The #MeToo Moment: A Rhetorical Zeitgeist

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2020

Using the New Yorker story Cat Person, and the babe.net story I went on a date with Aziz Ansari, it turned into the worst night of my life, we explore the possibilities of consent in a context of gender inequality and white supremacy, where women's physical safety is in danger when in the presence of men, where men have significantly more cultural capital and privilege than women, where white women most easily access narratives about agency and violability, and where the emotional labor in heterosexual relationships falls on women. The article argues for the importance of seeing consent as part of an affective economy, rather than a simple matter of choice and agency, and insists on a contextualizing of consent in the #metoo movement that is attentive to the cultural logics of patriarchy and whiteness.

Sexuality, Gender, and Policy, 2021

This article asks: Is it possible to craft a form of engaged, anti-carceral, feminist political practice that carves out a space for sexual negotiation, exploration, sex positivity, and changing conceptions of consent in an era shaped by hypermediation and, for the purposes of this paper, #MeToo? Five British based academics working in the areas of sexuality studies, law, media studies, and sociology were interviewed on this topic so as to better understand contemporary scholarly attitudes and where current research stands. Each scholar was asked a series of questions around consent as a legal and normative regulator of sexual relations— including its drawbacks, their views on other models of consent— including communicative consent, embodied consent, sexual autonomy— the possibili-ties for alternative forms of justice, inclusive of prison aboli-tion and restorative justice as they relate to sexual violence, and the kinds of feminism(s) they see developing from this.

Canadian Woman Studies, 2010

Laws

Legal consciousness scholars identify the ways in which law is referenced to authorize, define and evaluate behaviors and choices that occur far outside any formal legal framework. They define legality as the "meanings, sources of authority, and cultural practices that are commonly recognized as legal, regardless of who employs them or for what ends." We use the idea of legality to argue that, in matters of sexual assault and rape, the limits of the law extend beyond the courtroom. Rather than simply influencing or guiding only those who are willing to consult the law in their efforts to seek justice, laws and legal discourse have the potential to frame and constrain any attempt to discuss experiences of sexual violence. #MeToo and other forms of "consciousness-raising" for sexual violence highlight the limiting effects of law and legal discourse on public discussion of sexual violence. We find that, paradoxically, in the case of sexual violence law has the capacity to undermine the goals and benefits of consciousness-raising approaches, privatizing the experience of sexual assault and silencing its victims.

Feminist Media Studies, 2019

Sexual violence has predominantly been discursively constructed as bounded and binary, leaving little room for ambiguous or uncertain experiences. The #MeToo movement, however, saw some highly contested cases enter into mainstream news coverage that challenged these dominant understandings, including the divisive case of Aziz Ansari. This research uses a post-structural feminist framework to examine Australian news media reporting of this case in order to understand how discourses around sexual violence and sexual consent are (re)produced by news media following the #MeToo movement. The study found that whilst some discourse was more nuanced, the majority of reporting still perpetuated limited and binary understandings of sexual violence. Much reporting constructed pressure and coercion as the normal and acceptable "reality" of (hetero)sex, failing to acknowledge coercion as potentially harmful and problematic, as well as failing to consider the possibilities for doing consent differently. Reporting also (re)produced narrow and stereotypical understandings of gender roles, with women primarily seen as bearing the onus of gatekeeping sexual experiences, and men seen as "naturally" aggressive pursuers of sex. Ultimately, we argue that news media works as a site of erasure for particular forms and experiences of sexual violence.

Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies

Feminist Formations, 2019

This article explores how whiteness shapes public feminisms around sexual violence, using #MeToo as a case study. Building on the work of Daniel Martinez HoSang (2010), Gurminder Bhambra (2017), and others, I theorize political whiteness as an orientation to/mode of politics that employs both symbolic tropes of woundability and interpersonal performances of fragility (DiAngelo 2011), and invokes state and institutional power to redress personal injury. Furthermore, I argue that the “wounded attachments” (W. Brown 1995) of public sexual violence feminisms are met by an equally wounded whiteness in the right-wing backlash: acknowledging the central role of race exposes continuities between both progressive and reactionary politics dominated by white people. Political whiteness stands in contrast to the alternative politics long articulated by women of color, and Black women in particular. However, these alternatives may encounter different problematics, for instance intersecting with neoliberal notions of resilience, which are also racialized. Challenging political whiteness is therefore not simply a case of including more diverse narratives: this must be done while examining how sexual violence is experienced and politicized in the nexus of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism, in which gender, race and class intersect with categories such as victims and survivors, woundedness and resilience.

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 2019

Vand. L. Rev., 1996

arguing that feminism ought to be about sexual oppression because it is what is left in common once you bracket the differences between women). For a more thoughtful articulation that grounds solidarity among women on the notion of "a gendered life," see Martha A.