Abstract
Heather Hewett and Mary K. Holland's #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture (2021) identifies literature as a powerful site from which survivors of sexual violence voice and witness #MeToo. Recognizing the personal and political power of narrative within the #MeToo movement, Hewett and Holland's volume ‘picks up and extends recent interdisciplinary feminist scholarship on sexual violence’ by ‘focusing on the tools and capacities of literary studies’ (p. 8).
Hewett and Holland begin by grounding the #MeToo movement in the work of activist and founder Tarana Burke. Working with Black and Brown youth in Selma, Alabama, Burke ‘started using the phrase “me too” as early as 2005 as a way for survivors to connect with each other and to make a declaration to the world.’ 1 Yet, after #MeToo gained popularity in 2017, it ‘quickly became and remained centered on the experiences of privileged white cisgender women, while largely ignoring the suffering of women of color’ (p. 1). To its credit, Hewett and Holland's #MeToo and Literary Studies recognizes and resists this Whitewashing of #MeToo.
The collection is organized around four major sections. Part I: Critical Practices provides an intersectional framework for reading the political and cultural contexts in which narratives about sexual violence circulate. Amanda Spallacci uncovers how White feminism continues to plague the publishing and marketing of rape memoirs. Jacinta R. Saffold's chapter returns readers to the origins of #MeToo by focusing on the experiences of Black girls and urging readers to reconsider the price of their pain in her analysis of the street lit genre. Kasey Jones-Matrona asks readers to put #MeToo in conversation with Indigenous movements, including #NotInvisible and #MMIW, ‘to raise awareness about and address the legacy of missing and murdered Indigenous women’ (p. 83).
Part II: Re-readings offer a variety of critical approaches for re-reading representations of sexual violence in literature across forms, genres, geographies and time periods. Ann Marie Alfonso Short offers an important model for teaching works by authors who have perpetrated violence. She takes up the debates around celebrated and contentious author Junot Díaz, who is both a survivor and a perpetrator of sexual abuse, and argues that, rather than simply cancelling his work, teachers should recontextualize it within complex systems of power. Some of the most compelling chapters in this section place the #MeToo movement within a global context, such as Nidhi Shrivastava's chapter on postcolonial feminist approaches to sexual violence and the limits of #MeToo in India and Nafeesa T. Nichols's analysis of Post-Apartheid South African literature. The chapter ‘Philomela's Tapestry and #MeToo: Reading Ovid in an Indian Feminist Classroom’, co-authored by eight students at the University of Delhi, is a particularly powerful example of how students are using literature to develop their own framework for analyzing both fictional and non-fictional instances of violence in their lives. It is worth mentioning Robin E. Field's chapter is the only one that attends to male survivors, noting that ‘one in ten rape victims is male’ (p. 199). Hewett and Holland explain that their volume ‘focuses on male violence against women in the context of misogyny’ because it ‘is by far the most pervasive form of sexual violence’, so Field's chapter is an important glimpse into men's experiences with sexual abuse as part and parcel with gendered violence (p. 13).
The second half of the volume explores pedagogical strategies for teaching literary depictions of sexual violence. The first two chapters of Part III: Pedagogy: Practices and Methods provide different approaches to using trigger warnings in the classroom. Both Maureen McDonnell and Beth Walker position students not as oversensitive, as critics of trigger warnings often bemoan, but as experts in their own right, given that sexual violence is a pervasive feature of many college campuses. Chapters that situate masculinity within de/colonial contexts, including Hewett's chapter on Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) and Roberta Hurtado's chapter on Jaquira Díaz's Ordinary Girls (2019), model ways to decenter White, Western perspectives in the classroom. Part IV: Pedagogy: Classroom Contexts takes readers into different classroom settings to learn from the on-the-ground strategies that teachers use to scaffold students's encounters with sexual violence in literature. Candice L. Pipes draws on her experience teaching literature at the United States Air Force Academy to examine women soldiers's experiences with sexual violence and the ways that violence against women becomes a weapon of war. Linda Chavers's chapter, a must-read in the collection, turns to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) to teach how Black women have asserted control over their bodies and their reproduction even under the most oppressive conditions. In addition to providing an array of pedagogical strategies to teach literary representations of sexual violence, Parts III and IV of the collection bespeak the editors's and the volume's commitment to using literature to envision a praxis of social change.
Given that transgender people experience sexual violence at higher rates than their cisgender counterparts, I was disappointed in the collection's lack of attention to queer and trans perspectives. Sarah Goldbort's chapter is one of two that addresses LGBTQ+ survivors’s experiences. While there are some exciting examples of how Goldbort and her students look to queer communities, such as the kink community, to move beyond ‘hetero paradigms’ of consent (p. 292), the chapter's celebration of vulnerability fails to address the power dynamics therein, and Goldbort only loosely grounds her pedagogical use of ‘restorative justice circles’ in Indigenous epistemologies and cultural traditions (p. 290). Ethan Madarieta's chapter on Afro-Latina/o/e/x literature is the only one that addresses transgender people's experiences with sexual violence in a nuanced, sustained way. In a collection that is otherwise attentive to intersectionality, #MeToo and Literary Studies misses an opportunity to examine sexual violence and its impacts beyond cis- and heteronormative perspectives.
Burke has always emphasized that #MeToo is more than a hashtag; it is ‘a movement of survivors focused on healing and action.’ 2 #MeToo and Literary Studies's greatest asset is its emphasis on action, on what literature achieves in practical terms within and beyond the classroom. As Holland notes, ‘#MeToo testimonies reveals [sic.] misogyny not just in the fiction that we read, but in our own lives – one revelation causing the other’ (p. 118). To read this collection is to witness revelation after revelation of how misogynistic violence contours all our lives, even as the effects of that violence are not experienced equally, and to begin to envision change – in literature, in our classrooms, and in our world.