#MeToo

A Rhetorical Zeitgeist

Lisa M. Corrigan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032018195
• eBook ISBN: 9781000523669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

This edited collection on #MeToo activism challenges the overwhelming whiteness and straightness of #MeToo discourse and coverage. Using intersectional and decolonial frameworks and historical, archival, organizational and legal methods, these essays offer a rich exploration of #MeToo to understand how activism around sexualized violence reproduce and harm a wide variety of people.

The swift and powerful arrival of #MeToo as a compilation of complaints about sexual misconduct (especially in the workplace) has created pressure to dive deeper into the history of sexual assault and abuse in the United States. #MeToo: A Rhetorical Zeitgeist answers the call for more complicated analyses of systemic sexual harassment and abuse with essays that are deeply concerned with the whiteness and heterosexuality of #MeToo coverage and media framing to understand how and why #MeToo began to capture the public's attention in 2017 against the backdrop of Donald J. Trump's presidential administration.

These essays offer the first comprehensive study of the rhetorical politics of #MeToo. They tackle the complexities of sexual harassment, sexual violence and rape beyond white celebrity discourse to understand: how both violence and #MeToo activism affect transgender people; how #MeToo fails Black male victims of assault and rape; how Indian-American masculinity and comedy skirt sexual accountability; how the legal and affective precedent in the Supreme Court during the Kavanaugh hearings amplified concerns about sexual assault and rape; decolonial approaches to resisting sexualized violence from indigenous peoples; and narratives about assault from within the higher education community.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women's Studies in Communication.

(Trans)forming #MeToo: Toward a Networked Response to Gender Violence

V. Jo Hsu

ABSTRACT

Drawing from critical trans theory’s methods of systemic analysis, this article examines how #MeToo’s carceral politics have reinforced the exclusion and ongoing abuse of those most vulnerable to gender and state violence. The stories of many people of color, queer, transgender, poor, and/or disabled folks remain inarticulable within a retributive system that requires survivors to narrate themselves as “perfect victims.” Adopting critical trans theory’s emphasis on administrative violence, I connect the transformative visions of penal abolition with discourses on sexual violence. Focusing on the rhetorical strategies of incarcerated survivors and their defense committees, I demonstrate how these rhetors model forms of Rebecca Dingo’s “networked arguments.” In doing so, they offer a promising vision of how organizers and advocates can address the particularities of individual experience while also responding to and working collaboratively against oppressive social and state institutions.

As long as we are going to have prisons we are going to have sexual abuse in prisons. That’s the reality. That’s what happens.

—Gerard Bryant, New York City Board of Correction

Gerard Bryant—a former warden for a federal prison¹–made this statement in 2016 amid public scrutiny about Rikers Island’s “culture of brutality” (Malinowski). Since then, multiple investigations into the New York jail have revealed the ongoing torture of inmates, the targeting and endangerment of transgender prisoners (Stahl), and a “scourge of racism on the part of correction officers” (Foderaro). Bryant’s almost flippant response assumes the inevitability of prison violence. These are institutions designed for isolation, surveillance, and control. When compounded with the disproportionate criminalization of people of color, poor people, trans and gender-nonconforming people, and all others who live beyond the bounds of White, middle-class respectability, prison becomes a mechanism through which social inequities are enforced—and through which sexual abuse becomes a means of that enforcement.

While articles featuring the primarily affluent women at the center of #MeToo often acknowledge how “others” are disproportionately targeted by gender violence, few discussions actually explore the mechanisms through which that vulnerability is created. For instance, TIME magazine’s article “The Silence Breakers,” which featured #MeToo as their 90th annual Person of the Year, acknowledged that “47% of transgender people report being sexually assaulted at some point in their lives” (Zacharek et al.). That single statistic is the only sentence to even mention trans people. In actuality, those numbers are even higher for trans folks who are American Indian (65%), multiracial (59%), Middle Eastern (58%), and Black (53%) (Grant et al.),² and the cultural architectures that undergird these numbers require deeper and more thorough explanations.

The precarity of trans lives is not simply an amplification of the experiences of cisgender women but a product of myriad policies and practices that severely constrain trans people’s access to fundamental resources. As critical trans scholars have demonstrated, trans lives are actively truncated by state and social apparatuses that circumscribe “everyone’s field of action, existence, and self-understanding” (Nichols 43). Trans people experience three times the rate of unemployment and four times the rate of homelessness compared with the cisgender population (James et al.; Grant et al.). Relatedly, trans folks are also much more likely to experience employment and housing discrimination. Combined with the disproportionate rates of poverty among people of color—with the ways that property has been denied and stolen from Black, Latinx, Asian, and Native communities—trans people of color may find that abusive situations are their only options for survival. Even within the narrow range of life choices they are given, any survival strategies they take are far more likely to be criminalized and prosecuted.

It should come as no surprise, though, that the experiences of trans and incarcerated survivors (and particularly those of trans incarcerated survivors) have received minimal attention from #MeToo. While #MeToo has ruptured a pervasive silence around sexual assault, it has also done so largely through a vocabulary of criminalization and carceral punishment. This limited vision of justice has left many—specifically those most vulnerable to gender violence—beyond the purview of #MeToo. The few stories that acknowledge the existence and susceptibility of trans survivors mostly omit the fact that trans people are far more often targeted by police discrimination. In fact, trans people are incarcerated at six times the rate of the cisgender population and are far more likely to experience abuse of all kinds in prison.³ In an attempt to channel the energies of #MeToo toward more inclusive solutions, this article shifts focus away from casting rooms and boardrooms. Instead, I begin with the presumed endpoint of many prominent #MeToo narratives: the prison cell.

Bryant’s statement highlights a reality that has gone mostly untroubled amid the #MeToo uproar: Sexual violence is an integral component of the prison system, and the people most vulnerable to sexual violence are also most frequently targeted by policing and criminalization. In the United States, nearly one in six trans people and almost half of Black trans folks have been imprisoned (Grant et al.; Bierria et al.; James et al.). In 2015 alone, 65% of trans people who interacted with law enforcement experienced some form of mistreatment—from verbal and physical assault to being forced by officers to engage in sexual activity to avoid arrest (James et al.).⁴ In addition to the racial inequities amplified by all experiences of transphobia, rates of violence also skyrocket for homeless trans folks, who are much more likely to experience police harassment (78%), as well as for unemployed trans people (75%) and those with disabilities (68%). In the broader trans population, those who have experienced homelessness are also more likely to have been sexually assaulted (65%); the same goes for those with disabilities (61%). This tight networking of abuses reveals the ongoing need for more intersectional vocabularies. Without the ability to articulate and address these interrelated harms, any singular approach to systemic disenfranchisement inevitably reproduces other oppressions.

While intersectional theories and activisms are hardly new, as with conversations about sexual violence, advocates must continually struggle against their erasure. More recently, critical trans scholars have (re)turned to a systemic focus, intervening in the rights-based framework of mainstream “LGBTQ”⁵ politics.⁶ The antidiscrimination and hate crime laws at the center of LGBTQ activism do little to address the ways that legal and social apparatuses reproduce structural vulnerabilities.⁷ These campaigns also rarely account for how anti-queer and anti-trans violence is amplified on bodies of color, disabled bodies, and bodies that cannot find secure housing or jobs—the same bodies targeted for sexual abuse both inside and outside of prisons. Instead of pursuing legal protections against individual harms, critical trans theorists and activists have turned toward the “processes of gendered racialization … congealed in violent institutions” (Nichols 43; see also Enke; Spade; Stryker; Snorton; H. Davis), and they have channeled their efforts toward transforming these institutions.

In alliance with such efforts, this article explores interconnections among transformative justice movements, transgender theory, and intersectional feminism, and the ways they can inform liberatory responses to gender-based violence. I propose a trans-ing of the #MeToo moment that addresses the entanglement of gender violence and carceral politics. Adopting critical trans theory’s emphasis on administrative violence, I connect the transformative visions of penal abolition with the current “revolution” (Zacharek et al.) against sexual violence. What emerges is a rhetorical strategy that can attend to the ubiquity of sexual violence while also addressing how that violence is enmeshed in other forms of state and social control that specifically compound the subjection of people of color, immigrants, transgender individuals, those with disabilities, and others who find themselves entangled in the criminal legal system.

In the sections that follow, I begin with a trans reading of the #MeToo moment and the limitations of popular framings as exemplified by TIME magazine’s “The Silence Breakers.” I then consider potential (trans)formative directions via the networked rhetorics of incarcerated survivor defense campaigns. Through an analysis of #SurvivedAndPunished, a guidebook designed by and for supporters of incarcerated survivors, I demonstrate how critical trans theory and politics can help channel the #MeToo fervor toward the material conditions that structure vulnerabilities to gender violence—and, for that matter, to most forms of social violence. Combining systemic analysis with intersectional feminism’s “bottom-up” approach to justice, I argue that both thinking about trans experiences and thinking with trans theory enables intersectional discussions that account for uneven circulations of power. In attuning to the networked insights of stories from the margins, proponents of #MeToo might envision responses to gender violence that do not rely on similar forms of cruelty.

Thinking trans

I draw my understanding of “trans” from the foundational work of Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore. In “Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?” they define trans as movement among the “macro- and micro-political registers through which the lives of bodies become enmeshed in the lives of nations, states, and capital-formations” (14). In this conceptualization, trans moves along a vertical axis rather a horizontal one. Instead of focusing on the lateral transitions of gender identity (from male to female or anywhere in between), trans analysis shifts from the embodied experience of gender to the “set of practices through which a potential biopower is cultivated, harnessed, or transformed” (14). Trans-ing thus becomes an analytical practice through which to understand how identities, classifications, and administrative policies conspire in the uneven distribution of life chances. Such a perspective can illuminate not only the biopolitical mechanisms of gender but also those pertaining to race, class, nationality, and other sites where identity is cultivated.

This systemic approach to trans-ing facilitates yet another form of trans-theorizing: Rebecca Dingo’s “networking arguments.” Dingo advances “networking” as a transnational feminist approach to rhetorical analysis that connects “individual lives, stories, and sufferings to wider systems of historical, cultural, and material local- and geo-politics” (“Networking the Macro and Micro” 532). In “Networking the Macro and Micro,” she demonstrates how transnational feminist literacies can encourage more holistic conversations about women’s pain. Rather than comparing or contrasting individual accounts of suffering, transnational feminist literacies imagine and map relational matrices among peoples, nations, economies, and texts. Such rhetorical practices encourage systemic responses to marginal accounts, focusing on “how and why people become disenfranchised” (543) rather than single-issue solutions. While my focus here is the U.S. prison system, which is overwhelmingly the largest in the world, this nation’s prisons are built upon—and sustain—violences enacted by European emigration, by technological advancement and deindustrialization, and by a shifting global economic order. A transnational feminist approach to trans theory thus reveals how even domestic institutions are inevitably bound up with global flows.

In exploring how trans theory can produce networked rhetorics, I envision the “vertical” movement of trans theory as a method of situating individual voices within state and global configurations of power and of locating counterhegemonic alliances within those configurations. Integral to this conception of trans is the centrality of trans experience—a respect for the insights that border crossers have into strategies of containment. When examining the conditions of gender violence, then, it is imperative to consider those whose embodiments of gender are read as inherently transgressive. In the United States, that population includes many people of color, poor people, disabled people, trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming people, and others who violate the strictures of white, middle-class respectability.

While the most prominent #MeToo cases have effectively tacked out from individual experiences of sexual violence to—in Alyssa Milano’s words—“give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem,” conversations have focused largely on cisgender, heterosexual, middle- and upper-class white women. Attempts to address how gender is lived differently by people of color, trans people, immigrants, poor people, and/or disabled folks move primarily along a “horizontal” axis, gesturing to similarities and differences without mapping the cultural arrangements through which these differences are (re)formed. This cursory recognition is perhaps most effectively illustrated by TIME’s “The Silence Breakers,” which helped repackage Tarana Burke’s long-standing campaign for mainstream audiences. Whereas the phrase “me too” began as words of solidarity within Burke’s healing circles for marginalized communities, the hashtag attributed to Alyssa Milano’s viral tweet has recentered the stories of affluent women. In the year since TIME’s watershed text, Burke has voiced many concerns about #MeToo’s trajectory, focusing on how its prevailing iteration neglects marginalized survivors as well as structural responses to those survivors’ needs (Burke; Adetiba; Rowley). These critiques reflect shortcomings not only of #MeToo but also of many major feminist and other social movements, positioning #MeToo as a generative study for how exclusionary rhetorics emerge regardless of inclusive intentions.

“The Silence Breakers” and single-axis politics

In December 2017, TIME magazine’s “The Silence Breakers” declared #MeToo their collective Person of the Year, adding #MeToo to a nearly century-long roster of worldwide influencers. The New York Times described TIME’s issue-length feature as a gesture that “crystallized the #MeToo moment” (Bennett, “The #MeToo Moment”). As authors Stephanie Zacharek, Eliana Dockterman, and Haley Sweetland Edwards stress throughout the profile, one of the driving forces of #MeToo has been the convergence of many storytellers—among which disparities in status and privilege vary “not by degree but by universe.” What has resulted, however, is not a democratic commingling of stories but a vocal configuration that replicates extant social hierarchies. “The Silence Breakers” maps a sort of trickle-down justice through which “[w]hen a movie star says #MeToo, it becomes easier to believe the cook who’s been quietly enduring for years” (Zacharek et al.). Faithfully tracing the series of events that brought #MeToo to more public spaces, Zacharek et al. begin with the untouchable glamour of movie stars, describing exquisite wardrobes and luxurious homes. Despite all this opulence, “it turns out, in the most painful and personal ways—movie stars are more like you and me than we ever knew.” This line of reasoning suggests that celebrities are “like us” in that they also experience sexual assault and are threatened or gaslit into silence. When they break that silence, the rest of us are supposedly also empowered to speak.

“The Silence Breakers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The #MeToo Moment—A Rhetorical Zeitgeist
• 1 (Trans)forming #MeToo: Toward a Networked Response to Gender Violence
• 2 Expendables for Whom: Terry Crews and the Erasure of Black Male Victims of Sexual Assault and Rape
• 3 #AzizAnsariToo?: Desi Masculinity in America and Performing Funny Cute
• 4 Anger’s Volumes: Rhetorics of Amplification and Aggregation in #MeToo
• 5 “Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius”: Building a Decolonial Feminist Resistance to Gendered Violence
• 6 Isolating Structures of Sexual Harassment in Crowdsourced Data on Higher Education
• Index