#MeToo: Scandals and the Concept of Flirting

Abstract

This chapter investigates some of the ways in which the contemporary #MeToo movement and related debates have an impact on concepts related to flirting. We discuss flirting in relation to #MeToo as an interpersonal communication form occurring in workplaces such as film studios and business, as well as in the context of flirting as a cultural object itself. Analysing some examples of writing that worries about the possibility of #MeToo preventing workplace and public flirting, we look at how affective engagement with discomfort and vulnerability is implicated in flirting, and how it operates as a liminal activity built on unknowability of its communicative outcomes. Exploring some of the causes and origins of #MeToo in anger about the failure of ‘new masculinity’ and its claims to gender equity and corporate social responsibility, we show how flirting has been used sometimes either to initiate sexual harassment or to excuse it after the fact. Looking at #MeToo as a form of populism that, on the one hand, critiques gender relationality but, on the other, does not offer solutions, we end the chapter by considering how ethics grounded in vulnerability might simultaneously maintain flirting’s uncertainties while seeking non-violent forms of negotiated intimacy.