Abstract
Initiated by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 and famously revisited by actor Alyssa Milano in 2017 in the wake of the Weinstein trials, the #MeToo movement has cemented social media as a central tool for community mobilization in contemporary feminist movements. Digital communication tools provide activism with a new form of self-expression and a new capacity to disseminate information and aggregate followers. In the predigital days, Speak Outs and Take Back the Nights were dominant approaches to publicly communicating the reality of sexual harassment. Meanwhile, feminist talking or emancipatory circles, often hosted by rape crisis centers, cultivated survivor solidarity in private. The #MeToo movement translated and modernized these approaches into the communication practices of digital societies, a world of alternative spellings and symbols with celebrities only one message away, where the public and the private blend more so than before. As a result, women around the world have been able to acknowledge each other with simply six characters, #MeToo.
The Voices of #MeToo: From Grassroots Activism to a Viral Roar by Dr. Carly Gieseler compiles the experiences of various identity groups as they embraced, rejected, and negotiated the rise of the #MeToo movement, a survivor-led campaign initiated on Twitter to bring attention to sexual harassment, assault, and abuse in the workplace and beyond. Rooted in addressing sexual violence against black women, the #MeToo movement gained traction only a decade later because primarily white celebrities spoke out and promoted the hashtag. While providing an invaluable platform for collective action, the author argues that the #MeToo movement has not adopted a sufficiently intersectional approach, serving as an effective platform mainly for middle- and upper-class able-bodied white heterosexual ciswomen in employment, a small but powerful group. In response to #MeToo’s struggle to prioritize inclusivity, the author has centered theories of intersectionality in her work, providing chapters on how identities beyond womanhood, such as race, nationality, sexuality, and disability, refute the default #MeToo voice and complicate how survivors see their diverse experiences reflected by the collective.
The core arguments are powered by a content analysis of Twitter and contemporary examples contextualized with quantitative and historical information. Chapter 1 reviews the history of the #MeToo movement and frames the discussion with an overview of intersectionality theories. Chapter 2 focuses on the public versus private faces of the #MeToo movement as characterized by the classist dimensions of celebrity-led social mobilization. The author eloquently argues how celebrity activism and hashtag activism work effectively together as they are bound by similar roots in neoliberalism, but a commercialized approach ultimately hinders the movement’s capacity to be fully inclusive of private citizens. Chapter 3 digs deeper into the black women–centered contexts and origins of the movement as deployed by Tarana Burke and examines how #MeToo has silenced women of color in similar ways to other facets of feminism. Chapter 4 reviews the unique experiences of LGBTQ+ identities with violence and harassment and highlights how the spinoff #MeQueer was created to resist and reframe the heteronormative and binary language of #MeToo. Chapter 5 explores the global dimension of the movement that allowed for a shared vocabulary of oppression and where country- or language-specific hashtags were developed to adapt the #MeToo message to international contexts, sometimes in resistance to the movement’s U.S. origins. Chapter 6 describes the contexts and conflicts people with disabilities faced before the #MeToo movement with regard to public visibility and sexual citizenship. Given how perpetrators exploit physical and mental vulnerabilities and cultural assumptions of sexual behavior, the author critiques the movement for not making sufficient space for disability activists to hold the spotlight. Last, chapter 7 draws attention to toxic masculinities’ networked backlash against the rise of the #MeToo movement, a response that is underwritten by the socialization of boys and men to use domination and aggression to silence girls, women, and trans/nonbinary people.
A strength of this book is its courage to tackle such a timely topic by centering identity groups that have been marginalized in public discussions. Social media have been relevant and influential in feminism and in the individual lives of women for over a decade, but much of scholarship is behind on offering critical analysis of ongoing developments. The author demonstrates awareness of the limitations of “slacktivism,” as #MeToo has been labeled, and she shows appreciation of the emancipatory potential of social media mobilization, thus offering a balanced view of this emerging approach for collective action. The author mixes quotes from past and current activists and scholars (mainly Black women), recognizable celebrities, and everyday Twitter users. The latter two serve as entry points for students to understand that social analysis is not just for social scientists and that social media are legitimate sources of scholarly data.
Dr. Gieseler’s book is most appropriate for teaching undergraduate courses in sociology, communication and media studies, or gender and sexuality studies, as the author uses key terms to anchor her analysis throughout the manuscript that would reinforce lessons using critical theory found in introductory and lower-level courses. While readings on critical theories are best left to their original sources (Burke, Crenshaw, Davis, hooks, Collins, etc.), to build on them, the book lends itself well to assigning individual chapters as they stand alone in summarizing collective experiences with the #MeToo movement. Alternatively, students could select the chapter that most aligns with their interests and engage in a qualitative or quantitative project where they collect and analyze tweets relating to their chapter, offering an opportunity to integrate social media research methods instruction. This book may not be ideal for small-group discussion because it is a priority to mitigate intellectual and emotional harm from uninformed and unmonitored comments about sexual violence or identity politics on students carrying trauma from the same oppressive systems presented in the work; an individualized assignment with the text may be more meaningful. However, the collaborative, multistage social marketing project proposed and evaluated by Hertzog and Williams (2007) in their Teaching Sociology article, “Applying Sociology through Social Marketing: Student Reflections on an Intimate Violence Awareness Project,” provides a group structured process for engaging with sensitive topics, such as intimate partner violence, and could be readily adapted for projects involving sexual harassment and social media movements. Regardless of the approach, reading Nicole Bedera’s (2021) article, “Beyond Trigger Warnings” is essential preparation for teaching this book as survivors of sexual harassment are present in all sociology classrooms.
While the book draws from several critical theories, the language used when incorporating those frameworks into the analysis would be stronger if sharpened and used less repetitively. In addition, while the author provides a solid description of the critical concepts that guided the writing, much of the text was unnecessarily devoted to long quotes and summary descriptions of those concepts (mainly from Black women) when the reader would have benefited from more specific examples about the #MeToo movement. There are great titles and sources to complement teaching with The Voices of #MeToo. Encouraging students to examine the movement’s “official” website, MeToo Movement, is an exercise in critically reviewing the dominant narrative and falls in line with the book’s purpose. As a supplement to Twitter trends, the website MeToo Rising provides an interactive geovisualization of Google trends, allowing users to explore daily #MeToo-related articles across many cities in the world. For an account of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvey Weinstein exposé that resurfaced #MeToo, the book She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey (2019), two of the original investigative journalists, would pair well with Gieseler’s book, particularly in sociology courses looking at digital journalism and its impact. Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s (2020) #MeToo in the Corporate World examines sexual harassment in the private sector and highlights the movement’s limitations for Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ workers, thus allowing for a comparison on sexual violence and collective resistance in online and in-person spaces. Last, using a less academic but equally intellectual text, the short essays by Rebecca Solnit (2019) in Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Stories offer a humorous, engaging, and personal view on #MeToo that encapsulates the movement’s emotional energy.
The fuel of the antiviolence movement is survivors revealing their stories publicly—“I am here”—and reassuring each other privately—“You are not alone.” #MeToo is both a yell and a whisper, and it amplifies the voices of survivors, however loudly they can or want to speak. The Voices of #MeToo: From Grassroots Activism to a Viral Roar by Dr. Carly Gieseler offers readers a layered investigation into how social media activism has become a prominent approach for increasing awareness and mobilization by various groups and identities in the movement against sexual harassment.