Introduction
This book takes as its starting point reports from a number of women that self-styled movie mogul Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted them. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the Weinstein story in the New York Times on 5 October 2017 and the findings of Ronan Farrow’s simultaneous investigation for the New Yorker swiftly followed (Farrow 2017a). These stories prompted an outpouring of victim/survivor testimony, most prominently under the hashtag #MeToo, connecting the experiences of Hollywood women to those of women in vastly different geographic and socio-economic locations. However, it is one of the arguments of this book that for the contemporary moment to affect radical change it is important to understand its relationship to decades of feminist activism, theory and research. In this introduction, I clarify how I am using each of the three key words in my title—#MeToo, feminism and Weinstein—and explain my use of the term victim/survivor, before providing an overview of the way these are brought together in the organisation of the book.
The #MeToo Moment
We are in a moment when feminism is popular, at least in an Anglo-American context (Banet-Weiser 2018). This new-found popularity predates October 2017 and a number of critics have documented how feminist concepts and arguments have permeated mainstream media discourse in the 2010s. Kate Manne, for instance, has noted the increasing prevalence of “misogyny” in news headlines (2018: 31), whilst Nickie D. Phillips (2017: 13–15) found a 1871% increase in the use of the term “rape culture” in newspaper and magazine articles between 2010 and 2014. Other touchstones in accounts of feminism’s resurgent popularity are Beyoncé’s performance against the giant, illuminated word FEMINIST at the MTV Music Video Awards, and actor Emma Watson’s speech at the UN Women #HeForShe campaign launch, both in 2014 (Banet-Weiser 2018: 6–9; Rottenberg 2018: 10–11). Merriam-Webster declared feminism the word of the year in 2017, identifying the Women’s March in January, the release of the television series The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu 2017) and the film Wonder Woman (dir. Patty Jenkins 2017), as well as #MeToo, as key moments driving online searches for “feminism”.
It is not accidental that these indicators of feminism’s popularity are all centrally about the mediation of feminism—how feminism is understood in and through popular media texts and platforms. Indeed, in Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that popular feminism “generally materializes as a kind of media that is widely visible and accessible” (2018: 9). Banet-Weiser’s cogent analysis points to the feminist work which can be done in and through the popular media, whilst also acknowledging the ways in which popular feminism can be profoundly ambivalent for a wider feminist politics, at least in part because of the emphasis on visibility over action. Popular feminism in this iteration is fundamentally about being seen—as a feminist, supporting feminist issues—rather than, necessarily, about doing feminism. Moreover, the feminisms which become popular—and visible—are those which “do not challenge deep structures of inequities” (Banet-Weiser 2018: 11). These are feminisms of the individual rather than the collective, what Catherine Rottenberg (2018) describes as neoliberal feminism. Like Banet-Weiser, Rottenberg is concerned with how feminism becomes a mainstream story and the ways in which this distorts wider feminist histories of activism, research and debate.
The popular mediation of feminism has long been a concern for feminist activists as well as media scholars. Women’s liberation movement publications from the early 1970s consistently referenced “the media” as a site of possibility—and concern—for feminists. British movement publications often reprinted stories from the national press as sources of information about issues concerning feminists, whilst simultaneously debating the benefits and limitations for the movement in engaging with these same mainstream media organisations. For instance, the first issue of the Women’s Liberation Workshop journal Shrew devotes a number of pages to the relationship of the movement to the “bourgeois press” which, it notes in its cover story, “has expressed a great deal of interest in women’s liberation” (Shrew 1970). On the one hand, it was widely recognised that this kind of engagement could open up the movement to a wider range of women, a precursor of Banet-Weiser’s concern with feminism’s popularity. On the other, media representation was not always positive and feminists in both the UK and US were understandably suspicious of journalists’ motivations and often frustrated by their insistence on individualising the collective ethos of the movement by constructing “stars” (Mendes 2011; Dow 2014; Sheehan 2016). As such, there has long been a recognition that the discursive construction of feminism has only ever been partly within feminists’ control.
Although this may seem like an obvious point, it is one worth returning to in relation to #MeToo. As is well-known, #MeToo began trending after a tweet from US actor Alyssa Milano on October 15:
Within just 24 hours, 12 million Facebook posts using the hashtag were written or shared and within 48 hours the hashtag had been shared nearly a million times on Twitter (Lawton 2017). Milano’s initial aim for #MeToo was to “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem”. In other words, it was discursive activism, aiming to change what “sexual harassment and assault” means by expanding the understanding of who its victims/survivors are. As a collectively produced story about sexual harassment and assault (Serisier 2018: 101), it has—in many ways—achieved Milano’s goal, although, as we will see, a counter-narrative or backlash has existed alongside #MeToo virtually from the outset.Me Too.Suggested by a friend: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me Too” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem”.(@AlyssaMilano, 15 October, 2017)
It is important to emphasise that #MeToo is indivisible from the media platforms through which it has circulated. For better and for worse, #MeToo is networked feminism: a feminism made possible by the affordances of the social media platforms on which it circulates. Echoing Banet-Weiser’s arguments about popular feminism and visibility, the very repetitions of #MeToo are at times read as constituting a movement in and of themselves. For instance, Me Too Rising (https://metoorising.withgoogle.com) is a fascinating resource which maps searches for #MeToo across time and place, allowing us to see patterns in the global development of the #MeToo story over time. However, Me Too Rising is presented as “a visualization of the movement from Google Trends”: equating online searching for #MeToo with activism, and confining the movement to the platform. In addition, Me Too Rising also allows you to look at where #MeToo is trending at any given time, and these trends typically link to mainstream news outlets.
This example demonstrates that Me Too is not only networked feminism: it is also a mainstream news story, involving many competing voices attempting to determine, assert and limit the meanings and significance of the outpouring of evidence of gendered violence and harassment associated with the hashtag. These stories may—as Banet-Weiser’s analysis of popular feminism demonstrates—do feminist work, but focusing simply on the most visible stories as representative of contemporary feminism is profoundly distorting. Visibility and movement are not synonymous, as the Tufnell Park Women’s Liberation Workshop recognised in 1970:
This is one reason why reading critiques of #MeToo can be a frustrating experience. Important points about the way the #MeToo story has evolved (including, for instance, the centring of economically and racially privileged US women in mainstream media coverage) are used to argue for the limitations of #MeToo as a feminist movement. When this happens, we allow mainstream media to define what feminism is, and miss an opportunity to hold them accountable. In this sense, it is important to investigate #MeToo not only as a facet of digital feminist activism (Mendes et al. 2019), but also as an object of mainstream media commentary.We can be so written about and give so many interviews that we can be deceived into thinking that there is a movement when all we’re doing is dealing with the press and TV. (Tufnell Park Women’s Liberation Workshop 1970: 4)
Although what was to become #MeToo originated with Milano and her (unnamed) friend, Me Too as a feminist rallying cry and a movement did not. The Me Too movement was founded by Tarana Burke in 2006. For Burke, Me Too was an intersectional demand for support and recognition for young women of colour who had experienced sexual abuse, as well as a statement of solidarity (Burke n.d.). Burke’s version of Me Too was n...