Abstract
This chapter explores how speaking out about rape, sexual assault and harassment on social media can be understood in relation to second-wave feminist traditions of consciousness-raising. Central to the discussion is a concern with the personal and political function of speaking out, and how media engagement with victim/survivors’ experiences can shape, extend and/or limit their political potential. At stake is the position of feminism in mainstream media discourse around #MeToo. Drawing on Angela McRobbie’s (The Aftermath of Feminism. London: Sage, 2009) notion of the “double entanglement” which characterises media engagements with feminism, this chapter explores the contradictions inherent in ahistorical and decontextualised representations of a quintessentially feminist issue. It demonstrates that the backlash against #MeToo was simultaneous with its development, offering an analysis of news coverage of #MeToo and TimesUp!
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Notes
- 1.
Transcript and audio of excerpts of 2010 oral history with Jalna Hanmer for the Sisterhood and After project, available at: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/jalna-hanmer-consciousness-raising-groups
- 2.
This argument is indebted to panellists at the “Violence Unseen” discussion which I chaired at the University of Strathclyde, 25 March 2019: Lily Greenan, Brenna Jessie, Claire Heuchan and Anni Donaldson. See also Mendes et al. (2019: 88–89).
- 3.
See, in particular, a thread @TaranaBurke posted 15 October 2018 (https://twitter.com/taranaburke/status/1051840689477246978?lang=en)
- 4.
Catherine Mayer, co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party in the UK, reveals an additional contradiction in Time’s championing of the “silence breakers”. Also in 2017, Mayer brought a sex and age discrimination case against Time (Mayer 2018). That “the traffic in feminism” (Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer 2017) can be profitable for the very mainstream media companies which feminists might rally against in other contexts is one of the central contradictions of the current climate (Mendes et al. 2019: 31).
- 5.
Following the approach I adopted in a previous project which maps the development of the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse news story (Boyle 2018), this stage of the research deployed a qualitative, inductive approach to the material based on close reading. This allowed me to chart the development of the Weinstein story, noting both the language used to describe claims at different stages in the story and the role feminism—and feminists—played in the telling of these stories. It is worth noting here that the total corpus of 638 stories amounted to literally thousands of pages of text: very few of the articles were short news items; most were longer opinion pieces and the corpus also includes a number of transcripts from current affairs programmes on US television. My intent in this chapter is to note patterns in the coverage which I hope will prove suggestive for future research examining the discursive construction of feminism in the reporting of feminist issues in mainstream media.
- 6.
Bloom is dubbed a “fake feminist” repeatedly on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight. See, for example, the broadcasts on 18 October, 21 October, 27 October and 28 October, all available on the Nexis database.
- 7.
A full English translation of the letter can be found here https://www.worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/full-translation-of-french-anti-metoo-manifesto-signed-by-catherine-deneuve. Accessed 20 May 2019.
- 8.
Primetime Justice with Ashleigh Banfield, CNN, 16 January 2018.
- 9.
N = 22, with 8 stories in October, and 14 in January following this pattern.
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Boyle, K. (2019). Silence Breaking. In: #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28243-1_2
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