The #MeToo Effect
What Happens When We Believe Women
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
The #MeToo movement inspired millions to testify to the widespread experience of sexual violence. More broadly, it shifted the deeply ingrained response to women’s accounts of sexual violence from doubting all of them to believing some of them. What changed?
Leigh Gilmore provides a new account of #MeToo that reveals how storytelling by survivors propelled the call for sexual justice beyond courts and high-profile cases. At a time when the cultural conversation was fixated on appeals to legal and bureaucratic systems, narrative activism—storytelling in the service of social change—elevated survivors as authorities. Their testimony fused credibility and accountability into the #MeToo effect: uniting millions of separate accounts into an existential demand for sexual justice and the right to be heard.
Gilmore reframes #MeToo as a breakthrough moment within a longer history of feminist thought and activism. She analyzes the centrality of autobiographical storytelling in intersectional and antirape activism and traces how literary representations of sexual violence dating from antiquity intertwine with cultural notions of doubt, obligation, and agency. By focusing on the intersectional prehistory of #MeToo, Gilmore sheds light on how survivors have used narrative to frame sexual violence as an urgent problem requiring structural solutions in diverse global contexts. Considering the roles of literature and literary criticism in movements for social change, The #MeToo Effect demonstrates how “reading like a survivor” provides resources for activism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sharp study, Gilmore (Tainted Women), a professor emerita of English at Ohio State University, examines how the #MeToo movement used narrative "tools to revive a longstanding public conversation about sexual justice." She contends that sexual assault survivors sharing their stories on social media under the hashtag #MeToo in late 2017 constituted the "gelling of millions of diverse accounts into a collective voice that exposed systemic bias." The collective nature of the movement was crucial, Gilmore posits, because the sheer number of accounts made it difficult to dismiss sexual abuse as a widespread and systemic problem. Touching on Harriet Jacobs's 1861 slave narrative, the transformations undergone by rape survivors in Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Senate testimonies of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, and Mary Gordon's 2020 novel, Payback, Gilmore encourages "reading like a survivor," which entails extending the empathy and "care we feel for literary characters to actual survivors." The author's mixture of literary and feminist analysis yields eye-opening insights and provides fresh ways of thinking about the power of survivors' stories. The result is a thoughtful and thorough consideration of a global movement.
