The #Metoo Effect (e-book) (used book) | Leigh Gilmore | bookbook.eu

Description

The #MeToo movement inspired millions of women to testify to the widespread experience of sexual violence. More broadly, it shifted the deeply ingrained response to women's accounts of sexual violence from doubting all of them to believing some of them. What changed?



Leigh Gilmore provides a new account of #MeToo that reveals how storytelling by survivors propelled the call for sexual justice beyond courts and high-profile cases into a global movement. At a time when the cultural conversation was fixated on appeals to legal and bureaucratic systems, narrative activism--storytelling in the service of social change--elevated survivors as authorities. Their testimony fused credibility and accountability into the #MeToo effect: the gelling of millions of diverse accounts into an existential demand for sexual justice and the right to be heard.

Gilmore reframes #MeToo as a breakthrough moment within a longer history of feminist thought and activism. She emphasizes the contributions of intersectional and antirape activism that foregrounds autobiographical storytelling and the influence of a tradition of literary representations of sexual violence dating from antiquity. By focusing on the roots of #MeToo, Gilmore sheds light on how survivors have used narrative to insist on the significance of their experiences and to identify sexual violence as an urgent problem requiring structural solutions. Considering the roles of literature and literary criticism in movements for social change, The #MeToo Effect demonstrates how "reading like a survivor" provides resources for activism.