“Just let this sink in”: Feminist Megethos and the Role of Lists in #MeToo

Abstract

The #MeToo movement unveiled a shifting testimonial landscape available to victims of sexual assault, one that was able to apprehend the attention of vast public audiences unlike other protests before it. Through an analysis of published #MeToo tweets and public discussion of them, this essay argues that what happened during #MeToo reveals a feminist deployment of megethos. Theorizing what I term feminist megethos through the lens of listing extends theories of magnitude beyond the idea of cultivating coherence or amounting excessive detail, toward a theory that captures how megethos can puncture pervasive yet normalized attitudes that constrain efforts for justice.

Notes

1 I wish to thank Elise Verzosa Hurley, and the two RR reviewers, Erin Frost and Belinda Stillion Southard, for their generative feedback. Elisa Findlay and Christa Olson also provided generous responses to earlier versions of this article.

2 While men and people of trans communities are most certainly affected by sexual assault, U.S. cultural norms feminize the act of rape and those who are penetrated by penises, making a cisgender woman the archetypal victim in the U.S. imaginary.

3 It is important to note the difficulties of assigning labels to those who have experienced rape or sexual assault. I recognize the broad and important debates that explore the implications of labeling those “survivors” or “victims” but ultimately choose the terminology of victim to remind readers of the lack of choice central to the act of sexual assault.

4 All of the tweets analyzed in this essay were collected from published news sources. This data set was collected from a LexisNexus search of over nine hundred materials, as well as MeToomentum, an information analysis of the movement’s first sixth months. See D’Efilippo and Kocincova for more on MeToomentum.

5 For more on the role of bodily intensity in rhetoric, see Johnson; Larson.

6 These numbers have since increased and are still growing to date.

7 Print and broadcast news outlets published several tweets and dedicated much time to profiling the movement. In addition, others like actress Lupita Nyongo’o published their own accounts in editorials and other longform sources.

8 For more on feminist hashtags, see Portwood and Berridge.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie R. Larson

Stephanie R. Larson is an Assistant Professor in the Rhetoric program at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Her research interests include sexual violence rhetoric, affect, feminist disability studies, and theories of the public. Currently, she is preparing a book monograph that examines public discourse surrounding rape culture in contemporary U.S. publics.