#MeToo has received ample attention for nearly the past two years from the mainstream press, women’s rights activists, and feminist scholars. Given the public outcry over revelations regarding numerous celebrities who have perpetuated and experienced sexual harassment and the avalanche of individuals who included themselves using the hashtag #MeToo, it makes sense that many feminist scholarly outlets have begun to reflect on the implications of this moment.
As the editor of Women’s Studies in Communication, I believe it is imperative that this journal contribute to this conversation in ways that problematize #MeToo’s public articulation while also valuing collective resistance to sexual harassment. As Tiffany Dykstra-DeVette and Carlos Tarin remind us in this special issue, sexual harassment is a discursive practice that functions to silence and marginalize groups who lack regular access to power and resources in organizations, including those of higher education. An intersectional awareness about sexual harassment and the #MeToo movement requires that we attend to the discourses that enable and sustain them while also thinking critically about how #MeToo’s public articulation and circulation have served broader structures of inequality that have centered white, cisgendered women’s experiences at the expense of people of color, GLBTQ individuals, and Indigenous communities.
With this goal in mind, I reached out to Lisa Corrigan, whose own work at the intersections of Black Power, prison studies, and feminism has valuably contributed to antiracist scholarship in communication studies. I am delighted that Professor Corrigan accepted my invitation to curate this special issue. In addition to accepting unsolicited submissions, Dr. Corrigan invited five other scholars to contribute articles that revise and challenge many of the assumptions and norms of the mainstream discourses surrounding #MeToo. I am grateful for the work of Lisa Corrigan and the authors of this special issue: Jo Hsu, Tommy Curry, Ali Na, Emily Winderman, Ashley Mack and Tiara Na’puti, and Tiffany Dykstra-DeVette and Carlos Tarin. I am also very thankful for the anonymous reviewers who provided commentary and feedback in the process of bringing this special issue to publication.
These articles offer important insights and perspectives that should inform how we—as feminist scholars and activists—understand, research, and organize against sexual harassment in ways that are not just more inclusive but that also challenge the broader structures of power that enable individuals to sexually harass and violate others with impunity. One theme that emerges across several of these articles is that the movement against sexual harassment and assault will not succeed unless we decenter gender as the only or primary analytic for understanding sexual violence. This lesson suggests broader challenges for the future of Women’s Studies in Communication, a journal whose title itself might be read as exclusionary despite the journal’s commitments to intersectionality. I look forward to being part of future conversations as we navigate this tension moving forward.