The #MeToo Moment: A Rhetorical Zeitgeist

When editor Kristen Hoerl approached me to help edit this special issue on #MeToo, I told her that we would need to have a lengthy phone chat because my perspective on the #MeToo moment was far less jubilant than many other feminists. Indeed, while I was generally glad for the public outcry over sexual harassment and sexual violence and thought that hashtagging experiences was good to both amplify the frequency of sexual harassment and violence and to provide community for survivors, I was also concerned about white women hijacking a hashtag started by a black woman (Tarana Burke, an advocate for victims of sexual violence and Time’s 2017 Person of the Year along with women the magazine named “the silence breakers”), celebrity whitewashing (on Twitter and at the 2018 Oscars), the erasure of male victims, the lack of nuance about bidirectional violence, and disregard of sexual violence against LGBTQ people but especially trans women of color. Given the high profile and rampant murders in the last several years of trans women of color (“Violence Against the Transgender Community in 2019”) and indigenous women (“How The Treatment of Indigenous Women in the U.S. Compares to Canada”; McLean and Weisfeldt), thinking about harassment without attention to lethal brutality seemed egregious in the larger conversation about #MeToo.

Additionally, I voiced serious concerns with how sexual consent was centered in conversations around #MeToo after actress Alyssa Milano started using it in connection to revelations about (now-former) film producer Harvey Weinstein. Consent, especially sexual consent, implies that people are peers. And in a capitalist culture, peers are recognized through their ownership of property. Since women, people of color, children, and LGBTQ people are often thought of as property because they are propertyless, I am reticent to talk about sexual violence through the lens of consent rather than property, and, by extension, whiteness (see Harris; Mills). This is particularly true because consent language cannot remove coercion from sex; the coercion is central to hierarchies of power centered on property. Rather than focusing on consent, which is one-way and always already implies the ultimate (heterosexual) power of one partner over the other, I am far more interested in futurist imaginings that start with two partners being socially equal. Consequently, it seems to me that this kind of speculative politics requires class justice to precede sexual justice. So while consent language is certainly better than nothing, the overreliance on consent to ameliorate problems that fundamentally begin with property ownership as the foundation of compulsory heterosexuality seems insufficient. In cultures where there is no comprehensive sexual education, consent language as a lone intervention seems unsatisfactory and may even function as a diversion to real political solutions to sexual violence. Consent also implies that sexual violence is not intentional, which strikes me as a very odd rhetorical intervention given the murders of transgender women and indigenous women alone.

I also wondered publicly about ways in which #MeToo functioned as a post-truth technology for white women. While the slogan “Trust Women” has circulated for years, particularly in the reproductive justice community where I spend so much of my time, it has seemed somewhat disingenuous when applied to sexualized violence. On the reproductive justice front, “Trust Women” makes sense as an assertion of autonomy over their reproductive health, particularly the right to a wide range of health care services, including abortion. This is especially true in this moment where the revocation of abortion rights has gained traction in the circuit courts and states. But given the massive violence against boys and men by women (white women, in particular), it seems that the blanket call to “Trust Women” in the context of #MeToo is a problem when even just a bit of intersectional analysis and quite a bit of empirical data are applied. In this framework, trusting women (or rather, trusting white cis-hetero women) seems quite harmful. I often wonder, for example, about what Emmett Till would say about trusting (white) women. And, given my activism and political work in Little Rock, I can say with certainty that white women were not to be trusted during the desegregation of Central High School in 1957 (Anderson). Furthermore, with 53% of white women voting for Donald Trump, I find the blanket call to “Trust Women” in the context of narratives of violence to be perplexing. Consider as well the many false accusations, rape myths, controlling images, and stereotypes that have served as justifications for violence toward black men.

Rather than thinking through the details and complexities of sexual encounters, the call to “Trust Women”—particularly as Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education seeks to dismantle Title IX—dismisses specificity of experience, which is a de facto privileging of whiteness, heterosexuality, and able-bodiedness. The slogan works to circumvent the same kind of accountability that, rather ironically, feminists called for during the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh in September 2018. As an irony of liberal feminism, and perhaps as a feature of toxic white femininity, “Trust Women” works to detach sexual violence from non-white, non-heterosexual, non-female victims and survivors as well as from white, female, heterosexual perpetrators. This rhetorical consequence has the possibility of undermining any productive inquiry (or legal protection) for women and for everyone else as well.

As I thought about what kind of issue I’d like to curate in both content and form, it was clear that the erasures produced by the whiteness of the tweet threads, the sexual consent frame, and those that emerged as intentional and unintentional consequences of the combination of #MeToo and #TrustWomen would need to be front and center. I wanted to showcase perspectives by interlocutors who were marked by subject positions that did not fit the white framework that celebrity culture brought to Tarana Burke’s work. And even within celebrity culture, I wanted more nuanced examinations of contemporary claims of #MeToo issues that were not apparent in popular media’s hot takes.

Unsurprisingly, I also wanted to curate an issue that was predominantly written by people of color, including LGBTQ folx and indigenous authors. In a field grappling with #COMMSoWhite and “An Open Letter on Diversity in the Communication Discipline,” it was paramount for me to seek out authors who could speak to the lacunae on this political moment with clarity and depth (see Paula Chakravarrty et al.; “An Open Letter on Diversity to the Communication Discipline”). The issue begins with Jo Hsu’s excellent appraisal of the exclusionary rhetorics that have emerged as a constitutive force of #MeToo. Hsu explains, “Attempts to address how gender is lived differently by people of color, transgender people, immigrants, poor people, and/or disabled folks move primarily along a ‘horizontal’ axis, gesturing to similarities and difference without mapping the cultural arrangements through which these differences are (re)formed” (272–73).

Likewise, Tommy Curry’s essay examines the case of former National Football League player and actor Terry Crews, who sued Hollywood executive Adam Venit for assault after a being groped by Venit at a party. Crews’s case is interesting because in presenting himself as a victim, he both subverts the image of the white female victim of assault and confirms his appropriateness as a victim through white feminist appeals. Curry argues “that Crews's acceptance by #MeToo is rooted in his confirmation of the dominant feminist view that men are primarily the perpetrators of sexual violence and women are almost solely victims, a position that is actually at odds with the views of Tarana Burke—the original founder to #MeToo” (289). This is interesting given Curry’s own empirical and historical work on the persistent sexual violence and rape of Black men and boys.

Next, Ali Na’s essay surveys the landscape surrounding accusations of comedian Aziz Ansari’s potentially inappropriate sexual habits. Na introduces the concepts of “Desi masculinity” and “performing funny cute” to understand the “cultural response to Ansari as simultaneously desexualized as sexually undesirable and sexually deviant in his noncompliance with white normative masculinity” (308). Demonstrating how white masculinity is the litmus test against which Ansari is considered, Na’s essay highlights how hegemonic white masculinity shapes the terms of debate around consent and sexual practice.

Emily Winderman’s essay considers the (gendered but also racialized) double bind of performing public anger that is both a “laudable part of #MeToo” but one that “has been a restricted emotional resource for those whom the original movement was designed to serve” (329) to understand how anger—particularly volume as it amplified and diminished anger after #MeToo—became a global phenomenon. Especially for white women, anger has been a slippery emotional and political vector that complicates its use here.

Tiara Na’puti and Ashley Mack provide the next essay on decolonizing #MeToo by offering readings of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and the coalitional initiative Violence on the Land, Violence on Our Bodies. They “suggest that witnessing is one heuristic for approaching decolonial feminist critique that works to build deep coalitions by radically de-centering our voice as authors in favor of centering the voices of Indigenous communities” (349). This case study helps us understand the role of sexual violence for settler colonialism and to understand the important indigenous rhetorical appeals necessary to resist such violence.

Finally, the issue concludes with an extremely important essay by Tiffany Dykstra-DeVette and Carlos Tarin who “identify several salient structurating processes that (re)produce harassment via networking and professionalization and estrangement from agency, which draw on resources, rules and norms, and agency in particular ways” (372). In thinking through the structures that create the leaky pipelines of faculty of color and women away from successful careers, they identify features of organizations that undermine sexual harassment responses, even as the Department of Education continues to erode Title IX protections.

These essays offer provocations about how the communication discipline should understand the #MeToo moment from a historical and intersectional framework as well as from within the structure of higher education. As the communication discipline grapples with its own history of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism, scholars need to reimagine how we talk about sexual harassment and violence as well as how we respond in our communities. In my mind, the only path towards a more just and equitable community is a decolonial path that acknowledges the brutal and sexualized history of settler colonialism, the use of black boys and men in the plantation economy, the lethal violence against the LGBTQ community that sustains white heteropatriarchy, the deft moves made by men of color as they navigate accusations of harassment and violence, the scant rhetorical tools for describing violence against men of color, and the ways in which the organization of higher education replicates sexualized violence as a feature of its relationship to capital and resource extraction. Thanks so much to Kristen Hoerl and the Organization for Research on Women and Communication for the opportunity to curate this issue.

Works cited