#MeToo, white feminism and taking everyday politics seriously in the global political economy

ABSTRACT

This paper examines social media movements, specifically #MeToo, in relation to the politics of feminism and white privilege in the contemporary global political economy. Analysis of social media movements is located as a key part of the intricate web of practices that enable certain types of gendered identity and socioeconomic privilege to intersect, in powerful ways and to potent effect. The paper argues that, while scholarship on the global political economy has not often taken seriously popular culture sources in and across world politics, and needs to do better in this regard, investigating the politics of popular culture, race and socioeconomic privilege in contemporary world politics is important. This is because such analysis foregrounds everyday, cultural practices of knowledge formation, building space for emphasising relations of power but also highlighting the possibilities of and for resistance, agency and avenues for creative thinking and doing in world politics.

本文结合女性主义政治以及当代全球政治经济中的白人特权，考察了社交媒体运动特别是米兔。对社交媒体运动的分析是复杂实践网络的重要部分，该网络使得某些类型的性别身份与社会经济特权得以非常有力并有效地发生交集。本文指出，国际政经的学术研究往往不能认真看待世界政治中的通俗文化资料，应当在这方面有所改进。在当代世界政治的范围内考察通俗文化、种族、社会经济特权的政治，实在很重要。这样的分析强调了知识形成的日常文化实践，为聚焦权力关系打造了空间，但同时也为了反抗而指出了世界政治中有利于创造性思想及行动的可能力量及途径。

KEYWORDS:

• Popular culture
• global political economy
• gender
• race
• privilege

Acknowledgements

With many thanks to the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their care and insight. This research came about and was inspired by preparations for and discussion at a ‘Popular Culture Matters!’ workshop held at the 2018 International Studies Association Annual Meeting. Special thanks go to Nick Robinson and Kyle Grayson for organising this wonderful workshop and to the School of Social Sciences at UNSW Sydney for supporting my travel there.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Penny Griffin is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the School of Social Sciences at UNSW Sydney. She works specifically in the areas of gender and feminist studies, international political economy, international relations, global economic governance, the politics of development and the politics of visual and popular culture. Her current research examines economic governance, financial crisis and the ‘post-crisis’ period from a gender perspective. She has published with Routledge (Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism: Why Women are in Refrigerators and Other Stories), Palgrave Macmillan (Gendering the World Bank, 2009, winner of the 2010 BISA International Political Economy Group book prize) and in the journals Politics, Feminist Review, Men and Masculinities, Globalizations, New Political Economy and Review of International Political Economy.

Notes

1 Founded, and based, in San Francisco, USA, Twitter has 335 million active monthly users. As of February 2019, Twitter’s quarterly profits stood at $106 million (US), and its advertising revenue at $650 million (US) (Iqbal 2019). Data licencing is Twitter’s fastest growing revenue source (Iqbal 2019). Twelve per cent of US nationals claim to get their news from Twitter (Iqbal 2019).

2 To be distinguished from ‘Me Too’ in reference to Burke’s original movement.

3 Translated from ‘une liberté d’importuner’. ‘Importuner’, interestingly, translates into various English words, none of which flatter the writers of the Le Monde letter. Translations include pester, bother, disturb, molest and push.

4 Translated from ‘un statut d’éternelles victimes’.

5 Translated from ‘pauvres petites choses sous l’emprise de phallocrates démons’.

6 Translated from ‘cette justice expéditive’.

7 Translated from ‘alors qu’ils n’ont eu pour seul tort que d’avoir touché un genou’, a comment referring to the resignation of former UK Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, in November 2017 (see Andrews, Peigne, and Vonberg 2018).

8 Translated from ‘les victimes d’actes odieux’.

9 Translated from ‘lynchage médiatique’ and ‘climat de censure’.

10 Donegan (2018) eloquently summarises the oppositional voices to #MeToo, noting the number of feminist voices therein, including Daphne Merkin and Bari Weiss in the New York Times, Katie Roiphe in Harper’s and Cambridge scholar and public intellectual, Germaine Greer.

11 Atwood makes no mention in her Globe and Mail essay of the much celebrated (New York Times bestselling) 2014 book Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay. Gay is a black feminist and celebrated cultural observer.

12 Galloway, a senior academic and influential literary figure, was suspended in November 2015 and then fired following UBC’s commissioning of an external investigation. According to Whittall (2018), this cited a ‘record of misconduct that resulted in an irreparable breach of trust’, although the investigative report was never publicly released. Allegations of harassment, bullying, and sexual misconduct were, however, published in an October 2016 Globe and Mail investigation (Whittall 2018). In June 2018 Galloway was awarded arbitration damages from UBC ‘over statements that violated his privacy and harmed his reputation’ (Gold 2018).

13 Atwood does not necessarily claim the label ‘feminist’ for her work. Is ‘“The Handmaid’s Tale” a “feminist” novel?’, she asks in 2017.

If you mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which women are human beings — with all the variety of character and behaviour that implies — and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes. In that sense, many books are “feminist”. (Atwood 2017)

14 Beard had dared to suggest that Britain could cope with higher levels of immigration.

15 Standards of beauty, for example, and cultural norms of social etiquette, or the constitution of education, state-sponsored welfare, medical practices, the inhospitality of various forms of technology, depending on where and who you are, the requirements of advanced, post-industrial capitalisms, configurations of economic development, the meanings attached to welfare systems and the vulnerable populations that rely on state welfare provision.