AustLit

'How do we get the measure of the phenomenon that is #MeToo? Both deeply personal and profoundly structural, #MeToo has been described as a movement, a moment, and a reckoning. Some critics have dismissed it as man-hating or anti-sex; sceptics as a misguided millennial distraction from more serious feminist concerns. Others distinguish between a ‘good’ #MeToo (focused on eradicating sexual harassment from the workplace) versus a more capacious #MeToo (aimed at destroying the patriarchy). That #MeToo originated from the activism of African-American civil rights campaigner Tarana Burke in 2006 has not negated representations of #MeToo as White Feminism, but nor have the privileged white women who have been its most high-profile faces been delivered justice either.' (Introduction)

'In the past month or so, the Australian feminist movement has suffered multiple setbacks.

'The proposed federal budget would leave single mothers, women over 50 and women already financially marginalised living with even fewer resources. In Geoffrey Rush’s successful defamation case against The Daily Telegraph, the judge concluded the main defence witness, actress Eryn Jean Norvill, was at times “prone to exaggeration and embellishment”.'(Introduction)

'#MeToo is the most recent, and potentially most significant, example in a long feminist tradition of ‘speaking out’, collectively narrating personal experiences of sexual violence in order to ‘break the silence’ and, ultimately, ‘end the violence’. As I have written about previously, as a form of feminist politics, speaking out has at least three elements. Individual women break the silence surrounding sexual violence to tell their stories; these stories collectively form the basis of a political movement; and this movement produces a new over-arching story of the political reality of sexual violence, contesting existing dominant narratives (Serisier 2018). Therefore, as these books show, when we talk about #MeToo we are often talking about at least three things: a collection of personal narratives of sexual violence and harassment shared on social media; a movement built through and in response to these stories; and an overarching and highly contested political story of the meaning of those narratives. The focus of the books discussed here can be read through these aspects.' (Introduction)