271, 273, 275–​276, 295, 416–​417; decriminalisation of 413–​416, 424; forced 222; legalisation 271, 425, 432; legislation 324–​325; rights 30, 31, 451 absence-​presence 10, 72–​73 academia 99–​100, 141, 149–​150, 156, 347, 439–​445; vs activism 14, 172; Western  13 Academy Awards (Oscars) 132, 189, 190 accountability 13, 144, 159, 161, 163, 354, 389–​390; systems of 210–​211

adaptive preferences 36 affective solidarity 450 Africa 123–​134, 386–​393, 397–​409; see also African African: Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights 260; feminist 8; feminist protests 400–​404; heritage 231, 234; kitchen 127–​129; women 123–​134, 231, 234, 239, 402; see also Africa Afrikaans 402 agency 69, 99–​108, 179, 284, 323, 334; and desire 63; disguised 403; as identifications 450; linguistic 304, 306; of self 172; sexual 291; women's 59, 115, 119, 292 agential bias 103 Ahde, M 70 Ahearn, L.M 306 Ahmed, S 184, 221–​225, 227 akademiuppropet see #akademiuppropet Akeyesu, J.P 255 alerta de género 432 American Anthropological Association 141, 150 Amos, V  232 Amplify Project 103–​104 ANAIS 320–​321 anonymity 4, 8, 15, 17, 91, 99–​106, 372, 429 Ansari, A 12, 179 Anthropology 141, 148–​150 Antigua and Barbuda 158 Arab world 372–​380 Argentina 15, 276, 410–​418, 424–​426 Arias, O 427 art 110, 114–​115, 119, 178, 190, 353, 400; ars erotica 62; feminist performance 332, 344; heterosexuality in 183; provocative 114 Assange, J 66 Association contre les violences faites aux femmes au travail (AVFT) 271 Atwood, M 415 Auletta, K 192 Autain C 273 Ayyub, R 5 Ágústsdóttir, E.G 222 Back, L 231 backlash 43, 48, 119, 132, 161, 257, 378; conservative 288; government 295; legal 391–​393; patriarchal 173, 179; from perpetrators 379; social 410; traditionalist 412 Badinter, E 272 Bahamas, The  158 Baisers volés 62 Bă lă nescu, G 322 Bardot, B 275 Barth, J 189–​190 Barzan, O 329 Beauty Tips 451–​453 Belém do Pará Convention 155, 260

466

467

Index Belize 158 Benedict, H 194 Benziane, S 272 Betts, H 128 Black: British women 230, 236, 240; see also race or feminism Blackwell-​Stratton,  M  222 Blair, C 123, 124, 132 Blair, T  130 Blanche, M.T 307 Blank, H 183 Bloom, L 189 BoardSource 209 Bogado, A 232 Bollywood 176–​177 Bolyubakh, E 305 Bragă , A 329 Brazil 76, 412, 417, 425, 433 Brock, Z 193 Brook, V  192 Brown, A.M 241 Brown, W  88–​89 Bryant, K 191 Buchanan, NT 236 Buddhist 334, 343, 348 Buhari, A 129 Buhari, M 129 bullying 191, 327, 455–​456; cyber-​  260 Bulzarik, M 70 Burke, T 1, 29, 99, 123, 162, 232–​234, 239–​240, 440; conceptualisation of #MeToo 159 Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth 200–​201 Butler, J 4, 58, 85–​87, 90 butterfly effect 36, 42–​43, 48 Cambridge, Duchess of 69 Câmpeanu, A 329, 330 campus 43, 182, 321, 331–​333, 344, 349–​350, 363 Canada 72, 76, 156, 346 capitalism 31, 85, 320; global 27; neoliberal 86, 158, 278, 404 Carby, H 238, 239 Caruth, C 104 cascades 37 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 155, 259 celebrities 4, 44, 67–​69, 231–​234, 237, 292–​293, 347–​348, 376, 417 censorship 114–​115, 271, 278, 320, 331–​332, 335, 343, 347, 350, 353 Centro de Investigación y Docencia Economica (CIDE) 430 Chile 276, 410–​411, 414, 425–​426 Chin, J.L 127 China 4, 8, 15, 17, 320–​321, 331–​335, 343–​354

Chinese: diaspora 321, 335, 343, 347; government 320, 331–​332, 335; students 321, 331–​332, 335 church: Catholic 44, 269, 287–​288, 414–​416; Moravian 159–​164 Chutel, L 123 cinema 58, 133, 278 Ciudad Juárez 423 Cixous, H 3, 456 Clinton, B 43 Clinton, H 43, 129, 189 Colectivo Las Tesis  425 Colegio de Mexico, El 430 collective: action 4, 71, 321, 354, 415, 443–​445, 450; identity; 347, 441, 444; memory 304, 312, 404, 418, 451, 458; narrative 441, 443–​445, 453; see also narrative; voice 445 Colombia 412, 423, 426–​427 Collins, P.H 232, 237 colonialism 6–​7, 11, 28, 31, 154, 165, 400–​403; decolonial feminist movements/​activism 399–​400; expansion 237; legacies 232; practice 234; privilege 238; project(s) 234, 237; neo-​colonialism 156, 402; post-​colonialism 15, 238, 399 colonisation 156, 235–​236, 238, 399 Communist Party (China) 334, 349 connective action 350, 354–​355, 443, 445, 453, 457 connective logic 350 Connell, R 309 consciousness-​raising 29, 65, 393 consent 61, 147, 179; affirmative 284, 292; economics of 92; and non-​disclosure agreements; and rape 46, 183, 255, 416; reading 178; and seduction 55–​64, 270; sexual 12, 66, 455; and sexual harassment 46, 57, 361 conspiracy 6, 310–​311 Cosby, B 44, 67, 141, 145, 191, 257 Costa Rica 427 Council on Institutional Investors 208–​209 counter-​public 439, 442–​445 COVID-​19 xvii, 14, 269, 278 Crenshaw, K 202, 222, 232, 255 criminal justice 154–​155, 187, 189, 194 cyberpolitics 66–​67 Da, T 332–​333 Dakolo, B 125 Damon, M 188 data 176, 251–​252, 256, 332 Davis, A 415 Davis, S 124 Davis, K 354 De Haas, C 276 Dear Girls 452 decolonisation 6, 105 Deneuve, C 100, 275

467

468

Index Denvir, J 133 Despentes V 273, 278 Dhrodia, A 236 Di Marco, G 424 Diallo, N 55, 59, 60, 272 digital activism 304, 309, 399, 403–​404, 440, 442–​444 disability 5, 86, 134, 221–​227, 237, 255–​256, 454–​455 Dodson, C 132 Dominica 158 Donegan, M 4, 91, 99–​101 Draupadi 174 Durrheim, K 307 Egbon 126, 128 Egypt xix, 15, 17, 126, 372–​377, 400 electoral kryptonite 43 Eltahawy, M 11, 377 emplot 145 Encuentros Feministas (Feminist Forums) 423 Enloe, C 2 entertainment industry 44, 67, 231, 354, 426, 428 see also show business E-​romnja 321, 326–​328, 330–​331 erotic capital 16, 128–​129 essentialist 424 ethics 85, 90–​91, 149, 165, 321 École Polytechnique massacre 76 Fair, C.C 99 fallism 400 Faragher v. City of Boca Raton 200–​201, 202 Farrow, R 186, 194 Fassin, E 62, 63 Fatoyinbo, B 125 Fedorova, E 312 female genital mutilation (FGM) 131, 235, 374 FEMEN 272 femicide 269, 273, 276–​278, 400, 410–​415, 423–​426, 431 femina domestica 88–​90, 93 femininity 128, 452; acquiesce in 47; contradictive 367; and disability 222–​224 feminism: abolition 30; African 15–​16, 123–​124, 126–​130, 132–​133; Arab 373–​374; Black 29, 127, 232, 240; carceral 30; Caribbean 154–​165; Cartoon 99; confrontational 11; decolonial 399–​400, 402; French 62; glass ceiling 30; imperial 232; indigenous 232, 236–​237; mainstream 451; nego 127; performative 321, 332; plantation 230–​241; populaire 277; Roma 326; second-​wave 29–​30, 59, 89, 284, 441, 450, 451; senior 100–​101; subject of 56, 58, 59, 63; techno-​ 440; third-​wave 56, 451; Western 6, 13, 59, 284; white 29

Feminist Circle of Juridical Analysis (Círculo Feminista de Análisis Jurídico) 429 feminist: epistemology 180; Five 345, 352–​353 fertility 128, 226 FILIA 321, 325–​227, 329–​330 Finland 67, 70; Ministry of Health and Social Affairs 70 Fonda, J 233 Ford, C.B 11, 44, 144–​147, 258, 293, 380 France 12, 15, 56, 79, 269–​283, 293, 392 Fraser, N 451 Frente Nacional de Mujeres (FNM) 426 Freud, S 55–​56, 58, 60–​63 Fricker, M 110, 111 FRONT 321 Fundamental Rights Agency 287 Gao, Y  332 Garcia, S 233 gender: ideology 287, 412, 425, 427; quota 304 Germany 129 Ginsburg, R. B 203 Global North 6, 13, 156, 162, 233–​234, 400–​404 Global South 6, 13, 30, 156, 399, 402–​404 Goffman, Erving 58 Goldberg, W  100 Grady, C 100 Great Britain see United Kingdom Green Book 132 Greenwood, H. 70 Grenada 158 Gurira, D 132 Guyana 158 Haenel, A 278 Haiti 158 Hakim, C 128 Halimi, G 270–​271 Handmaid's Tale 415 hashtags 2, 5, 8, 13, 17, 154, 174, 250–​254 see also # hashtivism 158 Haiyan,Y 333, 344 hegemony: gender 65, 71; of machista values 424; neoliberal 87; social 85; of social ontology 90 heteronormativity 15 see also patriarchy heterosexuality see sexuality heuristic availability 37 Hill, A 2 himpathy 11, 191, 193 HIV 398 Hollywood 57–​60, 183, 231–​233 Holmgren, Beth 305 Holzer, J 184 homophobia 257, 272, 323, 367, 399 Horia, C 324, 329 Huang, X 334 Hyndman, E 103

468

469

Index Iceland 7, 15, 86–​87, 91, 113–​115, 221–​224, 251, 256, 451–​458 ICTs see information and communication technologies Ignatov, G 309, 310 ILO see International Labour Organisation Imkaan 239 incarceration 27, 30, 46 India 2, 5, 100, 172–​180 indigenous: suffering 156; women 28–​30, 47, 232, 237, 240; see also feminism individualism: neoliberal 69, 402; see also neoliberalism; possessive 85, 87, 88, 94, 95 INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica) 431 information and communication technologies 66, 440, 445 Ingimarsdóttir, A.S 224 injustice: epistemic 110, 111; hermeneutical 111, 112; testimonial 110–​112 interdependencies 34–​35, 87, 90, 102 intergenerational 7, 450, 452 International Labour Organisation 259 International Women's Day 158, 239, 305 intersectionality: of Chinese feminism 332; and class privilege 129; and disability 222–​223; feminist approaches to 27; and harassment 201–​202; and race 230–​241; relations among men 73, 76; relation to mysogyny 3; and Western feminism 59 invulnerability 85–​86, 93, 94 IPVAW 455 Iraq 372, 375, 379 Islam 127, 130, 375, 379 Islamophobia 7, 274, 375 Istanbul Convention 260, 288, 323, 330, 335 Jacobs, M.S. 234–​235 Jamaica 158 Japan 8, 15, 249, 251, 256, 360–​368 Jenner, K 129 Jezebel 124 Johansson, S 190 Jolie, A 183, 231 Jones, G 185 Jordan, J 230 journalist 5, 16–​17, 55, 72, 123, 127, 232, 237, 249, 260, 271–​276, 289, 311, 333–​334, 362; Argentinian 413–​416; Kenyan 389–​390; Mexican 428; personal account 372–​380 Judd, A 38, 43 justice: epistemic 110–​112, 117; restorative 9, 159, 365; transformative 155, 159; transitional 9–​10 Kamenchenko, P 308 Kantor, J 186, 194 Kardashian, K 129

Katz, J 102 Kavanaugh, B 146–​148; emotional defence of 11; resumé 44 Kazakhstan 307 Kelly, L 187 Kenya 8, 15, 386–​396 Kenyatta National Hospital 390 Khalifa, M 69 Khanova, L 309 killjoy 4, 221–​226 Kimmel, M 130 Kochkina, E 304 Kozlov, I 307 Kreatsoula, F 75 Kyrgyzstan 307 Lacan, J 58 Laplanche, J 60, 61 latinx 30 law 6–​14, 42–​54, 186–​198, 259–​261; anti-​ discrimination 206–​207; Buddhist 334; domestic violence 310; modification of 320–​321, 326 Lawrence, J 69 Leilei, Z 331–​333, 346 Lewis G 232, 234–​235, 238 LGBTQIA+ 2; anti-​ 156, 288; and feminism 269; harassment of 201–​202; inclusion 412; marriage equality 31, 324, 326; masculinities 76; in post-​ socialist countries 321, 324, 326, 331–​332; violence towards 72 Li, M 332 liberalism 85–​89, 97 Liz 390 Lorde, A 93, 221–​222, 225, 232, 239 Lü, P 331–​332 Luo, Q 321, 331 lynch lists 105 machismo 272, 411 machista 8, 424, 426, 428, 432 MacKinnon, C.A 38, 59, 60, 174–​175, 179–​180, 263, 267 Madīnah [Medina] 375; see also Makkah Macri, M 411–​412 Mair L 232 Makkah [Mecca] 375; see also Madīnah male gaze 58, 116, 119 male victims 309, 367 mandatory arbitration 205–​206 Mandela, N 130 Manne, K 11, 191 Maputo Protocol 259 Marea verde (Green tide) 423 Marghitu, S 190 Marx, K 88, 92 masculinity 47, 65–​77, 130, 186–​188, 194, 269, 344; bias 441; fatherly 67; hegemonic 155,

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470

Index 276, 367; hyper 368; toxic 30, 105, 129–​130, 149, 455 masquerade 58 Massay, G 131 mass-​information teletechnologies  57 maternity leave 128, 361 Mathieu, N.C 61 McFarlane, S 189, 190 McFee, R 240 McGowan, R 188 Medina see Madīnah Medina, J 110, 111, 117 Meili, X 332–​333 Melnychenko, A 304, 309–​310, 312–​313, 318 MenEngage 76 Merida 430 Merkel, A 129 Mexico 8, 15, 415, 424–​431; City 431 Middle East 126, 131, 174, 373–​375, 379, 386 Migunov, A 312 Milano, A 65, 67, 99, 232–​233, 239, 240, 250, 254, 273 Million Women Rise 239–​240 misogynoir 277 misogyny xix, 29–​31, 43, 46, 76, 100, 125, 173, 270, 333, 387, 439–​441, 457 misrepresentation 109, 113–​115, 119 mob trial 9 moral panic 291–​292 MORENA (National Regeneration Movement) 424 motherism 127 Muller, S. 273, 392 Mulvey, L 58 Murad, N 379, 380 Murphy, M. 72 Nairobi 389, 390 narrative: #MeToo 141–​146, 158, 175–​176, 402–​405; African female 132–​133; artistic exceptionalism 188; beauty and the beast 193; collective 441–​445, 453; counter 239, 451; cultural value 186; female 11, 454; feminist 128; film 58, 189; first-person 17, 451; male 11, 173–​174, 179, 452; monster 9, 186, 193–​194; pain 235; positive 323; religious 154; sexual contract 190; subversive 451; survivor 3–​4, 15, 364; third-​person 57; victim-​predator 132; white saviour 132 Natanson, M 102–​103 neoliberalism 17, 27, 68–​69, 85–​92, 94–​97, 232, 278, 320, 323, 402 Nica, A 326 Nicaragua 424, 426 Nollywood 133 non-​disclosure agreements 9, 202–​204 Nordic model 47 Nordic paradox 456

Norway 47, 256 Notre corps, nous-​mêmes 277 Nyanzi, S 10 Nyong'o, L 183, 184 Oaxaca 431 Obama, M 129, 415 object 60, 63, 87, 103, 119, 133, 172, 306; of desire 58, 60–​62, 124; sexual 48, 289 objectification 46, 59, 115, 116, 129, 235; of the self 87 Observatorio Ciudadano Nacional del Feminicidio (The National Observatory of Femicides) 431 Ogunyemi, C.O 127 Ogunyemi, D 134 Olimpia Law 432 ontology 65, 85–​90, 93, 97, 98 Orthodox 320, 323, 324, 331 Oscars see Academy Awards Osez-​le-​féminisme! 276, 277 Our bodies, Ourselves see Notre corps, nous-​mêmes paintings 114–​116 Pakistan 5, 258, 377 Palmer, L.A 232 Paltrow, G 59, 183, 232 pandemic xviii, 1, 27–​29, 429 Parkin, W  70 Parmar, P 232 patiency 103 patriarchy xix, 10–​11, 13–​15, 174, 257, 379, 450; capitalism 85; colonialism 165; culture of 378; hetero-​ 31, 162, 182, 237; heteronormative 172; intrinsic 126; machista model 424; men 76, 180; portrait of 278; power of 368; resistance to 109–​122; shadow of 456; struggles with 453; systemic/​structural 172–​173, 178; trauma 333 see also trauma; toxic 377; as usual 291 people of colour 233 see also black; latinx; race Pepper dem 126, 127 performativity 399, 450, 451; first-​person 57 Perón, J 411 perpetrator accountability 349, 362 personal is political, the 90, 146, 451 Peru 411, 425–​426 Pew Research Center 67, 402 pink wave 424 piropos 412 playacting 58 pluralistic ignorance 34, 37 Pokua, A 127, 130 Poland 6, 15, 284–​295 Polanski, R 12, 190, 272, 278, 293 police violence 27, 29 policy: advocacy 345, 353; anti-​violence prevention 76; change 71, 332, 390; design 59; dissemination 150, 261; documents 349;

470

471

Index ethics 321; government 304; initiatives 67; lobbying 354; outcomes 343, 345; peace and reconciliation 130; and practice 65, 71, 150, 256; public 204, 235; racist 323; reforms 390; sexual consent 66; sexual harassment 70, 200, 201, 211, 321, 391; shifts 237; statements 67 pornography 44, 47, 73, 177, 271, 273, 452; anti 60; revenge 69, 115 positionality 142–​143, 164 post-​colonialism see colonialism post-​socialist 17, 320, 330–​331, 335 post-​truth 172–​174 preference falsification 34, 37 privilege 44, 112, 141, 146–​149, 221, 251, 256; ableist 5, 257; class 129, 234; colonial 238; masculine 424; patriarchal 179; system 145; un-​ 404; white 237 Promundo 76 Prophet Mohammed 375 prostitution 46–​47, 73, 272, 277 protest 12, 320–​326, 362, 410–​418, 425–​426, 431; Arab Spring 376; black 295; gender violence 31, 332; journalism 372–​373 online 344, 352, 363, 389; pink tax 277; solidarity 330; student 4, 333, 348, 399–​400; women’s 303–​304, 390 public cruelty 450 Purple Drum 236 Putin,V 305, 310, 311 Qiqi, X 331, 346 queer see LGBTQIA+ Qureshi, S 239–​240 race 255–​256, 258; and class 1, 29; raced realities 150; racial injustice 231–​232; racialization 236–​238; and sexuality 230–​246; see also black; feminism; narrative; privilege; white radical rudeness 10 Rafi, N.J 258 rape: culture 258, 278, 387–​390, 392–​393, 399, 404, 416, 457; definition 46; marital 179; myths 44–​45, 111, 308, 388, 392, 400; serial 46–​47 Reader, S 102, 103 reconciliation 9–​10, 130, 132 Red Stockings 450 reflexivity 149 Reinhartz, A 102 reporter see journalist representation 124, 129, 134, 210, 402, 405; contingent 45; of feminism 114, 295; media 193, 276; political 271, 305, 427; of the self 31; of violence 224; of women 28, 294; see also misrepresentation rights: abortion 7, 30, 31, 451; civil 42, 200, 205, 232, 453; human 9, 43, 47–​48, 260, 362, 410, 415–​416, 432; inheritance 131 Robsham, M 71

Romania 8, 15, 17, 320–​321, 323–​326, 328–​332, 335 Rotunno, D 189, 193 Russia 5, 15, 17, 34, 303–​313 Saint Lucia 158 Saint Vincent  158 Sarkar, R 100, 101 Să să rman, M 324 Savile, J 67, 191 scapegoating 445 Sciamma, C 278 Searle, J 101, 102 seduction 12, 55, 61–​62; à la française 269, 271, 275; theory 55–​56, 60 Segato, R 426 selfhood 4, 103–​105 Senegal 387 Sensiblu 321, 324 sex education 226, 277 sex for grades 125 sexism 190, 269–​276, 324, 457; in academia 439, 441, 445; apathy about 411; awareness of 451; benevolent 116–​119; casual 178; dismantling 289, 387; everyday 66, 273, 450; hetero-​ 237; hostile 116, 117, 119; in the media 305, 310, 389; on social media 361, 440; in the workplace 209 sexuality 12, 58–​62, 71–​72, 156, 162, 270; criminalisation of 292; and desire 4; hetero-​ 4, 62, 182–​184; liberated 269; of men 65; as privilege 44; politics of 66; and race 15, 124, 126; of women 44, 129, 175, 179; see also LGBTQIA+ Shafi, M 258 shareholder lawsuits 207–​209 Sharma, K 12 Sherif Trask,  B  127 Shiori, I 365–​368 Shirley, D 132 Shitty Media Men 99, 101 Shklar, J 450 show business 68 see also entertainment industry silence 34–​38, 76, 85, 103–​104, 114, 118, 123–​125, 129, 159–​160, 309, 417, 432; breakers 1–​3, 162, 189, 343, 345, 348, 350–​354, 368; breaking the 29, 226, 270, 272, 292, 332, 346, 365, 368, 377, 453; as commodity 204; deafening 365; during sexual assault 367; Lorde, A 225; Roma women 328; strategic 5; of victims 161; silencing 109, 161, 204, 227, 294; breaking of 2, 3; breaking through 93; culture 118–​119; effect 14, 365, 390, 451; institutionalised 386; method 111; of women 112, 114, 133, 164, 173, 458; self-​ 37; tactics 387 Sita 174 slam poetry 178, 452 Slut Walk 93, 451 Slutsky, L 311, 312 smoking 31

471

472

Index social media 4, 7, 8, 9, 13–​14, 38, 158, 232, 250, 386, 398, 403, 401–​418, 441–​449, 450–​457; activism 250; campaign 125, 320, 411–​412; channels 291–​293; in China 342–​355; influence 128; intervention 43; movement 176–​178; platform 401; public 101; strategies 91; users 306, 311–​312 SOGIE 15; see also LGBTQIA+ solidarity 3, 27–​31, 101, 158, 249–​251, 294, 450–​453; affective 92, 450; and empathy 15; feminist 236, 330, 403; group 362; international 249; intersectional 225–​227; marches 324, 328–​330, 427; in media 311–​312; movements 112, 345; not showing 223, 239; spaces 232 transnational 154, 156, 403 Solnit, R 105 Sonke Gender Justice 76 South Africa 10, 48, 76, 126, 132, 134, 387, 389, 398–​404 Spacey, K 59, 71, 190–​191 Spain 48, 254, 287 standuperas (female stand-​up comedians) 428 Stanley, L 70 Stígamót 455 straight 30, 62, 183, 201, 239 Strauss-​Kahn, D 55–​57, 61–​62, 270, 272, 275 Streep, M 188–​189 sugar dem 126–​127 Sustainable Development Goals 251, 259 Sweden 47–​48, 66–​67, 71, 256, 291, 293, 401, 439–​445 Syria 35, 39, 372, 375, 379 talk show 349, 389, 413 Taussig, M 101 telegenic dimension 56 theory travelling 343–​344 Théry, I 60, 62 thresholds 34–​38 Time’s Up 44 Title IX 182, 184 transatlantic slave trade 238 Transcena 321, 324 transparency 45, 134, 310, 347 trauma 14, 45, 60–​61, 99–​108, 142–​144, 175–​176, 416; sexual 452; societal 9; temporality of 61 Trinidad and Tobago  158 Trintignant, M 272 Trump, D 43, 68, 129, 141, 146, 148, 184 Trump, M 129 Tutu, D 10 Twitter 57, 250–​254, 274, 440 Twohey, M 186, 189, 194 Tzu, S 129 Uganda 10, 231 Ukraine 272, 303–​304, 306–​307, 309–​310, 312, 326

Umunna 131 UN Women 231, 236, 251–​252, 378, 423, 455 United Kingdom (UK) 6, 34, 66, 68, 70, 134, 174, 231, 233, 236–​240, 402 United States (US) 6, 7–​29, 45–​48, 123–​124, 199–​200, 250–​254, 346–​347, 386–​387, 425–​428, 452; Congress 45, 200, 205; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) 9, 37, 199–​203, 209; judicial system 234; Senate 44, 145–​146, 200, 380; Supreme Court 44, 147, 200–​201, 205, 251, 258, 380 upskirting 56, 66, 251, 361 Uruguay 410, 414–​415, 423 Valenti, J 99 Vallelonga 132 Veracruz 431 victim-​blaming: as ableism 222; Argentina 411; China 344; defence 193; Iceland 451; Japan 364; Russia 308; South Africa 400; Ukraine 304 VIF (Network for Prevention and Combatting Violence against Women) 321, 325 Vigarello, G 457 Vishakha guidelines 176–​177 vulnerability 14, 15, 17, 46, 85–​97, 155, 326, 334, 400 Watson, E 275 Watson, L 237 wealth see capitalism Weber, M: iron cage 149 WeChat 344, 346, 349–​350 Weibo, Sina 321, 331, 333, 344–​346, 350–​352 Weinstein, H: trial of 186–​194 whisper network 392 Whisper Sheets 100 white 31, 132, 237–​238; innocence 31; men 145–​147, 184, 194; supremacy 28, 42, 46, 182, 184, 237–​238; saviour see narrative; women 7, 29–​30, 59, 146, 226, 232–​235, 402–​404 White Ribbon Campaign 76 WHO (World Health Organisation) 131, 374, 413 Wielenga, C 132 Wise, S 70 witnessing 162 Wittig, M 58 Wollstonecraft, M 117, 118, 172 Womanism 127 Women Awakening Network 344, 346, 349 women’s: march 239; strike 450 Women’s Liberation Movement 56, 59, 270, 278 Wynn, S 203, 207, 208 Xixi, L 346 Yakupov, S 307–​308 Yancy, G 234 Yazidi 375, 379

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