The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women

by Leigh Gilmore

Overview

The #MeToo movement inspired millions 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. 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: uniting millions of separate 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 analyzes the centrality of autobiographical storytelling in intersectional and antirape activism and traces how literary representations of sexual violence dating from antiquity intertwine with cultural notions of doubt, obligation, and agency. By focusing on the intersectional prehistory of #MeToo, Gilmore sheds light on how survivors have used narrative to frame sexual violence as an urgent problem requiring structural solutions in diverse global contexts. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231550703
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	04/25/2023
Series:	Gender and Culture Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Leigh Gilmore is professor emerita of English at the Ohio State University. She is the author of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives (Columbia, 2017), The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (second edition, 2023), and Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (1994), as well as coauthor of Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (2019). She contributes regularly to WBUR’s Cognoscenti.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: The #MeToo Effect
Part I: Narrative Activism and Survivor Testimony
1. The #MeToo Effect: From “He Said/She Said” to Collective Witness
2. Buildup: Survivors in Public, Trump, and the Women’s March
3. Breakthrough: #MeToo Silence Breakers
4. Backdrop: Antirape Lineage from Harriet Jacobs to Tarana Burke
5. #MeToo Stress Test: The Kavanaugh Hearings
Part II: Narrative Justice and Survivor Reading
6. Reading Like a Survivor
7. #MeToo Storytelling
8. Consent Before and After #MeToo
Conclusion: Promising Young Women--What We Owe Survivors
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

02/27/2023

In this sharp study, Gilmore (Tainted Women), a professor emerita of English at Ohio State University, examines how the #MeToo movement used narrative “tools to revive a longstanding public conversation about sexual justice.” She contends that sexual assault survivors sharing their stories on social media under the hashtag #MeToo in late 2017 constituted the “gelling of millions of diverse accounts into a collective voice that exposed systemic bias.” The collective nature of the movement was crucial, Gilmore posits, because the sheer number of accounts made it difficult to dismiss sexual abuse as a widespread and systemic problem. Touching on Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 slave narrative, the transformations undergone by rape survivors in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Senate testimonies of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, and Mary Gordon’s 2020 novel, Payback, Gilmore encourages “reading like a survivor,” which entails extending the empathy and “care we feel for literary characters to actual survivors.” The author’s mixture of literary and feminist analysis yields eye-opening insights and provides fresh ways of thinking about the power of survivors’ stories. The result is a thoughtful and thorough consideration of a global movement. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Paying careful attention to gendered, racial, class, and sexual power hierarchies, Gilmore offers a compelling and deeply considered analysis—grounded in literary history and criticism, from Harriet Jacobs to Sophocles—of narrative activism, storytelling in service of social change, tracing its explosive trajectory before, during, and since the 2017 #MeToo peak. This is such a smart book that complicates and enriches an understanding of recent feminist movements and the literary and activist lineage on which they are built.

Rebecca Traister

Gilmore draws on her peerless knowledge of women’s life writing and feminist theory to provide a stunningly original account that situates #MeToo in a long history of feminist narrative activism. This is a searing and ultimately hopeful analysis of how survivor testimony can change the world.

Sharon Marcus

Do ‘ladies lie’? ‘Survivor reading’ and ‘narrative activism’ are Leigh Gilmore’s powerful replies to the age-old charge. She argues for a #MeToo effect that has furthered the healing and justice that courts have all too often failed to give. A readable, rigorous, and compelling book.

Bonnie Honig

I highly recommend reading this book to be challenged, to deepen one’s understanding, and to be inspired to do more. It’s a five out of five on the enJOYment scale.

Moonglo Texas

This book offers a powerful, painful and profound vision of #MeToo as a form of narrative activism . Gilmore asks us to be alert to the ethical and political promise of #MeToo, how it builds on a long lineage of feminist activism and creates alternative pathways for justice. A necessary and vital book.

Sara Ahmed

The #MeToo Effect is a powerful, persuasive, and truly comprehensive story about the moment when millions of victims of sexual assault came together and used their narrative power to change the world. This is an essential read for anyone interested in understanding how the #MeToo movement was born, its successes, and how it continues to shape our conversations and culture today.

Salamishah Tillet

Leigh Gilmore writes with compelling authority about the sizable contribution that narrative expression makes to our understanding of justice. The #MeToo Effect demonstrates how victims and survivors have exposed the bias in traditional fact-finding processes, emphasizing that diverse trauma sufferers’ public storytelling is a longstanding tradition that pushes society closer to the truth.

Anita Hill