Echoes and Silences: #MeToo’s Reverberations

ABSTRACT

This special section of Australian Feminist Studies is dedicated to examining the echoes and reverberations of #MeToo beyond its viral epicentre in American celebrity media culture. It focuses on how #MeToo has resonated within institutions, practices and discourses associated with culture, science, and law. It aims to shed light on Australia’s unique engagements with #MeToo discourse and charts how discourses of #MeToo have propelled feminist critiques and reconfigured existing hierarchies. It also investigates the possibilities for #MeToo beyond neoliberal cultural logics.

KEYWORDS:

• #MeToo
• sexual violation
• Australia
• feminism
• discourse
• transnational

Acknowledgements

We thank the Australian National University, which supported a symposium on ‘Cultures of Sexual Assault’ through the Asia Pacific Innovation Program from the College of Asia and the Pacific, the Gender Institute, and the College of Arts and Social Sciences.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributors

Dr Shameem Black is a fellow in the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She also serves as Deputy Director of the ANU’s South Asia Research Institute. She is the author of Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (Columbia University Press, 2010). Her work in gender studies, South Asian studies, and literary and cultural studies has appeared in Public Culture, South Asia, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Frontiers, and other journals.

Rosanne Kennedy is Associate Professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality and Culture at the Australian National University. Her research, at the intersection of transnational memory studies, gender studies, and law, literature and human rights, is concerned with literary and cultural mediations of violence, trauma and injustice in the present. Recent essays have appeared in Memory Studies, Signs, Parallax, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Australian Feminist Law Journal and Comparative Literature Studies.

Dr Hannah McCann is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research is in critical femininity studies, and much of her work focuses on feminist debates on femininity and queer identity, salon workers and the beauty industry, and queer digital culture. Her monograph Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation was published with Routledge in 2018. Her co-authored textbook Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures was published with Red Globe Press in 2020.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian National University [Asia Pacific Innovation Program, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Gender Institute].