The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women

Leigh Gilmore

Published by Columbia University Press 2023

The #MeToo Effect

What Happens When We Believe Women

Leigh Gilmore

In the series Gender and Culture Series

https://doi.org/10.7312/gilm19420

Overview
Contents

About this book

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. She reframes #MeToo as a breakthrough moment within a longer history of feminist thought and activism.

Author / Editor information

Leigh Gilmore is visiting professor 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.

Reviews

Anita Hill, author, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence:
Leigh Gilmore writes with compelling authority about the sizable contribution that narrative expression makes to our understanding of justice. Through feminist analysis of the history of survivor narrative activism, The #MeToo Effect demonstrates how victims and survivors have exposed the bias in traditional fact finding processes. Gilmore reminds us that diverse trauma sufferers' public storytelling is neither new or novel, but is, indeed, a longstanding tradition that pushes society closer to the truth.

Sharon Marcus, Columbia University, author of The Drama of Celebrity:
In The #MeToo Effect, Leigh Gilmore brings her peerless knowledge of women’s life writing and feminist theory to bear on a major social movement. The result is a stunningly original account that situates #MeToo in a long history of feminist narrative activism dating back to Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. This is a searing and ultimately hopeful analysis of how survivor testimony can change the world.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
PREFACE Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION The #MeToo Effect Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I NARRATIVE ACTIVISM AND SURVIVOR TESTIMONY
1 THE #METOO EFFECT From He Said/She Said to Collective Witness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	21
2 BUILDUP Survivors in Public, Trump, and the Women’s March Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	32
3 BREAKTHROUGH #MeToo Silence Breakers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
4 BACKDROP Antirape Lineage from Harriet Jacobs to Tarana Burke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
5 #METOO STRESS TEST The Kavanaugh Hearings Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	80
II NARRATIVE JUSTICE AND SURVIVOR READING
6 READING LIKE A SURVIVOR Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
7 #METOO STORYTELLING Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
8 CONSENT BEFORE AND AFTER #METOO Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
CONCLUSION Promising Young Women— What We Owe Survivors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	164
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 2 images: a Tweet and a Times magazine cover

eBook

Published: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780231550703