Reckoning with the Silences of #MeToo

Feminist Studies 44, no. 1. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 197 Ashwini Tambe Reckoning with the Silences of #MeToo The past six months have been an important time for US feminism. For women’s studies professors, it’s been heartening to find the world outside our classrooms taking up conversations about sex and power that we’ve been having for decades. In this piece, I will reflect on three questions: What is going on? Why is it happening now? And what forms of feminism have been overlooked in the coverage of the #MeToo movement ? I spend the longest time on the third question, because I’m concerned about how #MeToo has advanced a version of public feminism that is, in some ways, out of step with currents in academic feminism. What’s going on? Although feminists have long championed public speak-outs for survivors of sexual violence—whether in Take Back the Night open mics since the 1980s or the workshops also called “MeToo” that Tarana Burke started in Alabama in 2007—the viral force of the hashtag #MeToo in mid-October 2017 took most people by surprise. Within the first twenty-four hours, it had been retweeted half a million times. According to Facebook, nearly 50 percent of US users are friends with someone who posted a message about experiences of assault or harassment. #MeToo was by no means just a US phenomenon: Facebook and Twitter feeds in various parts of the world, notably Sweden, India, and Japan, were rocked for days by this hashtag. Then came the slew of powerful cis-men, largely in the US 198 News and Views media and entertainment industries, who were forced to swiftly resign after allegations of sexual misconduct. This toppling continues and has expanded beyond the media to other industries where reputations matter: politics, music, architecture, and, somewhat belatedly, higher education. In an important way, the ground beneath us has shifted. #MeToo has tilted public sympathy in favor of survivors by changing the default response to belief, rather than suspicion; the hashtag has revealed how widespread sexual coercion is. Why Now? We need to theorize, on a cultural scale, why this movement against sexual harassment and violence in the United States has happened now rather than, say, three years ago, when Bill Cosby was accused by multiple women, or after Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News, was deposed. #MeToo’s impact may seem sudden, but it is a part of a groundswell in women’s activism since the November 2016 elections. The Women’s March was the largest globally coordinated public gathering in history. The 3-million strong Facebook group Pantsuit Nation saw hundreds of thousands of posts about experiences of misogyny. Unprecedented numbers of women are running for US political office this year. The signature affective note running through this political moment is a fierce rage about the election of Donald Trump. Trump’s impunity, I suggest, serves as a trigger provoking the fury at the heart of #MeToo. There are many reasons to find fault with Trump, but it is distinctly galling that he faced no consequences after acknowledging being a sexual predator. For victims of sexual trauma, it is already painful to watch perpetrators roam free because of how high the burdens of proof are in legal cases. When a person such as Trump is grandly affirmed by an election, it retraumatizes victims. Right after the election , therapists and counseling centers were flooded with patients seeking help with processing past events. The ballast provided by women’s feverish organizing and the instant power of social media has facilitated a collective emboldening. Trump has made the comeuppance of all powerful men feel more urgent. But from the inception of #MeToo, I have also watched its racial and class politics with some wariness: whose pain was being centered, I wondered? A colleague recently asked aloud: is #MeToo a white women’s movement? Another wondered, is this a moral panic? These questions News and Views 199 underline the importance of feminist insights that are overlooked in dominant coverage of the movement. What’s Left Out? Critical race feminism offers important insights when exploring the question of whether this is a white...