In her most recent comedy special, Growing, Amy Schumer describes young feminists as firebrands stepping in to protect older women from harassment that they have taken for granted:
“You’ve been getting sexually harassed like this your whole lives?”
“Ahh, yeah.”
“You wanna do something about that?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Many accounts of #Metoo also treat it as sui generis, emerging only recently in response to Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump, or as a result of Ronan Farow’s heroic reporting, or, when its more recent origins are acknowledged, as a safe space created by activist Tarana Burke for survivors of Sexual Assault.
The goal of this panel is to situate #Metoo within a much longer tradition of transformative feminist practice, which has always yoked the struggle for bodily self-determination with narrative control and the de-centering of male perspectives in narratives of sexual violence. We examine First Wave feminists use of print journalism, collective discourses like speak-outs and zine culture, and contemporary social media campaigns to contextualize the struggle against sexual violence and misogyny within specific social, historical, and media cultures.
#Metoo was not the first time that activists used the media to reveal male sexual misbehavior, nor is the backlash it has unleashed unique. Courtney Chattelier will begin with a discussion of the late-nineteenth century provocations of Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin who used their newspaper to expose the sexual hypocrisy of men like Henry Ward Beecher. These “exposures” were also occasions for Woodhull and Claflin to condemn rampant misogyny and the “sexual double standard” that repressed female sexuality while allowing powerful men to flaunt Victorian sexual mores—often leaving women to bear the social and physical costs of male sexual freedom. In equal measures lionized and condemned by the press and by prominent first-wave feminists, Woodhull and Claflin invented rhetorical strategies that predicted the #MeToo movement by more than a century. Their controversial reception likewise anticipated the backlash that women who challenge entrenched patriarchal norms continue to face in the twenty-first century, accused of “obscenity” and of threatening an idealized notion of due process by putting men’s reputations at risk. Chattelier addresses some of the continuities between Woodhull and Claflin’s writings and public speeches, and the contemporary politics of exposure that have attended #MeToo and its offshoots and backlash, including the publication of the “Shitty Media Men” spreadsheet.
Next, Samantha Wallace’s will discuss her archival research at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library in the collections of the New York Radical Feminists to interrogate issues of authority and certainty in the anti-rape activism of the 1970s and the generic form of testimony within contemporary narratives recounting sexual assault. She draws from a wide body of contemporary, narrative-based media, including fiction and non-literary forms like social media and blogs, to identify and historicize continuities between #MeToo’s rhetoric of certainty and the strategies of previous US anti-rape activism. She argues that #MeToo’s rhetoric of certainty is a direct response to prejudiced interpretations of women’s testimonies, what Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice,” an identity-based prejudice that causes auditors to read certain accounts as lacking authority, credibility, and credence, and which has historically preyed upon a woman’s uncertainty to destabilize her testimony. Wallace argues that one answer to the feminist assertion that we need to theorize in more depth the full “complexity” of narratives of sexual encounter—including those that end in violence—is to offer, perhaps paradoxically, uncertainty in contemporary narratives of sexual and gender-based violence as a significant critical site.
In the late 1970s and 80s, discussions of female sexual autonomy and pleasure erupted in what was later termed the Feminist Sex Wars. Jennie Lightweis-Goff’s examines often-overlooked figures in this posits #MeToo as an opening address to the key aporia of public feminisms that assert their desire to be “intersectional or... bullshit.” This putatively fourth-wave feminism consistently elides connections between intersectionality and the feminist sex wars, particularly in the treatment of Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins. Though Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” figured “pornography [as] a direct denial of the power of the erotic” and Hill Collins asserted a continuity between the auction block of slavery and the pornographic spectacle of the contemporary moment, neither is considered in conversation with figures like Catharine MacKinnon. By fiat and exclusion within public feminisms, protectionist feminisms have become “white feminisms.” Voss seeks to put arguments of the founding generation of intersectional scholars in conversation with anti-porn feminism, rather than perpetuate narratives of failure and closed circuits which have many postscripts to the sex wars.
Other accounts of #Metoo’s power and momentum cite the importance of digital technology. Angelica Devido discusses the DIY culture that emerged around the Riot Grrrl movement as a cultural moment wherein feminist activism encouraged and empowered women to speak up about their experiences. Their music and zines created a collective feminist discourse that foregrounded the importance of both creating narratives and the audience for them. This activism resulted in the cultural proliferation of what Sherrie Inness terms “tough girls” (1998), as women were encouraged by such feminist movements as Riot Grrrl to form sisterhood-coalitions, and to stand together to challenge the systematic violence and abuse that attempted to silence and oppress them. Indeed, this legacy of women speaking up and standing together to fight violence and harassment remains a central tenet of the contemporary #MeToo movement.