While #MeToo began as a grassroots movement, collective struggle organized by women of colour in the United States, its global visibility and reach were facilitated by the hashtag's virality in the digital space, exhibiting a form of social media feminism. This anthology is a rich collection of insightful essays that explores, examines and expands transnational feminist thought by engaging with #MeToo's relevance and contributions, as well as its limitations, blind spots and growth areas. In their introduction, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti and Vanita Reddy frame #MeToo as a ‘shared discourse’ rather than a ‘shared experience’, to avoid the ‘scaling-up’ conception of the movement and universalizing its reception and outcomes across different parts of the world. Instead, a shared discourse framework affirms the diversity and multiplicity of contexts and conditions in which the movement is perceived, accepted, challenged or enriched in and by localized feminist movements, as critical responses to the various forms of oppression experienced by women, especially those belonging to marginalized sectors and communities, and are often diminished, excluded or silenced in mainstream spaces of scholarship and activism. By focusing on its heterogeneity, the #MeToo movement emerges as an ‘unfinished political project’ capable of engendering radical possibilities in feminist politics (19). The authors employ different transnational feminist frameworks, such as comparing, decentring and recognizing, to ‘illumine feminist goals and struggles’, or ‘challenge conceptual foundations—such as gender, patriarchy, liberal rights, and secularism’, and as shown in the arrangement of the anthology, expand these frameworks by treating them as heuristic tools to draw out the convergences and divergences of the different essays (9). The first part, Comparing, features three essays. In their comparative analysis of two high-profile cases of sexual misconduct of top-ranking state officials—Indian minister of state for external affairs M. J. Akbar and US Supreme Court nominee (now Associate Justice) Brett Kavanaugh, Lakkimsetti and Reddy reveal how gender-based violence is reduced to victimization and vulnerability requiring paternalistic or patriarchal protectionism when social constructions of masculinities are not taken into account, as in the case in India, and is narrowed to toxic masculinity focusing on individuals rather than institutions that generate and perpetuate them when the mechanisms of patriarchy in different social spaces are not considered in understanding sexual transgressions, as demonstrated in the US case. Lakkimsetti and Reddy contend that India's #MeToo and its focus on patriarchal protectionism have overlooked the intersections of gender-based violence with caste, class, religious and other forms of social domination, thus sustaining the status quo of inequalities in Indian society, while the US #MeToo and its focus on gender identity have neglected to see the patriarchal projects insidiously working in their social structures. In examining three widely publicized #MeToo defamation cases following public allegations of sexual harassment—Meesha Shafi against Ali Zafar in Pakistan, Priya Ramani against M. J. Akbar in India and Amber Heard against Johnny Depp in the United States—Brenda Cossman and Ratnar Kapur argue about the paradox of defamation as a censorship tool: While defamation cases filed against victims may be devices to silence them, when they are brought to public platforms such as social media, where they can gain traction and support as happened with #MeToo, the voices of the victim-survivors of sexual harassment may be amplified and challenge dominant sexual norms despite the outcome of the cases. Through the careful navigation of defamation cases, these situations can generate spaces where sexual rights are discussed. The essay by Zeina Dowidar and Nadeen Shaker explores two cases that gained considerable public attention due to their involvement with perpetrators from the upper class of Egyptian society: university student Nadine Abdel Hamid calling out her teacher Ahmed Bassam Zaki on social media, along with other women implicating him for sexual harassment, blackmail and rape; and the Fairmont case wherein seven men who are sons of prominent tycoons in Egypt are alleged to be involved in drugging and gang raping a woman in the Fairmont Hotel. These cases are representative of the #MeToo movement in the country. Dowidar and Shaker highlight the dynamic interplay of sexual morality, social class and social media in the outcomes of the cases. The authors discuss how victim-survivors and advocates are compelled to deal with the silencing mechanisms perpetuated by the Egyptian value system and thinking, particularly cultural norms on chastity and purity for women, and rape myths that place the burden of responsibility on the victims. The online nature of the #MeToo movement in Egypt provides safe spaces, such as Assault Police and Cat Calls of Cairo, where women can speak up, name and shame perpetrators of sexual assault and harassment. The second section, Decentering, includes four essays showcasing initiatives to decentre the United States as the epicentre of #MeToo and engage collectively with other feminist social movements and solidarities. In her essay, Ashwini Tambe plots the geography and employs a transnational approach to posit that #MeToo can be understood ‘not so much as a progenitor of an upheaval in multiple parts of the globe but rather as an intensification of an ongoing strain of digitally driven activism about sexual violence in several countries’ (88). Tambe maintains that this approach allows and leads to reaping the benefits of a more expansive and less blinkered perspective of feminist activism of #MeToo, such as collective and courageous refusal to remain silent or of sexual respectability, and creative initiatives to foster ‘new feminist futures’ (91). She highlights success stories of activism in other countries, especially from the Global South, to counter the self-referential and imperialistic urge of the Global North to dominate the conversation, even within social movements. Hae Yeon Choo also employs a transnational approach to discuss how #MeToo is received in South Korea. Refusing the initial Korean translation, which suggests ‘I too was victimized’, South Korea has insisted on the ‘I too accuse’ or ‘I too speak out’ as more proper feminist translations of #MeToo to emphasize the act of speaking out rather than being victimized and to continue the legacy of South Korean feminist activism on breaking the silence around sexual violence (106). Choo also incorporated the collective stories of Seo Ji-hyun and Kim Ji-eun to demonstrate how women bravely and publicly speak truth to power and call for accountability from formal institutions. Barbara Sutton utilizes a hemispheric viewpoint in her essay to examine the currents and circulation of #MeToo in relation to feminist movements in Argentina, particularly on issues concerning gender violence and abortion rights. Contesting the hegemonic flow of feminist discourses and actions from North to South, Sutton brings to focus the long and strong tradition of feminist solidarity and collaboration in Latin America and the Caribbean, and how #MeToo came to the mix, making it a ‘part of multidirectional, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing feminist efforts toward more just societies, free from violence’ (138). The third and final section, Recognizing, contains four essays that tackle issues often excluded and marginalized in transnational feminist discourses of the #MeToo movement. Dinah Hannaford discusses in her essay how the #MeToo movement coincides with the publication of the article in the Times of London that exposed in detail the abuses perpetrated in 2011 by the employees of Oxfam, one of the leading international charities in the world, subsequently leading to the trending of the hashtag #AidToo. #AidToo has been a space to collect and elicit stories of sexual misconduct in the world of development. It reveals the prevalent issue of sexual exploitation of both workers and recipients in the aid industry. Hannaford also argues for decolonizing development due to the continuing influence of imperialistic logic manifested in the racist and misogynistic cultures in the aid industry. Sudeshna Chatterjee's essay tackles the inadequacy of the #MeToo movement in providing a space for sex workers to voice their vulnerabilities and demand political change to address their precarious and dangerous conditions. Chatterjee claims that #MeToo fell short of becoming an inclusive movement against sexual harassment because it did not engage deeply with the binary codification of consent and coercion and the conflation of sex trafficking and sex work. Relatedly, Landon Sadler's essay attends to the various depictions of #MeToo in popular culture, particularly the gendered scripts of rape consent dramas or ‘MeToo television’. By examining the episodes of the series I May Destroy You, Sadler argues that consent is a ‘constellation made up of multiple interconnecting factors and dimensions, including gender, race, sexuality, class, nation, place, desire, intention, language, history, technology, and state of mind’ (178). Using the experiences of Pakistani singer Meesha Shafi as she came forward with allegations of sexual harassment against another popular actor and singer, Ali Zafar, Ayesha Khurshid explains in her essay the split within the #MeToo movement in Pakistan, characterized by the mainstream feminist discourse's disregard for spirituality and nonsecular forms of activism. Despite being the face of #MeToo in Pakistan, Shafi's art and spirituality, inspired by Sufi themes, are questioned and separated from her social activism. Khurshid exhorts the integration of spiritual activism in feminist politics and thought to contribute to empowerment and healing.
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